The Startup Ideas Podcast - 400k Followers in 100 Days in an AI World

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Today Greg is joined by Roberto Nickson, the entrepreneur and designer building Eluna AI, Metav3rse & MV3. In this episode, Greg and Roberto talk about how to win the game of social media using AI. ►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team:https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comRoberto Nickson:https://www.youtube.com/@RobertoNicksonhttps://twitter.com/rpnicksonSHOW NOTES:0:00 - Intro2:42 - Why you probably need an alt account10:27 - Roberto's advice for new creators19:26 - Go slow to go fast30:33 - Roberto gazes into the AI crystal ball

Dude, I am really excited for this chat. Likewise, man. I feel like it's been a long time coming. I almost wish I was sort of like interviewing you on the pod because you're doing such like crazy stuff, man. So I'm really excited to chat today. I mean, let's just let's just chat and see where it goes. Why I'm excited to chat with you is I've seen you grow to millions of followers over the last

couple of years through your Metaverse account and now through your AI accounts. and I want to crawl around your brain and extract all that good stuff in there. And I appreciate you taking some time. Of course, man. I'd love to start by chatting about content. It's just been such a big passion of mine for so long. You mentioned Metaverse and Now Luna. I've actually been building, you know, let's call them faceless media brands, right?

For a long, long time now, a better part of a decade. And I've built and then sold now a lot to a lot of communities, specifically on Instagram because that's just where I've sort of like probably spent my most time you know on the internet on Instagram so I built a ton of communities you know totaling probably over 10 million followers but I think what's been really interesting is in January I started putting out content consistently for myself which is something that I've never done because I think this is where sort of the world is going especially the media landscape is going my inbound for my personal content has been 100x even even metaverse to the bull run 100x what that's

that inbound look like. And so I've really started to notice it's like, you know, people buy from people. People want their information filtered through people, not these faceless media brands or media giants. And so I think, I think it's sort of like a small microcosm of where the entire media landscape is going. So it's been a lot of fun to see. So if you were to redo it all, would you have started your personal brand earlier? 100%. Now, granted, there is, there is a lot of benefit to having like these media brands as like sort of support or content that doesn't necessarily fit my personal brand or content that I think may cause diminishing returns. It's great to have those media brands to kind of like, you know, use those.

But yeah, man, I wish I started a lot, a lot earlier, right? Because I've always been sort of posting content to the internet sporadically, but I've never done so consistently and deliberately. Like now I'm creating content and there's a deliberate mission behind it, right? I want to capture all the attention I can at the top. it down to my own products. Whereas before, it was just sort of, you know, off the cuff. Like, I'd post a picture here. I'd go on a vacation. I'd post a cool picture here. But it was really nothing but kind of like vanity, right? Like, this is my life. This is what I'm doing. Look how cool.

This picture I just posted was where now there's a deliberate strategy behind it. I have this new thesis. It's like a work in progress thesis. Curious your thoughts. That every brand will have an alt account. So I came to this conclusion. Do you know Nathan Lanz? Yeah, man. Yeah. Talk to him all the time on Twitter. Great guy.

Yeah, great guy. You know, tweets about generative AI a bunch. And I saw him just continuously tweeting about this Boris account. Have you seen that? Oh, is that his account? Yeah. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah, so basically he was like, yeah, he was, he basically kept tweeting like, don't follow Boris.

Okay, his last tweet. It's been less than 72 hours since Mid Journey 5.1 bomb dropped. Take out my 10 favorite examples. How are these not real photos? P.S. I stole this from Boris. Whatever you do, don't follow him or at Nathan Lanz. So I clicked on Boris and it's like, the profile picture is hilarious.

This guy with like super long hair. It's like this cartoon weird looking guy. And he went from zero to 19,000 followers in a couple of weeks. And if you go to his account, it's like way more edgy. So like it's way more edgy memes. it's like not really Nathan. So it got me thinking... A little more off brand for Nathan.

Exactly. What do you think of this idea that, you know, maybe every brand has their brand account, personal accounts for the leadership team, and then an alt account, which is way more edgy? I think two thoughts come to mind. One, that's fascinating because I thought Boris was just a real person, right? And it sort of like adds to this new notion of the internet where like, is there even a real person behind the brand? Is it AI generated, AI systems? Is it, you know, somebody completely different? And so I would have never known if you didn't tell me, right?

And so I think that's pretty fascinating. I follow Boris. I laughed at the memes. I like, I consume the information as if it were a real person, right? So like the first thing that comes to mind is like, wow, you know, generative AI maybe or AI assisted sort of like bot accounts could sort of pass as a real person. That's insane. But too, I love the idea. I mean, I think it's sort of what I have kind of been doing, right?

So sometimes there is something that I'd love to post, but I feel it's a little bit off-brands. Sometimes it's a little bit gimmicky. You know, like, here are 10 apps that you can use to harness the power of generative AI to boost your business or whatever. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to post that a little gimmicky, but I got Metaverse or a Luna that I can do that on. Right. And so there's no like, there's no brand equity hit, if that makes sense for like the personal brand. And so now that you say it, yeah, I actually think you're on to something. I think that's a brilliant idea, right?

because you have two separate brands, two separate tones, voices, communication styles. And then, you know, depending on the content that you want to push, it's like you can see which one is better suited for that. I love it. Yeah. And it's a, it's just another creative outlet. Like there's some things where you start writing the tweet and you're like, do I really want to press publish on this? Right. Right. You know, it's going to maybe ruffle some feathers. Maybe it's a bit too edgy, too cringe. So what you're saying is kind of like for the too cringe posted on your brand account and for the two edgy posted on the alt account. Yeah. I mean, honestly,

it's kind of like a finsta with economic ambition, right? Like a finsta, but that's public that you could use to drive commerce. I mean, honestly, you may have just spotted like a really fast emerging trend. So kudos to Nathan. I love that. I'm going to give that a lot of thought the coming weeks. So you've got these, you've got Aluna, you've got Metaverse. Tell people what they are and what type of content you post and why, like, why even be focusing your time on that? Yeah.

So what I've really been doing with some of these media brands is I, is I build up these communities and these audiences and then there's usually a product to push underneath that. With Metaverse has not been so much that. It's really just been like this educational sort of endeavor for me, right? Like, I love to educate people on emerging tech paradigms and new things happening in the space. Because I'm like, I'm a nerd, man. I'm geeking out about this stuff all day, like on Twitter, like chatting with like-minded people. And I just love to be able to present this to a more mainstream audience, like sort of what's happening, what's going on.

And so, like, I lead really through education first in my style. Aluna was always a, it's a SaaS. It's a SaaS startup, right? Because I'm looking around the generative AI landscape. And I'm like, man, this is incredible. but it feels pretty disjointed, right? Especially stable diffusion. I'm a big believer that open source will prevail,

and that'll be sort of like the winning foundational layer that AI is going to be built on top of because I don't want to go in a tangent, but even, you know, ChatGPT, I feel like every update it gets neutered a little more and more and more and more. So like as a builder, I'd feel a little bit, I don't know if I'd want to build on ChatGPT, right? They have too much leverage, it's too much platform risk.

So I'm looking at open source alternatives and I see stable diffusion. There's incredible stuff being built on top of stable diffusion. But it's hard for anybody to interface with. You got to be able to rent it locally in your PC. So you need technical abilities. You need to understand how to operate a node or set up a dev environment. I'm like, who's going to go through this and do it? Even Mid Journey, I think is one of the most spectacular products I've ever seen in my life.

But like, why is it Discord only? Right. And so I think we just saw an opportunity with the Luna to build the SaaS product to bring in like 20 generative AI products. Eventually, there'll be like this, this LLM that will train. So you'll be able to interface with all these products with voice. So as a content creator, like Greg, you might say, hey, I need an image of this. I want trap music, like a trap beat.

I need that on top of it. I want big bold text that says this. And so hopefully like in a year from now we'll have this LLM that'll be able to, you know, anything a content creator may need, you just do it through voice. When you came up with the idea for Aluna, where you like, I want to create this SaaS product and this is the vision? Or were you like, I'm not sure what I want to build here. I'm just going to aggregate a bunch of people and figure it out from there. So that's part of it. So I knew I wanted to create a product, right, for content creator specifically. And so that's

when I sort of reverse engineered it. And like something that I've just been doing over the last five to 10 years is like I build these online communities through education, through information, through like really great visual content that really resonates with audiences. And then I put like a product underneath. And with Aluna, that's it, man. It's like, we're trying to figure out now. Like, I think we've sort of achieved product market fit. You know, we have 30,000 users now. There's been 800 purchases on the site, I think 200 subscribers. So I'm like, okay, we're something here, but now it's about trying to figure out that moat and trying to figure out what to build next, right? And so what we've done is like we've just put four really dope builders under one roof,

me and my co-founder, Greg, who's a front of developer, Suha, backend wizard, and then Efe, who's our mobile developer. And, you know, now we're just tinkering and we're playing around and we're seeing what's possible. And we're just building, building, building, shipping as fast as possible. And, like, the idea is that we'll hit a home run on one of these products, right? And then put all of our resources behind that product. And so it's just like, it is this exercise and tinkering.

And it's been a lot of fun, man. And, you know, people really love the site so far. Yeah, you know, people often ask me, they're like, what should my minimal viable product be? Which should my MVP be? Yeah. And I always say that 95% of MVP's could be a WhatsApp group. Yeah, 100%. You know, like, or an Instagram or a TikTok or a Twitter account.

You know, it's a free account that you can just start inviting people and start with your friends, right? What advice could you give to people around maybe they're interested in a niche and they want to start an account? It's pretty daunting for a lot of people. What advice could you give to people around starting? So that's what you just said starting. Start is always my primary piece of advice. And as like elementary and obvious that it sounds, it's actually not that it's very, very difficult for people to grasp. And there's two things that I think hold everybody back.

And these are the two mental hurdles that I think if you're able to jump over, if you're able to leap, then you kind of become invincible, right, to me. And one is the ability to really, truly not care what people think, right? And I used to really care a lot. I was like, man, what's my boy going to think? What's this person going to think? What's this random person on the internet going to think? If I try this, it doesn't work out if it fails. And something that kind of like freed me was this idea that nobody's thinking about me, man.

Like, I finally realized it. Like, nobody's thinking about us. Nobody's thinking about anybody else. Everybody's really just kind of consumed and focused on their own self, right? And the other thing that helped me out was I realized like all toxicity and negativity on the internet. Like I started to really understand insecurity from an intimate level. And I think all behavior on the internet stems down to fear, like a healthy fear. But insecurity is like, you know, any toxicity on the internet kind of stems from there.

And so that allowed me, I'm like free now. I'll post whatever I want whenever I want. I don't care, right? And then the other thing is this idea that you're never ready and you never will be ready. You know, and a lot of people, oh, man, I see it every day. Oh, I need to get into a little bit better shape before I start making content. I need to make a little bit more money so people can take me more seriously. I need better equipment.

Like all of these, anytime I hear this, I'm like, this person is not going to break out anytime soon because they got to get over this mental hurdle. And so that's it, man, really understanding that nobody's thinking about you. and if they are spewing toxicity, that's a reflection on them and not you. And two, you're never ready. You might as well start today. I was actually reminded of that over the last 45 days because I decided that I wanted to grow my Instagram account. And my Instagram account had like, I don't know, 1,500 people following me, mostly like high school friends.

Yeah. So I basically tried to get my, you know, I've got 330,000. followers on Twitter. I was like, follow me on Instagram. Turns out like very hard to get people from, you know, one platform to another platform. Yes. So I was like, okay, I guess I'm just going to try to build this on my own. And first I was posting like everyday videos, you know, thoughts on my Instagram. And I kept noticing that like, you know, two, three, four people were sharing it. And I had a feeling that people were sharing it and they were kind of making fun of me basically um like who's this guy like post you know every day i was posting getting like three likes and i had to stop myself i

have to be like doesn't matter and you kind of just have to push through um now i'm at i'm sitting at like 650 500 followers and i'm like i could just start i'm starting to feel the momentum um just like till the end of the year where you're going to be you know yeah exactly so it's yeah i i totally agree with that advice. I think it's, it's easy advice to give. It's hard advice to take because you have to wake up every single day and look at your, you know, Instagram account and see two likes. Or guess how, guess what the media, what is it? The, I guess the average amount of likes on a tweet. Probably one. Zero. I mean, zero. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense, right? It makes sense. Like in our world, we, we

probably don't, we probably don't notice that, right, just because we're following people who have already like sort of accomplished and stuff. But yeah, I mean, you imagine, you know, Facebook has, Facebook has, I think now 80% of people with an active internet connection who are daily active users of one of the products, you know, so that's three billion people. So you can imagine, probably 2.9 billion of those, if not more, are averaging, you know, one or two likes and whatever piece of content they do. But man, that's that, you're proof of that idea that you just have to start, you know, even as uncomfortable as it is in the beginning. And that's another thing I tell people. I'm like, you're going to start creating content. You're probably going to suck at it.

Two, probably nobody's going to care for a long, long time. But that is the point. Like, that is part of the process. You've got to go through that. And that allows you to find your voice, develop a visual style, communication style, learn to see what works, what doesn't, what resonates with an audience. And so I'm like, it's that simple. You just have to start and then have patience. Like I saw Mr. B's tweeted the other day, like the total number of views that he's had in every year he's been acting on YouTube. And the first year, I think he had 14,000 views total, right? Not a huge number over the course of a year.

And then the second year, he had 7,000 views. So it got cut in half. He went even harder. Most people at that point would have been so discouraged, and they would have been, you know, starting to self-doubt themselves. And they would have quit. They would have stopped making content. And so, like, that was a perfect example of what will happen when you start making

content. It'll take time to break through. And that's just, that is just part of the game, you know, unless you get really, really lucky a ride like some crazy momentum wave. It's just going to take time and that's supposed to be that way. Yeah, you got to get out of your head and get into other people's heads, meaning what is the tweet, what is the picture, what is the video that is really going to resonate with the people that you actually care about?

I also think that there's a bunch of accounts right now that have millions of followers that are just very low quality accounts. Oh, man. Yeah. We could talk about that forever, quality versus quantity, right? Yeah. And first of all, I want to go back to what you were saying. Like, even if that were true, even if somebody were sharing one of your piece of content

to your friend, like in a negative fashion, like, how bad of a look is it for that person who took time out of the... So that's another thing I've realized. Like, there's no fulfilled human on planet Earth that would even take 10 seconds out of their day to tear somebody else down, right? And so that's another thing that's really helped me. It's like, who cares? Like, would you take advice from those people?

Probably not. So why would you, you know, why would you take the talk? toxicity to heart. So I was kind of like, these are the mental models that I've been framing for myself over the, over the years to the point where now I like true, I can truly say I just don't care, right? Yeah. Well, the booze come from the cheapest seats. Hate never comes from above. Never above. You know? Yeah, 100% man. So to me, like the best indicator of a quality audience is how much commerce you're able to push, right? Because ultimately, now people don't like to admit it, but like social media really is kind of a status game. And at the bottom of it, like the underpinning of social is

sort of, you know, the ability to drive commerce, you know, for yourself or others. And that, that is kind of like the game that we're all playing, I think. There is an economic ambition behind this all. And when I see, I mean, there are some influencers out there with five, six million followers that if they try to sell a T-shirt, they might get two sales, right? There's no, there's no relationship there with that audience. So there is a huge distinction between a follower and, or followers and a community, right? And I see this all the time. And I see people, hey, I have 100,000 people on my mailing list. And then you look a little closer.

Their open rate's like 1.2%. So it's like, what does that really matter, right? Or there's people with 3,000 people on the mailing list with a 70% open rate. And usually what happens is, you know, people develop this following through cheap tactics, right? So through like algorithm hacks, you know, through giveaway loops, whatever it may be. It's actually, if you want to get a 2 million follower Instagram account, you just do cheap tactics and it's easy. But what end up happening is your engagement will be like dismal. You know, I have 2 million followers in an Instagram account.

You might get like 300 likes per post. Like eventually you kind of expose yourself, right? And so like my mantra is always just build slow, build right, quality over quantity at all times. And I think marketers around the world are finally smartening up. Whereas five years ago, it was just like this person has a lot of followers giving money. Quick interruption from me. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcast or Spotify, you're getting any value.

you need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the Where It Happens podcast YouTube channel. I promise you the experience is richer, more interesting. So if you're getting any value, just stop what you're doing, open up the YouTube app, go to the website and press subscribe at where it happens on YouTube. And if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed, what are you doing? Go press subscribe. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of the show. You say grow slow, but at the same time, you're growing really quick.

You've probably added 400,000 followers across your platforms in 30 days. How are you doing it and how are you dealing with it? First of all, it's like people who are you blew up. I'm like, yeah, maybe overnight success, 10 years in the making. This has been nine years of trying everything is, you know, just like, constantly being, you know, creating content. Yeah, I think for my personal, I've gone maybe 400,000 across all my personal socials in the last 100 days. And then again, like Aluna in the last 100 days, you know, 230K followers, I think, Metaverse has added another 100,000 or so over the last

100 days. All of this, like people ask for the secret. The secret is just good content, right? It's just good content. And that's kind of it. And consistency and quality. And, you know, people ask like the cheat code was the cheat code was a secret recipe. I'm like, there is none. You just put in the work over a long enough period of time, you'll eventually have your breakthroughs and figure out. And so just instinctively and like sort of like innate to me now, I just understand how to resonate with an audience what people are looking for. So I've been able to crack a lot of these platforms, but the last sort of final frontier for me is YouTube, which I think is the most important one. So this year I'm like going to focus on trying to crack that one because that's the one that's

been alluding me for a long time. First of all, on the YouTube bit, I just recorded an episode where we go through how to grow on YouTube. The biggest takeaway I had from the Austin Lieberman chat was that the people, like, I thought the people that were watching the Where It Happens YouTube show were subscribers of the Where It Happens YouTube show, and that was completely wrong. It's, you know, a lot of people just seeing. it on YouTube recommendations.

It's people seeing shorts. It's people, you know, just seeing it across YouTube. So, you know, one way to think about YouTube is how do you reverse engineer search terms, basically? If people are searching for XYZ, how do you go and then create a video about it and then rank for it? So definitely check that out. And then I heard through the grapevine that you manage the Aluna Instagram account.

So I chatted with someone. on your team who was like, you know, doing some freelance work. And he was like, hey, I like, you know, I work on the Aluna Twitter account. And I was like, you don't work on the Instagram account? That's like the bread and butter. And he's like, no, no, no, that's Roberto's thing. It's, it's been really, really tough for me to find people who understand how to create good visual content. So that's my question. Can you outsource great visual content? This is so tough, right? Because it looks easy to do, right? It's a much harder. to do well than people may think. And so I've had trouble finding people that do it well on a

consistent basis. And then two, what I've noticed is here's another phenomenon that I think is like, and you talk about this a lot, which I love, like the solo preneur kind of like emergence, right? But here's a thing, Greg, like if I find somebody who's a killer who knows how to do it super, super well, why would they come work for me? They're just going to do it on their own for their own baseless media brands or their own products or their own whatever it is. I've had difficulty finding people to be able to create really good visual content. But at the same time, I really love it, too. Like, I really do enjoy it.

So it's hard for me to kind of like relinquish control as silly as it may sound in a world where, you know, you really need to be delegating to maximize output. Have you ever considered acquiring other media brands and employing kind of like a doing things media approach? For those of you don't know doing things, they run 35 plus accounts. They've got more than 80 million followers. some of their accounts are like middle class fancy or overheard. So it's these meme accounts.

And the beauty about it is, you know, once you have this network of accounts, then like coming up with the new account is so much easier because you can essentially pump the new account with your existing network. Totally. Absolutely. Absolutely. It compounds very beautifully. Exactly. So have you ever thought about essentially acquiring accounts, but it's really acquiring talent. Yeah. Yes and no.

I mean, one person that's doing that really well is my friend Kit. He runs the Puberty Media Group. You might have seen Puberty on Instagram. I mean, like I think he has 100 million followers across his family of accounts now. So he's done that really,

really well. I think for me, like honestly, Greg, like I like media. I like creating content, but I don't necessarily like the media business. I really love building product, right? Like that's what I've been doing over the last 10 years. And so that's kind of really what I want to focus on.

And I just look at these sort of media, brands that I'm building as a way to drive traffic and to bring awareness and attention to those products. So it's not necessarily something that I haven't considered. It's just not, you know, something that's super interesting for me. And for me, it's always been like, it's been a little bit less about the money and more about the freedom to do whatever I find interesting to do. So it's a great idea, just not something that I want to put a lot of time and energy into right now. That makes sense. It does. It does. Let's actually transition from the media. side of things to the product building side and talk talk aluna so okay so you launch a lunar um it's

helped a little bit by the metaverse account i would imagine in terms of growing it so funny enough it's really been so metaverse even stagnated for like four months it's actually been my personal content and i'll collab post uh with a luna and metaverse that has grown these accounts again right that have seen this emergence so metaverse is now stagnated for like four months it's actually been stagnated for a long time and it's now up I think like nearing 100,000 followers over the course of since I started making my content and I've noticed that these platforms are actually prioritizing original content creation and they like longer videos now even TikTok they're encouraging promoting minute long minute plus longer videos and so what I'd recommend anybody trying to build these accounts

is like leverage yourself or somebody else as a personal creator because that really helps to build these these other accounts you leverage your account started building a Luna the account. You're getting a lot of traction and starting to feel good. When do you know it's ready to actually go and build a product? And how did you know which product to build? So I actually had the product in mind first. So we knew we were going to build a product. And I think the first to actually commit to the repo was around 10 weeks ago. So I was like we've just been really rapidly. And then the Instagram account was in January. So about 12 weeks ago, I want to say. Right. And so I knew I wanted to build the product. I started with the IG account first just to drive that attention, to gather the team and the resources needed to build this product. But it was really, product comes first. And then it's like building an account to suit that product, if that makes sense.

My hunch is you knew you wanted to build something with AI and content creators. Yeah. So you knew that. And then you're like, okay, how do I like reverse engineer that to build an account around it? Once the account started to grow and you saw a validation, then you're like, okay, let's hit the pavement. put the team together. Did you raise funding or you just self-funded it? Not yet. So right now we're totally bootstrapped. There's been a lot of venture interest, but I was like, let's hit this product market fit first. Let's get some real, real momentum and understand like, okay, we're going to be

able to be profitable very, very quickly and then we'll be comfortable sort of raising funds. It will probably go for a pre-seed fund very soon, however, though, because I understood really quick, like to be able to compete with some of these BMS, we need a real distribution strategy. You know, we need a lot of money for there. And also the hardware stack. Like right now we're running on our own GPUs. And we have a product launching today called Motion Blend that I think is going to go crazy viral. I have a ton of content creators lined up to release a video around this Motion Blend product.

I think we'll, you know, reach a million eyeballs in a day. But we actually can't unleash that because we don't have the Jeep. We don't have the hardware stack right now to be able to, you know, like if about 100,000 people visit the site in a day, there's not going to be a lot of generations happening because all the GPUs are going to be filled up. up, right? And so now we're like, okay, no, we do need to raise capital just for the hardware stack and the distribution because there is, for some reason, there's no good GPU cloud service out there right now. So if anybody wants to build that, that's a great business to get into. So walk us through, like, what are the coolest product features about Aluna and how are people

using it today? Yeah, man. So the coolest product features, I don't think are out yet, right? So the Motion Blend is one of these new ones. It's actually built on a tool called DeForum. unstable diffusion. I don't know if you've heard of that, but it's, you know, you're able to input several prompts, you know, one, two, three, five, however many prompts you want. And then the AI blends, right? Like the diffusion fills in like this blend animation between all these prompts. And so again, like, I'm looking at the forum and I'm like, this is the coolest thing in the world. You can create your own music videos. Like imagination is limitless here. But like to interface with it, you have to be technically savvy. There's no, there's no interface right now.

that exists online for the average person to go in and create. So we've built that, we've tweaked it, we've added our own animations and whatnot, and that's launching later today. That, I think, is going to be one of our killer flagship products that we can evolve over time. And our text to image, I love it. We have different models that we've tweaked and refined over time, and I think the output is almost as good as Mid Journey, but Mid Journey is the King, right?

And text to image. And so that's why we're excited to release some of these upcoming tools. We have 10 in the pipeline that will come out over the next six weeks. which I think will be our sort of flagship product. Yeah, I also think it's similar to social in the sense that it's okay not to hit a home run at the first at bat. Yeah, totally. You're building goodwill with the community and they're seeing that you're trying

and they're seeing that you're making progress and you're doing it your own way. And as long as you're doing that and you have runway, all good. Well, I also think that one of the key elements to Aluna too that we set out to build is there's a social layer on top of, right? And we're releasing the ability to follow and be followed this week. But we've kind of built like Instagram for generative AI. And I think that's important because we all know in generative AI, the output is dependent on the quality of the input, right? And so these chat boxes, if you know how to work them, amazing, right? But the average person will go to chat GPT and not understand how to harness its true potential or power.

So what they'll do is they'll go search Google or whatever for prompts. But I believe if there's a visual feed there, you can actually follow your favorite creators, see what they're creating, get inspiration from their prompts, how they're creating, how they're using their tools. I think that gives us a real advantage, especially when we get into audio, video and all these other products that we're building. So you have this gorgeous visual feed of other creators you can draw inspiration from to really kind of get that, best output for yourself or your brand or business. And so I'm really excited about the social component that we're building on top of Luna. Do you think in five years from now, people are still going to be prompting? Or will that be a thing of the past?

I actually, I'm not as bullish on the idea of a prompt engineer as most, right? I think it'll be, it'll be like knowing how to use Google or Excel. It's just like a particular skill that'll be helpful. But no, I think the, I mean, like one of our main ambitions, too, is to build a product where you don't need to know how to prompt engineer. Like, we'll be able to sort of walk you through there. And I think a lot of products are going to head in that direction. Yeah, I think it'll be phased out relatively quickly. And how do you deal with competition?

You know, you're in such a competitive space. Yeah. Every entrepreneur knows the feeling of waking up and seeing a competitor come out and then your, you know, your stomach, you know, just tightens. It just hurts. And I'm sure you must feel that all the time. How do you deal with that? Yeah.

I mean, like what I think the most fierce competition are going to be the incumbents. You know, like a lot of this technology is going to be built into the products that we know in love and use today. You know, even, even mid-Journey, I think they're going to face trouble because it's eventually going to be integrated in Photoshop and a premiere into DaVinci Resolve, into Word, into every product that we already know and love and use. So the way that we sort of navigate this and one of our mantras is like, look, we have this now customer base that's pretty passionate. You know, they love the product. They want to see it succeed. Let's just cater to their needs. Let's not worry so much about the competitors, right? And so it's kind of this approach that I

learn from just consuming a lot of Jeff Bezos. Just hyper focus on your users, on your customers. Don't worry so much about what the competition is doing. And don't like your decision making shouldn't be dependent on your competition. It should be dependent on bringing the most value to your customers. And so we're just focused there and focusing on our advantages, which is the ability to ship at lightning speeds. You know, like you name a product, we can build it in four days and high quality. So the older I get and the longer I'm an entrepreneur, the more I realize that ignorance is bliss when it comes to competition. Yeah, 100%.

You know, I used to be, when I was in my early 20s, I would obsess about the competition. Yeah. And I would be like, oh my God, they have the same copy as us or the images look the same or our background is white and their background is white. And then I realized the people that win in the game of entrepreneurship have a long-term mindset. Yeah, 100%. And to your point, like, they're kind of like, okay, I'm focused on.

content creators and I'm going to basically, if content creators is the spoke in a tire, or the middle of the tire, the spokes are just the different products that you're trying to launch. And if you just like focus in the middle of tire, things are going to work out. One of those are going to hit. But if you spend all day obsessing on, you know, if you're on product hunt all day or you're on Twitter all day, just looking at different competition, it's nice to know. And it's also helpful, honestly, for motivation. Oh, yeah, man. It keeps you on your toes.

Yeah. Sure. I love that analogy, though. Focus on the spokes. Focus on the spokes. I'm sure you use AI in your workflow. Definitely.

What are some tools that you've been using that you find very, very powerful? Yeah. So first part of that question is, like, it's funny because we're sort of reversing engineer to solve our own pain points, right? So me, I want to build a product that I would be

integrating into my daily workflows to maximize my output. So one of the things was, you know, text to image. I'm using that almost for every Aluna cover. I'm generating my own image with a Luna. First, to draw attention to the platform for once, but also, too, because before I'd use stock images unsplashed pixels, but like these same images are being used a million other places. And so it offers a chance to really kind of like generate your own unique imagery. I can also like one of the things that's amazing is I have a chat GPT browser tab open at all times now. And I'm always interfacing with that. When it comes to creating content, menial things like rewriting captions,

written a little bit better. Sometimes when I'm summarizing or synthesizing an article or trying to present that information, I'll ask it to summarize that article, summarize a YouTube video. So it's increased my productivity. I would say probably like two or three X just on that front alone. And I also just amazes me how fast things can change, man. Like five months ago, we didn't have this product. Now I can't, I don't have a tab open.

You know, it's like always open on one of my tabs and I'm using it daily. But for me, it's been mostly on the copywriting stuff, right? It saved me a lot of time with copywriting because that's one thing that people don't realize when you're creating a lot of content is the captions, the stories, et cetera. So that's cut my time in half. But other than that, like, there's not a lot of products out there that I think have. That's another thing with generative AI. We can get to that conversation if you want.

But, like, I think there's going to be a lot of churn on a lot of these products because it's really cool. It's fascinating technology. But some of them are not just so helpful in the day to day, right? Like 11 labs. Best voice synthesizer on the planet. I'm using it maybe once a month, you know, and that'll probably get, like, less and less and less. It's just not that many use cases for it for your average content creator. unless you're automating content on YouTube, then it's a godsend.

Those people are probably using it every day. But I think we'll see this with a lot of generative AI as well, where it's not like, it's helpful, but for certain specific use cases, not for day-to-day use. Yeah, I think what's going to end up happening is there's going to be these AI suites for different communities. So there'll be the AI suite for content creators, the AI suite for marketers, the AI suite for marketers, the AI suite for insert. And it needs to be something that you're going to use every single.

single day if you're going to actually like pay for it and and adopt it into your workflow. I think what we're seeing right now, the stage we're in is there's a lot of people tinkering with single purpose AI apps. And we're we're starting to see a lot of magic out of them. But I think in 12 to 18 months, what we'll see is some of these sweets come up. Of course, some of them will be from incumbents like the Adobe's already starting that. Microsoft, of course, is already starting that, Microsoft designer, et cetera. but there's also going to be a whole new wave of Alunas and Aluna for X, right?

100%. Yeah. That's actually something that one of my sort of a mentor told me, he's like, hey, you got to focus on a specific subset. Because at the beginning it was just like, this is a tool for all people with business professionals, creatives. And he's like, that's too wide. You're trying to build too much for too many people. Niche it down. And so now, like, the focus is going to be for content creators.

And I completely agree with you. Eventually, there will be one for real estate agents in specific. All tools just, you know, kind of like built on behalf of that community. I want to end with this question just because it's an optimistic or pessimistic question depending on your view on AI. But what does the world of AI look like in five years from now? So I kind of, when it comes to tech, I'm sort of like an eternal optimist. And the reason why is like what is sort of the point of focusing on the negative if it's inevitable, right?

It's just sort of like wasted energy. The better exercise, I think, is how can we best harness it? How can we best be involved in the conversation to push it forward, ethically, responsibly, et cetera. What I think is going to happen, and I made a video about it today, actually, I just posted it. But like, you are going to be able to generate anything that you want, any entertainment medium that you want, curated to your taste. So, like, yeah, maybe, maybe Greg, you come home and you say, man, I want to play a video game. I'm a big RPG nerd. there hasn't been a good RPG in a while. I'm just going to generate my own tonight and play it.

Or maybe there's a specific software that you need for a specific purpose instead of browsing the app store and trying to find it. You just generate it. Hey, I need an app that can get me, you know, do this. So like almost any tool, any platform, any entertainment medium that you want to consume, you're going to be able to do it. You're going to be able to generate it. But one thing that I'm also thinking with AI, like obviously by the end of the year, we're going to have fully AI generated streamers, influencers, et cetera, I actually think there needs that human element. There's like that aura that exists. They call it the, um, the aura theory, uh, or the art theory where it's like, that human element needs to exist. So for example, I listen to a lot of this AI Drake stuff going on.

And some of the songs are crazy. Like if Drake sang it, I'd be like, this is the top five song of Drake. Like they're incredible. But there's like, it just doesn't hit the same as, as knowing that the actual Drake made this song, right? So I think the same thing is going to happen where like, There's going to be these incredible AI-generated movies and scripts, but I just don't think there's going to be as large an appetite as people think of for audiences to consume this because, like, what we really crave beneath it all is the story, is that human element, the story behind the artist, behind the creator. And so I think it's going to permeate, like, I think it's the most disruptive tech that I've seen

since I've, you know, since the internet. But it's, and it's going to permeate every, like, corner of culture. and it's going to be like at the center of the cultural zeitgeist. But I don't think it'll have like this end-all be-all effect that people are thinking. I think the human element, the creativity or ingenuity, I think it'll always be desired and craved. And it'll always be, you know, most important and central to me. Did you see what Warren Buffett said about AI the other day? I did, yeah.

So he compared it to the atom bomb. Yes, he did. So he said, and I quote, it can do all kinds of things. and when something can do all kinds of things, I get a little bit worried. I am personally skeptical of some of the hype that has gone into artificial intelligence. I think old-fashioned intelligence works pretty well. What are your thoughts? I agree.

So I think it was Munger that said that latter part where he said he's like, I'm skeptical of it. Old-fashioned intelligence is good enough. You know, I don't know if you would have asked me a year ago, I would have probably agreed. But now, like, we're looking at all the top AI researchers and sort of guru. in the world and the people that know this best. And five years ago, they all suspected that AGI would come in the 2070s, 2080s at minimum, if not longer. And now a lot of these guys are saying, hey, look, this is sort of inevitable for the 2030s. Some, you know, Kurzweil and Carpathie and others, they're saying maybe by the end of the decade. And so I think AGI

changes everything, right? Like right now, it's still pretty mathematical, like AI, right? For the people who don't know, can you define what AGI is? Yeah, so AGI or AASI, artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence is this idea where the machines become as capable of humans, right? Like they become as smart, creative, and shrewd as us for all intents and purposes. And basically where like our species won't be needed as much anymore, right? Like that's the sort of like ominous idea behind it. Because right now like AI is incredible, but it still very much works under mathematical constraints.

right like it's all this is the information it's just synthesizing the information and outputting it in the way that it thinks is best for the end user based on all these data points but eventually there's people out there that suspect that it's going to gain sentience for all intents and purposes it's going to gain creativity um and i think if and when that happens it just changes everything and it's like almost impossible it's almost like a futile exercise to predict what's going to happen because that's going to be so world changing that we don't know like it's it's it's ominous by nature, but I just tend to, I try to stay optimistic because it's happening no matter what. So let's figure out how to best approach it.

I love it. Well, I'm not a positive note. Dude, Roberto, you've got to come back again. You're... Anytime, man. I love this. I'm such a fan of you, man. I appreciate it.

And likewise, where could people find and subscribe to your YouTube? Yeah, subscribe to the YouTube. I'm struggling there. You can just search my name, Roberto Nixon. And on all other socials, I'm just R.P. N-I-C-S-O-N, R-P-N-R-P-N-R-P-N-N-R-P-N. Amazing. I will subscribe to your YouTube.

But, Roberto, tell the people listening to subscribe to the Where-It Happens YouTube, too. You got to subscribe to the Where It Happens YouTube. I'm actually not joking. Let me go on a 20-second tangent here. Like, one of the best hacks in my life has been subscribing to the right YouTube's and following the right newsletters. And so you have a couple. You have boring market or even a few.

Subscribe to these things. This is not a sales pitch. I'm just saying, in a couple months. minutes per week, you can elevate your game, content, entrepreneurship, life, culture, etc. Like literally, a couple minutes for week consuming this guy, Greg Isenberg right here, go and do yourself a favor. Otherwise, you'll fall behind. Elevate the game. All right. Thanks, man. I appreciate that.