How to Hit 2M Subs in 2 Years Building an AI Newsletter | The Rundown AI, Rowan Cheung

Intro

00:00When we first started, everyone was afraid of AI replacing everyone. There was a famous quote, "AI won't replace you, but people who use AI will." I realized my audience really wanted the latest AI news. The biggest problem they face see something that goes viral and they say, "I want to try that."

00:15And they try it and they're like, "Cool, I tried it." But they didn't find anything any use of it. So, they don't have any stickiness and there's there's no use for them to use that tool. There's no use for them to actually be subscribed to it.

00:25It was a really big problem at the time because the space was moving so fast and there's so much noise. So, I kind of became the go-to person for no noise AI news and quick takes on why it actually [music] matters for the average everyday tech worker.

00:38Like any other business, content is the same. And everyone talks about verticalized AI SAS, right? Like AI for law, AI for [music] accounting. These are huge startups getting all this funny, but no one talks about verticalized content creators.

00:52So, if you are a content creator right now or you're just starting content, I would highly advise you to My name is Rowan. I'm the founder of The Rundown. [music] So, it's the largest daily annuals in the world and we also do daily AI education.

01:02We have nearly 50% open rate across all of our newsletters [music] at over 2 million subscribers. So, many people were confused like, who is this complete like zero subscriber [music] guy who got Mark Zuckerberg for Llama 3.1? How does this guy get all the good guests?

01:17The reason why I got that interview is because I'm the newsletter guy.

Why Your Content Isn't Going Viral

01:35Who am I to be talking to Margaret Zuckerberger or Sam Alman? I'm not a journalist. I never went to journalism school. Like 3 years ago, I was just a college dropout when I was still in college. [music] I was sitting a psychology lecture. My friend turned to me and asked a question about the lecture we just heard.

01:52And I vividly remember just looking at him and asking, "You [music] actually remember that?" He's like, "Yeah, I remember that. This is this is a lecture." That's when I realized I don't learn from [music] like these settings of someone just teaching me and I have to remember it, digest it, and do an [music] exam.

02:06Like I just don't learn well in that school setting. So on the side, I was starting to self teach myself things. [music] I was learning how to code by actually building websites. I learned to design by actually creating [music] graphics anytime I learned and selftaught my myself through YouTube University expand my learnings on Twitter and that's the way I was also learning content [music] u by just posting and then the chat moment happened my first thread after that I remember I think it was a day or two after [music] chatb actually officially launched to the public I

02:38wrote a thread I'm like hey here's some cool things that I'm exploring in chatbt [music] and it went super viral for there I decided let's go all on this, see what happens. I'm really curious about the space. I've been in the space for a few months already.

02:48I decided to drop out [music] and go all in on just like posting a thread every single day. And I just I thought the virality would die down, but it actually increased. And then when Twitter started going super viral, I said, "Hey, how am I going to grow a business [music] or brand off this?"

03:05And the easiest thing I thought about was just starting an email list. We had so many AI newsletter competitors when we first started and so many of

The Secret Behind the #1 AI Newsletter

03:13them used AI to write their content which makes sense like AI newsletter written by AI but we completely steered away from it and we actually did the opposite. We started putting our faces behind the newsletter and we said hey this is human generated and we made sure that our takes were like very clearly human takes.

03:29We use AI for the structuring for some parts of research but we never do it for the human part. And there's a reason for that. AI generated content just kind of has no soul and [music] people are smart. They will know when it's AI generated.

03:44The only way I see this workflow changing is if like we have chips in our brain which I don't think is going to come [music] in many many years to come. So the human loop for creativity will always be there. I think content as a whole is going to [music] have two sides.

04:00The Walmart and the Whole Foods. The Walmart will be a generated content, easily accessible. It's going to be all over social media. It's going to be funny. It's going to be personalized. It's going to be really addictive. It's not bad content.

04:10It's still good [music] content. On the other hand, some people are still going to want Whole Foods. They're still going to want to know know the human behind things. They're still going to want to know the personal takes, the person behind it.

04:21The 1% that really have the humanity are going to have even more influence. They're going to have more trust, and you're going to be build bigger brands, and you're going to be able to distribute your message even further. It's going to be so much harder to be that 1%.

04:32[music] But I think everything else in the middle dies. So if you are a content creator right now or you're just starting content, I would highly advise you to be as human as possible.

Tip #1 for 10x Viral Content

04:52If you're a complete beginner and you wanted to start content creation, I would start with asking yourself, do I enjoy talking or do I enjoy writing? I ended up being the writing archetype. So, I [music] decided to start with Twitter. I think Twitter's a good spot if you are into AI.

05:08There are research breakthroughs, there are demo videos, [music] there are papers that come out and they only get published on Twitter. They don't get published anywhere else. So, you [music] have to be very active on Twitter to be able to keep up with if you really want to get deep in the weeds and what's happening.

05:25So, there's a little hack you can do if you're not a writer and your best ideas come from talking. Because I talk to people all the time and they're like, "Hey, I just suck at writing and I don't know how to write on Twitter. I don't write on LinkedIn.

05:39So, there's a little workflow hack that I tell them they can use to start. [music] And basically, you're going to use a tool called Whisper Flow or some kind of AI transcription tool. They're really, really good. And you download your phone and [music] you can go on a walk, 2hour walk, and you just ramble ideas into these notes, [music] and it you can say uh you can say um you can do whatever you want in [music] and you can say whatever you want in this talk.

06:04And then what you're going to do is you're going to go back home, you're going to have all your notes. So it's going to transcribe these notes for you and these are raw thoughts, right? So these are your ideas. These are not AI generated ideas.

06:12So it all stems from your human experience, your human takes, your human insights. Then what you can do is you can go to a cloud project. I've trained a cloud project on my best tweets, for example. So I exported my Twitter data. I found those best tweets that performed the best.

06:26I shoved it in there and I trained it on like [music] over 20 of my best performing posts. So this cloud project is trained on my writing style. And I'll take those raw thoughts and sometimes they're really long and I'll just put it into a cloud project or that cloud project and I'll spit out a draft [music] that's like 90% ready.

06:43And again, this is AI assisted writing but is all stemmed from humanity. [music] It stems from my ideas and it knows exactly how I write. This is a really good way for average people to go from literal thought and rambling to 90% ready post.

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Tip #2 for 10x Viral Content

08:08About a year ago, all of my audience was telling me I have to do video. I agree with them. I have to do video, but I work 80 hours a week. I'm a founder, content creator, and I have a million other things going on. So, I said, "Hey, how can we turn my writing into short form video without me being there?"

08:24We decided to clone my face and voice with AI. We still use my real writing and real takes to use it as a script, and we still edit a lot. So there's a little storytelling. There's a lot of research that goes into these stories that we want to cover, but basically we take my natural writing, we put into AI avatar and AI voice, and then we add B-roll, we edit it together, and we create a compelling story for reals, shorts.

08:49The Instagram account has grown to under over 160,000 followers in the year. And this is just from this a avatar workflow that we did. But there are definitely algorithm or the hook specifically is different across platforms. Your hook for LinkedIn for example is two lines and your hook for Twitter is actually three lines or your hook for Instagram is one line.

09:16Sometimes [music] we'll take our ad copies, our best performing ad copies and we'll basically run it through Claude. We'll train a cloud project on our ad copies and then when we have new ad copies we have to create for some of our partners, we'll run it through there and we'll say, "Hey, what can create the best ad copy?"

09:32It'll give us a good draft and [music] then we'll still fully revise off that. Um, and really there's no creator school. The best way to learn is just through your own practice, but you can also look at people who are are way ahead of you that inspire you and see exactly what they're doing or possibly even asking them if you're at the level where you can and DM them.

09:51But that's what that's what I would do.

Tip #3 for 10x Viral Content

09:58We believe AI is taught through habits. There's three ways that we teach you can learn. If you do one of these, you're going to be well off. Like you're going to be major early adopter in the space. So it [music] starts with number one, which is ask yourself every day when you're doing something [music] at work, could AI do this?

10:15If you don't know, you can literally ask chat, could AI do this X [music] task? That's the prompt. Simple prompt. And like a a pro tip would be just put it writing on a sticky note and putting it on your laptop screen, but just constantly asking yourself when you're doing tedious things, could AI do this?

10:30You're going to build this mindset of like, oh, AI can do this, AI can't do this, and it evolves over time because AI capabilities, we're living in the middle of it. So, this is really the question you should ask yourself. The second step of it is [music] when you do find something that oh AI can do this, figure out the tool that's best for that specific [music] problem you want to solve and then spend a couple hours.

10:51It could be for me I do it on Sundays every single Sunday. I love testing tools. [music] You might fail. You might automate it which will be amazing. You're going to have way more time to do higher level things. [music] You might fail and that's okay if you fail because you're going to learn where AI can't do things yet.

11:07And that's what AI intuition is. knowing when and when when not to use the [music] tool when it's better than you and when it's not better than you. And then the third is just sharing your learnings. I find the best way to learn is by sharing things.

11:18That's obviously how I grew a business off of the back of that. But you don't have to post on social media. You can also share it with your team on Slack. You could share it with your mom or your dad or your friends. Just sharing what you're learning with others is going to be good not only for your own sake but also kind of become the go-to AI guy around the [music] office.

11:40And that's going to help you with career, that's going to help you with your friendships, that's going to help you uh with a lot of things in life. So, uh that's the third tip.

Creators Are the Next Billionaires

11:54I'm not into a lot of politics personally and so I'm not in the space to be able to say who is right or wrong. But you could look at someone like Joe Rogan boys, they arguably influenced the election and they're content creators. That's pretty insane.

12:08If he told a farmer 50 years ago that'll do this job called a content creator, they would grow a following online and they would be able to influence an election. That's [music] insane. I think that's only going to get crazier. It's going to be harder to get to that level of influence and to grow a brand, a personal brand to that level.

12:28So much harder with the rise of a gener content. I think those creators will be the next billionaires. Those creators will run the [music] world almost. Content creator is kind of in the best position where they have distribution, [music] they have data as in they know what the audience wants.

12:45they can survey their audience and figure out what they want and then they can create anything. And everyone talks about verticalized AI SAS, right? Like AI for law, AI for uh accounting. These are huge startups getting all this money, but no one talks about verticalized content creators.

13:00And again, that's coming from someone who is a very broad content creator, but I can tell you verticalized content is blue ocean. Nobody's [music] doing AI for law content. And someone needs to be the guy. you're gonna find lucky breaks. And when you do find them, it's your job as a content creator to just go all in on it.

13:20That means you might have to spend more than 40 hours a week. That means you might have to do [music] things that others regular jobs you wouldn't have to do. But the momentum [music] is everything. And once you find that lucky break, it's like you got to just go all in on the momentum.

13:36I think it's harder, but it's still very blue ocean because there's so many problems that need to be solved in content. So yeah, Simom is really interesting. It was a great interview. He gave really good answers to a lot of these like further out there questions.

13:51One that was particularly interesting was his zero person company Betting Pool CEO can also be replaced by an agent. So I don't know, it just brings me to like this cool. We're living in this really cool spot or period in time where it's kind of the age of the idea man.

14:08like if you have an interesting idea just go build it. Uh because things are get growing really fast, capabilities are growing fast and yeah just most amazing time to be an entrepreneur. So that would probably be my biggest takeaway. [music]