How to Hit 2M Subs in 2 Years Building an AI Newsletter | The Rundown AI, Rowan Cheung

1. 0:00 – 1:33

   Intro

   1. RCRowan Cheung0:00

      When we first started, everyone was afraid of AI replacing everyone. There was a famous quote, "AI won't replace you, but people who use AI will." I realized my audience really wanted the latest AI news. The biggest problem they face, see something that goes viral and they say, "I wanna try that," and they try it and they're like, "Cool, I tried it." But they didn't find anything, any use of it, so they don't have any stickiness and there's, there's no use for them to use that tool. There's no use for them to actually be subscribed to it. It was a really big problem at the time because the space was moving so fast and there was so much noise. So I kinda became the go-to person for no-noise AI news and quick takes on why it actually matters for the average everyday tech worker. Like any other business, content is the same. And everyone talks about verticalized AI SaaS, right? Like AI for law, AI for accounting. These are huge startups getting all this funding, but no one talks about verticalized content creators. So if you are a content creator right now or you're just starting content, I would highly advise you to My name's Rowan. I'm the founder of The Rundown. So it's the largest daily AI news in the world, and we also do daily AI education. We have nearly 50% open rate across all of our newsletters at over 2 million subscribers. So many people were confused, like, "Who is this complete, like, zero subscriber guy who gotten Mark Zuckerberg for Llama 3.1? How does this guy get all the good guests?" The reason why I got the interview is because I'm the newsletter guy. [upbeat music]

2. 1:33 – 3:12

   Why Your Content Isn't Going Viral

   1. RCRowan Cheung1:35

      Who am I to be talking to Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman? I'm not a journalist. I never went to journalism school. Like, three years ago, I was just a college dropout. When I was still in college, I was sitting in psychology lecture. My friend turned to me and asked a question about the lecture we just heard, and I vividly remember just looking to him and asking, "You actually remember that?" He's like, "Yeah, I remember that. This is, this is a lecture." And that's when I realized I don't learn from, like, these settings of someone just teaching me and I have to remember it, digest it, and do a, an exam. Like, I just don't learn well in that school setting. So on the side, I was starting to self-teach myself things. I was learning how to code by actually building websites. I learned to design by actually creating graphics. Anytime I learned and self-taught my- myself through YouTube university, expand my learnings on Twitter, and that's the way I was also learning content, uh, by just posting. And then the ChatGPT moment happened. My first thread after that, I remember, I think it was a day or two after ChatGPT actually officially launched to the public, uh, I wrote a thread. I'm like, "Hey, here's some cool things that I'm exploring in ChatGPT," and it went super viral. From there, I decided, "Let's go all on this. See what happens. I'm really curious about the space. I've been in this space for a few months already." I decided to drop out and go all in on just, like, posting a thread every single day, and I just-- I thought the virality would die down, but it actually increased. And then when Twitter started going super viral, I said, "Hey, how am I gonna grow a business or brand off this?" And the easiest thing I thought about was just starting an email list. We had so many AI newsletter competitors when we first started,

3. 3:12 – 4:45

   The Secret Behind the #1 AI Newsletter

   1. RCRowan Cheung3:12

      and so many of them used AI to write their content, which makes sense, like AI newsletter written by AI. But we completely steered away from it, and we actually did the opposite. We started putting our faces behind the newsletter and we said, "Hey, this is human-generated." And we made sure that our takes were, like, very clearly human takes. We use AI for the structuring, for some parts of research, but we never do it for the human part, and there's a reason for that. AI-generated content just kinda has no soul, and people are smart. They will know when it's AI-generated. The only way I see this workflow changing is if, like [laughs] , we have chips in our brain, which I don't think is gonna come in many, many years to come. So the human loop for creativity will always be there. I think content as a whole is gonna have two sides, the Walmart and the Whole Foods. The Walmart will be AI-generated content, easily accessible. It's gonna be all over social media. It's gonna be funny. It's gonna be personalized. It's gonna be really addictive. It's not bad content. It's still good content. On the other hand, some people are still gonna want Whole Foods. They're still gonna wanna know, know the human behind things. They're still gonna wanna know the personal takes, the person behind it. The 1% that really have the humanity are gonna have even more influence. They're gonna have more trust, and you're gonna be able to build, build bigger brands, and you're gonna be able to distribute your message even further. It's gonna be so much harder to be that 1%, but I think everything else in the middle dies. So if you are a content creator right now or you're just starting content, I would highly advise you to be as human as possible. [upbeat music]

4. 4:45 – 7:03

   Tip #1 for 10x Viral Content

   1. RCRowan Cheung4:52

      If you're a complete beginner and you wanted to start content creation, I would start with asking yourself, "Do I enjoy talking or do I enjoy writing?" I ended up being the writing archetype, so I decided to start with Twitter. I think Twitter's a good spot if you are into AI. There are research breakthroughs. There are demo videos. There are papers that come out, and they only get published on Twitter. They don't get published anywhere else. So you have to be very active on Twitter to be able to keep up with if you really wanna get deep in the weeds in what's happening. So there's a little hack you can do if you're not a writer and your best ideas come from talking. 'Cause I talk to people all the time and they're like, "Hey, I just suck at writing, and I don't know how to write on Twitter. I don't know how to write on LinkedIn." So there's a little workflow hack that I tell them they can use to start, and basically, you're gonna use a tool called WhisperFlow or some kind of AI transcription tool. They're really, really good. And you download on your phone, and you can go on a walk, two-hour walk, and you just ramble ideas.

   2. RCRowan Cheung5:57

      Into these notes. And it, you can say, "Uh," you can say, "Um," you can do whatever you want in, and you can say whatever you want in this talk. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna go back home, you're gonna have all your notes, so it's gonna transcribe these notes for you, and these are raw thoughts, right? So these are your ideas. These are not AI-generated ideas. So it all stems from your human experience, your human takes, your human insights. Then what you can do is you can go to a Claude project. I've trained a Claude project on my best tweets, for example. So I've exported my Twitter data, I found those best tweets that performed the best, I shoved it in there, and I trained it on, like, over 20 of my best performing posts. So this Claude project is trained on my writing style, and I'll take those raw thoughts, and they're sometimes they're really long, and I'll just put it into a Claude project, or that Claude project, and it'll spit out a draft that's, like, 90% ready. And again, this is AI-assisted writing, but it's all stemmed from humanity. It stemmed from my ideas, and it knows exactly how I write. This is a really good way for average people to go from literal thought and rambling to 90% ready post.

5. 7:03 – 8:05

   Partner Highlights

   1. RCRowan Cheung7:03

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6. 8:05 – 9:54

   Tip #2 for 10x Viral Content

   1. RCRowan Cheung8:08

      About a year ago, all of my audience was telling me I have to do video. I agree with them, I have to do video, but I work 80 hours a week. I'm a founder, content creator, and I have a million other things going on. So I said, "Hey, how can we turn my writing into short-form video without me being there?" We decided to clone my face and voice with AI. We still use my real writing and real takes to use it as a script, and we still edit a lot, so there's a little storytelling. There's a lot of research that goes into these stories that we wanna cover. But basically, we take my natural writing, we put it into AI avatar and AI voice, and then we add B-roll, we edit it together, and we create a compelling story for reels, shorts. The Instagram account has grown to under, over 160,000 followers in a year, and this is just from this AI avatar workflow that we did. But there are definitely algorithm, or the hook specifically, is different across platforms. Your hook for LinkedIn, for example, is two lines, and your hook for Twitter is actually three lines, or your hook for Instagram is one line. Sometimes we'll take our ad copies, our best performing ad copies, and we'll basically run it through Claude. We'll train a Claude project on our ad copies, and then when we have new ad copies we have to create for some of our partners, we'll run it through there, and we'll say, "Hey, what can create the best ad copy?" It'll give us a good draft, and then we'll still fully revise off that. Um, and really, there's no creator school. The best way to learn is just through your own practice. But you can also look at people who are, are way ahead of you that inspire you and see exactly what they're doing or possibly even asking them if you're at the level where you can DM them. But that's what, that's what I would do.

7. 9:54 – 11:52

   Tip #3 for 10x Viral Content

   1. RCRowan Cheung9:58

      We believe AI is taught through habits. There's three ways that we teach you can learn. If you do one of these, you're gonna be well off, like, you're gonna be major early adopter in this space. So it starts with number one, which is ask yourself every day when you're doing something at work, "Could AI do this?" If you don't know, you can literally ask ChatGPT, "Could AI do this X task?" That's the prompt, simple prompt. And, like, a, a pro tip would be just put it, writing it on a sticky note and putting it on your laptop screen, but just constantly asking yourself when you're doing tedious things, could AI do this? You're gonna build this mindset of, like, "Oh, AI can do this. AI can't do this." And it evolves over time because AI capabilities, we're living in the middle of it. So this is really the question you should ask yourself. The second step of it is when you do find something that, oh, AI can do this, figure out the tool that's best for that specific problem you wanna solve, and then spend a couple hours. It could be, for me, I do it on Sundays, every single Sunday. I love testing tools. You might fail. You might automate it, which will be amazing, and you're gonna have way more time to do higher level things. You might fail, and that's okay if you fail because you're gonna learn where AI can't do things yet, and that's what AI intuition is, knowing when and when not to use the tool, when it's better than you and when it's not better than you. And then the third is just sharing your learnings. I find the best way to learn is by sharing things. That's obviously how I grew a business off of the back of that. But you don't have to post on social media. You can also share it with your team on Slack. You could share it with your mom, your dad, or your friends. Just sharing what you're learning with others is gonna be good not only for your own sake, but also kind of become the go-to AI guy around the office, and that's gonna help you with career. That's gonna help you with your friendships. That's gonna help you, uh, with a lot of things in life. So, uh, that's the third tip

8. 11:52 – 14:31

   Creators Are the Next Billionaires

   1. RCRowan Cheung11:54

      I'm not into a lot of politics personally, and so I'm not in the space to be able to say who is right or wrong, but you can look at someone like Joe Rogan and Elk Boys. They arguably influenced the election, and they're content creators. That's pretty insane. If you told a farmer 50 years ago that there would be this job called a content creator, they would grow a following online, and they would be able to influence an election, that's insane. I think that's only gonna get crazier. It's gonna be harder to get to that level of influence and to grow a brand, a personal brand to that level, so much harder with the rise of AI-generated content. I think those creators will be the next billionaires. Those creators will run the world almost. Content creator is kind of in the best position where they have distribution, they have data, as in they know what the audience wants. They can survey their audience to figure out what they want, and then they can create anything. And everyone talks about verticalized AI SaaS, right? Like AI for law, AI for, uh, accounting. These are huge startups getting all this funding, but no one talks about verticalized content creators. And again, that's coming from someone who is a very broad content creator, but I can tell you, verticalized content is blue ocean. Nobody's doing AI for law content, and someone needs to be the guy. You're gonna find lucky breaks, and when you do find them, it's your job as a content creator to just go all in on it. That means you might have to spend more than 40 hours a week. That means you might have to do things that others, regular jobs, you wouldn't have to do. But the momentum is everything, and once you find that lucky break, it's like you gotta just go all in on the momentum. I think it's harder, but it's still very blue ocean because there's so many problems that need to be solved in content. So yeah. Sam Altman was really interesting. It was a great interview. He gave really good answers to a lot of these, like, further out there questions. One that was particularly interesting was his zero-person company betting pool. CEO can also be replaced by an agent. So I don't know. It just brings me to, like, this cool... We're living in this really cool spot or period in time where it's kind of the age of the idea man. Like, if you have an interesting idea, just go build it, uh, because things are get- growing really fast, capabilities are growing fast, and yeah, it's just ama- the most amazing time to be an entrepreneur. So that would probably be my biggest takeaway. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 14:31