Discover Blotato AI: How to Generate ENDLESS AI Content Ideas

Full video transcript

Darby: Hey, what’s going on guys? Darby here, joined today by Sabrina Ramano from Blotato, a powerful tool for helping you remix content and grow your brand and your business on social media. Sabrina, thanks so much for tuning in with us today.

Sabrina: Yeah, absolutely, pleasure to be here.

Darby: Yeah, I’d like to hear a little bit about what sparked the creation of this tool. You’ve had some background in AI, and we’re here at the Scale With AI Summit to learn how to leverage and grow our businesses with AI. So I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, and then what is this tool that you’ve developed and how can people use it to practically scale their business online?

Sabrina: Yeah, so my background is computer science and physics. I studied AI in college. Right out of college I started an AI company that did real-time speech recognition and natural language processing, well before ChatGPT, and sold the company in early 2021 to a big tech company doing a billion in revenue. That was my first success as an entrepreneur. Right out of college I took a few years honestly trying to figure out what to do next, and I realized one thing I’m really passionate about is educating people on how to use AI, and I do that entirely for free. In the past six months or so I’ve grown organically from zero to almost 400,000 followers on social media across multiple platforms — TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, my newsletter, Twitter, hopefully Pinterest next, maybe Facebook as well, we’ll see. A lot of that process in the beginning was very manual: taking courses, reading what other content creators are doing, testing ChatGPT prompts, building workflow automations to do things like pull an interesting YouTube video I just saw, or pull trending news that just broke, pull a couple of those articles, and then synthesize it into a blog post or a social media post I can share. What ended up happening is I documented a lot of what I was doing, so I was building these workflow automations for content creation and repurposing, and people reached out saying, “Hey, I want more of those videos, I want more of that for my business so I can focus on my business but still organically attract an audience and clients without spending a bunch of time on it.” But then I found business owners are too busy to put together workflow automations and troubleshoot them, and you still have to piece together multiple disparate tools. So back in probably August I was still paying for five different tools for creating content because I’m on so many different channels, and what I realized is I should probably build an app that consolidates my best AI automations, my best prompts, my best workflows, to make it easier for myself and for other people to create high quality content at scale. So I currently push out 100 pieces of content per week with zero ad spend — literally my only budget is for tools, and I’ve reduced that budget by building my own tool, so I no longer pay for five disparate tools that I piece together to create content. That was really the birth of Blotato, and because I had an audience it was very easy for me to validate it. I made one TikTok video sharing “hey guys, I have an idea,” thousands of views, hundreds of comments within a day — boom, validated. Then I filmed myself building the MVP, which looking back was crazy because it’s spun up a bunch of competitors trying to do the same thing, but I filmed myself using AI to code the MVP 100%. A lot of people ran with that and are trying to do their own versions right now. I officially launched the product just eight days ago, and by day three of the product launch I had more revenue than in my previous AI startup, and that’s the power of building an audience — I just want to emphasize I built the audience entirely for free, zero ad spend. I’m not against ads, by the way, I was just curious how far I could go without a budget, without a team — it’s just me and AI, no ad spend, growing organically and then building this product organically.

Growing on social media, there’s the number one thing I hear from business owners, entrepreneurs, content creators: it’s overwhelming. It’s too overwhelming, too many platforms, I have to post too frequently, I don’t know what to write about, I’m staring at a blank page and I don’t know what to do. That’s the pain point I hear over and over. So what Blotato lets you do is, as you’re naturally organically browsing content anyway — let’s say you find a cool YouTube video — you can drop it into Blotato, it pulls the transcript, runs it through ChatGPT, and generates a publish-ready social media post for you, and then you can copy it to LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, boom, schedule it out right there. So you have the workflow to pull data from interesting sources of information you’re naturally searching through anyway as you go through your day — you hear breaking news in your industry, or interesting discussions come out, or people refer a YouTube video, a blog post, even TikTok videos. I can repurpose my own TikTok videos into other short-form content super quickly and easily, and that’s kind of what I built it for. I’m just really excited to be working with other entrepreneurs and content creators trying to build their brand.

Darby: Yeah, I love how easy it was to even just get up — I’ve made a few posts with that so far, just started testing it out recently, but it’s incredible how powerful that can be once you have the distribution and things set up in place. I would love it if you’re open to sharing a little bit about your workflow, maybe behind the scenes of the tool. How could somebody, again busy business owner or entrepreneur with more than enough on their plate, get set up simply and quickly with Blotato to start getting their content out there and growing an audience more organically?

Sabrina: Yeah, absolutely, happy to show a demo as well. Is it cool if I share my screen?

Darby: Absolutely, let me share.

Sabrina: Okay cool, so the name of the product is called Blotato, so just head over to blow.com and sign up. It has a 14-day free trial as well as a 30-day money-back guarantee and a one-to-one onboarding call with me personally, because I want to make sure everybody who signs up and is taking this seriously gets what they need to get started. Once you log in and sign up, this is the first page, and literally within two minutes I’ll show you how to make five amazing social media posts. The concept around Blotato is there are sources of information, and then you want to remix it easily into social media posts where you add your perspective and unique insights on top — you don’t have to worry about the formatting of the post because we have AI prompts that already have consolidated best practices for each social media platform. So here, for example, it’s “add a source” — you can add text, copy paste text, articles, websites, YouTube videos, TikTok videos. It now integrates with Perplexity, for example, which is what I use to find viral trending news in my niche. Audio, podcasts, audio recordings — a lot of people like to spitball on audio notes while hiking or doing something else and then transform that into a blog post. PDFs, especially if you’re in a field with a lot of research papers, archives, ebooks — you can drop all that in here as sources. For this example I’m just going to grab two YouTube videos from Gary Vee, of course, for social media marketing — one about a complete social media marketing strategy for 2025, and the next about “your full social media marketing strategy in 8 minutes.” So here I’ll add this YouTube video, paste the URL, and now Blotato is going to automatically fetch the transcript for that YouTube video — you can see it here. You can do additional advanced things — let’s say instead of the entire transcript you just want to extract the 10 most controversial quotes from this video, that’s an advanced option you can do for every single source you upload. Let’s take that one video, and let’s also upload a second video, why not — these are both related topics, and what I like to do is upload multiple sources around the same topic. So if I’m writing about breaking news — say OpenAI just released a new model — I’ll take a couple different sources of information, mash them in here, and remix it into social media posts. Here you just select what you want to create — maybe you want to start with one LinkedIn post, I usually do multiple social media posts, so it’ll pop open Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. This ChatGPT prompt on the right-hand side is already pre-loaded with an optimized prompt for that platform, but you can always use your own prompts or an existing prompt from the library you get when you sign up, so you can type pretty much anything here, edit the prompts to fit your style and brand, etc. Then once this is populated, just click generate for each platform you want to generate for, and it’ll take the data from the YouTube videos, run it through this prompt, and spit out your LinkedIn post — boom — your Instagram post — boom — your Facebook post in a second — boom. Facebook, for example, emojis are used a little more, so this prompt allows the use of emojis as bullet points.

Darby: I love how fast you’re able to source content and break it down. Something that might come up when you’re looking at the prompts and the style is, “okay that’s great, but how do I optimize or edit it?” So I’m curious what your approach is to me turning this 80% of the way, their content 100%.

Sabrina: Yeah exactly, and that’s what I built this for. I could have designed this to automate 100% of the AI content, but I don’t believe in that — I don’t believe that stands out, that’s not how I build my personal thought leadership brand. So I use Blotato to build 70-75% of the post, what I call the first draft, and then I edit it from here. Let’s say I go back to LinkedIn and I don’t like this — I want to try another prompt, take another stab, edit — maybe I want structured bullet points for LinkedIn for easy readability, I can choose a different prompt, I can edit this prompt. In each prompt there’s a guidelines section where you can put your preferences for the post — that’s where I’d put any specific guidelines that apply to my business — and then you can edit it here just like a traditional editor. Let’s say I want to remove these two sections — it’s a full-blown text editor as well. So I draft it with Blotato 70-80% and then edit as needed. Let’s say I want to do additional research — I actually integrated ChatGPT on this sidebar, that was a new feature since last week — if I want to ask something like “who is Gary Vee,” you can type anything here, but the point is as you’re writing the prompt, if it’s missing something, you have ChatGPT right on your sidebar to help with research. Let’s say it’s a more scientific article and you want to expand on a definition because your readers might not know it, you can ask “what is the definition of this, explain it to me like I’m 12,” copy paste that back into the editor, and that’s how you continually improve your post until you’re happy with it and ready to publish.

Darby: Very cool. Do you see integrations with Perplexity on here as well, or any thoughts as you’re building this out to continue to grow as a platform — do you want to be the all-in-one content repurposing tool, or can you share more about what your vision looks like for 2025 with this?

Sabrina: Yeah, I basically want to take everything I do as a content creator across all platforms, including faceless video, and put it in here. I want to be the one-stop shop for a content creator to get up and running quickly and to scale content creation. To answer your question about Perplexity — I currently have it as a source. One of my favorite ways to use it as a source is to find viral trending news, so here I’m pasting a prompt I like, and this will use Perplexity AI to find viral trending news about AI this past week. It gives you the article URL, a summary of each news item, etc., and I love that especially to report on new startups, new things happening. Obviously these are controversial since I asked for viral trending news, so there’s lawsuits, parents suing schools over AI — I made a TikTok video on this that did really well — deep fakes are a concern, especially during election season, that type of stuff. But the point is you can change this from AI to your niche, whether it’s remote work, leadership, productivity, whatever it may be.

Darby: Like I’m a baseball fan, I’m watching the World Series right now — what are the trending topics on the World Series, it’s going to pull that stuff up and you can quickly get it out there on social platforms. Do you plan on the ability to interact and monitor comments and engage with people, this being kind of a portal to those platforms to manage social engagements as well?

Sabrina: Yeah definitely, it’s in the future. The way I truly think about it is everything I do manually as a content creator today, can I automate it? Usually my prototype is some kind of automation in Zapier or Pipedream or Make.com, because if I can automate it using those tools then for sure I can build it into Blotato. What I like to do, for example what I’m doing with faceless video right now, is experimenting with a lot of different tools, workflows, and open source models to see what actually works, and then when I find what works I build it into Blotato so everyone else can have access to it too, and so I have access to it in a repeatable way — that’s my process in general for all of Blotato’s development. When I look at things like comments, there are tools today that let you auto-DM people back, or even Chrome extensions that do AI-generated comments on LinkedIn — very cringey, I’m not personally a huge fan — but I do want to consolidate all my comments in one place so I can just answer them all, because it’s really painful across multiple channels with hundreds if not thousands of comments every day. So that’s my Blotato roadmap: slowly take everything I do as a content creator and put it in one app so you don’t have to go anywhere else. Like I said, when I started this I was paying for five different tools — one for LinkedIn posting, one for Twitter posting, one for scheduling, one was Airtable to manage the prompts and track all my published posts, and then a workflow automation tool to grab data from YouTube, push it to ChatGPT, and publish it somewhere. I replaced all five of those tools. Even for published posts, I keep track of all of them here, and it has a RAG layer on top, meaning you can ask intelligent questions of your posts, and in the future you’ll be able to hook it up to a chatbot — a creator-specific chatbot that knows all of your content and sends people to relevant social links so they can engage more deeply with your content and community. I have a very big vision for what it will be, but it’s just me working on it part-time because I’m still creating content, so it’s been a wild ride, I’m curious to see how far I can go.

Darby: Yeah that’s great. Real quickly, if you would mind touching on what RAG means in the context of what a creator is going to be able to tap into with this.

Sabrina: Yeah absolutely, RAG is just a fancy term for adding additional context to AI so it knows what you’re talking about. The context in which people have heard about it is knowledge bases — in customer service, an AI chatbot typically has access to a knowledge base containing common questions, product details, and things like that, and then you use a technique called RAG to retrieve relevant items from that knowledge base so your chatbot has a bit more intelligence when it answers. So what I want to do in the future is create a chatbot for myself as a creator that all of my audience can message with questions, and it’ll answer with my brain based on all of my published content, and redirect them to other pieces of content they haven’t seen — because another problem I encounter frequently is people will follow me on TikTok and not realize I have in-depth tutorials on YouTube, or a whole beginner ChatGPT course in my newsletter. I’ve been wanting a chatbot specific to creators for a while, and this solves that problem because it consolidates all of your published posts and you’ll be able to expose it to a chatbot platform to query — like “where did Sabrina talk about this particular AI course” — and it’ll query all your published posts and pull it out.

Darby: I think that’s really cool. I’ve seen tools in the past that have tried to approach that problem, but you still had to bring all of your stuff to the platform, and that’s the hardest part.

Sabrina: Yeah, that’s the most painful part, because I tried to build this in a workflow tool — you technically can, I’m not saying you can’t build it in Make.com, but it’s quite tedious because you have to sync all of your content into one place first before the chatbot starts working, and then again you’re paying for a separate tool. A lot of people use Airtable, for example, to track all of their published posts, but because you’re publishing through Blotato, it’ll be able to track all of it for you, so you don’t need a separate place to document it. In addition, you’ll be able to easily remix old posts into new posts — repurposing your own content. On LinkedIn and Twitter, content’s very ephemeral — if nobody saw it, they’re probably not going to see it ever in the future.

Darby: Which kind of feels like a waste sometimes. How do you make content more evergreen?

Sabrina: Well, you can tap into that old post, and in the future I’ll just have a button so you can remix the post directly.

Darby: Oh that’s great, and assuming the answer is yes, it’s on the roadmap because you need to see analytics, stats, and tracking, like “oh this post did great, here’s some of the numbers” — is that something you have in your vision for building into here?

Sabrina: Yeah definitely, in the future I do want to build out more features for agencies, for example — things like analytics, white labeling, managing multiple client accounts, those are top of mind for digital marketing agencies.

Darby: Very cool, and I think the question that comes to mind now is, once you’ve effectively cloned yourself, you have your process optimized to such a degree that you can hop in, you’ve got all your stuff being managed, you’re out there across all platforms and scaling up your organic growth — how are you spending your time, what do you want to be spending more of your time on outside of the content creation world as a professional creator? Are there any levers you’re looking to, that you see as most valuable, now that you’re not having to spend all this extra time manually going through these processes? Building relationships is obviously an important part of any of this, probably the most important, but any thoughts on that realm?

Sabrina: So my philosophy in general for creating content is to maximize the amount of time I spend actually doing stuff. People ask me all the time how I get ideas for all this AI content, like it’s endless, and it’s because I actually spend most of my time building things with AI. Blotato itself is a source of ideas — just two days ago I deployed an AI customer support chatbot, and now I plan to make videos about how you can do that too, what’s worked well, what hasn’t, some guardrails you might want to put in place to make sure escalations go to you when they need to. Last week I made videos about using AI to create help documentation because that’s what I was actively doing for Blotato. So when I look at content creation in general, it’s how do I time-box it to 20 hours per week but also grow the number and quality of content I’m producing — right now I’m at about 100 pieces of content per week, I want to get to 200 with Blotato. That doesn’t necessarily mean new content — for example, taking existing TikTok videos, translating them into Spanish using AI, and it even makes it look like you’re speaking Spanish. I’ve had a lot of Spanish speakers comment that it was surprisingly good for the major languages, and then posting that on a TikTok channel focused on Latin America — I’d create a separate TikTok account focused on that geography and repurpose my videos over there. That helps increase volume and reach in demographics I’m just currently not in, because I keep in the back of my mind that I don’t really have that big of an audience when you consider how many people in the world could be learning AI and adopting AI today — there’s a very long way to go. So I’m constantly playing that battle of how do I produce more and higher quality content, but also how do I automate it so it doesn’t actually take more time. I expect to be able to produce 200 pieces of content per week given the same amount of time, in other words, and that’s how I think about Blotato and how I prioritize features to get there.

Darby: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, and having that time constraint — everyone has the same amount of hours in a day. There’s so many people in the world who have not even heard of Sabrina, much less Darby, much less so many of us, but there’s so much opportunity. What I hear as a big takeaway is you’re spending that additional time focusing on systems, optimizing your production process, but also setting up new distribution channels and entirely new audiences you’re not even scratching the surface of, and that’s a very highly leveraged way to spend your time. I think a lot of creators, as content creation gets more automated, can spend more time being strategic about those distribution channels. How are you being strategic about getting that stuff set up?

Sabrina: Yeah, and I was biased in the beginning — I didn’t think that reusing the same TikTok video on Instagram would actually work. I thought, “they’re totally different platforms, different audiences, there’s no way,” but I’d crosspost it without any changes and it would work — I was wrong. I accidentally went viral on Instagram multiple times, never checked it — I’m not actively on Instagram today, I’m primarily on TikTok — but I grew from zero to 100,000 followers on Instagram in two months just by repurposing the exact same TikTok videos. That really blew my mind and opened it — they’re totally different audiences, and I don’t think I realized that, I just assumed they’d be the same audience, I don’t know why. But now I know they are different audiences, so I’m thinking about how to repurpose the content I already have to new channels, new demographics, new audiences, without having to do any additional work after I set up the automation.

Darby: That’s great. For one last piece to leave people with as we wrap up here — if you were to start over completely from scratch, what advice would you give yourself right now for getting started, once they have a Blotato account and have their mind set on it — what would you recommend someone do to start building traction right away?

Sabrina: So for example, I meet a lot of people who want to start creating AI education content, and what I tell them is: use Blotato, repurpose my YouTube and TikTok videos, add your spin to each one, and just publish five times a day — choose maybe two channels and publish five times a day across those two channels, and that’s it. Just do that for two months, get your system in place so you’re doing it consistently. A lot of people get overwhelmed, too many tools, they don’t know where to start — just start by repurposing my own AI education videos, use Blotato to do it, that’s why I built it, and just start getting volume out there. I really think people underrate volume at the beginning, because in the beginning you don’t even know what you don’t know, and people have a lot of ego, fear, and insecurity, especially when it comes to being on camera and putting their voice out there. Usually in the beginning the cure for that is a lot of volume as fast as possible — after the hundredth video you’ll be much more comfortable on camera, after the hundredth post you’ll be much more comfortable sharing your real opinions. It’s very awkward in the beginning, but I encourage people to get over that as fast as possible.

Darby: That’s great advice, and those reps are just going to compound — you’re going to develop the skills over time and figure out what actually works for you. That was fantastic, thank you so much for tuning in with us here at the Scale With AI Summit, and again, blow.com — you guys go check it out, start remixing content, start growing your audience organically, get some reps in, and be consistent with it and see what unfolds for you. Thanks so much, Sabrina.

Sabrina: Oh, thanks for having me.