The Ryan Hanley Show - How to Build Your Own AI Software (Without Knowing How to Code)
Episode Date: March 17, 2026Join 15,000+ leaders getting the frameworks, tools, and contrarian thinking they need to thrive in the age of AI: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribeYou've been using AI wrong. It's not just for ...writing emails. It's for building your own software.In this episode, Austin Armstrong (Founder of Syllaby.io, author of Virality) breaks down the "vibe coding" revolution — how anyone, even if you don't know a single line of code, can build custom apps, automate their business, and create new revenue streams using AI agents.Austin also reveals why he intentionally cannibalized his own successful marketing agency to go all-in on AI, and he breaks down his exact START framework for going viral on purpose.If you want to stop paying for bloated SaaS tools and start building your own solutions, you need to watch this.In this episode:How to "vibe code" your own software for under $200The START framework for strategic virality (and why most people blow it on the first two steps)Why doing a "time audit" is the best AI strategy you can implement todayHow Austin built a $60K internal tool that now generates 95% profit marginsThe build vs. buy decision — and why the math has completely changedConnect with Austin:Syllaby: https://syllaby.io/Book (Virality ): https://amzn.to/4cSHSURThis show is part of the Unplugged Studios Network — the infrastructure layer for serious creators. 👉 Learn more at https://unpluggedstudios.fm.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I got to a point where I saw this AI writing on the wall of everything will be able to be automated.
Do I sit back in my business that I'm already burn out on and watch this slowly dismantle everything that I've built?
Do I take the chance? Do I be an early adopter?
Do I bet on this being a technological revolution and try and be a leader?
create something early that helps people,
risking cannibalizing my business.
That was the decision that I made.
It's a never-ending grind man,
and then you feel behind if you take that rest time,
or at least I find myself to it.
That's exactly it.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like, how do you marry,
how do you marry this desire to achieve and grow
and get better with the fact
that, you know, you can't just go all the time.
And I, you know, and I think we all probably know, too, I'm sure, you know, I'd be interested
if this is the case for you, but when you are on that full tilt all the time, always on kind
of thing, you're not doing your best work all the time.
You're just not.
And, you know, that's a, that, I struggle with that harmony.
You know, finding harmony there, I struggle with quite a bit.
Yeah.
So, there we go.
That's better.
Cool. Okay. Awesome. All right, dude.
Pertinent to the moment. Hot on your brain, a story that just came out,
something that's happened recently that I wouldn't have picked up in all the research and your materials that you're like, you know, this would be really cool if we talked about it today or I'd love to talk about this today, etc.
Well, the book is a big one.
How deep do you want to go down the AI rabbit hole?
We can go as deep as you want because...
as a completely,
I think that could be a really interesting,
I don't want to do,
I don't want to do everything nerdy AI,
but I do want to do some nerdy AI
because I know, like,
not being a technical guy,
so I'm not technical at all,
like don't know how to code, etc.
But was a math major,
so I understand how the logic works
behind these things,
and I'm kind of trying to download as much as I can.
And like I have my own open clause,
that I set up that I've been learning the hard way on that,
learning a ton, use Claude Code to build multiple applications that I'm not,
haven't commercialized, but I'm using for like personal stuff or, you know,
personal in my business stuff.
And, you know, one of the things that what was really funny about what happened this
week is, so I do growth acceleration consulting, right?
That's what I've done for amazing.
10 years. And obviously right now, everybody wants to talk about how those concepts now apply
through the lens of AI. So I ended up, but the workshops I did this week, what ended up happening
was I threw out the entire presentation, sat up at the front of the room, and literally
just asked, so what it was was it was a large group that they broke up into groups of 50,
and then they cycled through four times throughout the course of the day. So I got four different
groups of 50, which is cool.
And I would just yell out to the audience essentially, like, what's a problem that you're
having in your marketing or your sales?
And we would just, I'd either pull up, you know, Manus, Claude, or OpenClaught, and I
would just solve the problem for them, like, in real time.
And it was so much fun.
I know I could have done it a million times better, right?
Because it's not like my area of expertise.
But what I can, this is where I'm going with this.
I know that even.
hyper non-technical people are starting to play with this.
And I think how we frame our conversation is like,
here's how you don't like fuck your whole world up going down this path, right?
You know, how to avoid the chasing shiny objects to how do you make sure that your
open claw doesn't spend $10,000 on your credit card to buy, you know, whatever.
Like, you know, how do we?
And then, and then I really want to take it to kind of.
of your book and get into, like, I want to finish future casting.
Like, not so much, you know, where, how do we start positioning ourselves today for,
for what's going to, success is going to look like in the future?
Because I think, the last thing I'll say, and then I'll shut the fuck up because I'm supposed
to be interviewing you.
Oh, good.
The good thing is when it's your show, you can do whatever you want, right?
So, you know, I think the last thing is, yeah.
So you got it.
We're going to cook.
Let's go.
doing all this prep, but there's really no reason for that. So I do a little preamble,
so it's all good. So we'll just start going.
Appreciate you. Appreciate the opportunity, brother. Yeah, dude, same. And I think this couldn't be
more timely. What we're going to talk about today is been on my brain and I have been doing
so much dabbling, so much hobby, AIing, you know, strategies that I've used for growth
consulting in the past. And, you know, now I'm looking at these things. And like,
as a non-technical person,
I can see it, right?
I can see, there's, there is, it's not just like,
and I'm non-technical, I'm non-technical too, by the way.
I just got it pretty early.
Yeah, I love that.
I'm just a marketer and an opportunist
and got into the software game pretty early on
and interested in AI and it's changed my life.
But yeah, I'm with you.
I'm not a coder.
Sweet, okay.
It's the fun journey, though.
So for the audience, the context of this conversation,
guys, is going to be,
I wanted to spend this time with Austin to talk about,
level set where we are today.
I want to then get into some of the obstacles
around things like clawed code,
what agents are and how we should be thinking about them
and our businesses, what is this open claw thing
and why has it taken the world by storm?
And whether open claw ends up being the tool
or the platform, the set of agents that lives or dies
will be a different story,
but the technology seems undeniable.
And then I want to get into your book
in this idea of leveraging AI in ways
that are actually going to produce real results
because I see, man,
and this is where I love what you're doing
and I kind of love the way you approach it.
And I was so excited to chat was,
there's so much slop on how to use this,
like AI slop on how to use these tools.
I really want to get into like,
where can people place some bets
that have the best chance of producing real results?
So with all that set, how did you get into the marketing game?
Why the marketing game?
And what was it about AI in particular that has really caught your interest lately and diving so deep into this technology?
Yeah.
Well, Ryan, firstly, thank you so much for being on the show.
Thank you for the opportunity.
I'm excited to nerd out with you.
I feel like I was born for marketing, to be honest, as lame as that might sound.
But I stumbled into social media marketing.
when I was 14 years old on MySpace.
This is now 21, almost 22 years ago.
Crazy to think.
I had hundreds of thousands of followers.
I was able to monetize it in multiple ways.
My mom thought what I was doing was illegal.
Some of it might have been,
but I got caught up in that grind really early on,
and I sort of never stopped.
Fast forward to about 11 or 12 years ago,
I moved out to Orange County, California,
Yeah, which is where my professional career really began.
I got started in an unpaid internship in a video production video marketing agency,
really worked my way up for being an unpaid intern, paid intern,
part-time employee, full-time employee, ran that company,
started my own marketing agency about seven years ago,
and that's when I started to grow my personal brand pretty heavily on social media.
I wanted to practice what I preach.
Absolutely fell in love.
I've gotten early with TikTok.
And what I started to notice,
and this is going to lead up into the AI game,
is my organic top of funnel content
that was attracting my perspective leads
of business owners, entrepreneurs,
or aspiring business owners or entrepreneurs,
was useful websites for them.
So I created this series,
useful websites that feel illegal to know.
And I was sharing software tools,
productivity tools, marketing-oriented software.
And it was a very natural pivot for me.
I've always been an early adopter,
and I saw in the market shift
some of these AI tools start to come out.
Chat GPT, really early on before it was even public.
I got involved with Jasper, which was Jarvis before.
And I just really went down that rabbit hole pretty early on.
I got to a point in my company and my agency where I'm like,
a little burned out on this,
and I'm really interested in this software game,
I'm sharing these websites,
I'm also an affiliate for these websites,
I'm making pretty decent money from affiliate marketing recurring
with not as much work on a hands-on basis with agency clients.
And so that led me to starting my first software company,
which is called Syllaby,
It's a little over three years now.
It's an AI software company.
And I'm non-technical, as we were just kind of chatting about it as well.
So that's what kind of led me down this entire path from agency work, organic work, organic content
creation, to software, to AI.
And now it's just exploded.
It was one of those early bets that really has paid off and, frankly, changed my life.
And now we're on this endless rat race of new AI tools coming out.
We're talking about OpenClaw just yesterday, and I have it running in the background right now as we're talking.
Perplexities computer, which is a safer, more user-friendly competitor to OpenClaw as well.
We can go down that rabbit hole if you want, but I just want to open that up,
and that's kind of been my fun journey over the last 22 years.
Yeah, I love that.
similar in some regards in that
was non-technical, found the marketing space
2009, but was probably more LinkedIn than MySpace.
This is back when you couldn't even reply to posts on LinkedIn.
Like it was just like literally just cards floating down a timeline
where you still had to click to load more button
just to give everyone context.
It wasn't even Infinity Scroll invented back then.
And kind of took a similar path into marketing
and I've always been on that side.
And, you know, I have a question,
you said you were an early adopter.
And one of the things that I get,
particularly from, we'll say, service businesses,
Main Street businesses that reach out,
I think a lot of owners, operators, executives,
maybe second generation family members.
So I also seemingly get this a lot.
And maybe you see this from, you know,
the sons and daughters of business owners
who maybe tend to go operations versus,
the hard grind of sales.
I think they struggle a lot with how do I stay out on the front edge of what's coming
while still doing the day-to-day work that it takes to actually operate one of these
businesses.
This is a big mental struggle for people and they constantly seem to be yo-yoing between
I'm way out ahead.
This isn't really producing results.
I'm spinning my wheels.
I'm wasting time with, oh my gosh, I'm behind.
We don't have the right tech.
Our competitors are getting out ahead of us.
So as someone who tends to skew early adopter,
how do you filter out while also being a business owner,
where to spend your time without getting too lost in this new tech,
new ideas that doesn't actually maybe produce an ROI right away?
Such a great nuanced question that my brain is going in a million different directions.
So that is definitely the trap that business owners find themselves in, right?
And it really is the question of why they hired a marketing agency in the first places,
because they are too immersed in their own company and they need to focus on the company in order to grow it.
So they don't have time to focus on all of these new marketing opportunities or AI opportunities.
And so they hire an agency or a trusted partner and that, you know, that whole back and forth there.
Delegation is my answer.
So I understand where my full superpower is in business.
and that's where it's in research, it's in testing, it's in content creation, it's in public speaking,
it's in doing amazing podcasts like this, it's writing books, it's being the face, it's leading
the vision.
And so I don't need to do everything myself, nor do I want to do everything myself.
So I personally, to answer that question, bring on amazing business partners that I outsource
my suck to. I have team members that are able to do a lot of the day-to-day nuanced things so that I can
experiment and stay on the cutting edge and find and experiment some of these new early adopted
adoptive opportunities that are out there. And I thoroughly test them. And then if I see traction,
if I see ideas, then I'll bring it into my team internally for some use cases or I'll do some
marketing strategy on it. Like I said, I'm using perplexity's computer right now just to thoroughly
test it. I've been using OpenClaw for a while. I'm using OpenClaw personally, but I haven't pulled
it into my business yet because I think there's some risks and security issues there. But that's
how I personally focus on it. I'll give it pretty thorough tests amount of time, test different
use cases and see that cost-benefit analysis of is it really worth the time to go down it,
or do I let that shiny object go and focus more on what's actually working?
But I do a lot of testing when I'm home.
Can you describe your process for setting up what a test may look like, how you determine what
success parameters are for what you'd say, hey, this, you know, I can see it as like,
three buckets, right? So you try something, you're like, I just don't see this working. I see this
working, but maybe not now. And this is working, like, this is something I want to package up and put
into the business. How do you set those parameters up? How do you set the tests and how you
determine what success looks like for things that you actually want to bring into your business?
Yeah. So time and money are the two biggest KPS that I focused on. What are, um,
What are the current steps or current software or current processes?
How much time am I doing?
And I'll give you an example, thumbnail creation.
Right now I have this new tool creating thumbnails for me.
I was manually creating them in Photoshop for most of my YouTube career.
Canva made it a little bit easier, right?
So that's the natural progression.
It saves me a little bit of time.
less probably year to half a year with Gemini's nanobanana.
Now it's even faster, right?
And so I compare that where I can upload an example thumbnail,
a headshot of myself, and an idea,
and it will give me a thumbnail that's faster
than I would have been able to create it in Photoshop or in Canva.
It saves me time, it saves me money.
Now with tools like OpenClaw or computer,
there's a lot of these Asian tools out there,
it's a little bit faster,
and that's exactly what I'm testing right now.
So I'm doing this test exactly right now.
I said go do some research on the top AI tech thumbnails in this space.
Here's a headshot of myself.
I want to create a new video tomorrow demoing this tool,
create five thumbnail variations for me.
And it's doing that.
And it's learning and it's proving.
And so it's a little early for me to assess
if this is the perfect workflow.
But if it saves me time and it saves me money
and it's faster compared to the previous steps,
then it's worthwhile for me to continue
and go down a little bit deeper in that rabbit hole.
One of the things that I realized this week
when I was working with this group,
what, you know, we were talking about,
I think I mentioned to you before we went live.
So I had guys two days before recording this,
which is why I feel a little sluggish
because I did six hours of workshops.
I was only actually hired to do two hours of workshops
and then someone else bailed.
And I ended up doing an entire day with the workshops,
which was exhausting, but also phenomenal, right?
And I want to explain why.
And then I'm, because I want to put this in front of Austin.
So what we ended up doing,
because instead of a formal program
around kind of growth acceleration
in these businesses.
I have this human optimized model
that I talk about
a different story
unless you're interested.
But the idea was,
you know,
I didn't want to go too far down
the AI rabbit hole
because I knew this particular group
weren't AI natives.
So that was kind of my initial premise
when I showed up.
And then every question
the entire day was about AI.
So what I ended up doing
was literally just kind of tossing
my slides or my formal presentation away.
I just screen shared my computer
and I had people throw out
problems that they had in sales, marketing, or some sort of flow.
And we kind of built them on the fly.
All right, cool.
Very cool, very fun.
Here's the thing that I realized, and I want to get your take on.
How I go through this is very similar to what you just described.
I will literally pull out my whiteboard, which is about 10 feet off camera to my left,
and I will write out the process in detail.
Like, this happens, then this happens, then I have to go to this tool, right?
And if it's seven tools, it's seven tools, whatever it is, and I go start to finish.
This is exactly what I'm doing today.
And then similar to you, I start going, okay, like, what could I replace in here?
What I found on Tuesday that I thought was very eye-opening, not judgmental, but eye-opening,
was how few individuals in that room could articulate the full process, not just the way they do it today,
but how they would actually like it to happen.
I would say, okay, if that's the problem, what would you like to have happen?
And you would get like this deer in the headlights like, uh, just better, right?
So, um, you know, okay, all right.
But so I guess my question to you is like, you work with a lot of clients, you have an agency,
you're dealing with a lot of business owners.
Like, how do you help them?
Like, is there a framework or a model that you use to start to actually scope out
not just what you do today?
Because I think we, most of us could do that with a little bit of thought, but how do we
start to think about what we actually want because that feels like a huge unlock is like
because just because it's the way we do it today doesn't mean it's the right way to do it and
you can get some time back just by kind of rip and replace but if we really want to take AI in
particular to the next level it's almost building a more optimized process how do we how do you
get your clients to make that transition or even how do you do it in your own business yeah i got
I love this, and I think you'll probably appreciate this from a whole life optimization.
A time inventory is what I've been doing.
When I learned the power and what a time inventory is, that has completely changed my life.
And I really just learned about it from Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel.
Yeah, great book.
Fantastic book.
But if you don't know how to think through,
that step-by-step process of what you want,
document the entire process.
From the moment that you wake up,
or you can focus on your work,
whatever, however you want to do it, right?
The task, how much time it takes,
the start time, the end time,
your level of enjoyment of that task,
the ROI on that task
versus how much you value your time at,
every individual step.
So if it's like thumbnail creation, for instance,
step, you know, I spent,
five minutes going to YouTube and researching what the best thumbnails were.
And then I opened Photoshop and then I uploaded an image of myself and I removed the background.
You know, going through the step-by-step process and you'll find by doing this for several days to a week tops.
I mean, you can do it for two weeks, but you're going to find patterns really quickly from doing this of these are the exact step-by-steps.
this is where the time annoyance is,
I wish this thing could be sped up,
this is my annoyance,
I don't like doing this thing,
I do like doing this thing,
you know, and just going through that,
you'll find so much clarity
in all of the steps
that you can then take to
now agentic AI
or find an AI software solution
to a task that takes you
a large amount of time,
find somebody,
a virtual assistant,
an executive assistant,
or somebody to do that task,
that has been just the biggest life-changing thing for me,
for processing and outlining step-by-steps that applies to AI,
and it applies to just improving everything about your life and your business.
So,
I couldn't agree with you more.
I hate that my best AI advice is do a time audit.
Like, I hate that that's what it is.
But it really is.
Like, it works.
You know, like, I got, you know, it's funny.
So again, this is just fresh on my mind.
The last two, these two days I spent this week.
So obviously, you know, that's where my mind is.
But like, the look on people's faces when I would start my AI growth acceleration talk with
the first thing you need to do is a time audit.
And, you know, like, they'd look at me like, what?
I came here for like, you know, machines taking over the world.
Like, what are you talking about?
And I was like, well, we don't know if we're trying for efficiency and effectiveness, right, in a broad stroke,
if we don't know where we need to apply those things, you're just, again, you're just chasing rabbits,
you know, or shiny objects for the purpose of what, not having phomo or, you know, creating a new death scroll habit.
You know, which, look, I have, unfortunately, like, prompt,
uh, channels, like have taken over my brain for a period of time.
I'm just, I'm, like, emphatuated by, you know, the psychology and the phrasing and the setups.
And most of them I bookmark and never go back to, but, you know, it is what it is.
Okay.
So I get it.
I get it.
We can all chase these rabbits.
But this idea of a time audit, in my opinion, is so incredibly important because it allows you
to go, just like you said, like, I do this.
Like, one, when I do it, I find, I'm like, oh, my God, I didn't realize I did that thing as much as I do it.
Holy crap.
And then, and here's, here's where my next question goes is the last time I did a time audit,
which probably was in the fall.
I try to do them at least twice a year.
If not more, if I'm feeling off, it's like, almost like a, like a, like a recalibration hack if I'm feeling like my schedules up.
but try to do it every every year.
It was probably the falls last time I did it.
And this question popped into my brain
when I started to look at some of the things that I was doing.
Some of the things were most likely replaceable
with an AI system process, an agent, etc.
However, in evaluation, I was like either I do actually enjoy doing that thing.
Like it brings me joy to do that thing even though AI could do it.
or the friction in that process was actually a feature, not a bug.
So if you understand where my question is going,
how do we actually choose, right?
Because we could just over-optimized our entire life
and take the humanity right out of our business.
And now all of a sudden we hate what we do.
We're completely detached.
And our customers feel no connection to us
because we just went hyper-efficiency.
Okay.
I actually think we need the human-in-the-loop.
I call this a human-optimized business.
how do you determine those places where the human is actually a more effective,
I mean, I don't mean to go like completely anti-humanity,
but like a more effective utilization than an AI tool that could do that job.
Yeah, it's a great question.
And just to kind of take it back to the time of audit, the time inventory,
is that row of level of enjoyment is so important to add to there,
because if you like to do something,
you don't need to outsource it.
You don't need to find an AI for it.
I love posting on social media.
I could automate it,
but I like to post.
I like to spend my time on social media.
Yes, it's a time suck.
Yes, I'm probably addicted to it.
It's my socially acceptable addiction.
But there are other aspects that I can outsource
that free up more of that time
so that I can stay online more where my networking happens in the DMs to me having a hand on the pulse of
my trained feeds where if a news report comes out, I see it very quickly so that I can jump on
it and maintain my status as a early news source in AI, for instance.
So AI helps me with research.
AI helps me with some of the actual content creation, image generation, thread generation,
outlining of some videos. But then I actually enjoy the creation process. So I'll record
videos myself a lot of the time. I do, I own an AI video company, so of course I use some AI
video. But sometimes I edit them because I like to. Sometimes I outsource them because if I don't
I have that time.
I have that option to outsource if I want,
or if I have a little bit more time,
I still like to do video editing on my phone.
And I like the process of uploading and posting and publishing
and responding to comments.
So yeah, I could absolutely just set up automations to find content,
create content, schedule and post content, respond to content.
But then it's just the dead internet theory and play of,
bots creating content responding to bots and posting.
But that's just for me.
So do more of what you love and what you enjoy and find AI solutions and
automations for the things that you don't like to do.
That's where I would focus.
Yeah.
Life is short.
Like focus on what you love doing.
And I want to take us back to just something you said early in our conversation,
which was you kind of were evaluating your business and you decided that out of the things that the owner or the founder needed to do, right?
You could have gone whole hog into agency work and been the, you know, the BD guy, the, you know, be the, but you chose, hey, I'm going to be not necessarily the agent, the owner that works in the business, which is perfectly fine.
I think there's a stigma against working in the business because of all this work on your business, not in your business stuff.
I think you just have to choose one path.
So I guess I want to transition.
our conversation from kind of this setting the stage, which we've done quite a bit, I think,
a good job of, to how we actually, you know, more of what your book does, like the tools that
we use, et cetera. But before we get there, I just want to frame this and for the rest of your
responses, right? Maybe you could give us kind of a dual answer. For partially for that business
owner who wants to work on the business like you do, right? Loves the posting, likes writing,
likes creating, likes researching, okay?
And then I'd also like us to try to frame a path
because I know there's a lot of business owners
and executives who are going to be in this camp too
who don't want to do that stuff,
but they appreciate how important it is to their business.
They would rather be head of BD or running the team.
They want to work in the business
and have their hands in it,
but they do appreciate that we need to have our marketing message.
We have to be telling stories.
We have to be building an honest, et cetera.
So if you're cool with that, I'd like to just be able to talk those two paths
because I know we have a pretty equal set in this audience of in the business, on the business,
guys and gals.
So with that said, I want to transition over to kind of your book and your business
and talk more about how do we actually start to use these tools to get our message,
our audience, our brand out in front of people.
And you use the word viral a lot, which I know, like, depending on what side of the cynical spectrum you sit on is either completely acceptable or this, like, slop word that everyone, you know, hates on.
I have no opinion on it and certainly don't have a negative opinion on it at all.
So, like, why is viral important today?
And how do we start to set the stage, set our business up, our messaging up, like, what are the building blocks to actually be able to go viral?
Yeah.
So such great question. So yeah, virality is a controversial word, right? It's also subjective. So viral for me is different from viral for you versus viral for the local plumber, right? If you go viral in different niches, it unlocks different things. And I also mean strategically going viral. I don't mean cat videos and dancing. The whole thesis of my book.
is don't be a content creator, be a business owner who creates strategic content.
You have to have the back end systems in order to execute as well as capitalize on it as well.
Because you could-
Very glad you made that clarification, dude.
I'm very glad you made that clarification.
I think that's very important when we talk about this because, like, you could post a video
of one of your employees kicking you in the nuts, and it would probably go pretty far,
especially if you had like some trending music around it and like a doink sound or something, right?
But like, that's not actually, well, depending on your business, I guess.
That's not necessarily helping, and I would say the predominant amount of people that are
certainly listening to this podcast, that's not going to really help them grow their business.
So I appreciate that quite a bit.
We're talking about getting, we'll say, maximum reach and exposure on content that builds
brand and real audience.
Yes, absolutely, specifically in your niche.
So I love, think about it.
out a content funnel. At the very top of the funnel, you have the broad awareness-oriented
content. This is at the furthest reaches touching somebody and bringing them into your ecosystem
that could be a customer or could eventually be a customer. Just the broadest. I brought up this
example earlier, right? When I was growing my personal brand for my agency, I was sharing useful
websites that feel illegal to know. All of those, you know, powerful opening hot,
I'll get into kind of framework stuff if you want.
Love it.
Yeah.
Let's do all the nerdy shit.
As far as nerdy as you want to go.
Yeah, yeah.
Cool.
All right.
All right.
How much time we got.
So there's broad top of funnel oriented content.
There's middle of the funnel, the nurturing, the how to, the authority building oriented
content.
This is where you go deeper on individual topics.
And then there's the sort of phomo conversion oriented topic at the bottom of the funnel.
I love to stay at that top.
the funnel. This is where virality happens because it is the most broad appealing. It reaches the
most amount of people. Another great example of this, shout out to Roger Wakefield, just an example
that comes to mind. The expert plumber, massive, massive social media following, millions of followers
in the plumbing niche was a local Texas plumber, actually sold his practice because he was so successful.
and now he teaches other plumbers.
He had a lot of great how-to content,
how to fix a toilet,
how to change the spark plug
or the whatever plug on back end,
you know, whatever.
But his viral content is comparing
popular tools
or plumber reacts to,
you know,
septic tank explosions
or something like that, right?
Like it's very niche-specific.
It's broad appealing.
It's interesting.
It's going to Home Depot and hoping the person doesn't buy the large brand name thing that everybody thinks about,
but is actually just a scam because they're really good at marketing, right?
Like, real plumber reacts.
That is top of mind.
That's broad awareness-oriented content.
That's going to attract people to follow you.
And then that's where real conversions can happen.
So now we have living in that,
broad awareness oriented funnel. Think about that. Structuring your content will really help you
stack the odds in your favor. And so I have a framework in my book, for instance, that anybody can
follow. It's called the Start Video Framework. This S stands for stop to scroll with a powerful
opening hook. The T stands for talk about a problem that's related to that opening hook. The A
stands for aligns, where you can briefly talk about yourself and build authority. The R stands
for resolve that problem. This is going to be the meat and potatoes of your actual video. And then the
T is tell them what to do next. This is your call to action at the end. So if you have a broad
topic in mind, you have a strong opening hook associated with that. You're expanding on it by
talking about that problem. You're building and extending the view duration. Then you're talking
about how you are the perfect expert for this.
You're giving information away and resolving that.
And then you're telling them,
follow me if you want to learn more about this particular topic,
et cetera.
And if you follow a framework like that,
you're going to stack the odds in your favor
that they're going to go viral.
It's going to convert and hold attention.
And then you're actually going to generate leads
and sales for your business.
We break down to,
aspects of the start framework in particular that I see a lot of people who don't spend time in here
struggle with. First one is, as for you, the opening hook. I know just about everyone has probably
heard this term and knows that hooks are important, but just butcher this. Even pros
butcher this a lot. You know what I mean? Like you'll see great ones and then you'll see them
miss. So I'd really like to dig into what makes a good hook. How do we, you know, if I'm a
not a marketing person who thinks about this all day,
but I do want to put some content out.
Like, how do I start frame out?
Okay.
And then the other piece,
and this one I think is sneaky,
but is so often missed is the A.
Like, why should,
what is it about my experience
that you should actually care what I'm telling you?
I see so many people just blow past this,
not do it at all,
or butcher it in almost like,
when they do do it,
it comes off as like bragging or egotistic,
and it gives you almost the opposite feel.
So I love to talk about the hook
and then how we do that kind of authority part,
the why you should care part really well.
Yeah.
So the other nuance here as well is short form content
tends to go viral faster than long form content.
Keep that in the back of your mind.
With that said, the infinite doom scroll
on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Reels Now,
YouTube shorts, all of these platforms,
forums. We have to capture attention immediately where the next piece of content probably will.
There is an endless supply of content now, and that is the importance of the opening hook.
You also have to remember that nobody is doom scrolling on social media for you specifically.
They are there for entertainment, for education, edutainment, distraction, time killing,
whatever, right? So you need to have all of those components in mind. What I see a lot of people
get wrong is placing that A, that authority, that alignment at the beginning. That is not
a good opening hook. You can save that for later. It's important to mention who you are,
why they should trust you. There's different ways that you can do that. Stop doing it at the
beginning. Nobody cares, right? So think about it from new,
newspaper headlines.
You should be able to read it in your head in one to two seconds.
I think you have the grace of three to four seconds if you're really good with it.
You can also stack this with series as well.
This is a little bit more nuance.
So a series, for instance, I'll give you some examples of opening hooks that I use.
So I said earlier, these five websites feel illegal to know.
takes two and a half three seconds in order to say that.
It's a recurring series because I can swap the five websites in there each individual time,
but it stops the scroll.
What are the websites?
Why are they illegal?
Are they actually illegal?
It's a curiosity gap.
Another series that I have recurring right now,
actually variable, is chat GPT secrets you should know, part X.
Claude AI Secrets, you should know, part X.
X, Gemini, or Google Gemini's secrets, you should know, part X, right?
It creates that curiosity gap.
If it's something that I'm interested in, I'm going to continue to watch.
And I can fill in the blanks every single time.
So think about it from that perspective.
Oversensationalize it a little bit.
Create that curiosity gap.
And then the A, the align, there's different ways that you can do this as well.
by the time you're in that process.
So we stop the scroll,
you have your opening hook,
talking about a problem,
so you're expanding it a little bit.
Now you're maybe 15 seconds into the video.
This is a really good view extension,
retention,
uh,
that if you can,
if you follow that strategically,
especially in a short form video,
much more likely to go viral with that content.
Because short form content,
has that drop-off point immediately
if you're not hooking them, right?
That align,
keep it brief.
You've earned their attention for,
well,
15 seconds or so.
You can say,
hi,
my name's Austin.
I'm your,
I'm your friendly AI expert.
Or,
I've seen one recent,
I love horror movies.
I forget his name offhand,
but he's like,
hi,
my name's,
John,
I'd love to be your,
your movie guru,
right?
That's,
that's his,
authority in there. Or another way that you can do it and save the time is having your
credentials listed on there as well. So when I owned my agency, we worked a lot with therapists and
psychologists. So they had to put like their name and LCSW licensed clinical social worker
under it or SciD or if you're a real estate agent, mortgage broker, you have to put your
license number on the video, you know, on there as well. And so that builds authority as well.
And it can literally just be your title. And that builds that trust factor online as well.
So, you know, no like trust is a little cliche and I think it's even expanding past that.
But it really adds into that as well. So you build a little bit of trust after holding their attention.
And then you can go into the rest of the framework.
And with all, you know, just to be clear with the audience, I am not a, I do not teach
this type of stuff, but I do get asked questions.
And, you know, some people will be like, hey, I created this.
What do you think?
Right?
What do you think about?
Okay.
And I see, I really, I just want to stop on the alignment authority piece for one more
second because I do see things where like, I see sometimes it's like this big brag.
Oh, I've done this and this and I've done this thing.
and it goes too far, right?
And like you said, other people blow right past it.
Like, what is, like, a good stat?
Like, I know when I'm doing, I found when I'm doing a post about, like, a communication
method, I nerd out so hard on the psychology of communication.
I just love the idea that, like, if I know how to spin a certain set of words in a certain
order, I can literally hack your brain to do what I want you to do.
And visually it works as well.
I'm just fascinated by it.
And I found that when I share a communication-oriented piece of content,
particularly short form, that if I say,
hey, my name's Ryan Hanley and I've done over 400 paid keynotes as like my alignment piece, right?
So one little stat that kind of gives validation to, I've done this for a while.
That seems to work.
If I go farther, I can literally see on the Instagram thing, right at that section,
I'll get, and guys, if you're watching it,
you can see me doing hand gestures like a crazy person,
but essentially the graph in Instagram's retention,
I've seen it like in that section,
if I go more than one stat or I spend too much time there,
it literally dropped, like people are just scrolling away.
So how do you determine if, let's say I'm, again,
let's go Main Street services businesses,
like an insurance agency, a plumber, you know, whatever.
What are the stats that they could be thinking about,
maybe beyond just like their license or I'm a licensed,
whatever, that could add credibility without sounding too much like you're bragging or being egotistical.
I think you absolutely nailed it, right?
One line about something that you've achieved or something or how you've helped somebody,
particular to that video.
So try and tie the alignment to the topic of that video, right?
So the plumber route, right?
Like, I'm Roger Wakefield.
I've helped 10,000 people in the state.
of Texas over the last 20 years.
Boom.
You know, just move on for it.
You can get a little bit more specific, right?
Like, I've, you know, if it's five best toilet unclogged strategies from Home Depot,
you can be like, in the last 20 years, I've unclogged over 20,000 toilets in the state
of Texas, boom.
You know, and then you move on from there, like a stat achieved based on the opening hook.
Again, yeah, like, you've got like two, three seconds in each.
little segment here.
The resolve, you can, that's where your meat and potatoes are, you can put more emphasis
there, but specifically for this alignment, remember, like, again, this is discovery-oriented
content.
They don't care about you.
Sorry, sorry, everybody.
They don't give a crap about you.
If they want to learn more about you, they're going to click on your bio, they're going to
click on the website, maybe they'll DM you, maybe they'll go to the website, they're going to
do a little bit more research.
This is the user journey.
Stop making it about you and always make it more about who you're trying to reach.
Give your best information away for free.
Just have that two to three second alignment piece in there associated with a stat or a number
that you've helped, again, tie it into that opening hook.
That's all you need.
Yeah.
And guys, I don't mean to spend so much time here and I want to move on from this particular topic,
but I did think it was incredibly important
because when you guys send me your posts
and you'll say, hey, can you just take a look at this?
And again, I don't present myself as a viral expert.
I am not.
But the reason I had Austin spent so much time
is that I feel like we go right to the info
that we want to barf on people.
And while that is important, right,
unfortunately, you can't skip these two steps, guys.
Like, these are the two things I see kind of, we'll call them more amateur or non-professional marketers make, is that this is where you psychologically hook people in so that they do give a shit about the stuff that you're actually going to teach them.
So, you know, they're never even going to stop and you'll be in that like 200 view, you know, death valley forever if you can't get past this point.
So I just wanted to spend a little bit of time.
I appreciate you letting us languish there for a minute.
But I did think that was important.
You know, so now you hadn't had an agency and now you start an AI tool that does video, marketing, video, creation, video editing to a certain extent.
Like, aren't you cannibalizing your business by doing this?
Like, why would you, why would you, you know, go out and get into this?
And I think the tool is wonderful.
And please, like, dig into it, tell us about it.
Guys, not a paid sponsorship or anything.
I just think it's wonderful.
and I really want to think through kind of taking your business and adding to see and going,
we can turn this actually into an actual product that people can use.
I want to think through that whole process.
Yeah, it did cannibalize it.
And that was strategic.
That was on purpose.
So to one degree, I was completely burned out in agency life.
I was stepping away.
I tried to hire people to run the company for me.
I ran it into the ground.
I'm just going to be frank and honest there.
I was in the marketing agency space for a total of about 12 years,
and I got really burned out on it.
But I still wanted to help people.
I love what I do.
I love social media so much.
It's changed my life.
My whole purpose and mission is to provide the tips, tools,
and strategies to help change other people's lives and make money online.
with social media. And so I needed to find out a way that I could do that that wasn't burning
me out and that I could help even more people at scale. And so I really just, over the course of
two years preparing for creating this tool syllabi, I talked to a lot of our customers.
I talked to a lot of business owners of why they hired a marketing agency in the first place.
What were the problems that they were facing that needed?
to hire a marketing agency.
And the core problems that I came across,
and I really broke everything down,
is they know they need to create content for social media,
but they don't know what topics to create.
They don't know what to say on camera.
They need help staying consistent and accountable.
They don't know how to do video editing
or they don't want to do video editing.
They don't have the time to create and edit videos
and schedule and publish it across everything.
every social media platform.
Maybe they don't have a son or daughter that can do it either.
And so it's this chicken or the egg problem of them being so focused and not having time
on their business,
but not getting the word out enough.
So not enough new businesses coming in.
That's why they hired a marketing agency.
And I got to a point where I'm like,
when I break this down,
all of these steps can be done with software.
And so Syllaby started as an internal tool, really,
because I look,
I did that. I've been doing this time inventory thing for a couple of years now.
And I looked at what was taking me the most amount of time, and it was the content strategy.
So I was going out and doing competitor research. I was doing keyword research on topics
to create videos on for our customers, and then studying competitors and outlining this big content
strategy. So we started with that. And so that was really the main first feature.
of syllabies, enter a topic, enter a service,
and it shows you all the topics and questions
and keywords that your customers are searching for online.
Because I also believe that within this viral landscape,
social media is a search engine.
The discoverability engine is so good.
These algorithms are so good.
They're going to put content in front of you
based on your needs because of your viewing patterns
and your search history on social media.
That's a long-winded rant there.
And then they don't know what to say on camera as well.
So we came up with this whole interview process,
like when I was at my agency,
this whole interview process where I looked at,
you know,
main keyword that you're trying to create a video for,
and then what are the logical questions
that make this a longer video,
all within the same topic.
And so now with AI,
the last couple of years,
script generation just follows that format.
So we have our topic.
Now we have a script that is based
on my framework of the start video framework that I mentioned, but it has, it's based on tens of thousands
of video scripts that I've handwritten, uh, myself and, and I've studied as well.
That's alignment right there, folks. Do you hear them just align? It works. Because now you believe
what he's about to say. I didn't mean to call you off. That was perfect. One stat, one line.
It's so ingrained. Yeah. Right now, like literally you did guys, he just did what we were talking about
before, right? So now the next part, and I didn't mean interrupt you, but it was like so perfect
based on what you're saying.
Like now, like, I know I just said.
I go, oh, shit, he knows what he's talking about.
He did 10,000 scripts by hand.
Like, okay.
Like, I literally felt myself leaning in.
That's why I'd interrupt you.
I'm sorry, but that's what it is.
Oh, I love it.
By setting the stage there and saying,
I did 10,000 handwritten scripts myself,
I can tell you from blood sweat and, you know,
blisters on my fingers from holding the pen,
you know, what this scripting process looks like
and what produces a good script.
So just wanted to point that out.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, no, no, great catch.
I don't even catch myself sometimes.
It's just habit now.
And then, so what's the next step?
So you have your video script, right?
Then it's the actual video creation.
And that's gone over through a lot of iteration processes and so by an image generation
based on the context of the scene to now AI video generation with all of the models based
on the scene, edits everything together.
And then you can connect all of your social media platforms and schedule and publish it out.
So it's basically all of the steps that I was doing manually at my agency charging a lot of money,
multiple five figures per month in some instances.
And it's self-serve, it's automated, it just helps.
And I don't mean to be self-promowing, but I just thought that, you know,
I got to a point where I saw this AI writing on the wall of everything,
will be able to be automated,
do I sit back
in my business that I'm already
burn out on
and watch this
slowly dismantle everything
that I've built?
Do I take the chance?
Do I be an early adopter
that I've historically been?
Do I bet on this being
a technological revolution
and try and be a leader
and be and create
create something early that helps people and risking cannibalizing my business.
And that was the decision that I made.
And I think it was the best decision that I possibly could make.
I'm in a better situation, mentally, physically, financially in my relationship,
everything because of that decision.
But yeah, I cannibalized my own business.
I shut that agency down.
But it was worth it.
I mean, I love it.
I think it's, I, I, I, one, I love that it's a product that you created out of your own business.
And I want to put a pin there just for a second.
I want to come back to this concept because I do think this is where we're headed with some functionality.
However, I'm okay with, just, I just one, to clarify here, I'm okay with you talking about your business being a little self-promotional.
And the reason that I'm okay with it is because, one, you built it, you're on the show.
two, there are so many tools that we're getting bludgeoned with every day.
I think it's important to learn how you thought through these tools,
how you thought through creating your own tool,
so that the audience can start to create their own filters
as to what tools they choose.
Because $20, $50, $100 a month subscriptions to these tools
can stack up really, really quick if we're not smart about the ones we're using
and actually using the tools that we pay for,
which is a whole other conversation.
All right, I want to get into this idea of kind of thinking about our business and creating solutions just for us, right?
So this is ClaudeCode.
This is Manus.
This might be OpenClaught using these different, you know, codex if you're an open AI guy.
I'm almost completely off OpenAI and Chad GPT, by the way.
I kind of am too.
I'm with you.
Yeah.
They really drop the ball.
I'll be honest.
Manus AI. Have you played around with Manus?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
I love the direction that you're going here because I've been super
into vibe coding the last year as well.
So I have great answers for what I think is going to know.
Okay. But yeah. So I'll give the audience
an idea. So I
just I'll set the table and then I want you to run with this.
So two things, guys. So one,
the first thing I did from a vibe coding perspective was
I am terrible at person.
financial finance. Terrible. Like, I just, the idea of slowing down at the end of every month,
downshifting into second and like, how much did I spend on this? And what did I spend? I'm just,
like my ADHD crazy brain hates doing that. However, I'm not a dummy. I logically understand
how important it is to understand where your money is, where it's going, et cetera. So I just
vibe coded this little tool that allows me to upload my bank statements and my credit card statements.
and then it acts as, I told it to act with, like, Gordon Ramsey style, even though I know he's a chef,
like his style of aggressive, like, I want you to yell at me when I do the things that I told you I didn't want to do, right?
So, so I have this little thing and I get this little report once a month.
I've had this for, this would be my third month now, and it's just like, you said you weren't going to spend more than $300 on DoorDash in a month,
and you spent 500, like, blah, you know, you're.
you know, write me this like nasty gram.
Okay.
So that's an idea, that's one idea.
And then for my business, guys,
just to set the table here for how I'm thinking about these things,
is I went down the open claw path,
mostly because I was super interested in it.
But I had a real need.
For this podcast,
the podcast has grown to the point where I'm in that in-between stage
between doing it myself and hiring a team member
to come in and manage all the apps.
admin stuff. And what I said was, I wonder how far I can get with, you know, I chose open claw.
I could have done clog code agents or something like that, but I just went with open claw.
How far could I get with a tool like OpenClaw where I built out my own systems for doing this
without having to hire somebody, right? So I'm thinking about simple things in my business.
Like when I get a pitch from a PR person, which I get five a day to be on the show, right?
Well, I got to research the person.
I got to click on all their links.
I usually do like a wide research on chat GBT or OpenAI.
And it's hard.
You don't always know.
I mean, some people, you know, just aren't good fits.
It doesn't mean that people are bad or wrong.
But like, that takes a lot of time.
So now I have a simple, you know, group in Telegram for my OpenClaw.
I call him maximum effort.
He's max for short.
If you get that reference, you're one of my people.
And one of his tasks is I forward him an email from PR pitches, and he does this full build-out and then gives me a score.
If the score is over, is seven or above, he automatically responds and says, hey, we'd love to have insert person on the show.
Here's a calendar link, have them schedule.
Okay, great.
That alone, just that two-step process.
saves me probably two hours a week of work.
That's it.
And so how do you start to think through this?
So just table setting for the audience.
How do you start to think through this and go,
here's something that not that I need to go,
I want to go look for a tool for this.
This is something I could actually use Claude Code
or another similar tool to actually create this functionality.
How do you make that determination?
What are your filters?
for the things you can create versus going and finding a tool.
And what are the advantages to creating it yourself versus going and buying a tool?
Yeah.
Well, firstly, thank you, Max.
I'm glad I made the cut in the PR outreach process.
Thanks to maximum effort.
I think he said you've got to get this asshole on the show because he curses like a sailor.
He didn't mean that in a negative way.
All right.
F yeah, Max.
Okay, so it's a classic build versus buy perspective, even in business.
What is the cost investment and savings of building it yourself and internal versus just outsourcing it and buying an out-of-the-box solution?
This traditionally has been a much more expensive cost-benefit analysis because you'll have a technical team that, yeah,
you can build this internal, you know,
feature, but it's going to take, you know,
20 hours of developer hours at $50 an hour.
And then maybe you'll see a total ROI in that,
from that investment over the course of six months.
Well, maybe it's cheaper to just buy a $20 tool.
Outsource it, right?
But now with vibe coding,
that cost difference and that time difference
is drastically different.
I literally have
agentic AI
Proplexity's computer
coding me a Calendly
alternative right now
so that I don't have to spend
50 bucks a month on Calendly
anymore right now in the background.
That's a tool that I'm using
and then I'm also able to sell it.
That's the other benefit here
is creating tools for yourself
that guess what?
Probably other people are going to have
that same problem. So you can sell it to. So a great example of what I did recently,
about seven months ago, actually, using Manus. I was, so to set the stage here, last year I did
about 1.4 billion organic views on Facebook. Oof. Organic. No dollar spent behind it. 80%, it's actually
79.3%, of those organic views came from text posts.
these long text posts that were
rest in peace
Photoshop, these five new AI tools
do it faster, kind of that structure.
And then in the comment section
is one tool at a time, what it does,
what it costs, overview, blah, blah, blah, blah.
These posts went mega viral.
I used to do that research manually
on Google
and find the tools, write the headline,
write individual posts.
Then I went and started using chat GPT tasks last year to do that research and automate it for me.
And I still was just copy and pasting.
Then I had the idea about seven months ago, well, I want to just streamline and automate this whole process.
So I used Manus to create this tool called Threadmaster that does all of that.
It stored all of my top performing text threads that got those billions of views.
I can enter in any topic that I want and it automatically generates the thread in that
format that I can then copy and paste it. That saved me so much time and effort from how I was
manually doing it. And then because of the cost of it, I'm like, you know, and I'm sharing my
results in my marketing. I'm like, I bet other people would be interested in this too. And so I
charged $5 a month for it for unlimited use. It has about 2,000 users right now. So that tool,
and it's like 95% profit margins.
So I used BANIS to create an internal tool
that saved me a lot of time
that was helping me go viral on Facebook.
Facebook's paying me because I'm monetized,
but then I can sell it as a solution
that genuinely helps other people
achieve the same results as well
and save them time.
And this tool has made like $60,000 so far
and it's profited 52, 53,000.
But it's an internal tool that started with me.
And then I just put a small price tag on it to sell it as well.
And so, you know, it kind of goes back to the time inventory as well.
Yeah.
But also just like, also do it, do a price on it.
Like you were saying, you know, what's that tool that it tracks your,
tracks all your subscriptions.
I forget.
You just like sign into your Gmail.
Rocket money is one.
Rocket money.
Yeah.
Rocket money. Exactly. So it just, you know, sign up for rocket money or just look at your bank account statements and be like, okay, you know, I'm actually paying for 10 software tools right now per month and it's charged, you know, they stack up. I'm paying $500 a month in software.
Look at the ones that you're using only maybe specific features of, not the entire suite.
use a vibe coding tool
however you want
you know there's there's menace
there's lovable there's replets
there's Claude code there's codex
pick your poison doesn't matter right
vibe code that for yourself
get it as efficient
as it can be very simple
process you don't have to be a technical founder
to be able to do this either
get it to a point where it works
cancel your subscription
and if you want,
you can add your own subscription on top of it
and start making money
instead of just saving money.
Guys, this is like,
so I had another tool that I created
because scheduling, time blocking
is basically how I run my life, right?
Kind of similar to the time audit.
If it's not on my schedule,
this is the thing I get in my family,
I get an issue with my family all the time.
I'm like, guys, you can't just text me
and like have that be it.
Like my calendar, for a whole bunch of reasons, my calendar runs my life.
If it's on the calendar, I will be there, I promise.
It's not on the calendar.
There's a good chance I don't even know.
It doesn't matter how many times you told me.
Okay.
So I created this simple tool that any time I needed to do a project, I would type in the box
and I tell it what the project is.
Say it's, hey, so I'm working on a book.
I want to get the next chapter of my book done.
This is what it is.
I'm starting from scratch, so I have to do research,
I have to do all these phases for this particular chapter.
Okay, great.
And I'd hit go.
And what it would do is it would basically figure out, is it creative or is it tactical?
So it would either schedule morning for creative, afternoon for tactical.
And then it would say, based on, and what's your time frame?
Well, my time frame is a month for this chapter.
I'm just making that up.
Great.
So then it would go and say, based on your current schedule and the amount of time we believe
it will take to do this.
and the amount of creative versus tactile,
it would then go out and schedule those time blocks into the calendar
to get that particular project done.
So now it's not, I'm hoping to get it done in a month.
I've literally got the time scheduled in my calendar
to get this project done.
Okay.
So I kind of messed up a bunch of stuff before it goes,
because it was the very first thing I ever did.
Like, I think about that, and I always come back to that,
and I go, this was me, literally.
And this is why I messed it up,
is I want to get into, I want to be respectful of your time and I want to kind of wrap up with the audience here.
But I want to kind of get you to break down what this real is, it feels overwhelming to a lot of people.
Everybody that I talked to this week when I was talking about some of the things I was doing that are out on the edge a little bit,
they're like, that seems too far.
You know, that feels intimidating.
It feels overwhelming.
All I did to get that was talk into the text and put the talk to text file, though,
into the computer exactly what I just said basically.
Now, there's more to it to make it really work.
I messed up some things.
I got some things I got to fix.
But it's not much more than that.
Just telling a replet or a lovable or a manus, etc.,
what you wanted to do.
So for the audience who maybe has some of these things in here
and really wants to start playing,
what is starting to spin up your own vibe-coded application
actually look like in reality?
Like, you know, do you kind of have to dedicate a significant amount of time?
What is the nerdiness level?
How accessible is this?
I think it's extremely accessible if you're willing to put in a little bit of time.
I also want to say that it's not that expensive either.
You can get a fully deployed product up for less than 200 bucks, maybe even less than that,
depending on how much back and forth that you do.
It's quite simple, too.
using a tool like Replit.
Replit's a personal favorite of mine.
You can take a screenshot
of a website.
The URL
and say, code this.
It literally is that simple.
You can go to Callanley, take a screenshot of Callanley,
paste in the URL of Callanley,
and Reflet will gather all information
and code it for you.
It gets a little bit more.
And, you know,
you want to iterate.
with it.
But if you're able to talk to chat GPT,
you're able to talk to Claude,
you're able to talk to Gemini,
you can create your own software now.
There's really no barriers anymore.
You test it,
it's in a visual window next to it with you.
You say, this is broken,
talk to it in natural language,
get it to a point where everything pretty much works.
And again, you're just using it
and saying like, this doesn't feel right,
you can self-deploy it in these tools,
host it on that tool, map it to a domain,
connect it to a stripe account if you want to charge.
You don't have to, if you want to use it as an internal tool.
You can now publish it to the Google Play store as well.
For mobile apps, everything is self-hosted in these tools,
and they're getting better and better every single day.
So realistically, it can take a couple of different,
couple hours. It depends on the complexity of the tool as well. It's also a thing to remember that
you're not going to just recreate go high level CRM that has 10,000 features in two hours. But if you
just need a tool that does three or four simple functions, you can get that online in less
than a day in just a couple of hours, just going through it. You might spend tens of hours
working on something, and if you're a perfectionist,
maybe a little bit more.
But it's simpler than most people think.
I think everybody, including their uncles,
had an app idea,
but they've never had the resources,
the money, or the know-how to get it out there into the world,
and that barrier is no longer there.
To me, this is one of the greatest unlocks
of the next three to five years in business
is figuring out, and I'm a big F-A-F-O guy here.
Like, build a couple things that don't work and just delete them, right?
Like you said, it's going to cost you $20, $30 to mess around,
see what works, it doesn't work, it looks ugly, I don't like that.
Okay, great, delete it.
Start again, right?
Like, play around with this a little bit.
But I think the ability from a leadership perspective
to see these nuanced, repeatable tasks
that you can bring internal,
maybe strip out the 17 features you don't need
and just have the two or three that you actually use,
saves time, money,
especially, guys,
if you have a larger team
and you're paying 15, 20, 30 user seats,
I mean, that really adds up for some of these tools.
I mean, I built, I built, for a little side hustle thing that I have,
I built a Slack replacement doesn't do,
it does 15% of what's,
Slack does. It does everything that that little side hustle needs from like a message board
communication standpoint. That's it. It does everything we need. None of the other stuff. And I was
actually doing it for a client and it took 17 user seats at 15 bucks a user seat off of their
books. And now I think it costs maybe $40 a month total and like API cost. That's it. So it's,
I mean, and now they have all the messaging they need. It's not too much because they're thinking.
was like Slack was too much. It was too much. It's just overwhelming. We get lost, blah,
blah, blah. I was like, all right, well, what do you actually want it to do? And,
and, and guys, you know, like, I'm not hyper, I'm nerdy, but I'm not technical guys. Like, I'm not a
technical, I don't know how to code. You know, like, I'm learning some of this stuff, but,
but I'm not, I didn't walk into any of this. I walked in with zero intrinsic knowledge about
how any of this stuff works. To be honest with you, coding and that whole side of the game
has scared the crap out of me for such a long time because I felt like I didn't speak the
language. It was like scary. You know what I mean? Like I've worked with tons of devs. I've been on product
teams. But like that side has always been scary to me because I felt like they were speaking a language
I didn't understand so I could never be fully invested in the conversation. And now with this
ability, even if you do have a more technical person and more development, you can you can be
much more engaged in the process because you don't have to understand C++ or JavaScript or
whatever language. You just have to understand what you wanted to do. And that to me starts to
become the skill.
Huge unlock.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Dude, this has been absolutely phenomenal.
I can talk to you all day.
Tell us about where people can find out more about your AI video tool that you've created.
And then also how they get deeper in your world.
And obviously, we'll have all these links, including a link to your book in the show
notes, guys, whether you're watching on YouTube or listening, just scroll down.
You'll find all this.
Yeah.
So the name of my company is Syllabi.
the video generation tool, it's s Y-L-L-A-B-Y.
And it basically automates everything for video marketing
to help you drive leads and sales, saving you 70% of your time and budget.
My book, Virality, you can find anywhere you buy books, Amazon.
You can search for Austin Armstrong on Amazon.
You should be able to find it in there.
It is everything that I know about marketing,
helping you go viral in the right ways for business focused.
I'm not going to tell you to dance or to kick your employees in the nuts in order to go viral.
I'll teach you all of the frameworks and nuances for every individual platform as well as psychological triggers that will increase your engagement, things that will have an immediate lift for you and your organic content.
and I just hope that it helps you.
And I'm very easy to get a hold of
if you search for Austin Armstrong on social media.
I'm everywhere.
I am the nerdy with AI and glasses Austin Armstrong.
I am not the defensive line coach
of the Florida Gators Austin Armstrong,
nor am I the six-foot-two curly-haired relationship vlogger
in L.A. Austin Armstrong.
I'm that business nerd right in the middle.
I'm very easy to get a hold up.
Please DM me.
I love it, bro.
This has been great.
I appreciate your time.
Guys, check out Solilibi.
Absolutely get the book.
The reason I wanted to have Austin on versus so many other people that talk on this topic
is the fact that he has dialed in on this idea of strategic, right?
Strategic virality.
It is so incredibly important.
Going viral means nothing if you're not doing it for the right reasons.
Appreciate the hell out of you, man.
We're out of here.
Peace.
