1422: Augie Studio: Save Time on Video Marketing Using AI with Tech Marketing Leader Jeremy Toeman

Robert Plank 0:01 He quit video editing even with the best tools available at Warner media. It's Mr. Jeremy Toeman, and he is here because video editing can just be so painful. But he has built Auggie dot studio, which is the AI video studio that simplifies content creation for those marketers drowning in social demand, and he's also the voice behind the sub stack, founder at 50, exploring his reinvention later in life. It's Robert plank. It's the marketer of the day. Podcast. We're brought to you by D, F, Y. Podcast.com where your content becomes your most powerful lead magnet, but you make the content, you make, the videos, you make, the podcasts, and so many people don't put them to good use. So Mr. Jeremy is going to help us out and tell us that there is an easier way, and you don't have to become a video editing nerd. You don't have to learn all these tools. You can just click and if you can use a smartphone, then you can use audio studio, and he's going to tell us what to do, what not to do. Go from idea to traction and so much more. So Mr. Jeremy toman, how the heck are you today?

Jeremy Toeman 1:11 I'm doing great. Robert, how about you?

Robert Plank 1:13 I'm fabulous. I'm living the dream. Excited to talk with you. They call it the mutual man crush, I think, where we just, like talk about we went up with each other when I first met you a couple of weeks ago. You amazed me with a tool called replit, and you said, I can just put in a prompt and it makes a whole entire, like SAS product just based on a couple of sentences. It's amazing. What's available with AI and especially what you've created. So what have you made? What's Augie studio all about?

Jeremy Toeman 1:43 Sure, so thanks for that great setup. Augie studio, simply put, is what we consider the video editing and creation studio designed for busy professionals who don't have video editing skills. So we sort of look at the world like you have video you know how to use tools like Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve or some of these really powerful tools, or you're an influencer and you're really comfortable with like cap cut and the Tiktok or reels etc. Or you're sort of left out of the game. And the unfortunate truth is, we live in a time where there's over 500 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every single minute of the day, and 70% of businesses, particularly small to medium sized ones, still aren't taking advantage of any video marketing. So we built Augie so that a company doesn't have to go find an expensive production studio because they're great and they have their purpose, but it's not for like the local pizza shop to make their first like Tiktok or YouTube ad, right? We want to help these businesses reach their audiences, reach their customers where they're at, which today is social video,

Robert Plank 3:00 very nice. And you hear about all the cliches, all the stereotype statistics, about how the attention span. I mean, a few years ago, it was small. Now it's like Nano. Now it's minuscule, right? Now, what are we talking about, right? I forgot already from the sentence that I started, and so the attention span is super small. But then anyone who's posted the Tick Tock or posted to the YouTube shorts knows that well. These algorithms, they really reward that, right? And you say, Oh, well, I'm trying to post a 10 minute video about my pizza shop. No one's watching that. But if you have a 32nd 15 second, 59 second clip, and it's great how they've kind of, it seems like they've democratized it a little more. We're like it doesn't even depend on your number of followers, right? You put out a clip, they give it to a little small audience if they watch most of it, then they give it to a bigger audience if they watch most of it. So it kind of makes sense, even though us old timers, we have such a hard time understanding the kids these days and their skippity toilet and their reels and their clips, but it's just so competitive, and they're just flipping through. And if you can capture that attention, then you can get a lot of people finding out about your local business or your app. And so it's it's great that these tools exist, and some of them are complex and some are simple, but Augie especially is something that we should use. And so what do you think makes Augie stand out? You say that it's simple, it's for the rest of us, but if someone's like, Okay, well, don't some of those tools exist? How do you even get like, one level above stand outishness?

Jeremy Toeman 4:37 Sure, by the way, while while you were talking, I just happened to take a quick glance, so I had the number at my fingertips. Your point is right. So for your audience, if you're not on YouTube, shorts, I started the podcast just a couple of months ago, and I always put a clip on shorts. I'm now averaging hundreds of views per clip. I started with an audience size of zero. I didn't use my built in audience of 1000. 1000s of people I've worked with over the years. I created a new account, and I just quietly launched it. So if you're a fan of Robert's content and you have not started making short clips for YouTube shorts, this is the day you start doing it. Hopefully, what makes now to your question, what makes Augie, in our opinion, special is there's no learning curve on getting going and planning your content. So we work in one of kind of two different ways. Most of our audience, most of our users, either have no content or too much content. So the no content people might be like a small business where they have like, pictures of their products, pictures of their service, their store, their team, whatever it might be, no video editing skills, no technical skills, etc. So we made something called ad maker. Upload your videos, name your product or service, give us a one paragraph description. We'll automatically churn out your first social ad. It's not going to be, you know, you're not going to win a Clio, is it the Clios? I think that the Clios, you're not going to win an award with that video. But you're going to get going, and you get started, you're going to start being able to get involved in social video. And then as you scale up, you know, maybe one day you'll graduate from an Augie to a Premiere Pro. But hopefully we can help get you along the way. The second key use is where you have too much content. So for example, your podcast, Robert, or mine, we end up producing, you know 10s of minutes worth of footage per episode, but we both know that a highlight clip on LinkedIn can't be more than, let's call it 45 seconds. 55 maybe right, the attention span thing you just mentioned, it's it's true everywhere. So we build a feature called highlighter. Highlighter lets you literally highlight the transcript words of your original content. You basically click Next, and then we output you a video with just the ones you wanted. So it's a zero learning curve. Way to take long form a spoken word content could be audio or video or both, and trim it down to something really easily manageable. We do speaker voice detection so you can know, wait, is that Jeremy or is that Robert? You do? We do automatic closed captions. We let you assign background music. So we do all those basic things you're going to need for a great social ready video, again, just without any of the learning curve.

Robert Plank 7:17 Very nice. And it's good to know that these tools exist, because I was amazed. Even just a few months ago, I was talking to chat gpt, or talking about someone to someone about chat GPT, and I was like, No, you go to this website chat GPT, and they're like, I've never heard of it. You never heard of it. So we take for granted what people are just siloed in their own world, and they're not aware that these things exist, and maybe if they have heard of it, they're afraid to even touch it, even use it. Oh video editing, oh Premiere Pro. I don't, I don't understand timelines and encoding and but like people would be amazed if they knew how user friendly some of these tools are, especially when it's just as simple as you give them a video, it transcribes it, and you see the words on one side, like it's a Word document, and you highlight and it makes the video. There's no like, remember the days of like, writing down a bunch of timestamps and like, zooming in and being like, let me get to a 10th of a second, those days are gone right now. You just highlight the words and it outputs it. And so you say that there's kind of these two use cases, right? There's these two extremes, not enough content, too much content. And I'm sure that you've seen like, all sorts of people use it and so like, what do you think is the like? What's the difference between people that maybe like, use your tool and stick with it, versus those that don't like you mentioned about making, like, quick videos and getting traction, but how do we make sure that using Auggie is a habit that we enjoy?

Jeremy Toeman 8:49 That's a great question. I'll tell you a couple things. First, it's weird timing. I'm just gonna be really transparent. I'm sure everybody in this sort of Ai plus video space will come back and tell you, people come and they're finding the wrong tools for the job they're looking for. So we will sometimes get people who and they'll send us feedback. I couldn't figure out how to generate an image. And we're like, yeah, because we're not runway or Opus, sorry, Sora or vo or one of these tools that let you generate from scratch. We actually now do have that feature, but the first thing that we did a bunch of users is people coming for the wrong thing. They wanted us to do, a thing we don't do now, for the users who are looking for our kind of features. What I would say is there's sort of two key things in our onboarding that if our users even remotely try. Our Tutorial shows them how kind of the sausage is made, which is basically, how do you align clips to the spoken word. So that's just basically as you said before, just using your transcript and reorganizing it a little bit. And then the second thing is understanding that once a user tries. Bringing in their own assets. So we have a partnership when the deep integration with Getty Images, which means, if you're trying to make a video about fly fishing, right, you're a fly fishing Supply Company in Colorado, and you've got lots of little clips of your team making little flies and doing all these things, but you don't have a single clip of a guy actually fishing in the river somewhere in Augie. We would just give you that clip through Getty with full licensing rights included, et cetera, where our users sort of make it or don't, is when they recognize that if we suggest something like man in the river fly fishing, there could be 1000s of other options to use that might be better for your video, right? Maybe you wanted a man and his kid. Maybe you wanted two women on the girls trip. Maybe you want old and young, I don't really know. And so our users who notice, oh, I just hit the Replace button to get something different, they're often to the races. Our users who don't quite catch that, are the ones where we have the biggest struggle converting into long term use. Okay?

Robert Plank 11:05 So sometimes we just need to watch the dang tutorial and know where that special button is. And it seems like, oh, go ahead.

Jeremy Toeman 11:13 No, I was gonna say, I wish it didn't have to be that way. We're always working to make it easier. And so those, actually, what I just described, are going to become more and more intuitive in the product in the product in the coming weeks. But this is sort of how we build we put things out there. We see what people are trying to do with them. We see, where is it sticky, where's it's not and just try to evolve it so that we can make the best Dart and video editing product we

Robert Plank 11:34 can Oh, yeah, and with software, you just can't win. Can you either it does everything and it's complex, or it's so simple, but it doesn't do everything. It's like, you know, you can't really do both, right? Even, like Photoshop, you can do everything, but there's so many little tool bars and plugins. And ever since AI really became like mainstream and talked about a lot, there's always this discussion of the workflow, right? And it's like, it makes me feel a little better about myself, for for piecing together the different tools, right? If I want to make that image, sometimes I'll generate it in Dolly, or I'll make the prompt and generate it in Canva, or grab a Canva template and then take it from one tool to another. And so do you recommend that? Or do you find yourself? You find people do that a lot. They just kind of, they string together three or four tools, but like, maybe it is okay, right? Because it's just part of your workflow process.

Jeremy Toeman 12:31 I think at the stage of AI product tools, how you described it sounds dead on, right? Like there's not, you know, everything is sort of half baked, right now, right? Like the most, let's be honest, the most mature platform is chatgpt itself, and it still doesn't always know how to interact with something I'm giving it or what to do with it. So I think at this stage, feeling like any one tool is going to solve all your problems is probably the wrong thing. Feeling like you need to use 100 tools is probably also the wrong thing, and there's some happy medium, right? Like, for example, if you try using Auggie, and it's like, oh, this is perfect at the highlighter feature, but I don't actually need the ads it makes. Well, you might use some other thing for those kind of needs, right? And I think that's the way I recommend people be like, I don't think it's about, do you? Do you try chatgpt and try cloud and try Gemini and try the same chatbots over and over again. You can, if you want, and a lot of people having a lot of fun learning how they all work differently. I'm more interested personally in like, okay, chatgpt. Help me validate my idea. Good. I like what I've got here. Okay, lovable. Take this idea from chatgpt. What might this look like? What's a landing page for this? What's a UI concept? Cool. Hey, rep, let take this UI concept now make a working prototype that I can go show somebody right? Like, it would be great. And at some point they'll all do all the things we know, like the Swiss Army Knife is coming. But for now, I think having your sort of, your your own toolbox, it's not just a Swiss army knife, but actually, like, here are the three to 11 or so tools I use on a regular basis is probably the most efficient and results driven way to be and by the way, you're definitely at the tip of the spear by having chaining workflows. You know, I think a lot of people don't even realize you can actually link things together. I still tell friends, like most of my friends, are a little more um, technically unsophisticated, and so I will still tell them, You know what? Just, just right in chat. GBT give me a good prompt for replica to build XYZ, or give me a good prompt to mid journey, or Auggie, or wherever it's going to go. So that's, that's, you know, I think we probably, again, very similar tech geeky minds on that

Robert Plank 14:44 one, yeah. And these are, like the skills of the future that will be needed, right? It's kind of like how you need to be able to read and write. Needed to have some basic, like, spreadsheet skills, basic word processing skills, the prompting at the moment, in this early stage, it's. Kind of, I don't know if it's obscure, but it's like, not everyone has them, but like, the kids these days, they're gonna have to teach prompting in elementary school. Because even right before we recorded this show, we were talking about, like, like, the the prompt, I used to take your bio and introduce you with a podcast, and that took me, like, a week to get right. You know, I like, I'm like, Hey, chat, GBT, like, help me make a prompt. And even just that idea alone, of like, if you don't know how to use it, ask the tool itself, and it will tell you, that's right. And if you don't know like, if you hear about like, Claude, or you hear about like, four, oh, or GPT five, you're like, what about you? Just ask it. Say, I want to do this, what model, what tool, and like, it's amazing. It will tell you. And so, like, I'll be like, well, help me make a prompt, and I give it Jeremy's bio. And I want to have, like, a compelling podcast introduction that's short and has a hook, and it gives me something. I'm like, well, that's close, but I want it to be more like this and this and this. And then I like, it gives me a better one, and I paste it, and I like, kind of test it, and I debug and I iterate, and it's like, the the programming, coding skills, but applied to the English language, it's amazing to think about. And you add that with the chaining the workflows. I mean, now we're just really cooking with gasoline. And so, speaking of that, and you mentioned something that's also I was, I've done a lot and haven't really put to words, but like, there's, like, the tedious tasks, right? Like, I hate making landing pages. I'm like, Oh my god. Headline this design. I've got to test it. But then with chat GBT, I'm just like, hey, here's someone else's landing page, and I give it a screenshot, I give it the text, and I say, break it down to the bare bones. And then here's what I want to make. And here's, like, a YouTube transcript or a book. And like, make a landing page with this content, but in their style. And then I build it up. And then when I kind of make it halfway, I take another screenshot what I've built. I'm like, hey, now, what do I change? And because I have like, a buddy helping me out, they're kind of dragging me along kicking and screaming. And I get it done, like, if I engineer like a postcard, similar kind of thought process, right? I'm like, I want to say all the stuff in a postcard, it won't all fit. Give me the basic stuff I make it in. Canva, take a screenshot. I'm like, it's close or it's halfway, but like, how do I make it better? And it just like, people don't even know that to use these kinds of skills, right? And I imagine that in figuring out, like, the user interface and the features, I imagine you've kind of gone back and forth with AI as well.

Jeremy Toeman 17:38 Oh, tremendously. Like we are currently adding to Auggie a chat interface where you can say things like change the closed captions to be red, or even give it a hex color, or something like that, which eventually will will evolve to, you know, use the same fonts and colors that you can find on www.whatever.com, right? And we're trying to incorporate that way of thinking, but we don't know. Let's be honest right now, how long chat is going to be the interface we do for all these things, right? Plenty of people are using chatgpt with actual discussions, right? Talking to it, listening to it, getting to answers back, not probably you and I, because we're so much more taking the content and doing things within taking off to different places. But, you know, I love a chat interface personally, because it lets my sort of 30 years of product development work combined with just sort of radical internal curiosity like that is like my my safe space. It's a great environment, but to think that we're going to want to keep interfacing this way, like prompt engineering, is a really good example of something, you know, you brought that up. It's, it's like an aberration, right? We shouldn't be doing it. It's something we're doing to sort of cover the bases, right? But if I go talk to my friend who is an experienced podcaster, for example, and I want a better bio for my podcast. You know, I don't have to tell him he's a podcaster to do it. He just does it. And so I think the current like, where you have to define a role and a target outcome. This is all like, reminds me of being in 1996 again and knowing how to write HTML by hand. It was useful at the time. It only has so much lifespan, right?

Robert Plank 19:30 So hopefully it'll evolve into something else. And are you saying that what replaces chat like we don't even know yet. We can't even imagine that.

Jeremy Toeman 19:39 What I would say is that a things are cyclical. So we could very well end up, you know, you could predict that the next phase of interfaces is going to go back to, like, pre skeuomorphic designs, and we'll have like, things like, you know, back in that era. We could predict that it's going to go to a very go back to sort of flat and buttons and very visuals and gradients. We could predict that we're going. To go more into chat. Actually, maybe the visual web is coming to an end, right? My kids will tell you their perspective is the internet as as what we're used to, web browsers going to web pages, web pages. My kids are teenagers. In their eyes, they think that will be done before they're out of college. They think that whatever we're doing will be something different than that, and not like HoloLens or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. But more of you know we're in the process of almost dismantling the web as we know it, and going further and further into Internet is pipe of things. So I don't know how to tell you what it's going to be, and I and I, every time I make predictions, I like, I once, I once was I once like predicting that I thought the Kindle would fail. So that's where I go. That's why I keep my mouth shut those things. But I do think to not bet on more change and more rapid change is sort of folly at this stage.

Robert Plank 20:59 What's just so silly, the things that stick, and the things that people are just, oh, this will be the year VR finally catches on, right? And it'll be like, way back when they had, like, the the worlds where, oh, you'll put on your glasses and you'll go to a file cabinet and you'll pull it open, and it's like we were so sure that was going to catch on. But then also, somehow we still have like, http, colon, slash, last and the, why is it ending.com? Just because decades ago, that's what it's set, and now we're stuck with it so it's it's so goofy how, like, some things just don't take hold and other things we can't get rid of. But one thing that we know for sure is that we want to have some output, and we want to make money, right? And whatever that means for us. And so that means that instead of like playing around and playing around, it's a good stage, but we need to have some output, right? We want to grow the pizzeria. We need to be putting out some clips, and do it in a way that's fast, and in a way that we know that is good. That way we can do with some kind of regularity. That way we can consistently post to our social page. That way we can get some reliability, some trust with our people. And I have been frustrated with all of the beta kind of tools, like the the opuses and and all those, and the descript and the Riverside and they all, they all perform similar features, where you have a video, it makes the clips, but then it doesn't even do something as simple as remembering my font choices. I have to set the font, the font size, the positioning every time I'm like, there's definitely a way to shortcut and make it better and and your tool does, does this, right? You are all about saving the time and saving the clips that some of the other tools, it's kind of just like so tedious, and we can still get it to like half of the work to get that same output. And one thing I want to make sure that we cover a base on is I'm always fascinated by the idea of switching up the steps in the order, in order to make the software like, stickier, right, more addiction, more usable. And something that, that I thought was just blew my mind as a kid, was when you opened up Microsoft Word, it gave you a blank document. And back in the days of like, Word Perfect and all, you had to choose to make a blank document where they're like, no, no, no, we know why you're opening word. Here's a blank document for you. I'm like, there's so many things. Like, when membership software started, it would be made by computer geeks, and it was like, Okay, well, first create a username, then create a password, then pay money. And I was like, can't I just pay money? And then once I'm done, then make the username. I'm already a captive audience, and so I know that you've incorporated some of that into Auggie by being like, no, use the tool first, instead of, like, all these steps, like, use it first and then do the steps. So can you tell us just about the thought process that's gone into getting more people to use your tools?

Jeremy Toeman 23:57 Absolutely, I think the first thing is, you know, you acknowledged pretty well that there's a lot of, let's call it, 98% of the AI tools out there are in beta at best. Most of them aren't even really in beta, and they're still out there. And I'm not saying that about my competition at all. In fact, many of them have very, very strong products. It's more that I think we're all sort of trying to figure out many of those things. I'm sure we have users who've come to Augie and be like, this, does this even do anything right? And I'm sitting here, like, look at all the things it can do. So we've been thinking about this a lot, and we have a lot of data to show that users who come try an AI product, try it one time, and if it doesn't do what they want, they are not coming back. And that's not just us that we were seeing that everywhere. So we were thinking about, like, Okay, if you know, and I'm a product guy, so I've long ascribed to the theory of, you know, products are people hiring technology to solve the jobs to be done, right? So if you have a need of you. I want to promote my podcast on social, then you have a need of making clips for social, and now we have many different ways to do that. In Augie, what we've decided is this, we want you to be able to get a sample of using the product experience see if that works for your needs. If it does, at that point, we will attempt to get you do either register as a user and possibly pay so our first, first version of this is our highlighter feature. So again, you can right after we're done recording, you can upload this entire episode. You can next, next, next a couple of times, and then you'll get an interface where you get to pick the parts you want. And only when you hit I want to save this video. Do we ask you to register? Because we know that if you're hitting save this video, you liked your or you probably liked using the product and it did some value for you, and so at this moment, you're more likely to sign up and continue with the process, right? The second thing we're doing with this is our new ad maker, and we have it actually right now in testing and real users trying it out. And this is again, upload five, three to 10 images, product description, we do everything else. It's working beautifully. We're very I will just be really transparent, especially because I have no idea when this airs. We're going back and forth on exactly how we want to monetize that, because we do have to monetize it, because there's a cost involved. But we've been considering maybe users just can buy the video when they hit download. Maybe they don't have to have a monthly fee. Maybe if they like the video, that they're going to go use on their social feed or wherever, that's the moment where they pay, and they pay X dollars per output video, and maybe you can pre buy like 100 videos and save money and all that. We're still figuring it out, but, but it's sort of back to your point is we want to know that you've sort of come on the journey a little bit with us. You've decided that we did something good enough for you to either then register and pay for but provide you the value before we start to try to spam you 1000 emails a day on why we're the best thing ever made.

Robert Plank 27:05 I like that. And the lesson I'm getting is to think through every step, and we take for granted how many steps there are, right? You're giving me a flashback that when I started at sixth grade, one of the very first assignments they gave us was they were like, Okay, write instructions for how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And of course, you're like, oh, here it's just four steps. And they're like, no, no. You have to get the jar, you have to put it down, you have to, like, unscrew the lid, you have to go get the knife. And it's, I guess, the moral there was that you can pile in as many steps as you want. And there's probably, like, a right sizeness, right? It's probably like, that's right, like 20 to 30 steps. If it's only four, it's not enough. If it's like 100 then now you're just saying, like, you know, scratch your nose and like, you're adding too much. So there's a right sizeness of it, but there's still more steps than you think at first, even as something as simple, as mundane as creating an account and a SAS product. You're saying, Well, hey, the way that the attention spans are, you have one shot, right? They upload one video in one clip. And hey, if it takes 12 seconds to upload the video versus 22 seconds, they might leave it second 20 and we've all been there too, like loading. Oh, nope, I'm, I'm bored already. And, and there's like, two sides to it, right? Because even, like, there's the side of like, hey, I want people to use my product, but there's also like, they want to see, like, just what it's about, and they don't necessarily want to learn or read or watch video, like, then we just click and use it. Okay, now I want to create the account and get it done. And so it's like, you're just kind of scrutinizing each step and being like, okay, like, in what order do we ask things, and then what do we charge, and how do we make our money? And it's kind of, it's just fun to think about the process in all of it. And so we want people to use Auggie. But as far as, like, the features you have, or the features you're going to have, like, is there something that you think is not very well known, that you think is worth mentioning about what a does, but people might not realize it exists?

Jeremy Toeman 29:11 Yeah, I think the ability to use your own content and scale it up is something that we think, a, most businesses aren't really even fully aware of and be even those who are and are using our product aren't using it as much as they can. So what I mean by that is this, a lot of companies at some point have recorded video assets, right? They might have recorded whether they're when their executives giving a talk. They might have recorded footage of product in use. Who knows what we have found, over and over again companies that will have hours of archival content. Sometimes they've hired, you know, they made an ad three years ago, and they spent like 15 grand on it, and they actually have two hours worth of B roll footage, all high quality, looking great, that they never put to work. So in Auggie, we've had that we internally just. Call this Auggie my library. But basically we've added the thing where you can upload a script or a narration, right? So if it was narrations like, Hi, welcome to Auggie. We are the AI assisted video editing tool for every business person to move faster, yeah, the other what Auggies again, we call it video my library. What that feature does is it analyzes your own content. We do computer vision analysis to know what's happening frame by frame, and then we automatically select all the moments that vibe with your new transcript, right? So if you have two hours of B roll of people in your at your business, eating your food, buying your products, using your services, and you made that one ad that really came together nicely. You could use Augie to take the same clips you've already spent money on, you've already recorded, and make dozens of more ads, right? So that's where we think companies need to be like, Don't discard your old stuff. I mean, if it's really out of date, fine, but how can you reuse your digital assets? Right? We all know in the physical world, we try to maximize it, right? We hand down our old computers. We recycle our stuff. Well, the same can be true of digital assets, and we want companies to realize all of them could have future value, especially on social media, where your audience might have never seen what you've done before. So I hope that landed well, but I think we really want companies to just get more out of what you've

Jeremy Toeman 31:31 already done. Yeah,

Robert Plank 31:33 and that's powerful, and it reminds me of, you know, David Lynch and, like, Twin Peaks and all that stuff. Oh, yeah. Like he David Lynch, she would like, take a nap and have a dream about, you know, a zebra stripe floor and red curtains, and be like, let's just film it, and then later on, make it connect, and later on, have it all make sense, but it would just be a random dream and random visuals. And it's fun to think about applying that to your business, right? Because those of us who geek out with AI, you can upload an image and say, What's in this image and like, it's somehow, like, understands what the image is. So it makes sense that frame by frame of a video, would understand all the stills in your video. So if you have some new prompts, some new clips, some new transcript, and you time to slap the B roll on there, it can just, like, like, it's, it seems magic, but it's just AI to, like, put those clips on top of what you have, and it's like you already have all these hours of footage. Why not put it to you? So that's a amazing usage, amazing feature of it. And we've been jumping around and geeking out about all these possibilities, right content, video AI and especially using Auggie, but you're the star of the show today, Mr. Jeremy toman, so I want to make sure that in these final minutes, we discuss what's important to you. So in this conversation we're having, what's the missing link? What's the hidden question that I should be asking you? I just don't know to ask you.

Jeremy Toeman 32:59 I'll tell you a lot of my friends are asking me, especially like so I'm running a startup. I've started a podcast. I've got my oldest kid about to go off to college. I'm, you know, I've just, I turned 50 a couple years about years ago. Meanwhile, AI has showed up. It is literally wreaking havoc across the most most industries. Economic Times are uncertain. I get a lot of friends who are like, how do you keep going? How do you keep going? And I like this question because I think there's another version of it, which I was once asked after speaking on the startup panel, actually, which was basically, I want to do my own startup. I see you seem to have a lot of energy in yours. Where does that come from? And this is where I have an unfortunate kind of answer, which is, I think it's either native to you or not. And I really, really mean that. I think the answer to why I can keep going despite everything going on in the craziness around I don't know. I think I'm built for it. I think, like, the same way I'm not built to be a movie star or a bodybuilder or whatever other do your taxes. This is the kind of thing that my DNA, my makeup, my attitude, all of these things come together. And just every day is that next adventure. So I think the, you know, there's a there's a saying of some kind. I don't even know the saying properly, but if you ask what order centipede moves its legs, it'll come to a complete halt. And I think, I think that very true. And this to me, and I'm guessing you probably share some of this, and anyone who's really out there, kind of without a safety net just operating, and whether you're doing a startup with with a with a venture funding or or your own, you know, hung your shingle out, or just started creating content to see how you could turn that into a business. I think, you know the how do you make it all come like if you're finding that there's no momentum and there's no energy and you don't want to record the next day, maybe it's not what you really want to be doing. And to look at that. Me, I want every day to be a little different. I want every day to have something personally interesting, challenging, exciting. I want every day to be something professionally exciting and challenging. I want to be learning and you know, this might sound trite, but you and I both talked about our similar beliefs around ikigai as a centering principle. But I mean it when I say, like, how am I making the world a better place? And if today's answer is I'm helping struggling businesses make videos in an era where reaching customers getting harder and harder. You know, it's not the same as curing cancer. But I don't know how to do that, right? I don't know how to do that. One I do now to work in AV and Media Tech and make streaming media better, make hardware devices better, and make overall media consumption and creation experiences better. So hopefully, the people I'm helping, they're the ones curing cancer. That's how I look at it.

Robert Plank 35:51 They say, if you can't do great things, do small things in a great way. And if you're if you can't be Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, then put your skills to use and get some clients that are the elons or the Zuckerbergs, and then that's how you put your goodness into the world. And when you're when talking there, like, like, a diagram is forming in my I need to, like, go and rush to can of after this and, like, draw this. Because there's like, there's like, the fun you have, and then there's the productivity it leads to. And then there's like, the challenges that you have in the middle of that. And then there's like, the bigger picture, right? There's like, in what way are you serving humanity? And it's like, everyone has hopes and dreams, right? There's not a single person out there that doesn't, like, have aspirations. But then there's like, Okay, you have what you want to do, and then you go and you do it, and then you get that data, that feedback of like, okay, is this what I want to do forever? And I think that's where a lot of people fail, right? They they they try different things and they suffer, and they either stick to the wrong thing or they give up too easily. And there's just like, yeah, there's something to be said about just like, what you're built for, so to speak. And I think maybe it's like Robert Kiyosaki has a, I think he has a whole book called like, like a students become employees of C student business owners, and then the B students work for the government. So there's just like the different types of people, and there's like your potential, but then what you actually implement and you create. But no matter what kind of type that you are, maybe you're a business owner, or maybe you're doing the social media for some other business owner, or you're a video creator, you have to use this tool. You have to use Auggie studio. So what's the next step here? Mr. Jeremy toman, if they if our minds have been blown by what's possible and what we should be using, how do we begin using this amazing tool?

Jeremy Toeman 37:43 Well, I would hope that you could go to our website, Augie dot studio, as you mentioned, and if you have a long piece of content, if you're a podcaster, a public speaker, an event coordinator, anytime you're making content that's even like five minutes or more in length, try highlighter and see if you can get social clips ready for Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, LinkedIn, yada yada yada. Or if you have no content whatsoever, and you just need to get started, but you've got some visual assets, just some simple product pictures, try out our new ad maker, upload them, give a simple description of your product, and hopefully you'll have something. And what I would caution people, this is a really important one. I keep talking to people, and they start, they don't start on video, because they want it to be perfect. And so, you know, if the first video Augie makes you is, you know, depending on what you've uploaded, it might look like sort of a glorified slideshow with some narration and some music and things like that. That glorified slideshow is still better for you to reach audiences than nothing at all. And when you go with nothing at all, and you spend two years in planning and building your budget, whatever, all you're doing is falling behind. Get going, put stuff out there, you're going to be unhappy with it six months from now. But I guarantee if we went looking for like, the first Coca Cola ad, it probably wasn't that great, right? And so, you know, great, great video is really hard and really expensive. Think what video is good enough for your brand? And I don't need that as a pejorative, but what does the job, right? Robert made the comment right at the beginning. This is like, fundamentally, if you're even thinking of using a tool like Auggie, because you're trying to make some money on something, right? And I guarantee you some videos will make you more money than no videos. So that's, that's I'll get off my little soapbox after that.

Robert Plank 39:33 And you can't always know, right? You don't know, like you might spend all this time, sure, you might spend two years on the perfect video, and no one wants it, and you make a couple of clicks, make a quick video, and that's what is popular. Like the YouTube video on how to tie a tie has 7 million views. Why? Who knows? It's just what caught on, and you're making me want to go back and find the oldest Coca Cola ad that there is, because that could be a lot of. One for us to think about, but we need to use Auggie studio. And how do we do that? What's the call to action? What's the next step?

Jeremy Toeman 40:07 Just head on over to dub, dub, dub dot. Auggie dot Studio. You can, from our homepage, try both highlighter and ad maker. It's one click. They're both one click features. Or you can go create an account and go through the whole process and explore the whole thing. We let you do a lot of stuff for free. There's a lot of features built in for free. There's access to pre licensed stock content from Unsplash and pixels. If you choose to upgrade, you get extra minutes per month. You get access to our synthetic voice collection, and you get access to the premium Getty catalog. So I would love for people to try it out. Throw some stuff at it. See if you can get something interesting. Put it on social. See how it works. Come back. Iterate. Make it better. Keep making it better. And and send us your feedback. That's the other thing. Like inside Auggie, there's a feedback form, there's a chat form. We want to know, Are we are we crushing it, or are we completely missing the mark? Let us know we'll we're always building. We're always trying to improve.

Robert Plank 41:02 It very nice, and you practice what you preach. So that's Augie.studio. And then my understanding is that you also have an excellent sub stack. And you mentioned a little bit about now you're over to 50, and you're trying to keep up and keep the enthusiasm with the AI. So tell us about your amazing sub stack.

Jeremy Toeman 41:19 So it's literally founder at 50. If you type that all out, founder at and the number, sorry, is it founder at five, zero on sub stack, although you can find, hopefully that term will find me anywhere at this point, but I started a podcast back in May called founder 50. It's built on sub stack. There'll be written content coming this in the fall as well. But it's basically, what are the journeys so many people might have taken that don't get to the front of the press, right? We can find 1000 interviews with Musk Bezos, whomever, and how they did their journey. The truth is, they're very aspirational and they're very impractical. I'm at 52 probably not going to be able to follow Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or any of these people's footsteps. I probably already that's not going to happen. But I'm founder of 50 I'm interviewing people who have been the director of something, the SVP of something. In fact, my old boss, Mark Larkin from CNET, started as an unpaid intern, and 25 years later, was the literal president of CNET, right? And so I've got his journey on there, because I'm trying to get content out there that can help anybody in their jobs navigate career choices, difficult decisions, big life choices, from some of us who have might have already been been through those things. So it's all about the journey and the decisions made along the way. What motivates us, what doesn't what keeps us up at night, who has mentored us, who's changed us, who got us to see the world slightly different than we did before, and hopefully, all in kind of practical sound bites that anybody who listens to can maybe put to work for their own life. So that's what founder of 50 is, in a quick nutshell,

Robert Plank 43:08 very cool. And there's something underrated about the I don't know if, like, calling them mid is derogatory, but, like, you don't want Tim Cook or Elon on your podcast because they're way too high level, right? It's not very relatable. But the I mean, I'll take this guys we want.

Jeremy Toeman 43:26 Should either Mr. Musk's or Cook's podcast publicity managers be listening to this particular episode? I would love to have you on my podcast, gentlemen. But no. But realistically, the point of it, I mean, so fascinating to get to hear their journeys, right? But the point of it is also, as you were saying, it's like, who can you learn from? Right? It's more likely the Director of Marketing at HubSpot than the founder of, you know Ogilvy back in the day, right?

Robert Plank 43:56 Yeah, someone who's more your peer, someone you have more in common with. Because, like, I don't think I have much in common with Elon. No offense to him. And so we want those kind of relatable stories. And that is founder@fifty.substack.com and the tool that we really want you to use is called Auggie dot studio, because whenever I have a potential podcast guest, especially, I size them up immediately. I go, and I see, what's their most recent LinkedIn posts, and if it's a like a repost, I'm like, What's the most recent video? And then I go, when I look on their YouTube, and I'm like, did they last post a video? Four months ago? Seven months ago? Not interested. So if you want to immunize yourself against the wrath of Robert plank, then you can go and find some video of yours. Maybe you gave a keynote, or you have some video, you can take it, put it into Auggie, get a quick, real quick clip, you can post it, and then now you look a lot more relevant and someone that maintains their social media, especially if you want to get some press. Exposure, podcast guest appearance, get mentioned the news, things like that, like you have to have the recency. You can't take a break from your social media for six months, and you probably have so much just videos out there that people don't even know about you put it into Auggie dot Studio, you get the clip, you can post it, and now you can be relevant and up to date. So Auggie dot, studio is the place where we want you to go. But now that we only have a few seconds left in our podcast. Mr. Jeremy toeman, it's time for the scary part of the show. It's time where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot by asking about a fun quote or lesson that has served you. So what comes to mind as far as a fun quote or lesson.

Jeremy Toeman 45:43 It's a great final question. Unfortunately for you, I it's not a stumper for me, I have, I have a couple of these stories at my disposal. One of the ones I'm going to bring up will be working for a pixel perfect boss. And we were in our planning. We were in our planning. We were talking actually, I don't think he knew I was going to bring the story up, but I didn't know you were going to ask the question, sir, here we go. So I worked for a gentleman who basically was able to see any little missing detail. If you've never worked for someone like this, I think it is a unique type. I don't know these very impressive folks. Anyhow, I was working on him, working for some I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna name the company of the person, but anyhow, built, built some products for that person. I remember in the first product review, we're just going through things. He's like, why isn't the title centered? And I'm like, No, it's centered. He's like, No, it's not. Like, what do you mean? He's like, it's not. And we're on a zoom, and he started zooming in and, you know, like, enhance and enhance and enhance, we get all the way down to where we can see all the pixels. And he was right. It was off by one row. And he said, he's like, if you're going to do this kind of job, you need to be able to see that full screen period. He's like, I want your eyes to be able to find any of the flaws, and I want them to work fast. And that's what it takes to be great here. And I took that so much to heart, and you know, in a lot of ways, it's actually killed parts of my brain, because now I can't let go of certain things. But there's something to be said when you have someone who's willing to push you to do things at a level that I couldn't describe, less than perfection, and holds those standards so high at all times. Now, granted, he's human and he wasn't a jerk about it, etc, but he was pushy and he was strict. Is not quite the word I want to use. Just literally motivated me to get as close to perfect all the time, and that really trained my eyes, like I can look at anything from my own products to others and immediately see, oh, that's the wrong font. Oh, that's the wrong this, or that's not properly aligned, or what's this? And I'll do the same thing. Then I'll zoom all the way down to the pixels, take a screenshot, drop it off into a slack through. I'd be like, we got to fix this, or whatever. And so for me, getting that experience, as much as it was a slog to get through at the time, absolutely leveled up my game, and I'm so glad to have to have gone through it. So I hope that, I hope that counts for your stumper question, how they do?

Robert Plank 48:15 I think you did great. Strive to be pixel perfect, as long as it doesn't debilitate you, right? There's something to be said exactly the efficiency, and you weigh that with the perfection, and you strive to be that mean music teacher. Or like the story where Steve Jobs, like, tossed the phone in the fish tank and some bubbles came out and he said, Hey, you know, we can fit a little bit more space for the battery. Who knows what amount of these stories are legend. But that's something to think about and tap into, just having that little bit more obsession, little bit more attention to detail, to a healthy amount of OCD. So that way we can create the best app, SAS, landing page, product that we can because, as you said, you're a product guy, and the product we want you to check out is Augie.studio. That's a U, G, i e.studio. Mr. Jeremy toeman, it's been a blast reminiscing, pontificating with you. I'm glad that you came and I'm glad that we had this conversation. So thanks for being here. People need to check out Augie studio.

Jeremy Toeman 49:16 Thanks, Robert. Great chat. All.