244: How He Uses AI to Generate Millions of Views with Austin Armstrong

Today I’m talking to Austin Armstrong, a longtime digital marketer, founder of Syllaby and AI Marketing World, and someone who has built millions of followers across social media.

Austin has spent more than two decades studying how attention works online, and this conversation is largely about how that’s changing with AI. We talk about how he approaches content creation today, why Facebook has become his highest-ROI platform, what actually drives virality, and how he uses AI without fully automating his personal brand.

We also get into the business side of AI, including how Syllaby evolved from a productivity tool into an AI content platform, why the company had to change its target customer and pricing, and what Austin thinks happens to SaaS as AI agents become more capable.

Mic Drop Moments

• “If you’re intentional, AI is just the tool of execution for the idea now.” – Austin Armstrong

• “There’s infinite content, and if you don’t grab their attention immediately, they’re going to swipe on to another infinite piece of content until something catches their attention.” – Austin Armstrong

• “Don’t be a content creator. Be a business owner who creates content.” – Austin Armstrong

• “I outsource my suck.” – Austin Armstrong

• “You don’t need to have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in order to create software anymore.” – Austin Armstrong

• “Get great partners. Don’t do everything yourself.” – Austin Armstrong

• Why Facebook Is Winning Again
• The Biggest Myth About AI Content
• His AI Morning Automation Stack
• How He Grew on MySpace Early
• Collaboration as a Distribution Advantage
• Growth Hacks That Trigger Virality
• How Austin Structures His Content
• How He Posts 20 Times Per Day
• What Makes Content Go Viral
• Broad Reach Versus Ideal Buyers
• What Austin Refuses to Automate
• Business Owner or Content Creator?
• Building Syllaby Before the AI Boom
• How to Pivot When Building a SaaS
• AI Marketing World
• Why Physical Third Places Matter
• Advice for New Entrepreneurs

Brad Weimert: Lifelong digital marketing nerd, founder of Syllaby, AI Marketing World. You wrote a book called Virality! Lots of things to talk about. Austin Armstrong, welcome to the show.

Austin Armstrong: Brad, thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it. We’re going to have a fun nerd-out conversation about all things marketing and AI.

Brad Weimert: Well, there’s a lot to talk about, but let me start with a bunch of followers. So, you’ve built millions of followers across a bunch of different social platforms. What platform gives you the best engagement, and what gives you the best ROI? And how do you think about that today?

Austin Armstrong: Both right now are Facebook. It’s where I get the most reach by far. It’s where I drive the most traffic and conversions for all of my offers. It’s where the really good networking happens in between events. So, I have my own event. I speak at a lot of events. I’m in masterminds. And in between, that demographic of people primarily is on Facebook, because we’re a little bit older at this point, in the 30s, 40s, 50s plus. That’s just where we congregate online. It has changed. I’ve been in this game for 22 years at this point in social media marketing, which is kind of crazy to think about. Maybe four or five years ago, it was TikTok. I got on TikTok pretty early, about 2019. 2020-2021 blew up, scaled my agency to seven figures.

I became known as a TikTok guy, public speaking, all that stuff. I think TikTok has gone down quite a lot, and Facebook’s just picked up like crazy. I’m very active on every platform, but by far, right now, probably the last year, year and a half, Facebook’s been number one across the board.

Brad Weimert: Love it. I want to get back to that, but we’re going to jump around here. Biggest myth about AI-generated content in 2026 is?

Austin Armstrong: That it’s slop, because I see a lot of that comments online. There’s a lot of bad AI content, but there’s also a lot of really good AI content. I’ll give you some examples. Right now, I have a virtual summit coming up, but the top-performing ads on a daily basis are AI-generated graphics right now. Not a reel. We’re testing reels that I create myself, AI-generated reels using some of these models, Seedance, Seedance 2, and AI-generated graphics made in ChatGPT Image 2. So, for example, we’ve got two that are converting really, really well. So, I have, it’s Knights at the AI Table, kind of a play on Knights of the Round Table with all the speakers who are holding swords pointing at AI.

It’s crushing. It’s absolutely crushing on conversions and meta ads. We launched another one very similar to that because that one’s performing really well of all of us kind of tap dancing, like in a show routine, where we all have our hat out, and we’ve got a leg out, and we’re dancing. Performing exceptionally well. Same thing with videos. I posted a reel on Facebook yesterday of me getting… It’s like a behind-the-scenes of a film shoot of me getting eaten by a shark, and it looks just very hyper-realistic. 180,000 views overnight. It’s driving traffic to my AI group paid members.

If you’re just cranking out content at scale and there’s no thought process behind who’s it for, how are you prompting it, are you being specific with it, it can be just slop and noise and mess. But if you’re intentional, AI is just the tool of execution for the idea now. The artists hate that. I don’t care. It doesn’t impact my bank account. I am the idea producer based on my skills and years of experience. AI is my new tool used to execute on those ideas, and you test, and you iterate, and that’s what I would say is the biggest misconception right now.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. You have a couple frameworks I want to get into, and I want to talk a lot about the content creation and how you’re doing it, because I think right now is an interesting time. We’re August of 2026, and we’re well into this wave of really cool tools, really impressive models. And despite everything that people see, a very small percentage of entrepreneurs are actually executing in a way that is driving revenue for them. And I think some of that is that they’ve had limited exposure, they don’t know exactly how to do it, and they have some preconceived notions. Or what they did previously was slop, and they were like, “Okay, this is trash.” So, I’m excited to uncover kind of what you’re doing. Last quick one for you, though. What are the micro habits that keep your consistency edge intact? What are you doing each day to keep yourself focused?

Austin Armstrong: Well, that’s hard because I am a very ADHD entrepreneur that loves the new thing. Historically, though, one of the biggest self-things that I’ve incorporated is being my own biggest cheerleader and celebrating every win and success, no matter how small or how big. When I accomplish a task, I’m like I’m proud about it internally. I’ve just built up that habit of like, “Yeah, good job.” The downside of that is that with ADHD, I’m a chronic procrastinator as well, and I will push things off until the last minute, and it stresses me to no end. I think about it constantly. It bugs me. I know I need to do it. Why don’t I just do it earlier? But then when I complete that task, I’m like, “Yes, you did it, Austin. Great job.” So, little things like that.

There are newer AI agentic things that have helped me with my productivity quite a lot. I have, in Claude Cowork and Perplexity Computer, automation tasks set up. So, every morning it scans my calendar for the day, gives me context, sets me up for my day, and gives me notes. Like, for this podcast interview, you have great notes in there, how to be prepared. I got all that in a morning memo. You know, “Here’s everything that you need to do to prepare for this interview later on today,” or any meetings that are coming up or interviews or anything at all on that calendar, I wake up with that ready to go.

These agents and workflows also check my Slack messages and my emails at the beginning of every day, as well as draft me responses. Are there any important messages or emails that I missed that I need to respond to? And if I didn’t do something on my calendar, adjusting it, and automatically triggering it to reschedule that event on another day. Another tool that I just started using yesterday as well that I’m very interested in is called Littlebird AI. It lives on my computer. It’s always on and records from the text perspective what’s on my screen. So, it’s total context, and it learns my habits as I go about my day on my computer. So, it sits in my meetings. As I work and task-switch from tab to tab, it takes notes of everything, and it has those agentic capabilities as well.

So, I have it plugged into my calendar, my Gmail, my Slack channel, etcetera. And it sends me notifications. It’s learning and updating routines, and it’s learning how I can perform best or better based on my habits. So, those are a couple things that come to mind.

Brad Weimert: Oh, God, dude. I have so many questions around the AI side of this and implementing things. We will get back to that. But before we dive into AI and SaaS and all these other things, I have to, I’d be remiss to not talk about the content side of things with you. You had hundreds of thousands of followers on MySpace. What did you do to grow the MySpace account? So, I’m going somewhere with this.

Austin Armstrong: Yeah. So, back in the day, it was a lot of just follow for follow, to be honest. So, what we did to scroll back, if everyone can go back to the days of the Top 8, if you remember. Rather than a feed on Facebook or TikTok or Instagram or whatever, all of the posts were done in this kind of message board area. It was a separate area where every, all of the… It kind of reminded me of email, to be honest. You see these posts, and you can click in and see the individual posts from the creator. What we did was we networked as a group of… This is not politically correct whatsoever. It was just the name of the term, but we were whores. It was called MySpace Whoring W4W, Whore for Whore. That’s what it was called. I didn’t make it up. That’s just what it was.

So, all of us together would congregate in AIM, AOL Instant Messenger group chats. And once or twice a day, we’d be in these big 100-person AIM group chats, and one by one we would go and submit or share our HTML code of… And then all of the 100 people would copy that code and post it in that message board area, and it would be like, “Follow these five people,” boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, or, “Follow this one person,” whatever that code is. I did. It was my turn, 100 people shared mine, and then I shared 100 people’s posts. And we all cross-pollinated our following, and we were able to monetize that very well back in the day. But yeah, that’s how we grew. And then I had created a SaaS platform earlier too.

I won’t go too down the rabbit hole of that. But I partnered with a really good friend. And again, we’re like 14, 15, 16 years old, that simulated that into a software tool that I was able to promote, and people would pay for positioning on that. But because I was the owner of the tool, I was always at the top of it as well. So, that helped grow the following as well.

Brad Weimert: I love that. So, there are lots of platforms where that can be functional on today. Do you at all do that type of thing today? Where do you see that as an opportunity across the platforms that exist now?

Austin Armstrong: Yep. So, absolutely. So, on Facebook, I have a group called the AI Goon Squad. So, those strategies from a long…

Brad Weimert: You veered away from whores?

Austin Armstrong: Yeah, not politically correct. Again, I didn’t come up with the… This is my group that I started, but sometimes the community can take on a life of its own a little bit. So, somebody came up with that name. Sure, whatever. It’s a lot more evolved, so all of us are in the same niche, so we’re all AI content creators and marketers. There’s about 15 of us in that group. We all have similar offers. We’re selling software and services and whatnot. And the strategy’s kind of the same. Every day I’ll share one of my posts, and all of them will share that post, and vice versa. I’ll share all of their posts. But we collaborate on a lot of things as well. We win affiliate competitions together.

Collectively, we’ve won multiple affiliate competitions for Alex Hormozi and Russell Brunson, and we have unfair distribution advantages as a team. I love the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” And so, we really try to embrace that, help each other launch, like promote each other’s tools, and everything there. That’s mostly on Facebook. On other platforms as well, particularly Instagram, the collaboration feature is fantastic for this. So, you can connect with other people in your niche that are promoting similar offers and services. And on any given post on Instagram, a reel, a carousel, an image, whatever you want, you can add up to five collaborators on that, and it gets distributed to everybody’s audience.

So, I do that a fair amount of times as well, and it’s just a great way to trigger virality and reach a lot of people. Now, of course, the content has to be good too, but those are co… And you can add collaborators now on pretty much everything. You can do YouTube collaboration with one other person. You can do Facebook collaboration with one other account. And I think TikTok, you can do the collaborator on there too. But yeah, I mean, sharing is scary. I mean, collaborations have always been a part of good marketing. Stacking offers together, co-promotional stuff, you can and you should do it on every platform that you can.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that, on the one hand, you’ve got the evergreen will always be true marketing principles, collaboration, group effort. On the other hand, you’ve got the proposition of gaming the algorithm. And so, a collaboration is a tool that they built, they being the platforms to help facilitate an underpinning marketing principle. Sharing each other’s posts deliberately, in some way, is gaming the algorithm. It’s showing some external signals that other people care about what’s happening. How much do you think about marketing from a white hat versus black hat perspective?

Austin Armstrong: I am a growth hacker that dances on that very fine line. We’ll call it gray. We’ll call it gray. There’s a reason why I have millions of followers, billions of views, versus somebody that is a really good marketer and has thousands to tens of thousands of views. I will exploit engagement hacks that are on the platform, if I see them and if I notice them. I am very good at pattern recognition, particularly in social media and marketing, because I’m just focused on that one thing. And there’s human psychology elements there as well, how you say things to trigger emotional responses. So, I know that these platforms care most about dwell time, so how long they look at a particular post, and if they engage with that post, and then if they come back to that post and engage with it more.

So, you can say something that’s black-and-white statements or a little emotionally triggering, and it will cause arguments. In my book, I have a whole chapter on this. I talk about this a lot but trolling the trolls. So, trolls are inevitable on social media. Everybody loves to assert their own egos and perspectives and their own anecdotal evidence of why they’re right and you’re wrong. And you can leverage that for social media virality and engagement. Now, there’s super black hats, especially in SEO. There’s just blatant clickbait, fake information. I always try and be factual, truthful. I might over-exaggerate a little bit, but I do dance that fine line. I’ll give you just a quick example. This is not business-related, but super viral related.

So, the Odyssey movie that just came out. Huge, huge movie. Culturally divisive right now because of some of the casting choices. They’re only in the movie for less than five minutes, these casting choices, but the director took some liberties that led into the woke versus anti-woke conversation online.

Brad Weimert: Tell me what it is. I don’t know.

Austin Armstrong: Yeah, sure. So, Helen of Troy was cast as Lupita Nyong’o, a Black woman.

Brad Weimert: Ah, got it.

Austin Armstrong: And Achilles was replaced with a different character, played by Elliot Page, a trans person. Both of these casting decision… And then, in general, Odysseus’ crew has Indian actors and ethnicities across the board. The anti-woke community wants everybody to be white. And, fair warning here, Brad, this segment you should probably front-load the episode because this will just get engagement for you.

Brad Weimert: Perfect.

Austin Armstrong: But I was upfront with this and said, “This is going to be the biggest, like a massive movie. This will make a billion dollars,” all this stuff, because I’m a nerd and I also love to study box office trends. And it just triggered everybody online that’s like, “No, go woke, go broke.” And people are so emotionally charged over this right now. It’s become a political statement. So, I just post stuff like that. I don’t even say like casting choice is great. I’m just bringing awareness to something in culture right now that’s top of mind, it’s trending, and it’s triggering the emotions of one group of people. And I get paid from Facebook and paid from Instagram, from an engagement perspective as well. So, that’s why I do that.

But every time that I’ve posted about it, and I came back, and I was like, “Hey, the movie’s crossed a billion dollars,” and everybody gets into the conspiracy mode of, “They’re faking the numbers. The tickets aren’t the…” whatever. They push the bar back. But you can do little things like that, that you know will psychologically trigger emotions that cause engagements, and then if you just continue to respond to them, they will come back forever and continue to express why their opinion is the correct one, which just fuels virality and engagement.

Brad Weimert: I love it. So, I’m going to ask you, anybody that doesn’t care about virality or social content or putting out content is going to just skip the next seven minutes, because I’ve got a bunch of granular questions for you.

Austin Armstrong: Sure.

Brad Weimert: The reason for it, though, is that we are in a world where there is a premium on attention. And we’re finding ourselves in a situation where basically every business owner on the planet is making an effort to push in that direction. Some of them have 8-figure, 9-figure, 10-figure companies, and they’re trying to figure out content and virality and how to produce it. Some of them are content first or are brand new entrepreneurs trying to figure it out. Last, so I want to talk kind of structure and framework with you. But I guess I’ll start by following the narrative here. Who fu*king cares about the movie? Yeah, well, right. And more specifically, what I mean is we open by saying you talk about AI, and that’s the content you generate.

How do you think about the structure of what you put out? How much is allowed to be kind of nonsense that is there for engagement or stuff that is personal versus AI? Do you have pillars? How do you organize it?

Austin Armstrong: Yeah. Great question. So, my anecdotal evidence on social media, particularly for Facebook, TikTok does not work this way, Instagram kind of works this way, and YouTube kind of works this way, is that momentum is built from continuous, well-performing posts. So, if you have a series of well-performing posts, your next post is more likely to get engagement based on that previous engagement. There’s a lot of tactical reasons for that. The algorithms are very good. If you engage with one post, they’re going to show you the next post from that person. TikTok kind of operates on an individual video basis. So, with that in mind, I tend to spend or post about 70% of the content that I upload as top-of-funnel, broad awareness, engagement-oriented content, mostly business.

The movie stuff I’m just personally interested in. I like to insert personality into my content and my brands that makes me a human that people relate with me some more. I’m also in favor of, like, if you appeal to everybody, you appeal to nobody. So, I’m okay having people hate me and having people really like me, as well. So, mostly top-of-funnel AI-oriented content, sometimes engagement or news-oriented content, very infrequently bottom-of-funnel content of like limited time offer, buy my thing. I sneak things in in strategic ways. Like a top-of-funnel AI post that I want to get conversions from would rather than be a, “Here’s a tutorial for how to use Syllaby,” which would kind of be a middle-of-funnel if it’s a tutorial or whatever, would be a top 25 AI Tools You Need to Pay Attention to in 2026. It’s wide appealing.

And number one will be an anchor. So, it’ll be like Claude.ai or Chatgpt.com. You need this tool, right? So, it anchors it. And then number two will be Syllaby, so I’m right there. And then I’ll put in more anchors of well-known tools, and then I’ll sneak in my own tools. So, I’ve launched about 12 or 13 software companies at this point, so I just sneak in mine along. These posts often go viral because all of the tools service a different use case or a different user. Some are productivity, some are marketing, some are video, some are presentation focused, some are whatever. But yeah, I tend to stay top-of-funnel. As far as like buckets, I mean, it’s a good question because it’s kind of second nature at this point.

But breaking news, so whenever a new AI model comes out, I’ll try and post that as soon as possible. Or if there’s an outage, I need to post about something with Manus today because apparently there are some Manus accounts getting shut down and credits being refunded or something like that. It’s a hot topic, so I’m going to post something about Manus at some point today. Tutorials, those listicles, prompts, strategies, so use these prompts to do X, Y, and Z. And then I’ll also sneak in interest posts, things about my personality or my family. Like, my wife and I love baseball. We go to a baseball game. I’m going to take a selfie and post that to humanize my content a little bit. You get to know a little bit about my personality.

That’s just as it comes, just throughout life. And then very infrequently at the bottom of the funnel is conversion-oriented content. Like, my online conference coming up in about a week, which will funnel into my in-person conference, AI Marketing World, which is happening in October. So, that I’m heavily promoting right now, and in October I’m heavily promoting that, but in between that, like throughout the rest of the year, it’s just kind of grow engagement, grow engagement. I also post like 20 times a day, so the vast majority of those posts are top-of-funnel.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s talk about that side of things. So, how do you post 20 times a day? I mean, is it you posting? What’s the structure like that to execute?

Austin Armstrong: Yeah. So, it sounds scary, but it’s not as bad as you might think. So, I count the shares from the AI Goon Squad as posts in that 25. So, 10 of those posts right there are just sharing other relevant content or friends’ content. I look through my memories. This is a great way to get a constant index of new content. Every day I’ll look on Facebook Memories and see what’s evergreen or see something that I posted a year ago, two years ago. And if it’s something like an AI prompt, or some listicle or something like that, I’ll just update it and just revamp it so it’s new, but it’s a format that performed really well. So, I’ll repost that. Net new, I’ll probably create three to four posts per day. There’s different formats of reels that I regularly create. I kind of call them series content.

It’s like Claude AI Secrets You Should Know Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five. ChatGPT Secrets You Should Know Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five. If You Stack These Three AI Tools Together, It’ll Destroy the Internet, and Those Three Tools are Different, or Old Versus New. So, this is what we used in 2025. This is what we’re using in 2026. These are all a series of content that you can interchange the meat and potatoes of the videos, and crank those out pretty regularly, fitting that format. And I have AI agents scraping news as well. So, a couple times a day, Perplexity Computer mostly, and Claude as well. I have them both set up, but I lean towards Perplexity Computer right now because I just think it’s a little bit better on deep research.

But it’ll find the trending, breaking AI news stories that I’ve filtered that are broad-appealing as well, and I’ll post that. So, I have it automatically write that content in either a text format, or I’ll have it provide me a prompt so that I can take it over to ChatGPT Image and create a complementary image for it as well. And then I’ll shamelessly plug something real quick. Because I use it every day for this, I just launched a new tool called PostSnag, which lets me go on Facebook, and I can look at anybody’s Facebook page, profile, or group. So, I can go to Alex Hormozi, or I can go to Gary Vaynerchuk or any creator that I want. And it’s a Chrome extension. All I need to do is just scroll down, and it indexes and scans all of their posts.

And I do this on an ongoing basis, and it orders them by most engaging, so the most viral posts on any profile, any page. So, I’ve been using this tool. I just launched it about a month ago. I’ve scanned and indexed about 14,000 posts from 20 or 30 profiles in my niche so that I can constantly see what’s the most viral content in my niche, what’s the best format, what’s the best video, what’s the best delivery style. And I’ll go in there several times a day and be like, “Oh, this is a hot topic. This is a proven format.” I might share or repost it, or I might use that framework to recreate it in my voice.

Brad Weimert: So, that’s awesome. I want to talk about… Well, we’ve been talking about structure, so let’s stick there for a second. What are those elements that create virality for you, and what are you looking for? What have you learned from scraping 20,000 or 30,000 posts of high performers that consistently get virality?

Austin Armstrong: The opening line and the opening hook is the most important thing to capture attention, whether it’s the first two to three seconds of the video visually, or text and audibly, the first line of a text post or the headline of an image. Doesn’t matter. That’s what grabs the attention. That is what is going to cause intrigue or separate. There’s infinite content, and if you don’t grab their attention immediately, they’re going to swipe on to another infinite piece of content until something catches their attention. And then that dwell time that I mentioned as well. So, I’ll give you a quick example, like the ChatGPT Secrets You Should Know series. The specific way that I structure that is the opening hook, “ChatGPT Secrets You Should Know, Part Three,” and I kind of play with the tonality of my voice there to extend the time.

But it also creates a little bit of intrigue. Oh, from the viewer perspective, “I use ChatGPT. What’s the secret? I’m intrigued. I want to know.” And then the next couple of scenes drag it out a little bit longer so that I hold that attention. So, it’ll be, “If you go to chatgpt.com, and then you do this, and then you do this.” And by the time I get to that point, I’ve held their attention for 12 or 13 seconds, which is really good in short-form content. And I give really good actionable advice, fantastic advice they can immediately go implement. It’s something in a workflow that they probably didn’t think of before. It’s stacking multiple tools together. And then there’s a call to action at the end, “Comment XYZ, and I’ll send you the prompt,” or, “Follow me for more ChatGPT tips,” or something like that.

Now, there’s also little engagement hacks and strategies that I incorporate throughout the content as well that can also fuel engagement like crazy. Another quick example. When I go to show chatgpt.com, I’ll hold my phone up. By the way, all my videos are very lo-fi. I don’t have the crazy equipment. I film and edit everything on my phone. But I’ll hold it up to the URL bar. If you go to chatgpt.com, below the URL, I have a folder, and it’ll say something really suspicious. It’ll be like, “Donald Trump nude…” And the icon will be OnlyFans logo. And I don’t mention it. It’s just there in plain sight while I’m mentioning the URL. And without fail, every single time, people will run to the comments and be like, “Anybody else see that thing? What was that?” “Bro, open that folder and show me what you got in there.”

Like, the comments go wild. But as the comment happens, the video’s still playing, right? So, it’s also racking up the view duration. They rewatch it to make sure they saw what they actually saw before they comment sometimes, and it causes comment strings, right? So, it brings them back to the content. So, someone will post that, and then everybody else that sees it. They go to the comment section too, and they respond. And then an original commenter gets that notification that somebody responded to them. So, they come back to the video to respond, and they’re watching the video again because it’s playing in the background as though they’re responding to the comment.

So, all of these little psychological signals are what the platform is looking for in virality, and it’s also just applying a little bit of basic human psychology because I want to troll the trolls. I want you to assert your ego to say they found something that they think that I accidentally left in that video. But meanwhile, the content is helpful. It’s genuinely helpful. It’s amazing information, and I’m using all of these little trigger mechanisms to put some fuel on the fire of my content to stand out.

Brad Weimert: Love it. So, engagement groups, trolling the trolls. Even though you were like, “I’ve been doing this so long, I can’t think about the different buckets,” very structured system to like these are the categories of things that I’m thinking about. Series posts are great. I love that. One of the things that I consistently think about from a marketing perspective, and it’s directly applicable in social, is it’s very expensive to target your exact buyer. And it’s less expensive to go broad. When you’re thinking about creating content for people, how much do you want your actual avatar as a buyer to be in that thread and engaged versus just somebody to drive engagement?

Austin Armstrong: Great question. So, there’s different stages of the buyer’s journey, right? And so, the reason why I stay broad top-of-funnel is that I’m bringing more people into my ecosystem and sort of elevating them over time, no matter where they’re at. So, like all of the videos that I share would only really be interesting to a content creator that wants to make money online, a business owner that wants to bring AI into their business or productivity, or they want to turn their expertise into something that they can sell with AI, or they’re getting started with AI or something along the lines of that.

So, I’m bringing them into my ecosystem. They’re following me. It’s free content. And then the middle of the funnel is more deep-dive tutorials, right? Here’s how to create a skill in Claude or a markdown file or a deeper tutorial on one particular tool or use case or something like that. And they start to use some of these strategies and tutorials that I teach, and they apply it for themselves, and they see that it works. I just always try and give my best information away for free. And so that I build trust with them over a period of time through that content. And then when I make those offers like, “Hey, I just launched a paid community. Do you want to regularly jump on Zoom calls with me, and get access to my AI courses, or come to my conference where we can network and hang out together?”

Because I’ve built all of this trust up, they’re more likely to buy from me later on. I don’t need the upfront sale. I play that long game and trust over months and years that continues to compound. And I bring different offers to the table.

Brad Weimert: Well, I like that, but you’re also in a space, I suppose, where anybody can be using AI today, right? So, you’ve got a very, very broad audience to start with.

Austin Armstrong: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Do you think that you would approach it differently if you were producing content for CPAs? Would you look at it and say, “Hey, I still want to go broader than the general CPA because it’s a bigger audience and it will create engagement,” or would you narrow it and say, “I’m only aiming for CPAs on my list”?

Austin Armstrong: Are you trying to attract CPAs for something, or are you a CPA trying to attract people to hire your firm?

Brad Weimert: Let’s say you’re selling a product to CPAs.

Austin Armstrong: You’re selling a problem, okay, product to CPAs.

Brad Weimert: Let’s say you have software for CPAs. Some unique whatever, widget.

Austin Armstrong: Yep. It’s a smaller bucket, right? So, you have to figure out what are the pain points and problems that CPAs deal with. Can you create new solutions? AI for CPAs is probably going to be as broad of a topic that you can get. But you can maybe go a little bit deeper, right? Like, of the problems that a CPA deals with, what is the emotion behind it? So, if the current software that they’re using takes five hours of their time, that’s potentially five hours away from their family. So, you can create some, you know, talk about something broad like productivity tips for CPAs, or lifestyle tips for CPAs that anything that a CPA might be interested in. Not the direct sale of the product, service, software, whatever, but targeting the underlying emotions, things that they care about. Some of it could just be getting more clients. You want to attract CPAs at all levels, not just sell. So, just build the…

Brad Weimert: Well, that’s kind of what I’m getting at, though, is like so everything you’re saying is focus on the CPA, but you’ve got some derivatives which are getting more clients, and then you added, “If you’re a CPA.” Do you take time to say, “Fu*k that, I’m just going to do a message on getting more clients, period”? Do you go broader for business knowing that your offer’s going to be CPAs because the rest of the business community might create more engagement for the community? Or do you just say, “No, I’m going to stay focused on the narrow buyer, and that’s who I want in my audience”?

Austin Armstrong: It depends what you want. It depends on the individual. Some people like the attention. The other side of this coin is that everybody knows a CPA. So, this is kind of the, I always love giving credit where credit’s due, Adley with Viralish, this is kind of her mentality, is that, “I might not need to hit the CPA. I just need to hit the CPA’s cousin that’s very active on TikTok and is going to send that video to him.” So, it’s a longer sales process and sales time, but you could really go viral that way and reach a much wider set of people that are loosely connected to a CPA.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, look, that’s precisely why I ask, because there isn’t one right way to do this. And some people go really deep and really narrow, and they say, “I don’t care if I have a big audience. I want the exact audience that I’m after.” And then the opposite approach is everything you just said. But I think it’s a curious thing to think about when you’re architecting kind of a content generation machine, which it seems like you do. I want to talk about Syllaby and some of the other software platforms, but before we leave the purely content creation conversation here, which we will inevitably come back to, how much are you posting independently as yourself, and how much are the robots doing it for you? What is automated and what is not from a percentage perspective?

Austin Armstrong: Okay. This might shock people. 99% of the content on my personal brand is me physically posting, and not even scheduling. It’s me manually posting it. And I like the hands-on approach, and I’ll probably not, I’ve never really wanted to hand that off, because I like that boots-on-the-ground touchpoint. I think it just gives me a better hand on the pulse. Now, I use AI in a lot of the other stuff: editing, ideation, formatting, research, looking at top-performing contents. Going back to PostSnag, 14,000 posts from 20 of the top influencers in my niche. I create 20 markdown files, and I have an insane Claude, a Facebook super-agent that has all of this context, plus my voice from decades of recordings and whatnot of me. So, it can take all of this information and create original posts for me in my voice on a daily basis that every morning is just there.

I have it send me a Slack message. So, every morning I go on Slack, and I’ve got some tweets, I’ve got some LinkedIn posts, I’ve got some Facebook posts, I’ve got an outline for a video that I might create, and so that I can then record that video or just copy and paste that over, make some little tweaks, and post that myself. Maybe go over, make an image, if I don’t like the image that was created, tweak some stuff, whatever. So, I use it as my productivity tool. But yeah, I manually post pretty much everything.

Brad Weimert: I love that. That’s super helpful. Again, I go back to this crazy breadth of people that are trying to figure this out and figure out how to push it into their ecosystem and their world, which begs the question: Do you look at yourself as an influencer with a bunch of businesses or a businessperson with an audience?

Austin Armstrong: I have a quote that I like to say all the time: “Don’t be a content creator. Be a business owner who creates content.” I am a business owner. I am an entrepreneur that’s really good at creating content online.

Brad Weimert: I love that. What is the distribution in your week of creating content versus working on a product versus your agency versus thinking?

Austin Armstrong: ADHD helps with this quite a lot. So, it’s a fine-tuned superpower, I guess. I also like to say I outsource my suck. So, I have great business partners and great team members that handle a lot of the things that I don’t like to do on the operational side of things so that I can spend more time in content creation. And what I’ve trained myself to do is I get bored on a task very quickly, and so I need to task switch and do something else. And that task switch for me has become, or the productive procrastination is going on social media and looking at what’s working or posting something real quick that comes to mind or formatting it. And then I’ll go back to that task, or I’ll go to another task, and then I’ll come back to that original task, and I do things in pieces.

I don’t ever really just focus on one thing at a time to completion and then in the next thing and then the next thing. My brain just has never worked that way. I don’t work that way. So, I’ll sit in a meeting while someone else is talking. My brain goes to the phone. It’s also addiction. Let’s just call it that. I’m listening in the background, but I’m also looking on social media, and I might post something. And I come back to the meeting, or I’ll say my two cents, and I’ll go do something in another tab. It’s worked quite well for me, and it might sound familiar to the other ADHDs listening. And it might sound like, “This is the worst thing ever. How do you get anything done?” to the neurotypical people.

So, it winds up being quite a lot of time on social media and creating a lot of social media, but I don’t bucket my time either, for this is content creation time, this is deep work time, this is meeting time. I kind of just bounce around a lot, but I’m a very intrinsically motivated person. I have the general compass of this is the direction that we need to go. These are the tasks that need to be done in order to do that. I have to-do lists and things that I need to accomplish. AI helps me and keep track and stays on top of me. But it all gets done, and I spend a lot of time bouncing around.

Brad Weimert: Brand new businessperson, new entrepreneur, do they focus on the product and the business first or the audience first?

Austin Armstrong: Oh, it’s so good. And again, it could go either way. Typically, so I would lean towards audience first if it’s a mass-consumption product. If you’re building an enterprise niche solution and there’s only… You only want 100 clients because you have a 100,000-million-dollar annual thing. Who cares about content, you know? And I say that content isn’t everything. I talk to tons of people that I’m like the best way to sell their thing is to go to a trade show and booth. You know, F content. Just go to more trade shows, whatever that thing is. For me, I sell largely consumer SaaS, when I had my agency before and when I have my conference. Also, for conferences, one of the best ways to get tickets and butts in seats is to go to more conferences, because people who go to conferences buy other conference tickets.

So, I speak a lot. I’m a very extroverted person, so I’m working the room constantly, building connections, setting up future meetings. Just be like, “You know, come over to my conference too. Here’s why. Here’s what’s different about it.” But if you’re focusing on a consumer software tool or a largely consumer-facing product or offer, build the audience first. Build the trust, deliver incredible value for free. Just give your best information away for free. Share the behind-the-scenes as you’re building the business, because people love a hero’s journey as well. And, by the time that you have the thing that to sell, you’ve already built a lot of trust and rapport, and people have come on the journey with you, and they’ll just become better buyers.

Brad Weimert: So, you said you’re super extroverted. Let’s talk to the other half of the audience who is super introverted.

Austin Armstrong: Sure.

Brad Weimert: I also love that you just gave an out for producing content for people. Time and a place, it’s not everything. Depends what business you have. It was very well said, and I think that’s really something people need to think about with their own companies. For the introverts, if they are in a business where content makes sense, do they get on camera? Do they keep it to text? Do they shift their focus? Does it matter?

Austin Armstrong: There are so many ways for this. A shameless plug for Syllaby, we built this for…

Brad Weimert: It’s perfect. That’s what’s next. So, why don’t you just…

Austin Armstrong: Yeah, yeah.

Brad Weimert: You can answer that question, but tell me what Syllaby is, and then we’ll talk about kind of the product and the launch of it.

Austin Armstrong: Sure. So, Syllaby shows you topics to create. It creates the videos for you, and it schedules and publishes it to every social media platform. So, you can create, schedule, and publish a month of content in any niche to promote your business to grow a following in just a couple of minutes. My whole thing for it is I don’t care how you create videos. I just want to help you create more videos, because it’s helped you out a lot.

Brad Weimert: I love that. And to your point earlier, you’ve got tons of really high-quality AI-produced videos that are converting for you as ads and otherwise. So, we’ve reached an era where it’s working, and certainly there’s a lot of slop out there, but it seems to be working for people when implemented the right way. Syllaby was interesting for me when I looked into the history of it because you launched it before GPT-4 dropped. I mean, you launched the product early. And at the time, first of all, implementing AI into software was not straightforward. It was not cut and dry. A lot of people weren’t doing it. Second, ChatGPT 3.5 was what opened things up to the world, but it was really bad relative to what’s out there now. How did you think about the launch of an AI product then, and how would you do things differently now?

Austin Armstrong: When I started developing Syllaby, it was not an AI software. We went with the market. It was actually more of a productivity tool. So, the original launch of Syllaby was keyword research. So, we plugged into a third-party API that lets you type in a service that you offer or a pain point or whatever, and it shows you the long-tail questions that your customers are searching for online. And then a social media scheduler, so you could create the video yourself, using that topic, and a consistency tracker. So, it was really meant to show you topic ideas. You create the video, you schedule and publish the video, and then you mark it as complete, and just help you create more content. Very soon after that, we incorporated the script generation as soon as that was able to do.

I mean, I’ve personally written tens of thousands of scripts because I came from a video marketing agency background for 10 years before Syllaby even existed in many, many different niches. So, I have tons of just script frameworks and script examples. And so, we just basically… And it was very rudimentary. It’s gotten so much better in the last three years. But it took that topic, and it created a script for you to read and record that fit that format, and then you could schedule and publish that video yourself. And then as technology got better, the first video generation capability that we had in Syllaby was AI avatars. And we actually had our own technology in that. So, I have a really good CTO that helped develop some of this stuff.

We’ve worked with other third-party partners as well, D-ID, HeyGen, Synthesia, but we had our own technology for the avatar as well. So, you could record and train your own AI avatar and then go through that funnel. So, you find a topic, it generates the script, you feed that to the avatar. Syllaby generates the video for you and the avatar, and then you schedule and publish it. And we just continue to iterate. These AI video generation models came out for faceless videos, and faceless videos exploded, and we were right there ready to capture the market at the right time. And that continues to do just incredible. Seedance 2.5 just came out. Kling 3 is an amazing model. Google’s Veo 3.1 is an amazing model.

You can generate anything that you want. You can add yourself into it. You can upload reference images or reference videos of yourself or a team member or anything. You don’t even need to be on camera anymore. You can take that whole workflow and create content that resonates with your audience, your target ICP, and create schedule and publish across the board. So, it’s been an amazing evolution of launching pre-AI to just fully embracing AI everywhere in the product.

Brad Weimert: I love it. It also sounds like it was probably an awesome evolution of learning how to roll with the punches, execute, build with AI. Like that journey sounds super cool. What are the lessons that you got from it? And what are the missteps that you can guide entrepreneurs to avoid when they’re trying to either create an AI-first product or integrate AI into a product that they’re building today?

Austin Armstrong: Yeah. Entrepreneurial life is full of ups and downs and roller coasters, as is SaaS. So, when we launched, it was great. We had a huge, huge launch. It was very successful for the first seven, eight months, and then for the next 10 months, it was down. Every day was a downward spike, and it was very stressful. And we pivoted. That’s what we ultimately had to do. We had to kill some darlings and reposition. What we learned is that the initial ICP that we went after wasn’t working. So, we were originally going after business owners, entrepreneurs, professionals in different areas, and with the AI avatar technology. So, they wanted to be the personal brand. They wanted to be the expertise.

And the price point for that was higher, so it started at $49 a month. And what we really came across from user interviews and the data that we looked at is that’s not really who was using our platform. It was content creators that wanted to monetize on social media. And so, what we ended up doing was pivoting our messaging and our features to that audience. So, we switched our main video generation capability to faceless video. We cut the price in half, from 49 to 25, and focused more on that bulk creation and scheduling of faceless videos, kind of set and forget, fully automated. And that really picked things back up for a while. We went from, I’ll be transparent, we went from about 90K MRR down to about 40K MRR, and then that pivot took us back up to about 170K MRR.

And now, transparently, we’re in a level of saturation and a lot of competition as well. So, we’re not at our all-time high. We’re low, and we’re figuring things out, so we’re in the middle of a pivot ourselves. This is just how entrepreneurship goes. So, we’re testing new things. We’re testing new price points, new pricing strategies, new feature releases. We’re expanding our offerings. Forever, I’ve been very stubborn about just being a video-only tool, but we’re expanding into all things scheduling for business owners and content creators. We’re allowing you to create, schedule, and publish not just videos, but images and text posts, if you want to use that scheduler.

We just launched a mobile app and an API, and our MCP is coming very soon so that you can not even log into Syllaby. You can use Claude to find topic ideas and generate and schedule your content using Syllaby. You don’t need to log into our UI anymore. Use your agent. Go ahead. Use your OpenClaw. Use your Hermes agent. Use your AI agent of choice. Let us be the back-end support that does that research and execution for you. You don’t need to learn how to use our confusing UI. I think this is kind of a direction of where SaaS is going in general over the next couple of years. I think there’s going to be a consolidation of market saturation, a race to the bottom on pricing, and people just using an AI agent that they just open WhatsApp or Slack.

And they’re just like, “Hey, go find me some topics, create some videos, and go publish them for me,” or “Find me some scripts. I want to record it, and then I’ll just publish it myself.” They don’t need to log in and understand how to use all of this different software. So, these are some of the angles and pivots that we’re making based on the data and user interviews that we see and where I see the market going to.

Brad Weimert: Man, I have a thousand questions about that. I know we’re also coming to time here, so I want to respect that. A couple things that I took away from that that I think are big. One, you talked about the tremendous shift in different models that you used. So, I would say make sure that when you’re building something, you don’t code yourself into a corner and you have an easy way out, and an easy way to modify and adjust. Two is listen to your customers, and you made a point of saying, “We did a bunch of customer interviews functionally,” which can be as light as shooting them a DM or an email, and it can be as heavy as a formal study. I thought that was great.

And then the third is iteration, right? Listen to them and iterate as you need to. Before I let you go, one of the things that I also find interesting, and I want to see where it fits into the overarching framework, is AI Marketing World. So, you’ve got a live event that you’re now, what, this is the third year? Is that right?

Austin Armstrong: Second year.

Brad Weimert: Second year. And most people lose money when they do live events. Why are you investing into a big conference? What’s the point for you?

Austin Armstrong: Well, we have a backend offer on it that genuinely helps people. So, we are profitable in that sense. I also just like big, ambitious projects, and I could talk your ear off if I don’t know how much time we have.

Brad Weimert: I’ve got time. Let it rip.

Austin Armstrong: Oh, okay. Okay. So, I’ll try and summarize this a little bit. So, the point of the conference is that you, as the entrepreneur, the business owner, the agency owner, whatever it is that you do, you have years, decades of experience and skillsets and SOPs that are unique to you and how you deliver them to your clients and how you help them. The new defensibility moat is taking that expertise, that service, the SOPs, and turning it into a front-end software or offer that is an entry point to your service and your agency. It’s offering software and the backend service as well, meshing these two things together. And it’s never been cheaper and faster to do these things.

You don’t need to have hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in order to create software anymore. You can get these things up pretty quickly that are specific to your workflows. It’s a fantastic way to do lead generation. It’s a fantastic way to increase your bottom-line revenue on a monthly basis, and it’s a fantastic way to elevate them to eventually become clients for you and your higher-ticket product, service, whatever it is that you deliver. And that’s the entire point of the conference at AI Marketing World, is we take you through that. We teach you how to ideate, how to bring that, or actually develop it, with examples. We have a pitch competition there showing amazing startups and founders that are doing great things, how to go to market.

Just some of the brightest minds in marketing and in business and AI, and how they’re bringing all these things together. And that’s kind of the theme this year is bring your expertise into a sellable product with AI. And the backend offer is, it’s a three-day in-person workshop. It’s called MicroSaaS Lab. We had it last year. We’re doing it again this year, where it’s three intense eight-hour days. We bring in developers, like real software developers. We bring in guest experts and coaches, and it’s just a room full of like 50 to 60 people, all on their laptop, and they’re finding and validating those ideas, consolidating all of their expertise into that idea, creating and packaging it in this software, and then the go-to-market strategy, how to launch it even without an audience online.

I’ve done this 12 times now. I own 12 or 13 different software tools, so I’ve just built this incredible experience up on how to do this. And I actually help them market it, as well. And so, the whole flywheel here, too, is that it’s not just about that backend offer that we help people come out with a sellable product. I own an in-person startup incubator called Bullhouse here in Durham, North Carolina, where I invest in local startups and give them a free co-working space, and we hold events here locally. Those companies are able to present on the stage at the conference in that pitch competition, as well as the people that go through the MicroSaaS three-day workshop. They’re able to go back and present their product in front of we’ll probably have about 750 or so people in person this year at that conference. So, they’re able to demo that product there.

As we prove this concept out with Bullhouse and creating our own deal flow, essentially, and this giant marketing arm, it creates this giant flywheel of we will then very likely raise our own money, or I’ll have enough money through exits of some of these software tools or roll-ups or something like that, to be able to invest more money into those startups and pump them through the entire engine so that we can bring the best founders from all around the country, perhaps all around the world, being their main, their lead investors, fueling our local economy, and then filling this entire flywheel of the go-to-market strategy. I put my millions of followers behind them. We build them audiences and communities.

They present and be a part of the conference and our online community, and everything funnels together. And so, that’s the big picture of why I’m growing this conference, and I have my in-person brick-and-mortar startup incubator, and everything that I’m doing, it all just funnels together.

Brad Weimert: Dope. I love that, man. Well, a couple quick ones before I let you go. What are you paying attention to right now? What are you learning from? What are you focused on, whether it’s frontier tech, somebody you’re following, software people don’t know about? What is your energy going into at the moment from a learning perspective?

Austin Armstrong: I’m going to answer this in two different ways. Right now, in the immediate, it is the strategies to create, launch, and sell expertise packaged in software. I am just fascinated by this entire thing. I’ve just done it over and over again. I see more and more people do it. I think that it’s the new lead magnet and front-end offer into a back-end upsell. I’m just loving that and all of the tools around that. Separately, where my mind is going in interest over the next couple of years, because I see this three-ish year window of this opportunity of everything that we’ve just talked about over the last hour. I’m very interested in physical third places. So, your home and your work are your two. Where is that third space that you spend time?

I think that with all of this AI automation and agents, it’s going to do and handle most of our online stuff, and a lot of people are also just going to get sick of it because they’re just going to see an overwhelming amount of AI content online and just bots and ads and whatnot. People are going to go back to in-person. And so, I’m fascinated by conferences, so the conference is one aspect of that. My wife and I are talking about opening a local dog bar here because that doesn’t exist, and we’ve seen that before. Life Time Fitness is our third space because it’s got an outdoor pool in the summer and a spa and sauna and cold plunge, and it’s a great gym, and there are classes, and we spend a lot of time there.

I think more small things like this and physical third spaces are going to be so important to bring humans and connection together, and offline. So, that’s also permeating in my brain right now, and honestly, what I’m probably going to do in the next three to five years.

Brad Weimert: I love that, man. I couldn’t agree more. I personally like to own the real estate underneath those things, which is a very different proposition and another story for another time. What advice do you have for brand new entrepreneurs starting out today?

Austin Armstrong: Get great partners. Don’t do everything yourself.

Brad Weimert: Love that. Where do you want to point people? Where can people find out more about you, what you’re doing, Syllaby, whatever?

Austin Armstrong: Yeah, my main website, austinarmstrong.ai, will have access to everything. And if you want to meet me in person, hang out with me, aimarketingworld.co. That’s C-O. I’d love to meet you in person. It’s Dallas, Texas, October 21st through 24th. It’s going to be an amazing event. We’ve got five robots, and I’ll let you play with them.

Brad Weimert: Love that, man. Austin Armstrong, thanks so much. Great talking.

Austin Armstrong: Thank you, brother.