Building an Audience That Markets Itself Using AI

Ever watch someone build something massive and wonder, "wait, how did they start with basically nothing?" Here’s your answer!

Joe Downs and Peter Swain crack open the Morning Brew origin story (two broke college guys, a free newsletter, and a sticker) and use it to answer the question every solopreneur is quietly asking: how do I grow an audience that actually does my marketing for me? 

Using AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT, they walk through how to identify your hidden expertise, turn it into a free lead magnet worth paying for, and set up a referral loop… without a marketing team, a big budget, or a single Facebook ad. 

If you're building something on the side and want real AI workflows that replace a whole department, this one's for you.

Listen For

1:22 What can a free college newsletter with a sticker referral loop teach you about building an AI side hustle audience?

10:21 Why does Peter say your entire thought process is "back to front" — and what should you be asking your AI tool instead?

21:06 What is the exact conversation you should have with Claude to identify a lead magnet your customers would actually pay for?

24:57 How does asking for one idea completely out of left field from your AI tool unlock business opportunities you didn't know you had?

32:42 What's the one physical purchase Peter says is the single most powerful upgrade to your AI workflow and it's not a new computer?

Links Mentioned

Peter's Free AI Business Audit | Storagemoguls.ai 

Email the “Idiots” Joe and Peter

idiots@successfulidiots.com 

Joe Downs

Website | LinkedIn | YouTube | Email Joe:joe@belroseam.com 

Peter Swain

Website | Email | LinkedIn | X

Transcript

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Peter Swain (00:00):

Your thought process is back to front. Okay. Because you said it about eight times. What could I give away? What could I give away? What could I give away? You never mentioned once the more important part of the fact, which is what do they want to receive?

Joe Downs (00:18):

Two guys still in college though the finance newsletters they were getting in their inboxes were just unreadable. Dry, jargon heavy, nobody's idea of a fun read at 6:00 AM. So what'd they do? They started writing their own version. Funnier, shorter, actually enjoyable. And then they started giving it away to free, first to classmates. They didn't spend a dollar on ads. Instead, they built one simple mechanic. Refer your friends and you'd get something for it. A sticker, a T-shirt, bragging rights, nothing complicated. But that one loop, people sharing it because they wanted to, not because anyone begged them to, is what took a free college email from a few hundred classmates to millions of readers. Eventually, even a real media company paid money for a piece of it. Before they ever charged anyone a dime, they built an audience that did their marketing for them and then watched closely enough to know what the audience actually wanted next.

(01:22):

And that's the whole show today. I'm Joe Downs. With me is Peter Swain. We're just a couple of successful idiots using AI to simplify our lives and optimize our businesses. Peter, any guesses as to who I was talking about or what business?

Peter Swain (01:35):

Motley Fool.

Joe Downs (01:37):

Great guess actually. It was not them

Peter Swain (01:41):

Though. No.

Joe Downs (01:43):

I actually kind of wish it was because I feel like it's more known. Well,

Peter Swain (01:47):

I could be wrong. The stickers, the T-shirt.

Joe Downs (01:50):

Yeah, yeah. No, 100%. Alex Lieberman and Austin Reef are the two guys. They started Morning Brew

Peter Swain (01:56):

As

Joe Downs (01:56):

A college side project and turned -

Peter Swain (01:59):

I didn't know that was finance.

Joe Downs (02:02):

I didn't either. So that's why I probably just said as a knee jerk reaction a second ago, Motley Fool, because I'm familiar with them. And I don't know that I've ever read Morning. I've heard of them, but I don't know if I've ever read it. Fascinating either way. True or false, Peter?

Peter Swain (02:16):

No, I don't want to do this today.

Joe Downs (02:21):

It's much kinder.

Peter Swain (02:22):

Okay, thank you. Compared

Joe Downs (02:23):

To last week. Plus it's been a week since England Law, so you're good. I'll

Peter Swain (02:27):

Snuck that back in there. I thought you told me in private that we were one of the only two teams that won that weekend.

Joe Downs (02:33):

What do you mean? Oh, yes. Yes, I did.

Peter Swain (02:35):

I

Joe Downs (02:35):

Did. I

Peter Swain (02:36):

Did. Winners.

Joe Downs (02:37):

You were down. I was trying to help you.

Peter Swain (02:40):

Okay, thanks.

Joe Downs (02:41):

Did. You are the third place team. Congratulations. True or false, getting a Brit to actually ask a friend for a favor is harder than getting a college newsletter to go viral.

Peter Swain (02:53):

Definitely true. But isn't that true of Americans as well?

Joe Downs (02:57):

Asking for favors? Some people are professionals at it. I think we have less couth over here when it comes to that.

Peter Swain (03:04):

That's true. Can I ask for a favor?

Joe Downs (03:06):

You may.

Peter Swain (03:09):

Could next week's true or false be about Canadians?

Joe Downs (03:13):

Oh, 100%. I've been waiting for

Peter Swain (03:14):

You to ask that. Just dropping it.

Joe Downs (03:17):

Folks, before we get into it, as you know, we don't run ads. Not yet. And we don't have sponsors, not yet. But if you've gotten anything out of the show and you wouldn't mind leaving us a rating wherever you listen, Apple, Spotify, we would greatly appreciate it. And subscribe while you're there. All right. So today we're going to be giving away something for free as step one, which is not the whole plan. Then we'll talk about the reason building the next step used to take a whole team and a real budget and why that's not just, or it's just not true anymore that you need all that. And then we'll close with one move you can actually make this week, whether you're a solopreneur or you've got a team. All right. So Peter, these two morning brew guys, they could have just kept writing a free newsletter forever and called it a win.

(04:07):

They had a big audience, had real influence. Most people would stop right there. Why don't you think they did? And why shouldn't anybody building an audience stop there either?

Peter Swain (04:18):

Well, the power of the audience compounds for the size of the audience, number one. And number two, at some point, it carries a real cost. Sending an email to 50 or 60 of your friends, just do a Gmail and a BCC. But when you start getting into the thousands, you're going to start paying for technology. You're going to start paying for CRMs and SaaS software and domain monitoring. So whether you like it or not, you're going to be spending money. So at some point, it doesn't become a free product anymore. It becomes a product that's costing you money. So you're going to have to make the choice if you want to, carry on growing something. You're going to reach a point where you're spending money, so you're actually going to have to probably try making some money.

Joe Downs (05:01):

Why do you think the. I can't wrap my head around this part. The giving away, share my email and I'll give you a sticker. Like what? I don't know what else they were giving away, but what is the psychology behind that? It wouldn't work for me if you said I'll send you a sticker if you refer a friend and be like, what? Sticker.

Peter Swain (05:22):

So first of all, remember their audience were college students at the time. So the stickers, it's not just the sticker, it's the sticker, the T-shirt, the overall swag. Yeah,

Joe Downs (05:34):

The

Peter Swain (05:34):

T-shirt you got. It's kind of forming in there.

Joe Downs (05:35):

The T-shirt you

Peter Swain (05:37):

Would've got. You've got what's called CAC, customer acquisition cost. So you're going to be paying money to someone or something at some point in order to spread the word about your product or service. And physical businesses don't have it as much because they have a storefront and they have directories, but virtual businesses or digital businesses, you're either going to be paying Facebook ads or you're going to be paying content writers for organic SEO, but there is an acquisition cost. So if you can acquire a lead for the cost of a sticker, sign me up. My note to self at the end of this episode is print my gorilla mascot as a sticker. Because if I can get a lead for the cost of a sticker, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than a Facebook ad.

Joe Downs (06:32):

Yeah. There's this company called Goat Sports maybe. I don't know. They're probably into every sport now, but we first started seeing them on lacrosse sidelines. You get the tent and they're selling their gear and it's all goat. It's a really, really cool logo, but what do they do? They just gave away stickers. Hundreds of sticks. They would take as many as you want. The kids would just reach their hand and grab fistfuls of stickers and they put them on what were probably their notebooks or whatever. Now it's their laptops. And everything was goat, goat, goat everywhere. Again, it was a cool logo. And what did the kids want? They wanted to buy the merch. So they gave away the stickers.

Peter Swain (07:10):

See, and even though you aren't the sticker guides, you just said it wouldn't motivate you. You only know about this at this scale. It's only your recall is because of the stickers.

Joe Downs (07:21):

But these are also 10-year-old boys and girls, right? I guess you're right though. They were college kids. This is probably the '90s. When were these guys around? '90s, 2000 something is when they started. I think it was more the t-shirts. Stickers are probably in there as well. But you're right. I'm walking back my lack of excellent judgment there. Clearly the giveaway was working. I was thinking how does a 53-year-old get a sticker? But you're right, it's the college kid. It's the college mindset 100%.

Peter Swain (07:57):

It's like when people leave one of your storage facilities and they've just signed up, handing them a bag that's a cap and a T-shirt will probably earn you more than it will cost you because it's not every single person's going to wear it, use it. But if somebody puts that hat on as they leave the facility and they go to the mall, you've just gained eyeballs that would've cost you, I don't know, $2,000 a month in the billboard. And you just gained them at eight bucks for the cap.

Joe Downs (08:29):

Yeah. What's the AI equivalent of this? Well,

Peter Swain (08:34):

The great thing with AI is you can, through a multi-step process, you can kind of say, first of all, let's mine our IP. So we can take a transcript from a podcast or a live call or just standing on a stage or just walking around your bedroom with a recording device and you can just ramble. And at the end of that ramble, you can feed it to AI and say, "What's the IP or the framework or the name for this IP or framework work for me?" Now I want to use a weird example because it's easy for me. It's easy for storage moguls. But let's go back to the cap, the hat manufacturer that we talked about many, many moons ago. She will have a philosophy on what hat suits you. And she'll have a philosophy on how to choose the perfect hat. Now she might not know that you might not have it written down and scribed well, but I guarantee if I turn around to her in her store and say, "How would you go about choosing a hat for an event?" She'd say, "Well, first of all, you think about what the event is and then you think about how hot it's going to be.

(09:46):

I'm going to completely make this up and anyone that does hats for a living is going to ambass me." But you get my point, right?

Joe Downs (09:52):

I'm not sure this was the best example, but run with it.

Peter Swain (09:56):

It's going to be a hard one, but I hope it's a great one.Because the point is, if you were to take that, here's the eight steps logic in how you decide what your hat is, AI can turn that into the PDF, into the graphic, into the flow chart, into the tool, into the prompt. So that's your sticker?

Joe Downs (10:15):

That's your free

Peter Swain (10:16):

Sticker. That's your free sticker.

Joe Downs (10:18):

I didn't think you were going to land this, but all right, that's interesting.

Peter Swain (10:21):

I think I did land it.

Joe Downs (10:22):

You did. You did. I was worried because you got the point of the question, which is when you have a physical store, I don't even know how these guys knew who was forwarding their email to send them a sticker. We'll have to unpack that in a minute. But when you, like this goat company I was just talking about, you're physically there. They can hand you a sticker. I mean, a sticker is a tangible item. So you got the point of the question, which is if we're whatever our business is, in this case you chose a hat maker, but you could be a consultant. If you're a consultant who has started a newsletter and you're looking for your clients, your colleagues, your acquaintances to forward said newsletter, just like these guys, what is the. I don't know how those guys got these people's stickers, these college kids stickers.

(11:16):

Maybe they knew them. But the person forwarding your newsletter could be halfway around the world.

(11:25):

What are the digital stickers? What is an AI sticker that you can give them? Now, you just gave me one. I didn't think you would pull that off from the hat. That was amazing. But even then it was like you said, if you walked into her store. If we had to keep it digitally, what is an example of the digital AI sticker that I not only can give you that you want for sharing and forwarding or whatever you're doing, whatever, liking my post or whatever, how do I get it to you? How do I know? What is the mechanism I could set up where I know you did something for me and then I can deliver something for you for doing it?

Peter Swain (12:13):

Yeah. So there are systems in place. First promoter is the one that we use, which is kind of an industry grade, but there's all sorts of ones that will give you unique links. So when somebody. The referral mechanism will say, refer this to a friend and you click it and then you fill in their email address or something like that. Or when you forward it, it has the subscribe message. It's actually not. It's technical and probably a bit boring for this, but there are systems in place that facilitate that tracking. And you can either put people into a drawer for something. That's often a mechanism that gets used like we're giving away a free Mustang and everybody that refers gets a ticket for that and you can do it that way. Or you can go something like a sticker or a very common one is a book.

Joe Downs (13:02):

Okay. So again, I don't want to get technical. Thanks for pointing that out. There are mechanisms that you can put in place regardless of your business where you can get creative to use what I would call your organic audience, whether

Peter Swain (13:21):

They're - It's your best asset.

Joe Downs (13:23):

Yeah. Whether they're family and friends or newly acquired or longtime clients, they're your best amplification voice, are they not? I mean, that's how the morning brew started. They use their best amplifiers.

Peter Swain (13:41):

When people that are listening to this, there's a good chance that they got told to listen to this by someone else. And the reason they're here is because somebody that they trust told them to watch this or listen to this, which however they consume it. It's a much more powerful version of a referral, of a lead-in for somebody that you know, like and trust to tell you than if we told them or if we paid for an ad. Is why paid ads are so ineffective. I'm not saying you shouldn't do them, but in terms of the return, you can have a paid ad that reaches. I did a LinkedIn post the other day that we boosted. It went to 5,000 people and it resulted in one person joining a free challenge. So 5,000 paid exposures equaled one signup to a free thing. Whereas if 10 of my members tell 10 of their friends, I will probably get seven or eight.

(14:43):

So in percentage terms, it's like 70, 80% versus one in 5,000, whatever that works out to be.

Joe Downs (14:50):

Okay. So I think we've established it's important to do this for all business development. You started to give us a window into how you figure out what it is to do, but I think I might have cut you off and I want to go back to it because. And I don't even want to pick a specific business. I want to keep it generic. I just want to say I'm an entrepreneur, a solopreneur. Let's say solopreneur. So I'm by myself. If you have a team around you, that's even easier. But you're by yourself. I do X and I want to grow my pipeline of business so I can do more of X. You started to talk about how you start having to walk around your house, have a conversation with one of the AI tools. In that conversation, I'm assuming you're describing what you do. And if you haven't already done this, so folks, if you've been listening for a while, you should be fairly far along here with one of your AI tools and it should know everything you do in business.

(15:59):

But if not, you would start from scratch here. This is who I am. This is what I do. These are the hours I like to work. These are the hours I don't like to work. These are my ideal clients. These are who I will take as clients, whatever. This is all the things I do. What is the, not the prompt, Peter, but what's the conversation flow with the tool, the Claude or ChatGPT maybe, that teases out what I can give away? Because I want to bring this also back to, it's the free. The way we're growing this audience is by giving something away for free. It could be a newsletter, it could be something else. What does that conversation with the tool look like such that I can identify what it is I'm going to give it away for free? And then without being technical, how do I set up all the mechanisms to start to give away some sort of, and you're going to, I'm sure, comment on my choice of the word swag again.

(17:05):

What is it? Merch now?

Peter Swain (17:06):

Actually, you're making a much bigger mistake than the swag word. And I'd like to interject and help that first.

Joe Downs (17:16):

Get after it.

Peter Swain (17:18):

Your thought process is back to front. Okay. Because you said it about eight times. What could I give away? What could I give away? What could I give away? You never mentioned once, the more important part of the fact, which is what do they want to receive?

Joe Downs (17:32):

Yes. And that was going to be my last point.

Peter Swain (17:36):

But it's the only point. Okay. So when we're talking to AI, what we should be asking it and asking ourselves is what problem do they have? Number one. And number two, what would they be willing to pay to solve? Okay. Because I like putting a burden of proof on a lead magnet because one of the problems with it when people discover AI, they're like, "Oh my God, I can do anything." And suddenly there's just 50 crap PDFs floating around.

Joe Downs (18:07):

They're out there everywhere. Yeah.

Peter Swain (18:09):

Yeah. And those come from that thought process of what can I give away? Turn that round and say, what is the problem that they have that they would be willing to pay for?

Joe Downs (18:21):

Okay. So

Peter Swain (18:21):

That's part of your conversation. And then give that away for free.

Joe Downs (18:23):

And that's part of your conversation with the tool.

Peter Swain (18:25):

Exactly. So you describe your customer.

Joe Downs (18:27):

Okay.

Peter Swain (18:29):

Let's say for example, in go out to storage. The other tip I would give people is it should be the most, it should sound banal to you. It should sound so low brow that you're like, "Why would anyone pay for this?" So let me give you an example. I'm willing to bet that Joe Downs can look at a house and look at a storage unit and tell me exactly the size of storage unit I need to put that room in that unit.

Joe Downs (18:59):

Okay.

Peter Swain (19:01):

Am I correct?

Joe Downs (19:02):

I was pretty good at Tetris. Yeah, I could do it.

Peter Swain (19:03):

Yeah. I can't. Because cubic feet and like, oh, you need a five by 10 or a 10 by. I'd be like, "I don't know what you're talking about."

Joe Downs (19:13):

Who packs your car when you go on trips?

Peter Swain (19:15):

I can do that because you are proving my point with your humor because to you, that issue seems banal. It seems ridiculous. But anybody that's in their craft for long enough has so much intrinsic knowledge about their craft that they actually forgotten what they know.

Joe Downs (19:35):

Yeah.

Peter Swain (19:36):

Doug knows how to gain microphone position. Our producer just instinctively understands it. And if I was to say to him, "Produce me a 10 point guide for setting up my microphone," he'd go, "Well, you just do this, this and this." I'm like, "That's the one right there. That's the one people need." Because if I was doing a new podcast, even at this stage where we've done 30, 40 odd episodes and someone said, "There is this piece of software I've designed to tune your microphone and be like, I want that. Give that to me." So what do they want that they'll be willing to pay for? Put a burden of proof on it so you're not just issuing something bad, you're issuing something that they've perceived that they are winning by getting and try and make it really, really low brow for you.

Joe Downs (20:25):

Low brow for me so it's easy to produce.

Peter Swain (20:30):

Yeah, like the sandwich shop. It's a form of lunch bag that stops the cheese melting out the side or something, which to you. When I see people wrap burritos, I'm like, "How do you do that, man? That's so cool." If somebody was to give me an actual guide on how to wrap a burrito, I'd be like, "Yeah, I want that." So that would

Joe Downs (20:52):

Be it. The free burrito wrapping guide would - Yeah. And then where would that lead to business-wise?

Peter Swain (20:59):

That would then an inside the free guide they send me is the 20% off coupon that I can use in the store.

Joe Downs (21:05):

Interesting.

Peter Swain (21:06):

So the conversation with AI would be, "Hey, are you aware of my customer? Yes or no? Yes. Great. Tell me about my customer so you can sense check that its knowledge is correct. Awesome. I want to put together some kind of free thing that I can give away. The qualification is it must be genuinely useful for them. It must be worth money to them and near free for me to produce. And it must be something that is so easy. And there's a last one. And it must only solve one problem. That's a mistake people make as well.

Joe Downs (21:41):

Solve one problem, but leave others unsolved.

Peter Swain (21:47):

A hundred percent. You want to solve one problem so that they are coming to you going, great, I've done that thing. What's next? There is a great phrase that we use in our world called TTFW, which is time to first win. So the more important metric when working with - Time to

Joe Downs (22:04):

First win.

Peter Swain (22:05):

Yeah. It's not how big the win is that you give them. It's how quickly do you give them the win? So in their first interaction with you, whether they've given you money or they've given you contact information, they have still given you something. And there is an open loop as they're expecting payback for the thing that they've just given you. The more they give you, the larger that payback is expected to be. But also the quicker that payback is supposed to be. So you want somebody where you give them a lead magnet and do not say, step one, go to this store and buy these three things because their time to first win is now weeks away. They're very unlikely to fulfill. Whereas if it's like a photography thing, get out your iPhone and here's the five things you need to do before taking a selfie.

(23:02):

Number one, clean the lens. Number two, so the person goes from reading the thing to taking the thing and going, oh my God, look at that. It's amazing. It worked. You want the time to first win to be as small as possible. And AI's great at all of these.

Joe Downs (23:18):

So speaking of that, I find myself, I've evolved in how I work with and Claude in most cases here. In terms of that conversation you're having about your business and your customer and what they would want and what you could sell them free. I'm assuming you would also go into, "Hey, look, this is what I'm trying to do. I want to give them something for free that's low hanging fruit for me, but something they would otherwise have potentially paid for. I want to give it to them for free. And I want it to lead to them coming back to me for follow on step two, three, and four or product or this or that." I'm just point of order of how I've evolved with this. If I'm having that conversation, that entire conversation, I'm probably asking for the top five ideas, not just give me one.

(24:20):

I used to say, "Give me an idea." And then what I've found, and this is just kind of a point of order for everybody, what I found is that the idea it gives you is really good. And you start running that out. And then you're like, "Well now..." And then before you know it, you're like, "Wasn't perfect." So you're forcing this, you're making concessions over here.

(24:43):

Whereas if you just say, "Give me five ideas or 10 ideas," all of a sudden you're like, "Whoa, that first one, that was good, but this

Peter Swain (24:52):

Fourth one's even better." And a lot of times you can

Joe Downs (24:55):

Merge them. Go

Peter Swain (24:57):

Ahead. Here's just an upgrade for you. Ask it to give you five ideas that fit the criteria you've given it and ask it to give you one idea completely out of left field. That gives you some really interesting stuff where you're like, "Whoa."

Joe Downs (25:09):

Yeah. And it goes back to, remember, I don't know how many episodes ago we've talked about how this is completely different, but it makes us better people by using AI sometimes and to have difficult conversations. I know we did an episode on that. But it also inspires you. It gets your creative juices flowing. So that example of one idea out of left field, you don't know what that one idea out of left field is going to. Or you don't know how that's going to inspire some synapse in your brain to fire. And all of a sudden it's like, "Well, yeah, I didn't tell AI about the fact that I used to be a world-class rugby player and somehow that would tie into that." You what I mean? It didn't think it was relevant, but all of a sudden it is.

Peter Swain (26:00):

When we were doing a very similar exercise for me, it reminded me that I have an Airbnb and that I could use the Airbnb to form a new product for my community and say, "Hey, if you want to stay in my Airbnb in this week, this week, or this week, it's going to include two hours of my consultancy and I'm going to take you to dinner." So I now fill six of my 52 weeks of my Airbnb by putting two hours of my time in. And that was not my idea. Another idea that AI did for me that's been quite successful is I now, a couple of times a week, get paid to walk my dog. Well, I used to before Dutch passed away. But the idea was I have to walk him anyway. And I had a cashflow issue I needed to solve. And Jet came back and said, "Why don't you take a discounted hourly rate for the dog walk?" And it's worked really well because you have to send me the materials in advance because I'm out walking my dog.

(27:05):

I'm not sitting at my desk. It's good for my health. And because it's a, "Hey, we're doing 2.4 miles, which takes me 46 minutes. What do you got?" People skip out the, hi, hello, how are you? Blah, blah, blah. And they just get to the topic.

Joe Downs (27:18):

This dog walk brought to you by.

Peter Swain (27:21):

This dog walk is brought to you by, right? The thing that I think is profoundly interesting that I wish we'd kind of said at the beginning is what people miss about this that is so important is they spend a lot of time engineering the process of making the sandwich or buying the hats from the supplier or whatever it might be in their business. But marketing seems to be regarded as some kind of mystic art and it's not. It's exactly the same thing. You are engineering somebody going through these processes of easy way, top of funnel out there, mid-funnel in here, but haven't yet bought anything from us to bottom of funnel. They're now actually in a position where they want to buy something from us. How are we moving people through these steps? And this, "Hey, I want to give you something," opens up the reciprocity loop of when you receive something, psychology dictates that you want to return the favor.

(28:22):

You become in a buying mode. And the other thing about these, more often than not, is that we're asking for an email address or a cell number or contact information of some description, which is the first yes. We're asking somebody to part with something that in a few notches time, we're going to ask them for money. So we're asking them for the first yes. So hey, you give me this, I'll give you this. We're now in a transactional space, which is what we want to be. We want to move the nebulous relationship into a transaction of some description.

Joe Downs (28:59):

Okay. So thank you for that. So now I'm sitting here thinking, and this is phenomenal. I am back to my original juxtaposition. I am a solopreneur. How do I do this all by myself? How heavy is this lift? What does it look like? Paint the picture. How long does this conversation take? The first one, then what's my phase two, then my phase three? What does it look like?

Peter Swain (29:25):

You could get the very basics of this whole thing out in 45 minutes or less if you already have any existing relationship with AI, if it knows something about you. Because that first conversation is, "I need lead magnet. Let's talk about what the IP would be. What would the customer want to receive? What would they be willing to pay for? What would be a really easy lift for me? Make sure the time to first win is as low as possible." And then you would do exactly what you said. Give me five options. And I would probably say, give me five options and Grade each option from one to 10 in each of these things. I loved your next suggestion. Yeah, I like one. I don't like three. Four's okay. Two and five are amazing. So you'd probably throw three out, have another three, merge a couple, pull this from here.

(30:18):

And then quite simply, you'd say to AI, okay, if we're a digital product, okay, build it for me. Build me the PDF.

Joe Downs (30:25):

I'm trying to approach this like I'm the listener and I'm hearing what you're saying and it sounds great, but what's my organized plan of action? So do I start with. I start a project, I think, right? And in the project, so folks, I'm just going to use Claude, but ChatGPT too, you would just start a project, name the project, give some instructions, whatever instructions, attach whatever files you need to. And then do you start off, Peter, with, I just listen to this episode, maybe even get the transcript of the episode, throw it in and say, this is what I want to accomplish. The end result looks like this. Here's everything that you need to do. Ask me what you need to know about me and my business, right? That would be part of it. So that I can achieve an end result of you giving me five to 10 brilliant ideas with all these criteria.

(31:27):

I think that's what I would do, turn it into an interview process because -

Peter Swain (31:32):

Yeah, you don't need to know the how with AI, you just need to know the what. So if you're saying, this is where I'm at and this is where I need to be, and exactly, you could just feed the transcript to this end and say, go. Then how it gets there, it's going to be pretty good at deciding how to do that. But the interview process would work very, very well.

Joe Downs (31:53):

So really you just describe the end result, but do that first, right? This is

Peter Swain (31:59):

Where

Joe Downs (31:59):

I'm trying to get to.

Peter Swain (32:00):

Yeah, I think that'd be a really good solid approach.

Joe Downs (32:03):

And so that conversation is 45 or so minutes, you said?

Peter Swain (32:09):

Yep.

Joe Downs (32:09):

Maybe?

Peter Swain (32:11):

Max.

Joe Downs (32:12):

And then from there, what does it look like? I mean, obviously it depends on what the end result looks like from an action plan, but typically, what do you think it would be? I'm still a solopreneur, so it's still just me. So I can do the conversation all by myself. Now I'm 53, fairly tech savvy, but I'm not incredibly tech savvy. I've got no help. It's just me, my laptop and my AIs. What does it look like from there?

Peter Swain (32:42):

Go to Best Buy and buy a second monitor. It's almost the most powerful piece that we can add into an AI journey.

(32:50):

Okay. Because what you're going to want is Claude on monitor one and whatever Claude is telling you to drive on monitor two. Okay. And I want you to tell Claude what you just told me. I'm relatively tech savvy, but I'm not a geek. I'm a solopreneur. I don't have a team. I don't have access to somebody that can do this for me. I don't have a marketing manager. And I now need to be able to give that lead magnet to people. Where do I go? What do I do? How do I set it up? Walk me through it like I'm a six-year-old. Give me step-by-step instructions. Do not proceed beyond. Just give me. Have it walk you through. So I say, step one, log in here. Tell me when you're done. Done. Step two, go here. Done. Because a simple Google form can have an autoresponder email attached to it.

(33:43):

So it can be as simple as a Google form that says, "Hey, thanks, Joe. I'd love to send you my how to pick the perfect hat for the occasion guide. Fill in your name, email, and cell number here, and I'll send it to you via email in the next 30 seconds."

Joe Downs (33:59):

That's so interesting. I didn't even think about that. You don't even have to start with some high tech system to manage 100,000 newsletters

Peter Swain (34:10):

Or whatever. If you want, you can literally just say, "Text me on this number." And you can use your personal cell number if you have to and say, "Just text me hack guide and I'll send you the guide."

Joe Downs (34:24):

Yeah. So you really just want a system to get started, and then as it evolves, you'll evolve with it. As the system reaches its ceiling of complexity, it can only handle so many this or you can only handle so many texts.

Peter Swain (34:39):

The tech should always follow the business, not the business, follow the tech. So we don't want to go to First Promoter or Chargebee or any of these kind of enterprise systems until we actually know that people actually want the lead magnet that we're talking about. I mean, that is the first test. Because it doesn't matter how much we work with AI, it doesn't matter as a guy that's done this for 30 years, doesn't matter what I think. What matters is do people want it? Yes or no? So how do we test that hypothesis in the easiest lift possible? All

Joe Downs (35:08):

Right. So you don't need. I'm just trying to sum this up. You don't need a marketing team to do research for you. You just need to have a conversation with AI and tell it what you want the outcome to be, what you're trying to achieve. Then from there, once you, I would call it the end of phase one, once you have that, you've landed on that, you feel comfortable with that. Now it's time to execute that. So you just go right back to having the same conversation if you didn't touch on that already. Although that could be part of your first conversation, and I need to be able to execute it by myself. And then that lays out for you step one, step two, step three, whether you're going to start with your personal cell phone text messages or a Google form or set up something bigger because maybe you already have a 5,000 person email list and it's time to take it to the next level.

(35:58):

And by the way, I'm glad I just said that. If you already have a list, you already have a customer database, we probably should be asking them, right? How would you. I'm going to take a tangent here for a second. Let me finish the first thought. You should step by step, right? Phase one, what do I do? Phase two, all right, I'm here, what do I do? It's just going back to asking AI, including the execution. And then I think it just evolves and phases from there, but always going back to that same project and saying, here's where I am. What do I do now? Here's what's working, here's what's not working. Since I was going to go on the tangent first, but I'm glad I tied it up. What if I already have a database? Now I'm just looking at growing it. Or what if I have a following, a newsletter audience?

(36:46):

I don't know what they want. I just have the free audience. I don't know what to do. How do you engage them?

Peter Swain (36:53):

So we don't want to engage people that aren't our potential viable customers. So let's say you've got an audience of 5,000 people on that email list and it's grown organically and haphazard throughout the years. There's going to be a cousin on there, the friend at the golf club's on there. There's loads of people on there. Marketing is simultaneously as much about pulling people towards us as it is about pushing people away from us. So we shouldn't care if the lead magnet falls on deaf ears of the friend at the golf club because we're not trying to get his business. So the process doesn't change. In fact, it's even more important of my ideal customer is this person. We need to identify a problem that they have and something I can solve and et cetera. Which may mean that you send your buddy at the golf club the perfect burrito wrapping kit because you run a Spanish restaurant.

(37:49):

Now he might go, why the hell are you sending this to me? Doesn't really matter because if he's not the customer, it doesn't matter. We're not trying to grow a list of millions of people for the sake of it. We're trying to grow the right list.

Joe Downs (38:04):

So that brings an interesting question and one I've struggled with myself and had conversations about recently. All of this marketing that we're doing, I'm doing in storage moguls, you're doing, we'll be doing here for successfulity. It's short order. We already have personal profiles. Some people have large friend groups on Facebook or followings on Instagram or Twitter or whatever. But there's this apprehension, and I have it myself, about quote unquote, marketing to your friends. Is there a mental mind unblocker for that? Where it is what it is? Because you kind of just touched on it, like your buddy at the golf club's going to get this, but there's this stigma with that. Is it just in our own heads? Does your buddy at the golf club really care? I mean, people are seeing my stuff now and some are commenting. My mental, the way I get over it is, well, oh yeah, I didn't send that.

(39:08):

I have a social media team that does it. So that unscrews my mind from me being the person that hit the red button that said publish. But it's still on my social media platforms. It's still where my personal friends see it. How do we get over that? Or is there a way to deliver those messages?

Peter Swain (39:30):

I think the delayed gratification of being wealthy probably helps.

Joe Downs (39:37):

You're not going to give me

Peter Swain (39:38):

A

Joe Downs (39:38):

Placebo pill for this?

Peter Swain (39:40):

I hear you and I get it, but I will tell you that people that are successful are really the people that critique you. It doesn't matter where you're at on the journey. In my experience throughout life, if you are out running on the lacrosse pitch at five o'clock in the morning and practicing something in lacrosse and you're terrible at it because you're at the beginning of your journey, the best lacrosse player in the world would not laugh at you at that moment. He would cheer you on and encourage you and go, "Fair play. You're doing the work. You're trying to get better. I respect you." So to me, it's the same in any walk of life. I doubt the people that would make fun of you on your social media are people that have 200,000 followers. I'm guessing they're the people that have 39 followers, including their nan.

(40:28):

So yeah.

Joe Downs (40:30):

Fair point. So it's the average of the five people that keep company.

Peter Swain (40:34):

That's how I think about it in my head. When I send a screwy email, you reply to me, so let me know when we screw up. But you don't do it in a mean fashion. You do it say, "Hey Pete, this went wrong and I don't know if you've seen it or not." Which you've done a couple times and I'm really grateful because I'm like, "God dammit, we made a mistake again."

Joe Downs (40:57):

Right. But I'm not judging you. I'm just saying, hey.

Peter Swain (41:00):

But some people do.

Joe Downs (41:02):

Yeah.

Peter Swain (41:03):

But then-subscribe them on their own behalf or block them. I'm like, okay, I don't even care if you're my brother. I would just block you.

Joe Downs (41:12):

Yeah. And to your point, they're not the people we want to keep in our circle.

Peter Swain (41:18):

At least

Joe Downs (41:19):

In our circle, in our business circle or in our

Peter Swain (41:21):

Marketing circle. Exactly. I'm not saying don't talk to them at Thanksgiving. I'm saying you are now repurposing your Instagram account or your email to serve your customer. They're not your customer. So do them the favor of removing them from the followers.

Joe Downs (41:35):

Excellent advice. I think that trips up a lot of people from a marketing standpoint. Look, the show is about AI, but it's about entrepreneurialism too. And then we're all entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. She's probably pronounced it right. And we've got to market ourselves. We have to. Our businesses, ourselves, whatever. We just have to. And I know this isn't just about that because in fact, we just got an amazing email the other day from Shelly who's helping folks with Alzheimer's. And I don't know exactly what she did or how we helped her. I just know she was incredibly grateful. And so at the end of the day, that's probably, there's going to be some marketing involved there. I'm sure the AI helps solve or rapidly solve some issue, but she's going to want to spread that message. So at the end of the day, it always comes back to marketing.

(42:27):

At some juncture, somehow. So I wanted to ask that question because in the evolution of social media, which is what we're going to use to market for the most part, we all started personally first. And so that's where we have our, probably a lot of us have our biggest audiences, our biggest followings that maybe they're not quote unquote followings, but maybe they're friends on Facebook or whatever. But they're following you because they want to see your kids' pictures or whatever, right? But that's your largest audience. So how do you use it? And your answer is maybe not the one I was looking for, but it is the one that we all have to accept, which is, hey, look, you can't worry about it. If you believe what you're doing is for the betterment of others, put it out there.

Peter Swain (43:19):

100%.

Joe Downs (43:20):

Get over your own mental block. I probably just need to say that for myself. So thanks for allowing me. Thanks for the spot on the couch here.

Peter Swain (43:27):

We had the conversation the o day in storage programs. It's the same thing of there are lots of good reasons to not be comfortable on social media and they're really good reasons. And they're all the same reasons why you are going to stay poor and unsuccessful. So there's a phrase I can't say here, but I do say it quite regularly. Everybody in the world eats blank. The difference is entrepreneurs get to choose the flavor of blank that they eat.

Joe Downs (43:59):

There you go.

Peter Swain (44:00):

So that's the choice. The choice is, do you wish to eat the, I'm really uncomfortable marketing when my friends are watching? Or do you wish to eat the flavor of, I'm broke? Given those two choices, I choose, I'm going to market to people and have some people make fun of me every so often.

Joe Downs (44:20):

Yeah. With that in mind, do you have a, for someone listening right now, solopreneur, small team, doesn't matter, what's the one thing they should go and do this week?

Peter Swain (44:32):

If you don't -

Joe Downs (44:32):

Just listen to the show. What's the first move?

Peter Swain (44:36):

If you don't have your thought process in some form of an IP, in some form of a framework with some kind of a name, go and do it. Because too many people are trying to sell themselves versus selling the framework, the brainchild of what they have. So have that conversation with AI and define your IP. And I mean whether you're a sandwich shop or whatever the hatteries are called or running a storage facilities or define your thing because you want to be in a category of one and your IP is a category of one.

Joe Downs (45:17):

Love it. Folks, you can learn more about that at peterswain.com as well. It's a great mastermind. I am a part of it. So here's to recap, for those who have already built your audiences on the back of free, that is not the finish line. We need to start to understand what they're looking for beyond just your free newsletter, your free this, free that. The heavy lift that used to stand between you and the next step is gone. It's just the heavy lift is now how much context can you share with AI in a conversation? And then Peter, just share with you one move for this week. I want to hear some success stories. That's what I want to hear. Folks, please like and share this episode and rate it. The ratings actually, I'm learning. I'm learning more and more about how this all works. We need reviews and ratings apparently for engagement purposes.

(46:10):

Is that right? Why are you looking at me like

Peter Swain (46:15):

That? I'm just nodding. I'm just not in. I was just thinking to myself -

Joe Downs (46:21):

How

Peter Swain (46:21):

Stupid

Joe Downs (46:21):

Is my co-host?

Peter Swain (46:23):

No, no. Successful idiot, not stupid. What lead magnet we need to put in place and how we would do it for the rating and the review. That's what I was just thinking about.

Joe Downs (46:31):

Oh, well that's going to be your project for this week.

Peter Swain (46:34):

Yeah. I wasn't suggesting we would get a co-lab. It was a, I don't know the technical mechanism to track the rating and review back to the person. That's where my head spun into. But good thing, I don't need to because Claude probably does know.

Joe Downs (46:49):

Claya, just have a conversation with Claude and then let me know how it works out.

Peter Swain (46:52):

I was a bit busy. I was nodding, looking intelligent.

Joe Downs (46:55):

I thouht for sure you were judging me. For Peter Swade, I'm Joe Downs. We are your successful idiots. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.