Cody Schneider – Sneaker Sales to AI Pioneer: Crafting the Future of Content Marketing

SUMMARY

The discussion focuses on the two common paths in podcasting: building a business to sell advertisements or using a podcast as a go-to-market mechanism for a business. Cody emphasizes the importance of leveraging podcasts to build relationships and generate revenue through high-ticket services.

The conversation also delves into the practical applications of AI in content marketing, with Cody sharing insights on how AI can automate content creation, distribution, and optimization. The episode highlights the potential of AI tools like Swell AI in streamlining content workflows and maximizing organic traffic growth.

The episode offers valuable insights and practical tips for entrepreneurs and business owners looking to leverage AI in their content marketing strategies. The engaging and informative discussion between the host and guest creates a dynamic listening experience for listeners interested in the intersection of AI and content marketing.

Chapter 1: Introduction

00:00:00 – Welcome to the Maker-Manager Money Podcast
In this section, the host introduces the podcast and sets the stage for the conversation with the guest.

Chapter 2: Guest Introduction

00:00:21 – Meet Cody Schneider, AI-first company trailblazer
The host introduces Cody Schneider, highlighting his background and expertise in AI-first companies.

Chapter 3: Cody’s Entrepreneurial Journey

00:01:05 – From selling sneakers to influencer marketing
Cody shares insights into his entrepreneurial journey, from humble beginnings to strategic roles in influencer marketing and SEO.

Chapter 4: AI-Assisted Marketing Strategies

00:01:27 – Navigating the challenges and opportunities of AI revolution
The discussion delves into AI-assisted marketing strategies and how entrepreneurs can leverage AI in their marketing efforts.

Chapter 5: Podcasting Strategies

00:05:30 – Building a business through podcasting
Exploring the two common paths in podcasting: selling ad space or building a business through podcast distribution.

Chapter 6: Tools for Podcasters

00:12:23 – Recommended tools for podcasters
Insights into the tools and strategies that podcasters can use to streamline their workflow and enhance their content creation process.

Chapter 7: Swell AI Features

00:24:43 – Unpacking Swell AI features
A deep dive into Swell AI, its features, and how it simplifies content creation and distribution for podcasters and content creators.

Chapter 8: Drafthorse Origins

00:40:43 – Drafthorse: From internal tool to external success
The evolution of Drafthorse from an internal tool for programmatic SEO to a successful external product.

Chapter 9: Leveraging AI in Content Marketing

00:43:37 – The power of AI in content marketing
Exploring the impact of AI in content marketing and how it can revolutionize organic traffic and content creation strategies.

This chapter breakdown provides a structured overview of the podcast episode, allowing listeners to navigate through the content easily and focus on key topics of interest.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker-Manager Money Podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships from startups to stay-ups to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start. I like to dive deep into the journeys of entrepreneurs who are making waves and shaping the future. Today, I’m thrilled to have Cody Schneider with us, a trailblazer in the AI-first company landscape, and a serial entrepreneur with a knack for blending technology with marketing to create innovative solutions. Cody is the co-founder and CEO of Swell AI, a company revolutionizing content marketing with AI-powered strategies. He’s also at the helm of Drafthorse, acclaimed podcast agency, and Schneider Media, showcasing his diverse expertise in digital marketing, podcasting, and AI. From his early days selling sneakers to his strategic role in influencer marketing and SEO, Cody’s journey is a testament to the power of innovation, perseverance, and strategic thinking in today’s digital age. I’m excited to explore Cody’s entrepreneurial path, his insights into AI-assisted marketing, and how he’s navigating the challenges and opportunities of the AI revolution. Welcome to the Maker-Manager Money Podcast, Cody.

Cody Schneider:
Thanks, Kyle. Super excited to be here, so I appreciate you having me.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. Thank you for being here. I’m only 10 months into podcasting. So really my first question is, what does success look like for a podcaster?

Cody Schneider:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it really depends on the business that they’re trying to build. A lot of what I see individuals do is like two paths. It’s either I’m trying to get to a download volume where I can go and sell basically, you know, advertisements with some CPM. That’s why you often see people making business podcasts because the CPM is super high, right? Or their RPM of what they’ll be paid out by their advertiser. The other thing that I see people do often is they then build a business on top of this podcast or a podcast that they create. Great example of this is I’ve been on a couple of shows where their agencies, they basically use the podcast as inbound sales or like a sales, like go-to-market mechanism. So an example of this is like podcasts are one of the most effective ways to have an excuse to reach out to anybody and be like, Hey, I want have you on the show and we’re going to record this, you know, basically deep dive into whatever it is you’re working on. And the byproduct that, you know, the person gets from coming on that is, you know, they get, uh, this recorded hour long session that they can then turn into media that they can use across all their channels. So say for example, uh, you run like a digital web design agency and you’re trying, you’re in the Atlanta, Georgia area. and you’re trying to get new clients. This is like a really easy way for you to reach out to every business owner that exists in that area and interview them. And suddenly you’re now in relationship with them. And like what you’ll see happen is like you get phone numbers and then you’re texting them, but suddenly you’re friends and then you’re answering questions. And that just turns into these like natural evolutions of businesses. So anyway, just to kind of reiterate, I see those two paths being like the most common stuff that I’ve seen my, or I’ve done in the past in the podcasting space that I might be interesting to your audiences. So I previously worked at this company called Rupa Health. Our whole thesis was that building owned media was going to be this incredibly valuable asset in the B2B software space. So we were a marketplace for lab testing. And so what we ended up doing is we started this podcast that was interviewing practitioners about how they were dealing with these like weird, like you know, gut health management, like kind of these chronic disease management things that nobody was talking about. And we ended up growing that podcast from like zero to 150,000 downloads a month in about six months. And kind of the mechanism for that was really going after, like, let’s take industry experts and let’s talk to them about their knowledge that nobody else has access to. And let’s put that in public. Right. And that kind of like, you know, Pulling the curtain back for people from a content perspective is super interesting, right? Because normally they have to pay for access for that knowledge. That same idea, we ended up in an entirely different space. We saw that work in biotech. So in the biotech world, I helped my friend build this podcast called the Biotech Startups Podcast. It’s now like one of the top 10 life science podcasts in the US. But for them, what they focused on was like, let’s just talk to founders that have started biotech companies and be like, what was the process you went through? And again, just like pulling back that curtain. And then for, you know, their monetization strategies, like we’re going to promote our service, which is leasing biotech equipment to biotech founders. And then on the Rupa health side, like with their health podcast, what they were trying to do is basically have every practitioner listen to this so that they were getting like knowledge. And then that would turn into them coming to the platform to ordering lab tests. So I think podcasts. Like you either have to make them huge so that you can go and sell basically ad space, or you have to build a business that you’re distributing through that own media channel. I personally lean towards building the business that you’re distributing. That’s going to be the just most revenue generating. Like when you look at the payouts of podcasts from a CPM, like what you can go and sell advertising space, it’s not awesome unless you really join a podcast network. But then there’s all this, you know, it’s just a, it’s a really competitive landscape because it’s easier than ever for people to do it. But in contrast, like if you have a thousand people that listen to your show on a weekly basis and you’re selling a high ticket item, that’s like three to five grand a month in some type of consulting or service. I mean, if you get just five of those people, right, like you have a 25 K a month business and that’s suddenly like a real thing. You know, scale that up and you get 30 clients and you’re that’s an, that’s a million a year company. Right. And again, that’s, that’s only 30 out of that thousand people. That’s totally realistic and doable. So anyways, yeah, monologue in there, but that’s kind of a brain dump on the high level.

Kyle Knowles:
So, no, I love it. So even to get $5,000 per month, like how many downloads, how many subscribers or listeners would you have to have to get just $5,000 a month?

Cody Schneider:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, again, it depends if you’re selling that advertising space, like you’ll need at least in, I mean, it depends on the audience and the advertising space, but just to use an example, like the medical one, what we found is when they hit around like a quarter million downloads a month, which is a huge number, right? At that point, I think they were getting paid like a close to a hundred thousand a month for ad space on all four of the episodes. And then there was like, like small kind of, they call them like office hour episodes that were happening as well by an advertiser. But it was like a health food company. Like it was AG1. And so that was who was paying for that. But again, if you’re making like a business podcast, like you can go sell milk, like MailChimp or Squarespace or one of these companies, it’s just, it’s going to be way more on you to probably reach out with those numbers and be like, you know, this is what we’re the downloads that we’re getting. Here’s the consumption rates, et cetera. But that 5k number, that would be for like something for sure. That’s more on the side of like, okay, I’m selling you some type of service. I think it’s way more for. most people, it’s way more attainable to think like, okay, I’m going to get 5000 downloads a month, so maybe 1000 downloads per episode. And if I can get, you know, again, 10 of those people to turn into like 5k a month or 3k a month clients, and we do some type of service like, you know, AI powered SEO, or like unlimited like flip creation, or, you know, some type of one of these digital services that are especially we could talk through all these things that we’re seeing, like people build in the agency space with these AI tools that are now coming out. But I think it’s totally realistic to think like, okay, I can go and get you know, 10 of those people out of those 5,000 that are listening on a monthly basis to pay me that kind of higher ticket number and start that initial business. So I think for a lot of people, they come at this and they’re like, oh, I’m going to make this like viral podcast that’s like huge. And in reality, like the average podcast, like to be in the top 1%, like you just have to get like 5,000 downloads a month. It’s actually insane. Like most people think that like you have to have this massive thing and there are out there, but it’s like, it is so hard. And that’s, there’s a reason that like, there’s not actually a ton of money in podcasting for advertising. Like there’s 25 big companies and like, that’s, that’s it. Right. There’s like, uh, you know, it’s the serious XMs, the I hearts, like they have all the shows. There’s a huge consolidation that happened like after COVID in particular. And so right now, the biggest opportunity is like using a podcast as a vehicle to promote a business that you own, that has some type of like, you know, long customer lifetime value.

Kyle Knowles:
That makes a lot of sense. And so that means like Rogan and other podcasts there. they’re not in the 1%, they’re in the 0.00001%. I mean, they’re 100% 100% stratosphere. It’s a totally different universe that they’re living in.

Cody Schneider:
And it’s totally possible to like, I don’t want to discredit like that. It’s that it can’t be done. Like, and we see people do it all the time, right? Where, but the kind of the level of magnitude of sophistication that it takes to like climb now into that. So like, for example, my friend, his name is Jonathan. He’s, he was previously The podcast producer for my first million and the hustle daily and all these shows that are kind of these massive business podcasts that are really on the come up. So for them, like they had, I mean, just as an example, like they were taking the episodes and then they were making like thousands of clips, right? Like variations. And then they were taking all those clips and they had like 30 social channels across all of the social media platforms, like Instagram reels, TikTok, YouTube shorts. And so then they’re testing all of those pieces of creative to see which ones go viral. Right. And then they’re like, cool, we found a banger. It went viral on TikTok. Let’s test it now on YouTube shorts. Let’s test it now. on Instagram reels. Oh, let’s also like come back and let’s take that viral thing, but we’ll use the same hook, but let’s add like different insights at the end to see if we can make it go viral again on TikTok. Right. So now imagine that every episode they’re doing that twice a week. Right. and they’re producing the volume of content at that scale. Simultaneously growing newsletters, all these other marketing distribution strategies on top of that. YouTube has been a huge thing that we’ve seen explode in the last 12 months for podcasting as well. because there’s a natural virality that can occur on the platform. In contrast, if you look at a traditional podcast hosting, like it’s an RSS feed that goes to Apple Podcasts and Spotify, there’s no built-in virality on the platform. Spotify isn’t going to push a podcast to people if an episode gets popular. like it’s just like a different mechanism of growth. Like it’s way more word of mouth or you have to like introduce people to that type of funnel. And in contrast, like somebody can just stumble upon your YouTube video. And if it has a good thumbnail title and you like hook them in the first, you know, 30 seconds, you’re going to have a listener for 40 minutes, which is wild. Right. So yeah, I think it can be done. It’s just like what you have to do. And then the other piece of it is like, you have to have amazing content as well. Right. So it’s like, it’s like amazing content and then also amazing distribution to get to that scale. But if you just have amazing content and like decent distribution, I think you can build, you know, again, a 30 to 80 K a month company on top of this with some type of high ticket service. That’s like digital that you’re providing.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s really helpful. And you’ve talked about some of the strategies. Let’s talk about the tools as a podcaster that they can use. So what so you’ve talked about amazing content, you talked about, you know, pushing and promoting, you know, content clips, things like that. What other strategies and what other tools would you recommend to businesses that are sort of getting into the podcast game and, and trying to be successful at it?

Cody Schneider:
Yeah, yeah. So the stack that I always suggest to people is, uh, kind of, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s honestly what we use and when I’m doing shows, but using something like Riverside or squad cast. The reason for that is they do multi-tracking. So the recordings are done on each of the machines locally in HD. So if you have any internet connection issues, the upload still comes back with like a 4k like audio video. So recording Riverside, you then take that output and you put that into Descript. Descript is a like editing tool. I don’t really use it for editing and nobody I know that’s serious actually does. But what Descript has that’s super valuable is they have what’s called Studio Sound. It’s basically this AI audio upscaling tool. The next thing that I do in Descript is I remove the ums and ahs or any other filler words, and then I shorten the word gaps. At that point, drop that into Final Cut Pro, and I put the intro, outros, maybe there’s some slides, any of those changes that I’m trying to create. But At that point, the audio is you’re in the top, you know, 5% of audio just by doing that. Right. I mean, that takes three, you know, five minutes of focus time. Like all that processing happens in the background from there. It really comes down to, okay, like I’m trying to repurpose that content. So I then would take that audio. I’d up it and upload it into my hosting company, like transistor. I’d upload it into my, like into YouTube. If I’m doing a video podcast. Now Spotify has this or through Anchor has their hosting as well with video. I take that same video and I can upload it into a tool like Swell AI. So what Swell does is basically content repurposing powered by AI. So I give it a video file and it’s going to make clips. It’ll write blog posts. It’ll make tweets. It’ll make LinkedIn posts. It’ll write your newsletter about the episode, like anything that you can imagine. It can basically transform it into it. So these templates are out of the box at that point. It just wrote my podcast show notes. It wrote my YouTube description. It like, you know, I take those, I put those into my hosting companies. I then now have all of these clips that I can download and distribute across all the channels. I go to my social media scheduling app, something like my friends are building this company company called assembly dot marketing. So it’s basically I upload all of those clips into assembly. And then schedule those out to all the channels I’m trying to do distribution through. So like TikTok, Instagram, URLs, YouTube shorts. I just take the captions that were written by the AI. I drop those in there. And the article, I go publish that on my website. Again, it’s like copy and paste. We also have like connections in Swell where you can just like send it directly to WordPress or if you’re using Ghost for your hosting. And then we’re just adding like more integrations as people ask for them. So it’s like Squarespace. know, whatever else anybody could use is on the like on our list. But yeah, at that point, you have now basically like, you’ve recorded this in HD, you’ve edited it at like a quality level that is going to be, you know, at on par with what, you know, traditionally you’d pay $500 for from an audio standpoint, like from audio, like the upscaling. You’ve created all this media in the form of clips, in the form of a post, et cetera. And you’ve scheduled those out for distribution. And then the last piece is really, you take that newsletter, you schedule that out within whatever your ESP is, like we’re using mailer light currently and liking it just because from a price and kind of structure standpoint, I copy and paste that in the email. Super simple, like podcast or the subject line. It’s like podcast name of the episode. And then like, Hey, name the newest episode of blah, blah, blah podcast is live. Like click this link to listen. Now you link out to the Apple podcast episode. And then below that, it’s like a short paragraph. That’s super concise on what they’re going to learn, like five key takeaways from the episode. And it’s like, then at the bottom, like if you have like a company, like your company that’s sponsoring the podcast, like include that in there. whatever that upsell like CTA, like nurture call to action is. Yeah. That’s like the whole kind of stack that I’m seeing people do. And there’s, there’s obviously like tons of different ways to kind of go about that and like more sophisticated versions of it from a like distribution standpoint. But that, that is something like to mark, like in the next 24 hours, somebody could do what I just said, and they could have a podcast live and distributed across all channels, you know, know, Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google, you know, all the places that people are listening to these. So, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
So with that podcast stack, what’s a rough estimate for. you know, like a monthly cost pricing business for price.

Cody Schneider:
Yeah. So, so, uh, Riverside is like $19 a month. I think the script is 30 hosting. Uh, you can get it as cheap as like $10. And so, uh, I’ll just do that math, uh, kind of live. So it’s 50 we’re at 60 and then swell, depending on the volume, it’s like 29. So at that point, you’re basically like, you’re right around that a hundred dollar Mark. You can probably get all of this done for around a hundred dollar Mark. And again, that’s four episodes that makes all the media that your company could need for like, and I think this is the biggest thing that I try to emphasize, like, so Why are we even talking about content? So content is a great way to build trust and positioning, especially long-form content. When you think about what a podcast is, you have somebody in your ears for an hour a week listening to you have a conversation that’s educating them. Think about the level of trust that gets built through that one-to-many conversation. And just to put it at scale, get, you know, kind of a visual for people. Like, how often do you stand, like, say you’re getting 5,000 downloads a month. Like, how often do you stand in front of 5,000 people and talk to them about whatever it is that you’re discussing?

Kyle Knowles:
You’d be lucky to do that once a year at a big conference. It’d have to be a big conference, though.

Cody Schneider:
Exactly, exactly. But in contrast, it’s like, okay, like, if you have a podcast that you get 1000 downloads per episode, like, that’s 1000 people per week that you’re standing in front of, and having this conversation, you can’t see them, you don’t know they’re there. But that’s like that, you know, that’s the kind of the mental model that I try to express to people. So with that, like that’s, that’s a piece of this. The other side is when you make this long form content, you can, you can chop, like you can repurpose that and chop it up into clips for every channel that you’re trying to do distribution through that your target customer exists on. So say your target customers on LinkedIn, Twitter, they do email because everybody does. Um, and then also they’re on social, right? Like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, or whatever, wherever else you have caught, like with that video file as the source media, you have content for every channel that your customer’s on. So as a founder, it’s like, oh, you’re telling me like I can sit down for two hours a week, one hour of recording, one hour of post-production editing, and like one hour, you know, and that other post-production like includes also my scheduling of the media. And I can have all of my content like done through that process. And the knock-on effect of, oh yeah, I have an excuse to reach out to business owners that I’m trying to get in relationship with and like invite them on the show, right? So all of those things kind of packaged together, it’s one of the most high leverage things that I’ve seen. Again, I’ve been in digital marketing space for like 10 plus a year. I mean, I think we’re coming up on 15, which is crazy, but Very seldom you like stumble on these kind of arbitrages where there’s so much value that’s produced from like such a small amount of lift and it’s easier than ever to do these things. And so anyways, I’m like obsessed with them just because, and there’s, I mean, there’s tactical things we could talk about too, where it’s like, you can do what are called So Apple podcast episode URLs are technically a deep link on iOS devices. What does that mean? Let’s unpack that. So if I am on an iOS device, like say I text you an Apple podcast episode link, it’ll open my Apple podcasting app on my iPhone, right? So if I do a Facebook ad that’s to that Apple podcast link, and it’s a clip from the episode, And I target only iOS devices. When they click that ad, so say it’s like, it could be this clip, right? Exactly what I’m talking right here. When they click that ad, it’s going to open the Apple podcasting app on their phone. And as soon as they hit play, that turns into a download. So why am I talking about this? Well, I can basically like, hey, to get downloads for this episode and introduce new people to this episode. So that’s one tactical strategy. The other piece is like podcast SEO. So people don’t think about this, but the podcasting apps are search engines. So go right now and search biotech. And so my friend’s podcast is going to come up, Biotech Startups. That is absolutely intentional. We named the show the Biotech Startups Podcast because we wanted to come up for biotech. The only ranking factor of ranking on Apple Podcasts in their search engine or Spotify in their search engine is Is the keyword there? Does the show get downloads? And then how competitive is the space? So like if you search, you know, another one as an example, uh, like startups or the word growth or marketing, like my friend’s podcast called in growth, we trust is going to come up and like for them, same deal, like help them with like growing this show. And We just named the show like in growth we trust because we knew that it would come up for the word growth. And then we added like marketing and these other things at the end of that. You can also then name the episodes so that they come up for those same keywords. And you can add that to the show notes as well. And like with those three things, as long as the show’s getting downloads, you’re going to basically start to get just like natural inbound that’s coming organically. And then the layer on top of that is on the email newsletter side. So for the biotech one, as an example, we went and we scraped every biotech founder that was a seed or series A funded company in the United States. And then we slowly started to trickle them into a newsletter. So every day we’d upload 200 people, and we’d immediately send them an email that’s like, podcast, name of the most viral episode that we had. That exact email template I was just talking about, where it’s like, the newest episode of the Biotech Starters Podcast is live. Click the link to learn more. They then click that link, it takes them to the episode to download. But what we see is like, this is a cold email technically, right? Like this is a gray list, cold email, but we see open rates that are 45% plus click through rates that are like 5%. Like I couldn’t get that cold email to land in an inbox and get a click like that, or like an open rate like that. any other way. There’s no other way you could even accomplish that. But for some reason, right now, we’re still early and people don’t think that a podcast is marketing yet. Psychologically, it hasn’t been registered that this is just a marketing tool. And so for them, super receptive, as long as the content that you’re distributing to them is something that is relative to either their job or their career, their life. Right. So anyways, uh, this going down this rabbit hole of like, here’s how to do distribution. I’m like growing these shows, but hopefully valuable to your audience.

Kyle Knowles:
So, no, I love it. I mean, it sounds like the four hour work week really, because you’re talking about maybe two to three hours, a hundred percent per episode. roughly $100 a month. And the ROI is is that you’re talking about is staggering. Let’s let’s go back to swell. I want to stay on swell for a little bit. So yeah, please. And talk about kind of the features and things. I know you have also the ability to do like one podcast at a time. You have a different kind of pricing and you talked about $30 a month. So, uh, part of this, I want to kind of unpack. So LinkedIn posts, uh, Twitter posts, these different kinds of, uh, social media channel posts. So you’re crafting one specifically for those channels. Cause I know, you know, LinkedIn, maybe it’s, it’s better to use emojis and maybe Twitter it’s not, or things like that. So you’ve already crafted this in. Cause what’s happening to me is you’re talking about what swell audio, uh, will do. And I’m going, well, I’m doing each of these steps manually, individually. Yeah. Using AI to help craft a LinkedIn post, using AI to summarize, you know, a podcast transcript, and you’ve just packaged this whole thing together because you’ve been doing podcasting for so many years, you know exactly what a podcaster needs. Totally. And so that’s what you’ve baked into Swell. Talk a little bit more about kind of maybe the LLM behind Swell and as well as kind of the features and benefits.

Cody Schneider:
Totally. Yeah. So I think to take a step back, like what are we actually trying to do with AI? Like, What we’re really trying to do is I’m trying to build automation workflows, right? Like I have a content for, you know, for content marketing, I have a content output that I’m trying to create, and I’m trying to basically give an AI raw materials and then automatically generate that output, right? So we get asked all the time, like, what’s the difference between this and chatgbt? And I’m like, chatgbt, like, you can do exactly what we’re doing with chatgbt. We’re just going to save you like, you know, a 10th, like 10x the time, right? And so what, let’s break that down. So say, for example, like, I go get a transcript made of my episode, I take that to chat GPT and then I’m prompted, okay, like, you know, write me podcast show notes. And it’s like, here’s like, write me titles. And then I write a summary and then I write like key takeaways with timestamps for my, um, like my chapters. And then, uh, I write like, like, you know, extract the keywords. So I’m here and I’m prompting this thing like 10 times to get the output that I’m looking for. And that’s just for one of these pieces of content that I’m trying to transform, you know, the source material into. So like our view is that with AI, like chat is great as a sandbox, but I don’t want to chat with AI. That’s not my goal, right? My goal is to create the content output. So for us, that was kind of the epiphany really early on. And so what we’ve been building is what Like we’re like thinking about as like, this is a content automation workflow where I create this template. That’s like, and we call it like, we call it a prompt chain. So like when I, um, AI is the best when you break your, what you’re trying to create down into steps. An example of that would be like, say, I’m trying to write like a extremely detailed long form blog posts. If I just one shot it and I’m like, write a blog post, it’s going to write me this like 400 word article. That’s like not super interesting. In contrast, if I say, Hey, define the tone, style, and voice of this episode. defines that, and then I connect a chain of prompts, like in a chain. So it’s like I have that prompt one and define tone style and voice. Prompt two is then, okay, now create a extremely detailed blog post outline. So it creates that outline. And then in prompt three, I then say, okay, now write an extremely detailed blog post based off the outline that you provided in the tone style of voice that you provided above as well. So that whole like chat that I could do and chat GPT, what we built into Swell is that you can save that as a template so that anytime I provide raw material, which is the podcast episode, it’s just going to automatically generate that output for you. But let’s scale that up to, Oh, it’s not just a blog post. It’s LinkedIn posts about key takeaways from the episode related to digital marketing. It’s 10 tweets about key takeaways. It’s a Twitter thread about key takeaways and like. you know, telling a story arc narrative throughout it. It’s a newsletter that’s educational. It’s a newsletter that’s like promotional to like get people to actually go to the podcast episode. Like anything that you can imagine, you could basically like save as a template within this. And then the analogy I’m using more and more is like, we’re all we’re trying to do is like take raw material like oil, and we’re turning it into all of these different forms of outputs, whether that’s gasoline or diesel or aggregate or, you know, plastics, whatever that is, you can save those outputs. And then as a marketer, once I have those saved, and like we have these just out of the box for you, right? So that like the, you know, when a person signs up, there’s all of these templates that they just automatically get generated. So out of the box, I just do that upload. And suddenly I have all this content for all those channels. So that’s just the written content side. The other side is we automatically generate clips based off of like, we built this way to identify, we call them entities, but it’s basically like a idea within the episode. And it will look for hooks with the, like in, in those, those entity segments, it finds that hook and then it finds like insights after that hook. And then that’s like, we generate a clip based off that and we’re working on currently like right now. So say we, you provide like a side-by-side video of us, we just built a facial recognition, like tool that will basically like. it’ll find the person that’s speaking and then we can like stack those people into a new pixel aspect ratio. So you’ll like, you could provide this raw file that’s like in whatever format from like a guest and host, but it’ll chop that up into, okay, now it’s in a portrait landscapes, which is good for like TikTok and Instagram reels. And so we’re seeing that on Twitter, like in LinkedIn, that like side by side, that’s in a landscape format is doing better, but it’ll just automatically generate each of those. That also will create captions on top of those posts for you because we see those go more viral. Basically, as much of that workflow that people are already doing, we’re just trying to automate that. I get asked this all the time. I’m a business owner. How do I approach AI? How do I think about it? And the best thing you can do is like audit your process that you’re doing currently and saying, okay, like where can I fit tools into this process that I’m currently doing that removes the human, like heavy lifting. And most of the time, like you can look at these processes and you’re like, okay, 80% of what I’m doing, I can automate away or I can delegate to like an offshore team member that’s augmented by one of these AI tools, right? Just a side quest here for a second, like my friend’s company, he basically, this is what he does for a living. It’s called a grant bot, but he does consulting, like automation consulting. This is a great business. Also, if you’re like trying to start a company right now and like, you’re like, what do I start? I would go do this in a heartbeat. Basically what he does is he like connects like Airtables and Zapiers and like these AI tools all together. to create these workflows. And so he does a lot of consulting in the real estate space, tons of paperwork, paper pushing, emails, all this shit. And so what he ends up going and doing, and he comes into these companies and he’s like, sweet, show me your process, audits the process. And he’s like, awesome. We can automate 60% of your business away, that your teams work and make it more concise, less mistakes. And it’s always running in the background. And so he comes in and does that consulting. And then as a business owner, it’s like, of course, I’m going to pay you to do this. You’re basically making my business more profitable. And the same team that I had as an owner, how they were thinking about it is like, I can make that team focus on things that are more high touch, more high value from the human level. And then for like Grant and his company, for how, what it turns into is then they put them on a retainer and they’re like, Hey, just continually audit our process and make sure that this is running in the background so that this, you know, continue, like we continue our operations. Like it becomes like a pivotal, like, like cog in the machine in that operations process. So again, we’re just like AI is an incredibly effective tool when you’re augmenting the workflows that you’re already doing. Anybody that’s like, oh, you need to change your whole process, or you have to adopt this new way of thinking, I think that that’s the really poor way to look at this, especially with how early we are. The better way to look at this is like, OK, what are the things that are extremely time intensive? And a great filter for this is taking unstructured data and making it structured. The AI is incredible at that. So an example, like with Swell. A transcript, like the transcript of this episode is going to be really unstructured, right? It’s going to be this back and forth, like the conversation is wandering. I just went on an anecdote talking about a friend’s company, right? But AI is incredible at taking that unstructured thing. And I say, hey, like list the top key takeaways from this episode. And it’s going to be incredible at pulling out and extracting that information. So thinking about it in that way for your business is going to be incredibly effective for any business owner in the next five years. So that’s kind of how I’m trying to communicate it to people and how we’re using it internally and thinking about it from a content marketing side.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, thank you for the explanations and tools and strategies and anecdotes. I’m loving this because I’m a podcaster. I mean, I feel like I’m on a sales call and I am your next customer. So I’m just, I’m going to sign up just simply because I’m sitting on like 40 hours of content. And the time it’s going to take me to manually, even using AI tools, one-off tools here and there, to create the kind of promotion for each of these wonderful podcasts that I’ve recorded is staggering. I mean, it’s overwhelming to think about it. You’re my 31st guest. and looking back at 30 other guests, 30 plus hours, probably over 40 hours worth of content. So I definitely want to try Swell because it sounds like you’re combining things like Rev, things like Opus and Munch and all these other tools that do different things. You’re combining them into one workflow automation. Like I was thinking, I was thinking I was going to have to use Zapier or some of these other automation tools to pipe into several different other software as a service, AI tools. But now it sounds like Swell’s kind of combined all of these into one, one platform.

Cody Schneider:
Yeah, I mean, we’re really trying to eat up as much of that workflow as possible. So like, we’re not probably going to go super upstream, like to the recording side, like there’s, you know, you can record and zoom Riverside squad cast, like, there’s, there’s tons, you know, audacity, there’s, is it audacity? It doesn’t matter. But there’s tons of ways to basically create this. We’re just trying to create that node within the process where it’s like, cool, you give us just these raw media files, and then we’re going to transform that into whatever output. But like stuff that’s on a roadmap from a product standpoint is social media scheduling. So it’s like, yeah, cool. We just made all these clips right now. People are like downloading the zip and they export them to the social media manager. And then they like upload, you know, they, they have to go schedule it out. On our side, we’re like, oh, well, what if you just make like the time slots that you want these posts to go at? So it’s like 7 a.m. across Instagram reels, TikTok, YouTube shorts. And like it just made all these clips. You select them all, hit schedule. It schedules them as drafts automatically to those time slots that you created. And suddenly like you have like, you know, your entire weeks of social content scheduled out. You know, you could do like so basically building that social media scheduling and it’s a huge thing. The other piece that people like customers or clients are starting to ask for is the ability to do like manage their newsletters through us. So it’s like, cool, you’re writing this newsletter for me. Can you also just send it? And then you own that list just lives within there. So like, you know, high level, how I’m thinking about it is like, initially, we started out as just like an AI writer for podcasters, we’re like quickly evolving into like, I’m calling it like content repurposing powered by AI. And then in 2025, I think it’s going to evolve like further into like content marketing powered by AI. And what I’m really excited about is, it’s kind of weird to even say, but we’re getting to this point where it’s very possible that a company could market itself, if that makes sense. Where it’s like, oh, you have a good product and you plug into this software. And it’s looking at all your Google Analytics data and your social media data and all your conversion data. It has all of that data flowing in. But the missing piece was basically the analytics on top of that, of what does all this mean? AI has now created, it’s pretty good at understanding what’s happening. And just to talk about it on a small scale, say you’re doing this social media thing. So you have your social media scheduler built in. So you basically give this thing raw materials. It makes clips. It schedules them out to social. It posts them. We pull back the analytics data from the social accounts. And then we go back to, and we’re like, OK, cool. These clips perform better than the others. What do they have in common from a transcript standpoint? Oh, they have X, Y, and Z in common. You know, AI is incredibly good at seeing those trends. We then go back to your back catalog. I’m like, all right, let’s find more clips like the ones that we just found. And let’s schedule those out as well. And so it creates this like virtuous, like growth flywheel that’s happening. where it’s basically like learning the types of content that is most viral for the audience that you’re going after and cultivating. And like that is entirely possible. And like from an, you know, the academic in me is like interested on this idea as like, you know, Like again, can, can a company in a way market itself where it just, I just plug in and it, and it advises me like what it needs. Like we need content like this because we’re seeing that perform like best on social. So like go do an interview with somebody that’s in this like space. And it’s that, that I, you know, from an idea standpoint, totally possible. It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next five years with all these tools. that help these companies basically do their distribution and do their marketing for their growth.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. And I didn’t mean in any way, it wasn’t disrespectful at all to say, I feel like I’m on a sales call simply because you’re speaking my language. I’m like, I’m here for this is all I’m saying. I’m sold on the idea because I know from personal experience how hard it is to distribute content. It’s one thing to record. This is the easy part. You and I are having this conversation, very easy to do. But once you record the pressure that a podcast or a business, anyone that records a conversation that wants to turn this into a, you know, getting that on Apple, on Spotify, all these other places, and really promoting it properly. that’s where all the heavy lifting is. And that’s kind of where I’ve been stuck at after, you know, interviewing 30 guests. So now I’m hearing a way out of that pressure that I’ve been under to, you know, get these, you know, cause there’s just golden nuggets throughout all these founders, all of these entrepreneurs that I’ve interviewed. So thank you so much for the explanation. I want to get just quickly, I know we don’t have very much time left. So Swell, Was it born out of Drafthorse? And now Swell’s taken it to the next level where content clips and also all that writing.

Cody Schneider:
Yeah. Yeah. So, so Drafthorse, um, how we basically brought that to market was we actually built that as an internal tool to do programmatic SEO for Swell. Programmatic SEO is basically like building like thousands of blog posts or landing page, landing pages through like programming. Right. So. And I, an example of this would be like, I’m trying to write how to start XYZ podcasts. So like how to start a sports podcast, how to start a, you know, a book reading or book club podcast, how to start a finance podcast, et cetera. I would find all of those target keywords. And then I would use AI. I built a prompt chain that basically is like write a detailed blog post outline for how to start a sports podcast. And then. The next step of that, once it wrote that outline, it then goes and writes that article, but let’s scale that up. And like, let’s do that with a thousand different keywords that are related to our audience. And so we basically built this tool to do like internal, like to do SEO. I was talking about it in public on Twitter and people were like, Hey, I want, I want that. Like, I want that thing that you guys are doing. So we spun draft horse out in the weekend and basically took the code base that we had for swell. And we’re just like, let’s just. loan it over and do some modifications from a UI standpoint. Yeah. So we launched that and it ended up going viral in the first 30 days. It got to 10K MRR or recurring revenue, monthly reoccurring revenue. And how it fits into your marketing stack is like it’s really on what I’m calling like commodity content. So there’s kind of two sides of the spectrum with AI content, like commodity content. So it’s like general knowledge the AI has that it’s, you’re basically like deploying it to write about or like create content about. And then like thought leadership content, which is way more where Swell sits on that side of the spectrum. We’re like, we give it a raw source material and then we’re trying to generate like this kind of like new piece of or new idea based off of that source material I provide. But how DraftHorse works is I can go and write and publish a thousand articles related to my brand and have them on my website in five minutes. So from I put the keywords in, to the articles being written, to them being published on my website, it’s five minutes later. And you just published 200,000 words in five minutes is the idea. So what this like, how we, you know, how we’re seeing people use this and like, go about with this type, this type of like, oh, like that commodity content that the LLM is writing from its general knowledge is that it’s like the the content that it’s doing is just average, right? Because it’s writing from that. So when we think about an LM, like how they’re trained, is it basically like it scraped the whole internet, and it like learned from the internet, but the internet is like, a lot of it is really shit. And so it’s going to write to the average of everything that it learns. And so when people are like, Oh, it’s not like, you know, the, the LLM is, is it’s just okay. It’s like, eh, like from the content output, like really what, what is happening there is that it’s because it was trained on like the average piece. So this content that it’s writing is like average. And so for us, like what we realized really early on with this whole thing is that like there’s gonna be this land grab right now in the SEO world where, I mean, and we’re seeing this where people are just YOLOing. Like we did this as well, where we like, we published 20,000 articles, like just to see what happened. Like my brother’s in the medical space and he’s like building this new company. And so we’re just like, let’s just publish 20,000 articles. So previously, if I wanted to publish 20,000 articles that were like out of quality that would actually rank, like that would cost us $2 million, right? Like we did it for like two grand. And that’s the scale of magnitude of how much cheaper it’s gotten to just produce this type of material. But what that’s done for the business is it took their daily clicks from, I think they were around 500, and they’re now doing 2,600 a day. And that’s happened in the last six months. So that’s the amount of organic traffic increase that happened in that time period. That’s almost like 5x in six months. I mean, it’s crazy to even say that. It also sounds fake. You don’t see stuff like that happen often in this world. Yeah. So like where I see this all going is it’s going to converge. So like with draft, like, like draft horse, again, is writing from the general knowledge of the LLM. There’s this whole other layer of that where you can actually, if you, if you pull the source files from what’s ranking currently for that keyword and say, Hey AI, like you’re going to write this article about how to start a finance podcast. But. The source that you’re going to use to write that article is what’s ranking in position 1, 2, 3, and 5 on Google already. When you give that boundary of the source that it can write from, the constant output that you get is at a quality that’s in that top 10 percentile, rather than being that average that we saw previously when it’s just writing from its general knowledge. And so we’ve seen these articles when we do this, like in 24 hours, they go to page one, right? Because it’s like Google has already said, this is the good content that people will like. And we’re just telling the AI, here’s the example, just make something that’s similar to this, right? So that’s like a way to do this. Now imagine that scaled up where it’s like for every keyword we go and we scrape the front page and then we write based on that. But an even wilder side of this and like what we’re seeing these companies do is they go and they look at competitors’ websites And they sort by the volume. So they use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs. These are SEO tools. And they sort by the pages that get the most traffic for those websites. They extract the titles out of those pages. And then they go and they have the AI write to that title outline that they just extracted from a competitor’s website. So like, we’ve done this where, okay, cool. Like we just scraped like all, you know, we’ll say there’s 900 blog posts on a competitor’s website. We see that 80% of all their traffic comes from a hundred of those posts. we write those hundred posts all simultaneously based off of like, so I guess what I’m trying to say is like right now, like the cost of content has basically gone to zero. So what happens when it goes like when any commodity like starts to like when the price basically approaches zero, right? Or it’s a downward sloping curve that’s approaching zero. you get way more like noise within the system, right? So what’s gonna become more and more important and more and more valuable as time goes on is your internal knowledge that you have in a database that you’re using as source material is gonna become more important than ever. Like an example of this is like, say I asked the AI to write, you know, hotel marketing strategies, right? And it goes and it writes, you know, what it thinks is hotel marketing. Now, in contrast, say I go interview five hotel marketing experts about hotel marketing strategies. I record those 30-minute conversations. I put those transcripts into our source document. And then I say, OK, now write me an article based off of these transcripts about the best hotel marketing strategies. the content that comes from that expert knowledge is going to be so much better than what the general information of the AI has. So that’s like our view on it, like of how these, like the only way you’re going to be able to differentiate your content anymore and your marketing strategy is by having this owned like library. And it could be not just yours, right? It can be just like things that you think are interesting that you found on the web. So like other YouTube videos that are like of creators that you like, or blog posts of creators that you like. And so like, this is where we see Swell going, where it’s like, imagine I can provide like, here’s three blog posts as source material, they could be totally different things. But now I’m going to write this article based off of this outline that I provided based off of that source material that I just gave Swell. And like, that’s totally possible for our marketing team to go and do. Oh, and have it be in the tone, style, and voice that we defined. We want the AI to write in so that it always sounds on brand. So it doesn’t matter who uses the AI software, like which human uses it. But you could have a team of five, but it’s always going to be the same type of content, tone, and style, and voice that you’re trying to communicate to have consistency across your brand. So again, more just all the stuff we’re seeing on the front lines with this. There’s I think the hardest part right now is just what should I do? There’s so much I can do. My suggestion for people is like pick one or two things. that are like symbiotic in nature. And then just focus all of your efforts on that. So like a great example of this is like Google ads and like SEO, right? So it’s like, I have Google ads running to my business. I have a conversion event that’s like a signup or call or et cetera. And then whatever keywords ends up converting for my business on those Google ads, I go and I write SEO content using an AI writer or whatever that I’m gonna try to rank that page for, for that same keyword that we know created a conversion for my business. because I know that long-term, if I can get that page to rank, that’s going to provide inbound leads for my company. So it’s doing these two things together that create a long-term impact and not focusing on the 20 different marketing strategies I could do, just pick two. You’re going to be in the top 10% of companies if you just pick two things and do that for two years. So yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s great. And I apologize for calling it draft house. I think I’ve visited a few draft houses in my day. No, no, no. It’s all good. It’s all good. It’s all good. And you spun draft draft horse out of swell for this need. And, and you can do everything that you talked about with, with draft horse. You can give it your expert knowledge. You can get it in your own voice and you can crank out content that way. It’s not just doing what you could, anyone could do with chat. GPT has other features.

Cody Schneider:
The big thing for like how people use Drafthorse is bulk content writing. So like an example of this is like how to start XYZ business or like how to start XYZ online business. Like we have a website that I own that we did this with, right? So we basically found every like how to start XYZ online business and like keyword. And then we wrote like 10,000 articles for every one of those. It’s just writing from the general knowledge of the LLM. But the core idea is like, I can publish 10,000 articles in 24 hours for this website, right? So we see a lot of niche website owners or bloggers use us as a way to just fill out their site with more content so that they get more affiliate traffic, etc. So it’s just a tool within the tool belt of your marketing, right? Like again, Swell is all of that thought leadership content, like tools like Drafthorse are like, that’s just, I’m doing bulk commodity content production because it’s a land grab right now. And we know that over the next two years, like this is going to change. But right now in this moment, it’s like the thing that we can do that just like zero to ones, like a ton of content simultaneously. And again, the impact to the businesses is like what we’re more focused on. Like, I don’t really care like what tool or how it gets done. Like people always ask me like, what’s your, you know, what’s your stack? How are you doing this? Blah, blah, blah. I’m like, honestly, like I’m just doing whatever gets the output like that I’m looking for as easy as possible. Right. And again, with anything that I’m building or using, like that’s, that’s the filter through all of this.

Kyle Knowles:
Do you have a hard stop in one minute? Do you have just a couple of minutes?

Cody Schneider:
Yeah. Sorry, I do need to jump, but… Okay.

Kyle Knowles:
Can I just do a lightning round of questions? I know we didn’t get to… Please, fire away. Let’s do it, yeah. All my questions, but let’s just go through this lightning round and we’ll wrap up. So are you a musician?

Cody Schneider:
I do, yeah. I actually did music production for, at one point I thought that was going to be my career. I was like making trap beats like back in, I don’t even know, this is probably like 2014 and selling them on the internet. This is in the early days where you could just like throw stuff on YouTube and then sell licenses to it. Yeah, there was a point where I was like, all right, I’m going to do this. And then I play guitar and, you know, did lyric stuff. I do a little work in the music industry actually still out of Nashville. I work with Sony Nashville out there doing some marketing consulting for them. My friend, his name is Colby Acoff. He’s a country music musician who’s on their label, but he’s going on tour with Luke Combs this year. So still involved in the space, want to do a company in the space at some point. But yeah, I definitely, definitely have an interest in that world.

Kyle Knowles:
Love it. Favorite candy bar?

Cody Schneider:
Oh, God, I don’t know on that. Probably Twix. Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite music artist?

Cody Schneider:
Oh, right now, Dominic Fike. I’ve been obsessed with him. Yeah, he’s, I don’t know. I just think he’s doing really interesting stuff. Him or Gene Dawson are two that I’m kind of obsessed with currently.

Kyle Knowles:
Gonna have to look them up. That’s awesome. Favorite cereal?

Cody Schneider:
Oh, God. Probably Captain Crunch, even though I never eat it.

Kyle Knowles:
What are my all time faves? Mac or PC?

Cody Schneider:
Mac all the way, just because that’s what I know. Grew up with a G3 that had like Photoshop and Illustrator on it. And that’s how I kind of stumbled into this world. Yeah, without it, I don’t even know what I’d be doing. I’d probably be like a lineman or something. I’m from like Podunk town.

Kyle Knowles:
So anyways. Google or Microsoft?

Cody Schneider:
Microsoft right now. I think what they’re doing is unbelievable with this whole AI adoption thing. Also like, I mean, just their CEO is one of the most gangster, like just business people in the game at the moment.

Kyle Knowles:
Agreed. Co-pilot killing it right now. So let’s see, dogs or cats?

Cody Schneider:
Probably dogs. Yeah, for sure.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Les Mis?

Cody Schneider:
Oh God, Les Mis, just because I’ve seen it more. Okay.

Kyle Knowles:
All right. So what’s something that most people don’t know about you?

Cody Schneider:
Yeah, I think, uh, That’s a tough one. I actually am pretty anti-internet. That’s a big thing. I look at it as a tool, but I don’t have social on my phone. I try to be offline as much as I can. All of it’s fake because of people like me. Everybody’s selling you something because of people like me. Look behind that veil and made choices five years ago to adjust to that. Yeah, I think that’s the biggest thing. I think, you know, we always joke, like, go touch grass more, right? Like, it’s needed by all people. So yeah, that’s kind of the thing that I would say.

Kyle Knowles:
I love it. Thank you so much, Cody. I have learned so many things. One of them is that I probably need to put entrepreneur in the title of my podcast somehow. I think that’s going to help a lot.

Cody Schneider:
I would even niche down more, Kyle. I would have it be like side hustle or first business or like something that’s even more niche. I think that you could probably rank for something like that. It depends on your audience.

Kyle Knowles:
Because entrepreneur is just too broad.

Cody Schneider:
It’s super, it’s super competitive, right? But, but, but in contrast, like if you went after something that’s like, how does, you know, like side hustle, right? Or whatever, like some other variation of that, but it’s like a more like, like niche down version of it. Like whatever people are trying to start their first business, like the board that you, they would search for that. I think you could rank for something like that and get a ton of inbound that way. Like if I was in your shoes, that’s probably what I would do to like accomplish that, what you’re trying to. So, but anyways, not to digress.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, thank you so much. I’ve been looking forward to interviewing the founder of an AI first company and you’re my first. I’ve got two more in the next couple of weeks. So this has been a great kickoff to that. I love what you’re doing. I look forward to following your entrepreneurial journey in the coming months and years. So thank you for being so generous with your time and your knowledge today.

Cody Schneider:
Happened happy to do it. Thank you for having me and super excited to see where you go I’ll have to come out in a couple months We can talk more about you know What how you’re doing and what’s going on with your growth and also about the companies and stuff and what we’re seeing on the front lines Let’s do it.

Kyle Knowles:
And if you’re ever in Utah, let’s do it live.

Cody Schneider:
I love it. I love it. Sounds great. Thank you again, man. Have a good one You know, here’s joke like go touch grass more right like it’s needed by all people