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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
You can check out our daily blog post and signup for our newsletter here https://talk-commerce.com
Brent Peterson (00:04.795)
Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Jeremy Toman. Jeremy is a founder of AugX Labs. Jeremy, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life.
Jeremy Toeman (00:18.654)
Sure. Hey guys, I'm Jeremy. I live in the suburbs of New York after a long stint in San Francisco, before that Pittsburgh, Albuquerque, and originally from Montreal. And I've spent 30 years in the media and tech conversion space. Things you may have heard of include the original Slingbox, now part of the Sling TV, became the Sling TV brand, worked on startups like Voodoo and Sonos back before they were household names.
Spent some time at CBS, spent some time at Warner Media, and now I'm running my startup called AugX Labs. And our vision is to help make it easier for everyone to create more video, in particular for business needs, a lot of which happen to be marketing. So that's me in a nutshell.
Brent Peterson (01:06.939)
That's awesome and passions in life.
Jeremy Toeman (01:09.83)
Oh, I forgot the passions. I'm a tinkerer, I'll be honest. Like, I'm in the process of, I have a little bit of a short story I'm writing. I have like 14 little Zapier automations I'm tweaking. I've got, you know, I was doing a podcast till fairly recently. I always sort of like to play around with things. I'm building a tree house for my kids in my backyard. Now, of course, not one of these things is finished, but...
I think my passion is at least starting projects. We'll see how I do these days finishing.
Brent Peterson (01:45.443)
Yeah, well, I'm excellent at starting projects. And we started our house. We did a house redo. We started in 2002, and we haven't finished yet. So yeah, we're still working on it anyways. So Jeremy, be
Jeremy Toeman (01:55.456)
Oh my gosh.
Well, I'll let you know the treehouse is now safe for use. So there's a missing ladder step, but it's pretty obvious.
Brent Peterson (02:02.524)
Uh, awesome!
Brent Peterson (02:08.624)
Yeah, well, as long as it's not at the top. Good. Well, Jeremy, before we get into content, you have graciously volunteered to be part of the Free Joke Project. I am just going to tell you a joke, and all you have to do is, should that joke be free, or do you think at some point somebody should pay for it? And I did. I found this joke on the Albuquerque newsletter, so this is going to be very appropriate for you.
Jeremy Toeman (02:10.721)
No.
Jeremy Toeman (02:36.47)
All right, let's go.
Brent Peterson (02:36.783)
Here we go. What's a Canadian's favorite letter? A.
Jeremy Toeman (02:44.682)
Um, you definitely cannot charge for that joke. Uh, if you're going to charge the most you could charge, it'd probably be like a Canadian, uh, a loony. Um, but maybe that's the right answer. The right answer is that joke is worth less than a loony.
Brent Peterson (03:00.011)
Right. One more, one more. Because I'm from Minnesota, so this is big for us. What shouldn't curlers tell jokes on the ice?
Jeremy Toeman (03:03.941)
Okay.
Jeremy Toeman (03:14.89)
I'm guessing there's something swept away, but go ahead. Ah, all right, all right. Yeah, no, I actually think you owe me money for having me have to hear both of those jokes. That's kind of where I'm taking that. That's my response.
Brent Peterson (03:17.587)
Because it may crack it up. Anyways, yeah I know. I should have just said it. I should. Anyways.
Brent Peterson (03:32.343)
Yes, there you go. That's much better. All right, well, let's talk about something a little bit more interesting. So video is obviously more and more popular nowadays. It's being integrated into more and more things. Tell us a little bit about why you started doing what you're doing and how video is changing the market today.
Jeremy Toeman (03:55.522)
Sure. Let me open with a couple of interesting stats for you. YouTube has 500 hours of content uploaded per minute. OK. TikTok users spend an average of 95 minutes per day inside a TikTok. And then the third stat, and drive straight to, why did we start this thing? 70% of US businesses today have zero capacity
for making more than one video a year, right? And that could be a founder talking about a vision, that could be an ad on Facebook or on TV, but an infomercial, an explainer video, a training video, I mean, the types of videos just are endless. But how mind boggling is it that the number one vehicle to reach an audience and the number one method by which audiences choose to be reached is the most out of reach.
for most businesses in this country. And so we started basically, I was trying to make a video. I mentioned earlier I had a podcast. Well, I was trying to make a video promo for the podcast. I had been doing my research and it said like, the best way to go get audience in for a podcaster is you make a short 45 second minute long video. You put it on TikTok, you put it on YouTube and that'll like be your sort of your trailer. So I was like, oh, okay, I wanna do that. And I started.
trying to learn using self-paced tools and try to learning how to use Adobe Premiere Pro. And I quickly realized two things is that one, this is a brilliant product and two, I will never be good at it. You know, and the analogy I make, it's like me trying to learn how to pilot a helicopter just to go get milk at the corner store, right? It's one thing, Christopher Nolan trying to make the latest amazing movie, but I'm just a guy trying to make a simple video for my podcast. And that led me to think like how many other people
have the same kind of problem where we have a, for lack of a better word, a casual need for video, right? So every marketer needs video. We know this, we have the stats. I mean, it's not a question. But what we need to do now is convince everybody that it's actually not so hard to get into the space and play with video creation, thanks to startups like mine and so many others now that are really, I think, helping, hopefully anybody who's been listening to or watching this.
Jeremy Toeman (06:22.346)
find tools to be able to basically engage customers where they are, which is TikTok and YouTube. And not to forget things like Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook while we're at it.
Brent Peterson (06:35.363)
Yeah, that's such a good analogy. And I've also run down that same rabbit hole of buying a template on it for After Effects and then being told it's going to take me five minutes to get it up and running and you know, two or three hours later, you're still stuck on some little obscure thing that you're not sure about and you're Googling it and yeah, no, I totally get that. So, tell us a little bit about, maybe more about too, about how
ads, even the ad world is now using video and why that's going to increase your ROI by getting that. And then I'd like to just follow up, like, what are the biggest roadblocks you're seeing in even these short little video creations?
Jeremy Toeman (07:24.318)
Absolutely. So excuse me on ads. I'll give a couple more stats because I happen to have a few If you run an email newsletter and you have a video in there whether it's an ad or added value content You'll increase your open rate by 300% on average So what are we seeing the advertisers do? Well, they're adopting right? We have six second ads now a very common on YouTube we also 15 second very common on YouTube. But what we've been learning
And again, not even just speaking for my company, but just kind of the industry's been learning when we talk to the companies who want advertisers. So in other words, where, who wants advertisers video platforms, right? Um, there is so much more inventory and I mean, high quality inventory, the ability to get a message out to a highly targeted audience through video is sitting there at people's fingertips.
and nobody can make enough volume of ads to reach that market, right? Because there's a perception that it's very time consuming. There's a perception that it's highly expensive and highly complicated. Well, those things are true if you're really trying to use like old school Premiere Pro, like sorry, nothing wrong with Premiere Pro. It's a beautiful tool. It's just overkill, right? It's just massive overkill for what most people need.
Right. Most people need simple stuff for basic things and there's not a lot in that space. So sorry, I went long on that. But but it's such an important topic right now that the market that will benefit the most is those who are just trying to advertise. Right. Because whether you're talking to local broadcasting, social Facebook, again, Insta, again, snap, etc. You'll find that there's no shortage. It's not like trying to be the first page of a Google results.
Right? That's basically near impossible these days. But if you want to, if you're a restaurant, if you're a small agency, if you're a medium sized business, if you're an accounting business, a venture capitalist, anybody we're reaching an audience in the local region or local market or highly specific one, the ad platforms are all here for you, but you need to make the ads.
Brent Peterson (09:38.211)
Yeah, no, I agree. And I'm reading a book right now about the pager method and they're talking about just having regular content and how as a small business owner, even recording your video and putting it onto YouTube once a month is such an advantage in terms of getting you some authority and some social traffic.
Talk about what are the biggest roadblocks that small business people run into when they decide that they'd like to do this video.
Jeremy Toeman (10:16.902)
I think the hardest thing for most people with videos, as we're paying attention to, is the blank canvas problem. People don't know what to do. So your comment, like, look, I have to be very clear in my language. Creating video is the easiest thing ever, right? Where's my phone? I put my phone away so I wouldn't focus on it. But, you know, I can just, I can video things all the time. We all can, right? And that's what most people are doing. But, you know, that's why, personally, like my 16-year-old makes more videos per day than most companies do, right?
because we associate our personal brand with sort of a lower fidelity of content. And so if you're a brand, even a local neighborhood, you know, mom and pop pizza shop, you still are thinking to yourself, well, this is a video, this has to look good. I can't, I don't want it to look like I'm an amateur. Maybe I'm embarrassed about my own appearance or I just don't want to be on camera. And so people start writing to this like, where do I start? How do I make a video for my blank?
when I don't even know where to begin. So the first thing is, and this is my simple advice to everybody, there's no wrong starting point, right? This is an era that is a phenomenal, I mean, look, I record portrait videos of my kids playing sports, right? I grew up building products in an era where the notion that video would ever be anything but landscape was like, people would shoot you, you know what I mean? Kidding, of course. So.
We live in the area, and I think this is key for anyone in small, medium-sized business, video content, video presence, doesn't have to be an ad, but video presence of any kind, a webcam recording, a phone recording, a voiceover, et cetera. And as Brett's saying, it's better than nothing, okay? No one's gonna look at your brand if you're doing a pizza shop like, hey, this is Jeremy's Pizza, come on by, get our salami special this weekend, or the buffalo, whatever.
The audience watching that on platforms is expecting content to be of a lower fidelity. So I hate to use the phrase good enough because it sounds like a pejorative, but I want to make sure we change our thinking. What is a good enough video for your brand on social media? Does it need Christopher Nolan level production quality or?
Jeremy Toeman (12:34.542)
Could it be just not looking like you filmed it on like a 1987 Sony Beta Max recorder or something, right? Like your phone is beyond good enough. And so that's my first sort of pro tip is get comfortable that any content is better than no content, right? You're dead on right. And the simplest stat I'll give you is Google gives approximately a 50% SEO bump to any homepage with a video on it.
Brent Peterson (12:58.635)
Yeah, and I'll also add too that most people are looking at those videos on their phone and you can't tell if it's 4k on your phone. And I will say that there's also a space for that retro 1980s video style, which would include not super high quality or not high fidelity or whatever you want to call it. So yeah, what about, what about, you just mentioned the,
Jeremy Toeman (13:21.066)
Exactly.
Brent Peterson (13:27.523)
Having a video on your homepage, Google gives you a nice SEO bump. What other ways can people use video to leverage their sales?
Jeremy Toeman (13:37.57)
Sure, I would say to pay attention to the platforms and what you're trying to do. So if you think your users are, or audience, or customers are on like TikTok, for example, you know, getting content right for TikTok is the first step. So what's that mean? Short, right? No one, like our interview could be the most fascinating thing ever by now. Every TikTok is like, next, you know. So you've got to be short, you've got to be to the point. You can't even start with like.
Um, you know today, let me tell you about Rolling pizza dough. It's gotta be like yo, let's throw some pizzas, right? You've got to think about that energy, right? And so doesn't matter again your personality You could be using all stock clips. You could be using still images, right? You can use text effects for your video. It doesn't matter As long as it's getting to the point and reaching the audience there YouTube you have a bit more time. You've got a bit more actually You got to pay more attention to the thumbnail than those first few seconds
But I think you've got about nine seconds, the last time I read a report on this, to hook a YouTube view or you're done. So think about how are you getting to that point quickly? How are you letting the content get there? And then the second thing is think about content now a little bit more disposably than you did in the past. Like if you've been on the internet as long as I have, you might have a blog post you wrote in 2007. I guarantee you, no one's reading that 2007 blog post anymore, right?
Think about the same thing with content. If you make a video today for your pizza shop, wishing everybody a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving and have a good turkey love and come back to us with your cool pizza turkey ideas or whatever, that video won't get watched four days from now, right? So think about how you can embrace, I don't wanna use the disposable because again, I worry about pejoratives, but content that the relevance is very, very short-lived and
Again, how can you make that work on social, right? And I think that's sort of a key thing is that it's all about currency and it's all about speed to story.
Brent Peterson (15:43.055)
Yeah, you know, I'm curious, I was curious about you. I want to just go back to the video on your website. A lot of times people have that embed where it's sort of a background video that you're seeing it move as you log onto your homepage versus the video that's clearly from YouTube or something like that, where it's a describer type of thing. Is there a... Go ahead.
Jeremy Toeman (16:05.166)
Uh, yeah, you got to embed a playable video. So it can't be, um, video as background art was the way to think about it. Like the, when you, wherever it's just at the sort of the top of the page, it's gorgeous and it'll make your audience happy and everything, but it's not going to affect SEO ratings and that's a very specific thing to be paying attention to. Um,
Brent Peterson (16:10.)
Yeah.
Brent Peterson (16:15.975)
Mm-hmm.
Jeremy Toeman (16:28.77)
And there are a lot of people who surmise that by using YouTube embeds instead of, say, Vimeo, and I have no stake in this, but that it will bump your SEO further. I don't know. I'm not an SEO expert, but that's, as I pay attention, a couple of thoughts I've read and learned.
Brent Peterson (16:47.711)
What about, I mean, okay, I'm an AppSumo user. And you know, I always think, I get hooked into one of these things where they're like, oh, we have a revolutionary new tool. It'll make your video production, you know, so much faster, blah, blah. And I end up at buying it and then not using it because it's slightly easier than Premiere Pro. Is there, is there...
Is there any way around that editing process? Or should, yeah, tell us a little bit. I mean, you know where I'm going here. It is just really hard, no matter what tool comes out. The magic can't happen without a little bit of human input, right?
Jeremy Toeman (17:27.979)
Right.
Jeremy Toeman (17:35.886)
That's absolutely correct. So let me sort of frame a few of the things out there. I will be self-serving in this for transparency, but only to make sure we classify what some of your options are. So the first statement I make is the reason you're finding some of the tools hard to use is a lot of the tools, a lot of these, whether it's AI or just more recent video editing tools, focus it on very specific parts of the problem. So there are a couple of tools out there. I'll give you a great example, Capsule.Video.
They've been around for a few years and making great products. They're really, really strong at collaborative editing. And so they'll come to you and make editing a lot easier. And it is. But where they shine, where they outshine pretty much everybody is, it's like being in the Google Doc when you're trying to write compared to being in any other shared document format. Google did it right. So did Capsule. If you've got three people on a team who need a co-work, it's a great platform for that. But.
At the same time, that might not make your request easier, where you were starting from. So the first thing I'm suggesting to people is pay real attention to what your problem part is, because some people might find that the creation was pretty easy, but then it's that editing that's a mess. Our service, so it's called AugieMeetAugie.com, we are focused entirely on getting you started. So we let you use, for example, a prompt like, make a video for my pizza shop.
and we'll go off and assemble one using a combination of your b-roll if you have it, and if you don't, with stock content from Getty Images. And we have a paid relationship, so it's all paid for content. There are other tools out there as well that fit in different places. There are a few that are very template-driven, where you can upload your copy, a bunch of still images, and it'll sort of make these advanced slideshow-style things. There's no right or wrong answer. It goes back to where you started with.
Our tool and our focus has been help people create a video if they've never done it before. So I would look you in the eyes and say, if that's what you're trying to do, much, much faster. However, you're right. You're still going to need a human to come in and take a look. So whether it's us or any one of these other products, if our tool suggests a clip of waves breaking on the shore when you're talking about some ocean something, but what you really want was a view of the ocean out there.
Jeremy Toeman (19:59.574)
That's a nuance that only is in your head. And this is really key, and I'm gonna say this to everybody paying attention. I don't care if you use my product or any of them, but we are at the stage of AI where human in the loop is a requirement. And if you're representing a brand, you wanna do that one over on everything that's going out there, because we're already seeing a lot of pushback on how AI is being used and frankly misused. So going all the way back to it, I think this is a good time to be trying tools.
And what I would say is try with intentionality. What are you trying to make? Are you trying to make a video preview for your podcast? Who's good at that, right? We're good at things where you already have an existing audio or need audio. If you're trying to make a cut down edit of two hours of B-roll you filmed at your restaurant before you go off and make your ad, Artful's not the one for that. It might be check out like opus.ai or a couple of others.
where they'll take your 60 minutes of B-roll and find like little slivers and things like that. I think you can expect over the next year that all of us in the space will keep adding sort of both point solutions and widespread new tools and services, because I think we're also gonna see a lot of new types of videos being created.
Brent Peterson (21:17.167)
Yeah, I think I know I'll mention the book that I'm reading. Her name is Annie Schiffman and it's called The Pager Method. Anyways, one thing that she also said about video was try to do what you're going to do in live. Don't try to, you're going to do better at your video if you're in a live mode, rather than trying to do it to edit later. And editing is a time suck, right? So you tend to get better video out of something that you're going to...
that even if you're not doing it live, but if you are, it's even better if you're gonna stream it live on LinkedIn or wherever you're gonna stream your video, you'll end up getting a better result because you have to do it, right? Is there some formula in there that makes us think that, hey, if I'm gonna do this to edit, then I can make all kinds of mistakes, and if I can't, then hey, let's just get what we get.
Jeremy Toeman (22:09.806)
I think this goes back to the whole problem slash category slash genre, which is we all don't really know, right? Like if you didn't go to film school or take a video marketing essentials kind of course somewhere, how do we all know what's good and what's not good, right? We see one video that looks, you know.
Janky has got 400 million views on TikTok. And we see another thing that's obviously gorgeously professional produced and it's got like 67 views on YouTube. And you're like, I don't understand why. So I think there is a little, you know, je ne sais quoi, little sort of magic in the air around it. But I think going back to again, where you started, it's, I think you should be making video to tell your story. If you need to do some edits, do the edits, but.
You know, you're right. Like the more it flows natural and organically, the more it feels like, like I just sent an investor update by video. I do everything in my company by video. So I just sent an investor update yesterday. Turns out while I was watching the final version of it, I messed up. I mean, I just, I'd sort of, you know, verbal goof. I just, I named the company wrong. And I was like, oh my God, it's such a good take. The whole thing's perfect. It's like three minutes long.
So you know what I decided I left it in there and I added an onscreen text box that said I meant to say this Because it was just it just wasn't worth it. And what I realized is like this is a video for all my investors So obviously it has to be the professional caliber. But again, it's good enough That they're not expecting me. I'm not I'm not a journalist or something They're not expecting me to be a perfectly polished human
Right? They're expecting me to be a CEO of a startup that's doing its best. So I kind of look to you in the, in the audience here, who are you making the video for? What's the intended audience? What do they expect of you? Right? Are you just trying to get a simple point across or are you really trying to hit a very finicky audience with very micro, micro kind of, um, uh, magnifying glass and scrutiny on every little thing you do. Um,
Jeremy Toeman (24:16.65)
So again, just trying to throw some tips in here as we go. Hope that's helpful.
Brent Peterson (24:19.535)
No, that's great. Yeah, appreciate that. You know, Jeremy, we are speaking of a three-minute video. We're running out of time here, and it's been a really enjoyable conversation. Is there anything that you would give as advice to somebody as we're going well into the post-Black Friday, post-holiday season into quarter one? Any tips that you would give them on video?
Jeremy Toeman (24:47.07)
Yeah, I think if you haven't started in 2023, fine. Start in 2024. There's way too many methods of creating video from your existing content to not be trying. The results are phenomenal. I mean, I don't really have a following personally like on YouTube. I started putting up some YouTube shorts just to try using our product. I had 500 views on my first three videos. Like, you know, you get audience, right? So...
like embrace it, try something. Think, if I could really reach you, I'd say this, what is good enough for you? And I don't mean that negatively. Good enough shouldn't sound bad in this context, right? We're not Fletcher from Whiplash. Good enough in this case is what meets your needs? Like I'm a product guy, minimum viable product. We all have heard that term these days. What's a minimum viable video marketing?
Right? I'll bet you the bar is lower than you think it is. And I'll bet you for whatever your brand company product good or services. If you had started videos sooner than you have you'd be seeing results. And so 2024 go off make something be in it. Don't be in it. Whatever you need it to be try something.
Brent Peterson (25:58.287)
Yeah, and I want to leave, we're going to close up here, but I want to put one comment out there about AI and the mistake that I recently made. If you depend 100% on AI to do your content and you don't edit it, you are going to end up with mistakes. And I ran a paid Facebook campaign for my company and I had mistakes in my text.
And our niche is that we have human editors that edit the content, but there's also the idea of move fast and break crap, right? So I'm a believer in moving fast and I just want to get it done. So I'm going to do it myself and it's going to get up and on to the ads going to get done. And I'm not going to tell my business partner anyways, who's by the way, is the great editor. Well, I had, I, I'm just on Sunday, I'm going through my Facebook and I had a direct message and they said.
Jeremy Toeman (26:32.673)
Yep.
Jeremy Toeman (26:45.772)
Right.
Brent Peterson (26:53.627)
LOL, you spent all this money on Facebook, your service does editing, and you've got typos and misspellings right in your graphic. Oh my gosh. The thing is, number one, don't skip your process, right? But don't depend on AI 100%. And honestly, I have a runway ML subscription now. Wow, it does some fantastic stuff.
Jeremy Toeman (27:02.85)
out.
Jeremy Toeman (27:06.146)
Bye.
Brent Peterson (27:23.267)
Would I ever just let it go and let it publish a video or graphics on its own? No, I would definitely want to choose, look at it, edit, make sure it's what I want.
Jeremy Toeman (27:35.362)
I'm glad you brought that up because it's actually something, it's one of the few things about our product that I really want to just throw in there because it's so relevant. We have sort of a two-step process in the creation. One of it is when your script is done and you voice it, which it could be your own recording, but you can also use AI voices for us. So you can actually do everything just by typing. We have you check a checkbox that says, I have listened to my final recording because we want people to make sure you listen. Like
Again, my investor video is a good example. If you don't look at your timing, your spacing on things, it can get them wrong. The second thing we've done in our product is the moment the user hits Create and we actually generated the first pass of their video, we present something we call a rough cut report. Rough cuts is an industry term for first pass of your videos, first draft. We tell the user, this is your rough draft.
It's it's it took it would have taken you this long to do this manually and We think you need this many more minutes to get it finished We actually give ourselves a rating it through our AI of how good a match we think the AI did Using the example I just said before right with the beach Did it show you the angle you wanted or like because there's such a thing as getting it right and still getting it wrong You know
It could have shown you a beach during a stormy day. It could have shown you a beach in the winter. So we actually tell our users, hey, take a look at this. It's not ready for publishing. Make your little tweaks and edits. Hopefully, you'll spend five minutes instead of an hour, but you'll get there much, much faster. And you'll get there much, much better if you do. So sorry you learned the hard way. I'm hearing those stories in a decent amount, though.
Brent Peterson (29:25.919)
I have to take it with a grain of salt and it's going to make a great article that I'm going to edit when I write about it. So anyways, Jeremy, it's been such a pleasure talking to you today. As I close out the podcast, I give my guests an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Jeremy Toeman (29:43.958)
Well, obviously gonna tell you about what we do. So it's meetAugie, M-E-E-T-A-U-G-I-E.com, meetAugie.com. It is an AI video assistant that hopefully will let you make a marketing video in minutes. I actually don't say seconds on purpose, I say minutes because you do need some of that time in there.
Also, if anyone listening to this happens to be an Airbnb host, we made a tool that does a one-click, you're listing into a promotional video for TikTok or YouTube. Just go to videomylisting.com. So Airbnb host over there, marketers, try our tool, it's free. Meet Augie.com, make some videos, grow your business, and give us your feedback. I'd love to hear what did we do great, what didn't we do great, because we got new features coming literally every week.
Brent Peterson (30:31.431)
That's awesome, and I'll make sure I get all those links into the show notes. Jeremy Toman, thank you so much for being here today.
Jeremy Toeman (30:35.234)
Thanks.
Thanks, it was a real pleasure.