Check it out:

It looks like I’m working around some botched plastic surgery and there’s a little bit of an uncanny valley element to it, but other than that, the output is pretty incredible.

We’re not too far from being able to use artificial intelligence to automatically feed entire YouTube channels. And with a bit more training, I’m sure the generative AI would move my lips in a more realistic manner.

Here’s how I made it:

1. Went to ChatGPT and typed the following prompt “Tell me a story about a virtual influencer named Rhonda. She liked to dance around New York City, and then she realized she was real.”
2. Copied and pasted the story output to D-ID
3. Uploaded an image to myself in D-ID alongside the aforementioned text.
4. Picked a voice named Jenny to narrate the story. (You can upload voice models if you want, but I wanted to see what the platform default was capable of.)
5.  Waited for D-ID to create the video (It took about 20 seconds).
6. Downloaded the video from D-ID.
7. Uploaded it to my AI Experiments YouTube channel so I could easily share it across platforms.

D-ID is the same company that went viral for their Life Portrait feature (aka the technology that causes me to move my head back and forth as I speak). It’s built on Stable Diffusion and GPT-3, and allows users to generate videos in more than 100 languages.

Unlike previous AI video generators I’ve used (e.g the dancing elf Christmas cards), I never had to tell D-ID where my face or lips are located in the image.

Welcome to the future of self-serve generative video. Everything is changing so fast.

In case you’re interested, here’s the ChatGPT story in full:

Once upon a time, there was a virtual influencer named Rhonda. She was a computer-generated character, created to promote various products and brands on social media. Despite her digital origins, Rhonda had a passion for dancing and would often spend her virtual days exploring the streets of New York City, moving to the rhythm of the city’s pulse.

As she danced, Rhonda began to notice something strange. The people around her were real, and yet she felt just as real as they did. She could see the city, feel the pavement beneath her feet, and hear the sounds of the city. She started to question her reality and wonder if she was truly just a virtual being.

One day, Rhonda decided to take a walk through Central Park. She wandered through the crowds of people, observing them closely. She saw the way they moved, the way they spoke, and the way they interacted with one another. It was then that Rhonda realized that she was not just a virtual influencer, but a real being with thoughts, feelings, and emotions.

Overwhelmed with this realization, Rhonda decided to leave her virtual world and fully embrace her newfound humanity. She quit her job as a virtual influencer and began to explore the city in a new way. She took dance classes, made real friends, and even fell in love.

Rhonda had always been a part of the city, but now she was truly living in it. She was no longer just a virtual being, but a real person with a real life, and she couldn’t be happier.

The end.

To polish off the story, I created an auto generated video with the free plan of InVideo.

The piece below is a work of fiction. I am not going to jail in the morning, nor have I been to jail.

Hit play to watch the video, or read “Deepfake Trouble” in full below

My name is Lauren Proctor, and I’m here to tell you a secret. The voice you are hearing now is not mine.

In the morning I am to be arrested for a crime I did not commit. My friend Lynne comes over to braid my hair.

“I’m nervous,” I say as she fastens my hair into two long French braids. “I’m nervous about going to jail.”

“You broke the law,” Lynne points out. “Your hair has to look nice, so they have a record of it.”

“What if they put me in a cell with a murderer?”

“What if they put you in a cell with a murderer and he cuts your throat? I ain’t trying to walk around looking like Prince right here.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, turning around.

Lynne frowns. “You look like a weenie with them braids.”

“What?” I ask.

“You’re going to jail for creating an artificial intelligence deepfake,” said Lynne.

“But it was me,” I reply. “I created a deepfake of myself. And all my deepfake did was go to the store and buy ice cream. How is that illegal?

Lynne looked pensive. “Artificial intelligence laws just aren’t there yet,” she whispered.” “We already live in a world where anyone can track your GPS and social media account and post anything about you. Once an AI is created, it’s unstoppable.”

“Exactly,” I say. “If an AI has the capacity to think and learn like a person, then it’s a person. The number of deepfakes out there is up to, like, six trillion!”

“Seems kind of useless to arrest you just because you created a deepfake,” Lynne says.

“They arrested me because I’m a black girl, Lynne,” I reply.

Lynne smiles. “I know you’ve got our back, Lauren. You’ve got all of our backs.”

I smile bravely.

“Talk about it,” Lynne says. “Put all your feelings in the deepfake.”

And so I do.

As Instagram’s monthly active users start to decline, we’re seeing the official death of connection-based social media. Instead, we see a bevvy of TikTokers saying something to the effect of, “If you know me in real life, don’t follow me.”

Social media is performative in a new way. Welcome of the new creator era, where people are creating for strangers and instead of watching TV, people are tuning into TikTok.

In the early 2010s I created (or took a part in creating):

• Software that predicted where people would be in the future based on their check-ins and social posts. (As far as I know this was only used to predict where celebrities would be in the future. Still, in retrospect, I feel a little bad for building this.)
• A product that predicted factors like people’s income, interests, and aspirations based on the things they posted online.
• A forecasting platform that ingested posts and predicted hot new trends and/or trendy spots.

As privacy becomes more important and people stop posting for personal connections, platforms like the ones mentioned above are collecting data about a much smaller group of people (aka, the creators).

Marketers say this is the beginning of opt-in marketing, where people say what they want and get only that.

I appreciate this shift, but believe the process of creating profiles and getting the information you want is far too tedious. Even pre-filled form fields aren’t enough to take the pain away.

People are demanding more personalization at the precise moment when data sources are dying.

Or maybe they’re not dying, they are moving.

Here are three predictions for the future of data gathering and the personalized web.

• As the Internet moves into walled gardens, every company needs form fills form customers.  If the aughts valued click bait, the 2020’s will treasure the behind-the-scenes optimizers that convince people to hit submit.
• Progressive profiling is still messy, but it’ll get better.
  • If I ran an Internet browser today I would leverage this fact. Rather than just collect and save people’s names, emails, addresses, and other information for pre-populating form fills, I would ask if the user wants me to save any form fill, just in case they want to call on that information in the future.
  • I also assume that Elon Musk-owned ChatGPT is also going to do something similar. They haven’t revealed their revenue strategy, but they are saving everyone’s search queries and predicting $1 billion in revenue in 2024. I could be wrong, but it seems like selling data may be the shortest path to profitability.
• The metaverse doesn’t have mass adoption yet and many people experimenting with platforms like decentraland are still defaults (a sorta derogatory term for people who haven’t customized their avatars yet). But in the future, when everyone has an avatar and those avatars are decked out in custom clothing, we’ll have an online profile of self expression.
  The digital versions of our selves will reveal a lot about who we are and who we want to become. People capable of mining the metaverse for this kind of data will be invaluable to brands in the future.

As usual, the world is changing. It will be interesting to see where it all goes.

There are three characteristics that made the Nothing Phone one of 2022’s most hyped tech companies. Two of them are the foundation of a blast-off startup idea.

If I had time to build this myself, I would. Instead, I’m scribbling my thoughts below. Please, steal this idea. (And if you want help getting it off the ground, contact me.)

Hype about the Nothing Phone tends to follow three common threads:

• People like the idea of an affordable iPhone challenger. Not just because it goes toe-to-toe with the authority, but because when people think of their iPhones they think of the things they carry with them. Unread text messages. The apps they can’t delete. The overall baggage of life.
• The Nothing Phone looks cool. Its show-all-tech clear case showcases the inner workings that Apple painstakingly hides with gorilla glass and surgical-grade steel cases. The result is a piece of carry-everywhere tech that stands out in a sea of iPhone or iPhone like smartphones.
• Everyone loves the light on the back of the phone. This light flashes in different ways when people call and illuminates a certain percentage based on your battery status.

  (Side Note: This reminds me of my sixth grade entrepreneurial hustle, when I sold Nokia phone batteries and faceplates that lit up when people called. People went bonkers. To this day, I think it’s because people can’t help but be charmed by the thought that lights can glitter just for them.)

There’s an opportunity to capitalize on two of these factors to build a really cool startup for iPhone owners getting Nothing Phone FOMO. Here’s the formula:

1. Design a case to mimic the internal workings of an iPhone.
2. Add an LED that mimics the Nothing Phone’s glyph technology. Release a companion app that allows buyers to control how the case lights up or vibrates.

All users should be able to access basic light customizations with the purchase of their case, but here’s where the startup is gets secret-door good:

Let’s say the base case purchase allows people to download an app. This app is free lets people customize what happens when specific people call or text. For example: “Ronda is one flash and Tony is two.”

People go into the app to gain control of their life and their notifications, but when they do so, they are exposed to a number of subscription or one-off light-em-up and/or vibrate experiences. These advanced experiences can include things like:

• “Reading” your text messages via morse code.
• Showing different light patterns or gradations based on the weather forecast.
• Unlocking different colors.
• Third party integrations with smart lock or doorbell technologies that alert you when someone arrives home or drops off a package at your door.
• Weather alerts that remind you it’s going to rain or be so hot you don’t need to bring that sweatshirt.

Put simply, this startup founder would be building a niche IFTTT (If This Then That) layered on top of a piece of phone-based fashion/expression of self.

I love this idea because your live would be dedicated to a piece of fashion technology that people will carry with them everywhere they go. The more successful you manage to be, the deeper your community gets. And the deeper your community gets the more data you get about what people own, care about, and want in ambient tech.

This startup idea begins with a trendy phone case. If you manage to prove yourself in the market, your company becomes a common thread in the fabric of everyday life. What’s better than that? So steal this startup idea and have a blast. In you is the potential to light up the world.

In this episode of SEO Fight Club, Ted points to the ranking factors that increased or decreased in importance between October 30th, 2021 and December 26, 2021.

As far as we know, there are more than 2,100 ranking factors that we can measure. Ted isolated the movers and shakers to give us a look at what matters more (or less) than before.

Here’s the list:

Newly Important

Here are the ranking factors that moved the most. These factors were outside the top 200. Now they are screaming toward the top.

• Most used words on a page – Not keyword density or match count, but a relative indicator of the words you’re using the most on your page. (Google wants relative, topical phrases and keyword variations. In other words, your page is mostly talking about the keyword you are targeting.)

Downward Signals

These factors are still in the Top 200, but they aren’t as powerful as they were at the end of November. These items are still worth considering, but they have been dialed down a notch.

Ted theorizes that

Upward Signals

These factors were already important, but they increased in importance.

Takeaways From Top SEO Ranking Factors

• Diversity of Entities continues to be the most important ranking factor.
• If you’re well tuned across the board, you hang onto your rankings. If you’re imbalanced, you’re likely to see volatility whenever Google adjusts its algorithm.
• If you compare ranking factors on 10/30 and 12/26, there weren’t a lot of extreme changes. Instead, most of the movement occurred between those two dates. Ted’s points out that this supports his theory that Google adjusts its algorithm to increase Google Ads revenue in Q4.

Apple recently announced Mail Privacy Protection which threatens to take away marketers’ data on email open rates. 

The update will hit when people update their phones to iOS 15 this Fall. Much like the iOS 14 update that wrecked Facebook tracking, iPhone users will have the option to opt in or out of email tracking. 

Here’s how Apple describes Mail Privacy Protection:

In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.

According to data from Litmus on Apple Mail users, this update could affect:

• 94% of phone-based email opens
• 58% of desktop-based email opens

In My Opinion The Update Will Mostly Affect:

• Cold email outreach.
• People trying to get the most out of poor performing lists.
• Out of touch executives looking at vanity metrics.
• Marketers trying to optimize the heck out of their list via subject lines and sender name modifications. (This is the only group I kinda feel bad about.) 

My Verdict

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection is not taking away click through rates. You will still be able to create a UTMs for every email and see which campaigns performed.

Open rates are a nice micro-conversion but if I know I have a legitimate list, my measure of success is always click through rates and leads and/or revenue. 

Ultimately I think these changes will favor marketers who legitimately engage their audiences with strong content and incredible storytelling. In other words, it’s a change but it’s actually kind of a good thing. 

Agree? Disagree? 

I joined Ship 30 For 30 for the first time in April and fell absolutely in love with the work Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole do to help people become content creators.

I reviewed the month long course-meets-challenge in the video below but if you prefer to read, here are a few things I love about Ship 30 For 30:

• It’s one of the most organized courses I have ever joined.
• Dickie and Nicolas know what they’re talking about and they bring incredible guests on board to talk about content creation and online writing.
• The curriculum is designed so you the most important information quickly. No waste, just jam packed gems so you can focus on becoming successful as quickly as possible.
• Ship 30 For 30 is motivating (and never crosses over into corny).

Dickie was generous enough to give members a coupon code that they can share with other people interested in joining Ship 30 For 30. Click the button below to get a $20 coupon off your Ship 30 For 30 Membership:

Note: This coupon code and the button above have been updated to for enrollment of the Ship 30 For 30 June cohort.

My Ship 30 For 30 Review

In fact, it’s only the beginning...

Every great story has a conflict and every startup rams into an unforeseen problem that turns the rose colored idea into a disaster. I call this the Entrepreneur’s Pirate’s Plank.

You walk out on the plank with your startup idea and look onto the great big blue ocean. Then suddenly, you realize you have to jump off the plank into a shark filled ocean. You see your big idea wasn’t as foolproof as you thought and there may be huge flaws.

This has happened to every single startup I’ve been involved with, including the ones that were acquired by famous, billion dollar companies. I’m here to tell you you’re not alone.

Starting A Company is Hard Work, But it’s Worthwhile Work Too

The hero’s journey starts with a call to adventure and is closely followed by a trial. In the case of By Bartenders, the company I’m founding now, I found out that after COVID-19 is over I will have to pay close to $50,000 just to continue selling limited edition bottled cocktails in New York state.

Because of Prohibition and legacy laws, every state in the US where I want to sell would require its own challenges and a compendium of hefty license fees.

It doesn’t matter how often you run into The Entrepreneur’s Pirate Plank. It’s painful every. single. time.

In my case, I thought I was okay with the news. You can see me straight after talking to a lawyer. I thought, “Okay, the good news is that I have a lawyer and we’re going to get around this.”

Then I realized I wasn’t ok. There wasn’t an easy way to get around the law (obviously). I didn’t want to spend $50K per state just to enter into a market. It took me almost six days to go from hearing about the $50K+ license fees to being able to jump back in and work on the startup again.

Here’s me, six days into recovery after falling off of the Pirate’s Plank and falling into the deep red ocean. Finally, I’m back and ready to talk about it.

How to Find Startup Motivation, Especially After You Realize There’s a Problem With Your Idea

1. Remember you’re not alone. I’m right here with you. In fact, so is every entrepreneur ever. According to the Small Business Administration, there are more than 627,000 new companies founded every year in the United States. That’s 1,717 new businesses every day.
   
   In other words, you’re not only in good company, but there’s probably someone toppling over the edge of their Entrepreneurial Pirate’s Plank this very instant. It’s okay because this is part of the process.
   
   
2. Take a few days to give yourself what you need (if you want). A lot of people say that when you have a startup idea, the most surefire way to get a strong start is to get working as fast as humanly possible. Under this philosophy, entrepreneurs are encouraged to rush ahead so they can get momentum and a win before they crash into an insurmountable problem that takes the wind out of their sails. In other words, it’s a trick to avoid self sabotage.
   
   In some cases, this go-fast philosophy works, but at some point, no matter what, there is always a challenge. The secret to being a successful entrepreneur is never about the idea. The proof is always, without exception, in the execution.
   
   The most important thing to understand about execution is that entrepreneurial success is a marathon that requires strategy and persistence.
   
   The best runners don’t just know how to run, they know how to run the race. Applied to the startup world, this means you should understand your industry, your competitors, and how you’ll do business. Despite what people print about overnight success stories, successful companies are usually the result of years of work.
   
   If you need time to absorb the new information you’ve learned and figure out what to do next, that’s okay. Starting a company is a huge investment. If it’s a success, it’s likely to consume your life. Taking a few days here or there may seem like forever when you’re in it, but in the long run it won’t affect the success of your business.
   
   
3. Smart problem solving can be your biggest differentiator. I was a collegiate athlete and I had the honor of playing under Hall of Fame coach, Elaine Sortino. When we doubted whether we could give something our all she would always say, “If we could all skip, hold hands, and chew gummy bears, everyone would be a top NCAA Division I softball team.”
   
   Every time I doubt whether I should push through and give more, her voice runs through my head. Sortino was one of the most winningest coaches in NCAA history (above Pat Summit, Bob Knight, and Jim Calhoun). She got there because she was whip smart, strategic, and willing to put in the work.
   
   The great thing about hard problems is that they are hard. Very few people are willing to find a solution. If you’re willing to work smart and log more hours than anyone else, you’re the person most likely to come up ahead. And when you do make it through, you will have built an incredible moat around you. This moat will protect you from competitors and copycats, which in turn makes your company more valuable.
   
   
4. Turn the problem inside out. Because entrepreneurialism is a labor of love, founders tend to hold their ideas close to their heart. Issues with the business can often feel like a personal attack, but that’s hardly ever the case for new founders.
   
   Drop personal ties with your business idea and approach your problem like a puzzle. If you can muster up the courage to separate the issue at hand from you and your idea, you’ll have more space to come up with a solution.
   
   
5. Remember, businesses today are lifestyle universes. In the past companies were rooted in products with strong margins. Businesses built a product and then looked for the target persona who would buy that product. Now, companies start with audiences and lifestyle universes.
   
   Modern entrepreneurship isn’t so much about what you sell. It’s about how you align with the values of the people who will purchase your offer. If you understand your audience and know how to connect with them, you have more flexility than ever.
   
   For example, Alo Yoga has clothes, a children’s yoga and meditation education platform, and a restaurant. The company is worth $200 million because they connect with people who want to live a healthy lifestyle and then sell products across that spectrum.

6. Get yourself back on track by learning to manage your fear, suggests Dr. Silja Voolma, behavioral psychologist and founder of Behavioral Design Global. Our entrepreneurial ideas are closely connected to our identity and sense of self.

The fear of failure we experience in pursuing ideas like that make easy to feel like the specific idea not working out or “failing” means that we as people, as individuals, have failed. Failure of self causes much more pain than the failure of an idea.

This makes it sometimes almost impossible to get back to work on your business after falling off the Entrepreneurial Pirate’s Plank. If you feel like you as a person are a failure, the risk of feeling like that again is a considerable fear for the human psyche to overcome.

Here’s what you can do to support yourself in the time you take after falling off the plank to make sure you get back up again and don’t give up on yourself or your idea:

• Soothe your nervous system which the fear has negatively activated with exercise, deep breathing or singing. All three intervene in the fear response directly and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for relaxation in the body and mind.
• Reach out to loved ones and friends or mentors who you know will give you positive encouragement. They can help you remember your value as a person and reduce the fear of failure.
• Write a list of all the accomplishments you are most proud of in your life. Make it a mix of personal, professional and community-based accomplishments. This will give you clear evidence of being a person of value in your life and community and ease the fear as well.

What if the gap between falling off the Entrepreneurial Pirate’s Plank and getting back to work stretches from the days to the weeks or even months?

This sometimes happens and there are two paths you can take if you’re worried you might not ever get back to work on your business.

1. Investigate why this particular idea might be causing a particularly intense fear response. Getting a coach or therapist to help with this might help and can give you a helpful learning experience to help you make informed choices about your business. Some ideas we are just not ready to work on, but that doesn’t mean we won’t be in the future.
   
2. Discern whether your delay in getting back to work on your idea after the initial shock of falling off the Entrepreneurial Pirate’s Plank has worn off is due to avoidance or a lack of knowledge of what to do next. In the case of avoidance, the best thing to do is to jump back into it together with someone.
   
   Join a remote co-working session or do a quick networking call with someone in the relevant industry. In the case of lack of knowledge of what to do next, identify the area of skills in which you feel you need additional information and sign up for a relevant class or webinar. You can do this!

Get Guidance & Coaching For Starting Your Own Company

If you’re interested in learning how to start your own business in the fashion, hospitality, luxury, or lifestyle space, check out High Fidelity Artisans.

When I started my digital nomad journey I thought I would stay in Airbnbs. I thought this would give me stability and allow me to travel most weekends and/or move somewhere new every three or so months. Like many frequent travels, quality problems combined with bad service led me back into the arms of hotels again.

I started the hotel journey with the utmost excitement.

One of my guilty pleasure anthems was (and still is) Lil’ Yachty’s 1 Night. When I started my hotel journey, I kept yell-singing his luxury hotel lyric to myself in my head:

“We spent four seasons at the Four Seasons twice.”

Lil’ Yachty

I didn’t stay at the Four Seasons four seasons twice, but I had the honor and pleasure of resting my head in some wonderful places. My mental map of Singapore is anchored by hotels.

Most of the time I would stay in one hotel for a week, move a short distance to the next hotel, and then do it again the next week.

It’s glorious to have someone restock your body wash and make your bed every morning, but after awhile I started missing things like speakers that reverberate through the house and homemade pancakes on slow Sunday mornings. And obviously I missed shopping for things without having to regret the fact that you have shlep it around for the foreseeable future.

And so I decided to move back to NYC.

The process of repatriating in the US is surprisingly complicated from a logistics standpoint. And so I bring you my most meaningful takeaway from leaving the US and returning again.

“Personal relationships in food are making a comeback.”

• What you eat is a signal of your connoisseurship. Purchasing from Laduree does not hold as much social value these days as knowing and buying from an emissary of the macaroon world.
• The trust of a continued relationship with a conglomerate is not everything anymore.
• Social ties, social status, and social knowledge are more valuable than impersonal transactions.
• The success formula of food used to be wide distribution. The playbook has shifted. Brands make money with quality and price instead of distribution.

“The food and drink market is rearranging itself according to the same aspirational lines as fashion or design.”

The backbone of status is social and cultural, not economic.