Kate Bradley Chernis - What Have You Done For Me Lately?

Full Episode Transcript:

Kate Bradley Chernis - What Have You Done For Me Lately-

Chris Stone: As a content creator, do you struggle with how to use all of your content in the best way? We'll on this episode of casters. We talked to the CEO of Lately, Kate Bradley Chernis, who's changing the world of content re-purposing using artificial intelligence.

Jim Fuhs: Kate is not only the rocking CEO of Lately, but also understands the challenges of good content creation.

She has amazing story of resilience and persistence. That has led her to found a company that is charting the way ahead and how you as a client can use artificial intelligence to not only create content quickly, but effectively.

Chris Stone: What have you done for me Lately? Let's find out.

Kate Bradley Chernis: Hey, you guys

use that photo before on any podcast or any strategy

that you guys got that one first, that particular one tell you what it is by the way. So that little guitar, my, my husband is a guitar player and I don't know, it's some collection item, whatever, but he fixed it up for somebody. We had it. They loan each other guitars.

That's what guys do, so we added on a loan and we got drunk one night. We were like, let's set up. He was a fashion photographer in the city for years. And assisted Jill bound, Simone and Patrick and like all these guys, right though, guys. And so he had all of his set paper and stuff like that.

And we used to set it up the living room and then just do photo shoots, so we're like, let's get the guitar out and let's do jumps, and so we were doing those and we had gotten engaged about a month before and we thought this is 10 years ago. So before everyone was doing photo sets for their weddings or whatever, and we're like, Hey, let's do this for our wedding.

And the people who own that guitar. Actually he came and picked it up, like randomly, they were like, Oh, we don't want to loan it to you anymore. We want it back. And so we took a picture of it beforehand, blew it up into almost life size and then built a two replicas so that our guests at our wedding could like dress up like us.

We took this whole series of, yeah, look, there's a whole bunch of them. That's just one of them. And they all make me look like I play guitar, which I don't what he does. You

Chris Stone: look so comfortable. It looks like you're just like, I don't know what song or Ramones. I

Kate Bradley Chernis: think we had some Boston on when that night, when we were pretty

Chris Stone: more than yeah.

Kate Bradley Chernis: Who knows? Yeah. But what's great. Is people just now we've learned with marketing and how I was in radio is that people love to go behind the scenes. They want a sneak peek of what's it really like? And so for the wedding, that's what we decided to do was so not to go on about weddings, but I made the, all the wedding invitations were backstage badges that you were around your neck and cause we couldn't afford to pay for everybody.

Cause we paid ourselves. We had little all passes and then after show only, for the drinks and stuff like that fun is that it was really, it was great. Yeah. We just wanted to give people like a feeling of what it's like, what our lives were like, because they were pretty cool. We didn't make a lot of money, but, David was he was managed by cheap tricks management.

So he used to open up for cheap trick and the Dixie chicks, it's pretty cool. And then I met some cool people along the way, too, yeah,

Chris Stone: that's always the first question. If you're in the music business is so what artists have you met, and what are your favorite artists, but I don't know about you, but my favorite response to that is these were the artists that I was most friendly with, but seemed like cool.

Obviously like you talk about these big artists I've met Prince and Prince was great. But I've also met some artists that feel like no one knows, but I had a great time with, and they were fantastic people. And those are the ones that I remember that no one else

Kate Bradley Chernis: does. Yeah. Unfortunately I dated both of them.

Cause that was my job hazard,

And I thought I was done until this one real nice guy came along. But yeah, I can tell you some stories about. People, that's for sure. Okay.

Chris Stone: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's good to create a book someday about

Kate Bradley Chernis: that. The book is going to be amazing. It's going to be mostly about all the investors who've pissed me off since but yeah, what has been wonderful is like that journey.

I wouldn't trade it for the world because I learned so much about. Music, especially honestly, I didn't know a lot about music. And I'm still one of those people that most of the stuff I talk about, I know just enough to have the conversation because my brain isn't big enough for, I got a lot of stuff I've got to talk about here.

And it used to pick it, piss off my music director so badly because he couldn't believe, I didn't know, who poco was for or something like that. And I'm like, Oh, that's pretty cool. He knew obscure, but I'll try to make and I remember one time I said that the Finn brothers in writing on a newsletter were from Australia instead of New Zealand.

Yeah. And so then I really being for that, but I was like, everybody makes this mistake. So I learned early and the fans didn't care. Then you just got more attention for it. So I learned early on that, just being my authentic self and not, I used to worry that Oh no, I don't know everything.

These boys, the boys club is going to ding me for it. But then I realized that the more you just admit it, the more other people are like, yeah, me neither.

Chris Stone: Cool. And so if you're in like a this totally equates in a lot of ways, like nobody that you dealt with at the time probably remembers any of that stuff you remember.

And at the time it probably was horrifying initially, maybe. And and you feel that rush of your face and if you're a content creator and you're like afraid to. Fire up your microphone or turn on your camera or do whatever you gotta do because it has to be absolutely perfect.

And you're just afraid to, hit the damn button and just start and go and get those reps in and try to make, because that first video you put up, if you've made a mistake, if you said, New Zealand instead of Australia, or if you dropped an F bomb by accident or anything like that.

No, one's going to remember it, except you. So why not just put it past yourself and just move on. So that's awesome that you're able

Kate Bradley Chernis: to do that. Thank you. In fact, one of the best pieces of advice that one of my radio mentors gave me was he said, silence is really powerful.

I practiced. And I tried to use that a lot and I, we use it in our marketing now. So that space, so when we're doing a demo, sometimes it just means letting people. Talk or sell the product for you, which they do, so that's amazing. Sometimes it's doing what I just did. I just slowed down the conversation.

And I'm sure some people leaned in because that's what happens when you have silence.

Chris Stone: It's good. I'm noticing it. I didn't notice it before. And now that you said it I'm noticing it, it's true. Like I know you do, you're involved in sales and that's a big thing is the number one tool that you have is not your CRM system.

It's not even your social media planner. It's your ability to listen to your customers because they're going to tell you what you want, what they want. I should

Kate Bradley Chernis: say. Yeah. And too, it's a little bit tricksy, right? I think about it in writing as well. Cause that's how we're all marketing a lot is even video there's writing here.

What's the space between the words looking or even sometimes physical space, but even a comma or a period. Those things create space in how you read tax rights. So we all know that when you're reading texts, you're hear it in your head as a voice. And is there enough space in the actual text so that when you hear it, there's the pauses like with an ellipsis or an end dash in the right places to help emphasize the right thing.

Which is all a long way of saying it's related, right? Whether it's radio or marketing or AI, for me it's a big old mixing pot.

Jim Fuhs: So Kate, what brought you to start Lately?

Kate Bradley Chernis: Yeah, Steve blood it's all his fault. And my co-founder but not really. The, so the beginning. Would you like the long story or the short story?

And we'd like,

Chris Stone: whatever story you want to tell that's, we have all the time in the world.

Kate Bradley Chernis: All right. So raise your hand out there if you're an underdog, because this is totally for you. If you're a female founder, underdog, or a guy, any kind of person that just, has ever been in that place where.

Maybe you feel squashed and people weren't listening to your ideas, which that's how I felt, in radio it's a boys club. It still is. And and not that there's anything wrong with guys. This is just about exclusivity and like putting up that wall and I was sexually harassed constantly. And I even participated in it because it was totally normal and it was expected.

And which is weird to say that now, but when we have a lot more information about those things now, And I was in a hostile working environment, which I didn't know. We didn't have that language before. I didn't know what that meant. And that was the idea of people using sexually charged, whatever, in order to make you feel uncomfortable or to just make you feel invalidated or like my ideas weren't taking seriously.

And I was very, I was so frustrated because I couldn't figure out why I wasn't succeeding. I couldn't get an, a plus, like I, like in school I was trying, I was doing everything. And I still wasn't getting the grade and it really bothered me and my body started to fail me. So I had this huge rash on my torso that they couldn't diagnose.

And I had fallen down the stairs at work and I tore a tendon in my ankle and I read kept returning it. So like I was in crutches or in a wheelchair for most of my time there. And then finally my arms started my hands and arms. I had so much pain that I couldn't type or even touch a phone. And then I was deemed to be, have a partial, permanent disability.

They said that I was unhealable, which was like really crappy thing to hear, as you might imagine. And I was scared because suddenly I couldn't do the thing that you and everybody else needs to do to survive. Like I was thinking, okay, I can't touch a keyboard. Can I work at McDonald's? No. Probably not.

I can't even work at the cash register at the grocery store. And so I first I got an intern to work for me. I hired them myself cause XM wouldn't help me because they didn't, I didn't look like there was anything wrong with me. Nobody leave me and people didn't have this back then it's, I'd be kinda lightest and tendonitis.

And so then I learned about dragon naturally speaking, which was a new thing. People didn't know what that was. And there's a few experts in the country at the time. And one of them happened to live in DC. This woman, Krista, I couldn't pay her, but I had a couple hundred CDs and she was a fan. So that was really lucky.

And she helped me cause learning dragon naturally speaking, which is the AI engine behind in the voice center behind Siri, by the way, it's like learning a whole language. You really have to spend a lot of time with it. So I did this and XM wouldn't let me use the software at work because they're a big company and they're, the it team there had to pass all these integrations and yada.

And so I was like, had to get out. So I went to another music related company and same thing. There was an HR team that didn't believe me and wouldn't help me and the boys club and all that. And I was a really unhappy person cause I was scared and I was doing everything I could think of to do every kind of Western and Eastern medicine.

And my dad was really sick of it cause I was crying a lot. And so he took me by the shoulders one day, like lovingly, but he said. You can't work for other people and there's no shame in that. So that was a big deal because he hit on the shame because this is what I felt, my, my instinct. Wasn't like, you guys, aren't listening to me or respecting me, my instinct was I'm doing something wrong, and that to this day feels really bad. I that's my first default generally, anyways, even now, and it is for a lot of women specifically that I know. The other thing that happened was I read a self-help book. Remember I was trying to do everything that I could. And it was a really corny book.

The secret member of that book, worst movie, when I, why did I torture myself when it stopped? Cause I was trying to make a change. I remembered reading it and. And thinking this isn't a secret at all. This is just a mindset. And when I'm doing something that I feel awesome at, if I was rock climbing and I, the first time I climbed a five 12, like I wasn't thinking you're a jerk, you're an idiot.

You saw a guy was thinking I'm the best, so I decided to stop talking about how much I hated work, but that was really hard. My friends from work who hated work too, we like had nothing to say. Can we tell them, and and David, my husband he, at the time boyfriend, he hated his work too.

And so we were both like toxic, just perpetuating these feelings. And my, then he, so that this is all happened in the same week. David went to the bookstore and got me a book wanting to support me in a nice way, like he is. And it was guy Kawasaki's art of the start of startup book. And I read. The first chapter it's like the first or second chapter a guy says, don't make a plan, just get started. That's the worst thing you can do. And I was like, Oh, then I don't need this book anymore.

I stopped reading it. Yeah. And then the next day I met my first angel investors who, I didn't know, that's what they were. I was just happy accident. And I was complaining about Bob Lefsetz. I don't know if you know him. He was a huge fan of my channel, the loft. And he had written in a letter in one of his newsletters.

He was, music, industry, Wong. He was complimented making compliments and he was giving all the credit to my boss. And I was like that. I chose those songs. That's my show. And he told us that he didn't believe that I would have ever made those decisions. Cause I was too young and I couldn't possibly, understand the music business like that.

And so I was complaining about this with a lot of F bombs to these guys and they were like, we love you. Let's start a company. And they gave me 50,000 bucks to start my first company. So from there, this is the long story, right? Maybe I should leave some silence for a second.

Chris Stone: So if I can interrupt for a second, this point, here's $50,000 to start a company at that point was the concept for Lately already? No, that was just going to start a company. Here's 50 K. So

Kate Bradley Chernis: here's a story that nobody ever hears. My superpower is making super fans, that's what I was really good at.

At XM. Before I went to XM, I was at a little radio station called the penguin in Wilmington, North Carolina, which is adult album alternative. That's the format I was in was a really rare, but very cool format. All the music we talk about Prince and Matthew Sweet and the Ramones and the police and BB King all mixed together.

And the album cuts. And it's, it really depends. It's really relies on the ability of older music to influence the newer music so that when you hear the new music, you're referencing the older music. So on at that station, I came in and I was there for three. I think three months, it was really quick, and I knew I was going to exit I'm already, but I hadn't been in the contract wasn't inked yet.

So I had to kill some time and I thought the ocean sounded nice. So I go down there to this total boys club, they had, we had company meetings at a strip club regularly, which was unbelievably disgusting for lunch. I'm like, I'm not eating here. There's. Boobs disgusting. And it was my little weird AAA station, which was new.

The guy, my boss had brought his, introducing that to the ER area with smooth jazz and classic rock. And I think maybe a top 40 station. So this is what they owned. And I was a production director, which means you write the commercials and you do all the sound drops between the songs, right? They'd say you're listening to one Oh four seven the point or whatever it is.

And so I made all that stuff and he said that we could bring in records and play whatever we wanted. And so every night I would go, I would take the playlist and I would totally unscheduled and rearrange the whole thing. Cause it didn't make sense to me. And I would play songs that I would bring in as well.

And so I was on the air. My voice is on the air. It was my arrangement of the music and it was my commercials that I produced or were doing. And then my drops and when I went to XM, I was there in January or February and my old boss called me and he said, Hey, we got the book, the Arbitron book, which is what radio uses to figure out how to sell your stuff.

one. It's always like number: 2030

Chris Stone: Not AAA station was number one in the market.

Kate Bradley Chernis: My show and evenings number one, evenings was number one over classic

Chris Stone: roster.

The strength of that station compared to these others that were on the chart were minimal compared to these major stations. That's amazing. I

Kate Bradley Chernis: didn't even believe him. And he's what did you do? And I was like, I threw out your playlist. But what I did was. No, I left in mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes.

Oh my God. When you were talking about that feeling of blushing and that wave of warmth coming over you, when you're embarrassed I felt that all the time, I still have nightmares about that. This does tie into Lately, believe it or not, but I was so particular about the segway and how it sounded that it had to hear it before I played it.

And if I didn't, I would rather have silence literally. And that happened all the time. There'd be like 30 seconds of dead air. Because I'm trying to get it right. Not kidding. And we still do this, like me and my husband will have like music nights downstairs where he'll play a song than I will, but eventually I just elbow him out of the way.

And I'm like, let me take over here. So because a beautiful segue and I'll tell you why. So and so the neuroscience of music tells us that when your brain hears a song, it must. Instantly access every other song it's ever heard before in order to index that new song and its library. So think about that.

When you hear a song like your whole life comes forward, nostalgia city, and because of trying to look for familiar touch points of older songs to place this new one, and your, as we talked about your voice is a note, right? Same idea. There's a frequency here. When you read, you hear somebody's voice.

And so it's my job. When I'm selling you things, marketing you things to find those familiar touch points in order to couch my new thing in there. So you feel comfortable and trust me, right? It's all the same. So when I'm on the air and radio, partly from the, with segues of the music and what music I choose and how I, arrange it, but also what I'm saying to you.

When I dropped the liners in, and what kind of liners am I dropping in? Are they going to stop the show or keep it smooth? And so my job was to make you feel that you have a voice in my show, even though you don't. I'm holding the mic. And my favorite compliment that I would ever get would be somebody to say to me, God, I really hated that song until you played it.

What we did together was we, they wanted, they were into music. They were fans from XM and they were both musicians also. And we created a widget and it was a new song and an old song every day. Fit together. Remember widgets those little things. And that's all we did together with a $50,000.

So for a year I did this and it was super fun. We weren't trying to monetize it. I had a lot of listeners and I learned about code. Believe it or not little bit at least to figure out how to program the songs every day. And I got a bunch of people to work for me for free. Cause I, I couldn't do it all myself.

So I learned how to do that. And Chris bro, by the way, was one of those people. That's how Chris and I met. He was my favorite. He was one of my favorites because he's so hilarious and dry. And so his intro is always cracked me up so hard. Somebody else came along as I was more or less doing this and said to me, Oh, you're really good at marketing.

Would you like to consult us? We'll pay you a lot more money and you don't have to listen to music anymore. Bad music anyways. Cause I had to listen to a lot of bad music to find the good stuff, right? So that was my aunt. And she was the principal at the national disability Institute and she had organized a pretty, pretty revolutionary thing where Walmart and bank of America and 18 T and the IRS and the United way worldwide.

So nonprofit for-profit in government. We're going to collaborate together on this big idea. And so that so she put me on the account. So suddenly I was like literally managing a Walmart account and in my style, which was not corporate, I came from radio, I didn't own a suit. And I came into the project.

There was about several thousand people involved. It became almost 20,000. By the time I, I left. But. They all had to join together to help this good cause. And I thought, wow, this is a mess. And I said it, no not nicely either. And so I built them a spreadsheet really for my own mind to help organize what was going on.

And as I did that, I gave a lot of workshops and I understood, I learned a lot about how small, medium, and very large companies executed content creation or didn't, or did it badly. And I learned that it doesn't matter how much money you have or your expertise. Most marketers hate writing or are very bad at it.

They hire out all the time. If they spend time writing or whoever does they're spending like four or five times creating something, maybe it's a blog or a newsletter or a podcast like this. Think of all the time you guys go into creating each one and then wasted, right? There might be one announcement about it somewhere.

g you hear it once, at least,: 3000

I'm busy, and he kept he kept, he would stop by, he would drive by between New York, city and Vermont. And so when he stopped by for dinner at our house a lot, and finally he got me to show him all of my spreadsheets and the patterns and all this. And he kept saying to me, okay, We can automate your spreadsheets and we can make wire frames and it's going to cost $25,000.

And I was like, what did you, I worked in radio. Did you know that there's no money? I was a line cook before this, so by the way, another place where all pirates live. So apparently I really like, I like unstructured while, craziness clearly. And Steve. Took the money out of his own pocket.

Cause I was like, I had a, we're buying our first house, actually. I'd saved my whole life to buy my first house. And he made the wireframes with Jason. Who's one of my co-founders now. And they showed them to me one night and he said that I was much nicer to him afterwards.

So that's the very long answer to your question.

Chris Stone: Amazing. And so there's a lot of people watching right now. And that story is alone is a great reason to be interested in Lately. And that's a fantastic story and it's a comeback story of sorts. And so it's amazing to really hear that.

And but besides how amazing the story is, Lately is a truly amazing tool and I'm not gonna, I'm not going to fan boy in front of the co-founder, but I use it every day and sometimes hours a day. And it sets me up for weeks and sometimes months with content that's created and it's not just deal casters.

It's the business that I have, where I deal with. I, I have other clients and there's other podcasts. There's other things that I do. And so it does, there's lots of other social media scheduling tools out there, and some of them are really good. I'm not going to, I'm not gonna lie, but this one for me works best because where I spent most of my time, in pulling in the content was really finding.

Those nuggets, finding those moments, finding that spot in the video, in the podcast, in the blog that it was written, all of that stuff, just finding whatever it is, because everything's just, it's trying to drink water out of fire hose. And at the time, we're going through this podcast.

An hour from now. I may not even remember what that nugget is. I may forget what that nugget is and what Lately does when you feed the information your keywords and, and it learns your content and it learns and understands. The lanes that it should go in all of a sudden I'm dragging in videos and it spits out hundreds of pieces of content where it's that's it.

That's the moment that I remember doing that podcast. I remember doing that and I, I would have never known to go to. A minute, 38 seconds, 17 timestamp here and get this, 48 second clip where the guests said something that was key. And for me Lately, does that it says here, and you could integrate all of your social media platforms now, LinkedIn video for company pages, which is obviously huge.

And I guess maybe talk a little bit, if you could, Kate about that. There's content creators right now that are like, what why would I want to, and what Lately does that is, is levels above some of these other social media platforms.

Kate Bradley Chernis: Thanks. And by the way, I forgot to say this the beginning, Jim and Chris, you guys have been such kind friends to us and lifting us up so much.

And that's what this is about. I can only come back with help and it takes a lot of help. It really does. And just so people know it's not trivial, right? Every little thing that you guys say or do, really makes the difference. And it's the difference between, I think I shared this but my team, 95% of them weren't paid for two years, two years.

And so that's the difference it makes, now everybody's paid, we just. We just hit a million in ARR a couple of weeks ago, which is pretty big milestone for us. And that's not even about, part of it's about money, but these are the industry that I'm in the SAS venture industry.

There's different goalposts and they move, they keep moving all the time. And so it's very annoying and it's harder for women and people of color specifically.

Chris Stone: Thank

Jim Fuhs: you, Kate. I just want to say, to hit on this earlier, the fact that you had people that believed in you enough and your, what your vision with this company was to stick around for that long, without being paid, speaks volumes to the culture

Chris Stone: that built it

Kate Bradley Chernis: Lately.

Thanks. Yeah, Chris bro is one of those people, Lauren, everybody it's I don't know why. I'm not that wonderful.

It's been a it's. So we were just, and I'll answer your question, Chris, but we were just talking to David Meerman, Scott. Who's one of our investors because we were on with Mitch Jackson too. So I love hearing that you guys are be hanging with Mitch and clubhouse. He's awesome. He's amazing. He's such a good clubhouse host too, which is.

That's hard. I haven't, I've been learning from him. So anyways and David wrote the fan ocracy book, right? So the neuroscience of fandom, and we were just talking about what is the magical thing that makes people. Love and support you, whether it's music or a brand that you buy or a piece of software, whatever it is.

And I don't really know. Like we all spark for different things, but it's my job as the CEO to know how to wheel the spark. And no one delighted up. So with Lately, What we do is two things happen. Number one, you connect your social channels to our brain and the brain examines, everything you've ever published for the last year across any social channel.

And it's looking for the highest engaging posts, the stuff, your customers, your audience likes, they respond to, they retweet and comment on. And then we build the writing model based on what we know. Then we apply that model to anything you give the brain. So if you gave a brain a video like this, the podcast with video, We will automatically transcribe the video and then we will apply the writing model to that transcription and looking for those hot words, keys, and key phrases and ideas basically that we already know your customers are going to respond to and it gets smarter.

The more you put in, the more it learns. And like you, you mentioned Chris, you can curate and tweak it and give it some guidance, which you should, because it's, it is a robot in the end and the human. As we're displaying here is what matters. The human knows to leave space, that kind of thing.

And so essentially in a matter of seconds or minutes, depending on how long your video, we do this with any audio and we do it with any written content as well. You push a button and boom, you'll get 4,800 social posts, and they're not just, it's not just social posts. It's like the best ones that we already know.

People want to like reader. Watch or here,

Chris Stone: right? Yeah. And it's not, you guys use the analogy all the time and that is let me make sure I get this right. We get to third base and then you bring it home. Is that right? We load the bases and then we bumped for you, or I don't know. That's pretty much the analogy, but it's a key point.

And I think a lot of people. In terms of AI, they think that it's automated. You just set it and forget it. And that is absolutely not the case. And it's ineffective as a content creator, maybe a little lazy, especially if, when I, I'll take this video right here and I'll throw it in Lately.

I'll have to chop it into bits. Cause it can only take so many words at a time nudge, nudge to the gear developers.

Kate Bradley Chernis: I can tell you why by the way.

Chris Stone: Okay. That's for the after show,

Kate Bradley Chernis: we have so many users it'll break that's why.

Chris Stone: Oh, okay. Hey, nice problem to have, right. So I'll throw this video in there and it'll be split up.

And if I were to just, select all my social media platforms for deal casters for myself, for Jim. And then just whatever it gives me, turn around and shoot it out. Not that it wouldn't make sense if there's just no human context around it, and it's not like you got to spend an inordinate amount of time, you can program your typical hashtags your typical ads, your typical, you put in a link, you just have to nudge it to give it some space like you talk about, but sometimes what you say.

And what the transcript is not, I would actually say most of the time for me is not what you're actually putting in that message. And so it may be, at a point where you're talking about something and you're, maybe you're talking about your history at, what the boys club or whatever.

I may take nothing that you say, but it will be some sort of summarization under 400 or under 280 characters that really pulls people in. And the video clip alongside of it is what gets people there. It's that pattern interrupt and it's that attention. And for content creators Lately, just it's just next level in terms of being able to do that stuff.

Kate Bradley Chernis: Thank you. And that's the idea, right? It's just to find, we're talking about finding the spark, right? So let the AI find the spark, like you said, it's the same thing. So I actually, you don't even believe this. Of course we use Lately to market Lately and we use nothing else and we have a 98% conversion because the AI is smart.

But I also, and so I let my team do that. So I will, I'll ask you for this file, as And I'll give it to Alex. Alex has got to auto-generate Alex puts the human touch on it. Cause I don't have time to do this. And then Katie schedules, that's how we do it. But I also go back and listen to everyone that I do.

And I try to find five. I want to see how I'm doing to the AI. And I try to find five or so spark moments where I personally publish and then the AI learns from what I publish too. So there's a reason to also do your own. Fully manual post. Cause it gets smart that way. And it's been interesting too.

We're behind the scenes where like loading the brain up with best practices, content across all of our, where our database, and looking for these human elements and how to better find them, do a better job of highlighting them for you or even in the case, some cases doing the summary part for you.

So you wouldn't even have to do it, which is exciting because people. It gets stuck, man. They get, and it's not a big, it just, some people can see through the Meyer and pull out the nugget and some people can't, but yeah, some of

Chris Stone: the same rules still apply. So it, what it's helped me do as well is understand Twitter better.

It's helped me, because I think. Not too long ago. I'm like, do I even try to lean into this now? Really Twitter. There's so many other things and, but it's really helped me understand some of these platforms more because it's pulled some of those clouds away and eased up some of that stuff and set some things and made it.

So that, you're setting the ball on the tee, so to speak, to using a baseball

Kate Bradley Chernis: When we talked to Europe, they're like, what

Chris Stone: exactly? You have to talk I don't know, cricket or soccer or whatever soccer

Jim Fuhs: I'll tell ya. Cause, cause I introduced Krista the Lately and it was Chris bro, when he did the demo for me and he just God, you got to blow.

Like I actually had a blog post. And he put it in Lately and I'm not kidding. Literally, three minutes later it had taken this blog post that I had written a few years ago and it created 150 unique pieces of content. And I was just like, my mind was blown and I was like, that would have taken me forever to even think of how would I repurpose that?

And, Kate, you hit on it earlier. So many. Content creators as an example, we've got this great interview going on now with you loving the stuff you're saying, and it's so easy for us to say, all right, it's onto our next show. And we forget to do anything with this content. But with Lately, we're able to go back and say, Hey, let's go look at that show.

We did six months ago. Take some of those pieces that lately is already putting in our library and we can keep that alive. It's that whole idea of evergreen? There's no other product that I'm aware of, not to say there's not others out there that can do what you guys are currently

Kate Bradley Chernis: doing. There's not, it's because it's so interesting to Jim be like, No, this is, we're just looking at the DNA of copywriting and marketing here, really, but people forget, they get so lost in, there's management tools and there's analytics.

People get really lost in analytics, but the analytics really isn't telling you anything really, because what matters is the actual words, the DNA of your content. And so that's the way we think, because it doesn't matter like how good those tools are. Like, if you can't Polish a turd.

That's what's BS to stay on radio about a bad song,

Chris Stone: lipstick on a pig.

Kate Bradley Chernis: Yeah, there you go. There's another one. Yeah, but it's funny how people like really, because they it's such an Achilles heel, just the getting the ideation and then the other one, by the way, is the putting that personal touch. People have a hard time with that.

They get really stopped about like what their voice is and whether you should have a voice, people still say to me what if I'm marketing to like the banking industry? And I was like humans work there. No, and it's not a dumb question, but it's because the, this is what people taught us for so long was to be rigid and proper.

And, I was telling somebody recently that I used to go to venture capital meetings with my nice jacket on. And I had my little leather carry on, like my hair in a ponytail. That's not me. And it wasn't, somebody helped me unlock that and just be myself. And when you're yourself, you give other people the beautiful permission to be themselves.

Chris Stone: Okay. Yeah. A vulnerability transparency, all of that is it's important. I don't care what business you're in. And I, understand like there's, some people still have. Still have a problem with it, but people toss around personal brand all over the place. And so I look at the, lately giving you the ability to insert your personal brand.

It's okay, we've got you to a point where your personal brand is right in here in this 38 seconds or in this, how, however long this clip is your personal brands in here, because we determined that. Based on all of the stuff you've already posted. So your brands in here, you just got to find where it is and just put it in there.

It's not. And if you know what that is, if you know who your customer is, your key listener, your viewer, you know who that is, what their problems are and you know how you're going to solve them. And those are things that salespeople have been doing for years. This isn't new,

Kate Bradley Chernis: right. That's right.

Yeah. Finding the common ground is not new at all. That's why we always say the weather is like my favorite thing, because. It's just so easy to instantly have a conversation about something we both know and care about, and especially now, I was thinking, so COVID has been good to us in a lot of ways, but also.

It's like my tricks aren't working because now everybody can do them, so everybody is showing you what their real home office looks like. And I'm like, this has been my deal for like the whole time. Okay. What else am I going to figure out here? Like how. What is, how much more authentic do I possibly need to be?

Which is another word that we're all overusing, of course. But just, I wonder once we get to the darkest corners of the backstage, What's the next, what will the next thing be? I dunno, I'm shameless. So I'll go where wherever they want to go

Chris Stone: live from the ditch. It's Bradley churn is

Kate Bradley Chernis: no problem.

My parents are going to be like,

Jim Fuhs: What are some of the, like Chris mentioned earlier, you guys are. Now able to put we're able to put stuff on our LinkedIn company pages. What are maybe some of the other things you can talk about that you guys are working to develop in order to continue to keep lately like pushing the envelope or us is your customers and fans for that matter.

Kate Bradley Chernis: Thanks. So two areas like one AI is growing up. But also the platform itself, you guys know lately is a really robust platform that you can do a lot on. And we've been moving up market to, sell the product to larger companies, really thinking about their needs.

So is there an integration with paid? Can you transfer what the AI is learning, to pay it? And the answer is yes, that's on the roadmap and then, people want social listening, for example. We do it but not, it's not the same cause everybody wants a, more of a one-stop shop.

Those are a couple of places that we see the platform moving into. One of our features allows syndication capability where one manager or CMO or CRO can actually connect personal accounts to every employee in the company. If they want to and use the AI to publish out to those accounts or to push content to a pipeline where the sales person or the executive who needs to do thought leadership can receive.

AI pre-written content and use it as they like, instead of the old way, which is email it to you. And so we're working on ways to enhance and make that easier. And really, we've heard a lot about employee advocacy, which has been moving forward, especially in, now where people can't do conferences anymore.

How can you employ your army to work for you better? And then with the AI, it's been really exciting too. We did a test with Anheuser-Busch and Bev, where we learned from one of their brand voices. We took a lot of content, but into the brain and then pushed a button and we were able to produce from scratch content in the brand voice.

And so we actually are doing that with my content. Now that's one of the reasons I do manual. It's because it's learning from me personally, on top of all the stuff lately has published, because people want to sound like us. That's why we do that free writing class once a month. And look the idea, there will be okay.

You could push a button to sound like lately, but you could also push a button to sound like Gary V or you could push a button to sound like the best practices for the mortgage industry or the healthcare industry. So figuring out a way to, again, keep people. Starting them at third base.

Maybe they're getting like halfway between third and home

Chris Stone: where you still get a little bit too far off the bag. Yeah,

Kate Bradley Chernis: yeah. That's the, there you go. That's what I was thinking. So those things are like pretty exciting and we're, I feel like we've really, this year, There's no handbook, which is why I stopped reading the guy Kawasaki book right there.

Cause everybody's businesses different. And we hit some major milestones this year and, but we also it's because we've listened to you guys, but we also understood what we were selling better. We didn't sell lately as an AI platform that for the first time a month ago, we can say lately is the only social media management platform that creates content for you.

We really couldn't define what we did before. I'm telling you we've had a million definitions. They were about organization. I can't even tell you the terrible ways we've said things and that one probably isn't even that good. And we'll probably change it in five months. Someone was my advisor. Judy was just telling me this I'm really good at B2C marketing.

That's what I did for Walmart. And radio. But what I've had to learn is how to communicate how lately is both good for B2C and B2B, because most of our customers actually use it for B2B. And. Because it's not something I personally have been good at it. Not just cause I haven't done it very much.

I don't have the language around discussing it. So I've had to learn that language so I can sell it. And none of my sales team, as you guys know, none of them are salespeople. They're all regular people that happened to be really good at sales because they don't sell. And, but in order to go down, which we want to do, but we have to go up so make the big sales and then we can open up a long tail where, an average person who knows nothing about marketing could use lately.

So we have to do it this way first. And it's been, I feel like I'm graduating into a new class a little bit. I know this sounds silly. I'm proud of myself. And as we go this direction, I'm still kicking because all the things that we do that are unknown or the talks make lately sing. And I don't want to lose that.

And as we move into this next phase where I have to learn maybe to put my leather briefcase back in play. Maybe I'll put, some monster bumper stickers on that puppy. You, I don't know what it is, but

Chris Stone: some studs, like you're going to the Judas priest council

Kate Bradley Chernis: appears if you know exactly.

Yeah. I

Chris Stone: w I love how you're so not putting lanes around it, just for social and your dear working with these companies. I almost feel if a company is stuck, a business's stuck a person, even an entrepreneur is stock. Jim and I all the time and other clients that I work with as well, there'll be a concept.

And it's just what are we going to call this? And what is this? And how do we, phrase this. And it's not just social media, it's masterclasses and live virtual events and all of these things that all these businesses are doing, it's almost yeah, let's. Brainstorm, let's all get in and throw all of our ideas in there.

And I understand there's a benefit to that. I'm not, I, I'm not gonna, I'm not going to down on brainstorm every once in a while. I feel like it's okay to flex that muscle would imagine brainstorming even smarter and having a robot in the room, so to speak, or, the AI in the room saying.

Here's everything that's already your voice. And then here's a voice of Gary V and here's, you know what I'm saying? And so it's there's definitely all kinds of other things that you guys are working on and it's it's exciting. Thanks.

Kate Bradley Chernis: That's one of my phrases by the way that I always say, which is, it's always right in front of you, which is what lately is pointing out to you.

But I feel like whenever I'm stuck on anything, I just have to, I've already done this thing somewhere in my life. And I just have to look at something else and make a metaphor in my brain of how to apply it to this, the thing I'm having a challenge with. And that's my favorite thing by the way.

It's I think the reason I love covers so much because that's what somebody did is they're they spun something that, you know, and love into a new direction. And when they do it well, a good cover, I think, has to do that. I love the turning, turning the idea inside out and rebirthing it.

It's so exciting seeing you guys use the product the way you have, and thank you so much by the way. And hi everybody out there. No, I don't know you, but I like you already.

Chris Stone: Okay. Thank you so much, much for spending so much time with us. And so for those of you who are watching, listening, going to lately.ai, try lately and give it a, give it a whirl.

It is absolutely worth every penny we pay for it and more it's not only just a huge time-saver for us. It really has impacted our businesses individually. It's helped us with deal casters which which you're listening to and and watching currently. And so check it out, please.

I'm sure if you've looked on Jim's feeds and my feeds, you're seeing many examples of what Layli can do. And if you ever looked at any of that stuff and said, how do they do that? How do they get all the time? They must have people that do that for them. No. This is how we do our robots doing it for the

Kate Bradley Chernis: robots.

Yes. Amen. The robots. Thank you very much. This really means quite a lot to me. So I appreciate you. Thank

Chris Stone: you.

Jim Fuhs: Okay. Cause we love, love, love it, company love you. And all your team, you guys are amazing. And look forward to continuing to use lately for years to come. Or retire, whichever comes

Chris Stone: first.

who was an amazing guest. Thanks again, Kate so much for joining us lately.ai. Is where you need to go and grab lately to completely revolutionize your social media. I call it social media ex Mokena. It's awesome. I love it.

Jim Fuhs: People don't realize Amazon they're into everything and maybe one of these days you'll be actually able to publish content from lately straight to Amazon

Kate Bradley Chernis: On the list.

Chris Stone: Boom. Awesome. That's a tease that I can't think of a better way to end it. Thanks again. Kay. And to everyone, we'll see you next time on Dealcasters live.

Jim Fuhs: Thanks for listening to Dealcasters. Congratulations. You've taken another step forward in your content creation journey. Please, don't forget to hit the subscribe or follow button here in your favorite podcast player.

So you can be reminded every time we drop it. An

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If you have

Jim Fuhs: questions about this episode or have something you want us to review, you can also email us. At Dealcasters@dealcasters.live . Thanks again for listening and the deal don't fear the gear.