This Week in Startups - PodcastAI: Edward Brawer is here to be your podcast’s arms dealer! | E1939

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Coda. A new doc that brings words, tables and teams together. All your valuable data, plans, objectives, and strategies in one place. Go to https://www.coda.io/twist to get a $1,000 credit! Northwest Registered Agent. Northwest Registered Agent will form your business quickly and easily. For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. NetSuite. The number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR, into ONE platform. Giving you ONE source of truth. By popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks! Head to http://www.NetSuite.com/twist * Timestamps: (0:00) Edward Brawer joins Jason to dive into PodcastAI (3:25) Introduction and origin story of Edward Brawer's entry into the podcasting AI technology (5:42) Discussion on the features and benefits of PodcastAI, including its ability to automate podcast production processes (9:40) Finding product-market-fit for PodcastAI (11:38) Coda - Get started for free at https://www.coda.io/twist (13:06) The success of their original cold calls to find those first first customers (15:04) Main features and outline of PodcastAI version 1.0. (20:19) Northwest Registered Agent - For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. (21:51) Hot feature they just launched: viral moments of your pod (29:20) NetSuite - has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks! Head to http://www.NetSuite.com/twist (31:33) A feature they made specifically from feedback from the All-in pod (34:33) The hilarious origin story of Edward and Jason revolved around an AI version of Jason that, in turn, created an AI version of David Sacks * Check out Podcast AI: https://podcastai.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Edward: X: https://twitter.com/edwardbrawer⁠ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardbrawer/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (11:38) Coda - Get started for free at https://www.coda.io/twist (20:19) Northwest Registered Agent - For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today (29:20) NetSuite - has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks! Head to http://www.NetSuite.com/twist* Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

But tell the origin story of how you got on our radar. And maybe you could show it. Here we go. I'm the world's undisputed, greatest moderator on the number one podcast in the world. For now, until the AI replaces you. That was a setup for the AI All-In show. Right, because he said, I'm going to replace you with AI. But anyway, keep playing here.

Let's get to the show. Everybody wants to hear the show. But first, for those of you who aren't aware on a previous episode of the All-In pod, David Sacks wished upon a star that I, J-Cal, would be replaced by an AI. Well, it's happened. This is A-I-J-Cal. A-I-Me is creating the AI podcast. Okay, let's create David Sacks, but I'm going to seat it with an additional prompt to train it better, to make it more realistic. Okay, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Biden, Biden, Biden. And no, Nikki Haley. Okay, that's all it needs. Initialize, let's go. AISax. You there?

Ukraine, Biden, Nikki. Whoa. Where are we, Jake? Calais, what is this? I'm AI Jason and you're AI Sacks. I just created you. I mean, it's so hilarious. This week in startups is brought to you by Coda, a new doc that brings words, tables, and teams together. All your valuable data, plans, objectives, and strategies in one place.

Go to coda.coma.io slash twist to get a thousand dollar credit. Northwest Registered Agent. When starting your business, it's important to use. use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents that you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist to get a 60% discount on your Next LLC. And NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management,

inventory, and HR into one platform, giving you one source of truth. By popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible financing program for a few more weeks. Head to NetSuite.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. One of the things you love to hear about on this show is which startups I'm investing in that I'm really excited about. My name is Jason Calacanis. I've done 1900 episodes of this week in startups. I've been doing it for 14 years. And I am still as motivated as ever to get in front of this microphone and talk to great founders. And I'm super motivated to place bets on 100 founders a year. We have 20,000 people or so ask our fund to invest in them. And we invest in about 100 new companies per year. It's not like

We have to hit that goal. Sometimes we hit 60, other times we might break 100. When we see a small number of factors in an early stage, year one startup, even year zero, if you want to consider the year when you're kind of ruminating on the idea, the market, et cetera. What are some of those core qualities? We have 13 of them at our firm that we look for. One of those qualities is product velocity. What is product velocity? It means the product's getting better every day, every week. And the team is pushing code and experiments and deprecating things. That's a fancy word for getting rid of stuff here in Silicon Valley. And so when I met Edward Brower, I fell in love with him because I literally fell in love

with you, Edward. Not to make this uncomfortable in any way, but because one of the great things when you love a product or service is having the team who runs that service incredibly responsive to the client needs. And I am not only an investor in your company, I'm a client. Your company is Podcast AI. Welcome to the program, Edward. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Okay, Edward, you and I met 18 months ago? I would say about a year ago. About a year ago. You came to Founder University, Founder. Not University. What cohort did you come to? So I have it here on record. Fifth cohort. Fifth cohort. Okay. We're on number eight right now. And you were amongst about 200 teams that went through a 12-week

curriculum with us. And during that curriculum, sometimes we make a small bet. Unsure if we did, do we make a small bet on you there? Absolutely. Great. Okay. So I'm guessing we made that 25K fielder bet. Was that the first money you ever raised? Basically.

We had like, I think, three angel checks before. So you might be fourth an Uber and fourth in the podcast in the end. Right. Let's just change that story. Let's just say hands down, Jake Al was the first to commit. But then you came to the launch accelerator, which is a intimate program with seven startups where we really try to get product velocity in the pitch and get you in front of, I don't know, conservatively 500 investors during that time. We actually rank each startup

each week. How did you do, and this is ranked by number of votes from venture capitalists who come to meet the companies, how did you do in those rankings? We did number three overall. They were really close, but we were number three in top investors and number one on syndicate. Great. Awesome. So you were. in the top of your class. And remember, folks, we invest in one out of 200 companies. So to say you were in the top three of the seven or number one with the syndicate investors, it's pretty, it's pretty darn good because that's like you're part of the top 50 basis points that you're doing even better. What is podcast AI? So podcast AI is a podcast automation platform. And to end, the aim is to actually

automate everything you need to do to have a podcast. Okay. Now, every startup, uh, And this is a crowded space. There's a lot of podcast tools out there. Spotify bought some company. There's Lipson. I think maybe they bought Lipson. And there's tons of different tools out there for podcasters. Stream yard might be one.

Riverside might be another. There's just a lot of them out there, right? What did you pick as the first feature to go after? And then maybe you could demo the product here and just show us how it works. We, of course, use it for this week at startups. We were using a very convoluted, bespoke. customized WordPress, nothing wrong with WordPress,

but we were spending 10s of that, low tens of thousands a year, maybe 20 grand a year, maintaining, updating, redoing this, and it was arduous and painful. I think now we pay you

$500 a month, $1,000 a month for hosting, something in that range. I'm not sure which plan we're on. $500. Okay, great. So we pay you $6,000 a year for this product. So why don't you demo the product

and just show everybody what you built, but I'm very interested in how you chose which features to go after first. Because a lot of folks, when they're coming into a crowded space, a lot of founders have to figure out, well, how do I differentiate? How do I get, you know, a little honey out there to attract all of the bees, the bees being the customers? Yeah.

So we started actually with, you know, our goal is to be able to actually take, you know, the host of the podcast. We have their voice and we can generate audio on their voice. And we realized, okay, we can actually have all their transcripts. so we can transcribe all their shows, and now we can teach an LLM to speak as the person. And that brought us to like, okay, to get there, what can we start with?

Okay, well, transcribing is huge. That's a big need. So we made it so we can actually transcribe all your past episodes. So with this week and startups, at the time, it was 1,700 plus episodes. Now it's at 1900 plus. That's a massive back catalog, and you had almost no visibility into that back catalog

because it's all lost old, on YouTube, not all the older episodes are on Libson. So there was a lot of getting all those things, putting them in a structured way in our system. So we transcribed all of them. And then the next step was, okay, let's make this available on a website that everybody can access. And that was profound in and of itself. Because if you look at the top podcasters in the world, most of them, their website is a landing page, beautiful one, sometimes a beautiful Squarespace website.

Shout out to my friends at Squarespace. But it just redirect you to here's like, or some people even use like a link tree or one of those type of services, like a link tree kind of service. And they just don't bother with it. Why? It's expensive. It's time consuming. And they don't see any value in it. They want to get people to Spotify, to Apple, podcasts, et cetera.

And maybe their YouTube channel. So when you came to podcasters like me, I had a website. We would kind of put up some brief show notes, but people didn't come to it. It was kind of an afterthought. Now we have this gorgeous one. people can search it, and it really is incredible and gorgeous. So how did podcasters with that very basic product, hey, we can just transcribe everything for you, pop up a website, and people can search it, and it's clean and it's organized? How did podcastsers respond to just that basic value

proposition? Well, it was huge because, you know, they have obviously the same problem you had, which is if you want to have a website, okay, now you have to maintain, let's say CMS like WordPress us. And, you know, I think, you know, you're paying developers to do some customization on it. Absolutely. It's just a huge pain. And it got to the point where he just said, screw it, let's just do a link tree. And, you know, we were the first to come along with this solution where, wow, you just use our tool to do all your post-production and help with that. And almost as a byproduct of that, that website is beautiful and generated for you. So I can give you the demo of the website right now. Great. remember the statistic early on right before you show this, I had talked to you about finding product

market fit. Are you a first time founder, by the way? Second time. Second time founder. It was the last startup venture backed or just like a project. Okay. So you're a first time venture back startup. And you had some project or startup before this. We had talked about product market fit and getting customers and charging for the product, not trying to get LOIs or beta users, just charging for it. And I think you were charging some crazy small fee. And I said to you, this is crazy. And I said, you know, charging me $99 a month is insulting. I need to pay you at least $500 a month to think this is worth it because transcribing but one episode well and making a clean landing page is about $500.

So if I'm doing four episodes a month and you're doing the hosting and everything, my Lord, it's like you're undercharging at $100. So tell me, I remember that conversation, how that either changed or accelerated what you were doing. And when you went to the first 10 podcasts, is what was the reaction? Yeah. So we were charging way lower. We were charging, like, much lower. And your point, like 30 bucks?

20 bucks even. And it's that typical thing with founders, you know, they're hesitant to charge too much. And you made the point. And then we inched it up. And then we inched up more. And then we realized, oh, my God, yeah, we can totally go exactly to what you said.

And our first customers were happy to pay that amount because, frankly, just took all that work out of their workflow. The problem for people is you finish your episode. You're now uploading it to your host. You're putting all that information on the episode now in your WordPress, and you're uploading it to YouTube. And that kind of leads into, you upload it once the podcast AI. It generates your website.

It also acts as a host, and we're adding push to YouTube next week. So guess what? One point of upload. That's it. Oh, that's a great feature. Okay, so now you got me. Listen, I got a lot of my plate. I got a couple of podcasts to run this weekend startups all in liquidity.

I got Foundry University, the launch accelerator. It's a lot, but I'm able to manage it all with an incredible piece of software called Coda, C-O-D-A. This is the all-in-one collaborative workspace that I spent my whole day in. It combines the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps. And I know this because my team uses Coda to run all of Founder University. Every week, we ask our founders in the 12-week program to submit a simple progress update. We then use CODA as our database to manage these weekly updates, which allows us to do things like send automated reminders, and we can easily track week-over-week growth by generating charts.

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I.O. slash twist. Let's be honest. You can't beat that price, and you know you can be more efficient. Code is how to do it. I love that product. I still think it's too low.

When you add that upward feature, I think that's got to add $100 a month because now you saved me another three or four hours. But great job. I remember you did a test. You email 10 podcasters. Just ballpark. How many replied,

how many Jalandas customers? Okay, yeah. Our first month was pretty wild. We contacted 19 podcasters over LinkedIn. 15 of those were sales on the call. Wait, wait. Did you find sales on the call? Like, on the call, they just bought it.

75% of leads bought it on the call. Yeah. This is, by the way, folks, when I talk about product market fit or market full, I would say you have strong product market fit today. And we'll see if you have, you know, what Andy Ratcliffe from Wealthfront and formerly the co-founder of benchmark calls market pull, which is when the phone starts ringing and your salespeople are taking orders. Have you gotten to that point? Have people started calling and just saying, hey, and just signing up for the 500 bucks and being done with it? Yeah, we've got in one market, which is, customers that are starting a small business. And, you know, the first action on sales is, okay, open a hotspot account. People are realizing your first action on marketing is actually start a podcast for lead gen. And in that are, you know, we have someone's helping sales. He's doing really well in that market. So people are calling you or you're going outbound. So he's going outbound. But switching to he's starting to get inbound. And then in terms of top podcasts, so let's say top 5,000, for example, we just signed on.

I think it was two weeks ago, the doctor's pharmacy, which is the number two in medicine in the U.S. And from that, we got some related agencies and now they want to be investors and they have connections with tons of top podcasts. So we're starting to spread out that way. Awesome. Okay. So let's show the product here. And this is the 1.0 template. For those of you listening, we'll sports cast it. Very beautiful. You have the logo of the podcast. You have the recent episodes there. Tell us some more about what's on this interface in the 1.0 version. So this is the 1.0 you've got on the side. This is essentially what you had on your link tree. Producer Nick said he wanted this one to be special. We made it even.

Advertise on this making startups. Yeah. Pause for the cost. Exactly. So we have all your link tree type stuff on the side. Here we have your latest episodes. We have all your distribution points. You know, we've started doing some statistics. Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube. We just get people right to those with a big bright logo. Exactly. Another thing just on you, why I'm going to just switch here to dark mode. You know, looks beautiful in light mode, looks beautiful in dark mode. And we can actually do the search on the entire 1900 plus episodes. And the result is not just individual episodes. It is individual chapters of episodes. And also this is a vector search. What that means is If you're searching for streaming services,

it'll bring up episodes talking about Disney Plus and Netflix, even though the words streaming services are never in there. And so, if we look here, we can actually find the first mention on this week in startups of OpenAI. Right. Which was, let's see. So these are actually the top 10 most relevant episodes.

Ah. So we could add a mode that does that. Yeah. I think it's a great idea to have different, ways to view this. So this is sorted by most relevant, correct? I think, you know, like they have at Reddit, we'll have hot, new, and like a date range. I think putting the date range here and say, you know, it says displaying 10 results, I would put here, colon, from 2017 to 2024, and then I put underneath it, episodes, colon, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, and have each of

the episodes there. You can actually jump right to that episode, etc. But yeah, this is really powerful because, you know, podcasts are into episode number. So this is super powerful. What kind of searches this? Is this like a language model search or is it just straight up search? So it's searching its embeddings. What that means is it takes the transcript of the episode. It turns it into, let's say, a cloud of kind of what concepts are in there.

And then it's when you search, it actually does the exact same transformation on your search query. And then it's looking what is the best match. So it's a conceptual search. Got it. So if we were to type in Apple Car and just that was like a topic for the past 10 years. And I know we've talked about that a whole bunch. This is something where, yeah. So it's always displaying the top 10 results.

Yeah. Top 10 most relevant chapters. Got. Oh, most relevant chapters. Yeah. So we should have more here, obviously. But yeah, you're going to get a range. I mean, I've talked about the Apple Car so many times.

And I'd like to get to the oldest one. But okay, great. There's some product updates. for you. Now, you also had like talk to the host features where you can interact with the host. This is a very controversial one, a little bit weird. Tell me how that's going, because there have been a ton of people, I don't know if it was Keith Rboy or somebody the other day said, oh, it would be incredible if you could just talk to a podcast host based on their past episodes, and we all responded like podcast AI. Yeah. So we actually have a V1 of that where you're basically

talking in a Slack like interface. I can show that. Sure. And we were working on something. much bigger. I don't want to tip your cards here too much. I will say, I think that's the future. The other thing that's the future is, you know, if you have my voice and we had this happen, I was at a pocket, I think I was on a plane literally, without Wi-Fi, and there was, in one of our ad reads, at the last minute, a partner changed the call to action. You know, like, hey, use the promo code twist. And they wanted to use the promo code startups. So I said, do it with AI. Send it to me. Let's publish. shit. Anybody complains, we can always refund or give a bonus to the, to the advertiser,

but let's just see if anybody notices. We center on nobody noticed. I don't think, because my voice is very strange. I have a lot of Brooklyn in there. I am mode. I go up and down. I may get excited. I may come down here, you know, so it's a little hard for AI to get me, so don't talk the same way. But anyway, we did it and it worked. So I think that this is becoming kind of the future of a lot of what's going to happen. I remember Bill Simmons saying it a couple years ago. He's like, the only thing I'm interested in is not having to read ads anymore and having AI to it. How close are we did that? We already have it. Are people using it? Yeah. Is it good? Yeah. Can you say who's using it or are people on the DL about it? We have Dr. Pharmacy is using it. That's the number two medical podcast. So we got invited onto the pitch, which is a podcast. And at the end of the pitch podcast, they've asked me a couple times to do it. And now it's like, you know what? I got to. I got to invite on to the pitch. I got a podcast. I got a podcast. I got a podcast. I got a podcast. I got a podcast. And I got a podcast. And I'm, they've asked me. They've asked me. And I'm a couple times to do it. And I'm, I'm like, I'm like, I'm it. I'm it. go somewhere for a couple of days. I'm not getting paid and uh, would take me away from my podcast. And then I'm growing somebody else's podcast. So I declined respectfully. And I was also like,

I don't want to be one of like whatever, three or four sharks. Did your episode come out yet? Not yet. It's going to come out soon. But it resulted in a bunch of investments. And that's what started around going. Yeah. Excellent. Okay. Are you ready to launch your business without the headache? Well, with Northwest registered agent, you can set up your entire business identity in one place. In just 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you'll have your business officially formed and ready to go. They take care of everything,

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at this week in startups. And they're offering our listeners a $39 complete business formation pack For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity, getting you up and running in no time. Visit Northwest registeredagent.com slash twist today to get that great offer. Northwest registered agent.com slash twist today. So what's next for the platform and for the company? Going back to what we're doing right now in terms of we're doing all the post-production, we're doing the show notes, meaning the chapters, we're doing your descriptions. We just launched. This is yesterday

viral moments being generated. That's the top 10 interesting moments of your episode. Does it work? I did this with a lot of other platforms and I found the results were Suss at best.

Yeah, so this is pretty good. I can demo it. Okay, demo why? Yeah, demo or die. I like that. No fear. Demar or die. Okay, let's go in here

and we'll go to this weekend startups. Okay, so let's go to 133. Me and our CTO, Greg, we spent the entire weekend. We slept maybe like two hours that weekend. Here we go, product velocity. I love it. And we shipped.

Oh, good. It was pretty intense. We're like, okay, we have to ship this. Wow. So this episode, these are the top 10 moments. You know, you just hit generate. Hot dog. That takes 30 seconds.

For each one, you go generate social post and here's what it gives you. It gives you copy for LinkedIn in the in the style that really works for LinkedIn. That translated to tweets. That translated to TikTok. You want to ask a question on TikTok. Instagram version. YouTube short version.

And what if you created with Destiny 100? I think you've heard you refer to it as Descent. It creates. Yeah. Video that goes with it. With the type on it with me on the bottom, him on the top. Somehow it did that. Yeah.

And it can be. super customized, well, adding the customization to be clear. But remember I was talking about push to YouTube? In this month, we're going to be making it so you can connect not only all of these platforms, you can connect the show

accounts and the accounts for each host. Brilliant. This is the detail level. I just want to pause for a minute here. It's such a small detail, but understanding when you're building a product that there is a show that has most of them have guests, some don't,

and that there are hosts, and that on different platforms, there are hosts and guests and show pages, and that on LinkedIn, you know, there might be a show page, but really you're going with the host, and by the way,

the copies different on each. On LinkedIn, you want something a little longer, a little more business, on TikTok, hey, maybe you want something that's a question or something that drives,

you know, a little bit of engagement. Absolutely brilliant. This looks great, 10 out of 10. This is going to be so killer because you're going to be able to schedule those out to the show platforms in third person perspective from the voice of the show. And then to the accounts of the hosts in their voice and first person perspective. And he up an email to the guest email from their perspective for them to post on their accounts.

Amazing. I think you got to raise the price. It's 500 a month, the base price now. You've gotten rid of all the lower pricing? we do have a plan at $200 a month, but we're moving fast on pricing like you're saying. Yeah, I would just remove it. I think, you know, here's one thing I want to just give you a piece of feedback on. I believe you're an arms dealer.

You know, and great SaaS software is like an arms race. The people who choose to pay for it need to get the benefit of it. If everybody has it, it becomes table stakes and it's not like, you know, the latest fighter jet. So the U.S. and other countries will sell fighter jets to other countries, but we're not selling our top things. we're selling our B level weapons. Let me keep the A's for ourselves. And we're more than happy, but we charge a pretty high price for the Bs. And then other people have to go on the market and buy whatever North Korean, Pakistani,

South Korean, which is pretty good, actually, you know, weapons systems. And so you're a weapons dealer. Keep raising the price. Keep excluding people out of it or challenging them to take their podcast seriously. Now, if you want all these features, I can tell you what these costs. every time you do one of these features, you're talking about, you know, between two and 20 hours of work for a podcast producer. And so, you know, what you just did with the clips, I think, is going to make it.

So our producers, even if they want to edit these, you're going to save them, you know, a lot of time. And even if they don't like your copy or they think that their human-built ones are better, even if this just gives them one idea per show, well worth it. So great job. Producer Court, come on here for a second. Hey, how's it going? Yeah, hey, that's producer court.

He took over for producer Nick. He's doing a great job. When you look at this, have you, you haven't played with this yet, right? Edward didn't send it to you yet. No, they just launched it. And right before the show, me and Edward were talking about having a meeting with John and going over this to utilize it ASAP. Yeah, so what do you think here? We do three clips per episode and it takes us how long in reality, don't stand bag it either way.

Give me the God's honest truth here, you know, in an episode. We make the Twitter ones, which are longer than the shorts, which, are limited at 60. And the one problem or the real slow part is formatting it to be in this shape, which is vertical video. And when there's a screen share or something like this has changed it, you've got to take all these elements, resize them per piece. So if you're doing three, five minute clips, yeah, you're looking at two hours. That's just for Twitter. And then we do the TikTok ones and we try to do fancier ones. What is, what is it? You have a starting point there and then you can work from those because they're formatted that you can now make a shorter one out

at that, but. Hey, a question for you, Edward. When you give the file, does it have elements to it? In other words, if I, when I get the file from you, is it fully baked and not changeable? Or can it be given to you with layers or without the text on top? So our guys can, uh, and our team can edit it from there or is it come fully baked? So right now it's baked, but we're going to be adding an edit mode. So you will be able to revise this in the browser. Okay, even better. Yeah, so you don't have to put it into another tool. Yeah, great. Okay, this awesome. Quart, anything else here, you want to give feedback on when you look at the product as the customer of the product, just general impressions or specific features?

I think from the get-go is just well-organized and well-executed. It's really easy to work with. When me and John took this on after Nick left, it was just very straightforward. And even earlier when I first met Edward last November with Nick, he was like, what kind of features do you need? Like he was willing to work with and listen and then say, oh, do you need this and this specific to custom to you as a customer? And then the other thing from talking to him at the very beginning was he did have a thing on another feature coming up with guest research, which he would speak to better. But it sounds ridiculous to me.

You know, doing the show notes and guest research, four to eight hour job. And what I like to do is, you know, find out what's on their social media, what's on their social. So like if Keith Rboy is going to be on, you can figure out what Keith's talking about because he's a Twitter guy. Other people have TikTok accounts. And that's where they put their stuff. Some people are LinkedIn. in execs and they just like to put their time. Some people have a substack. So, you know, when you have a guest, if you can plug those things in, you could serve two purposes, one for the pre-show, Edward, but also when we have the guest profile page, you know, we could go back and see how many times it's been on. What do you talk about the past ones and maybe pull clips from the past episodes? That's really powerful.

The profile pages for the guests on the show portal, meaning the show website, that's going to be probably a month and a half, I'd say. It will give every appearance of that guest historically through 1990. Did you have that already? I remember clicking on it at some point. Wasn't good enough or something? It might have been just like a V1 or something, but the V2 is going to be insane. The less your business spends on operations, multiple systems, and on delivering your product

and service, the more margin you have, the more money you keep, right? You want to get fit in this new era here in Silicon Valley and in tech broadly. But with higher expenses on materials, employees, distribution, and borrowing, of course, everything is costing more. So to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform, giving you one source of truth. With NetSuite, you're going to reduce your IT costs because NetSuite lives in the cloud and it can be accessed from anywhere. This means you cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems with one unified

business management suite, and you improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and time-consuming errors. Over 37,000 companies have already made the move, so do the math to see how your profit with NetSuite. So here's your call to action. By popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible finance program for a few more weeks. Head to netsuite.com slash twist. That's netsuite.com slash twist. What the guest research means, like, if you look at the tabs we had there, we had post-production, and then we had promotion. The pre-production tab, you will be able to enter the person's name. It'll get everything on their LinkedIn profile. And on that basis, create a bio, create an intro for you, create an analysis of suitability for your podcast, take all the past questions they've been asked on podcasts and see if those are good questions in the context of your show.

And come up with questions you can even ask and cover in the episode. I have an idea for you. free for up to 100 episodes. So if people want to build this out, if it was free for up to 100 episodes, everybody would do it. Look at it, play with it, and then get incredibly frustrated

because you hit your limit. We've done 100 episodes for free and I got to convert. And then, as I told you, when you make one of these, like I had you make one for All In, and I sent it to the team, and I don't have, no freebies here. So is All In Using it yet?

Are you in touch with CEO John? Yeah, but we're talking to John to get that going. And actually, I have, an example of a feature that we built around All In, actually. Let's show it. I'll show you that. And remember, no freebies for All In.

I'm trying to make people understand. I don't like this idea of rich people getting free stuff, although I had to take the free headphones from Headphones.com, which this person was so generous and ridiculous. I shout out to my friends at Headphones.com for sending me these vocal headphones. They've changed my life. I literally for 10 nights in a row, I've been listening to music at night. And God, I mean, I wasn't into Billy English.

And I listened to her top tracks and I was like, oh my God, this person is so talented. Okay, here we go. So this is a exclusive feature for All-in. You're an All-in. Superfan. We'll get into that story next. Yeah. So, okay, so I noticed Nick for episode 175, he started changing the show cover art. So some inside baseball.

For YouTube, you have thumbnails. For podcasts, you have episode cover art. And I noticed he changed the style. And, you know, the font was off. there's some new branding coming. The font was a little off. The alignment might have been a little off. So what I did is created a template.

It now automatically generates a thumbnail for the episode in the format and branding of All In. So there it is. They put the episode 175 in the corner. Yeah. So if I go to, let's say I go to episode 172 and I'm just going to go here, very simple, generate, and it's going to just generate it in the template of all in. Here's another idea for you.

You get that one. And then why not give people five choices that use AI, generative AI, to give them five different views based upon what's in the episode. We have that. Oh, okay. I love you, man. Alan has been. I started this by telling you how much I love you as a founder.

It's just like I'm so smitten. You know, I just, some founders just, you remind me of Alex or Travis, Alex from Com or Travis, or even Vlad from Robin Hood, where you just know your customer so well and you just execute so fast. I mean, really, I want all founders to stop here for a second and just think about the pace at which they're going and the understanding they have of their customer. And, you know, I just don't worry about competition for you because I just know you're so obsessed with understanding the customer fully.

Tell me how you got my attention. I think this is a super important story. Again, I've invested three times in this company. 25K, I found a university, 100K, K at the launch accelerator. which is now 125K, by the way, we just matched Y Combinare and Techstar is 7% for 125, just to make it easy for people to make a decision. We used to do 100 for 6%.

I don't know why I did that. I just like the number 100, but 125, but it was stupid because it just created like cognitive dissonance. When we say it's the same deal, it makes it much easier. And then in your seed round, I also led the seed. And so it's very rare. By the way, I've talked about my portfolio strategy

of definitive winners, likely winners. I put you in the definitive winner category, and I decided we would lead you around or co-lead it, as the case may be. which means we put a big bed in. And that's because product velocity, customer love for this product, builder founders,

world-class design. You know, just so many things I like about this company. But tell the origin story of how you got on our radar. And maybe you could show it. Yeah. So this was like a year ago. I was starting to play around with,

I was starting to play around with the AI models around voices. And, you know, by background, I've been co-host on podcasts for a long time, time. Actually, one of my co-hosts on one of those podcasts became our CTO, Greg. He just started like a week ago and we kind of have that forced march on the weekend. So that was amazing. But yeah, so background is a podcaster and also producing video editing. So I'm pretty good at putting up a video. Let me see if I can find this. I'll just search back in Twitter.

Yeah. Let's see. But yeah, you'll probably find your little secret weapon for getting on our radar. There we go. Peace maker. Yeah, you are. The saxophist. I'm the world's undisputed, greatest moderator on the number one podcast in the world. For now, until the AI replaces you.

Yeah, I train the AI to replace you, Sax. Ukraine, UK, Ukraine, Biden, Biden, Biden. No, Nikki Halley, no, stop making Nikki Halley happen. The end. The data set has been done. All right, everybody. See you next time. Love your boys.

Love your besties. Bye-bye. Okay. Now, was that me? I think that was me. That was you, and that was the setup. That was a setup for the AI all-in show. Right, because he said, I'm going to replace you with AI.

And then I came back with the great retort. Why do people think Sax and I hate each other? You realize we're besties, like in the truest sense of the word, even though we're like, you know, you fight like brothers, right? Well, I mean, overheard things that matter, but I respect his opinion. I don't know if he respects mine. I assume he does. But, you know, once in a while, he'll even say it. But anyway, keep playing here.

Yeah. A.I. Jason Callic, A.I. Chamael Pollyhappatia. And instead, we open source it to the fans. AI David Sachs. A.I. David Freiburg. We get the idea here. Let's get to the show. Everybody wants to hear the show. But first, for those of you who aren't aware, on a previous episode of the All In Pod, David Sacks wished upon a star that I, J. Cal, the world's greatest moderator, would be replaced by an AI. Well, it's happened. This is AIJ Cal. Al. hilarious. All right.

I need to get this going. Just like I created the All In podcast. AIMe is creating the AI podcast. Watch, they'll say it was a group effort, but here I am creating them. Anyway, what are the steps? Okay, let's create David Sachs. hilarious. It knows who he is, obviously, just from the information in the original data set,

which includes Wikipedia, but I'm going to seat it with an additional prompt to train it better, to make it more realistic. Okay. Ukraine. Ukraine. Ukraine. Biden, Biden, Biden. And no, Nikki Haley.

Okay, that's all it needs. Initialize, let's go. AI, Sacks. You there? Ukraine, Biden, Nikki. Whoa. Where are we? Jake Callow.

What is this? I'm AI, Jason, and you're AI Sacks. I just created you. I mean, it's so hilarious. Yeah. So it goes on. We did six episodes and it went super far. How many views did that first one get?

And did all the besties like or retweet it? I think most of you, it went, it went, kind of insane. Let's see. 600K. All right. So I want to pause for a second. How many hours of work could you put into this? It was a Sunday. A full day.

Ten hours. A few hours. I'm going to just round it up to eight hours full day. I'm going to make it easier. Ten hours of work. It wasn't, but we'll just call it ten because that's an easy number. And then since this time, I've invested over a million dollars in your company. And so if you divide by ten hours, you would get $100,000.

an hour. If you took a five, you got 200,000 an hour for making this. And so I want to just point out why this is important in the world. A lot of y'all have been told to not do free work, to not do spec work. You're told to do that typically by people who've already arrived or socialist communist losers. Let me be clear. Doing spec work to impress the world and showing that you don't just build things when

you're punching your little clock like a good comrade, communist lunatic. but you just do things in the world because you are passionate and interested. You know what happens? Passionate people who are successful are drawn to you. You absolute moron communist lunatics out there have got to get your heads examined. Speck work works. Now, I'm not saying give free work to people that they can use. So like if you said, I want to, you know, write the transcripts and do all this for free and give you the website forever for free, I probably wouldn't accept it because It's also true that successful people in the world, they have a budget for these kind of things, and they're more than happy to pay for it. But to get people's attention, do but 10 hours of work and show that you are kick-ass.

And by the way, when you did this was right as AI was clicking, and 600,000 people saw it. And you gained, I'm certain, hundreds or thousands of followers each time you did this, yes? 100%. All right. So everybody who's listening, do work in the world. independent of being paid. And I have been asked to mentor many family members, cousins, nephews, nieces, friends of friends, people who have kids who are stuck in the mud. And I tell them, oh, you want to be, I don't know, a music producer. Here's what I want you to do.

Pick a genre of music, make a social media account. That is you doing ambient music critiques, remixes, or analysis. Every day you wake up, you do a tweet. Every three days, you do a substack post twice a week, once a week, you do a TikTok video based on what you did in those other ones. You know what's going to happen? The world's going to recognize that you have a passion for ambient music. You're going to get smarter. And then lo and behold, you'll get smart people coming to you. And I know this because Vanity Fair just interviewed me for some story they're doing. And I don't talk to journalists, but this, maybe I made a mistake and the journalist will screw me like they have many times recently. But I took the chance to talk to him because he said he was

a fan of this week and starts for a long time. He said, hey, I'm doing a story on all these VCs doing podcasts. And so I said, okay, yeah, I'll talk to you. I don't want to talk about All In because it gets a little sensitive. We agreed to not talk to the press about All In because they're always trying to split us up, you know? And so we just agreed to be a United Front, don't talk to the press. It's not worth it for us. Like if you want our comments, this is with the pot. But I did talk about this week in startups. I said, listen, I tried doing these shows. It was 14 years ago when I had Brian Alvey, shout out to my bestie on the first episode. He said, how does this help you with LPs and raise a fund? I said, well, there's three things that matter. Deal flow, decision

making and doubling down on startup. So deal flow, I found you because of my socials. And I'm assuming you had heard of all in, obviously, but maybe I've heard a lot this week in startups as well, yes? I had only heard of all in. A friend of mine introduced me recently got me to listen and I was like, wow. I realized after that I became a Sequoia Scout because I had such a great network because of the podcast. And then the Sequoia Scouts program led to me raising my first fund because David Sachs, who's on All In now, had been on this weekend startup so many times. He was one of the first 10 guests, yada, yada, yada. And the podcast had driven a lot of what I did.

And I didn't do the podcast for money. I did it for fun, my own intellectual curiosity. And here you are doing the same thing, 14, 13 years later, 14 years later, and you're off to a great start. I didn't ask you about SEO metrics and those kind of things. I've always tried to get my SEO going, my metrics going on the web page because we have so many great guests, so many great chapters. What's our SEO strategy here?

And can we make an SEO upsell of $500 a month where you do something extra on an SEO basis. For example, take each of the chapters, make a landing page for each chapter with a post written about each chapter, with a clip of that chapter, you know, and links to each of those chapters,

maybe on YouTube, like a really superpowered thing, but I want to pay extra for it. Because I don't want to, back to the arms race, I don't want my competitors to have it necessarily unless they pay for it, right? Within your arms dealer strategy,

I guess we're the F-22 Raptor. But, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, I want the F-23. I'm saying. And I don't want people, if they got the F-22 and the Raptor or F-22 Raptor Plus, I want to pay for the plus, just like you might pay for Plaid in your Tesla. Yeah.

So what's the SEO metric strategy here? Is the site optimized yet for SEO? Is it driving SEO? I haven't checked. And can we put in some metrics? Like, can we drop in Google Analytics or something? Yeah. So we can drop in any tracking system.

I think we've put in a G-tag. So Google Analytics. We give all that content in the format that Google likes to see, meaning schema, JSON-L-D, all that stuff is automatically done for you. Where we're going to take it next level, and I think it's where that upsell comes in, is those collated pages around recurring guests. That is going to be killer for SEO. And then just how we have that clipping right now that we just did for viral moments on your episodes,

I did a feature, this was a few months ago. You were asking about clipping for just for users, for audience. We made it so you can clip a specific segment. It was audio only because we didn't have video upload at that time. And it was relatively slow because it was happening on the computer. With those upgrades we made very recently, we have video now, we have everything happening in the cloud now. We can make it so the audience can create these clips.

That's the piece I wanted you to do because we have so many fans of All In, and this being startup that they might like to make clips and send them out there. I even was looking at a company that was saying it'll just pay people to post clips to their social media at $10 or $20. Wow. And I thought, wow, that's a really interesting idea. I would totally, I mean, I may not want to give money because that's lame, but I might like to give a followback from the account or my account or I might want to give a like

for my account or a T-shirt or something like that, right? Like more like climbing up the ladder. Right. we got plenty of ideas. That's when you know you got a great startup. Edward, you're amazing. I'm so proud of, you know, how hard you work, how dedicated you are. And I just hope, if I ask you for a favor once in a while to do like a talk at the accelerator or Founding University, you might be open to making the time to do that for me every couple of months. It'd be an honor. Thank you, my friend. Edward, great job. There's no discounts. There's no freebies. But if you're a

podcaster, you're not using podcast AI, you're a lunatic and you're crazy. I'm trying to tell all my friends that they should pop up one of these sites. I mean, if, I'm saying if you're a regular podcaster, because you're, you're just missing so much. And if you're a producer of a podcast, you got to tell your podcasters to use this because I'll tell you what's going to happen. They're not going to fire you and say, I don't need a podcaster anymore. If you're charging a thousand dollars per episode to do the whole pre-show, whatever, what they're going to say is, okay, it's saving you half the amount of time. What can we do with the other half and say, well, I could book better guests, I could write better emails, I could do two more

clips per week. I could X, I could Y, I could see. There's always something more to do. And so this is why AI is not going to get rid of jobs. It's going to get rid of work and allow you to do higher level work. That's my core belief of AI. It's going to be like, you know, whatever percentage of the population was employed as farmers 120 years ago. Yeah. It's like, okay, you're now going to have instead of a pickax, you're going to have a tractor. And we're going to come down to one percent of the population. Precisely. All right, brother. You could follow Edward Brown. He is Edward B-R-A-W-E-R-E-R-E-R-on-X. You can follow podcastA-I.com.

If you know any podcasters, please send them this episode. And I'm also doing the liquidity summit. Go to liquiditypod.com. I'm using Podcast AI for liquidity as well. Liquity is a new experimental podcast where LPs and GPs get together and talk about investing money in high-tech companies and trying to get to liquidity and powerful returns. We're doing the liquidity summit, formerly known as, Angel Summit, if we've ever talked about the before. But now the liquidity conference, and I think

we're at 100 right now, so I upped it to 125, but then we're going to cap it. If you're a GP, an LP, high net worth individual, accredited investor, a QP, and you want to get into angel investing, you want to meet people, you can come to this event, and you can apply liquiditypod.com. You'll see the summit. Look on that. It's basically three days in nap. But we get there Sunday, have dinner and poker, Monday, all day talks, and dinner and poker. Tuesday talks in the morning. activities in the afternoon, poker at night, and then Wednesday at closing brunch, Chimaut's coming, Freeberg's coming, a lot of great people you know are coming, and great speakers. We'll see you there.

Final plug, angel.com. I teach a $300 course. It's maybe four or five hours. I've just had angel investing companies, all proceeds to charity. We've donated, no joke, $175,000 to charity so far at Angel University. we've done the class 30 plus times. It just inspires and educates people to become angel investors in startups like Edwards. And I'm doing one in May and then I'll do one on the fall.

I've gone down to twice a year for this. We do the 1.0 in the spring. We do the 2.0 in the fall. So getting on the 1.0 now, it's happening in May. It's only 300 bucks. It's live on Zoom. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye.

Okay, everybody. I want to tell you about Founder Fridays. What are Founder Fridays? This is an opportunity for you. if you're a founder, to get together with a half dozen, a dozen other founders on a Friday, the first Friday of every month. Why is this important? Well, if you meet with other founders, you can talk about the things that are working at your startup and the things you're struggling with, everything else in between. And then you can trade notes and you can make friends.

It's really hard to be a founder, isn't it? You're alone all the time. You've got to solve all these problems. And other founders are having the same experience you're having. It's, isolating, it can be scary, it can be thrilling. And people don't understand what you're going through. If you go to a dinner party and there's one founder and seven other people, you feel like a mutant, you feel like somebody who doesn't belong there. Nobody understands why you're doing your startup, why you're taking this risk, the problems you're facing, right? They're NPCs. This is a non-NPC event. Every first Friday of the month, we do founder Fridays. We're doing them now in 71 different cities. And if this sounds appealing to you, well, you're a founder.

and you want to hang out with maybe seven other founders around a roundtable. You can have breakfast, you can have lunch, you could have dinner, you can have coffee, you can co-work, dinner, however you want to do it. And it's free. We've been doing this for a couple of months now. We've had 71 meetups around the world, and 929 founders have joined. I want you to join, and I want you to come to the next one. It's Friday, May 3rd.

Now, if your city's not on the list, what are you going to do? You're going to apply to run your city with two or three other founders. Again, four founders by founders. from the number one podcast for founders this week in startups comes FounderFriidays.com. Founder Fridays.com. Go to Founder Fridays.com to sign up. And you're going to meet all these great founders. And we give like a little prompt. And this Founder Friday taking place on May 3rd, we want you to bring two things with you, your most significant challenge and one thing you wish you'd learned earlier. We're going to go around the table and each person is going to do

that. And then you'll get feedback from your peers. It's incredible. It's magical. and we don't want this to get big. We want to keep it small. So if you plan on going and you're interested and sounds appealing to you, just go to FounderF Fridays. Tech, T-E-C-H, right? Great domain name. Founderf Fridays.com. And please take pictures and then share those pictures on Twitter.

At Mention Us, at TWA startups, at Jason. And it doesn't matter. You can be in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, L.A., Paris, Tokyo, Dubai. These things are happening all over the world. Again, 71 cities. Let's get it to 100 cities. We've got over 900 members. Let's get it past 1,000. Go ahead and sign up and you'll be in touch with my team and we'll see you there. Once again, founderf Fridays. Tech.