0 to 100K Followers In 10 Months With AI | Simone Ferretti

What if you could build a personal brand that grows on autopilot, even if you never step in front of the camera? Today, I've got Simone Ferretti with me, and he's going to show us exactly how he grew an AI-powered account from zero to over 95,000 followers in just 9 months. We're talking the full system here. How to create an AI avatar that looks and sounds like you, the script-writing process, content generation, video production, and the distribution strategies that actually work. Hello, Simone. Thank you for being here.

>> Hello. Hello. Hi, everybody. Super glad to be talking about this. Very excited to share with you all my workflows.

>> Oh my goodness. We are so excited. What you've achieved and all the cool things you're doing. I'm like, I know we all just want to pick your brain. So, can you fill us in on what we're going to be talking about today?

>> Yeah. So, I am a full-time content creator. I have been going full-time in 2020 during COVID and I built my channel to over 680,000, my main channel, and then also TikTok 800,000 globally, like total all the channels I have over 1.6, 6 million. But the cool thing is that last year I had a question and I wanted to see whether I could build a new Instagram account from scratch without ever recording a piece of content because I've been working with a lot of entrepreneurs and everybody's like, "I, I don't have time. It just takes too much time to sit in front of the camera, coming up with a script, do everything, and it's just like you don't see much results at first." So, I wanted to solve that single question, whether I can build an AI Instagram without recording ever a piece of content and growing it very fast. And today, I want to show you everything that I've done. And I hope I can inspire other people to start their own personal brand online.

>> Oh my goodness, this sounds amazing. Like, I'm already so excited. Just even the fact that you just said it's faceless is such a barrier for so many people. Like, so many people are so afraid to be on camera. And then the fact that you just started it and achieved all of that in such a short amount of time, it's it's insane, but so cool.

>> Yeah. No, it's it's really, really cool. I will show you how you can just literally record one video and then multiply yourself unlimited amount of time so that you can create VSLs, uh, Reels, YouTube videos, anything that you want to. You will be able to do it with this system without ever sitting in front of the camera for a second time. I'm so excited. Yay. Let's dive in.

>> Cool. So, I'm gonna start sharing my screen right now. And the title of the presentation is "Build and Scale Your Personal Brand with AI." I reached 100,000 followers in a brand new account without being sponsored by my main channel because that will be, let's say, cheating, in just 10 months. And as of today, it's about 13 months that uh, has been running and we have 140,000 followers. So it's like, it just keeps growing every day without me ever recording a piece of content. Then I have a team that manages the few manual things that we need to do, which I'm going to explain you in a minute. So I'm going to talk about a bit about me and how I reach these points. We're going to talk about online authority. I want to talk about the content wheel and how we can actually scale with AI. So, I want to be quite brief, but as I said, I've been a videographer for the past 10 years. And in 2020, I went full-time into uh, content creation online during COVID when I was at university. And then I was just literally posting tutorials and helping other people learn videography and photography. Then I posted a bunch of courses and I have over 60, 16,000 students and amassed over 1.6 million followers and 300 million views across all the channels. I have currently two channels. So, one main one and one is the AI one. But how did I get to the AI one? Well, I used to travel actually. I'm still traveling quite a lot. Every once every one or two months, I'm just moving place. And every time I move place, I want to look professional. So, I started learning how to create epic studios in very small rooms. And even right now, if you don't see it, I'm in an Airbnb in Paris. It's very, very small. I have the bed next to me, but still, it looks quite good because I learned how to master background design, lighting, camera settings, and just positioning. So, I decided to make a course about this. And I helped over 4,000 entrepreneurs look good on camera. So, these are some of their results that we achieved. But then talking to all these entrepreneurs, there was always one thing in common, like one problem: time. We just don't have time. And so I was wondering whether I could actually build an Instagram account, multiply myself, multiplying myself unlimited amount of times just using an avatar. And so I decided to open a different channel, again, different from my main one, called Spero.ai. Spero.ai. And I was like, "Let's see where it goes. Maybe it's going to fail, maybe it's not going to work, but I just want to see." And then in December, we reached 105K followers. And as of today, we have over 140,000 followers. Because when you look like an expert, people treat you like one. And that's like my philosophy. I always try to look good whenever I do workshops, whenever I do client calls because again, it just increases your perceived value. Because one of the most important elements right now in 2026 for me is about personal brand. How the world perceives you. That's simply what it is. It's like, what's the opinion that others have about you? And you can build your personal brand by simply showing up and showing up with authority. If you show up and people can understand that you are an expert, that's how you build your personal brand. And now you can do this in two main ways, right? You can do it offline and you can do it online. But let's try to analyze these two elements. If you do it offline, yes, you can create events. These are amazing. Maybe you can gather what, 50 people, 100 people, 200 people, a thousand people. It's still very, very limited to organize an event. It takes months and it's a one-off. So, okay, you can maybe record the event, but overall, it's just that event happens once and it's very time-intensive. It takes so long and it's so difficult to create actual events. Then it's pretty private because people will not fly in from all over the world unless it's like a huge event that can happen, let's say, once a year, right? But online, online you can create a piece of content that takes you maybe 1 hour or 4 hours or even 8 hours, but then you have an unlimited potential reach, which is crazy because one video can reach millions and millions and millions of followers and it stays there on the platform, especially on YouTube, but right now even on Instagram, more like longer and longer. So that piece of content can keep getting likes like what's happening right now. If you posted it six months ago, it's still getting reach right now. So it can be pretty much evergreen. And then quantity. Well, if you build a team, but even if you are by yourself, you can easily post one video or two videos or three videos a day and just like keep pushing out, keep pushing out content, which is crazy. And also, it's public. Anybody can access whatever you're posting, right? Unless you put yourself uh, your account into private, but if it's public, then you know you can reach literally from the furthest point. You are now in Australia, right? And I'm in Paris right now. So we are literally communicating very quickly, very easily. So obviously online is the way to go for me. I'm not saying that you should not do anything offline. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is it's so much easier to build a personal brand online than doing it offline with a much bigger scale and much easier to to bring it to the level that you want to. And with AI, the best thing is that you can literally multiply yourself tenfold. Videos, you can create an avatar. Photos, I'm going to show you. You can have an avatar that generates photos for yourself that look exactly like you. Voice, you can just have your voice cloned and therefore you can have an avatar text. Well, you can teach LLMs and ChatGPT and Claude and and other tools that I'm going to show you right now how you actually speak normally and therefore just create scripts and create content based on your own voice.

So now let's do a little game. I'm going to show you two photos and then you can decide and just think it in your mind, obviously, whether you you think that this photo or these two photos are both AI, both real, or one AI and one is real. I'm going to give you three, two, one. Okay, both AI. Let's move on again. Both AI, both real. One AI, one real. What do you think? We got AI on the left and real on the right again. Both real, both AI, one AI, one real. Left is real, right? Is AI. And then these three stacked photos. Which one do you think is real? Which one do you think is AI? Are all the three real or all three AI? Well, top one is real, middle one is AI, and bottom one is real. The thing is, I did a helicopter ride in London which was absolutely amazing. Absolutely, like very much recommended. And then I was shooting with my camera all the different landmarks and it was amazing. But then I noticed that on Instagram, it works so much better if there is a photo of myself and then this kind of like format works when there is, let's say, a close-up as well in the middle. So what I did is that I tried to generate it with AI and the results were really outstanding. Like, it looks exactly like me and not even my mom will recognize that the middle one was not actually me, but it was just AI. So we can create photos in any scenarios. And then this other thing which happened, actually, this photo that I created was at the end of 2024. So I wanted to um, I have a dream which is to do a TEDx talk and I'm sure it's going to happen. But in that case, I was like, "Can I fool my best friends and just tell them that I did a TED talk and see the reaction?" So, I posted these Instagram stories with this um photo and then I was like, "Yeah, I realized one of my biggest dreams. I went on a TEDx uh stage and blah blah blah." And then all these, these are basically, I wouldn't say my best friends, but people that know me very well, even personally, like physically, like we met and all of them were like, "Wow, that's amazing. Congratulations. Incredible. What a dream." Blah blah blah. This never happened. It was an AI photo. So I was like, "Can I prove?" And this is already over a year and a half ago, that uh, you can do anything you want with AI. So imagine right now with all the new tools, it's crazy.

So now a new game. Which one is AI? Which one is real? Or are both AI, both real? I'm going to start again the videos.

>> I literally can't tell with any of the stuff that you're sharing. Like, I would have could have sworn that top photo in the helicopter was real and the other two I didn't know. But like, I can't even tell with anything you're sharing.

>> Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the beauty of it, right? When we understand the power of this like impossible decision-making, whether it's like real or AI, then we understand that we can really do great things. So again, here we have the left one is real and the right one is AI. And this is actually used. This is created using the tool that I'm going to show you in a minute that is called HeyGen, that allows me to basically clone myself in a perfect way. So with HeyGen, you can actually create multiple, they're called looks. So within an avatar, which let's say the avatar is me, then I can create as many videos as I want to in different scenarios. So in this case, I created over, like, I think 20 different angles and different backgrounds and different positions so that my team can just pick whichever they want to recreate of myself and therefore we have also variety of backgrounds and variety of scenes because at the end of the day, we're all trying to solve for time, right? And if we want to solve for time, we need to understand that AI is not replacing ourselves 100%, but it's replacing ourselves as 90%. So we can make the AI, we can use AI to just like 10x our output, but we still need to put a little bit of time. Let's call it 10%. And the best part, you can create ads, you can create YouTube videos, you can create IG, TikToks, VSLs, courses, stills, anything that you can think of right now. It's possible to create them with ultra-realism.

And now we can talk about the content wheel. So if you want to build a personal brand online, you need to post content. And how do you post content? Well, you need to understand how to actually create content and what are the structures of those things. So, if we want to simplify very much things, which I think we should because you should not overcomplicate things, we need to start with an idea and then a script. Then we need to record it, or in this case, we're just going to create an avatar. Then we need to edit and we need to post it. This is the content wheel. Let's just not overcomplicate things. We can overcomplicate it afterwards, but right now, it's very simple. You find an idea, you script it, you record or generate the avatar, you edit it, and you post it. But first, before I want to show you what, how I manage all my content pipeline. Now, keep in mind that what I'm going to show you right now, it's very, very advanced. Reason being is because my team now is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We are basically like eight people full-time just working on my content management system because I wanted to remove myself. But since September last year, I was completely alone with just an editor. So the management system was much simpler. It was just literally, okay, we have an idea, then we move it to script, move it to record, we move it to edit, and then we post it, okay? But right now, obviously, because it's becoming so much more complicated, we have so many projects that are going on, I'm just complicating things because we need it in a bigger team. So I want to show you right now how it currently looks. We have two main boards: one is Trello and one is Notion. So on Trello, this is how it looks. We have basically columns that explain the stage page of each video. So at the beginning, we have "Content Ideas." Then we have "In Scripting." So these are the videos that require a script. For example, I go inside this video for ComfyUI. We have uh, the platform access, we have the script, and we have a bunch of other guidelines that are needed for this. Then we have uh, "Script Review." So here, once the script is ready, I go inside and then my team, I mean, I don't do it myself anymore, but then we have the project manager that goes inside and just checks that the script is okay, and then it moves the uh, "Script Review" card into "Pre-production." This means that the video is be, is ready now to be uh, produced. Then we have "In Production" to create B-rolls. We have the "Audio and Video Clone" section. So whenever the B-rolls are created, we need to regenerate my voice and my face to then have it into "Video Production," which is basically assembling all the things. Then we have "Revision." Then we have uh, the "Approved" section, and then the "Automation" with ManyChat whenever we want to add uh, CTAs, and then "Ready to Publish," and then we go into "Published." Then I have also the "Organic Content Pipeline" for my main channel. So this one that I've shown you right now is the AI pipeline. Whereas for my main channel, it's different because the teams are completely different. I don't want to, I don't want to mix things because I want to have two separate teams that uh, think in a different uh, different way. On my main channel, because the quality is incredibly high, I'm still very much involved. Whereas on my AI channel, it's completely independent and I'm just trying to use Trello and Notion to understand which uh, which of the two is better. So this is just, this is just a test that I'm doing, but the concept is exactly the same. We have columns based on each stage of each video. So we have "Ideas," we have "Approved Ideas," then we have "To Script," a bunch of other things that I'm not going to explain because it's like, it's in the middle. But then we have "To Record." So on my main channel, I'm still recording myself because again, this is just the test. This is basically um, a non-stop experiment that I'm running whether the AI channel with my avatar can perform even better than myself recording. And then there is "To Storyboard" for the editors. Then there is "Editing" and then if I load more, there's "Being Edited," "Review," and then uh, yeah, basically just being ready. And then once it's approved, then we go live. But this is again, is a very, very much more complicated than what it should look like at the beginning. You just have "Ideas," you have "Script," "To Record," "Edit," and "Post." So you should have, I think, five columns.

Then let's go back to the presentation. After you manage your projects, then there is one tool that I really, really like that I'm going to show you right now. Because to find ideas, one of the biggest mistakes that I see is that beginners tend to just reinvent the wheel. They want to come up with a crazy concept, crazy things that have never been done before. And most likely, this idea will fail. Especially at the beginning, you never want to reinvent the wheel. Even at my level, I'm always trying to find inspirations from either social media, from Pinterest, from Instagram, from YouTube, or even from potentially real life that I see from movies and just try to combine ideas and whether and and see whether I can actually come up with a structure that is unique to me, or just changing the hook but having a structure that is similar to other people. It's very, very important that we do not reinvent the wheel. We're going to waste a lot of time. So there are two ways on how I find my ideas. One is to do it manually scrolling through Instagram because I think Instagram is just going to feed you whatever works for the algorithm and I think it's super, super powerful. Or I use Sank Castle and I'm going to show you how it works right now. Sank Castle is a very cool tool that again, find, allows you to find competitors and analyze whatever is working on the platform and then just save them, analyze these videos, and then potentially take their structure and then use it for yourself. So I'm going to show you right now that inside of channels, you will be able to uh, save all the competitors into a list. So right now, this is just a demo that I want to show you. I saved five uh, of my competitors, including me. So we can see that these people are into the AI space like myself, and these are all friends. Then once I go into videos, I will be able to use filters to decide what I want to, what I want to see here inside Sank Castle. So, for example, I decided, okay, I have this uh, list right here that is the "Top Educator." So this is the list that I created. Then there are all the channels. So if I want to remove any of the channel that I don't want to see, I can remove it here. And then we have the posting uh, posting date. So let's say I want to check only the last three months of content that have been posted. And then I can check for the platform. And I can also filter by outlier. So the outlier is basically saying, I'm going to analyze one channel. I can see that the medium views or the average views is 50k per video. Then I want to see only the videos that performed either 50k or maybe 100k or 150k. So we find outliers. This is how we actually repeat a process that has already worked and therefore we are not reinventing the wheel. Very, very important. So let's say we write a 3x outlier. And then if we want, we can set minimum amount of views and also the engagement rate. So right now, I can see that between us and all the other ones, uh, all the other competitors that I selected, we have a bunch of videos that we can take inspiration from. Now, let's say I'm going to take uh, this video from Ben. I'm going to go into the video and then here I can see a lot of different data. So different metrics, the description, the transcript, and then also the hook analysis and the hook uh, structure and the struct, sorry, the hook analysis and the structure analysis. So basically, Sank Castle is breaking me down why this video has worked, and I can see that there is a style analysis as well. And I can take all of this information and just study them and decide how I can potentially remake this video with my own voice. So, I'm never saying to just copy and paste all the words. That's not how you should do it. But you can take the structure of the videos that already worked. Understand why they worked, and then repeat it for your own kind of niche, for your own video. So, here I can see that for the hook analysis, this says, "Here's how to do X and Y." And this can be super powerful because you can use it for your own content, for your own niche, and just substitute X and Y with your own uh, topic that you want to talk about in this video. Right? So this is very, very, very, very strong. Then you can uh, use it to add projects, save to vault, and do other things. But also, what you can do is that once you found an outlier, once you find an outlier, you can also go into the next step, which is scripting. So here, there is a QR code in case you want to access this tool right now that I'm going to show you. This is called Poppy. Not many people know about Poppy, but I think it's extremely powerful because Sank Castle allows us to find ideas, to find outliers. Then what we can do is that we can take those outliers and then import them into Poppy. And now, let me show you what Poppy is. Poppy is basically as a whiteboard that allows you to paste in anything that you want, including scripts, including voice notes, including web pages, YouTube videos, Reels, any sort of media. And what you can do is that you can put them into groups and then link them to an LLM, let's say to ChatGPT or to Claude. And therefore, we are training the LLM, whether it's ChatGPT or Claude, with these creative materials that we just pasted in this whiteboard. So this again is another demo. At the very top, I created a group, a group called "Target Brief." And here I have added a bunch of references that the company gave me. Okay. So these are, let me just take these videos right here. These are two videos that the company gave me as reference, and then there is a brief that I got from uh, this company, let's say, archives, because right now I need to make a video about archives. And then we have the landing page of archives. So this is the targeted brief. And my goal right now, what I'm trying to do is just to make a video in a script for Archives AI, which is a tool that allows you to do UGC content. Then what I did is that I created another group called "Spero's Videos," which are my videos. These are my top-performing videos. So, I'm training the LLM with my top-performing videos, and I don't need to explain it. I don't need to write any text. It already knows once I link it to the LLM, just by simply taking this and then linking it to the LLM. That's it. Now, it means that this box, which is the ChatGPT, let's say, will allow us to reference everything that we link to it. Then I created a third box, which is called "Rory's Videos." Rory is another top player in my industry. We are friends. He's amazing. So, let's say I want to take inspiration from him. I can paste here the top videos from him and then I can just link it to the LLM and then and then I can reference Rory's videos. Then I've also added a bunch of YouTube videos that explain how to script videos. So, these are amazing creators that have made unbelievable YouTube videos and therefore, I'm just pasting them here so that I'm training ChatGPT. Okay, make sure to read these scripts and just like script my content based on these guidelines. And again, what I'm going to do is that I'm going to take this and I'm going to link it to the LLM. So now we have it linked, all of it. And then we can go inside. Let me finish the linking here. Boom. Then we can go inside, maximize this chat, and now this chat knows everything that I've attached before, right? So I can just go here and then I can literally type, "Based on Spero's videos, write me a script about Archives, which is the brief that we attached, where you have uh, all the information needed inside the brief, target group." So that was the first group. "Make sure to use uh, the structure and the flows described in the guides on scripting viral AI videos," which is the last group with YouTube videos that I that I pasted in, in also Rory's videos. And then here we're going to have a complete script that can be basically already pasted in and recorded into our content management system, and it looks amazing. So the hook, for example, is described that, "Here's how you can create unlimited AI ads that look completely real in just a few clicks." This is a perfect hook. I would not change anything. And the best part, you can be the face of every single one of them. So here, exactly how to do it with Archives. First, record yourself holding the product. Then take a screenshot of your best frame. Now go to Archives and select the actor section. So it knows already everything that has been done already and how you do it. Isn't it crazy?

>> It's so cool. Like this whole thing, I'm just like, wow. This is like amazing. Like that tool that you showed where you just link everything up and then it turns it into this script. Like, this is so cool.

>> Yeah, it's super, super cool and makes our lives so much easier because before we used to do this, everything manually, basically. And this is how you come up with scripts. Now, what is the next process? Well, you need to, you have a script. Now, you need to generate your voice and you need to generate uh, your talking. So, to generate the voice, I use 11 Labs. And again, here there is um, QR code that you can use to download or to get a subscription from 11 Labs. And now I'm going to show you how it works. Basically, you just need to go into "Voices." This is the main uh, 11 Labs uh, website. You just need to go into "Voices" and then you're going to create a voice. And you will be able to create a professional voice clone in just five minutes of recording. And this is very, very key because uh, before when I did my first clone voice, I needed to feed uh, to this tool four hours. And because I have courses, for me, it was easy. But for a normal person, you would have to speak four hours in front of the camera. So that's quite intense. But right now, we can clone our voice with just five minutes of content. And this is amazing. So once you have, like, you just need to follow the steps here. You click on "Professional Voice Clone" and then you finish off. I already created two of mine, which is what my plan allows. So that's why it's gray for me and doesn't allow me to do that. But then I just need to go into "Text to Speech" and then here I can paste my script. So let's say you can just grab the script from here. We're just going to take this one right here. And then we go into here. We paste the script and just we select the voice. So my voice is "Simony Pro." So this is the voice that I already recorded. And then here you have a bunch of sliders that you can move around to play and see which voice you like the most in terms of stability, speed, similarity, and style exaggeration. So you can play around with these and decide how you like it most. And then you just click on "Generate Speech." Now, there you go. Can you hear it? "Here's how you can create unlimited AI ads that look completely real in just a few clicks." So here is basically the voice is exactly like mine, and that's why it's so powerful. But now we can step it, we can take it one step further and instead of just generating the voice, we can plug this voice into my talking it. So here I can show you that we have another tool that is called HeyGen, which is the one that I mentioned before, that allows you to create different avatars. And all of these are all avatars of myself that I can use at any time, just to create any videos that I want to. So we can go, for example, using this one right here. Then I'm going to go in "Use in Video" and then here I will be able to upload the file that I downloaded from 11 Labs. So I go here, "Upload Audio," and then select a file, and we can pick the one that I just downloaded from 11 Labs, which is this one. Now, there's also "Connect 11 Labs with HeyGen." This is uh, you need to connect it, and then it's up to you whether you want to connect it or just use, like I'm doing now, with the with the download.

>> Yes.

>> How did you make these? Like, I know in HeyGen you've got like all those little different kind of like um, I don't know, Reels or videos there. Did you just make them all separately and do you just reuse them or how does that even work?

>> So the way it works is that once you go in "Avatar," you can upload a video of yourself. So, let's say I'm going to record a video of two minutes, like the one that you're seeing uh, with me talking right now, literally live. And then HeyGen will be able to replicate this exact set and my exact moves. So, if I move a lot with my hands, then HeyGen might be struggling a little bit because it doesn't understand exactly where I should position my hands. But then if I stay a little bit more still, like this one, and I just move little, like a little bit my hands and not too much, then HeyGen will be able to replicate exactly the same setup. So what's really important is that we have a very high-quality input to then have a very high-quality output. In AI, it's always like this, input is so important regarding the quality of the output. So what you need to do, the whole input you need, is just a two-minute video where you speak to the camera, doing exactly the gestures and the movements, and using the same exact background that you'd like to have in the avatar. I believe HeyGen also allows you to potentially change the background, but I've never tried it myself because I'm more of a, of a studio guy. So I always try to look as good as possible at first in camera, and then you're going to feed that video into HeyGen, and HeyGen is going to be able to replicate it, but also uh, sync it with your own voice and the new voice that you're generating. So HeyGen will be able to basically lip-sync based on the voice of 11 Labs. You will be able also to replicate your voice inside HeyGen. Especially for me, because I'm not an uh, native English speaker, I have a little bit of a weird accent, and HeyGen doesn't recognize my accent that well yet. So that's why I'm doing it with 11 Labs because 11 Labs is the number one at generating audio so far. So this is super easy to use HeyGen, but the results are really, really good. And then you can again, look at my Instagram on Spero.ai, and all the videos that you see right there are all made with HeyGen in terms of the avatar. There's, I think, there's only one video that I needed to do for a client where it was the real me. All the other ones are all HeyGen.

>> That's so cool. That's amazing, like that you can make a whole brand like that.

>> Yeah. Yeah. It's really, really cool. So this was in levels. Then we have HeyGen as well. So here you can have the QR code that you can uh, again, check out HeyGen. And then regarding the edit, this is kind of like the biggest question mark that we have because people are like, "But it takes too long to edit." And I agree. And as of today, we don't have like top, top, top level tools that allow us to edit in a very simple way. So unfortunately, this is still like for us, because we require super high quality, it's still like manual work. But I have a friend who started an IG account, I think, on December 1st. So let's say three months ago, and she reached already 10,000 followers just using Captions, which is this app that you see the logo on screen right now, as editing. So basically, the way it works is that you just click on "AI Edit," and then you just need to feed all the videos that you have, even if it's just one, you will be able to select the template, and then Captions will be able to uh, edit with just a bit of graphics, a bit of text, a bit of like movements and stuff like that, and it works very, very well. Personally, I use either Captions or CapCut, that has also an AI edit feature, to create stories. So whenever I have, let's say, a recap video that I want to create to post on stories, I use any of the two apps, and it works incred-, they work incredibly well. So, this is another alternative, and it is possible to actually grow on Instagram just by using one of the two apps as an AI edit. But, if you want to have like top-level quality, like my kind of accounts, then you need to outsource it. And editing takes a very long time for you to learn, and it's one of the most time-consuming tasks. So I would highly, highly recommend to hire an editor as soon as you can, if Captions or CapCut are not good enough for you. So this is like what I would recommend in terms of editing.

>> Amazing. Yes.

>> Yeah. And then the last step is obviously to post it. So you have your video that is being edited, that is ready. I use Metricool to schedule my posts on the AI channel. On my main channel, I still post it myself manually, but right now I'm trying to build agents to to do more of the tasks like writing the writing the caption and then making the cover and then posting automatically with ManyChat automation as well. And uh, it's a little bit more complicated, but I think it's possible. But for basic automations in terms of posting, just use Metricool, and it's quite good. Then I want to show you one last thing if we have two minutes, and this is just like how I do my CTAs. So, if I go on ManyChat right now, here, this is a tool that has been a game-changer for me. It's called ManyChat. And basically, I don't know if you've seen those posts that say like, "Comment X and I'll send you this," and "I'll send you the link." Right? So, these, these are all done via ManyChat. And basically, it allows you to create automations based on certain triggers. A trigger is, let's say, a word that has been used in a comment. So, I'm going to show you this example. Uh, we have, actually, no, this is Facebook. I'm going to show Instagram, which is a little bit better. So, for example, this is a post that I posted last night. It has been sent 308 times just in a few hours, which means that I have 308 leads more from last night until now, just by using ManyChat. And I know exactly because on ManyChat, they're also uh, um, divided by tags. If you want to add a tag, you can do a lot of different things. I'm going to show you a very simple workflow right now, and then I can show you a more complicated one. So, for example, I can tell that I can tell ManyChat whenever a user comments on this post, and I selected a post, uh, then send this information. And the trigger can be either any comment or can be a single word. So, let's say this one, I have the comment includes these keywords: "AI prompt," "product," "motion," and then I reply automatically using these replies right here. So, let's say, "Done, your DMs have been, like, is in the details," or like, "Check your inbox, details sent," blah, blah, blah, any kind of replies that you want. And then I have a condition: "If this person follows me, then I send them the resource. If they don't follow me, then send the message and say, 'To get the link, follow me first.'" Then this person, once this person clicks this button, then it checks again whether they follow me or not. So the only requirement for you to receive any resource is to follow me. You might be saying, "Yeah, but people can unfollow you later." That's not a problem. At least it's like one step, uh, whatever. And then when they see that I add a lot of value with all my resources, they'll be incentivized to to stay, uh, to keep following me, let's say. And then here again, there is a message sent, says, "Yay, here's the link." And then there is a link with the Google Doc that contains, usually we try to give a guide, to try to give as much value as possible, explaining exactly how to use the tools and some examples, so on, so forth. So this is a very, very simple workflow. But now I want to show you as well how deep you can go with this, because it's actually insane.

So this automation has been sent 20, 20,000 times, and we created over 19,000 contacts, which is really, really crazy. And it also collects emails. So we managed to collect over 9,100 emails, which if you had to pay for it on, on like paid ads, it would cost you a ton, right? Whereas this is just made with organic. And this is a very, very complicated workflow that I'm not going to go in depth about because it's just too complicated. We don't have that much time. But this is just to show you how much in-depth you can go with ManyChat, doing any sort of replies, AI stuff, showcase this, showcase that, showcase an image, have different use cases. It's really, really, really, really cool. So this is like the end of the cycle of the content wheel. After you, you post it, you have this as a CTA to track leads. So this is the main thing. I also, as I said, this was the the content wheel. So we got, we covered the ideation, we covered the scripting, we covered the generation of your avatar with your voice, we covered the edit, and we covered the posting as well, and a bit of the CTA afterwards. So these are again, all the QR codes in case you want to download it, you can just take these. And then regarding video and image generation, we haven't covered it in this session because it's just too much that we should cover. And I know I gave a lot of information, but I hope it was useful. For videos, I use Hickfield, Freepick, and Clink are the main ones. Right now, we still have VU, and I think there is a new version of VU coming soon. For the imagery, again, it's just Hickfield, Freepick, and actually, these are the main two that I use in terms of these tools. Basically, what they are, Hickfield and Freepick are just aggregators of AI models, which means that I can go inside Hickfield or Freepick and then I can select the model that I want to use. Right now, the best one for imagery is Nano Banana 2 or Nanobanana Pro. And for video, it's Clink 3.0 or Cling Motion Control 3.0. And I'm sure they're going to be more coming out very, very soon as well because they're just being updated all the time. So, in general, you just go to Hickfield or Freepick and then you use the latest AI tools to create your videos and your images in case you need any sort of cover or like B-rolls, anything. Now, they're all really, really good. Then I also have a waitlist right now for a new program that I'm launching, which is about helping other people succeed with a personal brand on Instagram. So definitely sign up on the waitlist, and this QR code when we launch is going to also redirect you to the program itself. And this was it. What do you think?

>> Amazing. I'm speechless. I do have questions. This was all amazing. If someone was to wanted to start like building a personal brand today, what would you recommend in terms of should they do a mixture of AI clone content and themselves? And how often do you think they should be posting?

>> So for me, posting, I would say at least once a day. It's really, it's really hard to grow on Instagram unless you post once a day, just because, first of all, you're not good enough to make sure that you have like a viral video if you post once a week. You just need so much repetition in so many videos to make sure that you get the reps in to get better and better and have more feedback loops from the algorithm itself, from Instagram. So the more you post, the more you understand, okay, this type of content works, this type of content doesn't work, then I need to double down on this. You can experiment and see what brings you the most results, both in terms of engagement, but as well in terms of sales. For me, when you ask me how do you build a personal brand, the first concept that comes in my mind is you need to start with the result in mind, which means, do you have a program that you can sell? What's your ultimate goal to build a personal brand? Like, why do you want to grow on Instagram? Probably most of the audience maybe is like a small, small business owner, is a small entrepreneur, or they want to try to make it uh, in some sort of ways online. And the best way to go about it is just you start with the result that you want people to to achieve based on your expertise. So you make sure that you analyze what you're good at, and then you teach people how you got there without holding back. Just don't hold back and teach everything you know about that specific uh, subject in a very simple and distilled way. So you can make literally 20-second videos uh, uh, talking about one little secret on that website that you usually use to do your thing, let's say. So it's all about understanding what's your competitive advantage, and then you break it down into very, very, very easy and digestible videos that you can post online to educate the audience. In my opinion, educational content is king. So, I would definitely go about teaching other people what you know already, based on what you want to sell them afterwards, because at the end of the day, you need to monetize uh, sooner or later.

>> Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. Also, do you think we're better off doing a lot of video or do you think we should have a mixture of content?

>> Uh, I would definitely have a mixture. I think uh, one of the the feed bit that I receive about myself, for example, is that I don't talk enough about my background. So I have, I think, a very interesting story, and people don't really know about it because I just do educational content on third-party tools and I don't talk too much about myself. So if I had to start from scratch again, and now what I'm trying to integrate is that, sure, I'm trying to educate and like teach people what I know about uh, AI videos and like personal branding and stuff, but I also would love to integrate more of my life and more of my background with potentially static images and carousels, um, or maybe potentially even Reels. So I would definitely try to do a bit of both, if we can, both static videos and also stories. Stories are very, very powerful to connect with your audience. Yeah.

>> Love that. Thank you. Also, one more question. With your account that you grew really, really big, do you also do that account like, do you still post for that account on say things like Facebook or um, TikTok or Threads or anything like that, or was the main driver literally Instagram?

>> So there is always one main driver for, for in general for personal brands. You have one main uh, channel. For me, it's my main IG account. But then I grew actually much faster on TikTok before. So I started when TikTok was first out in 2020, and that was like already at 300 or 400K before even Reels uh, were were available on Instagram. Uh, but right now, I'm trying to cross-post everywhere. So I'm trying to cross-post on TikTok, I'm trying to cross-post on Threads, and I'm trying to cross-post as well, um, on on other platforms with different teams. So, at the beginning, I would not recommend to go omni-present because you're going to burn out. If you're just starting out, pick one single platform and just double down on that. And then, for example, if you're creating short-form content, it's quite easy to just repost on TikTok. So, you can create Instagram Reels and then repost them on TikTok and potentially YouTube Shorts on a dedicated channel. But do not go all platforms from day one because you're going to go crazy. Uh, right now, because I've been doing this for a very long time, I am able to have teams on separate channels that are now working to to build me up on on other channels, and that's like how, let's say, I'm trying to scale. But overall, start with one platform.

>> Yeah, this has been so amazing. I could think of at least, I don't know, another half an hour's worth of amazing questions because you're just so knowledgeable on this topic. But this has been amazing. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time today. Where is the best place for people to find you?

>> So Instagram, I think, is the main channel, as always. So you can find me at Spero21. So Spero21. This is my main handle. And then again, if you look back in the presentation, you see that QR code that has the waitlist for my AI program that is launching soon. But again, on Instagram, for sure, when we're going to launch that, we're going to have the link there, and all the main resources are there. So definitely check out on on Instagram and reach out there.

>> Yay. Amazing. Thank you so much, Simone.

>> No worries. It's been a pleasure.