Roberto Nickson Grew 400K+ Followers In 100 Days: Here's How

0:00[Music]

0:16[Music] dude I'm I am really excited for this chat likewise man I feel like it's been a long time coming I almost almost wish I was sort of like interviewing you on the Pod because you're doing such like crazy stuff man so I'm really excited to chat today I mean let's just let's just chat and see where it goes um why I'm excited to chat with you is I've seen you grow to millions of followers over the last couple years you know through your metaverse account and now through your AI accounts and I just want to talk shop I want to crawl around your brain and extract all that good

1:05stuff in there and and I appreciate you taking some time of course man no I'd love to you know start by chatting about content it's just been such a big passion of mine for so long you mentioned metaverse and now Luna I've actually been building um you know let's call them faceless media Brands right for a long long time now a better part of a decade and I've built and then sold now a lot to a lot of communities specifically on Instagram because that's just where I've sort of like almost like um I probably spent my most time you know on the internet on Instagram so I built a ton of

1:36communities you know totaling probably over 10 million followers but I think what's been really interesting is in January I started putting out content consistently for myself which is something that I've never and it's because I think this is where sort of the world is going especially the media landscape is going my inbound for my personal content has been 100x even even metaverse to the Bull Run 100x what that inbound look like and so I've really started to notice it's like you know people buy from people people want their information filtered through people not these faceless media brands or media Giants and so I think I think it's sort

2:11of like a small microcosm of where the entire media landscape is going so that's been a lot of fun to see so if you were to redo it all would you have started your personal brand earlier hundred percent I think um now granted there is there is a lot of benefit to having like these media Brands as like sort of support or content that doesn't necessarily fit my personal brand or content that I think may cause diminishing returns it's great to have those media Brands to kind of like you know use those um but yeah man I I wish I started a lot a lot earlier right because I've always

2:42been sort of posting content to the internet sporadically um but I've never done so consistently and deliberately like now I'm I'm creating content and there's a deliberate Mission behind it right I want to capture all the attention I can at the top funnel it down to my own products um whereas before it was just sort of you know off the cuff like I'd post a picture here I'd go on a vacation or post a cool picture here but it was really nothing but kind of like vanity right like this is my life this is what I'm doing look how cool this picture I just posted was where now there's a

3:11deliberate strategy behind it I have this new thesis it took a work in progress thesis yeah curious your thoughts that every brand will have an ALT account so I came to this conclusion um do you know Nathan lands yeah man yeah so talk to him all the time on Twitter great guy yeah great guy you know tweets about generative AI a bunch and I saw him just continuously tweeting about this Boris account have you seen that yeah oh is that his account yeah so yeah so basically he was like yeah he was he basically kept tweeting like don't follow don't follow Boris or I stole this here okay yeah his last tweet it's

3:54been less than 72 hours since mid-journey 5.1 bomb drop check out my five check out my 10 favorite examples how are these not real photos P.S I stole this from Boris whatever you do don't follow him or at Nathan lands so I clicked on Boris and it's like the profile picture is hilarious it's this guy with like super long hair it's like this cartoon weird looking guy and he he went from zero to nineteen thousand followers in a couple of weeks and if you go to his account it's like way more edgy so like it's way more edgy memes it's like not really Nathan so it

4:31got a little more off-brand for Nathan exactly so it's kind of what do you think of this idea that you know maybe every brand has their brand account personal accounts for the leadership team and then an ALT account which is way more edgy I think two thoughts come to mind one um it that's fascinating because I thought Boris was just a real person right and it sort of like adds to this new notion of the internet where like is there even a real person behind the brand is it AI generated AI assisted is it you know somebody completely different uh and so that I would have

5:03never known if you didn't tell me right and so I think that's pretty fascinating now follow Boris I I laugh at the memes I like um you know I I consume the information as if if it were a real person right so so like the first thing that comes to mind is like wow you know generative AI maybe or AI assisted sort of like bot accounts could sort of pass as a real person that's insane but two I love the idea I mean I think it's sort of what I have kind of been doing right like so sometimes there is something that I'd love to post but I feel it's a little

5:31bit off-brand sometimes it's a little bit gimmicky you know like here are 10 apps that you can use to harness the power of generative AI to you know boost your business or whatever and I'm like I don't know if I want to post that little gimmicky but I got metaverse or luna that I could do that on right and so there's no like there's no brand Equity hit if that makes sense for like the personal brand and so now that you say it yeah I actually think you're onto something I think that's a brilliant idea right because you have two separate Brands two separate uh tones voices

5:58communication Styles and then uh you know depending on the content that you want to push it's like you can see which one is better suited for that I love it yeah and it's a it's just another creative Outlet like there's some things where you start writing the tweet and you're like uh do I really want to press publish on this right like you know it's gonna maybe ruffle some feathers maybe it's a bit too edgy um too cringe um so what you're saying is kind of like for the two cringe put posted on your on your brand account and for the two edgy posted on the alt account yeah I mean

6:32honestly it's kind of like a finsta with economic ambition right it's like offensive but that's public that you could use to Drive Commerce I think I honestly that you you may have just spotted like a really fast emerging Trend so kudos to Nathan um I love that I'm gonna give that a lot of thought over the coming weeks you've got these you've got a Luna you've got metaverse tell people what they are and what type of content you post and why like why even be focusing your time on that what I've really been doing with some of these media Brands is I is I build up these communities in these

7:05audiences and then there's usually a product to push underneath that with metaverse has not been so much that it's really just been like this educational sort of endeavor for me right like I love uh to educate people on emerging Tech paradigms and new things happening in the space because I'm like I'm a nerd man I'm geeking out about this stuff all day like on Twitter like chatting with like-minded people and I just love to be able to present this to a more mainstream audience like sort of what's happening what's going on and so like I lead really through Education First in my style um Aluna was always a it's a sass it's a

7:38SAS startup right because I'm looking around uh generative AI landscape and I'm like man this is incredible um but it feels pretty disjointed right especially stable diffusion um I'm a big believer that open source will prevail and that'll be sort of like the winning uh foundational layer that AI is going to be built on top of because you know I don't want to go in a tangent but even you know Chad gbt I feel like every update gets neutered a little more and more and more and more so like as a builder I I feel a little bit I don't know if I'd want to build on

8:09chat GPT right they have too much leverage there's too much platform risk so I'm looking at open source Alternatives and I see stable diffusion there's incredible stuff being built on top of stable diffusion but it's hard for anybody to interface with right you got to be able to run it locally in your PC so you need technical abilities you need to understand how to you know operate a node or set up a Dev environment I'm like who's going to go through this and do it um even mid-journey I think is one of the most spectacular products I've ever seen in my life but like why is it

8:36Discord only right and so I think it just um I think we just signed up opportunity with the Luna to build the SAS product to bring in like 20 generative AI products eventually there'll be like this this llm that will train uh so you'll be able to interface with all these products with voice so as a content creator like Greg you might say um hey I need an image of this I want uh you know pop or trap music like a trap beat I need that on top of it I want big bold text that says this and so hopefully like in a year from now we'll

9:06have this llm that'll be able to you know anything a content creator may need you just do it through voice so I started to interrupt you so when you came up with the idea for a Luna were you like I want to create this SAS product and this is the vision or were you like um I'm not sure what I want to build here I'm just gonna aggregate a bunch of people and figure it out from there so that's part of it so I knew I wanted to create a product right and for Content creators specifically and so that's when I sort of reverse engineered it and like something that I've just

9:34been doing over the last five to ten years is like I build these online communities through education through information through like really great visual content that really resonates with audiences and then I put like a product underneath and with the Luna That's it man it's like we're trying to figure out now like I think we've sort of achieved product Market fit you know we have 30 000 users now there's been 800 purchase purchases on the site um I think 200 subscribers so I'm like okay we're something here but now it's about trying to figure out that moat and trying to figure out what to build next

10:03right and so what we've done is like we've just put four really dope Builders Under One Roof me um and my co-founders Greg who's a front-end developer suha back-end wizard uh and then fa who's our mobile developer and um you know now we're just tinkering and we're playing around and we're seeing what's possible and we're just building building building shipping as fast as possible and like the idea is that we'll we'll uh we'll hit a home run on one of these products right and then put all of our resources behind that product and so it's just like it is this exercise and tinkering and it's been a lot of fun man

10:35and and uh you know people really love the site so far so yeah you know people often ask me they're like what should my minimal viable product be which in my MVP be yeah and I always say that 95 of MVPs could be a WhatsApp group yeah 100 like or an Instagram or Tick Tock or a Twitter account you know it's a free account that you can just start inviting people and start with your friends right um what advice could you give to people around maybe they're interested in a niche and they want to start an account it's pretty daunting for a lot of people what advice could you give to people

11:16around starting so so that's the what you just said starting start is always my primary piece of advice and as like Elementary and obvious that it sounds it's actually not that like it's very very difficult for people to grasp right and there's two two things that I think hold everybody back and these are the two mental hurdles that I think if you're able to uh jump over if you're able to LEAP then you kind of become invincible right to me and one is the ability to really truly not care what people think right and and I used to really care a lot I was like man what's my boy gonna

11:49think what's this person going to think what's this random person on the internet gonna think if I try this it doesn't work out if it fails and something that kind of like freed me was this idea that nobody's thinking about me man like I finally realized it like nobody's thinking about us nobody's thinking about anybody else everybody's really just kind of consumed and focused on their own self right then the other thing that helped me out was I realized like all toxicity and negativity on the internet like I started to really understand insecurity from an intimate level and I think all behavior on the internet stems down to

12:19fear like a healthy fear but but insecurity is like uh you know any toxicity on the internet kind of stems from there and so that allowed me I'm like free now I'll post whatever I want whenever I want I don't I don't care right and then the other thing is this idea that you're never ready and you never will be ready you know and a lot of people oh man I see it every day oh I need to get into a little bit better shape before I start making content I need to I need to make a little bit more money so people can take me more

12:44seriously um I need better equipment like all of these anytime I hear this I'm like this person is not going to break out anytime soon because they got to get over this this mental hurdle and so that's it man really understanding that nobody's thinking about you um and if they are spewing toxicity that's a reflection on them and not you and two you're never ready you might as well start today you know so that's kind of my two pieces of advice as simple and basic as they are I was I was actually reminded of that over the last 45 days because I decided that I wanted to grow my

13:20Instagram account yeah and my Instagram account had like I don't know 1500 people following me mostly like high school friends yeah um so I basically try to get my you know I've got 330 000 followers on Twitter I was like follow me on Instagram turns out like very hard to get people from twit you know one platform to another platform yes so I was like okay I guess I'm just gonna try to build this on my own and I was first I was posting like everyday videos you know thoughts on my Instagram and I kept noticing that like you know two three four people were sharing it

14:03and I had a feeling that people were sharing it and they were kind of making fun of me basically um like who's this guy like post you know every day I was posting getting like three likes um you know and I had to stop myself I had to be like doesn't matter and you kind of just have to push through um now I'm I'm sitting at like 6 500 followers and I'm like I could just start I'm starting to feel the momentum just wait till the end of the year where you're gonna be you know yeah exactly so it's yeah I totally agree with that advice I think it's it's easy advice to

14:40give it's hard advice to take yeah because you have to wake up every single day and look at your you know Instagram account and see two likes or you know guess how guess what the immediate what is it the at gets the average amount of likes on a tweet probably one if you I mean zero that's insane yeah yeah I mean it makes sense right it makes sense like in our world we probably don't we probably don't notice that right just because we're following people who have already like sort of accomplished and stuff but yeah I mean you imagine you know Facebook has Facebook has I think now 80 percent of

15:21people with an active internet connection who are daily active users of one of their products you know so that's three billion people so you can imagine probably 2.9 billion of those if not more are averaging you know one or two likes on whatever piece of content they do but man that's that your proof of that idea that you had you just have to start you know even as uncomfortable as it is in the beginning and that's another thing I tell people I'm like you're gonna start creating content you're gonna probably gonna suck at it two probably nobody's gonna care for a long long time but that is the point

15:49like that is part of the process you got to go through that and that allows you to find your voice develop a visual style communication style learn to see what works what doesn't what resonates with an audience and so I'm like serious it's that simple you just have to start and then have patience like I saw Mr Beast tweeted the other day like the uh the the total number of views that he's had in every year he's been acting on YouTube and the first year I think he had 14 000 views total right not a huge number over the course of a year and then the second year he had seven

16:16thousand views so it got cut in half he went even harder most people at that point would have been so discouraged and they would have been you know starting to self-doubt themselves and they would have quit they would have stopped making content and so like that that was a perfect example of what will happen when you start making content it'll take time to break through and that's just that is just part of the game you know unless you get really really lucky or ride like some crazy momentum Wave It's just gonna take time and that's supposed to be that way yeah you gotta get out of your head

16:46and get into two percent get into other people's heads meaning what is the what is the Tweet what is the the picture what is the video that is really gonna resonate with the people that you actually care about I also think I also think that there's a bunch of accounts right now that have millions of followers that are just very low quality accounts totally oh man yeah we could talk about that forever quality versus quantity right yeah and first of all I want to go back to what you were saying like even if that were true even if somebody was sharing one of your piece of content your friend like in a

17:20negative fashion like how bad of a look is it for that person who took time out of it so that's another thing I've realized like there's no fulfilled human on planet Earth that would even take 10 seconds out of their day to tear somebody else down right so that's another thing that's really helped me it's like who cares like would you take advice from those people probably not so why would you you know why would you take the toxicity to heart um so that was kind of like these are the mental models that I've been framing for myself over the over the years to the point where now I like truly I can

17:47truly say I just don't care right yeah um well the booze come from the cheapest seats hate never comes from above never about you know yeah 100 man um and then to what you were saying uh my bad what was the follow-up question on that lots of training thought um there's a bunch of accounts that you and I follow that are low quality to me like the the sort of the um the best indicator of a quality audience is how much Commerce you're able to push right because ultimately you know people don't like to admit it but like social media really is kind of a status game and at

18:24the bottom of it like the underpinning of social is sort of you know the ability to Drive Commerce you know for yourself or others and that that is kind of like the game that that we're all playing I think there is an economic ambition um behind this all um and when I see I mean there are some influencers out there with five six million followers that if they try to sell a t-shirt they might get two sales right there's no there's no relationship there with that audience so there is a huge distinction between a follower and or followers and a community right and I see this all the time and I see people

18:55hey I have a hundred thousand people on my mailing list and then you look a little closer their open rates like 1.2 percent so it's like what does that really matter right would you rather or there's people with 3 000 people in the mailing list with a 70 open rate you know and so I see this all the time and usually what happens is you know people develop uh this following through cheap tactics right so through like algorithm hacks um you know through giveaway Loops whatever it may be it's actually it's actually if you want to get a two million uh follower Instagram account you just do cheap tactics and it's easy

19:27but what end up happening is your engagement will be like dismal you only have two million followers on an Instagram account you might get like 300 likes per po like eventually um eventually you kind of expose yourself right and so like my my mantras always just build slow build right quality over quantity at all times and I think marketers around the world are finally smartening up whereas five years ago it was just like this person has a lot of followers giving money right and so that's what kind of like helped perpetuate the sort of phenomenon of low quality uh uh followings on some of these large accounts but people are

19:57smartening up now man so I think I think that all evens out Market plays itself out you say uh grow slow um but at the same time you're growing really quick yeah you've probably added 400 000 followers across your Platforms in 30 days how are you doing it and how are you dealing with it yeah I mean I think so uh first of all it's like people saying oh you you blew up like and I'm like yeah oh maybe overnight success 10 years in the making you know this has been nine years of trying everything as you know just like constantly being you know creating content

20:32um yeah I think for my personal I've gone maybe 400 000 across all uh all my personal socials in the last hundred days and then again like the Luna in the last hundred days uh you know 230k followers I think metaverse Saturday another hundred thousand or so over the last hundred days all of this like people ask for the secret the secret is just good content right it's just good content and that's and that's kind of it and consistency and quality you know people ask for like the cheat code what's the cheat code what's the secret recipe I'm like there is none you just put in the work over a long enough

21:02period of time you'll eventually have your breakthroughs and figure out um and so just instinctively and like sort of like innate to me now I just understand how to resonate with an audience what people are looking for um so I've been able to crack a lot of these platforms but the last sort of final frontier for me is YouTube which I think is the is the most important one so this year I'm like gonna focus on on trying to crack that one because that's the one that's been eluding me for for a long time first of all on the YouTube bit I I just recorded an episode

21:30um check it out um where we we go through how to grow on YouTube um I'll definitely be watching that Austin Lieberman and the biggest takeaway I had from the Austin Lieberman chat was that the people like I thought the people that was watching the where it happens YouTube show were subscribers of the where it happens YouTube show and I was completely wrong it's you know a lot of people just seeing it on YouTube recommendations it's people seeing shorts It's people um you know just seeing it across YouTube so it's really about you know one way to think about YouTube is how do you reverse engineer

22:17um the search search terms basically if people are searching for XYZ how do you go and then create a video about it and then rank for it so definitely check that out and then um I heard through the grapevine that you manage the Aluna Instagram account so I I chat I chatted with someone on your team who was like you know doing some freelance work and he was like hey I like you know I work on the Aluna Twitter account and I was like you don't work on the Instagram account that's like the bread and butter and he's like no no that's that's Roberto's thing yeah

22:56it's it's been really really tough for me to find people who understand how to create good visual content so that's my question can you Outsource great visual content quick Interruption from me if you're listening to this on Apple podcast or Spotify you're getting any value you need to come to YouTube and subscribe to the where it happens podcast YouTube channel I promise you the experience is richer more interesting so if you're getting any value just stop what you're doing open up the YouTube app go to the website and press subscribe at where it happens on YouTube and if you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed

23:42what are you doing go go press subscribe thank you enjoy the rest of the show this is so tough right because it it looks easy to do right it's much harder to do well than than people may think and so I've had trouble finding people that do it well on a consistent basis and then two what I've noticed is here's another phenomenon that I think is like and and you talk about this a lot which I love like the solo preneur kind of like uh emergence right but here's the thing Greg like if I find somebody who's a killer who knows how to do it super

24:13super well why would they come work for me they're just going to do it on their own for their own you know their own uh faces media brands or their own products or their own whatever it is and that that's kind of the thing with um that I've been seeing with you know a lot of these like big accounts that hire people to create content for them and even this is a phenomenon that's happening in big media right now right eventually the people that are creating the content they're so good that why would they work on behalf of somebody else right and so a lot of these a lot of these um

24:41companies sort of agencies I look at them as incubators now right so maybe I can incubate great talent but eventually I'm going to want them to go off on their own and do it because that that's sort of the that's sort of the difficulty here man it's like if you find somebody really really good they probably won't want to work for you anyways right and so that I've had a I've had difficulty finding people um to to be able to create really good visual content and um but at the same time I really love it too like I I really do enjoy it so it's hard for me

25:10to kind of like relinquish control as silly as it may sound in a world where you know you really need to be delegating uh to maximize output have you ever considered acquiring other media Brands and employing kind of like uh doing things media approach um for those of you who don't know doing things they they run 35 Plus accounts they've got more than 80 million followers some of their accounts are like middle class fancy or uh yeah yeah overheard so it's these meme accounts and the beauty about it is you know once you have this network of accounts then like coming up with a new account is so

25:49much easier because you can essentially pump the new account with your existing Network totally absolutely man it compounds very beautifully exactly so have you ever thought about acquiring uh essentially acquiring accounts but it's really acquiring Talent yes and no I mean one one person I was doing that really well is my friend kit he runs the puberty Media Group you might have seen puberty on Instagram I mean like I think he has 100 million followers across his family of accounts now so he's done that really really well I think for me like honestly Greg like I I like media I like creating content but I don't necessarily

26:23like the media business I really love Building Product right like that's what I've been doing over the last 10 years and so that that's kind of really what I want to focus on and I just look at these sort of media brands that I'm building as a way to drive traffic uh and to bring awareness and attention to those products so it's not necessarily something that I haven't considered it's just not you know something that's super interesting for me and for me it's always been like it's been a little bit less about the money and more about the freedom to do whatever I find interesting to do so it's a great idea

26:52just not something that I want to put a lot of time and energy into right now if that makes sense it does it does Let's uh let's actually transition from the media side of things to the product building side yeah talk talkaluna so okay so you launch Aluna um it's helped a little bit by the metaverse account I would imagine in terms of growing it uh so it was so funny enough uh it's really been so metaverse even stagnated for like four months it's actually been my personal content and I'll collab post uh with the Luna and metaverse that has grown these accounts again right that

27:28have seen this emerging so metaverse is now stagnated for a long time and it's now up I think like nearing a hundred thousand followers over the course of the since I started making my content and I've noticed that these platforms are actually prioritizing original content creation and they like longer videos now even Tick Tock they're encouraging promoting a minute long minute plus long videos and so what I would recommend anybody trying to build these accounts is like Leverage yourself or somebody else as a personal Creator because that really helps to build these these other accounts so you start so you leverage your account started building a

28:02Luna the account you're getting a lot of traction and starting to feel good when do you know it's ready to actually go and build the product and how did you know which product to build um so I actually had the product in mind first so we knew we were going to build a product and I think the first actually commit to the repo was around 10 weeks ago so it's like we've just been really uh rapidly and then the Instagram account was in January so about 12 weeks ago I want to say right and so I knew I wanted to build a product that started with the IG account first just

28:33to drive that attention um to gather the team and the resources needed to build this product but it was really a product comes first and then it's like building an account to suit that product if that makes sense my my hunch is you knew you wanted to build something with AI and content creators yeah so you knew that and then you're like okay how do I like reverse engineer that to build an account around it once the account started to grow and you saw a validation then you're like okay let's hit the pavement put the team together did you raise funding or you just self-funded it not

29:06yet so right now we're totally bootstrapped there's been a lot of venture interest but I was like let let's hit this product Market fit first let's get some real real momentum and understand like okay we're going to be able to be profitable very very quickly and then we'll be comfortable sort of raising funds um it'll probably go for a pre-seed fund uh very soon however though because I've I understood really quick like to be able to compete with some of these bmrs we need a real distribution um strategy you know we we need a lot of a lot of money for there and also the hardware stack like right now we're

29:37running on our own gpus and we have a product launching today called motion blend that I think is going to go crazy viral I have a ton of content creators lined up to to release a video around this motion blend product I think we'll you know reach a million eyeballs in a day but we actually can't unleash that we don't have the hardware stack right now to be able to you know like if that 100 000 people visit the site in a day there's not going to be a lot of generations happening because all the gpus are going to be filled up right so now we're like okay no we do need to

30:04raise Capital just for the hardware stack and the distribution um because there is for some reason there's no good GPU cloud service out there right now so if anybody wants to build that that's a great business to get into walk us through like what are the coolest product features about a Luna and how are people using it today Yeah man so the coolest product features I don't think are out yet right so the motion blend is one of these new ones it's actually built on a tool called deforum unstable diffusion I don't know if you've heard of that but it's um you know you're able to input several

30:36prompts you know one two three five however many prompts you want and then the AI Blends right like the diffusion uh fills in like this blend um animation between all these prompts and so again like I'm looking at the Forum and I'm like this is the coolest thing in the world you can create your own music videos like imagination is Limitless here but like to interface with it you have to be technically Savvy there's no there's no interface right now that exists online for the average person to go in and create so we've built that we've tweaked it we've added our own animations and and whatnot and

31:07that's launching uh later today that I think is going to be one of our killer Flagship products that we can evolve over time and our text to image I love it we we have different models that we've tweaked and refined over time and I think the output is almost as good as mid-journey but mid journey is the King right in text to image and so that's why we're excited to release some of these upcoming tools we have 10 in the pipeline that'll come out over the next six weeks um and which I think will be our sort of Flagship product and the cool thing about building a Luna Greg is that um

31:37right now we're just tinkering we're just exploring and it's and it's working and people are loving it I do think we'll we'll hit that home run soon with that killer product um one of these next eight products that we'll ship I think will be that home run that we then you know go laser focused into yeah I also think it's it's similar to Social in the sense that it's okay not to hit a home run at the first at bat yeah totally totally You're Building Goodwill with the community and they're seeing that you're trying and they're seeing that you're making progress and you're doing it your own

32:09way and as long as you're doing that like and you have Runway um all good well I also think that one of the key elements to a Luna too that that we set out to build is there's this social layer on top of right and we're releasing the ability to follow and be followed this week but we've kind of built like Instagram for generative Ai and I think that's important because we all know in generative AI the output is is dependent on the quality of the input right and so these chat boxes if you know how to work them amazing right but the average person will go to

32:41chat GPT and not understand how to harness his true potential or power so what they'll do is they'll go you know search Google or whatever for prompts but I believe if there's a visual feed there you can actually follow your favorite creators see what they're creating get inspiration from their prompts how they're creating how they're using their tools I think that gives us a real Advantage especially when we get into audio video and all these other products that we're building so you have this gorgeous visual feed of other creators you can draw inspiration from to really kind of get that best output for yourself for your brand or business

33:12and so I'm really excited about the social component that we're building on top of Luna do you think in five years from now people are still going to be prompting or will that be a thing of the past I actually I'm not as bullish on the idea of a prompt engineer as most right I think it'll be it'll be like knowing how to use Google or Excel it's just like a a particular skill that'll be helpful um but no I think the pro I mean like one of our main Ambitions too is to build a product where you don't need to know how to prompt engineer like we'll

33:46we'll be able to sort of walk you through there and I think a lot of products are going to head in that direction where it's kind of yeah I I think it'll be phased out relatively quickly and how do you deal with competition you know you're you're in such a competitive space yeah um every entrepreneur knows the feeling of waking up and seeing a competitor come out and then your your you know your stomach you know just tightens um it just hurts and of course I'm sure you must feel that all the time how do you deal with that yeah I mean like what I think the most fierce competition are

34:29going to be the um the incumbents you know like a lot of this technology is going to be built into the products that we know and love and use today right So eventually like um you know even even mid-journey I think they're going to face trouble because it's eventually going to be integrated into Photoshop in a Premiere into DaVinci Resolve into word into every product that we already know and love and use so um one thing that we kind of the the way that we sort of navigate this and one of our mantras it's like look we have this now customer base that's pretty passionate you know they

34:59love the product they want to see it succeed let's just cater to their needs let's not worry so much about the competitors right and so it's kind of this approach that I learned from just consuming a lot of Jeff Bezos just just hyper hyper focus on your users on your customers don't worry so much about what the competition is doing and don't like your decision making shouldn't be dependent on your competition it should be dependent on bringing the most value to your customers and so we're just focused there and focusing on our advantages which is the ability to ship at lightning speeds you know like you

35:27name a product we could build it in four days and high quality so the older I get and the longer I'm an entrepreneur the more I realize that ignorance is bliss when it comes to competition yeah 100 like when it comes to a lot of things right yeah it's true and I think it's just you know I used to be when I was in my early 20s I would obsess about the competition yep and I would be like oh my God they have the same copy as us or the images look the same or our background is white and their background is white and then I realized the people

36:02that win in the game of Entrepreneurship have a long-term mindset yeah 100 and to your point like they're kind of like okay I'm I'm focused on content creators and I'm gonna basically if content creators is you know the middle the spoke and attire um or the middle of the tire the spokes um are just the different products that you're trying to trying to launch and if you just like focus in the middle of the tire things are going to work out one of those are gonna hit um but if you spend all day obsessing on you know if you're on product hunt all day or you're on Twitter all day just

36:39looking at different competition uh it's nice to know and it's also helpful honestly for motivation keeps you on your toes yeah sure I love that analogy though focus on the spokes focus on the spokes yeah yeah um I'm sure you use AI in your workflow uh what are some tools that you've been using that you find very very uh powerful yeah so first part of that question is like it's funny because we're sort of reversing engineer to to solve our own uh pain points right so me I want to build a product that I would be integrating into my daily workflows to maximize my output so one

37:22of the things was you know text to image I'm using that almost for every Luna cover I'm generating my own image with uh with a Luna first to draw attention to the platform for once but also too because before I use stock images unsplash pixels but like these same images are being used a million other places and so it offers a chance to to really kind of like generate your own unique imagery um I can also like one of the things that's amazing is I have a chat GPT browser tab open at all times now and I'm always interfacing with that when it comes to creating content

37:52um menial things like rewriting captions you know written a little bit better sometimes when I'm summarizing synthesizing an article or trying to present that information I'll ask it to summarize that article summarize a YouTube video so it's increased my productivity I would say probably like two or three x just on that front alone and I also it also just amazes me how fast things can change man like you know five months ago we didn't have this product now I can't I don't have a tab open you know it's like always open on one of my tabs and I'm using it daily but for for me it's been mostly uh on on

38:27the copywriting stuff right it saved me a lot of time on copywriting because that's one thing that people don't realize when you're creating a lot of content is the captions um the stories Etc so that's cut my time in half but other other than that like there's not a lot of products out there that I think have that's another thing with generative AI we can get to that conversation if you want but like I think there's going to be a lot of churn a lot of these products because it's really cool it's fascinating uh technology but some of them are not just so helpful in the day-to-day right like

38:5611 Labs best voice synthesizer on the planet I'm using it maybe once a month you know and that'll probably get like less and less and less there's just not that many use cases for it for your average content creator unless you're automating content on YouTube then it's you know godsend those people are probably using it every day but I think we'll see this with a lot of generative AI as well where it's not like it's helpful but for certain specific use cases not for day-to-day use yeah I think what's going to end up happening is there's going to be these AI Suites for different communities so

39:26there'll be the AI suite for Content creators the AI suite for marketers the I suite for insert and it needs to be something that you're going to use every single day if you're going to actually like pay for it and and adopt it into your workflow I think what we're seeing right now in the stage we're in is there's a lot of people tinkering with single purpose AI apps and we're starting to see a lot of magic out of them but I think in 12 to 18 months what we'll see is some of these sweets come up of course some of them will be from incumbents like the adobe's

40:00already starting that Microsoft of course is already starting that Microsoft designer Etc um but there's also going to be a whole new wave of alunas and and a Luna for X right for 100 yeah that that's so that's actually something that one of my uh sort of a mentor told me he's like hey you got to focus on the specific subset because at the beginning it was just like this is a tool for all all people with you know business professionals creatives and he's like that's too wide you're trying to build too much for too many people um Niche it down and so now like the

40:32focus is going to be for Content creators and I completely agree with you like eventually there will be uh one for real estate agents in specific all tools just uh you know kind of like built on behalf of of that community and I I think you nailed it man I really think you nailed it that's something that I've been thinking about it's like there will be a suite for everything as specific as you can imagine you know um and so we're we're kind of focusing on the uh content creation with the hyper competitive landscape that we're we're facing but you know eventually we can maybe um what we want to build is eventually

41:04an API so people could build on top of it and you know have a Luna um you know sort of refined for the specific community that they they're trying to Target so I think that's well said and I agree I want to end with this question just because it's uh optimistic or pessimistic question depending on your view on AI but what does the world of AI look like in five years from now so I kind of when it comes to Tech I'm sort of like an eternal optimist and the reason why is like what is sort of the point of focusing on the negative if it's inevitable right it's just sort of

41:36like wasted energy the bet the better exercise I think is how can we best harness it how can we best be involved in the conversation to push it Forward ethically responsibly Etc um what I think is going to happen and I made a video about it today actually I just posted it but like you are going to be able to generate anything that you want enter any entertainment medium that you want curated to your taste so like yeah maybe maybe Greg you come home and you say man I want to play a video game I'm a big RPG nerd there hasn't been a good RPG in a while I'm just going to

42:07generate my own tonight and play it right or maybe there's a specific software that you need for a specific purpose instead of browsing the App Store and trying to find it you just generated hey I need an app that can get me you know do this so like almost any tool any any platform any entertainment medium that you want to consume you're going to be able to do it you're going to be able to generate it but one thing that I'm also thinking with AI like obviously by the end of the year we're going to have fully AI generated streamers influencers Etc I actually think there needs that human element

42:36there's like that aura that exists uh they call it the um the aura Theory uh or an art Theory where it's like that human element needs to exist so for example I listen to a lot of this AI Drake stuff going on and some of the songs are crazy like if Drake's sang it I'd be like this is the top five song of Drake like they're incredible [Music] but there's like it just doesn't hit the same as as knowing that the actual Drake made this song right so I think the same thing is going to happen where like there's gonna be these incredible AI generated movies and scripts but

43:13I just don't think there's going to be an as large an appetite as people think of for audiences to consume this because like what we really crave beneath it all is the story is that human element the story behind the artist behind the Creator like I think it's the most disruptive Tech that I've seen since I've you know since the internet um but it's and it's going to permeate every like corner of culture and it's going to be like at the center of the cultural Zeitgeist but I don't think it'll have like this end-all be all effect that people are thinking I think the human element the creativity our

43:43Ingenuity I think it'll always be desired and craved and it'll always be you know most important and Central to me but did you see what Warren Buffett said about AI the other day I did yeah so he compared it to the atom bomb yes he did so he said and I quote it can do all kinds of things and when something can do all kinds of things I get a little bit worried I am personally skeptical of some of the hype that has gone into artificial intelligence I think old-fashioned I think old-fashioned intelligent works pretty well what are your thoughts I agree I think it was so I think it was Monger

44:21that said that the latter part where he said uh he's like I'm skeptical of it old-fashioned intelligence is good enough um you know I don't I don't know if you would ask me a year ago I would have probably agreed but now like we're looking at all the top AI researchers and sort of gurus in the world and the people that know this best um and five years ago they all suspected that AGI would come in the 2070s 2080s at minimum if not longer and now a lot of these guys are saying hey look this is sort of inevitable for the 2030s some you know Kurzweil and and

44:52um carpathy and others they're saying maybe by the end of the decade and so I think AGI changes everything right like right now it's still pretty mathematical like AI right for those of you for the people who don't know can you define what AGI is yeah so AGI or ASI artificial general intelligence or artificial super intelligence is this idea where the machines become as capable of humans right like they've become as smart creative and shrewd as us for all intents and purposes and uh basically where like our species won't be needed as much anymore right like that's the sort of like ominous idea behind it and

45:29um because because right now like AI is incredible but it still very much Works under mathematical constraints right like it's all this is the information it's just synthesizing the information and outputting it in the debate in in the way that it thinks is best for the end user based on all these data points but eventually there's people out there that suspect that it's going to gain sentience for all intents and purposes it's going to gain creativity um and I think if and when that happens it just changes everything and it's like almost impossible it's almost like a futile exercise to predict what's going to happen because that's going to be so

46:01world changing that we don't know like it's it's ominous by nature but I just tend to I try to stay optimistic because it's happening no matter what so let's figure out how to best approach it I love it well and then a positive note dude Roberto you gotta come back again you're anytime man I love this dude I'm such a fan of you man I appreciate it and and likewise where could people find And subscribe to your YouTube uh yeah subscribe to the YouTube I'm struggling there you could just search my name Roberto Nixon and on all other socials I'm just RP and i c k s o n r p

46:36Nixon amazing I will subscribe to your YouTube Roberto tell the people listening to subscribe to the where it happens YouTube too you gotta subscribe to the where it happens YouTube I'm actually not joking let me let me go on a 20 second tangent here like one of the best hacks in my life has been subscribing to the right YouTubes and following the right newsletters and so you have a couple you have boring Market or even if you subscribe to these things this is not a sales pitch I'm just saying in a couple minutes per week you can elevate your game content entrepreneurship life culture Etc like literally a couple

47:10minutes for a week consuming this guy Greg isenberg right here go and do yourself a favor otherwise you're falling behind Elevate the game all right thanks man I appreciate that