Can AI write copy that you can trust for blogs, Adwords and advertising, or is it simply dog food?

Erwin Lima is eating his own dogfood, and it’s a great part of the storylab.ai narrative he tells me from Holland, where the team are building out the platform to help content generation and interation for everything from google Adwords, to blog headlines to blog copy and more.  As a brand story consultant Erwin also explains the importance of the 3 part structure to any story of 'Problem, Solution, Result,' which is reinforcing what Park Howell describes in earlier podcasts as "ABT" - And, But, Therefore.

Erwin also tells me how he and his team are building their loyal following, hence the reference to eating his own dogfood.

The team are  offering a freemium model so click the link in the show notes to generate 25 pieces of content per month for fee.  

Transcript

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Jim James 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the UnNoticed show, today. I'm delighted to have Erwin Lima, who's joining us from Holland. Erwin, welcome. Now you're a published author, you're a storyteller. And you're also the co-founder of a new company called story lab.ai. Tell us how do you help entrepreneurs get noticed?

Erwin LIma 0:20

what we do at Storylab.ai basically we use our AI tool to help you create more stories f aster more and better stories faster. And what that means is that, we help you create all of the, necessary, tidbits a story about your company, your brand, the services you provide, in such a way that, you can do it faster than you would normally, and then you can do it better than you would normally, so that you can get noticed by the right.

Jim James 0:46

Now. Oh, and that's great. The question though, I've got is how do you start? Because a blank piece of paper is difficult, but also if you're like a blank, cursor is no easier. what do people need in order to start that? Because if you just put in one word, you can get gobbledy gook from a.

Erwin LIma 1:04

Yup. Yup. What, what you want is to have an idea of, what you want to write about, and that's basically all you really need is an idea about what you want to write about. And the idea could be just the name of your company or a description of, the service or product that you want to talk about, or the idea that you want to talk about in, let's say. Two three, maybe five words. That's one thing other thing you need is maybe expand on that idea and describe that idea with one or two more lines of texts. if you go ino the generator, you can see exactly how that works.

Jim James 1:37

Okay. So can you give us an example then? Maybe one you've tried, because for most of us, the idea of putting in some text and getting something usable doesn't make any sense. So how, how have you used it?

Erwin LIma 1:51

Yeah. So that's, a great, I can give you an example. I was surprised by this one, myself, as as you mentioned, I've got a bunch of experience as a copywriter. And one thing I tried when I was trying, our, ad generator, I think it was the Google ad generator. We also do Facebook ad generator and a lot of blog stuff, but I was trying for the. trying to work out the kinks in our platform, testing it. and what I did was I was sitting in the room where I'm sitting right now. My son was a big gamer. It's his room had this, trust, gamer, mouse sitting on his desk. And I figured, Hey, let's try to see if the generator can give me good ad copy. That it will help me sell this trust mouse if I need it to. Right. Uh, so I went to the, Google ad headline generator on our platform. and I said, in the idea or topic box, I said, this is a "Trust Gamer Mouse" and then in the description box below that, I said, this is a trust gamer mouse that, need, and I kind of guest gamers need that to be super accurate. And super quick. And so are the things that I ended up put in the intro. And then I click the button that says, inspire me and it came back. and what was great is literally this surprised me. It gave me, I think, two options that were decent. One that was pretty good. And one that I really couldn't use. But then the final one that it gave me was trust your movement. And this is like as a copywriter that kind of gave me goosebumps that an AI. We've came up with, come up with that creative of a headline for a gaming mouse "Trust your movement." I thought, wow. that's scary. and that's one example that, of how the platform might work

Jim James 3:25

Okay, so that's great. So that's one that you could actually take away and use straight away right now.

Erwin LIma 3:29

a hundred percent.

Jim James 3:30

That's one you mentioned about Google to create then? Storylab

Erwin LIma 3:39

So, the main, I would say the main thing that, that we feel that any AI, copywriting tool can help you with this is idea generation. It's the start off, not with a blank, a blank page, but with something to go off. And so the main thing that we see people using it for right now is content, idea, generation. so you, you pop in, in a topic that you want to write about and you say inspire me. And it comes up with a couple of ideas for. headline generation. So same thing only, it translates to direct thread, everything usable headlights. and off of that, we have the sequence that we call block story regenerator, where if you click that, it will ask you to, put in a topic. It will give you headlines ideas and then you will be able to select one of those headline ideas. And off of that headline, it will give you a blog intro and offer that blog intro you can even select that and it will give you an outline for the blog. So it really helps you along the process of creating a blog story out of nothing. But knowing the topic that, you want to write about.

Jim James 4:43

Okay, so sounds pretty extensive. So my question to you, so Erwin, from a story lab, we're just talking then about creating sort of longer form content. Just tell me though, because often AI content can end up being gobbledy goop, frankly. How does it stay on message? Because the broader, the longer it gets from an original kernel of an idea. Sometimes the content becomes further and further away from what the company wanted to say. How do you keep it being relevant?

Erwin LIma 5:16

there's two things I I would say to that one is that, the AI engine that we use, which is GPT three or, a connection to GPT three, which is the largest AI, natural language processing AI in the world, does that what it does really well. So in general, I would say that we, we see that it comes back with copy or content. That is really good, really on topic. Uh, however, The AI does not understand, literally does not understand what it's saying and what it's about. So it may very well veer off topic a little bit, very slightly. And, that's where the second part comes in, which is what we, 100% advise everybody using any AI copywriting tool and especially ours, because those are people that we want to talk to them about. We advised them to do is you use what the AI tool gives you something to start off with, but you always keep, keep the human element of a human element of your own human creativity as a check, as a balance, to see, to make sure that it's saying that what you're saying in the end is what you want to be saying. And that's also we believe, how we believe you get the maximum out of, AI AI copy generation the maximum t of yourself, as a consequence of human and use as something to create go off of and improve as you go along with being what you are, a wonderful human,

Jim James 6:39

okay. So as you say it augments rather than replaces, the human,

Erwin LIma 6:44

absolutely 100%.

Jim James 6:46

What about the. If you like the the evaluation of that content, there are tools like headline, analyzer, and CoSchedule, for example, that if you put in a, a piece of content, it will evaluate that for style, for engagement, so on and so forth. Although I put the same headline in both of those and got entirely different results. So I have no idea which one to believe, how do you help people to analyze what might be the performance then, and to choose between let's say two different headlines.

Erwin LIma 7:16

Yeah. That's a, that's something that actually we're working on. So, uh, just to give you a, an idea for our background, we've been working on this for, a handful of months now, and just started out, creating uh creating the first basic tools. And then my buddy, is more tech savvy than me. Is, on the backend he's, pushing buttons, turning what knobs and tweaking everything to get it to the point where we, have a 95% quality assurance that we feel that we can provide. Now in the back of our heads, we have, kind of a. Kind of a tangential roadmap mapped out that we haven't published yet. but the things that you're talking about are things that are on there. So what we, one of the kind of directions we see this going is where a tool like you mentioned like headline, analyzer, or tools like that, that could give you instant feedback on the copy that you're creating to tell you. or give you an indication of how effective that content is going to be. it's definitely something that we're planning on building out towards, in the middle to long, I would say middle term future, but it's not, we're not there yet. Sadly.

Jim James 8:24

Okay, way there. Oh, and your background then is as a story teller and as an author and, in your other you consult for people on building a brand story. Can you tell us then would be some of the key elements that someone should think about in our speak PR program? We talk about storification, they need to create What do you give us guidance to people? Because before they use story lab, they need to be thinking about their business as a story. Don't they.

Erwin LIma 8:54

Yeah. Yeah. before they used to realize they need to be thinking about their business as a story, that kind of like that as a question. Yes and no, I would say, but, yeah, it's a good one. so what would I give to people to, to be able to pin down kind of the story of their brand? Is that your question? is that correct? Yeah. I would say, there's a story structure that a lot of storytellers, reference sometimes it's the, it's the, hero's journey. And it has, depending on how you look at it, exactly it has 12 steps or it has four phases, three phases. I like to layer it with, three phases of the "Need Solution Result" Uh, structure, which essentially, if you look at it, you can easily, very easily layer that on top of the hero's journey. And if you do that, so this is really taking it to the super most basic level that you can do when you want to do is to say, what was the need? What is the solution? And what is the result talking about your brand? That means you're going to look at the need in terms of were you as the founder, or the founders of your company, your brand looking at in the world you felt needed to be changed and needed to be different? right? That's the first step. The second step is solution is. Okay. So what did you come up with? was the solution to that thing that needed to be changed? That could be like your value proposition or your overall promise the world. you could even talk about a product or service that you offer there. and then, result, the third stage talk about, what does that bring to the world? How will that change the world? here you can talk about either your vision for the future and how your brand sits in that future. Or you can talk about how it changes, uh, the initial problem that you saw for the people that you're trying to help. So your customers, your audience. So this is a basic, most basic structure that you could use to talk about your brand. So "Need, Solution, Result" and then you can dive in and create like subsections and all those where you could get into like maybe the history of the Founder, You know, their personal and personal history, or when you're talking about the solution part, you can get into the specifics of the products and services that you need. So you see that from that top level structure and three tiers of the three steps you can get down and you can dive into those smaller steps and you can dive deeper into those, get again, and you create content around every step like that. Maybe based off something like story lab, AI.

Jim James 11:15

So, Erwin we've taught then about these three phases. So conceivably then someone that wants to use Storylab AI. I can think about putting content in that relates to these different phases. what do they do from a sort of amplification and distribution perspective? Do they, cause if they've got this piece of content, they only use it the one time or.

Erwin LIma 11:42

Oh, no, they can not. They can for now, you can use and reuse every bit of content that you get from story lab, AI. Because literally what you want to do now is just a copy of out of the editor and paste it onto whatever platform you're using it for in the future. If you go into that, if you go into the interface you will see that in, after you've, put in your topic and you're putting in a small description and you cland you clicked inspire meves you back these options. It takes you to an editor and in the editor, you can, you can edit, obviously you can write more. What you see is there, there are two buttons at the bottom of the editor. The left one says save, where you can say whatever you've been working on the other button, doesn't say anything yet. And this is something that's also for the future. The plan is to have that be a connector to a, at first one or two of them in the near, in the farther future. as many as you can imagine, platforms where you can automatically, publish from our platform out to, to as many as you like uh, So we're not going to be putting any restrictions on a use of the continent. You get at all.

Jim James 12:46

Okay. Yeah. So it will become, a platform, a bit like a Zoho or a hoot suite or a, an amplification platform directly from the content generator. What about Graphics? Because increasingly view is that just the text itself isn't generating enough engagement. How do you think people can use what they generate using story lab AI within multimedia, if you like pictures and

Erwin LIma 13:10

Yeah. Yeah. That's also something that's, that's, that we're thinking about. not something that we're seeing, that we're seeing ourselves integrate into our platform very soon, but definitely something that we think about, towards the slightly longer future is integration. The creation, the easy creation of graphics off of, the copy, the copy that we've created in the story lab, but for now, yeah. We're the way we think about it right now is you create your story lab is focused solely on copy story, text words. so you create your story there and, you use that and you go on another platform for. to add visuals to it. yeah, I'm totally on board with the saying that you have, it's absolutely a hundred percent very important and getting ever more important to, to add visuals to your story,

Jim James 13:57

what one could do is just cut and paste that into canva, for

Erwin LIma 14:12

it's a, I would say freemium model. I would also venture to say. I think it's not, it's not very expensive if you go beyond the free, subscription. So our free subscription right now offers you 25, AI runs each month, so that I feel, we feel, give you, more than enough. Of a candidate, they get a feel for, does this platform work for you? Does the work flow of this platform work for you? Is the copy that the AI has given you valuable at all? Although we'd love to hear from you and then anybody, trying out the platform obviously is that working. And then if you're maxing out those 25 runs on. this month, maybe next month as well. then you can upgrade and get a way more than that for 250 AI runs at $7 a month. So to most entrepreneurs that would be something worth considering.

Jim James 14:58

that's more than most would be creating that would play into what I talk about with the active communications index that it's content times, times consistency. So that's fantastic. Erwin

Erwin LIma 15:09

Yeah.

Jim James 15:10

an Irwin. If people want to connect with you, either for your story and brand story expertise, but also for story lab in whatever interested, how can they get hold of you?

Erwin LIma 15:20

Yeah. So, say the easiest way to connect with me is, through, LinkedIn or Twitter, where, if you, search for Lima on LinkedIn, you will most likely find me. And if you look for Arab Lima or Lima underscore rights on Twitter, you will also find me, next to that. you can find me at the storylab.ai, obviously you connect with me there

Jim James 15:42

okay. That's wonderful. And one last question for you. How are you going to get, Storylab noticed what's working for you.

Erwin LIma 15:48

Great question. what's working for us right now is eating our own dog food. So, I'm creating a bunch of content, but my buddy, who is our kind of chief marketing officer and who knows way more about marketing than I do is, also creating a ton of content literally by using our content generating tool and editing this stuff, the, the guidelines and tools that we provide to make that copy better, and then what he does is he does marketing and SEO magic and makes it so that as many people as possible get to see content, we try to be active on social media at least a couple of times a week where, we're on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, all these places. All thanks to my, my buddy, the CMO of, storylab.ai and, and that's really starting to pay.

Jim James 16:32

Okay.

Erwin LIma 16:32

it more and more people flooding through the website, you see, more and more subscriptions people trying it out. So that's great. And we're slowly steadily building this thing.

Jim James 16:44

Oh, and congratulations. As an entrepreneur, I salute you and as someone who has to write copy continuously, I thank you for creating what you're creating and joining me on the show to share it with other entrepreneurs. Thank you so much.

Erwin LIma 16:56

Much obliged Jim. And, thank you so much for having me on. And also if you would, after you've tried out the tool, please let me know how it feels or working for you, that would be awesome because all feedback, like I said, a super valuable to us at this time.

Jim James 17:09

Wonderful. Thank you, Erwin Lima for today on theUnNoticed show way from Holland..

Erwin LIma 17:13

Thanks. You.