Black Hat deadline madness, AI-powered content tactics, and the auth provider dilemma

Small Efforts - with Sean Sun and Andrew Askins

Sean survives on 1.5 hours of sleep while juggling Black Hat submissions and client launches! 😴 Andrew discovers a new MetaMonster content strategy and shows off the new grid UI that's generating page titles and scoring them for engagement. Plus: should you delegate your therapy homework to Claude (hint: no), auth provider decision paralysis, and why internal linking breaks the table concept.

Links:

• Andrew’s Twitter: @AndrewAskins
• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewaskins.com/
• MetaMonster: https://metamonster.ai/
• Sean’s Twitter: @seanqsun
• Miscreants: http://miscreants.com/
• Margins: http://margins.so/
• Sean's website: https://seanqsun.com/

For more information about the podcast, check out https://www.smalleffortspod.com/.

Transcript:
00:00.81
Sean
Oh, you stopped.

00:03.40
Andrew
Yeah, that would be the most obnoxious sound in the world. I was doing the, like, little kid exasperated sound.

00:10.45
Sean
Yeah, yeah. What is that? What do you, what do you, how do you, like, what is the English phrase for that?

00:16.64
Andrew
have no fucking clue.

00:17.80
Sean
It's not like rolling your R's, but it's like blubbering.

00:21.54
Andrew
It's like flapping your lips. I don't know.

00:23.97
Sean
I guess.

00:23.99
Andrew
I was doing this. Pfft.

00:26.94
Sean
That's a thumbnail.

00:28.02
Andrew
Oh, God.

00:28.21
Sean
That's good.

00:28.89
Andrew
Jesus.

00:32.72
Sean
That's a good thumbnail. I'm going to have Jonah try that out. We'll see how it performs.

00:36.82
Andrew
Try what?

00:37.93
Sean
You just blubbered.

00:40.08
Andrew
Please no.

00:40.97
Sean
Okay.

00:43.70
Sean
How you doing? how's how's How's it going?

00:48.00
Andrew
I'm good. I just pushed out a YouTube video, LinkedIn video for Metamonster.

00:54.94
Sean
Nice.

00:55.68
Andrew
i I think this is maybe going to be a ah new tactic is I saw um like an SEO influencer type share something about how AI overviews really like structured schema.

01:12.35
Andrew
And so I was like, dope. I'm going to go write a prompt to create structured schema in the new MetaMonster UI, record myself doing it, tag this person in the post,

01:22.19
Sean
Cool.

01:24.43
Sean
Sick.

01:24.60
Andrew
and like shout them out in the video. And then did comment on my post. i don't yeah know They didn't share it or anything, but they commented on my post.

01:30.77
Sean
Sick.

01:33.39
Andrew
And so that was kind of cool. And I'm like, I think this is probably a good tactic to follow is just like take the things that people are talking about and just record short videos showing how you can use MetaMonster to execute on them.

01:38.71
Sean
Yeah, 100%.

01:47.17
Sean
Yeah, all all of that makes perfect sense. that like

01:49.42
Andrew
Yeah.

01:50.67
Sean
that That feels like exactly what to do to grow Metamonster.

01:54.27
Andrew
Yeah. Yeah.

01:55.81
Sean
In fact, I would not be surprised if that was the way grew your user base to your first 500 to 1,000 this point. Yet, yet, to to ah thousand at this point so

02:06.85
Andrew
Maybe. i mean, no one is watching, like, our videos aren't getting any, yeah, any views.

02:09.98
Sean
yes yet yeah

02:12.87
Andrew
And, like, my like LinkedIn, most of the people liking my LinkedIn posts about Metamonster have been, like, my friends. So I haven't gotten, yeah.

02:22.08
Sean
yet yeah i think you need you need one you know ah ah you need like

02:26.86
Andrew
Yeah, you need one to go viral-ish in the SEO world. And you need, yeah, I just need to stick with it and...

02:33.43
Sean
yeah plus i mean the content just gets reused so for the blog anyway or or the website anyway so yeah um i absolutely yeah but that sounds perfectly correct to me that's

02:45.76
Andrew
Yeah. I also, um i so I recorded this one today with Screen Studio, was fun to play around with. I like some parts of it a lot. I found myself really wishing, though, that it would generate a transcript like Loom does.

02:59.46
Andrew
can probably use, like, a transcript generator. I can just find something like that. But the reason is, i have gotten alex from like Lex like Lex.page set up pretty well.

03:12.97
Andrew
probably do it in Claude too. But I've got it generating pretty good marketing emails based off of video transcripts. And so it's been like a really nice way to like just, you know, reuse content as I record the video.

03:30.97
Andrew
And then I upload the transcript to Lex and I have Lex generate a, generate a marketing email, I edit that email, and then I copy it over to loops and send it out to the Metamonster list.

03:47.74
Andrew
So I've also been thinking about playing around with some of the automation tools to see if I could actually automate that whole flow.

03:50.05
Sean
Cool.

03:56.02
Andrew
And it would still be, like, human in the loop because I want to edit it before it goes into loops.

04:00.35
Sean
Yeah.

04:00.43
Andrew
But, like, even if it created it as a draft in loops, I could then go to loops and edit it there.

04:04.58
Sean
Yeah. 100%. 100.

04:08.89
Sean
hundred percent and

04:10.32
Andrew
So...

04:12.64
Sean
Yeah, 100%. um I always, well, okay. Sorry, 100%, you can do that. I always struggle with the idea of doing that because I feel like the time it takes to like do that is sometimes not worth the just doing it manually. I feel like I could be automating Okay, one of the things I could definitely be automating is sending you the link to this Zencaster thing. But every single every single time I do it, I'm like, yeah but it's just so easy to just make it.

04:42.92
Sean
And it's so much more work to go figure out how to do it in N8N and like increment the number by one.

04:48.73
Andrew
Super fair.

04:50.98
Sean
Which...

04:51.09
Andrew
This is the classic problem with delegation in general, right? Whether it's automation or delegation, it's just you've got to get over that hump of it's easier to do it myself.

04:57.56
Sean
Yeah.

05:00.78
Sean
Yeah. Yeah. Well... Okay, well, that's that's a different way to think about it. That's kind of like death by a thousand. I'll do it myself until you can't do it yourself anymore.

05:12.62
Sean
I'm not going automate it.

05:12.73
Andrew
Yeah.

05:13.46
Sean
It's not going to happen. I'm just going to send you.

05:14.86
Andrew
Yeah, I'm probably not going to automate this for a while either.

05:15.60
Sean
Yeah. yeah cool okay uh on to another productive topic that we didn't talk about before the show but now i want to know last time we had a call or two times ago we were talking about uh that you were writing down the story of why you would be pushing something off and procrastinating

05:22.29
Andrew
Okay.

05:26.80
Andrew
Yeah.

05:37.62
Andrew
Oh, shit. You just made me realize ...