The $10M AI SaaS Playbook

this is David Park and he built an AI app to $10 million a year in 2 years how lowbudget videos on Tik Tok and Instagram you might remember David from our Underdog video well you guys love that video it got a million views so I called up David to see if he wanted to come back on the channel but this time do something a little bit different I said dude why don't you come on so we can share with the world your short form video Playbook that took your business from $0 to $10 million I know a lot of people are making a lot of money with this Playbook but nobody's really sharing the how so let's have you come on the channel be an open book and walk us through your step-by-step process that anybody can do for free he said yes and that's what you're about to see right now a detailed tactical breakdown of his $10 million Playbook including how to find unlimited viral content ideas for free in just 5 minutes how to find influencers that can 10x your startup and the Not So secret method to have the smartest Founders are generating hundreds of millions of views look David's not an influencer he's not selling a course he's in the arena every day and this is what's actually working right now watching this whole video will change the way you think about making money online so I'd advise to sit down take notes and take it all in welcome to the $10 million AI Playbook by starter story okay welcome David first tell everyone who you are what you built and why every founder needs to watch this video my name is David I'm the founder and CEO of Jenny AI Jenny's a collection of edtech tools that helps researchers research write and everything in between with AI assistant collectively we do over 10 million a year we're profitable and we have over 5 million users the vast majority of our growth came in the last two years using the Playbook that I'm going to share with you today so first thing I want to know is how do you think about growth as a startup yeah so

how we think about growth at the highest level is just having more users today versus yesterday and having more users tomorrow versus today and the best way that we can kind of measure the progress toward this goal is just thinking about growth in terms of three pillars which is distribution conversion and retention distribution is basically just how can you get your users to know about your product how can you get them onto your landing page how can you get them to watch a video about your product on Instagram or Tik Tok conversion is when they see that video and go to your landing page how can you get them to pay for your product will they start a free trial will they convert after the free trial and then lastly is attention which is after purchasing your product how long will your user continue to use your product Are you delivering on the value that you advertised even if you conquer one of these pillars you can make a very profitable and valuable and helpful business today I'm only going to be talking about distribution and we're going to be scoping it down even further just talking about the most successful distribution Channel we had so my three-step process basically just Gathering ingredients figuring out as much as you can about your users so that you can kind of skip a lot of the iteration process as you're creating content content as you're creating accounts and then you want to basically explore try a bunch of these different hypotheses content types different creators and then once you figure out something that works the last step is just trying to squeeze as much value as you can out of these like winning content types by turning them into series or reposting them or transitioning them to paid ads okay so let's dive into the first step which is the ingredients how do you know what platforms and what content ideas are going to work yeah so to create a truly viral video you have to understand what your viewers want to see which you have

to ask yourself like who are your viewers what are their interests what are they currently watching why are they watching it and how can you create content even more engaging than what they're currently watching this is the most boring part of the process will really save you months of work and increase the odds of a viral video in my opinion by a significant margin to do this you can even explicitly ask them for their Instagram handles and you can just check who they're following what do they enjoy watching in their free time so once you find a few of these influencers that your ideal user demographic follows you can then use in or Tik tok's own algorithm to help deliver you who you can sponsor or bring in house you can go to these influencers profiles and click suggest similar accounts or see what are the hashtags that they mainly post on and you'll get an easy list of hot leads that you can also follow once you have these this list of influencers you can create this new Instagram this new Instagram is basically just going to be delivering you new people that you can either sponsor or work with one of the biggest risks that come with influencer marketing is you basically you pay for a post and it really does not do well at all or maybe they were a little more successful in the past and recently maybe not so much when you have Instagram or Tik Tok deliver you influencers with kind of their own algorithm you can be sure that these influencers organically will appear on people's algorithms like they're still being served up to people okay so what are you specifically looking for in these influencers firstly it's that they have the potential at least to go viral when it comes to sponsoring influencers it what matters more to me is not really the floor of are they consistently getting 5,000 10,000 100,000 views what matters way more to me is the ceiling do they have at least one or two videos that gets 1 million 2 million 10 million views and sometimes you'll find that

their sponsored videos do significantly worse than their average videos I always take that into account as well if their sponsor content always seems to flop then I'll probably reconsider these things okay so if you do this you're going to find like a million ideas how do you sort through all those ideas and find the right content formats to try so firstly you can get a lot of ideas from step one where you have the list of influencers that your users watch so you can think about what type of content are these influencers posting what sponsored content have they posted before and which of these videos have popped off like why do you personally think that they did well and then you could take these hypotheses and you know try them out if you're talking to your users you could ask them what other tools that they use that are similar to your tool or tangentially related to your tool do those tools have social media accounts what type of content are they doing you can learn a lot just from what your competitors are posting and if your angle is similar to them then you could get inspiration from what they're doing you could scroll yourself on the Tik Tok account that we talked about earlier the Tik Tok account you created just to see what the algorithm serves you and just keep scrolling until something naturally grabs your attention and that can give you ideas either you could try to emulate that hook or you could build upon that hook and say okay this is the reason why I think I stopped and I think that our users might like it if we if I tweak that hook a little bit and you can kind of start from there all right I got to stop you for one minute my conversation with David that you're watching well actually it went on for nearly 3 hours but if I posted the whole thing YouTube would bury it because to be honest it goes into some more complex and nuanced stuff that I just couldn't fit into the video so if you're actually serious about implementing a strategy

like this and creating short form content I've uploaded the entire Playbook to the starter story platform if you want to get full access to it right now just click the first link in the description it's 100% free but it will only be available for very limited time just go to the first link in the description and you can download the whole thing all right I want you to dive into creating content how do you get started and what are the different variables that you test when you're creating content the variables that I suggest playing with are uh exploring different people on camera different influencers maybe even some of your friends if you're on a budget different hooks like what is the text that that shows up immediately in in the first second of the video or what is it the first thing that they say that kind of hooks you in like top 10 reasons blank or the best way to the worst thing is the I hate when whatever that hook is you want to be trying a bunch of them you try different accounts there are some instances where your account may just be no matter what you seem to do you just can't seem to get it off the ground it's just stuck kind of in like 100 300 view hell in in those cases you may want to try creating a new account with a new SIM card you could try different editing fastpac editing slow pace editing you try different lighting either making it more of like a casual more comfortable where it's just uh seems to be kind of homemade or maybe you want to try with a little bit more cinematography so those are some of the highle things that I would suggest that you you you play with but you get way more granular with the types of tests you do for Content all right so Outreach how do you actually get in touch with the influencers that are actually good and going to get views and going to drive sales to your product so I'll give you tips on how to actually reach out to influence and if you do these then I'd be genely surprised if you weren't

getting some responses from them I guess the first thing is you you have to kind of be ready for ection I think that's the first barrier for a lot of people they'll send like one email or two emails to influencers and they think oh this is the perfect partnership and then they don't get a response back and then suddenly they have a little bit of trauma with like talking to the influencers or maybe they do get an email back and like it's a wildly absurd you know price point that you can't afford it and then that kind of turns people off but we don't only just send emails you got to remember that a lot of these people making content they they're not business people of their own they're just normal people They don't check their emails every day like Founders do so instead of sending email emails we send DMS as well depending on which Target demograph we're going after like DMS has a vastly high response rate but really you should be sending both like if you send an email and they don't respond you shouldn't just give up you should also send them a DM saying hey I'm the founder of such and such I'm a big fan of your content here's the type partnership we're looking for if you're interested would be awesome to partner up something like that you also don't just want to give up after the first email if an influencer had to respond to every single message they wouldn't have much time to create so you kind of have to within a few days follow up just bump up the email uh show case why you care more about the partnership and I guess dovetail into that you want to show it within the message that you send in your email or your DM it's a fine balance they need to be as detailed and as tailored as possible for each collaboration but still super concise things that you should really be doing is demonstrating that you're genuinely a fan of their content which you shouldn't have to fake because if you're building a product in this space you should be a

fan of what they're doing like they're in the same space as you and they're talking to the same people that you're trying to help the difficult part is not really like faking that enthusiasm but actually showcasing it some Founders I feel like a little cold where they're just saying Hey I want to partner with you humans don't talk like that usually you want to like say I loved your latest video about this I love this specific message that you had I think that that message is you know a similar mission that we have at our product you want to really be somebody that they want to work with and show like why should they partner with you like why will Their audience love your product so you should not talk about you know extraneous things like how many employees your startup has or what fundraising round you're at or you featured on Tech crunch if you're working with influencers they really don't care about any of this stuff they they just care about creating good content and the partnership just feels more natural to them and even after all these things like I said you should expect more than 50% of influencers to not respond but the good news is the hardest part of influencer marketing was always yesterday you're always learning how to write better emails you're always learning how to contact these influencers you're spreading the worded about your product a little more these influencers you know if they do a collab with you a lot of the times they'll follow your account it's a little bit more social proof for when your users come and they check out your content or you talk to another influencer they say oh I've seen this other influencer's videos on my for you page they've worked with this account it's not that risky for me to work with that account too all right so let's talk about deals how do you structure these influencer deals and how do you get the most bang for your buck if you know what I'm saying so when you're structuring

deals with influencers one high priority that you want to set is you want incentives between you and the influencer to be aligned so you should both want a great video that converts the most obvious thing is that you should try to avoid paying Upfront for the video and most May pay half upfront this because most influencers are fantastic people but some influencers will just try and drop a half-ass video once they get the money into their account and also generally just lose all of your leverage once the payment is completed you want to try to split some of the payment so that some percent of it comes from the number of conversions that they bring you and you could track this via coupon code or UTM link and if they don't want to do that they could at least you could at least give them some affiliate bonus like oh if the video gets x amount of views then will give you an additional payment on top or if the video gets a certain amount of Clicks in the link in BIO will'll also give you another bonus the other thing that comes with structuring deals with influencers is you want to pay the least amount price per video that you can and one way to do that is you could actually purchase influencer Partnerships in bundles so you could say oh let's do a partnership of maybe three videos or 10 videos right and then say how about instead of 500 for one video we do three videos for 12 00 or something like that at that point you basically pay less per video and even if the first video does not great you have these second and third videos where one of them can now pop off this allows for a cheaper price for video and also helps to build like a real relationship with an influencer you don't want to pay based on the number of subscribers or the number of followers that they have the sole question you should be asking is Will Their audience convert and like your product or will they not the landscape of social media has changed like very rapidly where

someone with 50 followers could get more use in someone with 10 million followers okay so yeah incentives are really important when working with these people but what I really want to get from you are like the dirty details on the negotiation tactics I really want you to go deep on this cuz I think our audience would really really benefit uh to hear about these the the best way to do it is in my opinion is you talk to an influencer you bake everything in like you know what's the price if we get like exclusivity one instagram story we want linoln bio for an entire month oh I want exclusivity rights for this video I want usage rights for for this video juice up the the price and then they'll give you their fair price for what that is worth to them and you could say well okay well how about we just remove these things how much is this cost itself okay well let's remove that and remove that from the price and you end up with the exact price point of the only things that you need you can then say how could we get like a 30% 40% discount if we bul do a bulk order the other thing is oftentimes creators they post not just on one platform they post on Instagram reels they also have a Tik Tok they also have YouTube shorts so if you say how about you also posted on Tik Tok as well and we'll pay like 30% more it's not that much more work for them it's just the same video that gets reposted and then for you your price per video gets drastically cheaper because you're only paying 30% more for another video on top of what you already paid for and this isn't just like you're trying to like rip off the influencer that's pretty good for influencers as well because they just have a larger payment you know instead of getting up 500 bucks maybe you get a lot of videos and they end up getting $2,000 and you could say We'll order three four videos per month every month with this partnership and so now they have like a stable income to sum it up when it comes to negotiating with

influencers some Founders are a little scared like they don't want to offend an influencer but you have to remember like there's so many variables at play that come with the videos like maybe with that price they expect a lot more things like they had to do a lot more things but you could talk with them and drive that price down pretty significantly if you're very transparent with them about why you came to your price and if they can meet you there people are just receptive in general if you're just a truthful honest person yeah those are just some my tips when it comes to negotiating with influencers all right so let's talk about ugc instead of hiring influencers you can bring people inhouse to create content on your branded accounts or just on accounts with no followers can you tell me about how these deals work yeah so ugc deals are as stable as it gets because you're posting like 20 to 30 videos a month maybe more right so it's fine if really 10 videos flop and then just a few videos do well some people like that having to do a sponsored deal having to really make sure that it goes viral can be stressful Some people prefer like oh okay so you will basically just give me the Playbook of what kind of videos that I should be making and I just need to post like one video a day maybe it only takes some 20 30 minutes to make the video and that comes with some base salary which is like very stable and also comes with some incentive so like if your coupon code gets more than x redemptions then we'll give you a bonus or each each Redemption that you get will give you 20% 30% of LTV of each of these users that come in or maybe we do a view incentive there's no rigid way to structure it right you should just talk with the person that you're trying to hire for the ugc deals and you can see when their eyes twinkle and then you want to obviously incentivize them the way that they're excited to be incentivized an industry standard is usually you pay like 2000ish per month

it could be a little lower a little higher depending on who you're targeting but $2,000 per month and then some incentive bonus on top of it and it usually shakes out like you will probably end up making around $3,000 a month you also could actually hire influencers to become ugc creators for you if they already have an audience then usually they expect to be paid a little bit more so 3,000 to $5,000 per month with some incentive on top you can play with these numbers as much as you want you do the math yourself like okay if they can even capture like some percentage of their original audience like this could be worth it for me but you just have to make sure that there's always some incentive because it gets pretty tempting for ugc person to just phone it in just like okay I have to do my video today okay just do it in 5 minutes and just post it it's not really their fault we're all kind of victims to like we may want to take the path of least resistance if presented to us so you want to kind of also like reward them if they do well okay I want you to dive into posting strategy I think a lot of people get caught up with this how many different accounts should you have what times a day should you be posting just break down everything in terms of that strategy the most obvious thing is I think you want to be reposting all your videos on all the short form platforms like reals Tik Tok YouTube shorts it's almost arbitrary which of these platforms your video will pop off on we've had videos where the same video would do an immense amount of views on one platform and do very poorly on another platform there's my new details like when you post them you don't want to just post it with the Tik Tok Watermark obviously that's like the most obvious thing but also you want to actually rewrite the text in the hook within each of these native platforms it helps with like the SEO of the video and it helps just like make it seem less like you're just like farming Clips

across multiple platforms if you are working with an influencer and they are now making ugc Conta for you initially I suggest you post videos similar to what that influencer posts on their main account the videos will probably just end up being circulated back to the followers of the main account so it's almost as though you're getting these like sponsored posts but they're not really sponsored it's now on this account that you kind of own and then once you are demonstrating like okay this account is doing well people resonate with it you can start experimenting more with videos that feature your product maybe more heavily or videos that are a little more experimental you want to post pretty frequently just every single day you should be posting at least one video in my opinion just farming hooks finding what works learning each time having a spreadsheet just having a bunch of different ideas for content and then cutting off branches okay these ones I've tested this thoroughly this is not working cut off these cut off these oh this one seems doing well why is it doing well just continually pulling on that thread until you get that like Banger video it is tempting to always say oh my videos aren't doing well must be because I'm shadowbanned you kind of want to avoid that excuse but if you are posting for like 10 days 20 days you know he like wow this is like pretty much the same quality as my competitors I'm getting 10 views they're getting a million views then you could maybe think about okay maybe I need to be either paying a friend to make an account or tell the influencer directly to make count on her phone and she just sends me the password you know kind of getting Crea with it okay I want you to talk a little bit about success what does it mean to be successful with content what are you optimizing for and what does like going viral mean to you yeah so a lot of people think that virality is like views comments shares these more

superficial metrics I think these things are usually correlated with viral but at true virality is just something that infects the people that you really wanted to see your content a video with 10,000 views that somehow hits the pocket of viewers that love your product and they're immediately evangelized I would say that is like very viral and you did a good job of creating content that was able to go viral in this pocket with this community that's worth infinitely more than a viral video that got a million views but it's a lukewarm meme or it's some video where product has a mid-roll ad and people are just going to scroll over that anyways all right so we talked a lot about finding content ideas working with influencers but what happens when we create content it works it gets a ton of views what do we do next as you kind of methodically track how well your content is doing it it becomes pretty apparent that some ideas in some videos work way better than others you want to basically kill the videos that don't convert and explore variations of the better converting videos and so I've been talking a fair amount now about how to actually get to a viral video and it it' be really tedious to restart this cycle every single time but the good news is that once you have one viral video you can basically milk that Discovery into 10x or even 100x the initial views of finding that viral video so when you find that video your goal is to somehow turn that video into into a series series is kind of like basically reposting the same video over and over with subtle variations you might think this is unrealistic like how could the same video continue to go viral over and over but the unfortunate truth is that most people even you and I are creatures of habit and we just like seeing the same things so you want a video that you could basically slightly tweak and repost multiple times a week that's still fun for the audience some viral series that maybe you've seen is a guy

tries to see how many sticks of spaghetti it takes to hold his weight it's sticks of spaghetti one time it's coat hangers another time when he gets really rich maybe he'll try with an iPad or something but basically it's it's a really minimal effort and it's the exact same video every single time he doesn't have to go through the entire Loop of testing out influencers testing out different hooks testing out different accounts all these things he knows that it's going to go viral every single time he just needs to tweak one small thing the actual actionable example we did a Jenny is we had a series called point of view you have a paper do or point of view an essay do and it was just a ridiculous plot of someone realizing that they have an essay do and then running to the computer and then we showcase Jenny for some reason this series did extremely well and it does not take that much creativity right you just kind of are swapping out sleeping in the first 10 seconds versus maybe walking your dog in the first 10 seconds versus maybe you're at a restaurant the second half is completely the same a realization comes and then you have to go to jny AI we probably posted that exact same video two times a week for maybe half a year and that's done hundreds of millions of views tens of thousands of paid users I would say probably over half a million dollars and it was one of several video series that we were able to cook up this is not oh you once you find a r video oh you could post it again next week and you post it again maybe the next month and then it dies out you could drill this same video multiple times a week I see some people do the same video every single day you could go from Z to 1 million with just one viral series okay that's cool but what I really want to know is how do you like truly maximize this how do you take this to the total Next Level that makes you millions of dollars yeah so it's pretty comprehensive but if you really

want to maximize you want to start tweaking and posting the series not just on one account if you really want to maximize you can have multiple accounts so for example we have Jenny AI USA at so at one point we had J Germany we have jny ai Australia then you want to translate and create the same video with creators that speak different languages so we have one account where the entire account is in Mandarin once you have a video so powerful it just TR sends language it'll go viral no matter what culture no matter what language is being spoken then when you have a really Mega viral video and you kind of feel like it's on the Twilight years it's maybe fading other your competitors are copying it everyone's posting about it you can then prolong it even further by reaching out to Maybe meme Pages reaching out to these aggregate accounts they'll have ridiculously low sponsorship fees so you could pay $50 even sometimes $100 and then you could post it on account that has hundreds of thousands of followers um you know this this video has gone viral on your many accounts if you repost it here it has pretty good chance of going viral here too one caveat is like typically these meme Pages they have like the meanest comment sections you could ever imagine but it doesn't really matter because you're still getting views you're still prolonging the lifespan of your your content and eventually enough copycats will copy your video it'll get played out and then you restart a step one where you're back to finding this new viral series and you kind of go down this entire eight-step thing again all right so now we got the full framework thank you for sharing that David uh but I wanted to just have you just touch on something really quick because you mentioned it uh the multi account strategy and having multiple different accounts could you just really go into the details of that cuz I think uh that would be really helpful for people watching the multi account strategy is

once you find a viral series you can start creating new accounts but this time you don't actually need to work with big creators CU you can just find charismatic ugc people that can just basically take this viral video that you've figured out and just have them remake it in the past we at one point had five different gen accounts all posting similar content five accounts across through platforms so 15 videos going out every single day many of our accounts only have like tens or sometimes hundreds of followers and they just repost or recreate stuff from our main account and in some cases which is ridiculous the account with 48 followers will get more views than our main account with 55k followers even when posting identical videos and this is why it's so important to make multiple accounts in my opinion because perhaps your video about how to use AI to help you do research only hit the engineering student side of Tik Tok but the same video would be just as helpful to polyi Majors or literature Majors by recreating multiple accounts and recreating the content you can increase the lik hood that you're squeezing as much of the upset as possible out of your piece of content and hitting all of these different pockets of Tik Tok all right the $10 million AI short form Playbook dude I think this is so awesome because this is what's actually working and you're so open to sharing everything about it which I rarely see so thank you for coming on but before you go I want to just get your advice for anyone who's going to watch this and go start actually doing this stuff what would be your advice to actually win doing this and to just get out on the best foot possible yeah basically influencer marketing is a variant of marketing that really rewards extra effort and creativity which should be great news for any founder who's willing to put in that extra work and maybe they're constrained by Capital if you can't find an influencer's email it'll be extra

work to find out how to contact them but it could also mean that they'll be more impressed that you're willing to go the extra mile and find a way to make the partnership work and there's probably going to be less people sending emails if the emails are hard to find so once you get past the barrier there's just less competition for you to get that deal if you have no idea who the rising stars of your industry are it'll take a of work to you know uncover them but these Niche influencers will always be a better deal than working with huge creators that have agents and they're well-versed in how to extract as much money from you as possible it's the same with content instead of just asking your influencer to just make some boilet plate video shaling your product maybe they have some viral series that you noticed that Their audience already loves is there any way to organically add your product to that series or maybe there's some inside joke that your influencer has is there any way you could kind of do some creative play with that can you write the script to make it more organic to their tone of voice instead of just giving them the boiler play script or maybe allow them to write the script give up some of the creativity it takes a little bit of trust but maybe allow them to write it first and then you can kind of spend time to tweak it and make sure that your product is being portrayed in the way that you want to be portrayed the sad truth is very few companies and very few Founders actually put in this extra effort and the sponsorship really just devolves into the influencer doing the ad read as as if they have like a gun to their head or they just down like an entire bottle of melatonin like all the things the first few emails you send will probably be super cringe and they're probably going to get ignored and your first influence partner ship will probably be painful you'll probably lose some money but slowly your skills will compound you'll get more data and

you'll get better at it so the good news is that you only need one amazing influencer to make up for all the losses of the previous 10 influencer Partnerships and so as an added bonus even the with these losses you get to keep the learnings like what you learn from these previous influence Partnerships you can use that data to find even more successful Partnerships at a more frequent hit rate so hopefully this video gives you a little bit more of an edge as you talked to influencers you could avoid some of the early mistakes that I made and I'll see you on my for you page soon hopefully thank you all right that's it that's the $10 million AI startup shortform Playbook thank you David for coming on you're coming all the way from South Korea right now which is just absolutely crazy but I appreciate the last three hours that we spent together and you breaking down everything I mean we went over so much we we went over distribution conversion and retention and then we really Dove deep on that distribution thing that whole short form Playbook uh researching reaching out to influencers structuring deals with influencers posting strategy we talked about going viral we talked about really how to milk a viral video once you get that success which is super cool uh but I hope to have you come back on and talk about conversion and retention so if you're watching this video right now uh please leave a comment to ask David to come back on and we'll do this again but otherwise I hope you guys enjoyed the Playbook we worked really hard on this video and I hope to see you in the next one peace