**Transcript:**

Hey, hey. Welcome to the Expert Scale Show. Today I am joined by Austin
Armstrong, and he is here to talk about something pretty cool. How his viral
social media content has produced over 300—what is it, Austin? 350 million
views in the last month. Is that right?

Yeah, it's been pretty insane just on Facebook. About 350 million reach, a
little over 300 thousand new followers every month just on Facebook right
now. It's kind of mind-blowing.

That is absolutely insane. And I know even in our private community, people
have been banging down your door asking, "What in the world is Austin
Armstrong doing?" So, we had to have you on the show. Thanks so much for
coming out and sharing just whatever magic wizardry you're doing behind
the scenes there.

Yeah, Richard, thank you so much for having me on. It's been a blessing. I've
just been doing this for like 20 years, man. So, I've picked up a couple of
tricks along the way.

I love that, man. That's really the secret there is—most people don't talk
about it—every overnight success, every $350 million views thing that
people want to elevate is usually about 20 years in the making.

Yeah, it's kind of funny. It's been a long journey, and part of the benefit of
growing your personal brand is that you're able to pivot it to a lot of different
topics along the way. So, I've been doing social media marketing since
MySpace when I was 14 years old. People are looking at this, they're like,
"How could you possibly have been doing this for 20 years?" I'm 34. I'll let
you do the math there.
I stumbled into it and was immediately hooked. You know, it's funny. I'm
writing a book right now about marketing strategy and everything. And I'm
writing an entire chapter about those early days on MySpace and how
fundamental they were and how many synergies there are of what I'm doing
right now that I was doing as a 14, 15, 16-year-old on that platform.

But it's really just about consistency. I started my professional career about
11 years ago when I moved across the country from New Jersey to California.
Stumbled into a video marketing internship and fell in love. Started as an
unpaid intern, worked my way up to paid intern to a part-time employee to a
full-time employee.

Really developed a lot of expertise in the behavioral health expert space. So,
working with psychologists and therapists and addiction treatment
professionals in that space and getting that life-changing information out
from their head into a format of video content.

And so, that led me to starting my first company, which was called Social
Pro, a social media and SEO organic marketing agency that specialized in
that, but a lot of service-based businesses. And along the way, I had the idea
for Syllabi. And I used all of that experience from social media and the
repeatable processes from working with service-based business owners and
turned it into an automated workflow within Syllabi.

And so, I've been the guy on a lot of different things over the years. I was the
addiction treatment marketing guy. I was the SEO guy on TikTok. Then I
became the TikTok guy for a long time because I had a lot of success on
TikTok. Then I became the short-form video guy because I didn't want to just
be the TikTok guy. And so, I figured out short-form video across every
platform and have exploded my reach.

And then I became the AI guy because I was showing all of these useful
websites for business owners and entrepreneurs creating content like "these
five websites feel illegal to know" is a series that really exploded for me. And
then it was an easy pivot to go from useful websites for entrepreneurs to AI
websites for entrepreneurs just riding those trends and pivoting it very easily
with my personal brand.

And now the last year has been faceless video because that's one of our key
flagship products within Syllabi. As you kind of mentioned, we're an A-to-Z
workflow tool. When we launched Syllabi, we didn't even have video
production. And when we finally added video production, it was actually AI
avatars. So, the ability to clone yourself and create videos with that.

And we hit a market saturation point there. So, we really grew very quickly
when we launched Syllabi and continued to grow for about eight months.
And then there was market saturation, AI tourism, and we were on a 10-
month downward slope. MR dropped, users and subscribers dropped because
people were experimenting.

And so, we really just took that time to talk to our users, listen to our users,
see what they were interested in, paying attention to those online trends.
And we came to a really strategic pivot where we switched from targeting
business owners specifically with AI avatars at a more premium price point.

We switched to content creators or business owners that want to be content

creators and create more content faster. We switched our core offering from
AI avatars to faceless video, which is a huge trend online. And we actually
slashed our price in half. And what that did was exploded our business, and
now we're three times higher than we've ever been and we continue to grow
month over month.

Faceless videos are such an opportunity that we can get into. I'll kind of end
my rant here, but that's kind of been the 20-year journey and just paying
attention to those online trends as well as what I'm genuinely just interested
in and passionate about. And that's allowed me to stay consistent and pivot
that personal brand towards a lot of different things over the years.
You know what I love about that story? I love that you perfectly balanced the
need to be consistent as a creator over a long period of time with listening to
your audience and being tuned in with trends. And I think there's such a
ditch when it comes to content creation. If you fall into either one of those
alone, there's some people who are very consistent in posting, but they're
not relevant.

They're kind of saying the same thing over and over again, and they lose
their market's attention and interest. And you guys pivoted both within your
software and I'm sure within your content strategy realizing that, oh yeah,
there were trends. You needed to stay consistent, but you needed to also
adapt what you were messaging and what topics you were talking about at
each stage.

You went from, you know, the guy in all of these different really sub-niches,
and you followed the trends, which is probably a big part of consistency is
equally important, but it sounds to me like a big part is also listening and
being tuned in to what's happening so that your social content is relevant
and timely. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, 100%. You have to have a hand on the pulse, and you have to, you
know, so social media is social, right? You have to lean into that audience
and build a community online.

I just posted something that kind of is going viral, just a thought on Facebook
yesterday. "Don't be a content creator, be a business owner that creates
content." And that has been a huge mindset shift over the years for me, too.

I'm a content creator at heart, but I build businesses that allow me to be a

content creator. And so, I delegate a lot. I am not afraid to give tasks to other
people. In fact, I do it. I outsource my suck. I bring in business partners. I
don't need 100% of everything.
I want to lean into my zone of genius and what I'm passionate about, and
that's being a content creator, having a hand on the pulse, and being able to
really lean into what's working and the format of what's working. It's not just
the topics that change over the years. Like what worked for any of us years
ago is probably not going to be what works today.

You have to be able to shift the subject matter and the type of delivery. And
so, like for years I've been the short-form video guy, but I'm not reaching 350
million people from videos on Facebook right now. They're text threads. And
so, I noticed that particular trend and I'm leaning into that, and that's why
I'm having explosive growth.

And so, I constantly am testing and listening to users, and I respond to every
single comment or as many of them as I can, including the trolls, which is
one of my favorite strategies. But you know, always feed the trolls.

Oh my gosh, I love the trolls. But yeah, always, the more that you can have
that hand on the pulse, and if you're serious about content creation and you
like content creation, I love this. I'm addicted to it.

If you free up some of your other time, there's a great book on this, "Buy
Back Your Time" by Dan Martell. Do a time inventory, you know, outsource
everything.

Such a great book. There's so many actionable things that I took away from
that book to just give it to other team members so that I can free up more of
my time to lean into marketing and content creation and talking to our
customers every single day. That's really been a huge benefit for me.

That's massive. I love what you said, "Outsource the suck so you can have
your finger on the pulse." And I think that's where a lot of people get
overwhelmed and therefore they stop doing content.
I've even been guilty of this myself, right? Where I'll get consistent with
content for a while and then I'll get other stuff that takes up my time and I'll
stop being consistent. But if I look back, it's probably because I didn't
outsource the suck enough and I was spending too much time doing that and
not enough time actually keeping my finger on the pulse.

So, tell us a little bit about the AI tools that are now available to people
because I think probably a lot of people listening are still trying to catch up
on what's possible right now with AI.

So, can you talk a little bit about how you're outsourcing the suck either to
people or to AI or tools and then really just what's possible now that wasn't
even just six months ago when it comes to putting out consistent content
that can get the crazy amount of reach you're seeing?

Yeah. So, as far as day-to-day logistics that I outsource, I have somebody

that manages my email and manages my calendar because that's just not
the best use of my time. I can just look at my calendar, have notes, and
show up.

Fantastic productivity tip there. The other thing that I realized is that I can
come up with the idea, I can record the content, and I can publish the
content, respond to people, but I don't need to do the video editing. That is a
very time-consuming aspect that I can outsource.

I have a team member edit that actual video, send it back to me. I kind of
took that from Gary Vee's approach. Gary Vee has a very similar mentality
where he loves to have a hand on the pulse, but he doesn't need to do every
single component of the content creation aspect.

So, I have somebody that edits the videos for me. I am primarily active on
TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and a little bit more on X now.
But I also have somebody that manages some of my other profiles.
They manage my X, they manage my Pinterest. Pinterest is a very slept-on
platform that nobody talks about, but it's a huge opportunity. And so, that's
what I use some people for.

Now, I am starting to use more and more AI tools as well. So, I mentioned
those text threads are what's getting me the most organic reach right now.
What I mean by that is the specific format is a clickbait headline of text with
a colored background on Facebook.

Very nuanced here. So, I'll say something like, "Rest in peace Photoshop.
These five AI tools will transform your photo editing." And I'll have a down-
pointing finger emoji, right? And then in the comments, each comment is a
tool. So, it's one tool with a description of what that tool does and the URL to
do it.

Now, you can stack this with affiliate marketing if you're really smart as well
and have those as affiliate links. And that's a format that works exceptionally
well.

And so, now ChatGPT just in the last couple of months released a
functionality called Tasks. And so, what this does is you can train this task.
And so, every single day it will for me write these threads every single day
for me.

I trained a task on how to have the headline, find different tools, the niche
and industry. It's trained on my voice. And so, every single morning I get a
notification from ChatGPT: "Here's your daily thread." And it did all the
research for me. It typed everything up for me. It has all of the links. It has
the clickbait headline.

And so, all I need to do is copy and paste that over. And they work
exceptionally well over and over again. I might do a couple of little language
tweaks or something like that, but that saves me countless hours of doing
the research on all of these tools and coming up with all of these headlines.

And then, shameless plug here with Syllabi, you know, we've really replaced
the need for a content marketing agency. That's kind of the big plan, but a lot
of marketing agencies actually use this for their clients.

And so, we kind of replace the need to have like five different tools, five
different subscription costs and save you as the business owner, the
entrepreneur, the content creator, or the agency that creates content for
your clients.

Topic research, script generation and writing, AI voice cloning, avatar cloning
of yourself if you want to be on camera, URL to video, audio to video,
faceless video, animation of those videos, scheduling and publishing, you
can connect all of your social media accounts to it.

You can automate the process. You can bulk create. So, I can go in there and
say, "Create four videos a day for 30 days straight on how to be a business
consultant," right? And it's going to generate 120 different topics, different
titles, different scripts, different unique videos, and automatically schedule
and publish them to every social media platform, automating social media
growth for yourself or for your clients.

And like this was never possible even just a year ago. So many cool tools out
there.

That's absolutely insane. One of the things that you just busted a myth for
me and probably for a lot of people listening is that you can't put links in
your posts or it'll kill the reach. But I love that you are busting that myth with
350 million views where it's like, "Hey, I'm telling people go below and you're
giving them these tools and you're actually putting affiliate links sometimes
in the comments."
So, not only are you getting this massive reach and creating a lot of
conversation in the comments, you're probably getting clicks, sales, affiliate
income through that reach, which I think is like every content creator's
dream.

It's like, yeah, you build reputation and reach and that's an asset that you
can always use to grow your business, but how cool would it be to actually
be able to liquidate that time right away? Like see a direct ROI.

That's insane. Yeah, just to kind of expand on that because, you know, if you
put a link in the actual post itself, they will completely throttle it and you're
going to reach nobody. But it has zero effect on your reach in the comments
section of that.

And I say this for YouTube videos and stuff too. People I see all the time, like
experienced marketers posting their YouTube links as a Facebook post. Don't
do that ever. Instead, say, "I made you a tutorial on X, Y, and Z." And put like
a little down emoji and then put that YouTube link or that link in the
comments area there.

Quick other thing to highlight on that. There's a lot of different ways that you
can monetize this strategy right now. Affiliate marketing, which I just
mentioned, you drive clicks to that with a description and information.

I drive people—I cross-pollinate my platforms. So, I send them over to my

monetized YouTube channel. So, I'll say, "Here's a tutorial on X, Y, and Z." In
fact, I did that. So, like one of my threads two weeks ago reached like 70
million people.

So, I'm like, "All right, let me do a video tutorial on YouTube on the same
topic, but walking through every one of the steps." Reposted that same
headline and caption, but instead of the five comments, I linked to the
YouTube video. Over 100,000 views from Facebook alone on that Facebook
post that is monetized, that drives revenue.

The other great way that I'm doing this is growing my email list. So, there's
an amazing platform called Beehive right now which has this boost program,
and basically you get paid to grow your email list for free because the other
newsletters are paying to grow their subscriber account, right?

And so, I'll post a comment just as a closing call to action on those threads
like, "If you love this tutorial thread, you're going to love my AI newsletter
where every single week I share topics on X, Y, and Z. Here's my subscribe
link."

A percentage of people will subscribe to the other boosted newsletter

platforms, and that monetizes as well. And so, there's so many different
streams of income that you can generate from this.

That's so amazing. I think that's honestly something that has been a limiting
belief for me in my content game is like, you know, you sort of it's almost like
running a marketing funnel where a lot of experts are familiar with this idea.

We talk about it a lot of like a self-liquidating offer, a self-liquidating funnel.

And the reason you have to create that is because many times there's only a
small percentage of people who are actually interested in your core offering
or what your business does.

And if you're spending money on traffic to get those people's attention, you
have to have some way to liquidate some of that spend. And I think in a
similar way with content creation, the cost is lower, but it can sometimes be
a lot more time.
And so, people are like, "Well, how do I know that this is going to translate
into an ROI? What if a lot of the people I'm reaching aren't even a good fit for
my backend or service?"

And what I love what you're doing is you're kind of going, "Some of the stuff I
post will directly connect to what I do, and some of it may not, but I've
created ways to monetize audience building for the rest."

And I just think that's brilliant. I think a lot of experts could really learn from
that strategy because even just for me, it changes the way that I would
weight the importance of that time in regards to my strategy.

It gives me resources to actually reinvest if it's actually earning direct

revenue for whether it's affiliate marketing or channel views or whatever
advertising dollars. That's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, point on like there's pros and cons to growing a large
audience and having those vanity metrics, which I genuinely do think that
the vanity metrics matter.

You can be insanely profitable with having a small audience that's hyper-
focused on the product or service that you offer. And you don't need—I have
1.5 million followers on Facebook right now. You don't need that many
followers to be successful, right?

But by going viral and having a large following, you can drive more product
sales and services and whatnot. But yeah, it opens up all of these additional
streams of income that you can reinvest back into it.

I'm making multiple five figures a month just from doing that strategy that's
not driving sales to Syllabi at all because there's a lot of people that are not
the right fit.
Just transparently, like when you have a lot of followers, I have a lot of
followers that come in from like Africa, and I love all of my supporters, but
unfortunately they're just never going to be a subscriber of Syllabi because
they don't have a bank card.

And the conversion rate is so high for those people over there, but I can still
provide that audience a lot of value. I can still help them grow online, and I
can monetize that effort as well so that it's not just a waste of my time.

I actually am getting an ROI from the effort of growing organically.

Man, that's so insightful. One of the things I'm really curious to dive into,
especially in the realm of video marketing and video production, is what
these AI tools can specifically do for experts that they may not even be
aware of.

So, why don't you talk a little bit more about how the average, let's just say,
coach or course creator or consultant, how should they be what should they
be paying attention to as far as AI tools that could radically either grow their
business or make things that they're doing right now that are very time-
intensive much easier?

Well, there's so many tools. Just to shamelessly plug Syllabi real quick,
there's other tools as well. So, like if you have a podcast, you can upload that
audio file into Syllabi. It'll transcribe the entire podcast for you and then it'll
generate a video for you around that.

So, you can instantly take your educational podcast for coaching consulting
and turn it into a video for social and distribute that across the board.
If you want, you can also do keyword research. So, one of the best things
that I learned as a coach consultant is to give your best information away for
free. And that might sound counterintuitive.

You know, give the information away for free, sell the implementation
because they're going to know, like, and trust you, and they're going to hire
you because you've resonated with their specific problem.

And so, if you look and do some research on what are the reasons, the
emotional pain points of why someone would need to hire you in the first
place, and create content around all of that.

We'll show you all of the questions and data and cost per click so you can
associate dollar value with these topics, etc. across the board.

ChatGPT is a no-brainer. If you're not using ChatGPT at this point, what are
you waiting for? Where have you been, bro? Where have you been?

Like I'm sure the adoption rate of marketers in ChatGPT is like more than
90%. But if you're that sub 10% that's not using it, please jump in there.
Train a custom GPT on yourself.

So, one of the things that I've done is I've done a lot of podcast interviews
like this and I do a lot of public speaking. And so, I downloaded all of the
transcripts, about 70 pages of Google Docs of transcripts from podcasts I've
done and speech recordings that I've done.

And I trained a custom GPT on all of that text data that I uploaded to it. So, it
knows me very well. It knows my voice. It knows my expertise. And so, I can
ask it questions. I have it helping me write my book right now as I write it
and then I send it through to edit it a little bit and make it flow a little better
but still in my voice with my unique words.
I mentioned the tasks earlier. So, you can set up daily tasks to do anything
for you—research, do particular research, do content creation, analyze what
competitors are doing, feed in data like documents or spreadsheets.

I have ChatGPT read every contract before I sign any contract. Now I upload
it into ChatGPT and basically say, "Are there any red flags or clauses in here
that I need to pay attention to?" And that kind of acts as the first pass
through for me before I look at those particular sections and then end up
signing the contract.

For calendar management and email management, there's platforms like

Motion, which is awesome. I've experimented with it and used it before. It
will move items around on your calendar if you completed them or not. It'll
automatically reschedule in a free spot for you so that you can remain more
productive.

And then Superhuman is a fantastic email management tool that's AI-driven

as well. And so, you can just—there's little commands. My wife uses
Superhuman. You can just add a command like, "Are you free at," and it links
to your Google calendar and it'll show your availability on there, and you can
just click a time and it sends that to the prospect and it automatically adds
that event to your calendar.

But in general, just to kind of summarize here, there are tens of thousands of
AI tools out there now that can do every single thing that you can imagine.

Like Manis just came out. AI operators and agents are going to explode this
year that can do all of the tasks for you and disrupt the need for a virtual
assistant, to be honest.

But you know, look at—do a time inventory. And look at all of the tasks that
you do every day. Do this for like a week or two weeks and see what are the
tasks that bring you the least amount of enjoyment, that take the most
amount of time, that you hate doing, and then start to look up AI solutions
for those things.

There's probably a tool that does 90% of that, if not 100% of that, and then
use that. You don't need every single tool out there, but focus on your unique
pain points as a coach, consultant, expert in whatever that you do. And seek
out those tools and solutions to help you be more productive and output
more.

Such good advice. I love the idea about doing a time audit. You know, it's
funny, man. We were actually just playing around with this recently, and I
was pretty stunned where we were able to take—we're able to take a voice
note from someone where they're just recording a voicemail basically
ranting, stream of consciousness about their area of expertise and using an
agentic workflow—which anybody who's listening doesn't understand what
that is, it's like an AI that performs one task and then it sends it to another
tool and then that tool performs a task and then it sends it to another one
and that performs a task.

So, it's like multiple little helpers all playing their part along the workflow.
And by the end when it got through all the way to the end of that workflow,
we had a fully built-out course that was in that expert's voice.

It had an AI avatar of them in the corner of the course video teaching. It had
slides, and it was built like the course—the implementation exercises from a
voice note, right? Insane. Absolutely insane.

And so, for me, I think it's such a—I hesitate to use the word gold rush, but it
is a wild, wild time to live where so much for people who are experts who
have real expertise to share with the world—not generic stuff—I think it's a
really unique opportunity to share that message with potentially millions or
even hundreds of millions of people so much faster and so much easier than
has ever been possible before.
Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It's the biggest leap forward in technology not just since
the internet but the printing press. Like it's just it's such an opportunity right
now.

This is not a trend. This is not a fad. This is not NFTs or blockchain, which is
still viable technology but was not immediately consumer accessible. And
that's the difference here is that these AI tools and solutions are immediately
consumer accessible with very little technology understanding needed.

Anybody can go into ChatGPT, and if you can talk to Siri, you can talk to
ChatGPT and get incredible outputs and link things together like you're
saying. There's so many automation tools out there like Make and Zapier and
so many new tools that are coming out to just link all of these processes
together.

It's an insane time to be alive, and you're almost foolish to not just start
experimenting with some of these things to be just to be blunt.

It's so cool. Well, let's not be fools. Let's experiment. For all of you listening,
Austin just called you out. Boom. Don't be a fool. Austin says go experiment
with AI.

I want to talk about your book in just a minute and just get a little sneak
peek into that. Before we do, I just want to encourage anyone listening. Man,
if you have not used Syllabi—Syllabi.ai or .io—we have both.

One of the things I love the most about your software, especially for me as a
creator, is that Syllabi allows you to do market research to start there.
Identify the pain points, the questions, the search traffic, the things people
are actually interested in that will be relevant for you to make content
around.
It allows you then to pour out your expertise and your ideas and work
collaboratively with AI to shape content to address those problems, those
issues, and then go through the entire workflow to produce amazing videos
for social media in a fraction of the time—maybe 10% or less of the time.

What would have taken four hours before you can maybe do in like 4 to 10
minutes now within that software. And so, I'm a wholehearted believer. Like
I'm honestly our whole community is a raving fan.

We're just going to give you a big old endorsement out here on the Expert
Scale Podcast today and go check out Syllabi.io or .ai if you want to get a
really full-stack solution to start putting out amazing AI videos that are
relevant content.

And who knows, maybe you'll start getting on the Austin train and start
seeing your posts go viral. So, tell us a little bit more—give us the as we
begin to wrap here, give us a little insight into this book you've mentioned
twice that you're writing about. Do you mind giving us just a few little
nuggets or pieces from what's going to be in there?

Yeah, absolutely. So, it's basically my 20-year journey of being a social media
marketer and what's working right now. So, it's going to be a very tactical
business book. Kind of focused on video marketing in particular, how to
monetize in a lot of different ways.

So, I said in that quote earlier that I posted yesterday, "Don't be a content
creator, be a business owner that creates content." That's really the mindset
shift of this book is how to create content that actually goes viral on every
single platform, how to actually do it, how to incorporate AI to help you along
the way.

There's going to be interviews with some of my content creator friends and

colleagues, very successful people online, as well as stories from my 20
years of experience to make all of those tactics and strategies a little bit
more relatable as well.

So, it's very much hero's journey focused with actionable tactics that you can
immediately implement. It's probably going to be the best 20 bucks you'll
ever invest.

Well, man, I can't wait till it drops, and we're going to read it and we'll have
to maybe we'll have to have you back when the book drops and we'll make
sure people can get that into their hands.

Well, Austin, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on the show
today. I know you brought so much value to our listeners. Is there anything
as we kind of wrap that you'd say as encouragement to somebody who
doesn't have 20 years of experience, but they're like, "Man, I really want to
own this social media game. I really want to grow." What would you say to
them as we wrap today?

Perfectionism is procrastination. Just start, stay consistent, and make micro

improvements along the way. Never quit.

So good. Such good advice. Man, this episode was hot sauce, strong sauce.
Whatever platform you're listening on, please make sure you go give it a
review.

In exchange for the amazing value Austin brought today, give it a like, give it
a subscribe, give it a comment, and Austin, we just can't thank you enough.

Hey, man, I'm excited. I'm going to start competing with you on social media.
I'm going to take all these tactics. See if I can get to at least 10% of Austin
Armstrong's online fame.
It'd be great, man. I'm competitive, brother. Get ready. Next time we'll come
back and you'll be like, "I get two billion views every week."

Well, thanks again, man, for being on. Thank you. Yep.