Austin Armstrong / CEO of Syllaby. Digital Marketer. Millions of Followers on Social Media

Austin Armstrong has mastered the art of digital marketing, video content, and AI automation.

From MySpace to millions of followers, he’s built multiple seven-figure businesses and now helps creators streamline video production with Syllabi.

In this episode, he shares how AI-powered faceless videos are changing the content game, how to monetize short-form content, and the truth about the TikTok ban’s impact.

Don’t miss this deep dive into the future of social media and AI marketing!

5 Key Takeaways

1. How AI is transforming content creation
2. The rise of faceless video marketing
3. Monetization strategies for short-form content
4. The impact of the TikTok ban on business
5. Why AI-driven automation is the future

Signup for Syllaby: https://syllaby.io/?via=voppa
Discount Code: Headsmack

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Austin Armstrong is a digital marketing expert, public speaker, and two-time seven-figure entrepreneur. He’s the CEO of Syllaby.io, an AI-driven platform that helps content creators generate and publish videos in minutes. With over 4,000 videos on TikTok and millions of followers across platforms, Austin is a leader in short-form video marketing. He’s also the host of the BusinessTok podcast and the founder of the upcoming AI Marketing World conference, where he brings together top minds in AI-driven marketing.

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Paul Povolni (05:39.992)
Hey, welcome to the Heads Mac podcast. name is Paul Pavolny and I am here with Austin Armstrong, another misfit. And we're going to be having a great conversation today. Austin is a lifelong digital marketer, public speaker, two times seven figure entrepreneur, host of the podcast, Business Talk and the CEO of Syllabye, an AI startup that helps content creators create, schedule and publish videos in minutes. Austin has posted over 4,000 videos on TikTok.

tripling his own business revenue and thousands more across his clients accounts. Austin has leveraged his success on TikTok to gain millions of followers across every social media platform. He loves sharing the strategies that have worked for him to empower you. How you doing, Austin man?

Austin Armstrong (06:27.192)
Paul, I'm doing great, man. I'm just realizing as you're reading that, that I'm probably gonna have to change that bio after they ban TikTok. Let's hope not though.

Paul Povolni (06:33.354)
Yeah, and I do want to talk about that and get your thoughts on that. If that changes everything or nothing for you. I appreciate you doing this, man. You know, I first got introduced to you, I think on TikTok. I was doing some some brainless scrolling and you kept popping up and I saved some of your videos and I said, I got to watch this later. I got to watch this later. got to watch this later. I got to do this later. I got to implement this later. And I probably have.

Austin Armstrong (06:37.068)
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (07:00.994)
dozens of your videos saved somewhere on some to-do list. so I can, so I can go back and watch it. And so I love what you're doing, man. it's, it's pretty awesome stuff. but I do want to kind of hear your origin story a little bit about how you became Mr. TikTok and how you launched syllabi. And so you can go as far back as you want to go, but, share a little bit about your origin story. Where, you know, where did it all start?

Austin Armstrong (07:05.56)
You

Austin Armstrong (07:11.064)
Thank you.

Paul Povolni (07:29.223)
and what got you into this.

Austin Armstrong (07:32.204)
Yeah, I'll try and make this as brief and concise as possible, because it's a little bit of a long journey. I was fortunate to find what I think my calling was in life pretty early on. So I got started on MySpace when I was 14 years old. We're going to zoom out to 20 years ago on social media, really at its origin days. And I was hooked from the moment I joined that platform.

Paul Povolni (07:50.026)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (08:00.12)
And I don't just mean like hooked on being on social media. I was growing large followings. had hundreds of thousands of followers on MySpace and I was monetizing that in various different ways, doing email lead gen, promoting bands and t-shirt companies. I had a really brilliant friend who's a web developer and we're both like 14, 15, 16 years old. built.

Paul Povolni (08:09.953)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (08:25.505)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (08:26.484)
early SaaS platforms to help other people grow their followings on MySpace as well. And that was so impactful in my growth that that really stuck with me because I was impacted by that at such an early age. Now fast forward to about 11 years ago is where my professional journey really began in video marketing on social media. I had moved out to California from New Jersey, grew up in New Jersey.

and I stumbled into an internship at a video marketing agency that specialized in the behavioral health space. And I loved it. I saw the long-term vision, even though I started as an unpaid intern, I was not paid to be there, I was just paid to learn foot in the door, but I saw the vision, I loved it and I stuck with it. And so I worked my way up from being an unpaid intern to a paid intern, to a part-time employee, to a full-time employee.

Paul Povolni (09:13.613)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (09:25.75)
Fortunately, the owner of that company really saw the passion and potential in me and he became my mentor. He really invested in my growth, paid for me to do sales training and travel all around the country to different marketing conferences. I'm a very extroverted person, so I'll walk up to anybody and talk to them immediately. That's definitely a superpower that I have.

Paul Povolni (09:48.14)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (09:55.4)
And we eventually actually became business partners. So fast forward to now six and a half-ish years ago, I started my first company, which is called Sociality Pro, which was a social media marketing agency. We specialized in video marketing, but we also did a lot of SEO. And that was very much a part-time thing at the time. I was head of digital marketing at a drug and alcohol treatment center because I had just come from that.

Paul Povolni (09:58.702)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (10:25.164)
that path and gotten very good at marketing in that industry. And what happened was, leading up to TikTok, in 2020, so I think it was like June or July of 2020, the pandemic was around for like three months or something like that. I got fired from my job, no real notice. And so I was faced with the entrepreneurial decision of like, do I bet on myself and go all in?

Paul Povolni (10:41.58)
Right?

Austin Armstrong (10:53.462)
and see what I'm made of, like see if I can make this a full-time income. Talk to my business partner, talk to my wife, decided to go all in. Strangely enough, decided to go all in on TikTok for whatever reason. Jumped in, attended some webinars to learn. It just clicked. It worked. And so I started growing on TikTok, talking about SEO. I became the SEO guy on TikTok, got a ton of clients and consulting gigs.

Paul Povolni (11:04.429)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (11:22.948)
that way eventually the, grew far enough that, I had enough followers on Tik TOK that people started asking, can you help me and my company grow on Tik TOK? yes, I will take your money and help you grow. Of course, said the entrepreneur. and so I started to grow and I kept getting banned on Tik TOK, which forced me to figure out all of these other social media platforms. after the first

Paul Povolni (11:34.36)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (11:51.349)
Banned for what?

Austin Armstrong (11:53.378)
They would be, so I share my content like these five websites feel illegal to know and useful websites and whatnot. And I think that they just don't like that type of content that sends people off of their platform. They want to keep you on the platform.

Paul Povolni (12:08.086)
Right. Which most social platforms are kind of like that.

Austin Armstrong (12:12.012)
Yeah, yeah. then just how I I played that I dance on that line of being a little provocative in order to increase engagement. But I think like that opening line feels illegal to know when you say it over and over again sort of flags their algorithm. Long story short, it forced me to not put all my ethics in one basket and figure out all of these other platforms. Figured out YouTube shorts, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest.

LinkedIn, have millions of followers now because of short form video.

Paul Povolni (12:44.482)
Now, did you originate that language or did you see somebody else use that language? I've seen other content creators use that same language.

Austin Armstrong (12:50.519)
Yeah

Austin Armstrong (12:54.242)
I

You know, I've been using it for so long, I'm really not even sure anymore. I think I came up with it. I think it was a tweak on something that somebody else said. So I'm constantly studying other people's videos. And so I don't want, because I'm just honestly, I'm not even sure anymore. I think I took something, an opening line that was very similar and I took that and tweaked it.

Paul Povolni (13:17.301)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (13:25.697)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (13:25.974)
And I definitely was the first person to do the like side-by-side talking to myself videos like reacting that I definitely originated with these useful websites. But I'm not a hundred percent sure about that opening. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (13:32.854)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (13:38.55)
Now, before we go into talking about, you know, the TikTok and diversifying, what happened in the interim between MySpace and your internship? Like what happened in that space?

Austin Armstrong (13:49.516)
Yeah, such a great question. because I was, I've reflected on this a lot, if I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be to stay more consistent. I didn't know that social media would be a career path at the time. I don't think anyone did, which is, you know, very few people. after MySpace, yeah.

Paul Povolni (14:11.436)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, cause there was a place to share food, cats, dogs, vacations. Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (14:20.216)
Absolutely. mean after after my space died like I was very I was still active on other social media platforms like I had created like Weird theme niche pages on Facebook that didn't really grow that much. was very early on YouTube but I wasn't really consistent with it and You know in your your late teens your early 20s. You don't know what the hell you're gonna do it in life anyway and so there was a little bit of

Paul Povolni (14:45.759)
Right, right.

Austin Armstrong (14:49.47)
inactiveness in growth and pursuing that. So like I did bartending, was a server at a yacht club for years, all kinds of like weird random jobs that are meaningless now.

Paul Povolni (15:08.11)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so, okay, so let's go back to you were talking about diversifying stuff. Like what was, where were you getting your learning from? Was it just from trial and error? Was it from other people's videos? Was it from some other source? Where were you learning your stuff from?

Austin Armstrong (15:28.428)
Yeah, a lot of listening to podcasts, a lot of going to conferences. love going to conferences, hiring coaches and consultants. One key moment that I always love to bring up is when I cracked the code on YouTube shorts, it was really just because of a great YouTube coach and friend, Jeremy Vest. We decided to get together and we're like, we're going to figure out YouTube shorts. We're going to crack this code. And every single

day we would jump on a Zoom call and study and we would test theories. We would review each other's videos objectively and just give constructive feedback and criticism. We'd study videos like how long is the opening hook? How long is something on frame before it changes? What do the titles look like? Are the videos looping back to the beginning or are they just ending abruptly?

Paul Povolni (16:02.274)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (16:27.208)
Is there a single call to action? And going through that exercise every single day with Jeremy, I think we did it for almost a month. I had that little epiphany aha moment of why am I just sharing everything? A head smack moment. Definitely a head smack moment. Definitely a head smack moment of why am I sharing all of my videos? Let me just share the most viral videos, which were the These Five Websites Feel Illegal to No series.

Paul Povolni (16:40.706)
You mean a head smack? Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (16:55.82)
And so I only was uploading those and that's when YouTube exploded.

Paul Povolni (17:01.08)
Who were you finding that was doing it right? was kind of a big influence when you were doing the studying and the analyzing of these videos. Or was it, were you just testing your own?

Austin Armstrong (17:12.896)
We were just testing our own. We were studying all kinds of channels, completely unrelated to anything. So Jeremy was the head of Braille Skateboard on YouTube, for instance. They have about five million subscribers. And so we were looking at their videos, which is completely unrelated to what I do, but it was just broad titles, very short, short videos that are visually driven.

Paul Povolni (17:34.775)
Right? Right.

Austin Armstrong (17:40.12)
You don't have to speak the language in order to understand what's going on in the video. I mean, there was other similar creators to me like Matti McTek, who is still pretty big creator online. All kinds, everything that we could think about. Videos that had millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of views on shorts.

Paul Povolni (17:58.349)
Yeah, yeah.

Austin Armstrong (18:06.018)
we were hyper-focused on shorts and so we were just looking at the best performing things and just meticulously looking at everything.

Paul Povolni (18:13.08)
So when did you feel that maybe this social media thing can actually have a future? when, when was that aha moment for you, that head smack moment that you said, do you know what? Cause you had mentioned, you know, earlier, was like, Hey, who's how are you making money on social media? It's cats, dogs, lunch, breakfast, you know, when, when was that moment for you that you're like, wow, I think, I think there's a future in this.

Austin Armstrong (18:25.025)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (18:31.063)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (18:36.408)
Well, I would say two different times. it really was originally on MySpace. I was making so much money back then. I remember, you know, looking at PayPal, which I don't even know how we had PayPal because we were under 18. But just getting paid like, you know, I would do an email lead gen thing. Like it was totally sketchy, borderline illegal, just like bait and switch.

Paul Povolni (18:51.679)
Ha

Austin Armstrong (19:04.216)
but I'd be like, I just got paid $500 today for a post. Like this is crazy. I can afford apartment with this. But I don't know why I didn't stick with it, is like, you know, everything happens for a reason, I guess. And then the other moment is definitely when I really started growing on TikTok early on, I would say close to five years ago.

Paul Povolni (19:11.894)
Wow, wow, yeah.

Austin Armstrong (19:34.028)
four and a half, five years ago. Now, when I really focused in and committed on TikTok of why I wanted to be on that platform and what content that I was going to create and giving myself an ultimatum and it working and immediately starting to get leads when I was dialed in, I saw the future there and I said, okay, I'm going all in on this thing.

Paul Povolni (20:01.304)
So when, when that started happening and you started getting leads, what were they leads towards? Like what were you selling? What were you doing? What were those leads being pushed to?

Austin Armstrong (20:12.394)
My marketing agency, so the Socialty Pro. So because I was having a lot of success with SEO oriented videos on TikTok, I was starting to get SEO leads. I had worked with other agencies at that point. So there were a couple of agencies that contacted me to help with their clients because they were doing other things online. All kinds of different clients, a gold company that buys and sells gold.

Acupuncture, definitely behavioral health oriented companies, because I always showed examples of addiction treatment centers that I was doing SEO for, so other treatment centers would contact. Lots of just contracts in that space. And I try and slowly move them over to video too. Because I've always been good with SEO, but that just kind of...

Paul Povolni (20:53.955)
Right, right.

Austin Armstrong (21:08.086)
I never saw myself as an SEO. That's just the content that kind of worked online. And I kind of became that person. Like I really see myself more as a video marketer than an SEO, even though I went down that space for a long time.

Paul Povolni (21:22.264)
So now that you've gone all in on TikTok, what do you think about the TikTok ban? That seems to be, you know, talked about and everybody's kind of concerned about how are you feeling about that?

Austin Armstrong (21:29.847)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (21:34.69)
Well, I learned long ago to not have all your eggs in one basket. So I've been diversifying for four or five years now. So it's not really going to impact me, but I think it sucks. think banning TikTok is going to hurt the US economy more than their concerns of it being a Trojan horse for China. know, so, so many businesses in America

Paul Povolni (21:57.539)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (22:03.852)
rely on TikTok for marketing, distribution, direct sales through TikTok Shop Now, opportunities for musicians and artists and creatives to develop income streams around their passions that was never really available even on platforms like Instagram. The uniqueness of the culture of TikTok

is becoming grained in US now. It's how trends start. It's just such an impactful platform. And it really is a shame that the politicians don't see that value. And they are so concerned about China spying on us that I just think it's a complete misstep. I think it is

Paul Povolni (22:35.704)
Right.

Paul Povolni (22:58.69)
Right.

Austin Armstrong (23:00.652)
going to be banned now for the longest time. don't think it, I didn't think it was going to be banned. I thought they were going to continue to prolong it indefinitely. But here we are four days away and there's no news from the Supreme Court. It looks like it is going to be banned. And even if they, the appeal process, like if Trump tries to bring it back, that's going to be a long journey.

than to just avoid the ban. There's Mr. Wonderful has put in a bid for $20 billion with some of his buddies. I heard to purchase TikTok without the algorithm, because that's kind of been the stalemate thing is ByteDance does not wanna get rid of that. They don't wanna sell their algorithm. But Mr. Wonderful, I saw a video on his, we want the TikTok everything.

Paul Povolni (23:38.306)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (24:00.408)
they're going to rebuild the algorithm, which I don't think is going to work. I don't think they're going to get it. yeah, I, I, I unfortunately think it's likely to happen right now and it sucks.

Paul Povolni (24:13.432)
Yeah. Well, and you've mentioned so many good reasons for its existence and also just as a new source for a while there, know, know now meta is also changing its tune a little bit on how it filters content, but, know, TikTok used to be the place that if you wanted to find the truth about what's happening right now, it was the only source for that because at that point Twitter was Twitter, you know,

Austin Armstrong (24:22.924)
Yes.

Austin Armstrong (24:26.892)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (24:38.935)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (24:42.47)
and so, you know, it is, you know, even for that, I think it's kind of a shame, for it to go away. And there really isn't anybody that's as primed to take over the space as they were, cause they really nailed down what they were doing with the, the, the sales and the, you know, e-comm on there and everything else. And so, yeah, it is going to leave quite a significant void.

Austin Armstrong (24:43.0)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (25:07.182)
Um, for a while there until somebody is able to at least get 50 % of the way there,

Austin Armstrong (25:14.134)
Yeah, I think probably the closest competitor is Instagram, but I think it's just like people have such a sour taste in their mouth about Zuckerberg and just meta platforms in general. It's funny now, you know, everybody's been... I don't know if you've heard of Red Note yet or seen that. This is so funny. It's so funny. It's like an act of rebellion. So all of these...

Paul Povolni (25:34.368)
Yeah, which is another overseas... Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (25:43.34)
There's a little subculture over there already of TikTok refugees, people that are flooding from TikTok over to Red Note as a F you to the government, which is so ironic because they're going from a platform TikTok that is the parent company, ByteDance is a Chinese company, but the CEO is from Taiwan, I believe.

Paul Povolni (25:47.438)
no.

Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (26:09.432)
TikTok is entirely operated out of the United States. And then now they're flipped. And the whole reason for this ban is because of China, right? And so now everybody's going to a completely operated in Chinese app. The app itself, I have it on my phone because I have to experiment. The whole app's in Chinese. You can't look at the terms of service because it's in Mandarin. You can't like go through your settings because it's in Mandarin. I don't speak Mandarin, but...

Paul Povolni (26:29.002)
my goodness.

Austin Armstrong (26:36.862)
you know, a lot of the settings are entirely in Mandarin. You can't even read anything. And so it's just this really strange stick it to the man rebellion thing that's happening right now. That's a little strange. think people will, you know, if TikTok ban goes through, people will, think, just naturally go to the other platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, back to Facebook, probably.

Paul Povolni (26:50.882)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (27:04.376)
Snapchat now there's a name I haven't heard in a while. What do you think of Snapchat? It seems to have been a kind of the thing and then a kind of nobody talks about it anymore

Austin Armstrong (27:10.817)
Yeah.

Well, it's a younger demographic on the platform. I was at a Duke basketball game last night and I just happened to notice a younger kid in front of me on Snapchat and my just brain went to, oh, he's using Snapchat. He was just like hitting with his friends. yeah, Snapchat really came around when I was just out of high school, I think. It's been around a while now. think early 20s. mean, maybe I'm...

Paul Povolni (27:26.67)
you

Austin Armstrong (27:42.904)
I think I'm misremembering how long it's been around, but yeah, it's still very active. It's just a younger demographic on there. Snapchat's like the one platform I never cracked the code on. And it's largely because of like the type of content that I create. like Snapchat Spotlight, which is their organic discovery engine, does not like content that sends you off platform.

as we were talking about earlier. And so that every single video that I'd upload, they're like, not eligible, not eligible, not eligible. But yeah, it's...

Paul Povolni (28:12.374)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (28:19.34)
Yeah. So with, with the amount of people that you have following you now, how are you pivoting? You know, if, this band happens, how are you pivoting to retain that audience? and where are you pivoting them to?

Austin Armstrong (28:33.154)
Well, to be completely honest, TikTok hasn't been my main platform in like two years because they banned me when I had, I was about 900,000 followers on there and I couldn't get it back. I actually gotten it restored four times. Fifth time was the charm. They wiped it from the database, everything. I have 200,000 followers on there now, but it just has been a little flat. So Facebook, believe it or not, is my primary platform, followed by Instagram, followed by YouTube.

And so this is just another day in the office. TikTok has just kind of been this afterthought for me for two years, which is unfortunate because I have such a really cool origin story with TikTok. I have so much to thank TikTok for. I have a very love hate relationship with that platform, but you know, I'll lose 200,000 followers, but you know, that still means I have two and a half million followers online. I'll be okay.

Paul Povolni (29:07.288)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (29:30.542)
Yeah. Now, now how are you generating income from posting on these networks? You're still doing shorts, right? So, so how would it, how does posting shorts for the person that is like, well, yeah, I kind of scroll through this, but is, you know, how are these people making money doing this stuff?

Austin Armstrong (29:41.304)
Yep.

Austin Armstrong (29:52.342)
Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to make money. you know, people immediately go to add revenue and bonus programs. Let that just be the icing on the cake. Don't let that be the primary source of revenue. Otherwise, you're going to be sorely disappointed because it fluctuates like crazy. It's not as good as you think it is until you're getting a ridiculous amount of views. They pay me far less than they probably should, but, you know, it's just free money.

Particularly on Instagram, ManyChat automations are a fantastic way to drive leads and sales. And so quickly how that works is ManyChat is a automation platform that's meta approved that you can connect your Instagram and Facebook page to. And so you can say in the video and have in your description like comment the word boom and I'll DM you a link for whatever you're talking about.

I'm sure people have seen that type of thing, leave a comment word. What that does with ManyChat's automation trigger is every time that somebody leaves that comment, it will automatically respond to them with a comment response like, check your DMs, just sent you the link. And it does, it sends them a link to their direct messages. It's like email marketing on Instagram DMs, and it works phenomenal. It's like,

80 % open rates and like 60 plus percent click through rates. And when you have a lot of followers and you have an engaged audience and you work in this call to actions, every single time that you do something like that, you'll get hundreds, if not thousands of clicks to your offer. And then there's of course a percentage of people that sign up, don't sign up, whatever. Aside from that,

showing the URL. I'm, and links and links in your bio is also another great way to drive sales. just DMS in general, like people will DM me and we'll have conversations and that's where a lot of conversions come from in the DMS. Facebook in particular, I have had a lot of success with text based posts and text threads, recently. So things like, you know,

Paul Povolni (32:13.164)
Wow, okay.

Austin Armstrong (32:17.6)
almost a little click-baity, like rest in peace marketing agencies, this one AI tool will make you a beast online. And then you'll put like a little arrow and then the format is kind of like four or five steps as individual comments that are text-based and you leave a link there because if you just post a link in the actual post on Facebook, it stifles the growth.

Paul Povolni (32:35.245)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (32:48.084)
like crazy, like a hundred, you'll get a hundred times less, but not if it's in the comments. And so that's kind of the game that we play with Metta. But that works tremendous. That works incredibly well for driving traffic to anything. And then you just have to diversify how you're creating revenue, affiliate marketing, direct leads and sales to your own products and services.

Paul Povolni (32:52.941)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (32:58.924)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (33:14.616)
I am starting an AI Marketing World Conference right now, so I'm driving sales to my conference, which is next October in Dallas, Texas. Ebooks, brand deals with other companies that just want brand exposure. There's a million different ways that you can monetize attention online. You just have to slowly build these sources.

Paul Povolni (33:39.521)
Right.

Paul Povolni (33:43.362)
Right. I love that because, you know, it's, it's not just about posting content. It's leading them to some sort of an something, an offer. And like you said, whether an affiliate, a co-sponsorship, and there are so many ways. I do advise those that have just listened to this to go back and write down every one of those ideas, because, you know, it's, it's not just, it's not just about, you know, I'm, posting stuff, I'm posting stuff, I'm posting stuff, but it's also, you know, what does it lead to? What is it? You know, you've got to have something that.

you offer or provide that you can lead them to, right? Cause that makes all the difference. It's not just about posting content and getting attention. It's kind of like yelling in a stadium, Hey, look at me. And then everybody looks at you and you're like, you know, I don't have anything to say, you know, now they've got your attention. And so, and I think a lot of people do that with their marketing is they fail in that. they yell.

Austin Armstrong (34:27.416)
Cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (34:39.138)
you know, in the stadium, look at me and everybody looks at him and then they're like, I don't really have anything else to say apart from that, you know? And so, so you'll, you'll learn how to do that. And so what's, what, what have you found is like your, your best thing you mentioned about the, you know, the, the, word post and then an arrow down. I've seen a lot of that. And I think I first saw it on Twitter X where, people were posting some sort of a post and then having a thread of,

Austin Armstrong (34:47.992)
percent.

Austin Armstrong (35:01.356)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (35:07.286)
you know, in the comments of additional content. What else are you finding that is really working right now, aside from those text posts with an arrow for more content?

Austin Armstrong (35:17.954)
Well, short form content still works like a charm. If you create sort of broad content, you're not like, hi, Instagram, right? You're just creating broad content that's valuable. You can repurpose that across every platform. Post it on Instagram reels, post it on Facebook reels, post it on YouTube shorts. I go in waves with Pinterest right now. Pinterest is getting a lot of views for me. So I'm back on recommending the Pinterest bandwagon.

Paul Povolni (35:44.12)
What?

Austin Armstrong (35:46.934)
Nobody talks about Pinterest.

Paul Povolni (35:47.916)
Wait a second, isn't Pinterest just for stay at home moms to learn how to knit stuff? Come on now, Pinterest really? I'm being sarcastic of course, but yeah.

Austin Armstrong (35:55.02)
That's the stigma. Yes. Yeah. is like a visual search engine. So it's like if Google and Instagram had a baby is how I like to describe Pinterest. It's a search engine. People search for things online. It's not, you know, yeah, it is largely a woman demographic, 60, 65%. But I mean, I reach half a million plus people a month and I haven't even posted on there in six months.

Paul Povolni (36:07.437)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (36:24.66)
My content just ranks and it's useful websites and AI entrepreneur and it just drives clicks. Every video that you or post that you put on Pinterest, you can optimize the headline for a search. It's clickable to a landing page or an offer. You can do affiliate marketing through Pinterest really well. You can drive traffic to your website or any landing page you want through Pinterest really well. It's fantastic platform to emphasize.

Paul Povolni (36:30.188)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (36:53.4)
It's one of those amazing platforms that it's like SEO. Once you put in the work, it just kind of lives forever for you. That's one of the, they have one of the longest shelf lives of their content than any other platform out there. Like a video on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube might die in a couple of weeks or a month or so. On Pinterest, they can live for years. So I love Pinterest, but.

Post that video everywhere. Post it on X, post it on threads. Post that video everywhere. And then other types of content like carousel posts still perform really well. Like sort of the image version of those text threads will do something like that. Like here's a catchy headline with perceived values, swipe through, value 0.1, value 0.2, value 0.3. Yeah, those are kind of the...

collaborations work really well too, to grow in general. But those are kind of the formats that I'm primarily doing right now that are working well.

Paul Povolni (37:53.889)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:00.408)
Well, now you had mentioned to me in another thread of conversation about the impact Rachel Peterson made on you. Now I just had her on my podcast. Tell me a little bit about that. What happened there?

Austin Armstrong (38:09.753)
yeah.

Austin Armstrong (38:13.334)
Yeah, yeah. So going back to the, my early TikTok growth, I had said like, I attended a webinar. was Rachel Peters, Peterson's website or webinar. I've had the great fortune of interviewing her on my podcast, which was a, she was a dream guest. I have so much to thank that amazing woman for. So on TikTok, when I first got started, I was on it for maybe three months or so, and I was just a

Paul Povolni (38:32.311)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Austin Armstrong (38:43.106)
flailing flopping fish with no growth. I was posting stuff all over the place. I had no strategy. I was posting like a cat video and then like a website video and I was trying to do a trend and just figure out the platform and it just got nowhere. And it was, I saw a Facebook ad for her. She was hosting a free webinar on how to use TikTok to grow your business. This was so early.

This was so early in that space. Nobody was using TikTok for their business. And so I'm like, let me attend this thing. She delivered so much value for free in that webinar. And I gave myself an ultimatum. said, I'm gonna give myself 30 days on TikTok. I'm only gonna create business oriented content. I'm gonna hyper focus.

And if it doesn't work in those 30 days, I don't see any traction or growth or anything that maybe this is not the platform for me. And that was the focus needed to start this whole crazy journey of short-form video growth. mean, it was in those 30 days that I was doing videos on SEO that started to grow and I immediately started to get clients. And it just has snowballed over the last...

four and a half, five years now. I've, shouted Rachel from the rooftops over and over and over again. She's such a pivotal point of my online success. Rachel's amazing.

Paul Povolni (40:13.89)
Ha ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (40:19.96)
Yeah. Yeah. I had her on, not too long ago and she's just an amazing guest and just so full of wisdom and so full of experience and so full of value and just amazing thing. So when did, when did syllabi and I want to talk about syllabi when, how was that birthed and how did that come about?

Austin Armstrong (40:39.352)
Yeah, so at a high level, Solibuy is a tool that lets you create, schedule, publish, and automate videos to social media. And it really came from my 11 years of video marketing experience. There were a lot of problems that business owners were facing over and over again. There were a reason why they wanted to contract us and sometimes couldn't contract us. They know they need to be active on social media, creating video.

but they don't know what topics to create. They don't know what to say on camera. Maybe they don't like being on camera. They need help staying consistent and accountable, but maybe they also don't have the time to actually do this or they don't have the budget to hire a marketing agency. And so they're stuck in this loop of not knowing how and not having the time and not having the funds to be active on social media while they're trying to grow their business to get ahead. And it's this endless cycle.

And so there were also a lot of repeatable processes that we were implementing to help our clients grow. At the agency, we've done billions of organic views across social media on videos over the years. And I took all of those concepts and I took all of those pain points and I started to come up with the idea for a platform that automated a lot of this. The original idea was actually just a...

a content strategy tool, which became the execution and implementation of that. But the original idea was just, here's how to do competitor research, here's how to do topic research, structure it into a 30 day plan for videos that you can follow. And we had our early content calendar on there. And this was, in fact, I just posted a thing on Facebook today, which was interesting.

I had the idea about three years ago, which was pre-AI boom, pre-Chat GPT, pre-OpenAI's API. This was pre-AI startup. This was just a software startup.

Paul Povolni (42:43.448)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (42:47.832)
still blows me away that it's only that it's been that short too. It's just AI. mean, it feels like so it's been forever, but yeah, it hasn't been that long. So, okay, sorry to interrupt, but yeah, when you mentioned three years, I'm like, wow.

Austin Armstrong (42:51.338)
I know, I know, it's changed our lives.

Austin Armstrong (42:57.762)
Yeah. No, no, no. You're so right. And so I attended this mastermind and I was workshopping this idea that was in my head of taking idea to idea. And then I started to take action on it. I self-funded with my business partner, self-invested from the agency to start to build what is now syllabi. And I'm a non-technical founder.

I'm just a marketer, I'm the idea guy, the visionary, whatever. And so I had found a development team overseas to work on this thing, spent about $15,000 all in. It took them six months to build this prototype that was real janky. But it was a visual point that...

I think was necessary because I brought it to my now CTO, who's a good friend of mine. I've known him for a long time. Brilliant, brilliant engineer software developer has been in the AI ML machine learning space for seven, eight, eight years now. He also ran a marketing agency so he can speak my language and software experience. And I pitched him this idea and I said, you know, here's where it's at. I'd love to bring you on as CTO and go all in on this startup.

Paul Povolni (44:16.407)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (44:24.876)
And he said yes, and what took that team six months to build he rebuilt it better in a 48-hour Just hackathon by himself and then and then we spent we spent a couple months Refining it to getting it to MVP and then we launched January 25th of 2023 so we're eight, know not to date this podcast I don't know what what time or what day this is coming out but

Paul Povolni (44:53.669)
It'll come out Monday. Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (44:54.156)
In eight... Okay, perfect, perfect. So on the January 25th, Sologbite will be two years since it's been live and it's been phenomenal. So that's kind of the origin story.

Paul Povolni (45:07.724)
Wow. now you in the, in the bio you'd, it said that that you were two times seven figure entrepreneur. that via syllabi? that through a previous? Okay. Wow. That's amazing.

Austin Armstrong (45:20.214)
Yeah, that's the agency and syllabi. So syllabi has had some tremendous growth, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. So we hit a million ARR in seven months, which is incredible for a startup. And then because we were pretty early, all things considered in this like AI SaaS boom, were super early to market, but then the market exploded. There's a million startups that came out. And so people are short of this new sort of terminology of

Paul Povolni (45:44.27)
Right, right.

Austin Armstrong (45:50.264)
AI surfing, what did we call it? What was it called? Like product surfing, AI tourism, that's what it AI tourism. And so they're experimenting with a lot of different tools and they're not committing to long subscriptions. And so the market got saturated. We were on like a nine, 10 month churn, just slow descent.

Paul Povolni (46:02.381)
Ha

Paul Povolni (46:11.629)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (46:19.634)
Luckily, we grew very quickly. At the beginning, we had an awesome cushion to carry us through this 10-month period as we refine the product, make it better, talk to our users every single day. And we did a strategic pivot about seven months ago from focusing on AI avatars to focusing on faceless videos and faceless video automation and switching our target demographic from business owners to

content creators. And when we did that, now we've been skyrocketing back up. We're higher than we've ever been. We have more signups every single day than we've ever had before. We're insanely fast right now, like 20 to 30 % month over month growth. Truly blessed, but it's because we went through that 10 month period of suck and trying to figure it out and talking to our users and figuring out their real pain points.

Paul Povolni (47:12.215)
Right, right.

Austin Armstrong (47:18.524)
and working through all of it. yeah, we're about to approach 3,000 active subscribers in syllabi. We just crossed 100,000 lifetime customers. That's existing signups and repeat customers. So we've been able to get a lot of our customers back.

And so it's been quite the journey as a first time startup founder, but I'm truly blessed and I love it. And I love the community that we've built around SoliBy that see what we're doing. yeah, I'm building it in public and we're really getting the community involved and it's been amazing to see.

Paul Povolni (47:42.488)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (48:00.088)
So yeah, and it is, it is confusing out there for a lot of people because it seems like every day somebody is coming out with some AI something that does something and it's like starting to blur. And some of them are like, do everything and you know, we do all this and we do all that. And this is the one thing you need, and this is the one product you need. And so it does get confusing. And so, you know, you're, leaning into faceless videos, I think is a great way to kind of differentiate yourself as opposed to.

Austin Armstrong (48:08.754)
Yeah. Yep.

Austin Armstrong (48:14.85)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (48:30.254)
So kind of getting lost in this noise of just AI software after AR software coming out. So talk about a faceless video. What is a faceless video?

Austin Armstrong (48:42.284)
Yeah, so as the name kind of implies, it's a video without your face on it. So with the idea that everybody should be creating videos online, it's the most adopted format of content on the internet and has been for many, many years at this point. Now, sometimes people don't want to be on camera. They don't like being on camera. They're literally not allowed to be on camera because they're in a regulated industry.

They don't wanna deal with their friends and family criticizing them, but they still want to either be creative and put content out there, or they want their business to grow and leverage this format that's getting so much just free organic distribution. Faceless video is the perfect solution for that. I thought it was avatars, but I don't think it's avatars anymore. I think there's a lot of long-term potential with that, creating like a...

deep fake version of yourself, if you will. But what a faceless video is, there's a couple different types. It could be B-roll. It could be just shots and clips of action and motion happening with audio narration and subtitles on screen and background music. That's typically the entire thing that's packaged. There's a newer style of faceless video, which is AI generated imagery and video.

which is what we primarily do. And so when you generate or type in a script within syllabi, what it does is it reads sections of that script and it will uniquely generate an AI image in any art style that you choose that shows what is being talked about in that script and in that narration. And then it pieces it together to tell a story. And what we've recently added in syllabi is the animation and motion.

of those images. And so after the images are generated, you can turn them into scenes, moving scenes. So it creates an entire story that tells about business, about history, about hobbies, about interests. Basically anything that you can think of to create content around, you can completely automate it now. Still,

Paul Povolni (50:48.002)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (51:09.205)
add your...

opinions and expertise and your uniqueness. While you can 100 % automate this stuff, I still am a content creator and I still put that out there that this is a tool to help you save a lot of time and energy. It is not really supposed to be a replacement. There will be people that fall on all sorts of areas on that spectrum.

Paul Povolni (51:39.416)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (51:40.118)
That's one thing that really separates us is that I want to just empower you to create content however you want, whether you want to be in front of the camera or you don't want to be in front of the camera. syllabi can help your entire A to Z journey there, but getting away from the question of that's kind of what a faceless video is. It's a packaged video without your face needing to be the center of attention.

Paul Povolni (52:00.301)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (52:06.188)
So when you created that, what problem were you solving?

Austin Armstrong (52:11.928)
all of the problems that I had brought up. So what topics do I create? We have an idea discovery engine where we show you topics and questions that people search for online with data. I don't know what to talk about on camera. We've taken my best practices for what goes into a good video script and we generate you a video script on any topic that fits that format.

Paul Povolni (52:15.64)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (52:37.17)
That's why so many of our videos perform exceptionally well and many go viral organically. The creation of the video. So in just a couple clicks with whatever presets that you want and you can save the presets, it generates the video for you. So saving you a lot of time and energy. don't need to know how to do video editing. You don't need to press that record. And you can schedule and publish it to all of your platforms.

So if you want to be omnichannel present on all of these platforms, you can just schedule it out ahead of time. And you can schedule up to 30 days of content in less than five clicks within Celebite. That was kind of our North Star, which we recently achieved. That's without any customizations. Of course, you should customize, but...

Paul Povolni (53:12.173)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (53:23.01)
Wow, wow, wow.

Paul Povolni (53:30.862)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (53:34.732)
Yeah, you can automate up to five videos a day for 30 days straight, long form or short form, up to 10 minutes long currently across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and threats on any topic.

Paul Povolni (53:51.256)
So who are you finding has been most successful with this? You mentioned people that don't want to be on camera for a variety of reasons. Who have you found that has been most successful with doing faceless videos?

Austin Armstrong (54:05.494)
Yeah, well, we have a lot of businesses that use us, real estate agents, come to mind, medical professionals. New content creators is who we've really spent a lot of time with and who we see having the most success that's celebrating their growth online and having syllabi be a part of that. People that have never created a video in their lives before, but want to create a passive income stream.

That is who is having the most success online. mean, we have a great Facebook group, syllabi content creators. We just passed 20,000 members in that group. Every single day, there's people that just can't believe it. They started a brand new channel. They created a couple videos. Their first video got 15,000 views, something they'd never thought of would be possible. And we're helping people monetize and develop

Paul Povolni (54:59.245)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (55:05.602)
multiple income streams. So we've gotten a bunch of people ad revenue approved. All of these AI generated videos are able to be monetized on every social media platform. They fit the criteria of every terms of service. And we really encourage affiliate marketing. And so one of the ways that we're just growing as a community and helping people out while they're already creating faceless videos.

like this, we encourage them all to sign up as an affiliate for syllabi, which pays recurring revenue. And all they need to do is post in the description of that video, create a video like this yourself using syllabi. Here's my affiliate link. And so we're doing a lot of webinars and teaching on how to do that so that we all can win together. And so there's people that have never created a video, never made a single dollar online.

that we're helping grow channels with thousands of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of views. They're starting to develop passive income streams online. It's been pretty amazing the last couple of months.

Paul Povolni (56:09.034)
Yeah, wow. So you mentioned affiliate marketing. How else are people making money doing faceless videos?

Austin Armstrong (56:17.206)
Yeah, all of the things that I said earlier are still applicable. ad revenue, affiliate marketing, selling your own products and services, lead generation, brand deals, selling courses, selling downloadable eBooks. One of my favorite recent ways is newsletter growth. So there's a great platform called Beehive. Shout out to Beehive.

Paul Povolni (56:44.685)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (56:47.234)
they've really built this, the best email marketing platform for content creators with this marketplace that other people can, other newsletters pay other newsletters to help them grow. And so how it kind of works at a high level is newsletter A pays in their marketplace, a dollar per email that you're able to get to sign up and confirm for their email.

Paul Povolni (57:01.762)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (57:17.714)
I can, if I apply for that and they approve me, which is very easy to get approval for all of these, when I send somebody to sign up for my newsletter, which is free, after they sign up for my newsletter, they enter their email, a pop-up will come up on that screen and say, would you also like to subscribe to this related newsletter? Newsletter A that's paying you a dollar per email. If they say yes, which is free for the user to sign up,

and they confirm, you get paid. And so for me, it's about 20 % conversion rate. And so 20 % of the people that I get to sign up for my newsletter for free will also sign up for this other related newsletter for free, and I get paid to do that. And so because Faceless Videos are getting so much attention, just send them to subscribe to a newsletter where you talk about that topic. 20 % on average, might be higher, might be lower. That's just my average.

Paul Povolni (57:50.348)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (58:18.328)
You'll get paid a dollar, $2. It fluctuates. seen as low as like 50 cents per email. I've seen as high as $4 per email. It depends on their campaign. Fantastic way to make revenue online from attention. Those are some of the ways.

Paul Povolni (58:25.997)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (58:31.82)
Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. Wow. Yeah, I've actually gotten some emails from people that have signed up for Beehive and I'm like, hadn't seen that before, but it seems to be popping up every now and then. So, you know, we do have a lot of people that, you know, we live in a generation that has a lot of anxiety, you know, and the idea of a faceless video for somebody with an anxiety, they don't want to be on camera.

Austin Armstrong (58:41.302)
I love it. Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (58:52.908)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (58:58.894)
They don't want to be peopling, you know, you know, it seems like a great way to be able to create content to, you know, generate attention, generate income. You know, with the, you you had mentioned several different avenues for making money from these. With the content, you know, you had mentioned that you could feed that information and it'll generate some of this content, content ideas.

Austin Armstrong (59:01.794)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (59:27.224)
Do you have to have any kind of particular business to be creating these videos or so? So what are you finding in that space?

Austin Armstrong (59:35.832)
No, there's a lot of people that have no business. They just want to create interest channels. So ancient history, superhero channels, there's old school gaming channel that's picking up a lot of momentum. One of our top organic platform users is the history of Ireland, which is pretty amazing. Entirely, yeah, it's like tales of, let me see if I can pull it up real quick on the spot here.

Paul Povolni (59:57.454)
Wow

Austin Armstrong (01:00:05.272)
She's got 40 something thousand followers. Give me a sec, on TikTok. It's tails. Oops. Bear with me here. Tails.

Austin Armstrong (01:00:18.264)
If you tails Irish history tip yeah and the user the is the tails Irish history as the at 43,000 followers 225,000 likes her videos have gotten hundreds of thousands of views 560,000 369,000 421,000 33,000 every single one of these videos is generated in syllabi I Know that syllabi is paying her because we've done a case study on her

Paul Povolni (01:00:37.293)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (01:00:47.934)
hundreds of dollars per month just from their ad revenue. The most viewed video that I've ever seen, because we do monthly challenges in syllabi, there was a channel about all things Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he did a face... so random sometimes. One of his videos did like 1.3 million views on Facebook. This is a Facebook page.

Where he he mixes the content. It's not all syllabi some of it is some of it's him He posts regular stuff. It's just a niche page about Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania But yeah one one one point three or so million views organically Facebook reels Anything that you can think of Children's children's books There's a really cool

therapist that I met at a conference I was speaking at last year that started creating a channel about like cartoons and stuff and she's had a couple videos about the Grinch that have done her one video just hit just this week at 200 it's like 260,000 views on YouTube about the Grinch so all kinds of stuff I mean I have I've created

Paul Povolni (01:01:58.48)
Ha

Paul Povolni (01:02:05.442)
Wow. Wow.

Austin Armstrong (01:02:12.376)
The cool thing about this platform is it's fun to use. like all of our team use it and operate different faceless channels. And so I have like a cocktail recipe channel. So like how to make XYZ cocktail. I have an ancient Egypt channel, a general ancient history channel, an ancient Rome channel. We have superhero channel. Just anything that you can think of.

Paul Povolni (01:02:22.744)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:02:40.408)
And you don't have to be an expert in those areas, Syllabi helps you create that faceless content. Wow.

Austin Armstrong (01:02:42.41)
No. No.

Yeah, yeah, all you need is an idea, but we suggest ideas for you. We do webinars every week where we deep dive, because this is very mission driven for me. Video marketing has obviously changed my life and I'm just on a mission to help change other people's lives with this stuff. so whether you're a subscriber or not, doesn't really matter to me. Our community, I bring in guest experts. We host webinars every single week.

Paul Povolni (01:03:02.946)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:03:13.144)
On just how to do a lot of this stuff So if you want to use syllabi to save a bunch of time cool If you want to figure out and do all this stuff yourself cool take what I've learned You know just like just like I learned from I've never given Rachel a dollar But I've screamed her from the rooftops because I've just learned so so much about her It's kind of the same thing. I'm just given given amazing information out there So no matter where you're at in your journey, no matter what age you're at no matter how

Paul Povolni (01:03:34.147)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:03:42.466)
tech savvy you are. I really want you to have the opportunity to be successful online if you want to. It's not gonna necessarily be easy from day one. You've got to put in some work and figure it out. But I don't want you to have an excuse that you can't make this work because anyone can make this work.

Paul Povolni (01:04:00.812)
Wow. That's amazing. And I think a lot of people that are listening to this, you know, are going to be pretty, pretty excited about the very idea of signing up for this. And, you know, there'll be, there'll be a link in the, in the description on how to sign up for this. And I do encourage those that, you know, are looking for revenue streams, looking for ways to get out there, looking for, looking for ways to get some of their ideas, their thoughts, their interests, their passions.

It sounds like the potential is limitless when it comes to the types of ideas, because you're going to find people that are interested in those ideas. Like you mentioned, Ireland and cocktails and superheroes and all these different topics. so is most of that content filtered to a certain platform? Is it just broadly broadcast like you had mentioned earlier?

Austin Armstrong (01:04:43.853)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:04:55.65)
Yeah, I've seen successes on every single platform. Lots of success on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook. I'm not sure that I've seen a particular success on threads from these faceless videos yet, but it's there, so why not just share it if you've got it? But yeah, mean, it's so simple to just...

Paul Povolni (01:05:12.396)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:05:17.153)
Right.

Austin Armstrong (01:05:24.874)
select all of your platforms and schedule publish it, publish it out.

Paul Povolni (01:05:29.582)
So what is exciting you about the future when it comes to AI and content creation?

Austin Armstrong (01:05:36.322)
Well, it's only going to get easier and easier. think 2025 is going to be the year of agents. And so that's a really fascinating concept for me. Because right now, I think it's a natural evolution. We're working on some agentic stuff within syllabi. Right now, it's still human input and execution, even though you can automate a lot of this. With agentic,

it basically will do everything for you without you needing to take a lot of the steps if you want. And so it'll execute on your behalf a lot of these things. So that's really fascinating. The other thing that's really interesting is I see this getting more and more involved in hardware over the next year or two. It's really, really in the early days. Like I have a Samsung

Galaxy Note 24, whatever the most recent one is that has Galaxy AI in it. It's very limited. Apple has Apple Intelligence now. Google has Gemini in their Pixel phones. There are different, I think I lost them, but I had the Ray-Ban AI smart glasses. But all of these things are kind of just novelties so far. I think we're really going to see

Paul Povolni (01:06:56.398)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:07:03.5)
a lot more adoption of AI into useful hardware coming up, which is fascinating. Just a week or two ago, I saw that Elon announced that he's going to be porting Grok into Tesla vehicles. So you're going to have an AI model in your car, which is going to be the first use case of that.

Paul Povolni (01:07:25.016)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:07:29.186)
these Android robots are gonna start infiltrating people's homes. These are gonna be available reportedly as low as like $16,000, $17,000, which is if it does half of what it says it's gonna do, think like that's an accessible price point for the upper half of America.

Paul Povolni (01:07:32.087)
Ha

Paul Povolni (01:07:50.85)
Right, right. Right, yeah.

Right, right.

Austin Armstrong (01:07:57.516)
These tools are not going to be for everybody, of course, for the time being. They're going to start pricier and then they're going to come down in price. So that's just how new technology happens. Yeah. mean, and as far as content creation, mean, video, AI video is going, is a natural trend. Sora just dropped last month, which is fantastic. It still has a lot of room for improvement.

improvement. There's so much there that they need to improve on, but it's really cool. There's a lot of these cool AI models. AI video is going to be huge, huge, this year online.

Paul Povolni (01:08:27.052)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (01:08:44.59)
Yeah, it's pretty mind blowing. Yeah. It's pretty mind blowing. What AI video is already doing. Um, I put in a, uh, an image of a house from like a bird's eye view. And I told her to animate it like a drone fly through this photograph. And it did it. It generated this video and I'm like, Oh my, this is unbelievable. And then it was.

Austin Armstrong (01:08:45.528)
That's kind of where my mind's going, yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:08:52.193)
Yes.

Austin Armstrong (01:09:02.071)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:09:09.462)
I posted, I did another picture of just my dog, you know, kind of looking over a stone wall at a beach. I said, you know, animate this into a happy dog. I'm like, wow. I mean, it is, it is pretty mind blowing in its early stages. it's just, yeah, it's, it's crazy.

Austin Armstrong (01:09:13.229)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:09:18.616)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:09:25.046)
Yeah, I saw it. It sure is. I I just saw a crazy use case. I don't really know how I feel about it. But yesterday, somebody tagged me in this. Someone made a completely AI-generated video of firefighters saving animals in a fire environment. And they added the sound effects and labeled it as firefighters saving animals in the California wildfires right now.

Paul Povolni (01:09:53.047)
Wow.

Austin Armstrong (01:09:53.234)
And that was that people were running to the comments and saying like, this is so heartbreaking. Look at these animals. It's AI. It's they were 100 % AI generated. You just have to like really look at it. And you notice those little things like, you know, things overlapping. But at a surface level, that video deceived a lot of people. Really interesting use case there.

Paul Povolni (01:10:06.979)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:10:15.405)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:10:22.36)
This stuff's very good. It's already at a point where it's deceiving humans.

Paul Povolni (01:10:27.03)
Yeah. Yeah. I think we are getting into a point where trust, you know, in what we see, you know, you believe it with my own eyes. I'll believe it when I see it is no longer a measure of facts and fact checking and being able to decide whether something is actually real because it is so deceiving. mean, you used to have, you know, six fingered mid journey images and people like, yeah, it's fake.

Austin Armstrong (01:10:46.488)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:10:53.166)
But it's gotten to the point where people are doing these photo shoots with AI that are just unbelievable. I mean, you don't need a photographer. You don't need somebody to go out and shoot photos of you. could get very realistic images of yourself. So with the content creation that you're doing, for the people that miss the human element, what do you advise to them? How do you help?

What do you tell them to keep that human element and keep some stuff real so people don't get tired of it quick?

Austin Armstrong (01:11:30.188)
Yeah, I mean, do what you feel comfortable with. Content creation, for me and a lot of creators, is a creative outlet. And so even though I'm able to do a lot with AI and as the days go on, we'll be able to do more and more with AI, I still enjoy creating content. I write a lot of my posts, the vast majority of my posts. I still manually create videos myself and I manually upload them.

across all these platforms, because I enjoy doing it. love doing it. interact. Nobody has access to any of my social media platforms. anything, and I respond to comments and messages constantly. It's 100 % me. It's not automated. It's not a team member. It's not a VA. I love doing that because I'm borderline addicted to it. But that's socially acceptable form of addiction, I guess. But lean into...

Paul Povolni (01:12:02.339)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:12:21.324)
Ha ha ha.

Austin Armstrong (01:12:28.632)
however your comfort level is. Find those pocket communities online too. There's great school groups. This is a platform that's come up. And Circle is another like alternative community platform. There's Facebook groups, there's Discord communities, there's offline communities. I mean, go to conferences, go to networking events, go to mastermind groups.

connect with people in real life. think that's ultimately like where AI is going is it's this whole online world is going to largely be automated. It kind of already is. And so it's just going to save us a lot of time to do more in-person human stuff. It's going to give us back time to spend to do more experiential things, go to concerts, spend time with our loved ones, do activities, things like that, chase our physical hobbies of

Paul Povolni (01:13:05.663)
Hahaha.

Austin Armstrong (01:13:24.14)
woodworking or playing guitar or rock climbing or martial arts, know, think all of that.

Paul Povolni (01:13:26.324)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I love what you said about, still you, you do a lot of posting yourself. think, you know, AI, is, incredible and there's, there's a lot of people that use it incredibly well, but I think, you know, keeping it as an augmentation of what you're doing and not a total replacement, is, is a safe thing because humans love humans. Humans love human activity. They, they like to have real engagement. And there are some people that have gotten all in on AI.

to where it writes everything. It'll write all their emails, it'll write all their DMs, it'll write all their posts, it'll write every single thing. And people are like, well, am I talking to you? Am I talking to an AI? And I want some level of realness in what I'm seeing as well. And so think that's gonna be the challenge for the future is balancing between how much you're plugging AI into your social thing. Because if it's social media, it's you being social.

as well as you producing this content and finding a way to balance that where people still feel that they have access to a real you. I think finding that balance, I think is gonna be a challenge in the future. And like you said, you still do it all yourself. You still have all the access and you take care of it yourself. And I think that's a future that we all need to kind of push for is what I can do and what I should do.

two very different things and keeping that realness is pretty important. As we wrap this up, what's a head smack moment or a head smack that you've had or a question that I haven't asked that you'd like to talk about?

Austin Armstrong (01:15:11.736)
Ooh, that's a good question.

I think you asked a lot of great questions, to be honest.

Paul Povolni (01:15:23.95)
So tell me about the AI conference that's coming up.

Austin Armstrong (01:15:24.79)
We talked about teeth.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. So it's called AI Marketing World. The website is aimarketingworld.co. If anyone's interested, it's gonna be October 9th through 11th, 2025 in Dallas, Texas, technically Frisco, Texas, just slightly north of Dallas. I have a really cool story with this conference. this conference was originally,

video marketing world, which has been around for several years. I first attended that conference about five years ago as a person in the back of the room that was just observing and learning from great people and just having fun and networking and being around my peers. Two years later, I had started getting success on

No, I guess six years ago. Yeah six years ago that I first went to that conference three years ago Three or four years four years ago four years ago. I was starting to grow on tik-tok and I cold messaged the owner of that conference Scott Simpson and Said hey, I've been to the conference before I notice you you don't have anyone that's speaking on tik-tok Would you be

interested in having a TikTok speaker. I've learned a lot from this conference. would, I would love the opportunity. He invited me on his podcast. We had a great conversation, of course, knocked it out of the park. You gotta, you gotta deliver. And he invited me to be a panel moderator on the first TikTok for business panel at video marketing world. And of course you have to deliver. So that was very well received. I did a bunch of research and did a phenomenal job, I think.

Paul Povolni (01:17:07.16)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:17:21.12)
They invited me back the following year to be a standalone keynote speaker to talk about TikTok for business. Fast forward now, that was two years ago. Now I'm business partner on that conference with Scott Simpson and his wife, Camber. And we pivoted it from video marketing to AI marketing to ride this hype cycle. I am a testament of that.

conference. I've just come up within that conference and won awards at that conference and had a lot of success. And so I want to continue that and share everything that I've learned to help other people at that conference as well. it's we've brought it. We've already have our speaker lineup secured. We've got some of the best AI marketing experts in the world. Jonathan Mass, we've got Anik Singhal.

Paul Povolni (01:17:51.041)
Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:18:16.376)
Molly Mahoney, so many amazing speakers on the lineup. The lineup's great. I really want it to be an immersive experience as well. It's not just going to be people on stage talking at you for three days. We're going to have AI hardware tech demos, and there's going to be all kinds of cool sponsor booths and amazing things. It's going to be amazing. Tickets are on sale. They're early bird discounted right now.

Paul Povolni (01:18:21.1)
Yeah, the lineup is incredible. Yeah.

Austin Armstrong (01:18:45.976)
If anyone is interested, that's ai-marketingworld.co. I'd love to see you there. I'd love to hang out with you and just talk shop.

Paul Povolni (01:18:55.374)
Awesome, man. Well, yeah, I've seen the lineup. The lineup is incredible. And if you have any interest at all in anything AI, I do suggest you check that out. I'll have the links in the show notes. And Austin, this has been amazing, man. I really enjoyed this conversation. Very informative, excited about syllabi. I'm excited about what you're doing in that space. know, AI is just fascinating. You can't ignore it.

Austin Armstrong (01:19:11.234)
Very fun. Absolutely.

Paul Povolni (01:19:21.262)
It is what it is the future and so I think you really need to consider it when it comes to What you're doing as a job and then if you don't like your face on camera Look at syllabi as a way to do faceless videos that'll get you out there as well Austin thank you so much man, and this has been amazing

Austin Armstrong (01:19:32.834)
You

Austin Armstrong (01:19:43.522)
Thank you for the opportunity. It was a great conversation. I love any excuse to just talk about this stuff. So I hope this was helpful for the audience and thank you so much, Paul.

Paul Povolni (01:19:53.281)
It was awesome. Thank you.