Episode Transcript

Martin

Tell me what’s going on in the AI world.

Igor

There’s been some updates the last couple of days.

What’s going on? There’s actually a lot to talk about.

It’s a very interesting point in time that we’re actually talking and having this conversation in, because there was, as you might know, there’s OpenAI, which released Chat GPT and all the other AI innovations that people talk about, and they had probably the most significant event or where all of this is heading this year.

Okay, so two things that I would like to bring to your attention that happened there, and maybe we can discuss them and you can kind of give me your perspective on what they’re going to do.

Because Chat GPT, you’ve experienced, right? Use the web interface, you ask it anything.

So what changed there now is for all the use cases that you might be doing.

So for your case, maybe writing ad copy, right? You’re going to have your very own specific custom trained assistant.

They call them gpts.

That does just the one thing, right? So right now you had like the open kind of field of Chat GPT that could do anything.

But now in the next evolution, it’s going to do one specific thing and it’s going to do that specific thing super well because you’re going to be able to add your data, add your documents, you’re going to be able to upload the analytics from maybe the previous ad campaigns that you ran, whatever, you’re going to be able to give it that, and then you’re going to give it a personality and you’re going to have your personalized version of GPT right on the website, easily available, no coding, no nothing.

And then you can create like tens of these.

Plus you’re also going to be able to sell them so you can put them on the store that they’re releasing later this month and people are going to be able to access those.

So that’s like a part of the innovation.

And there’s like 15 other things, but that’s the one I would like to share.

Martin

And is that setting up now? Sort of like the App Store is developed in a way that people are going to be able to build out these custom characters and you said sell them actually as templates or how does that work? So someone, I’m going to go buy this character blueprint and upload it straight to my chat GBT account.

That’s sort of how it’s going to work.

Igor

Yeah.

So essentially you’re going to be able to create them for yourselves and then you’re going to be able to offer them on their App Store.

There’s like a verification process just like on the App Store, and you’re going to enter into a revenue share agreement with OpenAI themselves.

So yeah, essentially you can create them for yourselves and if you feel like the world could use them, you can put them out there and other people could use them too.

Martin

Got you.

And what are some early cases you’re already seeing? 

Igor

Yeah, so there’s some really funny ones.

People are obviously trying various things, but the cool thing is you can integrate a lot of apps into it.

So one that popped up right away was people linking it to various apps that people use daily, like Spotify or something.

So all of a sudden you’re going to get to really easily link, chat, GPT with your Spotify account.

And you know, when you want to create a playlist, you just get to do that for that.

So that’s a basic one, but then maybe you can also link it to your CRM or to your email marketing software and just interact with it from within.

But I think for me personally, the use case that I’m most excited about building, and it’s not out yet, right? It’s coming later this month, the custom ones.

But one of the first things I personally will be trying is building some sort of YouTube assistant.

One that is trained upon my previous data, is trained upon other channels that I enjoy, has all the transcripts of videos that I was particularly proud of, of myself and also has access to the Internet, also has access to like a python sandbox.

So it can create mind maps, it can analyze all the data, it can analyze all the views, it has access to all the analytics that are critical and that I review regularly.

And then that YouTube assistant is just going to be there.

It’s always going to be one click away.

And whenever I have a question or an idea for a new video, it’s going to be my first stop, right? I’m going to be like, hey, I thought about creating this video.

Any suggestions? And then I’ll set it up to anytime I ask it for suggestions, just give me suggestions for titles, thumbnails, content, chapters.

What are maybe some spin offs of this? Could I turn this into a show? Right? All of these things I’m just going to have preset in there and then that’s going to be my first stop when I have a new idea.

So I think everybody’s going to be able to create something like that for themselves.

Martin

I’m just thinking about, there’s so many use cases, but you’ve obviously done really well with your YouTube channel organically.

I’m not sure how much you’ve used AI and chat GBT in that process.

As you’re building out this assistant, what do you see as the biggest impact it’s going to have for you? Obviously, it’s going to be able to look at your data from views and, as you said, help you with ideas.

What do you see as sort of the one or two things that are really going to move the needle for you? 

Igor

That’s a good question.

That’s a good question.

So that’s the thing.

In the word assistant, it’s implicit that it’s not a replacement, right.

It’s kind of like a support, but I guess it depends on the tasks, because there are certain tasks that I have, certain jobs that I have that an assistant can fully take over.

Right.

So when it comes to here’s one idea, can you give me five similar ones? That’s kind of a task that I have myself as a YouTube content creator.

I come in with one idea and then I have to kind of go through and find similar ones or find different flavors of that idea and explore if it might not be worth it to actually redirect.

And instead of doing idea number one, maybe number three would be the one that my energy would be more wisely spent on.

But those are like thinking and planning and brainstorming type of tasks.

Those, these assistants can kind of fully or mostly take over today.

Right.

But then there’s a different category of tasks, one that actually, the ones that actually require doing something, right? So if you’re going out and if you’re writing, you’re already doing something, that’s kind of like the gray zone in between.

But if you’re going out and you’re like constructing a building and building a house and laying the bricks, let’s say, then that’s not really a task for an AI assistant because you need to move physical goods.

So that’s kind of the spectrum, right? It goes all the way from just like thinking and brainstorming all the way to laying bricks, let’s say.

So now the question is where on that spectrum is the task that we’re talking about and how far can we get? Because writing, arguably, it’s close to thinking, but it’s like more action, right? It’s closer to bricklaying than just like brainstorming ten ideas.

And then with some of the things that I outlined, like it being able to plug into Spotify, it being able to plug into many other apps and then interacting with those apps, it being able to send emails, right.

These things are closer on that actionable spectrum and further away from just like thinking and brainstorming and closer to actually getting things done in the real world.

So just to return to the original question, I think for myself, the main thing that I’m looking forward to doing is actually creating drafts of scripts.

But this is just like me personally with the YouTube, but it can do it already, it can write them.

But I would really love for it to give me more of a personalized touch.

There’s this thing called fine tuning with AI models where you can feed it certain input output pairs, like hundreds of them.

Like when I ask it to write a script, give me this type of output, and then you give it 100 examples, let’s say, and then the whole model behaves differently after that.

So I’m really looking forward to doing that.

It’s not available yet for the biggest model OpenAI has, GPT four.

I’m really looking forward to doing that, training it on my actual videos and then adding my YouTube analytics, then adding YouTube data, then adding all the recent, all the data that is applicable to it already, and then going in and being like, hey, please prepare scripts for these free videos for me.

But still in the phase, we’re in the last mile.

So it’s human, that’s the way it’s supposed to be, right? Just like when you hire an assistant, you wouldn’t give her the final decision, right, on everything you do, right? She would just assist you, she would create the draft, she would do maybe 80% of the work.

But kind of the last mile where we stand right now should be human if you want quality output.

Martin

My sort of understanding of where this is heading and a lot of the applications for it is it’s going to be able to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

But that ultimate sort of creative end touch from a human is still not at the point where that’s going to be replaced.

And I don’t know where that’s going to go.

I don’t want to speculate too much on that.

But at this point, as far as I can see, and that’s been my own experience with an advertising agency, is our applications have always been, to a certain point, definitely helps ideation, all of this sort of heavy lifting.

But the last little piece, you definitely still need the creative direction.

Like creative directors in advertising, for example, are not just about to be replaced.

And I guess your creative direction for your YouTube channel, ultimately you’re going to get more ideas and stuff.

But at the end of the day, you’re the final piece, right? So I just want to ask you one more quick question on, like, what other data, aside from your videos and stuff? If you wanted to train it to get to know Igor better and to know all your past videos, what else could you feed it? What other data could you feed it from your personal.

I don’t know.

Can you go into past emails? 

Igor

It’s a good question.

So basically, one answer to that is everything that you ever produced.

And that might not be the right answer, because not everything that you ever produced or said might be relevant, right? Some private conversations are entirely irrelevant to your work life, right? So that might not be the right answer.

And then just saying just the stuff that I published on YouTube is probably not the right answer either, right? It’s better than giving a nothing, but there might be way more relevant.

Maybe the thinking process behind the videos would have been super relevant for it.

So, like, everything that is relevant to it, right? Just like the way to think about it is if you talk to an assistant.

That’s why it’s such a great framework.

That word really captures it.

If you talk to a brand new assistant, what would you tell her for her to do a good job, right.

You wouldn’t be telling her about your childhood experiences like some random conversation you had when you were twelve, right? Probably not relevant to the task that you want from her.

But you might be telling her your thought process behind some of the videos that you’ve been creating.

Right? So we actually thought about this question a lot, and we actually built this framework that we named it.

It’s a blueprint, and it’s a framework for what data to provide it, right? It’s like, what are your goals? What is your job? What is your background? What are your language preferences? What type of output would you like to see? Do you want citations or not? It just depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

But if you fill out these various fields and answer these, we have like 24 building blocks like that that you can mix and match.

If you give it answers to that, and you tell it in what voice you want it to respond, you tell it in what tone you want it to respond.

All these details, it’s pretty granular.

It’s not just, I want it to be friendly.

No, it’s like, no, I want the voice to be friendly, yet professional.

And then you give it maybe examples too of that, right? Here’s like examples of how I speak.

Then the quality just goes to a different level.

And most people just reach kind of the first level and they prompt something very quickly and they kind of make their conclusion.

They’re like, I tried it.

It’s not that good yet.

I’ll come back to it in the future.

But the fact is, for most people, for most people, if they really knew what to ask it and how to ask it and what info to provide, then the conclusion would be different because it’s better than people realize now.

But again, it’s limited, right? It’s an assistant.

Martin

I suppose that’s what you teach all your students, right? How to find that balance of, like, right data, right questions, and right direction.

And I just had a thought, as you were saying, that of you thinking about your assistant to write your YouTube scripts, I assume you want to try and find a balance of having an authentic voice come through.

So giving it data from your past videos and stuff that you have said.

And this is sort of my language that I typically use, while also, I guess, aspiring, you always want to get better, right? And I guess that’s where you can start to say, I would like to sound more in this tone, or start to.

So I guess you could find a balance of, hey, make me sound or make this script sound authentic.

But also I want to add in this little element.

I want to be a little bit more, I don’t know, edgy or something in that direction.

So, yeah.

Have you tried sort of playing around with that a little bit? 

Igor

It’s a great point because that’s really kind of like the more intermediate version of using it.

Because when you start, you kind of just give it, like one task and you’re like, okay, thank you.

But really the better version of using it is having a conversation with it.

So you get a first answer and you do exactly what you suggested.

You kind of go in and you give it your feedback just like you would with an assistant.

Right.

She comes back with the first draft, you’re like, thank you.

But.

And then you point out the things that you would like revised.

You can do the same thing there.

But with all that being said, I should point out that I don’t really script my videos.

Some people do.

I’m more of a bullet point type.

I like, freely speaking.

So I really love to use it for outlines at best.

So I never use it to a script word for word.

Just doesn’t work for me personally.

I kind of speak freely.

I like speaking freely.

But, yeah, you can certainly do that.

Even for the outlines.

One of the most basic examples that I showed many time on the YouTube is just when you’re trying to write a book with it, right? Which is like a super long format.

You don’t go in and say, write me a book about XYZ.

You go in and start with, write me an outline for a book about XYZ.

And then it does it, it’s like, okay, here’s the ten chapters, here’s the subchapters.

And then you’re like, all right, in chapter three, could you switch out these two subchapters? Could we switch chapter five with seven? And chapter six, could we change it entirely and adjust it? Cool, maybe do another round of that, right? And all of a sudden you have an outline that you actually like and then you can go in like, okay, write me a draft for chapter 1.1.

Write me a draft for chapter 1.2.

Here’s another cool thing that we didn’t talk about that just changed.

Are you familiar with the context window that comes with these things? So, like how much info it can intake at one point in time? 

Martin

Yes.

So it was very limited up until now, right? So with GPT four, we had up to maybe 8000 tokens available, which is roughly like 6000 characters.

They just upped that thing to significant jump.

You’re able to feed it a 300 page book.

So you can take research papers, throw them in there.

You can take research papers.

Not one, right? You could take all the analytics.

It was just very limiting up until now, right? You might have a boatload of analytics and it can’t even take it in because it’s just too much.

Well, now the context window, just what is that, like 15x.

Martin

For someone that is anyone listening out there that does feel a little bit overwhelmed or a little bit like behind? Because I also feel like that with everything you share and you tell me, I’m like, oh my God, I need to be catching up on this.

There’s stuff I’m missing out on.

Igor

I know.

Martin

What advice would you give to someone in that situation that’s feeling like a little bit behind, a little bit overwhelmed with the options? What can they start doing to start to stay up to date more? 

Igor

So there’s several options.

I think it depends on what learning type you are, right? So if you know yourself already a little, you will know.

For me, I love learning through a long form audio with video to it.

So that works just best for me.

Also, I’m a visual learner, but I’m good with long form content.

So I’ll be looking into probably YouTube for that.

That’s why I do YouTube, right.

Because it’s like the most natural to me.

I’m just creating what I wish I had.

So if you’re a visual learner, I think YouTube is a great place and where to start at the point that is most relevant to you.

So whatever industry you’re working in.

So, for example, with you, I wouldn’t be looking for tutorials on how to write children’s books, right.

To start off, look for the ones that are going to be acutely relevant to you that you can use right away.

And just use the search function and be like, okay, chat GBT for, I don’t know, ad copywriting.

Cool.

For Google Analytics, data analysis, and then check that out, see what those people are doing.

Get a first feeling for it.

So that’d be one answer to it.

The other one is, Twitter is obviously great depending on if you use it a lot.

But that’s really where kind of like, a lot of the news lives.

And that’s where all of creators like me also get their info.

It’s not from some news outlet that kind of adds their two cent and this a few hours late.

No, it’s like straight from the Twitter accounts and from people playing with it all day.

So that’d be another one.

But then beyond that, you also have, if you’re not the visual learning type, then I would say, newsletters.

Incredible.

There’s some really good ones.

So we have a newsletter of our own, but we only do it like once a week there.

We essentially do, like, the ultimate digest.

We do, like, one app that is useful that you can use now, one news story that really mattered this week and why it mattered.

And then we’re like one prompt that you can use today.

That’s it.

And then sometimes we add, like a video of the week at the end.

That’s it.

But that might be too little for certain people.

If you want to get more, I would recommend the rundown newsletter by Rowan.

And then there’s Ben Bytes by Ben Tussle.

The last one is really.

That’s like a waterfall of info.

So you get daily.

That might be too much for certain people, but the rundown is like the good daily summary.

So if you get one newsletter like that and try it for a week, you get our newsletter, which kind of gives you the weekly summary, and you check out two free videos.

You’re already on your way.

And another thing is, and yeah, might be biased because it’s ours, but when you sign up to our newsletter, we have this freebie that gets you started.

So it gives you 250 use cases and it gives you all the presets that you can just copy paste.

And we have videos on YouTube that kind of guide you through it.

So if you do that, you’re already ahead of most people that kind of just go in and intuitively they type in what they’re thinking, but what do they know about how the system functions? You kind of need to do a lot of trial and error to find the use cases or the wording or the angle or like, they’re not including a target audience while there should really be one.

Otherwise it’s going to start making up the target audience, right? And then you’re like, this is, what the hell is this giving? Why is it like making up facts here? Well, because you didn’t provide it to them, right? So these are all the things that some of beginner guides like that help out with, right? You avoid mission, you find the use cases that are relevant to you and then you expand from there, right? All it takes.

You need to find one thing that is really useful to you and you’re going to keep returning to it and you’re going to be like, what else could I do? 

Martin

I think that’s the exact point.

Find something in your daily life, in your work life that you want to play around with that is relevant to interesting to you.

And I think everyone’s going to see the impact and can definitely also recommend the newsletter, super consumable for someone like me that doesn’t consume a lot of media.

I found your newsletter super sweet once a week.

Good information there.

Igor

Super compact.

Martin

We’ll put the link to that in the show notes for sure.

Igor

And it’s free.

Martin

And it’s free.

And it’s free, exactly.

Martin

Take me back to before you started AI, before you dived into this world.

What were you doing and what led you up to the point of getting involved in AI? Right, it’s a good question.

Igor

The answer is a lot.

I really stumbled into it on my explorations of technology, and I’ve always been a very tech savvy and tech oriented type.

I always tried and experimented a lot.

And also I got a little lucky on the timing as I discovered it.

For my other interest, I discovered Chat GPT like 24 hours after the release and I was already, by the way, this is YouTube channel number five for me.

Right? But the first one I had when I was 17, which is twelve years ago now, doing YouTube videos on magic, the gathering on the Xbox.

I was at the top of the leaderboard, worldwide leaderboard there.

So I was just like, I’m going to get a capture card and create YouTube videos.

It was just my voice and recorded stuff, but that’s where the YouTube thing kind of started.

And then throughout my had a video production company before this, so I was creating first event videos, but then trainings, like my ultimate thing was like corporate trainings where we created like 30, 40 training videos on a specific topic.

So that’s where the video component comes from.

It was always just like kind of my hobby.

And then over time, I made it my career, and then YouTube was always just like, my passion and tech was always my passion.

I’m the type of guy that has a bit of time on his hand.

Like a few years ago, I had a bit of time in summer and I just picked up coding inside of python and I just learned that and built on that.

And then the pandemic came around, had some time on my hand, and I bought power tools and I learned, like, carpentry.

And I built a terrace for myself, which was like a seven month project.

I totally underestimated that because I did all the gardening and I had like 30 plants and everything, but not working every day.

It just took forever because I dragged it out, but I was just always like this exploratory type, this like, ooh, here’s a new thing.

And then I obsess over it.

And I’m also very good and quick at learning.

I was, I had the video set up.

I was trying like, two other YouTube channels at the time, and I knew about AI, but by no means was I a power user before chat, GPT came out, dabbled and used actually Dali, two before that and GPT free, I knew of GPT free.

I didn’t actually use it actively.

But when this thing came out, when the chat interface came out, also, for me, it was this light bulb moment of like, this is really different from anything I’ve ever experienced.

Martin

Yeah, you were the really early adopter, right? Like, what environment were you in? Who were you, were you in different forums, channels? How did you find out about the release? 

Igor

It’s a good question.

So I’ve always been in various communities and spread out, and at the time, one of my various interests was.

So I was running like two channels at that time, like populating them.

One was video production and the other one was NFTs, actually, but not NFTs.

Kind of like the investment side that most people are familiar with.

I was mainly focusing on technical tutorials on how to do blockchain stuff.

So my most popular video on that channel was how to mint NFTs from smart contracts, which literally showed you how to use the blockchain explorer and how to fill out all the fields so you can manually do things.

I had many kind of technical tutorials like this, and I was in some communities of more less investment oriented, but more like tech interested people, like developers, and I was in communities like that.

And in one of those communities I just had a conversation where she just brought up like, I just started playing with this new thing called Chat GPT and I was like, what? And this was less than 24 hours after release.

So I just went in and that’s where my exploration started.

It was really being in a technology oriented crypto group, but again, it was really not focused about the trading aspect where most of them were.

And the conversation naturally led to hey, here’s this cool tech related thing that I discovered.

Tried it out and yeah, rest.

Martin

We talked about that early YouTube growth.

As you saw, as people were picking up on these videos way more than what you maybe had previously experienced.

Was that like a big motivation then to go, I need to go back into this platform and learn everything about it and learn more and more to ultimately go and share it.

Was that a big driving force for you? 

Igor

Sure.

But I think I also naturally kind of have that whenever I dive into a new topic, I kind of make that my sole focus to the detriment of other parts of my life and my health.

But legitimately I kind of just do that naturally.

And then obviously if you put out free videos and each one of them gets more views than the last 20 videos you did combined.

Right? Because I was like, also, interesting fact with the YouTube that I should share, it was like anything but an overnight success because legitimately, as I mentioned, first channel twelve years ago, but also this channel that I was uploading on, the AI advantage right now is actually the channel that I had all the NFT tutorials on.

And it was monetized.

It got monetized like two weeks before I started uploading AI related videos on there.

So there was over a year where I was uploading twice a week and I basically got the channel monetized for live streaming every Monday for like four months straight to get the watch time, and I barely got it mid November.

So the channel had some traction already.

If you look at the stats compared to the numbers now, you can barely see it, but it was like a rising.

I was adding 80 subscribers every month for like 14 months already.

And then I had an initial audience to kind of show the content that I created, too.

So I think that was really helpful.

So it was not like a blank channel where I just uploaded a tutorial and it exploded.

It was like over a year of regular uploading and a monetized channel, plus a decade of kind of video creation experience before that.

So that’s what really led into it.

But to answer your question, yeah, obviously, once you upload a video and then in like three days, it gets more views than all the hard work you put into the last 20 videos, that one thing gets more attention and comments and people are engaging.

It’s very motivating to create another one and to keep pushing to kind of get the feedback and get the signal that people are actually enjoying what you’re doing and they’re asking for more.

That really helps.

But I’ll also say this.

Usually people, when they kind of think about this and like, oh, great, you had, like, a viral YouTube video.

Usually that conversation is more like, oh, that had to feel amazing.

But the truth of it is it was extremely stressful.

And people that haven’t been through it, usually only people that have been through a similar experience can relate to that because that builds expectations.

Right? And it’s not just like these.

They’re not abstract, they’re like, very concrete.

They’re in the comments.

It’s people asking for things.

You say a word wrong and all of a sudden you have the most, like, comment.

Is somebody hating on the fact that you said one word wrong in a 45 minutes recording? Right.

It’s just an example.

But a lot of external opinions are all of a sudden in your life, right? You go from maybe your surrounding being, I don’t know, five to ten to 15 people.

You go to, like, all of a sudden, 20,000 people having their opinion right there and no consequences to them expressing it.

Right.

So that can be very stressful.

Plus the expectations and the numbers and everything.

And you see it, like, spike and then you see dip and then it stays dipped for a few days and you’re like, what the heck? And then it spikes again and you’re like, you’re on this roller coaster ride.

Yeah.

Which is like, emotionally stressful while you’re just trying to learn and share what you learn.

Right.

It changes it completely.

So that changes.

It’s not just, yay, this feels great.

It’s a lot of emotions together.

Martin

Sure.

Because everyone on the outside rise, seeing the viral YouTube video and seeing your subscribers and everything go up, I’m like, oh, wow, how cool is that? Not actually realizing the feedback.

Igor

What would happen if the opinions in your life like 100 x tomorrow, right? Yeah, because everybody has an opinion, right? And especially on the Internet, people are feel so entitled to share their opinion, which is fair in most cases, but sometimes it’s just like, the hell, man, you spent like 5 seconds thinking about this concept and now you’re ready to criticize something.

It is what it is.

It comes with the territory.

I wouldn’t have it any other way, but yeah, it was a wild year.

Martin

I mean, was YouTube always something that you did you always see yourself as a creator? Did you think you were going to get into education? What was the motivation behind starting your previous YouTube channels? Was that always something that you really wanted to do? 

Igor

I just loved creating videos.

I thought it was like the idea of being able to literally capture reality.

It’s like the closest thing that we have to time travel, right? You get to use these devices, these cameras, and put a bunch of glass in front of them and then you get to capture reality and replay it at any time.

That always felt so cool to me.

I started out by creating snowboard videos when I was like eleven or something.

I had like a waterproof, like handicam or something.

I was out in the snow.

I was so proud of it.

Martin

This is before Gopros? 

Igor

Yeah, this was before Gopros.

I was just like waterproof camera.

I could take it out into the snow and we were like filming us, like jumping in the backcountry and failing, barely getting over the ledge and everything.

But that’s where it started.

I just kind of loved capturing those moments.

And when I got into uni, it just naturally transitioned into kind of like filming some of the trips we went on and filming some of the friends and activities we were doing.

And then when I got to a point in my life where I was basically forced to make a life for myself, I just thought to myself, like, what is the thing that I enjoyed the most that could also make money? And it was just like, oh, wait a minute, this whole camera video thing, I’ve been doing it.

I love it.

It seems that people are doing this.

So I just went out.

I cold DM’d like 110 people on Facebook, like different event organizers in Vienna, and one of them replied like f off.

And one of them was like, okay, you can do one for free.

And that’s where it started.

So I always just had this thing, like for video.

Then I turned it into a career.

And ultimately I love learning new stuff and one of the best ways to learn is to teach.

So that just came like super naturally to me.

I was either teaching people in my surroundings, so I had the video component and then I had this component of loving new and technology related things.

So it’s just perfectly merged.

I just had to learn over time how to kind of talk in front of cameras and stuff because I don’t think that’s natural to anybody.

But it’s a practice thing.

If I look at some of, not even the channel twelve years ago, even the videos from like two years, two and a half years ago, it’s just like. 

Martin

You see a big difference.

Igor

Yeah, for sure.

It’s just a skill you have to build.

Martin

When you thought about running a YouTube channel and monetizing it, did you ever think that you were going to be selling education products, like online courses and guides and stuff like that? Did you envision that? Or was it more of like a byproduct of once you built your audience, you’re like, we need to deliver a product 

Igor

It’s a good question.

I don’t think I ever envisioned it concretely, but I was always very interested in the business side of everything.

I always did my own accounting with the video production company.

I was always very interested in the business side of everything.

And then actually the first AI related product that I released was very, very early.

It was before Christmas last year.

So I think on December 23, I remember at seven in the morning, I finished up just the PDF, the 80 page PDF, and it was a prompting ebook.

Now there’s a million prompting ebooks, but this was like in mid December, like Chat GPT or like end of December, chat, GPT, prompting ebooks.

They weren’t really a thing.

So there were some people putting out prompts, but it all came in December and it just came naturally.

It was like, okay, so I’m doing all these tutorials.

Each tutorial has like a few prompts and a few use cases, but what if I took all of them and added more and found, what if I really did the work and found everything that I found useful so far and then maybe go even the extra mile and find even more and put it into an easily digestible format? And I was like, I got to do that.

That’s the most amount of value that I can deliver to the world right now.

And then it’s just natural to kind of export it as a pdf and put a price tag on it.

And what I always did is I always gave a big chunk of it away for free.

I always did that.

I was like, okay, cool.

So I just spent like ten days collecting all my thoughts and everything and formatting and setting it up.

Cool.

Now let’s cut it into.

Let’s take one third of that and give that away for the people for free.

Or like now with the newest product, it’s more like free.

Four months of development and now.

Cool.

So we developed a whole new system.

Everything.

Let’s give that system away for free with a bunch of presets.

And if people want to go the extra mile and they want to save, we did three, four months of work, so you don’t have to do extra two days of work, essentially, right? If you want to save those two days of work, you can buy a product to save that time.

But everything we came up with, we’re giving out for free.

We’re like, here it is.

Here’s the notion, templates that we build, here’s the characters for the custom instructions in Chat GPT that we built.

Here’s the three step process to replacing your tasks in your job.

Just take it all.

Take it all.

That’s kind of the YouTube mindset.

Find interesting stuff, share it for free, and then have a premium version of it that just saves some extra time for the people where their time is worth more than money.

But if you want to recreate that with enough work, you certainly can.

So that model has been really.

If you pair that with like a 14 day, no questions asked money back guarantee, it feels super good to me because it’s just like legit.

Like, hey, we did this, we built it.

Here’s the whole thing.

Here’s even more.

If you want to buy it and you have a money back guarantee and then it allows us to reinvest more.

And I’ve been reinvesting like a maniac.

I don’t have any savings.

Everything’s going back in.

Yeah, because this is the thing and I want to at least contribute something actually valuable to the space and the products allow us to do that.

Or to at least attempt that.

Martin

No, for sure, man.

I think it’s a really good lesson to anyone that’s listening out there that’s considering getting into online education and considering teaching something online, is that you started with content first.

You started with finding solutions.

You were curious about a topic and you just started to produce good quality video content around that.

And as you said, also the early videos, you said, were not what they are now.

You just started.

You started down that process and you motivated yourself to keep finding solutions and information, gave it for free.

And that’s like a lot of the clients that we work with have a similar sort of story of like, they’ve built their YouTube channel or their blog or their Instagram page, whatever it is, sort of sharing this content because they’re passionate about it, they’re interested about it, and then all of a sudden they get people knocking on the door saying, hey, I want to learn more of this, or, hey, can you do this for us? And that obviously opens the door for some more premium products, right? So that’s really cool.

And I think a really good lesson maybe.

Igor

Let me just underline that last point you made, because I think that’s so critical.

I think that the online content model for people that want to get into education, online education, the ultimate formula is really not the formula that you find with traditional companies or corporations, right? Where it’s like, I have a product, you give me money, then you get the product.

No, here it’s more like, here’s everything I know for free.

And then if you want to go the next step and if you want to get into the advanced things, that’s where we’re going to charge something to lead you through that.

But essentially, it has been regurgitated a million times, but you really have to provide the value up front.

That’s kind of the reason why people come in.

You just help the world.

You just tell them what you know, and then if they like it, you can come up with solutions that are for the next level.

That’s also what I did create the beginner content.

I have a lot of intermediate and advanced content on the channel just for free.

Right.

But it’s just different when you talk about something like a course.

I think there’s a lot of wrong ways to do a course, and I think many people have done that.

That’s why they got such a bad name.

I think to certain people that courses have a bit of a bad rep because so many people just hit the screen record and they just kind of like, blabber.

And it’s not really pre planned and it doesn’t really take you for a curriculum, and you don’t really get any results in the end.

Right.

But I think the right way to do it is like, okay, so you could spend like 50 hours or on YouTube watching all this, or you could get the course where I spent like months kind of organizing all my thoughts into as concise of a curriculum as I could with actionable steps along the way and resources that supplement it perfectly, not just like, oh, here’s an add on.

No, here’s the add on that you will need at step 2.3.

Because we talk about this concept and you actually need to try it, right.

If you craft that, then all of a sudden you go from needing 50 hours to needing three to 4 hours.

It’s still a lot of time, right? Because it’s like, especially my content is super concise and sometimes people are like, oh, talk slower, Igor, edit slower.

And I’m like, I don’t know, this is my style though.

Martin

Just slow down the video speed.

Igor

Yeah, exactly.

Just set it to 0.5, you’ll be fine.

Exactly.

But I think there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

And definitely for anybody looking to get into content, the right way is just start with free beginner content and give them everything you have.

Everything.

Don’t hold back.

Just like everything.

If you’re into gatekeeping, then this is just, don’t even bother.

Don’t even bother.

That’s not how this works.

That’s why all the corporate social media channels, most of them, right, there’s a few exceptions, but most of them, you don’t see big corporations having incredible YouTube channels regularly.

First of all, because there’s like no single point of focus, no person that kind of presents it.

But also they’re not ready to give away everything they have for free.

And that’s how this works.

If you’re not ready to do that, it’s probably, I don’t know, find another way.

Martin

No, for sure.

You’ve got to have that foundation, right? And that’s what we say to all the clients that we work with, where we start running advertising for them, is that you’ve got to have that foundation first.

And that’s what we look for is like someone like you that has built that audience, has built, done the hard work, hard lifting of giving away that content, creating all that time.

And honestly, one thing that’s very interesting and important distinction, one reason I really like online courses is that teachers like you have to spend a lot of energy condensing all of that knowledge and making it in a very concise, bitable sort of format.

That’s.

Yeah, as you said, there’s months and years of research and knowledge that goes into compacting something into what’s arguably a very, very low price point for the impact that you can have.

Now.

One question I have for you is, as an educator in this space, which is rapidly evolving and changing, I mean, you see it every day, how have you found that staying up to date with, I know you’ve created these courses, or you’ve sort of told me sometimes the interface changes on chat GBT and all of a sudden the content you’ve created before is not as relevant as what it once was.

How have you sort of stayed ahead with that? Have you had to make constant updates to your curriculum? Yeah, how have you dealt with that? 

Igor

That’s tricky for sure, because.

Exactly.

Now, the development event happened two days ago and they announced a complete overhaul of the interface.

It just now combines all the models into one.

So a lot of things work differently, I think multiple strategies.

There’s no really real one answer to that.

But one would be sure you can upload date, like older content, but just if the functionality is the same and the button kind of changed and the logo changed, then it’s fine, it still does the same thing.

But in other use cases, when there’s like a completely new thing, then yeah, you should probably be adding a video to kind of the advanced module.

Right.

So that’s what I’m working on right now.

Also another thing is add kind of the community aspect to it and you do, let’s say regular events or you just have a common chat room, then you can be really agile and you can really adapt.

Right.

Whereas like the video, pre recorded video, you have to redo the whole thing.

But if you’re doing what we’re doing with the course, we’re doing biweekly events so people can come and every two weeks we kind of digest all the new things that are relevant to extend the course curriculum with that.

So I think that’s one of the best options if you have like a community aspect, because otherwise, how are you going to adapt if the whole thing changes multiple times a month? How are you going to kind of talk about the news sustainably? Are you going to be reshooting the whole course like twice a month? No, you’re just going to leave the parts of it, the parts that work.

And also it should probably be designed in a way that it’s a little more sustainable.

Right.

If we’re talking like basics of crafting, like the simplest prompt, that’s not going to change.

That’s what I’m saying.

It’s like these different building blocks of knowledge.

They’re constant across time, but then if you have a community aspect to it, it allows you to keep it up to date.

So that’s really the best solution I found so far.

Yeah.

Okay.

So incorporating that sort of ongoing updates, coaching calls, et cetera, to sort of combat that, that’s good.

And be agile, be ready.

Right.

Because this update dropped and it’s like we spent the last three, four months developing a whole new framework, whole new system.

And yeah, it turns out that we were close, but not spot on with what the new chapter holds for us.

So right now we’re talking, but the team is running scripts and prompt engineering and figuring all we are working hard right now at this moment to update it to the new functionalities because, yeah, they just weren’t available two days ago, they weren’t announced and now they are.

So we got to react.

So be ready to react.

Like, do whatever you have to.

If you need full time team members, then that’s why I always wanted to go in the direction of building a team because I realized that with a space developing so far, if it’s just me or if I just get some help, then there’s only so much you can do.

There’s only so much you can do.

Right? And then we wouldn’t be talking right now because I’d be like writing a script or whatever and I wouldn’t get it done anyway.

So be agile and adjust your space.

Other spaces certainly move slower.

This is probably the fastest space in tech.

Moving space in tech.

And then tech is probably the fastest moving industry.

Martin

I know you’ve been working on some new products recently and you’ve had some updates to existing ones as well.

Tell me a little bit about those and what you’ve been working on.

Igor

Yeah, so essentially we have the course, which is, I think, absolutely fantastic for somebody getting into it.

And it covers all the basic to intermediate points that you want to cover.

Plus it comes with the community aspect.

But I think the most exciting thing that really, like this year, we had a lot of experiments and a lot of them have never seen the light of day.

The good and the great ones are all on the YouTube, or most of them are on the YouTube, but then some of them just go beyond and we just had to kind of flesh it out, which is what we did with the latest one.

And it’s essentially, I don’t know, it still kind of blows my mind because I was surprised by how well it works for myself.

But it’s a three step system to first, like, you identify a worker, employee, a character, whatever you want to name it.

We have a database, and you just pick one that is closest to you.

In the second step, you copy paste like free parts and you essentially find all the jobs that the worker could be doing with AI.

And then in step three, you just combine the first two parts and you let it do the work for you.

And that’s really cool because you can customize the character in the first step.

Right.

For example, for me, we have a category of 100 youtubers.

So I’ll just pick the one that is the closest to me and I’ll customize a few details about it.

And then in the second step, when I’m in the discovery process of all the different jobs that the worker could be doing, well, it’s going to give me exactly the jobs that I could be doing with AI.

And then you just pair the tasks, the jobs in the second step with the super rich profile of the worker in the first step.

And you just get like super high quality results.

It’s a three step process.

It’s not something that you just copy paste, it’s like free things that you need to copy paste.

Right.

But the results are really cool.

But obviously this is a little more advanced.

If you’re just getting into it, this might be too much.

It’s like, okay, so we’re doing like custom instructions and then we have a prompt generator that works with the custom.

This is like intermediate stuff.

Yeah, for sure.

But I think it’s really worth it because it’s like a system that allows you to kind of discover all the work that AI can do for you today.

And yeah, I thought that was kind of my ultimate goal.

And we tried multiple approaches of doing it.

Many didn’t work, this one did.

So we productized it and we’re fleshing it out right now.

Martin

For all the listeners out there who are considering starting their own online education course company, maybe a YouTube channel.

Educating, teaching online, what advice would you give them? 

Igor

Well, so for people who are already educating and they want to move into the digital sphere, I think one of the best pieces of advice is just record yourself in the beginning, whether it’s video or it might just be audio, right? Just like get a little mic, have it on here.

And when you’re teaching, when you’re lecturing, when you’re doing your one on one classes, just record yourself.

And then what you can do is you can transcribe it and then you can work with those transcripts.

You could even use AI to kind of analyze them, right? What could I have done better? And you can start building your curriculum from there, right? You can maybe listen back.

You can really work with those recordings because if you’re not in the moment and you have a recording, you can really reflect on what is the value that I’m communicating here.

And then it’s all about condensing that, right? So on the Internet as like attention spans are shorter and it’s definitely different than watching something on your phone.

It’s just a different experience than sitting face to face with a human.

It’s just different.

You turn off so many senses.

All you have is like the vision and the auditory sense, but there’s no smells, there’s no touch, there’s no surrounding, there’s no.

All the little factors that affect our everyday life.

The fact that there was like a bus going by, it’s kind of a shared experience.

You’re tuning all that out.

So you need to get that much more concise in your messaging.

So my recommendation would be just start with the content you’re already creating.

Record that.

Whether video or like, just turn on the iPhone and record yourself while you lecture, while you’re teaching somebody, tutoring somebody one on one, just say, look, this is just for internal use, just for me to reflect on it and then do it, then reflect on it and think about, like, okay, what of this could be valuable to others? Maybe the answer is the whole damn thing.

Maybe the whole recording.

That’s your thing right there.

Like, here’s a 1 hour coaching session on XYZ, right? So I think that’s the starting point.

Like, if you’re already teaching, just record it and go from there.

And just think about making it more concise if you can.

And if you’re not teaching it well, start and then record it.

Martin

No, great advice, honestly.

Just begin the process, right? Take that knowledge you already have and start down the process.

And I’m sure once you do that, you create that first video, then it sort of starts to spiral from there and you get better at your creation.

Igor

And one last thing to round it out is really this.

Everybody knows the first one is always going to suck, right? It’s going to be bad, and that’s fine.

That’s part of the process.

But look, if you as an educator, are not ready to accept the fact that your first creation is going to be bad, how on earth do you want to make it your life’s mission to help other people get over that hurdle of the first step? Right? That’s your whole thing.

You’re teaching people, you’re helping them to go from one point to another, but you yourself are not willing to go from not being good on camera to at least giving it a shot.

Like heck.

How are you going to motivate them? You got to lead by example.

And even if it’s just little things that they’re never going to find out.

Like, I tried recording 15 YouTube videos and it didn’t work.

And also, if you haven’t done at least 20, you haven’t even tried.

I’ll say that too.

If you did like three, four, and you gave up, you haven’t tried.

In my eyes, you haven’t.

Martin

Stick with it.

Stick with it.

Martin

I love that advice, man.

That’s really good.

So anyone that’s on the fence out there worried about it, just get started.

Do that first video and see where it takes.

Igor

It’s 100, to be honest.

Martin

To really start to get the momentum you mean?

Igor

It’s 100 till you reach a form that actually represents who you are.

Until then, there’s going be to a lot of learning, right? Even if you figure out the speaking component and the teaching component, there’s so much visually you can do.

There’s so much lighting, audio stuff.

There’s so much packaging.

There’s so much.

Okay, how do I structure the outline? There’s just so many variables that most people first hundred videos are exploration process, right.

And just know that and that’s fine.

Like, exploration process can be super valuable to people too, right? 

Martin

I mean, that’s the thing.

Think about your progression.

How many YouTube channels did you have before this one? 

Igor

Yeah, this is number five.

Martin

This is number five.

You know, people can look at where you are now with your subscribers and your viral video, but really, what’s behind that? This is just the tip of the iceberg of what you’ve put in.

So, man, that was a really fun episode.

Thanks so much for diving into such an interesting topic.

If you want to check out Igor, head over to myaiadvantage.com and also on channel as well.

Same name, right? 

Igor

AI advantage.

Martin

AI advantage.

Martin

And check it out.

Yeah.

Stay ahead of the curve and thanks for coming on, man.

It’s great.

Igor

It’s been a pleasure.