Intro Voice Guy [00:00:14]:
You’re listening to Entrepreneur’s Enigma, a podcast about the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey. Every week, your host, Seth Goldstein, interviews entrepreneurs from all walks of life about their entrepreneurial journeys. From store owners to fortune 500 CEOs, we all have stories to tell. So sit back and join us for the next 20 or so minutes while we explore the entrepreneurial world.

Seth [00:00:49]:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of the entrepreneurs enigma podcast. You know who I am by now. I’m Seth. I’m your host with the most, I guess, is what you can say. Something like that. Whatever. I have Cody’s it is Schneider or Schneider?

Cody [00:01:03]:
Schneider. Yeah. You got it. The show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cody [00:01:07]:
Classic German.

Seth [00:01:09]:
Classic German. Cody is the, an acclaimed AI innovator and digital marketing guy. He is the founder of draft horse AI and swell AI. So there’s 2 and there is so stresshorseai.com and it’s, drafts. I said, stresshorseai.com and swellai.com. If you go swell.ai, it takes you somewhere different. It’s like a portfolio

Cody [00:01:33]:
platform. Yeah.

Seth [00:01:35]:
Dotcom. It’s a dotcom. So, so so he’s very big on AI and helping you get the most out of your audio, you know. And when it addresses horses, it looks really cool as well as helps you get a lot of SEO articles out there and build up your the oomph, for lack of a better word, of, content on your site quickly so that Google can have something to to sink its teeth into and people have something to read, which is kinda nice. And you’re really a big thought leader in the AI augmentation. So using AI, not to replace you, but to augment what you’re doing to help you out, like with content, you know, not talking nothing worse than having to sit back and transcribe it manually. It’s like, well, yeah, I do that. You don’t need some of the transcribe it for you.

Seth [00:02:19]:
You know, you just let AI do it. Certain AI’s are better than others, and the Descript is enough to edit it with, but it’s not something to publish. I I’ve played with swell.ai. It’s it’s neat. It understands me, which is a which is interesting for someone who’s from Philadelphia. Nothing can understand me. The these could barely understands me. It’s enough for me to edit.

Seth [00:02:42]:
But, like, I know you the one of your competitors, Cast Magic, understands me. So the ones that are dedicated to listening and transcribing understand me. Whereas the ones that are meant for editing, we’ll get there. So how did you find your way into all this AI stuff? I mean, like, I go to what’s the background? Who is Cody, and why why do we care kind of thing?

Cody [00:03:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So, I mean, bullet point, background or pedigree or whatever you wanna say. I sort of started off in ecommerce, somehow ended up in b to b, marketing. I was working for Oh,

Seth [00:03:15]:
that happens. Somehow it happens.

Cody [00:03:18]:
Always does. I studied economics in college, dropped out twice, the classic story, and kinda just was building things on the side always. But, yeah, ended up working at a b to b marketing agency. Our really position in the market was we did strategy consulting for fortune 500 companies that were in the manufacturing space.

Seth [00:03:36]:
A very, very interesting. Yeah.

Cody [00:03:38]:
Yeah. It was awesome. But think, you know, door manufacturers, windows, shower bases, super unsexy companies with, like Yeah. Purchasing decision time horizons, yeah, that are super long. So cut my teeth there. My boss, while I was there, had gone to Y Combinator, did the whole thing, went out the mecca, you know

Seth [00:03:57]:
Oh, wow.

Cody [00:03:58]:
Saw God, came back, and was basically using it in traditional spaces. My role was digital strategy. So what I would come in and do is basically, audit the resources that they had available, build out the processes for their teams, and then we would basically hand off and train their teams so that they could internally run And

Seth [00:04:13]:
this is all before AI?

Cody [00:04:15]:
All before AI. Yeah. We were all doing this on the human level. And then from there, I ended up, in the valley. I worked for this company called Roopa Health, joined as Employ6. Ended up, helping them take them from a, $20,000,000 valuation to a $110,000,000 valuation in about 6 months. Wow. Wow.

Seth [00:04:31]:
That’s fine. Oh, wow. Because I mean, you said, like, if you said 2 years, I’ve been like that. That’s pretty impressive.

Cody [00:04:34]:
Oh, yeah. It was just insane. Wild. It was wild. Yeah. It was one of the fastest growing things I’ve ever been a part of. And then from there, kind of ventured out, did a small stint at a crypto company, doing head of growth there.

Seth [00:04:47]:
You’re gonna have to tell your keeping crypto a little bit. You have to kind of head to head to

Cody [00:04:51]:
Totally. Totally. Yeah. We were one of those high yield savings accounts powered by DeFi. Our whole shtick was that we were non custodial, meaning that the wallets and the keys were owned by the individual rather than creating, like, a whole pool so they could pull directly from the network at any point, like, without us. All we were doing

Seth [00:05:06]:
was It’s more it’s more it’s more legit. Yeah.

Cody [00:05:09]:
Totally. Yeah. And so then we were using MSTABLE and, stable coins for all of it. And it it it was like everybody, we thought we were insulated and trying to, you know, doing our best for that. Terra Luna, like, the fallout happened, and so we got affected. And I mean, I ended up going and telling my boss and my friend. I was like, yo, if I was you, I would fire me. You no longer have a product, and I’m only valuable if you have something to sell.

Cody [00:05:30]:
Yeah. And so from there, ventured out and was just doing early stage consulting, and this is really the origin of Swell. We found podcast to be this incredible vehicle for marketing. There’s something we wanna pioneer at Roopa. We we were selling to practitioners, and they traditionally are extremely hard to get in front of. Everybody’s trying to sell to them because they always have money. And, so what we ended up doing was spinning up a media arm of the company. We ended up taking a podcast, their podcast is called The Root Cause Medicine Podcast, from nonexistent to a top 20 medical podcast in the US in about 6 months.

Cody [00:06:03]:
Wow. When I left, they were

Seth [00:06:04]:
You like that like that 6 month window, don’t you? You like

Cody [00:06:07]:
the easiest one 6 months. The craziest growth curve. I you know, and it was all kinda stacked up. So I’m not anyway, so from that, I was doing this I was, basically, a CRM for insurance agents. Was

Seth [00:06:19]:
the company consulting

Cody [00:06:20]:
for, the most unsexy thing in the world, but we made a show for them. I was doing all of the, my whole strategy is make long form pillar content, chop it up into all the different forms that we wanna distribute through, think newsletters, blog posts, LinkedIn posts, you know, clips for social, etcetera.

Seth [00:06:39]:
Love it.

Cody [00:06:39]:
And then distributed across all channels. And saw that happening. I was like, there’s gotta be a way to basically incorporate AI into this. And everybody that I knew was already experimenting. Oh, so

Seth [00:06:47]:
you do you started it, not AI. You started in this field, not AI ing it. You’re doing it the old school way. We’re gonna take a quick break, hear from our sponsors, and get right back to the show.

Cody [00:06:59]:
Totally. Yeah. And then we saw this opportunity to basically, like, build this, you know, marketing workflow. And that’s really what I’m obsessed with and what we’re really focused on as well was we’re trying to figure out, okay, you know, what are the things that humans are doing currently? How do we automate a way or augment their teams to get, you know, 80% of that, you know, heavy lifting done? And that’s really where, you know, we’re

Seth [00:07:22]:
So what’s your sweet what’s your sweet spot with Swell? I mean, like, like I mentioned at the top of the show, I mentioned that, you know, there’s others out there like Cast Magic. You know, there’s Awesome Minvo, which was Memento that is more the video side. Do you guys do video? It’s We do our

Cody [00:07:37]:
video. Yeah. So Uh-huh. Our Yeah. Basically, upload a piece of long form content into us, and it’s gonna turn into clips, blog posts, newsletters. You can then send that. We have social scheduling built into the platform so you can schedule

Seth [00:07:50]:
I do that nowadays. Yeah.

Cody [00:07:52]:
Totally. You can also publish, like, a blog post as an example directly from Swell to your website. It just goes as a draft. You click a button, and it’s there.

Seth [00:07:59]:
And then you can and you should always edit those blog posts, people. Always edit those AI. You know? Don’t just go,

Cody [00:08:04]:
like Totally.

Seth [00:08:05]:
No. AI. Boom. No.

Cody [00:08:08]:
Yeah. So what we’re really obsessed with, though, is, like, everybody is trying to create some type of output and how do we create the vehicle to build that workflow to create that output. And so we built templating into the platform. So as an example, we you can do what we call prompt training. So for, say you upload a episode, it creates a transcript, and then you’re, like, alright. Now write a detailed blog post based on this or detailed blog post outline based on this transcript. So writes the blog post outline, and then I can chain a prompt and be, like, okay. Now based on this outline, write a detailed blog post.

Cody [00:08:40]:
Now once that blog post

Seth [00:08:41]:
is So, essentially, you are Minvo, and Cast Magic having a baby is you.

Cody [00:08:48]:
Basically. Yeah.

Seth [00:08:49]:
Because just Cast Magic, for those who don’t know, only does text. Totally. Though, really, I know they’ll debate with me, but they only really do video. So you’re kind of a conglomeration of the best of both worlds, which is really cool.

Cody [00:09:02]:
100%. 100%. Yeah. I’m just trying to take the whatever your source media is and turn it into anything that you want, and then, you know, again, another part of that chain can then be, okay. Now rewrite this article so that it’s in a casual conversational tone. Use more vocabulary from the transcript, and you can even add, like, a persona of who you’re trying to have it be written from. So from Oh,

Seth [00:09:21]:
so write write like Cody, please.

Cody [00:09:23]:
Exactly. And then, you know, what we see is we can get stuff 95% of the way their human comes in over the top of this.

Seth [00:09:29]:
Yeah. Adds it up a little bit, put some personality more personality into it. Yeah. It’s awesome.

Cody [00:09:33]:
Totally. But for, you know, solo creators, that type of thing, and that’s really where we started. We, like, wedged in with podcasts. We’re now starting to work with, like, come a lot of companies that are doing webinars. We’re seeing traction.

Seth [00:09:42]:
Yeah. And I think it’s video, audio, something that’s just like it’s Which is everything.

Cody [00:09:45]:
Everything’s going there. Right? So

Seth [00:09:47]:
It’s too much of a bear to do it manually.

Cody [00:09:49]:
It’s too much. 100%. But, I mean, what’s super exciting is, like, a lot of these companies, especially in the b to b world, they have, you know, 200 webinars they posted over the last 3 years.

Seth [00:09:58]:
Okay. Okay.

Cody [00:09:59]:
What do I do with this? Right? I’m just sitting on this gold

Seth [00:10:03]:
mine that I can’t treasure trove. Yeah. Exactly. There’s so much stuff there that you can mine through a book to do all this other stuff.

Cody [00:10:10]:
100%. 100%. And so what we’re really, you know, excited about and focused on is, okay, you know, imagine I build a blog post outline template, like, just like I described a second ago. Yeah. And that template I can apply to a project. I upload my entire back catalog of webinars, and I just wrote 2, you know, 200 articles, and they can all be published to my site in 20 minutes. And that’s, you know, the the kind of the scale that we see this content creation at.

Seth [00:10:32]:
I love it, man. I love it, dude. I love it. And I mean and the best thing is it’s affordable, which is really appreciated because, you know, podcasters, we don’t have a lot of money.

Cody [00:10:42]:
No. For sure. And that was, you know, something we learned really early on and realized that we were gonna have to branch out into the larger just marketing category.

Seth [00:10:49]:
Yeah.

Cody [00:10:50]:
But where we see this going because I I get this question, you know, asked every time I do one of these. It’s like, what’s the differentiation? What happens with AI and all this? And, like, how we see the opportunity is what people are really trying to do at the end of the day is, like, automate a task or automate a job role. And so Mhmm. We are starting to see the inkling of this happening, like, just with what people are asking for us on the product side. This is why we built in social scheduling. Right? They’re like, hey. What I’m actually trying to do is I wanna give you source files. I want you to find me, like, the best clips based off of, you know, what I

Seth [00:11:19]:
love that it finds clips that I’ll never find.

Cody [00:11:22]:
Totally.

Seth [00:11:22]:
I will find that it’ll take me hours of listening to find these clips versus, like

Cody [00:11:27]:
Totally. Brilliant. Totally. And then it auto we built auto cropping into it. So it basically does active speaker identification. And so, say, you ask me a question and I respond and then maybe there’s some crosstalk, it’ll basically isolate whoever’s talking. And if there’s crosstalk, stack them. We add captions over that.

Cody [00:11:43]:
That clip can then be scheduled to all your social channels, do cross posting. But what we see, you know, the exciting piece of this and what people are starting to ask for is, like, hey. You know, this is awesome, but how can you just make it so that it will just run my social media? And so this is the question that we’re starting to explore of, like, okay. Well, we’re calling her Jenna. It’s this agent that we’re building. And, basically, you know, how she functions is she has access to your entire back catalog. She has access to your social account. And maybe it’s not even your core social accounts.

Cody [00:12:11]:
Right? Like, in this hypothetical world, like, you could have 20 Instagram accounts, 20 TikToks, and 20 YouTube shorts accounts.

Seth [00:12:18]:
Mhmm. And But it’s a lot of manage for a human. So if you give give give the AI lady, for lack of a better word, give the AI person a Yep. 3 of his accounts. It says to say run these accounts for me.

Cody [00:12:30]:
Totally.

Seth [00:12:31]:
You could you you handed me 1. Yeah.

Cody [00:12:33]:
Yeah. And you hire Jenna. She shows up in your Slack, and it’s Oh. 49 a month or whatever it ends up being. And she then is finding clips. She’s scheduling clips. The clips are posting. She’s analyzing the data to see what worked most effectively.

Cody [00:12:48]:
She’s going back to your back catalog and then creating this flywheel. And so we think that we can basically do that, you know, for social media management. We think we can do that for SEO. We think we need to get to that for Google Ads, all of these different channels. And this is what we’re really excited about. Right? It’s like

Seth [00:13:01]:
I understand.

Cody [00:13:02]:
Yeah. You know, product companies. If people are way better at product than the art distribution, this is a classic, you know, trope within the

Seth [00:13:08]:
It’s gonna exhaust fast. We’re doing the content. We’re exhausted. We only do

Cody [00:13:12]:
the it’s just a matter

Seth [00:13:12]:
of that. Yeah.

Cody [00:13:13]:
100%. 100%. And so if we can just augment those teams and you just have to focus on a good product, we’re providing a great customer experience, and we’re handling the distribution. Like, really, the thing I’m trying to figure out is, like Yeah. Can we just make it where a company comes, they plug in. Right? Yeah. And they give us access to all the things that we need, and then your your company just starts proliferating itself. Like, as long as, you know, you have product market fit and there’s, you know, some an angle that it can go from.

Cody [00:13:37]:
So and again, it won’t be perfect to begin with, but, like No.

Seth [00:13:40]:
I can personally do

Cody [00:13:41]:
an SEO.

Seth [00:13:41]:
That’s that’s the that’s the creepy thing about AI is this sucker learns.

Cody [00:13:47]:
Totally. Totally.

Seth [00:13:47]:
Sometimes it makes you jump off a bridge. Sometimes it doesn’t eat glue on, a pizza.

Cody [00:13:53]:
Totally.

Seth [00:13:53]:
9 toss a glue. Like, give it credit. They chose Elmer’s glue. So I don’t just trying that.

Cody [00:13:59]:
Yep.

Seth [00:14:00]:
But I I mean, do you have your own algorithm, or do you tap into chat GPT or you chat tap into Claude, or you do a combination of all of them? Or

Cody [00:14:08]:
We we basically use whatever, like, we use all these different models for different aspects of the the product. Oh, so your cloud migration is is its own thing. But what we found to be the most effective we could sit down. We could train these models, but by the time we have one trained, like, what ends

Seth [00:14:25]:
up You’re out of this out of this out of you’re so out of good market.

Cody [00:14:28]:
It’s better to let these companies basically and a lot honestly, the open source community is doing insane stuff as well. So what we’re realizing is that

Seth [00:14:35]:
Of all of all people, Meta is doing open source LLM, and I’m like and Zuckerberg comes out. He’s like, you should all be open source. Like, I’ll bite me. Like, it’s like He’s just doing it to

Cody [00:14:45]:
eat up the market, which I love. Like, I feel like he’s trolling, you know, all these companies that are

Seth [00:14:50]:
raising money. Troll. He’s one giant awkward troll. I love it.

Cody [00:14:54]:
It’s funny. It’s amazing. But, anyway, yeah. So I I how we see this going is and where we see it headed is it’s it’s, you know, the cost to produce AI generated content has gone to 0. Like, if you wanna write a 1,000 articles, it’s nothing. Right? But Yeah. Whatever you write is gonna be very average. And when you think about it, of course, it is going to be.

Cody [00:15:14]:
It’s it’s trained off of the general knowledge of the Internet, and the general knowledge of the Internet is pretty average. Mhmm. And so the opportunity we see for companies and and really the the way to differentiate in this, you know, the coming years with with all this AI content is you have to provide source material from

Seth [00:15:32]:
thought

Cody [00:15:32]:
leaders, from experts Yeah. That then you’re transforming into whatever, you know, media or or or or or form of media, for wherever you’re posting. It’s a blog post, a specific structure, LinkedIn post specific structure, etcetera. But that’s the only way that you’re gonna be able to differentiate as a company when it comes from to a content marketing, in the long term now. So

Seth [00:15:51]:
I love it, man. I mean, I’m looking at I’m looking at your site right now. It’s like, normally you try it. You give it uploads, see how it works, make sure it’s not going haywire in your stuff, make sure you understand you. Very important. Take it from a guy who talks really fast from Philadelphia. Like, we say we don’t say water. We say water.

Cody [00:16:09]:
I mean,

Seth [00:16:09]:
I mean, if you could understand me, it’s something. So then in $29 a month, 300 minutes. So it’s, like, 13¢ a minute, which is probably for and then, you know, $49 a month for 600 minutes. You know, it’s it’s it’s comparable, 10¢ a minute for more. You know? It’s really awesome because it’s it’s affordable. And then, also, I guess, if you run out, you can say, I need I need another 60 minutes. Here’s $8. There’s 9 bucks.

Cody [00:16:37]:
Totally. You can just buy you can buy that one off as well. And Yeah. I mean, we work with from all scales of creators at this point, from solo creators up to like, we have clients where they have I mean, one of them has 500 shows, and they’re publishing at least weekly. So

Seth [00:16:52]:
sustained. It’s bad too much. Yeah.

Cody [00:16:54]:
Yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah. So see. Totally. And so, I mean, there’s just a large podcast network as an example. But, yeah, I think

Seth [00:17:00]:
Oh, I get what I get what you’re saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cody [00:17:03]:
Totally. Totally. But the, the big thing here, what we’re trying to do is, like, again, I’m not I it’s not at the scale where it can replace people entirely, but if I can make it superhuman and make your team or just a single person, like, function like their 10 employees, then, like, that’s a super power That’s

Seth [00:17:20]:
where AI

Cody [00:17:20]:
see that across

Seth [00:17:21]:
Well, that’s where AI comes in. It’s like it makes you better at your job because you can’t replace it yet because it’s gonna take you glue. So, you know Totally. You gotta watch AI. It’s it’s like watching it. It’s watching like a 6 6 year old kind of thing. Totally. Here’s the question.

Seth [00:17:34]:
So what’s the best thing? Because you’ve done the corporate thing, the startup thing. You’ve been fired from startups. You’ve been hired from to startups. What’s the best thing about being an entrepreneur? Because this is your baby.

Cody [00:17:45]:
Yeah. I think, you know, why I I don’t know if I really had a choice. I I’m I’m kind of a compulsion based human being.

Seth [00:17:52]:
Yeah. For me entrepreneurs that way. Yeah.

Cody [00:17:55]:
Totally. Yeah. I I mean, I I just really what it came down to is, like, I thought I was gonna stay up in the start or stay in the start up world

Seth [00:18:02]:
and You are. You’re still there. You’re still there.

Cody [00:18:06]:
At a probably, like, ahead of growth capacity.

Seth [00:18:08]:
Yeah. The more in in house life and health insurance provide for you kind of stuff, that kind of thing.

Cody [00:18:13]:
Whatever. Yep. Totally. And so what I realized, you know, thank god early on was a lot of the times the people that came I mean, I had a friend that he was a cofounder of a company. You know, they went through Y Combinator. By all measures, all accounts, unbelievable company. The hot you

Seth [00:18:30]:
know,

Cody [00:18:30]:
total success. 5 years of work, and he, I think he got 1,500,000 in secondary. And I’m like, that’s, you know, nothing. Over 5 years, you get a gun and made double that working at a FAANG company with, like, how, you know, good of a an engineer he is. And so I just saw that basically occurring and saw what was happening, you know, in the self funded space. And I I’ve owned companies in this, like, you know, I’ve it’s, like, smaller tool type of products and, also, like, agencies, in it that we could use as cash flow to build out what Swell is turning into this, like, larger platform. And so that was really better

Seth [00:19:05]:
to spend other people’s money. Sometimes give it away as an equity and spend other people’s money so you can do it right. I think now it only makes

Cody [00:19:13]:
sense to go and get an angel round. Like, you’re like, it’s basically

Seth [00:19:16]:
I know that I’m seeing PC round is not what you need anymore. You need at least angel. Get, like, warranty people to throw you, you know, a few 100,000 just to get something rocking and rolling. Yeah. And then fill it out and then like Yeah.

Cody [00:19:27]:
Crayo AI is a great example. Right? Like, they the I think they, in 4 months, just went from 0 to 400,000 in MRR. And so, you know, 5,000,000 ARR run rate in less than a 100 days or something absolutely insane. It’s crazy. Right? And the founder is literally, like, talking about what they’re doing on his YouTube channel. Right? Like, that’s the paradigm that’s now existing with, like and the model has shifted. Right? They gave away equity to top creators within their category. They’re like, yo, we’re gonna give you a 5%.

Cody [00:19:57]:
You go and you ship this thing.

Seth [00:19:59]:
That that trade was already realize that 1% equity is a lot. Most advisers get 1%.

Cody [00:20:04]:
Totally. You

Seth [00:20:05]:
know, if if there are a half a percent evens a lot. Because if they Totally. Exit a 100100000000, that’s a nice amount of chunk right there. Yeah.

Cody [00:20:12]:
Totally. And all they did is they went and they found people that were shilling other products that were similar to theirs. And they’re like, hey. Instead of, you know, being an affiliate and just getting an affiliate commission, let’s partner on this. We’re gonna give you a equity percentage. Here’s the expectations of how we want you to promote it, but you’re already doing this. So just do that for us.

Seth [00:20:29]:
You’re doing this, you know, but here’s a cut of the company, and it makes you more passionate.

Cody [00:20:33]:
They can, you know, I think in what he said and again, all this data is here, sad. I don’t know. I don’t have any insight or knowledge on this, but

Seth [00:20:41]:
But he’s putting he’s building in public, which is awesome.

Cody [00:20:44]:
7 days went to 20 grand MRR. Like, I mean, that doesn’t in in traditional VC land, that doesn’t exist. Right? No. And so, basically, you can get these companies to scale so quickly that you can start to self fund them, and they’d be basically, make this flywheel of growth. Right? And, historically, that’s why you go raises. I’d go get a bunch of money, and I would then deploy it into growth, you know, as that growth capital into the growth of the company. And every dollar that I get in more, I would spend basically to get this to happen. Well, now the it’s like we’re seeing this with companies that are under 10 people.

Cody [00:21:15]:
It’s like 5 engineers and maybe 5 you know, 22 marketing people and then 3 contractors. And they’re basically getting these companies to 10,000,000 ARR, and it’s more like it’s an it’s changing the So

Seth [00:21:27]:
on the flip side, you know, you you see that you see this progress. You see, you know, what the best thing about being an entrepreneur is you can do your own thing, you know, and build out your own thing. You feel like it’s your baby and stuff like that. Not to be at the whim of, you know, corporate and being cut when things are bad. It’s you, you know, it’s you. But what what’s on the other side? What keeps you up at night with Swell and DraftForce?

Cody [00:21:50]:
I mean, just this is moving so quickly. Right? Like, every day I see something drop on Twitter where I’m like that, you know, we that was impossible a week ago. Right? Like, I just saw this person that basically show he built a a AI agent that, uses Claude’s Sonnet 3.5, which is unbelievable programming. It’s what everybody’s finding. Yeah. But, basically, you can have this almost like chat dialogue back and forth. So imagine in, like, one half of the screen, it’s like this chat dialogue. And then the other half, it’s just, like, building out whatever the piece of software is that you’re trying to create.

Cody [00:22:22]:
And you’re just, like, basically, like

Seth [00:22:24]:
You can be an English major in code. Yeah. It’s kinda

Cody [00:22:26]:
weird. Exactly. It’s like, what does that mean from a product standpoint? What does that mean? I mean, even as a marketer. Right? Like, it’s like, what if I go find all these emails? And it just goes and it finds scours the webs and finds your entire target audience’s emails.

Seth [00:22:37]:
That’s incredible. So what is the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

Cody [00:22:42]:
Yeah. I think the the biggest thing is, like, the only way companies die is is, like, they just quit existing. It sounds so stupid. Right? But, like

Seth [00:22:50]:
It’s it’s obvious.

Cody [00:22:51]:
Basically yeah. It’s just it’s it it really is just like you run out of money. Right? So be default alive, and if you can get to that place, like, at that point, you it’s just a game of who can. And I think that, you know, it looking at biology. Right? We get this confused often. We think that, like, natural selection selects the winner. That’s not actually what’s happening. It’s killing all the losers.

Cody [00:23:10]:
And that is the same thing when it comes to companies. Like, if you can survive long enough, you have a very high likelihood. Like, if you can survive 5 years, you have almost, like, a 100%, like, likelihood that you can survive 20. Right? Most companies, almost 80% of them die in the 1st 5 years. And so if you can get past that threshold, you basically can live on. So that’s, you know, the thing that I always try to keep as a mantra, whenever all of this is happening. I think the other piece is just, like, for your own sanity, when you’re building this type of stuff, especially in the space that I am. Like, tomorrow, a new model comes out.

Cody [00:23:40]:
It totally decimates our business hypothetically. I think that, you know, when to to to combat that from a just a mental health standpoint because, like, this is a part of the game. You have to be at, you know, be able to compete at this at a high level. You have to always be thinking, okay. Like, what’s worst case scenario? Like, I gotta go get a job back in, you know, with the skill sets that I have in digital marketing at an agency or a company. Yeah. Like, I mean, that’s not the worst thing that could happen. Right? And and in reality, like yeah.

Seth [00:24:07]:
There’s You can always go back out. You can always go back out and do it again. K. Make make some money to arrive and reinvest it, that kind of thing.

Cody [00:24:14]:
Totally. 100%. But I think the the biggest thing as well, like, another huge thing that I found to be incredibly valuable is find a group of people that are at the same level of company growth as you are. Yeah. And it’s, like, even if it’s 10 of them that are all kind of growing simultaneously, it just creates this this cohort that you can basically bounce ideas off of. It’s so important.

Seth [00:24:33]:
Even if they, you know,

Cody [00:24:34]:
even if they repeat on German doers, even if they’re first time, like, just somebody that’s at the same kind of, like, growth trajectory that allows Mhmm. You’re you’re gonna be facing the same problems at the same rate, and that allows for this, you know, mutual learning. And this is why these startup incubators are incredibly valuable. Right? We’re gonna have YC’s because you I mean, you have 80 peep you know, whatever. A 160 people that are all doing the same thing at the same time at the same moment. And you

Seth [00:24:57]:
get to, you

Cody [00:24:58]:
know, basically have that that group learning and and knowledge acquisition simultaneously. And also, Chris, this competitiveness. But, anyway, yeah, I think those are the I think the three things that I would say focus on if you’re

Seth [00:25:08]:
interested in doing so. I mean, I’m part of Founder Institute, and I I mentor there. And I I love watching with the with the kids. Not all kids are my age sometimes. They’re 43 years old. I love what they what they’re coming up with. And and and then they’ll help each other out. They all scratch out their backs.

Seth [00:25:23]:
Sometimes they become users of each other’s products. It’s fantastic. Totally. Totally. So Cody, where do people find you online? Obviously, obviously, swellai.com, drafthorseai.com. And you’re on LinkedIn. Right? You’re always posting Yeah.

Cody [00:25:37]:
LinkedIn and Twitter is where I’m most active. If you just Google my name, Cody Scheider, it come up it should come up. If I don’t, I’m very bad at my job. Yeah.

Seth [00:25:45]:
Looks like you have good hair. Good hair

Cody [00:25:46]:
and beard.

Seth [00:25:48]:
On here. Long. Long, big hair. I’m jealous now.

Cody [00:25:51]:
Fire line’s getting softer than a pudding cup, so I’m just riding this as long as I can. But

Seth [00:25:55]:
Exactly. Ride the hair. Ride the hair, buddy. But, Cody, thank you so much for being on, buddy. This is great. And hopefully you have some fun out in the wilderness. No. I don’t have you said?

Cody [00:26:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Visiting family. So yep.

Seth [00:26:07]:
That’ll be fun. You’ll have some fun out in the wilderness. Kind of let your brain kind of release a little bit. It’s come by you out a little bit.

Cody [00:26:14]:
Do my best. Harder than easier said than done

Seth [00:26:17]:
for everybody. Never stop thinking. Exactly. And guess what? We’ll see everyone next week. Goldstein Media hopes you have enjoyed this episode.