Entrepreneurs are always looking for leverage.
Some people leverage capital, some people leverage systems, distribution, talent or brand, but one of the largest forms of leverage available to us in 2018 and moving into 2019 is rapidly becoming something that even the most basic levels of awareness cannot ignore – and that is AI-powered content creation.
Why? Well, for starters, the modern business is a content-generating, idea-experimenting, multi-channel- reaching beast. Startups have to be on social media, have killer landing pages, create videos for pay per click ads, have full design sets and deal with the so called ‘first world problem’ of an audience with an incredibly short attention span.
This is a tough one for founders, startup teams and small businesses. Their customers are demanding more content and that demand is increasing at a much faster pace than the business can keep up.
The reason that so many companies are trying to monetize “AI content creation” is that they have not yet figured out what the new economics of work will look like. And the new economics of work is not really about efficiency or productivity in the sense that most people understand it. The new economics of work is about creating entirely new ways of working. Because, with a small team and the right tools, you can get work done at the same level as a large team. And with the new business models and products that we are starting to see, you can create entire digital businesses where none existed before.
This is not a fad for any entrepreneur who is listening. This is a real opportunity in the market.
Table of Contents
Content Has Become a Business Infrastructure Layer
Only a few years ago, content was a peripheral function. Important, but not always central. Today that is no longer the case.
Content is how your product is discovered, understood, believed, shared. Content is about awareness, education, engagement, and even conversion. But what about the very first impression of your product? What about the moment before a user books a demo, signs up for a free trial, or makes a purchase?
The content that needs to be created for a business has changed over the years, as has the work required to source, gather and create that content. Gone are the days of just requiring a few blog articles here and there. The modern business will require content for multiple platforms and mediums to really engage with their target audience – from videos and podcasts, to social media graphics and animations, and explainers and product videos, to social creatives, founder communications and variations of the core messaging for each social channel.
We are all producing a whole lot more content. What used to require a team of creatives to produce can now be created and completed with the aid of a bit of AI.
Not too long ago, the first question we’d get when talking to someone about a project or business idea they’d like to pursue would be “how do we hire 5 people to do this.” Fast forward a year or two and that first question is increasingly being replaced with “how do we build this AI workflow to do that.”
That question is creating a whole new generation of startups.
The Biggest Opportunity Is Not One Tool, but a Workflow
The biggest myth that confuses people about the nature of modern day AI is that they have a clear understanding of a system or application at the feature level, when they have little to no understanding at the workflow level.
A single copywriting tool is useful. A single graphic design tool is useful. A single audio editing tool is useful. But real business value is achieved when many design activities are flowing into one application.
That is where the strongest opportunities are emerging.
Everyone wants to convert text to music, images to video, and speech to live action video. They want to do this fast and on all platforms. When an entrepreneur comes up with a product that fulfills this common request, they no longer have a tool, they have a solution to a production problem.
AI Music Is Opening New Business Models
And bottlenecks are where strong businesses are built.One of the coolest categories I’ve seen so far is music creation with AI.
Music has been a fundamental part of marketing, storytelling and digital branding for centuries and is still a major challenge and expense for small businesses and organisations. The typical marketing brief is to choose from the hundred’s of current popular songs, or some bland, over used TV advertising soundtracks. Even creating a simple jingle for a radio ad is a stretch for many. A bespoke, original song, or a brand identity soundtrack is usually an unaffordable luxury. It also requires a high level of musicianship, as well as significant post production work, such as sound design and mixing.
That is changing.
Why this category is important The value of this category can be seen with platforms like Lyrics To Song. The ability to travel from lyrics or ideas to song is a very powerful one. It means that creators, founders, indie marketers and agencies that need music on a regular basis can get the music they need in a quick and affordable way.
The entrepreneurial opportunity here is larger than it first appears.
We believe that some applications of AI music technology will benefit many different types of composers, from those who work on video games, films and TV shows, to ad agencies, and other media producers, as well as marketers who want a distinctive sound for a brand, app makers who want to allow users to create music within an app, and digital agencies which compose music for their clients, as well as schools offering music composition services to students.
In a very profound way, music is no longer an art form in the classical sense. It’s evolving into a new paradigm, more like a “software app” where the end user has to pay for it in dollars and cents.
Static Images Are Becoming Dynamic Assets
Another major opportunity is the transformation of still images into motion content.
As an entrepreneur you are no doubt aware of the importance of visuals and the role they play in helping to communicate and capture your target audience. Standing images are no longer a viable option in this new era of short-form video and seconds not minutes social media. Businesses are requesting video content for their online platforms because video engages and communicates in a faster and more dynamic way than an image or text based message. Video grabs attention and brings content to life, making it look more engaging and therefore more professional.
That is why AI image animation is gaining traction.
That is exactly the assumption Animate Image AI, our latest innovation, is based on. Using this technology, rather than manually editing a full video from start to end, you can turn any sequence of images into a moving clip, all in a snap of a finger. And that’s precisely where the value lies for businesses — getting the most out of the content they already have.
Potential applications for this technology include: – SaaS tools for content creators – Services for design and marketing agencies – White-labeled solutions for specialized industries – Branded content – Fast creation of social media content.
The savvy modern day entrepreneur asks: How do I remain relevant to the times? The answer is simple: Not every film in the world needs to be made in Hollywood. What the world needs is more video, more frequently and in lower quality. More mass produced communications, not more expensive blockbuster movies that have the special effects budget of a Michael Bay movie.
That is exactly where AI animation products can win.
Talking Content Is Becoming Easier to Scale
Video is a dominant format and has been for years, yet we still struggle to scale what we call “speaking video.” This format of video requires so many more hours of human effort: more hours to capture the right footage, more hours to craft an engaging edit, more hours to find and manage talent, more hours to get the content localized, and even more hours to negotiate revisions with stakeholders.
These frictions create another obvious business opening.
Because founders, creators & marketers all want to be able to communicate more quickly through spoken words, without having to dramatically increase headcount to do so. Lip-sync and voice-enabled visual content creation tools are starting to become commercially viable.
Well Lip Sync Pro just happens to be a platform that sits right in the middle of that. And the world is changing and the world wants to be able to create this talking content in a more accessible, flexible and scalable way and businesses need to be able to communicate quickly.
Explainer videos can be used for: Product explainers Creator videos Educational content Localized campaigns Character-based storytelling Faceless content businesses Internal training assets
For the entrepreneur, getting media coverage is no longer about media. It’s about infrastructure for doing business in the 21st century.
Why These Categories Matter to Founders
Why Entrepreneurs Should Care About AI Content Creation There are a ton of reasons why you should care about the innovations coming out of Silicon Valley and the world of AI. But I’m not here to bore you with a laundry list of all the cool stuff that’s coming out. Instead, I’m here to explain exactly why you care. And the answer isn’t because of the tech itself. Because the tech behind this new wave of “AI Content Creation” is pretty cool, but it’s what the tech gives to businesses that’s more important. And what it gives is this: The solution to 3 of the biggest growth challenges business has today – all at once.
Lower costs to produce First of all, the cost to produce the ad is lower. You don’t have to build a full scale creative agency. You can be highly productive with a smaller team.
It also allows for faster testing speed. Companies can test more unique versions, learn more quickly and be more efficient.
Thirdly, it unlocks new products. Most founders spend most of their time trying to build a product within an existing software category, which they believe customers care about. But with an AI generator, you get to build a whole new class of products centered around the act of creating and the experience of being creative.
That is a meaningful shift.
As long as I can remember, software startups have largely focused on applications in the areas of productivity, analytics, communication and operations. But now creative output is becoming a first class software function. And this unlocks a ton of new business models where founders can now build entire companies around helping people create work — but also art, brands and other forms of creative content that connect with people.
In this episode, we’ll be discussing the topic of Digital Content Optimization. One of the things that people often forget is that digital content is really pervasive in pretty much all online businesses and so the addressable market is actually much larger than people would think.
The Smartest Founders Will Think Beyond Features
This is a growing market and a growing fast. It will soon become a regular market with competition and it will no longer be possible to just demo a piece of technology and have a business. There will be lots of companies with cool technology that can do lots of neat things, but there will be more to it than that. The companies that will be successful will understand the channels of distribution, how the technology will be used and the value it will bring to the end user.
1. Ask better questions for yourself. Start here and figure it out. Who is your user and what is their problem that you are trying to solve. Is your product saving them time, making them more efficient, or generating revenue? Is the workflow that you are building something that aligns with the workflow of how they would be creating content on their own? Can you build a product that is something people are interested in and find useful enough to use casually, but that they also use frequently?
The companies that will gain from content generated by AI, in the sense that they will gain from the future created by this content, are not the ones that impress us with the abilities of their models. It is the companies that help us see what is in it for us, in terms of tangible business advantage.
That is a more durable position.
The Future Belongs to AI-Native Media Businesses
We are now living in an era where the production of content for all forms of media is no longer a prerogative of large organizations with deep pockets and a corresponding array of specialized skills and workflows. Content production is about to become far more modular, far more accessible and far more demand-driven thanks to AI.
That shift opens the door for a new class of businesses.
Some will build applications upon the platform while others will build the businesses and services that those applications enable. Some will grow their media brands, as well as creator businesses and agencies, using the platform. And, we believe, most of all others will use the platform to launch entirely new forms of video that incorporate music, animation, and narration in brand new ways.
Why LyricsToSong, Animate Image AI and Lip Sync Pro matter. I wrote in my last blog post that these 3 applications represent more than just a new set of tools or features. Rather they are looking glass into the emerging Content Creation 2.0 landscape, and therefore a harbinger of things to come in the Content Marketplaces sector, which is why I believe they are highly relevant and indicative of the future of Content Marketplaces sector, namely the emerging AI-native content infrastructure.
For founders, that matters.
The next wave of digital entrepreneurship will not just about building new versions of the productivity apps that we currently use to make our working lives easier. We’ll be creating applications which help us to create, communicate and monetise our attention.
Capturing the attention of potential customers is a challenge that countless companies and individuals face on a daily basis, with the goal of persuading them to part with their hard-earned cash. In that sense, I believe that Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram could be the single most clever move ever made by an entrepreneur.
