All right, here we are again. I recorded this on a walk and I listened back to it for about two minutes and it just really sounded like I was out of breath and it was hard to listen to. So as much as I want to take you on walks and share my thoughts, I think it's probably better if I have those thoughts and then come back and record them. So here I am trying to make this sound better for you because I can't can't be publishing things that sound terrible. Anyway, that's not the point of this episode.
Jason:The point of this episode is I wanted to talk about how I am trying to climb Cringe Mountain and I'm not the first person to come up with that phrase. I've seen it around a bunch but for me what that means is I have completely neglected being on social media for many years and this is you know it was stemming from burnout for sure but that was like ten years ago but somehow that burnout lasts a long time but hey that's what happens when you film a YouTube video, you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you're on what was the beginning of Instagram for about five years straight every single day back in the early 2000s, and it really wore on me a ton and I don't think I really knew how bad it was and how much I hated even just the thought of picking up a camera and talking to camera for quite a long time. But here we are in 2026 and what I wanted to share a couple things. The first thing is a year ago basically to the day we made the decision that we were like okay we kind of see the writing on the wall with where things are with AI and being business coaches for the previous eight years or seven years at that time, it just, it felt like information was going to become a commodity and that when you can get an incredibly great answer in seconds from a chat box in your phone on an app, why are you going to pay a $100 a month?
Jason:And I get it. There's so many other things that come along with that. There's so many other things that we thought were the value of our coaching program and monthly, you know, kind of like hangouts together and just being in a group and still having that connection because while AI is amazing, it's still you know you're talking into the void to a machine. And I think for us what it really made us think hard about was A) we would just had kind of like gotten tired of talking about what we've gotten tired of talking about, but B) when you can just get any question answered as quickly as you want it answered, it changes the landscape of what matters to people. And I remember recording an interview with Gemma Bonham Carter, who is a WAM member and she was a long time teacher customer even before that.
Jason:And she's just really smart, really thoughtful. She kind of lives in the same coaching space. And I remember talking to her about this idea of just, you know, if you're going to have, especially an info product, like it has to be a done for you product. Like it can't, it can't really exist anymore as just like information that someone has to go and do all the work for. And I really stand by that in 2026.
Jason:I do think there are some exceptions to that, but I think even more so now than ever, things have shifted. And so I want to get back to like the content creation of all, but I want to just share timeline wise why a year ago I think matters in my head. Maybe you feel this a little bit, maybe you're not that into kind of the same space as we are but maybe you're seeing it and so we make the decision to shut down wandering aimfully into our last launch we go on paternity leave we have our little bundle of Joy Leon and we start to get back into work a little bit in like November and this is when you know we had been working in Lovable but we were working in Lovable a ton more and Lovable is basically like an AI app building tool and you just chat with it and it does design and it codes and very, very incredible to see your ideas come to life. I've already talked plenty about that, but then come December and December is when Anthropic dropped their, Opus model. And I think the first one was Opus 4.5 and we heard rumblings about it and again I think I talked about this a little bit before but it'll make sense and it seemed to just really be an incredibly intelligent model when it came to coding more than any agent had before or any AI had before And so we then had, you know, the beginning of the year stuff, we would travel and what have you.
Jason:When we finally came back and we started working on Clog Code and actually using Opus and just seeing what it could do and the change and just the drastic ability that it could take ideas and make them legitimate things, it really flipped a switch for us and that's kind of what was the spark of saying like okay we think we can build Asper a year but that's when we were like okay we can definitely do this. Now getting back to the content creation of it all. While these tools are incredible and you really can make any idea come to life, it goes back to the age old problem that if you're not telling people about it, no one's gonna know it exists. And we have this very interesting problem that we of backed ourselves into where for years, especially like the beginning of 2020s, basically said like email newsletters are still the thing. You don't have to be on social media because if you grow a really good email audience, they will purchase from you, they will be your biggest fans, and you can make great revenue.
Jason:And we proved that. I mean, made $2,500,000 with Warning Aimfully in that time, and we did not really have to be on social media at all. And we stopped basically writing blog posts and we really just relied on the relationships we built in email. But here's the thing that I think happened and the thing that we're only seeing the repercussions of now, which is why we're getting back on Instagram specifically more. And I think what happened was, so obviously with COVID so many businesses went like turbocharged online and where did they go that was working really well?
Jason:Email newsletters. And what happened was the email inbox was already kind of a cluttered space, but it became now over cluttered. I mean, just so many more messages. And I remember we used to go with, you know, we would have a two week launch and we would just send an email every other day. We didn't have to send email every day.
Jason:Like our last launch, it was like, you have to send email every single day because if you go two days, you're you're not going get any sales on the days when you're not sending emails. And we saw that happen. And so I think with the shift in how much email marketing happened in the early 2020s, it really changed how people's inboxes are. And I know that from a lot of people who we interact with both in our community, but also just that I'm friends with online, they've said the same thing. They were just like, yeah, like my email used to be like my bread and butter for doing a launch.
Jason:Now it's like, I'm lucky if I get like a tenth of what I used to get. And you know I think we started to feel that a little bit but where it has really come to head is the beginning of this year and where we are with the beginning of this year is we have our first app Scene Roll which launched and it did an okay launch. I think starting a new thing, our audience is not aligned with video creation necessarily and that's what the tool does. And we had a 100 and some odd people, I think we're up to like 125 people have purchased some credits through Scene Roll, which is not nothing. Getting 100 customers is absolutely not nothing, but it's a lower priced product.
Jason:And so that only generates $4,500 in total revenue. We can't live off of that forever. Now we had some other revenue from the Vibe Coding two site in the beginning of it, which is great because that was helpful. But that fast forwards us to where we are with now our second project that we have launched. And our second project is Solo Content Studio.
Jason:And it's likely if you aren't on our email list or your inbox is a complete mess, or you don't follow our Vibescoding2 account on Instagram, this might be the first time you're hearing about Solo Content Studio. And very quickly, the overarching problem that we're solving with this app is you have to create content these days. And there's so many types of content that you can create. It's not to say you have to create all of those types of content. It's just that there's a myriad of things to create to keep people's attention and to engage with them and to have touch points where they are.
Jason:And those things are newsletters. They are Instagram stories and carousels and reels. They are blog posts that still have value, not necessarily the value they had ten years ago, but they still have value. They're YouTube scripts. They are podcast outlines, slide decks, a bunch of other things.
Jason:And so what Solo Content Studio does is it essentially knows who you are through some training that we've set up through a lot of planning and effort. And in learning you and your voice and your brand and how you like to write certain things, it will then generate content for you. And it just, we're looking at it as a very high fidelity draft of that content. Like it's not supposed to be an immediate copy and paste because we always believe that you need that first human touch and that last human touch when it comes to AI generated stuff. Otherwise you get slop.
Jason:But what we have seen with it for ourselves, the example that we keep talking about is we built the newsletter specialists. They're called specialists in there. You could call them kind of like agents, but it's not really the same thing if you know that word in the kind of AI space. But we have these specialists. And so the newsletter specialists, essentially we've trained it on our audience.
Jason:This is for our Growing Steady newsletter. We've trained it on our tone of voice. We've trained it on our topics, our specific way that we like to format it. And what used to take us two to three hours every week to write a newsletter has gotten down to about eleven minutes start to finish. And that may surprise some of you listening to this.
Jason:And I can tell you that we have used it on the past couple of newsletters. And I personally, I couldn't tell the difference. And that is because we are going back and we are adding in our own stuff, but it is doing the legwork of what we're doing. So the really cool thing about Solo Content Studio is it's essentially like thirty minutes of training upfront that really is going to set you up for success long term for all the content that you want to create. Once that training is done, we call it sharpening, you can then just drop in three bullet points of your next newsletter.
Jason:Or if you have a YouTube video script and you just have this idea in your head that you want to tell this story and you want to have this outcome and you've trained it on how you make YouTube videos, it can then just churn out a YouTube script for you and it's going sound exactly like you. And the early feedback that we've gotten which is really great is and this is the thing we really wanted to solve for because it's the problem we ran into was people saying like, oh I used to try and do this with ChatGPT or I used to try and do this with Claude, even if I used Skills, even if I used a Project, even if I used a Custom GPT, it just never got there. Then it would kind of break down and it would just it still repeated things and it would lose context and it just was never good enough for me to rely on and you know some people I think still used it or still do use it and they just kind of know that like, oh, this is like, it's not even I mean, it's a first draft, but it's like a half of a draft.
Jason:And that's good because that can help you save time. But those same people who told us that are using Solo Content Studio and they're like, I am literally shocked at how good this is. I this is like my newsletter is 90% done when I do this output. And those are the things that we're so happy to hear because it's how we feel too. And and so coming circling all the way back to like the the thing that I was telling you about with content creation is what we are building the solo content studio tool for is to solve our own problem where in 2026, you just really, it's very difficult to rely on only an email newsletter because email newsletter growth is very hard by itself.
Jason:It's very difficult to get new people to find you in at least in our experience nowadays in 2026 without having external things pointing people to your email list. And specifically, you know, that being social media because that's just where everyone's attention has gone. Again, same thing in the time frame of the twenty twenties. Everyone's attention went to TikTok and Instagram, and it just was like maximized our focus on these apps being part of our lives and being in our hands all day long and all those things. And so for us, what that means is we knew we had to get back on these platforms.
Jason:And as of recording this right now, it's actually kind of a fun moment for our Vibe Coding two Instagram account because it has gone from zero to 300 followers from January 1 to April 1. And then in the past month, it has gone from 300 to 800 followers. I give Caroline all the credit in the world. She is 100% in charge of our Instagram account there and the reels that she's making are so fun and they're so creative and it's really, really cool. She's shaping the solo content studio, social content specialist around what she's learning.
Jason:Like she's learning all these things about hooks and she's learning all these things about storytelling and she's putting all these things in the training to help people who want to create social content have it be better suited to actually get shared and to get follows. And listen, we only have 800 followers at this point, but there's no doubt in our mind that if we can stay consistent with this, I would bet all of my cinnamon rolls that in six months we will probably have 5,000 followers. I wouldn't be surprised if we had 10,000 followers. I'm not saying that to gloat, I'm saying that because I really feel like Caroline is doing so much research and she is putting so much effort into this that the rewards are going to come for our accounts And that's a benefit to everybody who's going to join Solo Content Studio because it is only going to continue to shape that tool and make it better as we learn. So the other thing I wanted to share so anyway, let's come back to Cringe Mountain for a second and then I want to come back to another specialist in the tool and I don't wanna just prattle on for too long so just a couple more minutes.
Jason:But for me personally, I am trying so hard to shake off the the burnout, to shake off the cringe feeling of, like, not wanting to be on camera. And I just decided the other day, I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna start posting daily reels on my Jason Does Stuff Instagram, and I'm gonna just care less about can't compare myself even to Caroline who's spending so much more mental energy and effort and talent into hers. I just have to do the version I can do so that I can feel like I'm actually contributing to people finding out about what we're doing. And so I just gave myself a little two week challenge and I just, I'm not going do it for thirty days.
Jason:I'm going do it for two weeks and I'm just going to record it simply. And I'm just going to do like little jump cut videos around our office or our guest bedroom, which is where I am now. And I'm just gonna share like thoughts and things that are going on, but also like the work that we're doing because that's the thing for me that I want to just be fully honest about is that we're creating all these things, we're making all these things, but we're just telling our email list about them, which is just this like one group of people that we continue to tell things about over and over again and we hope that that's going to be enough people to sustain our businesses. And when you are pivoting your business completely from what it was to something new, we have to realize that well we have to get new people in who are more aligned with what we're trying to do. And we're, you know, we're already seeing the benefits of this and we're seeing people on our list who are brand new, who have signed up for the Solo Content Studio Cohort, which is amazing.
Jason:Like they just joined like last week and they're already signing up for a a $300 thing, which is really cool because that is proof that we're putting out content that people are resonating with, that they wanna get on our emails to hear more about what we're doing, and then they're buying a product that they feel is aligned with what they need. And that's the exact funnel that you want to create these days. So for me, I'm trying to overcome this crazy mountain by getting back on just creating reels on Instagram and being okay with them being so, so, so imperfect, so not really well thought through if I'm being totally honest. Because if I just do it for two weeks, it's like any other habit in life, it will start to become something that you go, okay, great. Like, now I have this down.
Jason:It feels more comfortable. I'm not hating hitting publish every single time when I'm putting up one of these videos. And I'm, I'm feeling like I found maybe like a, a voice for myself where I wanna move forward with this. It's not gonna be perfect. It's not gonna be amazing.
Jason:I'm not expecting much to come from my Instagram account whatsoever for our overall business goals. But what I want to come out of it is just this idea that I don't feel so cringey when I'm going to create content and then I can be more excited about actually creating content to help our business and contribute to the marketing which is the thing that I was so known for over ten years ago and I've just been really kind of like quiet and behind the scenes about. So we'll see where what comes of that. The other thing I wanted to share just one more thing before I let you go is the specialist that Caroline just finished last night. We're literally building the first version of the product right now as we are in our launch period because that's just how we roll.
Jason:And she built the blog specialist. And what this is being built off of is an automated content blog generator that I have built for Tea Tree, which in the past, I think it's like two months I've been working on this now. In the past two months, it has written 150 blog posts. Now you might hear that and go, Oh, these are gonna be just crap. I'm gonna go read these.
Jason:I would challenge you to go to ttree.co/blog and click into any of the blog posts. Just scroll like the middle of the feed of blog posts. And you will see that they are like pretty formulaic. Like they're not like well crafted stories and all this stuff, but that's actually not the goal. That's not the point.
Jason:What I did is I had Claude do a ton of research of what's actually working in 2026. Like what are the SEO specialists, the people who live, eat, and breathe this, like what are they reporting as working? And what they're reporting as working is solving very specific questions that people ask with a blog post because all AI is doing now is finding those, summarizing it, giving it to somebody. But they're crediting the place that they're getting it from which does get you some traffic and some clicks. And you might be wondering yourself like, okay, 150 blog posts, how much is the traffic increase?
Jason:Traffic increased. Well, I can tell you that it has gone from zero visitors per day about a month ago to averaging about 25 visitors a day, which is not a lot. And I understand we're playing in small numbers here, but I have also we have also landed two sales in the past week from that blog specifically because we use a specific coupon on the blog. So what I really love is that we are starting to get traction and traffic. We're starting to get a couple sales trickling in directly from the blog.
Jason:To me that is a winning formula that a blog can still work. It just changes the shape of how we think about a blog. Now if you're listening to this and you're like, ew, I do not want to write a blog that way that like has AI churn out, you know, answers, you know, content that's just answers for people's searches, that's totally fine. If you want to write story driven blog posts and you want to write, you know, just really thoughtful things, I lived that for a long time and I really appreciate that writing, but I can tell you from my personal experience as someone who used to love and do that, I don't really read that stuff anymore because again, I'm getting all those stories from people's reels on Instagram or their stories on Instagram or whatever. And I'm not saying that you have to abandon your beliefs and your thoughts and like what you see in things.
Jason:I'm just saying that I'm trying to be a smart business person who is seeing what is working in 2026 content wise and what has shifted. And I'm, I was just chatting with this with my buddy Matt Diavallo the other day for a new podcast that he's starting and we were both talking about this idea of becoming the student again and just being okay with the fact that like yeah I felt like we had it all figured out like five years ago but we've changed. The landscape of the internet has changed. People's habits have changed. Technology has changed.
Jason:We have to change with it. And like what worked five years ago is not going to sustain us and create a profitable business. So And we have to be okay with that. And I have to be okay with learning new skills. I have to be okay with being like a newbie again at creating content and not expecting to like get lots of views on things and be okay with you know posting something and being like well that could have been a lot better but you know what at least I posted and I didn't do nothing.
Jason:So anyway this is just a little bit of a ramble, I went a little bit longer than I wanted to here on just a little solo episode but I hope that this at least gave you some perspective or thoughts on how we're thinking about content creation moving forward, why we are buying into posting on Instagram again more regularly, how we are putting out more content than we have ever before. And it's because we're using our own tool in Solo Content Studio. And I'm so excited for all the other specialists to be ready for us to use. I'm actually starting to work a lot more on Instagram carousels for Tea Tree's account. And I'm kind of like honing the product there to like figure out how that works.
Jason:But if you're interested, if you're a Weymer, you already get access to Solo Content Studio. So you don't have to do anything except just check your inbox. You've already got an email about But if you are not a WAM member and you want to join us, you wanna learn more, you can go to solocontent.studio is the URL. It's also in the show notes obviously. And we would love for you to join our first cohort here.
Jason:We're doing an early bird price this week as of this podcast episode going up. It's $295, and then you also get the first two months for free using the tool. And that, initial investment is for you to join a live training on May 14 where we're gonna actually show you how to use the product, walk you through setting up your first, specialist, also then walk you through how to sharpen your entire team so that you have a really good brand voice built in, and that's why we're doing a live thing so we can actually, like, talk to people and get them working together and and getting these things set up properly. So it's not just another tool you buy, you log in, you don't use it, and then it doesn't bring any value. It's like we want to start with people using it really well, which is also why we're doing the two months for free because we wanna learn from people as they use it, change the product, update the product, make all kinds of improvements.
Jason:And we also have a little built in community that you'll get access to for two months in the product itself, which I just finished building today actually. So if you wanna learn more, check it out at solocontent.studio. The price is gonna go up next week and then we're gonna close the doors and then it's just gonna be available as a monthly product for $99 per month. So this is definitely gonna be the best time to buy if you're listening to this and you're curious, go check that out. And then I just hope you'll maybe climb Cringe Mountain yourself.
Jason:Maybe put yourself out there. Maybe you've been holding back and this is the podcast episode that is kind of giving you permission to go. Yeah. You know what? I'm gonna go watch Jason's dumb reels over at instagram.com/jasonduststuff.
Jason:And I'm gonna see how simple they are, but you know what? I can do that too. Or I can create a story. I can create carousels, or I can do whatever. And I've been putting off being on social because of Cringe Mountain or because I feel like I shouldn't have to be the student again and learn, but I just think we have to let go of those things so that we can move our businesses forward and be smart and actually think about the things that are working in the 2026 at all.
Jason:Okay, that's it. I am done. I will talk to you all soon, not on my next walk probably like this, but I will have thoughts again sooner than a month because that's how long it was between the last episode. Okay, goodbye.