Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Basic Business AI, a podcast dedicated to simple AI strategies for businesses who don't want to get an advanced degree or hire some acronym bro. I'm your host Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media at Annabot Prime. We bring on regular business owners like you and me to discuss practical strategies, ideas and perspectives about AI without getting too far into the weeds of the tech db. AI is sponsored by Conversational Funnels, the new way to automate lead generation, qualification and appointment bookings for service based businesses. If you want more sales calls on your calendar without having to pay some expensive marketing agency or higher appointment setters, Conversational Funnels are the best bang for your buck in 2024. Download the Blueprint for free by going to conversationalfunnels.com Today's guest is Igor Kfets.
Egot is an Amazon bestselling author of the List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire. He's also the host of List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to make more money and have more freedom by leveraging the power of an email list. He's the founder of Igor Igor Solo Ads, world's top email lead generation agency. Igor specializes in helping average people break the link between their time and their income. Using high impact list building techniques, he has helped thousands of people build a wildly profitable email list without any previous experience. That's awesome. Igor. Welcome to Basic Business AI.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Thank you. It's great to be here.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Amazing to have you. So from your perspective, how is AI reshaping the future of your industry?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: So AI has.
Well, it had a tremendous impact on everything that's going on in my industry and my industry specifically is revolving around online marketing and lead generation.
So both the paid side of it, the paid ads side of lead generation as well as the organic side of it have both been impacted by AI. It's pretty much now in the DNA and the biggest impact as far as I'm concerned is happening on a few levels, one of which is now. The demand for content is much greater than before. You're expected to create content 10 times faster and it has to be of the same high quality as before. There's very little, there's very few people at this point and very few businesses at this point in my industry that do not rely on AI to create content and that create content in a 100% human and organic way. Most are now using AI in one way, shape or form or another. Whether it's to write emails, whether it's to script videos, whether it's to even like create entire webinars for me personally, you know, AI really played into my laziness and I'll explain why I say that I am the spokesperson for my business. Meaning, you know, one of the reasons why I'm on this podcast is because I'm the one to make public appearances, I'm the one to deliver presentations, I'm the one to, you know, do a webinar, etc.
And, you know, a big part of how we generate customers is through webinars, videos. We got a podcast and, you know, media, basically media which requires me to appear on camera and, or speak from behind the screen.
And as soon as AI got developed, one thing that I've done is I've. I've used AI and taught it to talk like me, both in the sense that it can write like me.
Where previously I was doing at least two hours of writing every day, now it's down to like 15 minutes every other day or so. Just because of AI being able to write like me by me feeding it a lot of my content and saying, hey, learn from this and then do like this. And then it magically does.
And the other thing that I've done, as soon as technology allowed it, which was about six months after, maybe three months after the release of ChatGPT, and that is I cloned myself, meaning that I now have video and audio Igor that can deliver content instead of me having to be there. So, for example, it got so good that I can now produce some sort of audio and send it as a voice note on WhatsApp to my wife, and she can't tell the difference that it's me or if it's a machine.
So, you know, it's kind of like in the Terminator 2, when that liquid cop used to transform into people. So we're getting there, okay, but we're not going to use it to kill people. We're going to use it to make money.
So. And I sometimes use it to get out of, like, tricky situations in my household. So, you know, points for being creative for me. But no, to be serious, though, if I need to produce a sales letter, I have a writer. If I need to deliver a video that's 15 minutes long, or VSL, also known as the VSL, where I'm selling a product or service, I load a script into AI, script written by AI into another thing that's AI, and that thing produces the VSL for me, speaks like me, and formats it into a presentation too. It'll pick out all the slides and everything. So, like I said, it really plays into my laziness. But at the same time, I guess the other end of that conversation is, is it laziness or is it the, you know, the average marketer trying or business owner trying to keep up with the demands of content production? Because I don't know if you noticed this, I don't know if you do any paid advertising right now, but for example, the, the average lifespan of an ad on Meta is now a couple of days. It used to be a couple of years. I have friends who used to have the same ad run for like three years, make tens of millions of dollars. Now for one offer, you have to produce 20 different ads. They have to be delivered by 15 different, you know, content creators. You have to have it in gazillion different formats and it has to be brilliant copy. Well, if you're a human being, there's not enough hours in your day to be able to produce so much so quickly. And at that quality, maybe one out of every 100,000 people can do it who got the experience and, you know, the track record or the talent. But the average business owner, forget about it, you can't. And you know, the amount of content you have to create at the top quality, it is just now a necessity, which makes it very difficult for business owners to keep up. And this is where AI is coming in. So while it is making our life on one hand easier by helping us produce a lot and do a lot that we couldn't do before, both personally and professionally, I also think when the entire market gets pushed into that, what happens is it increases the speed, increases the competition and others, even entire competing businesses to my own that are being created with nothing but AI and one person sort of like being behind the scenes, like the, what do you call them? The, the Riddler in Batman, right? So he can like make things happen like that.
So on one hand, I'm loving it, I'm using it in my personal and professional life. On the other hand, I am not looking forward to the next five years because it's just going to cannibalize content. It's going to increase competition, it's going to increase the amount of ad spend we have to put toward generating a new customer. But at the same time, it's really exciting because of all the new possibilities that can be created by that. For example, part of what we do right now is developing a software that can produce email marketing campaigns at a very high level, but for pennies on the dollar. So an average business owner can save thousands of Dollars that they used to actual copywriters to go and craft that stuff by hand. So I don't know if that answers your question at all.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: It does, and I love it.
Because, yes, everything has gotten faster, Our attention spans are shrinking and we're turning into goldfish.
And yes, what you say about we need to keep up because now we need more content and like, but we also need to keep the quality. Like, it's amazing that we can use AI to create content, but we need to know how to use it to actually create quality in the content and not just noise.
So I love the way you're using it and I love the way you're. You're describing everything. Tell me what, for instance, what are some of the platforms that you use?
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Right. Some of the platforms that we're using, I believe are. My team uses them. Right. So I'm again, like I said, I'm pretty lazy and I'm pretty fortunate to have money, so I can afford to hire talent. But I know we use hey, Gen 11 labs. So hey, Gen for video, where you can create an avatar of yourself that's gonna be real.
11 labs for audio. And I believe descript does the same thing. And sometimes we interchange based on what we're trying to do.
We briefly use something called latte, which would take a longer video and cut it into shorts. So we kind of dropped that because we got away from the whole shorts strategy. Just not. It's not working really well in our business. So we moved away from it.
For copy and everything copy, we use the Chat GPT. And to be honest, though, like, if I'm really honest, recently I've been using Gemini, which is Google's ChatGPT, sort of for copy, for writing marketing material, scripts for VSLs, things like that. And it's been doing a much better job, in my opinion, than Chat GPT, even though I use a premium version on both. I think Gemini is a little bit better for copy. I've also been using both ChatGPT and Gemini to help me with polishing my second book, which I'm about 30% through. So, yeah, that's. I guess that's pretty much it. There's really no, no limit where you can take this with tools. And one of the biggest problems that I ran into early on when ChatGPT got released, and all of a sudden all these software started popping up everywhere. It's like, oh, this is an image creator. This is a sound creator. This is this, this is that. All of a sudden you realize there's thousands and thousands of pieces of software.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: It's a universe of them.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: Yes, it is a multiverse of software. And I found myself going for two weeks or so from one software to another and getting super excited. Like a shiny object seeker. I would be downloading or signing up for a ton of different software. And then I realized just a big distraction from what really matters in my business, which is generating leads, turning leads into customers, collecting the payment from customers, customer support, product delivery, and then turning one time customers into lifers, which is by again and again. So it took, it took me a little like while to shift my attention away from the shiny, exciting world of AI to say, okay, out of thousands of these things, what are the five that I really need to.
[00:12:40] Speaker A: Yes, that's exactly right.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: Oh my gosh.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Yes.
So I got pretty excited.
But yeah, there's a, as you say, multiverse of platforms. And we don't need all of them. We only need maybe 1, maybe 2, maybe 5. But like not more than that.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: No, we really don't. And I think the fundamentals of what makes a business profitable and successful still hold true. Well, AI is a disrupting technology, which means it's going after, it's going after some businesses, going after some jobs. Like for example, most copywriters who are really not that good, they're sort of like beginners and basic level, they're, they're not needed anymore. You still need the high level copywriters who can synthesize ideas for promotions and really make strategic decisions. But you know, about 50% of copywriters, I think they're out of a job.
In addition, there's now things like for example, creating songs with AI, right. All of a sudden songwriters who operate on platforms like, what's that platform? I used it once where you can like hire a songwriter to write and sing a song for you. Song Finch. A really cool platform, but what takes that artist a week to do and costs like 150 bucks. You can actually do it for free with AI right now, just by typing a few words into a prompt.
It's, it's truly incredible. And I think in almost every field, if you have a business or a service that's like lower level, meaning if you're a designer and you specialize in logo creation, I think you're out. I think you're on your way out. Because I can go to ChatGPT or any of the specialized AI software that actually I can use for free and just say create 10 logos for my burger shop now. I actually done that. I have a Friend who contacted me, they're from Ukraine and they're like, I'm going to start, I want to start a place. I'm going to make burgers and they're going to be black. It's going to be a black bun. Right. So they're only going to be black burgers. Help me come up with names. I said, okay, give me a minute. I went to chat GPT. It's like my friends is starting a burger shop. They're going to be black. So give me 10 name suggestions and make sure that it's no more than three words and every word starts with the same letter. So we settled on Black Burger Bar. I think that was awesome. Yeah. Then, then it's like, okay, my friend needs a logo. Come up with a, with three variants of logos for Black Burger Bar. Then all of a sudden you've got like three variations. And I send them to my friend. They're like, oh, I like number two.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: It's like, okay, yeah, it's amazing. For free.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And then I go back and I say, hey, chat GPT. I really like number two. Give me a high resolution, you know, file of this logo so I can download it. Bam, done. This is a process for which you used to have to go hire a designer and pay that designer and go back and forth with a designer for like two weeks and obsess about it. And I know there's agencies who specialize exclusively on logo creation and they charge you $2,000 to do those. Agencies are out. We don't need them anymore.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: That's awesome. Yes.
AI is amazing for brainstorming. It just needs a little tweak sometimes. So, Igor, tell us about who you serve and how people can reach out to you.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: So I work with regular people who work regular day jobs, but they realize that no matter how much they get paid per hour, there's not enough hours in the day for them to make what they're truly worth. And also, even if they get paid like a thousand dollars an hour, there's only so many hours in the day and they can only get paid while they work. So they burn out. Now what I do is I help them start an online business where the center of that, the star of that business is their email list, which becomes a money making asset which can produce cash flow and multiple streams of income for them every day of the week. So they can send an email and make money from that email. This is obviously is a little bit more complicated than I'm trying to explain right now. There's more subtleties to it. There's more strategy to it. So if you want to find out more about how that works, I encourage you to check out my book. It's called List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire. You can get it on Amazon. In fact, if you've got Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime, I believe you can get it for free as part of that library. But you can also go to Igor's book.com and get me to ship you a physical version of that book. I will print it for free. I'll just ask you to ship it and ship it and handling. And for doing that, I will give you a $3.2K bonus package that includes the Audible version of the book, the digital version of the book, and several trainings, bonuses and templates that will help you get your email online business off the ground. So I'm doing that because if you get the book on Amazon, I will not be able to communicate to you. Amazon does not give me your email address and that's a shame because otherwise we cannot build a relationship. So instead I encourage you to go to Igor's book. Com, get the book there so you and me can start having your relationship. Plus you will get on my email list and you can see how I do the things that I do so you can model them and make money yourself this way. So that's Igor's book.com awesome.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: So we're going to wrap from here. Thanks to our guest Igor Kfets for joining us for a practical conversation about AI and its potential for business. You can learn more about what he does by going to eagersbook.com if you run a business of any size and you have some ideas or strategies around the topic of AI, we'd love to have you in a future episode as well. We interview business owners of all, obviously of all levels of experience and exposure to AI, so we can represent all voices, especially the 90% of us who are curious about AI but not trying to be tech geniuses. Apply for a future episode by going to basicbusinessai.com and one more time. If you want to solve the problem of lead generation qualification and follow up by automating it completely, download the Conversational Funnels blueprint for free free@conversational funnels.com See you next time on Basic Business AI. Oh and by the way, if you like this episode, tell your friends. See you later.
