162 | From Recording to Publishing: How Michael Katz and I Make Podcasting Easier and More Efficient

[00:00:00] Right after you record, edit, produce your fantastic podcast episode, you think the hardest parts are right behind you. But now you have the joy of having to figure out what to title the episode and how to create amazing, eye-catching SEO show notes.

[00:00:22] What if I were to tell you, I found a really easy way to do it? Welcome to the podcast where you get exclusive behind-the-scenes tips to make your own show sound truly spectacular. This is… Podtastic Audio

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[00:02:21] Elevate your podcast, delight your guests, and engage in your audience with superior quality of Riverside.fm You know, in the early days of my podcasting journey when I first got started in podcasting, literally I knew nothing about nothing.

[00:02:38] When I tell you that I really mean I knew nothing about nothing. And when we first made our very first episode, or the first 10 or so episodes, I thought it'd be super clever and super neat to perhaps maybe use these two word titles for the episode.

[00:02:57] So our very first episode, episode one was Beef and Bitmojis. We kept the theme with the same letter for each word and having two words as the title description.

[00:03:10] Now the very first episode, Beef and Bitmojis, we were talking about the new trend when it came to plant-like beef and plant-like burgers, like meatless burgers.

[00:03:23] And the Bitmoji part, we were talking about how people were putting Bitmojis on their resumes to turn in for new jobs and things like that.

[00:03:32] It was basically a two-part discussion on two different topics. And that's how we came up with having two different words in the title description.

[00:03:41] And although the word beef and Bitmoji are key words that were definitely used within that podcast episode, but having the title just read Episode One, Beef and Bitmojis does not tell you what the episode is about. And more importantly, it doesn't tell you why you should listen.

[00:04:04] And this went on for quite a while. I can't remember exactly how many episodes we did the two word titling. But at some point, I decided to add in different guests and what their topics were about and kind of weave that into the title and into the description.

[00:04:22] And I got kind of lazy when it came to writing the description of the episodes.

[00:04:26] Basically what it was is that I would take whatever the guest had in their bio and just copy and paste that into the show notes of the episode, which wasn't really that great, but it was better than nothing.

[00:04:40] But today we have these incredible AI-powered tools that can handle that stuff for us. You create the audio podcast and let AI do all the writing. It will come up with the best titles and descriptions possible, things that I would never have thought of. It creates.

[00:05:00] And the AI-powered tool which I have been using for quite some time here to make all my show notes, all my titles, all my descriptions is Flowsen.ai.

[00:05:12] While I was in New York City not that long ago, I had a chance to meet up with the CEO and owner of the company Flowsen.ai.

[00:05:21] And we were talking all about podcasting and all the cool things it can do and how AI has really helped out a lot of content creators. So the first thing I want to know is what is Flowsen.ai and how can it help us podcasters?

[00:05:39] I guess the shortest way I'd describe it is it's a platform that really can kind of take almost any audio or video file. And in this case, we're talking podcasting. So how can it take your podcast and, you know, number one, help you publish faster using AI?

[00:05:53] So how do you help develop all those really great post-production assets that you need to be really compelling and succeed? And then number two, how do you market your podcasts better?

[00:06:04] So how do you take your episodes and develop a bunch of really interesting kind of content that you are putting on different platforms to alert people to what you just did? And I guess the third thing that's related to number two is how do you repurpose it?

[00:06:17] So, you know, I always compare a podcast to a big piece of clay that you can make into a lot of pieces of pottery. I heard an analogy recently, a guy who I really agree with told me that it's a Thanksgiving turkey.

[00:06:27] Not everyone loves turkey, not everyone loves turkey, the day of. A lot of people love some of those things you make on the leftovers the next day. And so how do you also turn it into other really usable assets to grow your brand, get clients, show your expertise?

[00:06:42] And so Art Platform helps make that really easy. And I guess the last thing is we really care about like brand voice. So we want to help you not only write better in a best practice but also sound like you. Amazing man. Yeah. So FlowSend, it's FlowSend AI.

[00:06:58] AI stands for artificial intelligence. Intelligence, I'm assuming. And so in a nutshell, you take any content that's usually narrated because I've got a lot of YouTube videos that are out there that aren't narrated. So FlowSend wouldn't do anything with that, would it? It would. It could.

[00:07:16] I mean, it's definitely not like music, right? So if it's something, it's not going to tell you what's going on in a video per se that does not have spoken words. Correct. Yeah. And in a sense, that's a spoken content. Maybe it's the best way to put it.

[00:07:30] So you're right. Right. I have like videos where it's music in the background of like us doing stuff or playing with the kids and things like that.

[00:07:36] But there's not a lot of maybe a couple words spoken, but it's not like an actual, like a podcast or a narrated like video and things like that.

[00:07:44] So if your video is narrated or your podcast obviously is narrated because it's vocal audio, you would drop that file into FlowSend. And FlowSend does what with the file? Well, first it transcribes it. So first we generate a high quality transcription.

[00:08:01] We can talk more about that later, but you know, we first we do in just like an AI transcription and we think that's pretty damn good for the industry.

[00:08:09] And then, you know, basically once it generates a transcript and that should take probably no more than a minute or two, it, you know, you basically click a button and under a minute it develops out of full suite of content.

[00:08:21] That's anything from your, you know, if you're a podcaster that's your titles, your descriptions, your show notes, time stamps, your YouTube description, which, you know, a lot of times should be different from your regular one.

[00:08:33] To, you know, promotional assets here like SEO keywords, social posts, social copy across platforms, you know, blog posts, newsletters, you know, the owned channel is so important, you know, that undervalued in podcasting.

[00:08:46] And so how do we basically take that file and, you know, basically in minutes turn it into all of that content so you can go kind of promote your podcast better and create a lot of really good content from it. And that's where the short of it.

[00:09:00] And then, you know, beyond that we also help you kind of identify interesting parts in the transcript that you might want to clip or take out or, you know, make into creative assets. So really, I'll allow us to different things.

[00:09:10] Well, taking the content within the entire, let's say audio podcast here, you just take your audio podcast, you drop it right into FlowSend AI and it transcribes what you said and everything that said.

[00:09:22] I believe it also will dictate which speaker is which and you actually get to choose who is who when you type it into the transcript. So it kind of figures out this person said that that person said this, right? Well, we call that diarization in the transcription industry.

[00:09:39] Okay, okay. So when you do that now does that help it figure out the content part later? Yeah, I mean, what's really interesting about like AI and I think this is something that is underrated.

[00:09:53] But to give you like a little bit of my narrative where, you know, we've been building at itles for a while before this company. And I had started a podcast and it was to kind of support another company I was building.

[00:10:06] So I think it is a really interesting channel of content and the way to get things out there and a way to, you know, record long form content, whether or not with interesting people.

[00:10:14] And so, you know, what, what I started to see was like why I started with, right? And I was using tools, you know, I was huge Riverside and Descript and for a lot of different things.

[00:10:23] And then I'd use chat GPT to try to help me really automate that back into the process. And, you know, I'd say I'm a top 1%ile chat GPT user, a cloud user.

[00:10:34] And still I found this like huge pain point in figuring out how to like make this consistent and eliminate like hours off of that work and make it sound like me. And it just was this like annoying tedious process every single time that kind of restricted me.

[00:10:47] And I said, you know, I just can't really do it all. And I think with AI, one thing people don't realize is if I'm just going to use chat GPT myself or something like that, right? And you might, but context is really, really important.

[00:10:59] What kind of context you give it is absolutely critical in helping you to understand what is this recording in helping chunk it for you.

[00:11:07] If it's too long and making it kind of a reasonable size for the AI to understand in helping kind of reduce a lot of those like AI ticks.

[00:11:15] Right. And so, yeah, like, you know, one of the things that we embed in the platform often is we want to, you know, if you are a podcaster and you are a podcast who has guests,

[00:11:26] most more likely than not, you want the guest insights to be highlighted a bit more than your own talking when you go. Well, it depends on your guest. But yeah, yeah, well, if you have bad guess, well then fine, maybe you shouldn't be publishing it.

[00:11:40] But yeah, it's you want to showcase them.

[00:11:42] And so, you know, how do you help give the AI context of a, you know, trying to think about what the guest said instead of what the host said and trying to really help, you know, each of these things seems really incremental,

[00:11:52] but they add up to a much greater whole. And so what we want people to see when they come into the platform is first and foremost with zero customization.

[00:12:02] They should see better results than they're getting by using their own AI tool like a Claude or JetGPT or Gemini or anything else like that. So yeah, I can detect the difference here.

[00:12:12] And if they can't, you know, there's some stuff we have to work on, but I think a lot of it is like perspective and taste and what do you care about?

[00:12:17] And then what we want to do is say, look, we want to make it easy enough for anybody to come in and log into this thing and see that.

[00:12:24] I don't care how technology, literate or illiterate you are, but then have a lot of like what I'd call power user features that should be easy enough to discover that make this thing really powerful and customizable to suit your workflows

[00:12:39] and also adopt and learn your voice and the kind of things you want in there. So yeah, it's about context and it's about like learning about you.

[00:12:47] So one of the most popular like of all the features that FlowStat does, what is the most popular like three you think?

[00:12:53] Well, I mean, look, I'd say like what's really funny is you have any kind of like product led tool or you're giving a tool to people just like that anybody can buy pro consumer.

[00:13:04] There's a huge like curve in a way which is 75-80% of users are going to only be using your most basic stuff and we hear that all the time.

[00:13:13] I mean, I was just doing case studies in the past few weeks and doing customer calls and there's people who are absolutely loving FlowStat that all they do is use it to get a quality transcript and get a bunch of interesting titles and descriptions and time stamps and show notes.

[00:13:29] That's it. They're not even using any of the promotional content that we do. And it's a good thing it had that thing, right? It frustrates me because I know how powerful it can be, but I'm also proud and happy that they're getting value out of it. Yeah.

[00:13:43] It's like say that the person who buys a really fast sports car, but literally goes like the speed limit and just doesn't even like open it up or anything like that. You're like, come on.

[00:13:52] Or like I guess I'm guilty of it too because I have a four-wheel drive truck and I get, I don't think I've only taken it off road one time. So there you go. Exactly.

[00:14:01] And I think that's a really good analogy because you're like when Ford is making the Ford F-150 or whatever, they are very happy for some casual person who's doing a lot of work. They're not stopping them, certainly.

[00:14:15] They love when you come into the dealership and buy the car. Of course.

[00:14:18] What they want to do exactly what they want to do is make sure that for the professional, the technical professional coming into the dealership that they are able to withstand all of those really challenging pressure tests and be the default car. And guess what?

[00:14:32] By nature of having done that and accommodated those people, they're actually creating a really aspirational product for the casual person. Right where that person says, well I would love to be that. Or you know this person I know who's a really talented person is using that.

[00:14:48] I should buy that too. And that's kind of how we want to be right.

[00:14:52] So where we're having, we have plenty of people who are just individual creators using it and then we're doing deals with the media companies who are doing tens or hundreds of podcasts and agencies and other types of assets.

[00:15:03] And so we love that they use us and the fact that they're choosing us should indicate to the creators too. Oh yeah, this is a really good platform. Right? I think you should use this too.

[00:15:13] With any great platform, I think it has to be, it first off has to work amazingly well. It has to deliver on all fronts. It has to deliver things better than anybody else. But I also think it has to be ease of use.

[00:15:23] Think of Apple for example like the iPhone and things like that. They're fairly simple to use and they work very, very well. It's probably why they do so well. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, you're like, Apple has a gazillion apps that you can go do on it.

[00:15:36] Or you could just literally have one screen of apps and it's, and you're like, this is gorgeous. Right? I just use my Apple Notes app. You know what I mean? Okay, fine. That's great. But here's what you can do if you really want to soup this thing up.

[00:15:48] And so, yeah, I think we want to make it that way. And it's harder of course as you get more requests and people want certain things of how do you keep it clean?

[00:15:55] You know, we get, we get calls from people who are like, I love how clean it is. How would it be dirty? I don't understand. What's a dirty AI platform? No, just like, no, I just mean it's like busy, you know, like, oh, it's like too busy.

[00:16:06] There's too many features, there's too many bells and whistles that I have no idea what's going on. And I'm like, well, those are the hair. You just don't know about them necessarily. We try to make it look simple at least for you. And I appreciate the layout too.

[00:16:17] I appreciate that you do put the first thing you can get to the content section. After you've uploaded your transcript and all that, you've made the content section side of it all. The first thing it comes to is the examples of titles.

[00:16:29] I think having a good title for the episode really is probably one of the most important things when creating a podcast episode is having a really good title and having good titles help get people to press play.

[00:16:43] Yeah, and look like I'll be the first person to like say, I'm biased because I'm like, I know how I would say everything's important. You know what I mean? Like, oh, it's really important to have this and that and a million different things.

[00:16:56] But of course at the end of the day, that's a lot of people are looking for. And the hardest challenge there, Chris, is everyone is comfortable with different styles.

[00:17:05] And let's say you go to YouTube and you might find some really popular creator who's talking about this one weird trick made me $10 million. Now does that video title convert views? Probably. You know what I mean? People will click on that kind of stuff.

[00:17:21] But I'd say like, you know, 90% of people are not willing to publish things that look like that. That's just not their personal brand, their voice.

[00:17:28] So we have to kind of toe that line always of saying what is the best kind of objective neutral one that we think is going to be really good and we can look at your transcript and try to understand what's the tone of your podcast or asset in general.

[00:17:39] And then you can really allow you to customize that and put in things of like next time and this time I really want it to look more like XYZ. I want it to be more like Beatty. I want it to be more serious. Right?

[00:17:50] And then it will be more like a good idea to use it and help you get to that really quickly. Right? So you can set it and forget it. And it learns as it goes.

[00:17:58] So every time you use it, does it kind of like take off the last time you used it? Like what things you put into it? Yes.

[00:18:04] We just added a bunch of features around that recently where what we've always had is a few different things, which is number one, the ability to ingest your examples. And it might be a blog post or your newsletter or titles. Right?

[00:18:19] And we want to ingest those and imitate the style that you like. So what have you done before? Now might be punctuation. That might be just tone. It could be capitalization, right?

[00:18:31] It could be a whole list of different things about all the different ways that we write and talk. And so we've always been able to learn from those. You put those in one time and it'll remember you forever. No way.

[00:18:40] You keep up with those over time if you want. So you'll say like these are right in totally automates your workflow because you don't have to teach a custom GPT or, you know, what do I look like? It's a set it and forget it.

[00:18:51] And so for people who are producing multiple podcasts, and this is what I talk about like scaling, they can have different projects with different voices. Really? Different workflows. Yeah. So you might be producing a sports podcast and you might be producing a business podcast.

[00:19:05] Those are looking very different in terms of probably the way you're styling things and the links you have to put into your descriptions. And all of that.

[00:19:11] So we want to help manage people, manage multiple things because we put in different kinds of assets and to not just podcasts. And so the brand voice can be different across those.

[00:19:20] And then, you know, recently, and what other thing we've had for a long time is the ability to chat with an output. And I think that I could do that. I didn't know you could do that. Yes.

[00:19:31] I even get on the phone sometime but um, but you can chat with that but in sec every single little output. I can chat with it and I can, I think of it almost like speed editing. So I'm like, I want more variations of this title.

[00:19:42] I want more, you know, I want these to sound more like this. And if you like what you see, and this was a newer feature we had recently, if you like what you see, you said this is better.

[00:19:51] What you could basically say is add this to my preferences. ModifyMap. I find the future as well. Right. So, you know, the chat was like local, I guess I would say, but we need to know that you liked it better. Right.

[00:20:03] And if you didn't like it as much, you know, do we need to know that I like that better? Okay. Great. So we have a very simple button you click and basically it starts to like learn your preferences over time and you're adding to that roster.

[00:20:13] So we want this platform to be more valuable for you the longer you use it. Great. That sounds fantastic. I mean having, having long term success, long term customers is always a win-win for any business if you ask me. So yeah, that's great stuff.

[00:20:27] So we're talking all text based stuff here. So it doesn't do anything video related or anything like, like that. Right. It's all just, just physically text on the screen. Yeah.

[00:20:37] And there's a lot of me I'd say like I look at it into is like flow send is just as two things in heart, which is number one. It's an analyst. It can analyze your audio or video. It can, you know, tell you about key points in there.

[00:20:51] I can tell you anything about the recording itself. That's one thing. So it's an expert analyst like think about your best possible in the world assistant who can understand all the context behind what happened here and tell you everything about it. Nice. Number two, it's a copyright.

[00:21:05] And that's where we focus a ton of energy and effort producing really quality copy. And we still have plenty of room to go as we all do, but that's been a huge focus.

[00:21:15] And that's my problem with a lot of these tools before there was some in this podcasting space. And of course there's like the JetGPT engineering ones. And I just found that they weren't really up to the quality bar that I set for myself.

[00:21:25] And that's not to say that I'm some sort of snob, but I love writing and I thought, you know, probably whatever we develop here will be useful and relevant for anybody in the space,

[00:21:35] but probably from 90 plus percent, 90 percent of people, any other thing is probably fine for them. They might not notice the difference initially. Yeah. That's okay. I got to accept that.

[00:21:47] I do care for those who really are thinking about this stuff and definitely companies and agencies are definitely thinking about that. And then I'd say serious content creators are too. We want to be the preferred tool for them in terms of customizability and personalization and just overall quality.

[00:22:03] It's kind of like, you know, when you see it type of thing. So are there any other outputs that you have not put into those that you're thinking about putting in there?

[00:22:12] I know you have the Twitter thread and you have a LinkedIn post one, the blog post one, the newsletter one. Is there something that's another maybe? I mean, I wonder if there's one.

[00:22:22] I mean, I know you could be one of this generic posts that you can go across like multiple type of like Facebook and things like that. Yeah. So well, I guess two things.

[00:22:32] One, I realized I didn't finish the kind of like video question, which is we also want to help you identify the relevant video clips, et cetera. We've seen some mixed quality with some of the video platforms.

[00:22:41] And so we didn't want to, you know, put out something half-assed ourselves around that maybe later, I would say.

[00:22:46] But but essentially we do a lot of people still love us because they help them find those clips faster and they do want to edit themselves just at a very high level. So I'll say that number one. Okay. Yeah.

[00:22:57] Around the outputs in the platform, one thing that people, you know, we need to be clear that people don't realize today is we do have like an existing lightweight library of additional ones that you can put in.

[00:23:07] Now those are, you know, we have a huge update coming in the next few weeks where we will add like a much bigger library of those.

[00:23:16] And the reason we don't have them in the content tab that you see by default is because we don't want to overwhelm people. It doesn't make sense. People will be extremely overwhelmed by tens and hundreds of outputs. Yeah.

[00:23:30] But we do add them in our on the top right of every of the content of them. And again, we need to make this clearer to people. Not everyone has time to learn is you can add additional ones.

[00:23:40] You can create your own and you can ask the platform for anything you want at or you could choose something from the existing library.

[00:23:47] And so a lot of those that we're putting in the library are ones that we've used to success or that we've seen customers use to success. And actually one thing that we are officially launching as we record this podcast is our community, our user community.

[00:24:02] And what we want to continue to do with the user community is as people share tips and tricks and things that are working for them,

[00:24:08] we can also add those to the platform over time so that everyone can leverage the collective output and expertise of other people using the platform. And so we're already adding some of those today, but we want to really suit that up. So is it very customizable then?

[00:24:23] So for example, if I wanted to only use like four of the outputs, right? It's the only ones I use every time. Can I just push the other ones out of view so I do only have the four to work with?

[00:24:34] Yes, absolutely. So you could already do that before. Well again, some of the stuff needs to be more discoverable. But then literally as we speak today, and this should maybe show you the speed at which we're shipping, even though we're a young company,

[00:24:49] today we added the ability to change the order of your entire feed, content feed based on what you want and remove them in a much simpler way. Easy. Nice.

[00:25:01] And so, you know, you could always toggle them on and off, but one reason we wanted to add removals is because a lot of times people want to experiment with custom outputs. And maybe they said, you know, I actually didn't really like that. I didn't want that.

[00:25:12] And so can they just delete them more easily? So again, we're trying to make it highly highly customizable. But we want it to be simple enough that even if you never ever ever or someone who thinks about customization, you're still getting value out of it.

[00:25:24] That's great. That's good stuff. So so in a nutshell, basically if you need a LinkedIn post based on this podcast episode, you have that available. If you need a Twitter thread X thread, they call it now. You have that available.

[00:25:38] And if you if you want actually like really good show titles for this episode, you can physically have those and you can change them up. There's I think there are each output. I believe there's like is like five. There's maybe five different things you can do.

[00:25:54] One is like make it more casual. One make it more serious. I think the other one is like longer shorter and think the other one was like just change it.

[00:26:02] But I think even with that, you can still type in examples of keywords or things you want to put in that like for a title.

[00:26:09] For example, I've done that where I said, OK, create a title, but make sure it uses this phrase or this keyword in the title and will still create that. Yeah, I that's a board talking about around chat, which is those things that you can do.

[00:26:21] Those are just examples. We're trying to almost guide, you know, like I said, it's so hard to guide people sometimes in terms of the things they can do. It's a problem of like imagination, maybe is the way I'd suppose it is like, you know, not met.

[00:26:32] And most people don't have time to think about this stuff. They got other jobs at the time, maybe 90% of the time. And then, you know, even if they don't, they're kind of like, I just need this thing to work and move quickly.

[00:26:43] So we put in those examples of like making sure to make it longer, make it whatever, highlight these things because we want to get their minds rolling. But you could really put anything in there.

[00:26:51] And so we've seen incredibly creative use cases of people customizing that really interesting ways. Yeah. I love it, dude.

[00:26:58] I love the hardest part for me before even, you know, use flow, said before even use that I was using using chat to BT to kind of give me ideas. Like give me 10, like two, 10 titles for this episode about blank, blank and blank.

[00:27:12] And it doesn't even hear the episode. So just based on what I've told it so far without going through the entire transcript, just based on what I told it, it's going to come up with some things.

[00:27:19] And they're meant to always be accurate because it doesn't, it's not pulling things from the episode because it doesn't know what the episode is. But with yours actually knows what the episode is. It actually hears the episode.

[00:27:30] So actually based on the things that were physically said in the episode, it's going to make a great title. I think it's amazing. Yeah, I think that's kind of the point. And again, there's always room to grow.

[00:27:41] But what we want to do is really be the best to understand the context of what you're putting into the platform. And on a good video is a really funny beast, of course. And I think, you know, some of these generic solutions are really bad at those.

[00:27:54] You know, on a relative basis because it's just a very interesting format. I think it's the most interesting format possible. And clearly you agree given how passionate you are about podcasting and how much you invested in it.

[00:28:05] But it's one of like the last bashings of original content that makes sense. And where AI really shines, AI can be fine at producing, you know, something from the ground up. It'll produce something fine, mediocre, I would say.

[00:28:19] But where where it shines is in repurposing and remixing original content. And then when you layer additional expertise on top of that, we want to layer expertise into the platform so you don't have to think about it. You don't have time to be an expert.

[00:28:34] That's where you really start to cook as they say. Speaking of AI experts, I keep hearing the big buzzword is like an AI prompter. Is that a new career or something? Like how much prompting does it go into creating something like this? A lot. A lot.

[00:28:50] And it's not like one prompt, it's like chaining them and doing many things, you know, maybe behind your titles. There might be many different things, many different steps. So, and again, like not that you want to expose the complexity. It's kind of funny.

[00:29:05] I don't know if you remember. It was a study done a bunch of years ago about kayak.com, which is so popular for a while. It's a book, you know, so it was the popular one.

[00:29:15] And one thing they always talked about was it actually, they generated the results immediately right after you searched. But if you have usekive.com, you know that they really generated them kind of slowly. Like it took 10, 15 seconds of like a loading bar before they got to the results.

[00:29:32] And from everything that was out there, that was intentional. Where kayak wanted to make what they were doing. They wanted to almost show you, hey, this is hard. So they made it intentionally slower than the platform actually was.

[00:29:46] Or else maybe you wouldn't value the work they put into it from a technical perspective. Interesting. And I always find that funny because we definitely don't want to make it more complex than it seems. But you hope people appreciate it and understand the work that goes into it.

[00:30:01] And if there's someone who can't do that, yeah, great. Maybe they're not a good user, honestly, that they can't use it. They can get a good value out of them. But if they want to use something else or think there's something else, it's just fine. Great.

[00:30:13] I'll use a GPT bot or something like, okay, great. I won't stop you. But I wouldn't have started this company because if I didn't think that there was an opportunity, even for people who sort of thought they were middle tier experts.

[00:30:27] This is not only limited to YouTube and podcasting. I just thought about this. If you were going to college and when you're in college, a lot of people pull out their recording devices and they record the lecture and things like that.

[00:30:42] That audio for that lecture, you could drop into Flow Send and then you can spit out like all the best keynote parts or all the best what I mean. I guess you can do this kind of the same thing, but not publish it,

[00:30:52] but just have those notes all kind of broken down, right? Yeah, it's really funny. You said that someone says that already. No, no, I'm laughing because we have, you know, look, we think about this stuff all day, obviously.

[00:31:07] And, you know, we continue to build this technology that of course, you know, podcasting is a primary use case. We have people doing other things with it. We have people putting in webinars and events.

[00:31:18] And, you know, one funny thing I'm doing with it just as another example is I am creating Flow Send's case studies. Interesting. Using the platform. How am I doing that? I am doing calls with customers. We are having 30-minute to hour-long calls with them.

[00:31:34] And I already have created my case study template in Flow Send. Here's the different outputs I want. I have my kind of like custom props set up of here's the Spornut.

[00:31:43] I have examples of what I think it looks like in terms of sounding like I wanted to sound. And I just plug those calls in and it outputs them right there. And you'll see that. Now, I'll put them on the website in a few weeks.

[00:31:54] I'll be here too or something just more about getting to it. But it makes it so, so easy. I mean, it's truly incredible.

[00:32:00] And so the course thing is something that I have thought about a lot of how would this be implemented as a separate application more jointly on a college campus. Because again, we've built so much technology to support that. It's more about like a front-end kind of thing.

[00:32:15] But you're like, well, what if one person in the class uploads the recording and suddenly that becomes part of everyone's database? And they can shout that. Well, yeah, I mean it could go for business meetings and things of that sort.

[00:32:26] Or it can go for pretty much anything that's physically recorded, whether it's audio or video.

[00:32:30] So I guess if somebody even had their iPhone out and they're just recording the video part, could you take that file from the iPhone and drop it in there and do the same thing with it? I'd do that already today. Oh, look at you man. One step ahead.

[00:32:43] Yeah, I mean, I am like I am the I am the number one test case. I think for us what you're alluding to here. And I think it's interesting is like, yeah, some people are never going to even think about the stuff.

[00:32:52] But how do we make these like different templates and use cases really easy for you to do when you come into the platform? So you can see that and we can give you those ideas if that makes sense. Right.

[00:33:05] And how many templates can you physically load into a FlowSend account? Unlimited. Is it really unlimited or is it like okay, it could be a cap on it, right? It's got to be a cap. No, no.

[00:33:17] Well, look we obviously have costs in our business beyond the people and that's something. We also have a costless money, whether it's transcription or then putting on content. And so we have to either, we had to choose how we're going to price this thing.

[00:33:36] Like well, some platforms charge based on how much content you create. They have all these credits and you have AI credits. And that really never made sense to me. It's not something that kind of sticks in someone's mind as like an average person.

[00:33:50] Really almost nobody thinks about things in those ways. And so we were basically like, well charge based on minutes because that means you're like a serious uploader. Like, you know, whether you're very consistent podcaster or you know, very prolific or company.

[00:34:03] But we don't want to charge people based on the outputs they get because our belief is you should be squeezing every last drop of value out of every single thing that you were putting out there. Absolutely. It took time for you to record something.

[00:34:15] It took time for you to create anything to even record a note in your phone that takes time to record a podcast, to do a webinar. As soon as that you should be getting the maximum possible. We do not want to charge you for that today.

[00:34:26] It's like, that's a win-win outcome. Yeah, it costs us money but guess what? In the long term benefiting the community, benefiting the user, it'll come back around. We know it will and we'll get better. Yeah.

[00:34:39] So to charge per minute of actual audio or video, whether it is either or not the physical size, I guess now based on that, what is the limitations of how much files? How big of a file could someone dump into Flowsend?

[00:34:54] Could it be a 4k, 8k video or no? 10 gigs is the limit. That's per file or? Per file. 10 gigs. I mean, I don't know what a 4k video is. No lots.

[00:35:06] No one has had the problem and no one has said to us that my file did not upload because it was too big. So, and I saw some platform in our space, you know, in general, announced like we can now accommodate 2 gigabyte videos.

[00:35:19] And I was like, that's jump change. Look at you. That's dead since the beginning. Now of course, like that's not ideal for you because number one, as you mentioned, we're not like trying to read video and interpret what was set in there. Sorry, what's in the video?

[00:35:35] So you'd be just the same for the most part today, uploading an mp3 as you would an mp4 or something else.

[00:35:43] But you might add something stuff in the future around that so we don't want to stop you and also it's just slower to upload on your side because it's your upload speed of your internet.

[00:35:51] So the smart thing to do, I guess if you are a video YouTube content creator and you say, I got to do everything 4k all day. I want the best video and all the best stuff. But if you can make a super like what is the base?

[00:36:05] What is below 4, what is below HD levels like 4 at 480 or whatever it is quality? If you can make a really low quality version of that same content just so you can upload it into Flowsend wouldn't things move much faster for you.

[00:36:18] Talk about data and things like that but still keep your 4k video version that you can put on YouTube. So you just want to get the transcript just so you can get the Flowsend cool stuff.

[00:36:28] Again, you can still upload it into our platform but I even have like a little on my Mac I have a little right click thing automation that I say like convert this video to an mp3 and before I put a lot of our stuff in. So anyways.

[00:36:43] It probably makes it much faster. I would assume that a 4k video 20 minute 4k video uploads much slower than say a 20 minute mp3 audio. Again, it's not a restriction of Flowsend.

[00:36:55] It's about the local your internet basically is what we are restricted by and it's truly just your internet. But we also I mean we upload YouTube videos really quickly. So if you even upload your 8k YouTube video into our platform it goes super fast.

[00:37:09] Right from YouTube right to go through your computer first. No, you can upload YouTube links today. Wow, check that out.

[00:37:17] Now have you taken a YouTube video that's on YouTube with already get YouTube's transcript because YouTube already transcribed stuff for you automatically you know and have compared it to Flowsends and what have you seen? I was better.

[00:37:31] I guess I would say like more accurate with the words and things like that more accurate. Yeah, more accurate. Definitely more accurate right and again that's you know.

[00:37:41] We've had an interesting debate about that recently in the company because we want to provide the best possible AI transcription that you can get.

[00:37:50] Now we have developed a proprietary process that is not released to customers today for a variety of reasons and one of them is that we love to have a little bit of human auditing but to produce some of the most accurate transcripts we've ever seen.

[00:38:06] And the reason we didn't really advertise it is you know it's just hard to compete in that market or you know get brand recognition and we're building something different and we think it's more valuable in a lot of other ways.

[00:38:16] But we've had some customers come to us recently and ask us if we have kind of human transcription and what that looks like and we've gotten actually a lot of really interesting momentum based on that and potential deals coming in the pipe where we can charge it all less and make it even better than they have today.

[00:38:35] So it's interesting like we find a lot of people don't you know as you probably see on YouTube plenty of people don't even upload their own transcript.

[00:38:41] They just upload and YouTube does their own thing or they upload something they just got from another platform but you know for those that really care about their transcript and want to upload it somewhere else and it to be really clean.

[00:38:53] We also are starting to provide services for that too. So it's a funny question you asked. Yeah I've never been being a fan of transcripts because I personally have never really used them to look at well I'm not ever consumed them.

[00:39:04] What's to say that really and I guess it comes in handy when you're trying to create content based on the transcript like flow send does. Yep it's absolutely a necessity to get really good content to come out of this podcast we created.

[00:39:18] It really needs to understand what was said in the audio and has to get that pretty accurate as accurate as possible can.

[00:39:26] Yeah that's what we try to do as good as possible on the platform and a lot of times in the process of giving additional context to the AI around the transcript that was generated.

[00:39:36] It'll actually be able to understand a lot of the things that was there and so even if you have errors in your transcript it generally does not affect your outputs.

[00:39:43] So that's you know some of we've had to tell some customers because they're like oh I do need to correct everything and it's like absolutely not. It'll still produce highly highly accurate and engaging content.

[00:39:54] So for podcasting here speaking here you do have any advice that you'd give like podcasters or considering integrating like AI tools like flow send or other ones into their production process. Yeah I mean I got a high level like don't be stubborn.

[00:40:10] You know I'm a firm believer in like imperfection number one and then releasing in perfect things but at the same time I do think you know it's worth investing a little bit of money and time into what you're doing if you care about it. Value your own time.

[00:40:26] And so I always thought about how to strike that balance myself because I'm really cheap and when I started I was like well just use whatever chat GPT subscription I have and I'll get a software maybe to record with someone else and beyond that you know some a little bit of editing paying for that but beyond that you know nothing.

[00:40:42] I think what I realized pretty quickly was that's going to create a lot of churn and people talk a lot about that you know that most podcasts don't make it to 10 episodes and takes a special kind of person to get past that

[00:40:57] and I think one of the reasons is like you either invest too much and you're out of money or you don't invest enough.

[00:41:04] You know invest enough you're like I just paid out agency $6000 for episode to like what okay what are you doing you know this is like again I'm not going to get our wife from that that you're not giving yourself a chance or you don't invest anything you do it all yourself and you're taking too much time and you're totally

[00:41:23] drained and it takes consistency to build an audience and to find your voice a little bit and so my advice to people is focus on using relevant tools to clean your audio buy some equipment that helps make it better for you.

[00:41:41] I do the research you know for your if you have guests on right you know try to ask questions and have a perspective and you know again invest in just like some of the basics things that basic kind of AI tools that are out there to you know clean audio and maybe breaks and all that kind of stuff

[00:41:57] but don't stress too much over editing every little piece of content and editing things down people listen to Joe Rogan that's the most listened to a podcaster basically the world and he has like four hour episodes.

[00:42:08] Again it's different but it's relevant worth thinking about of like hey well people aren't hanging on every word be easy on yourself.

[00:42:18] Try to be consistent in releasing get something out there and then try to actually work on that kind of like post production stuff that you that is tedious and that you ignore and that flows helps with because that's going to help you try to get more reach and make that investment worth it.

[00:42:34] I think it's kind of underrated people to think about that like be purposing and marketing aspect quite enough they just assume that people are going to find them. Yeah, I built it out there they should listen.

[00:42:45] And it's like podcasting the joke I make sense like podcasting is the least viral form of content ever invented. It's like it mostly lives on like non algorithmic platforms. And so I was really going to search for your thing.

[00:42:59] And they heard about from their friend or they saw you on another platform talking about this.

[00:43:03] And so, you know focus on this conversion and try to like just build a very simple stack of like maybe an editing tool that has a little bit of AI in it if you don't really know how to like control audio and you don't have money to hire somebody.

[00:43:16] And then find a tool that can help you in that post production and marketing process that can just help automate some of that out.

[00:43:22] Yeah, I know that AI and there's a lot of audio editing tools that when I jumped into this there wasn't much of anything that I knew of.

[00:43:29] I had to figure this out the hard way how to do this kind of stuff and you know through trial and error you figure things out and I think one thing that we were really struggling with that I now looking back probably was the titles and descriptions like I didn't really

[00:43:42] have great decent titles and descriptions so probably episode 150 or whatever it was way beyond like way past I should have and I just I just thought I just thought probably I mean a lot of mistakes you know when you first start off in podcast and we all make a lot of mistakes

[00:43:57] same thing with YouTube too we all make a lot of mistakes. We all kind of learn from those mistakes but I think one of the mistakes is like thinking that just because you recorded it and you put it on to even Apple podcast for example there's no guarantee anyone's going to listen to it.

[00:44:09] There's no guarantee it's going to be found and so what would flow said and tools like flow send help create amazing titles to help get people to press play.

[00:44:19] And I think a lot of it is with SEO keywords and SEO type stuff which is another beast if you don't know what you're looking for how do you how it even works how to create amazing show description and you know even even even with something simple like like a post on Facebook or Instagram or

[00:44:37] wherever having you know write keywords and then maybe even you know hashtags and it's another thing that flow send does what I love so great as it does SEO keywords but what I have done as I've said turn these into hashtags so I can use these on places like

[00:44:52] LinkedIn and Instagram and places like that because that's another thing I think having the right hashtags does help put you in from the right people.

[00:45:02] Yeah absolutely it's like it's all been increasing your odds in this whole like Internet game and my kind of thesis today is you really can't like AI and editor and a content editor when you can like hire somebody you can use AI but it's going to be kind of crappy just being honest I've

[00:45:22] tried different things it's really hard you got to have your own voice and perspective.

[00:45:26] Now it can help you with audio quality and things like that but not content and what we want you know people who care about podcasting they care about content they're putting something out there they're putting their voice out there.

[00:45:37] We want them to have as much time to focus on that kind of core content and be able to automate everything else to the extent possible.

[00:45:44] And the one thing I think is like a misperception and I was talking to a big podcaster you know Hodges of thousands down and up a son at least maybe millions just yesterday and he's like well you know just I feel like we should spend

[00:45:59] you know more time on marketing not less when we were talking about photos and and my whole thing was no I think we're actually in incomplete agreement.

[00:46:11] The problem is that most high tools out there to junior and so you think well I'm not going to just turn it over to them and so when I say automate I don't mean spend no time.

[00:46:22] Yeah if you want to do that sure but I mean how do you get the outputs that you really care about and want and have even more time to think about it is all these things I kind of left on the on the floor before that I would never had times do.

[00:46:35] And now I really want to imagine here so I promote this thing if I could and you put you know kind of go in and set it and forget it so I think people should spend more time on that stuff and then I'll have as much time as possible to spend on their core content because that's people are going to listen at the end of the day.

[00:46:49] Is it good is it compelled.

[00:46:51] Right I mean no matter how much I was going to hear you spent money on no matter how great clean your audio is the matter of all that stuff if you don't have anything good to say or any content and valuable or anything interesting to say then no one's going to come to in the first place.

[00:47:05] So exactly and again that's not to say you need to put too much pressure on yourself and in one episode. It's not easy. You need to give yourself time to find your voice find your perspective.

[00:47:17] I hear people too many people like pre planning and I do it myself.

[00:47:21] I mean I'm starting a new podcast after kind of you know I had a podcast that support all business of mine and still been releasing episodes from that but I wanted to start up you know kind of like a live series for flow side and I just kind of put it off forever.

[00:47:35] And I had someone I know who I really wanted to have on and he's like let's just record it now. I was like no I don't know I got a plan of he's like stop.

[00:47:44] So people get people get in their own head and that includes me and I know like I've done this before and so you know don't be too perfectionist about it all.

[00:47:52] Yeah, I know I get the feeling to I know the same way because because you would not believe how many times you're on podcast or audio.

[00:47:59] I've had to retake an episode like I just like the way that way I was doing it or I didn't like the way I was you know presenting on the microphone and I would do take after take after take and I'm like what are you doing you know like like I make it look easy but there's a lot of trial and error behind all of this to make sure it's the great

[00:48:17] And I know that sometimes when you get out of your own headspace and just relax and he just get in there and do your thing and it's great. It's a wonderful thing.

[00:48:26] I think tools like flow send help take the things that you've already created the podcast you've already made and it just takes it and it just gives you all these outputs that you can share and tag along with it.

[00:48:38] Like for me is always the description was hard to figure out or what are the keywords or what's this episode about in a summary like I don't know. If you're talking with your buddy about 15 different things.

[00:48:49] What do you title that because you've talked about 15 different things and flow send will help figure out the best things that it thinks should be maybe the title about that thing.

[00:48:58] So I think it's great for the kind of stuff because creating the audio for me seems to be the easiest part of this whole podcasting process and the hard part for me is the thing you just created. What do you do with it?

[00:49:09] How do you make sure it's someone else finds it. And I think flow send is fantastic for that stuff.

[00:49:15] And though yeah like there's one thing that I show people sometimes like I you know like to create posts after podcast about what or the top you know piece of advice or top insights from the guest. And let's say that I record my episode.

[00:49:31] I want to do that myself. What I'd have to do is literally read the entire transcript listen two times marked out every single one and I need to I need to know what I'm looking for in the first place. That's really hard.

[00:49:43] If I what I can do is I can upload an episode of flow send and I can you know create a little custom prompt and say hey tell me the top five insights from this guest. And it produces that back to me in five seconds.

[00:49:54] And it's usually pretty good stuff too.

[00:49:56] It's stuff that you don't usually have to like almost directly post it like like then and and that's without even like adding examples and first or doing other kinds of personalization and so why I say that is because that is almost impossible for a human.

[00:50:10] You need to give some other tasks to go listen to that entire thing. Unless you told him it before and then it would still be really hard. So that's that's my entire thing with all this.

[00:50:19] Hey I do is like can focus on the content focus on sound like you want to sound focus on talk about the content you want to and use other tools to go figure things out for you and use trial and error to find out what you like and give yourself the best odds of success.

[00:50:34] Whatever that means to you. Maybe that means more listens. Maybe that means more clients. Maybe that means having more fun. Yeah, definitely I agree on all those.

[00:50:43] Well Michael this has been fantastic having you stop by today man I really appreciate you spending your time with me talk all about flow send when I absolutely love flow send the user for every episode.

[00:50:53] I've been using it since probably first talked to you or whatever it was a while back and it's been a great great platform for me and for any podcaster or even a YouTuber out there that needs to create like all the text based stuff around the content.

[00:51:08] They already created. It's amazing man. So where can everybody find out about you and flow send. Yeah, I mean we're at flow send dot AI. I'm on Twitter Miguel cats. I'm on LinkedIn.

[00:51:22] And so Michael and cats I you know the whole those two different things can find me there. And then of course you're you can try out flow send.

[00:51:30] And if you want to talk about some of the more advanced stuff you want to custom demo or help us, you know, get you set up. We're happy to do that too because we want to see people successful and really succeeding off of that. That was fantastic.

[00:51:43] It was so great being able to meet Michael in person sit down in his office see where the company actually resides right there in the middle of New York City. What a great and wonderful experience. It was awesome.

[00:51:57] So if you are struggling or perhaps maybe your show descriptions are a little lackluster, they don't really get somebody to press play. That's really what it's all about.

[00:52:07] It's getting that person that new listener to see your title of your episode and say yes, I want to press play on this one because this one is speaking to me. Well then check out some of these AI tools including flow send dot AI.

[00:52:22] Hey, thank you so much for listening all the way to the very end of the episode.

[00:52:27] And because you listened all the way to the very end, I'm going to give you first dibs on my exclusive brand new offer I have as of right now, like right now, right now.

[00:52:39] I'm going to be doing personal one on one coaching for any podcaster that's either struggling with their podcast or wants to elevate their podcast, or maybe somebody doesn't know how to start a podcast. They need help just figuring out the basics. I am here to help you out.

[00:52:59] One on one coaching is now available and there will be a special link in the show notes of this very episode where you can schedule a call with me. And because it's me doing these virtual calls one on one, space will definitely be limited.

[00:53:15] That's why I gave you first priority. I hope to see you soon and until next time, happy podcasting.