How to Use AI for Video Shorts

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Ibrahim Mohmed  – Taja.ai

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 “Taj’s AI-Driven Transformation Journey”
06:23 “Transitioning to Software Products”
08:25 “Emotional Creative Entrepreneurs”
11:37 “Shifting Focus: Diversifying Platforms”
16:29 “Becoming an Authentic Influencer”
17:23 Maximizing Watch Time for Platforms
23:25 College Connection Sparks Startup Venture
24:14 ChatGPT’s Role in Agency Launch
29:43 Content Creation Tools and Scheduling
33:35 Streamlined Video Content Expansion
36:19 Improving AI-Generated Video Shorts
39:31 Automated Video and Blog Creation
42:06 “Video-Based System Advantage”

Podcast Transcription:

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:00:00]:
The first thing is these algorithms care about watch time more than anything. And what watch time is essentially how long is someone watching your piece of content? And if the. The higher the watch time of your content is, the higher the algorithm will pick it up and showcase it to more people. Because it’s signaling to the algorithm that as a result of your video, people are staying on the platform longer. And so as a result, these platforms can serve more ads, these people, and then that platforms make more money as a result. So watch time is huge.

James Kademan [00:00:41]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and strength and successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link funded drawincustomers.com we are locally underwritten by the bank of Sun Prairie Calls On Call Extraordinary Answering Service as well as the Bold Business Book. And today we’re welcoming, preparing to learn from Ibrahim. Oh, my gosh, is it Mohammed Mohmed? Yep, Mohmed. All right. Founder of Taja. Let me try that again. We are welcoming Slash, preparing to learn from Ibrahim Momed, founder of Taja who.

James Kademan [00:01:17]:
I gotta say, Ibrahim, I’m excited because we were just talking about this before. We create shorts with this software. So we’re talking about, or talking to the founder of a guy that’s you, that created a product that we’re actually using. So that’s kind of monumental in our world. So I’m excited. So, Ibrahim, how is it going today?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:01:37]:
No, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I’m happy to hear that you guys are using Taj actively. And my day’s going well. Weeks going well. It’s crazy that we’re in September, but mid September, that is. But yeah, just trudging through and trying to end the year on a high note.

James Kademan [00:01:54]:
Yeah, fair. Tell me just a quick history. I know my experience with Taja, but I have no idea how old the software is or really how you got started. So let’s start with how long have you been around?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:02:06]:
Yeah, Taj has been around for 26 months. So two years and two months. We started back in December of 2022. Basically. I ran an agency before that, managed influencers, helped them build and monetize their content on social, primarily YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, all the ones that have AdSense revenue associated with them. And we had a lot of clients that had podcasts on YouTube, but we just didn’t have the bandwidth or demand or. Or we didn’t have the bandwidth to keep up with it. And so at that time, you know, Chat GBT had just rolled out, so my partner and I started looking at how AI could affect our business and help us streamline our business.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:03:01]:
So we, you know, went on this whole discovery realm and under, you know, looked at what are the key pain points, identified those key pain points, and then we use Taja as the tool to help us streamline the business. And then in July 2023, we decided to roll it out to everyone.

James Kademan [00:03:20]:
That’s awesome. So the. Has it worked for your clients that were using you to market or essentially, if I understand correctly, they were looking to become influencers.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:03:32]:
They were already influenced. So the clients I used to work with, they were already influencers. They were like prominent NBA players, former NBA players. They just wanted to get in the media space. So they wanted us to run their podcast, essentially repurpose their podcast into multiple forms of media, such as, you know, clips, shorts, etc, and put it up on their channels. So we were running their clips channels actually for them. And, you know, the first channel we ever built was, you know, went from 0 to 100k subscribers and 14 months using Tasha.

James Kademan [00:04:08]:
Well, it’s incredible. That is super incredible. Tell me a story about the back end. Because, Chad, GPT comes out, the AI revolution essentially is happening, and really got fired up. I mean, what are we talking November 22nd?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:04:22]:
Yeah, November. December 22nd. Yeah.

James Kademan [00:04:25]:
So did you have a background, a programming background to help you figure out how to turn the AI and use it as a tool to build this whole program or how did that work?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:04:35]:
No, my partner did. My partner, he’s an engineer. He’s been in building AI tools since, like 2015. He’s been in the space, so he’s understood it. Well, all that. He actually sent me chatgpt and he’s like, hey, this thing just came out. Do you think it could help your business at all? And then that’s when we started just going down the discovery lane and figuring out what can work. And then he.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:05:01]:
He was the one building it and I was the one, you know, putting in people’s hands, testing it out and. And selling it.

James Kademan [00:05:10]:
That’s awesome. So when did you decide to actually spin it off to a product that you offered independent of the other services that you had with your other business?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:05:20]:
Yeah, July 2023. We decided to do that.

James Kademan [00:05:23]:
Okay, and was that a big conversation to decide to do that versus just keeping it more or less in house?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:05:29]:
No, not a big conversation. I think we were always building for like, an element of. Of. Of putting it out to the masses. It was Just figuring out what’s the pain points. How can we leverage the agency and the relationships we have with the agency to build something that’d be useful for a lot of people. So that was always the, the forefront. I’ve always wanted to be in the product space just because the impact’s greater, the scalability is higher, and, you know, you, you own the product in comparison that, you know, as an agency, the, you know, the.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:06:08]:
You have a few clients and you’re kind of at the mercy of those clients. Product the same thing. You’re at the mercy of the customer, but it’s more of a partnership than it is, you know, from a, from, from working with a client.

James Kademan [00:06:23]:
You know, it’s interesting you say that, because one of my previous guests, pretty recently, he was in more of a physical product space, I believe, or service. Whatever it was, he wanted to transition to a software product because he said, we just want to sell usernames and passwords. And it made me think, like, oh, that is pretty smart. Shy of the whole tech support and updating the software and all that kind of stuff. Your customer base possibility is way bigger, incredibly larger than what you could do with selling a physical product or something of that nature. So that’s cool. I like that idea. Ibrahim, the.

James Kademan [00:07:04]:
Do you still have the marketing business essentially for influencers?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:07:09]:
Yeah, but it’s like, not as active as it used to be. It’s more on autopilot. We have some clients on Snapchat, we manage, but that’s more, you know, a lot of things are on autopilot there.

James Kademan [00:07:20]:
Gotcha. So is Taja taking up more of your time now?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:07:24]:
Yes, Taja has taken up more of my time.

James Kademan [00:07:26]:
All right. And was that anticipated when you created it or that just evolved over the course of the past couple years?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:07:33]:
It was anticipated. I wanted to dial back. Like I said, I wanted to work on a product over a service just because it’s a lot of times in the service industry, like I said, you’re at mercy to the client or like, you know, especially what I was doing. You’re, you know, your days and your workflow is dictated by how the client’s feeling. And so those were things that were just too unpredictable. So I didn’t want to be in that space.

James Kademan [00:08:04]:
Tell me a little bit about dealing with influencers. Maybe dealing with is the wrong word. Working with influencers, some of them have a little bit of a big head or ego or they tried to flex a little bit, I guess, with that over top of you. Or were you more or Less on the same level. We’re here to help you maintain your influencer status or grow it.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:08:25]:
So yeah, not an ego, I would say. I just think, you know, a lot of times creators and stuff will make some great is like their feelings, their emotion, how in tune their things. But that could also be the other side of it, which is that is a detriment to them, but it’s also what makes them who they are. So like it’s more about understanding that. And as creators, they’re all businesses but the, they’re businesses with emotions. Like they’re human beings. Like there’s nothing you can do to avoid that. But you know, so a lot of times they have a, their emotions flow up and down, up and down.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:09:12]:
You just got to ride that wave depending on, on the day. But it’s not an ego thing, it’s nothing like that. It’s just how they operate. Understanding that, you know, that is also what makes them great at what they do. And so just for me it was that I’m a type A person. So like that element of riding these waves doesn’t really work for me. Well, just because it’s not my personality.

James Kademan [00:09:38]:
Gotcha. You know, it’s interesting you said that a business with personality. Or would you say business with personality or business with emotion?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:09:45]:
With emotion.

James Kademan [00:09:46]:
With emotion. That I would say there’s got to be challenging. Just like any. Working with any person is challenging, whether it’s.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:09:56]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:09:57]:
Your manager or whatever.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:09:58]:
Yeah. But when you’re managing like different brands, like let’s say Apple or whatever, it’s more like black and white. Obviously you’re working with people but Apple doesn’t have a like human emotions.

James Kademan [00:10:09]:
Yeah. I imagine something like Apple or Pepsi or Nike or whatever they have. This is the voice of our business and that’s going to be the voice that’s pretty, probably pretty strict.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:10:20]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:10:20]:
Someone that’s more human is going to be like today is a bad day because of whatever or a good day because of whatever.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:10:28]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Like Apple. All these other ones are just dictated by P. L. Like what’s there? What does that look like? Are we hitting our goals? Are we growing? If not, we need to make a change. But it’s not, you know, doesn’t have like emotions of like this up and down roller coaster.

James Kademan [00:10:45]:
Sure. That’s interesting. Tell me about working. I didn’t even I guess realize that you were in this influencer space. So I’m curious about this. When you or when you work with them, are you trying to get them on all the platforms or do some of them focus on one or two because that’s where their crowd is. Because there’s.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:11:04]:
Yeah, it’s a case by case uselessness. It’s a, it’s a case by case for sure. Like the first ever client I ever worked with was, you know, they were big on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat was their biggest one. They weren’t on Twitter, they weren’t on, you know, those elements. And other clients I would have would be, you know, I want to go on Twitter, I want to go on TikTok, Etc. The main common denominator is always YouTube. YouTube was always the channel and the platform that people wanted to be on. So that was the main common denominator.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:11:37]:
And then the subs were different of like, where else am I going to grow my presence and stuff. People would more pick their poison on that front. Especially since a lot of our clients focus on AdSense as the revenue source. It wasn’t brand partnerships. Everyone wanted YouTube as the main one because that’s the long form platform, that’s the one that’s been there the longest, it’s the one that generates the most revenue. And then they kind of went to other realms. So you know, as Snapchat evolved and introduced shows, we started doing that. As Twitter evolved, it started to, you know, take payments on long form.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:12:13]:
We did that as Facebook evolved, etc. That those were the platforms we focused on. But it’s a case by case.

James Kademan [00:12:20]:
Gotcha. So the AdSense thing, just so I understand AdSense, an ad plays when you watch a video on YouTube or something like that and who, whosever video it is gets a nut from that.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:12:32]:
With other.

James Kademan [00:12:33]:
Okay, with the other platforms, the Snapchat and Twitter and all that kind of stuff, is there a way to actually make money off those?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:12:41]:
Yeah, there is so many. So Snapchat back in like 2020 to recently they more so stopped. They had shows. So we had multiple shows on Snapchat. But those shows, just like YouTube would get, you know, you’d see them on Discover Feed, you’d click on it. If you’re interested in it, you’d watch it. And then throughout the show there’s ads and then the more people you got to watch and view your view these ads, the more you got paid. So Snapchat was a big business in that realm.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:13:11]:
Now they have something called mid roll program where if you’re a content creator, just like how you post Instagrams on stories or stories on Instagram, I should say Snapchat has a Feature like that where you can post stories on their platform. When you post stories, you get paid. So that was a big realm where, like, a lot of creators in the beginning days were making like six figures a month just posting stories. So a lot of them, it’s notorious that, like, they quit YouTube because they are making more money on Snap for a lower lift of production. Wow.

James Kademan [00:13:48]:
What would be the. The advantage or disadvantages of posting it strictly on a platform versus posting the same thing on multiple platforms?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:13:59]:
For this, like, use case specifically or what?

James Kademan [00:14:03]:
Just broadly, I guess, if I got something I’m getting paid on Snapchat, I would want to. Even if I’m not making as much money on YouTube, I would still want to post it on both. Or is that a no? No?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:14:15]:
Yeah, there’s no. There’s no disadvantage because it’s. A lot of times it’s two different audiences. Like, the audience that may be on YouTube that’s interested in your content might be different than what’s on Snap. That’s interesting. Your content, like Snap, skews more towards Gen Z and the younger generations. YouTube might be a different audience, so it’s no issue. And the big part too is they’re both discovery platforms.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:14:40]:
Like, you know, less people are searching for you and more people are just coming up on your content via discovery. And so at that level, it’s about making something compelling. You know, for the game of Snapchat specifically, it’s about having a good thumbnail that people click on and watch your content and getting ranked higher in the discovery feed by having compelling content that people are actively watching, seeing multiple ads from. And the algorithm will notice that and be like, this is engaging content. I should push this up more and show it to more people. Just like that are lookalikes to the person that’s actively watching this. So there’s nothing wrong with ever posting the same thing across multiple platforms, because each algorithm, you know, will pick it up differently and showcase it to audiences. And then you get.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:15:31]:
Your content just gets shown everywhere as a multiple, as a multiplier.

James Kademan [00:15:38]:
Gotcha. All right, tell me a little bit about how people become influencers. Because you hear these stories about people making six figures a month. And I look at videos like what my kid watches on YouTube and stuff like that. You see tens of millions of views and the videos three days old. And I’m just trying to wrap my head around how. How is a measurable percentage of the world. If you look at, let’s just say 10 million people, right? It’s not 100% of the world, but it’s a measurable percentage of the world.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:16:11]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:16:11]:
How are they getting that reach in that short of time? Like, I mean, this is both a curiosity question for how does it work? And like, I got videos that have 12 views and stuff like that. So how do we get there? Not, Yeah, I have 12 million views. Right. So I’m just curious.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:16:29]:
So it’s a couple things. The first thing of, like how to become an influencer, like, what should you do? The first element is you have to be authentic. So it’s about what’s authentic to you. And I think there’s a couple questions you should ask yourself whenever you’re trying to become an influencer or even when you’re ever you’re making a video, which is, who’s my target audience? What is something that I know that is unique to me and not many other people know? And then three is what do I want people to walk away with after viewing my content? I think if you can have concise answers for all those, you can understand what your niche is and also what type of content you should be creating. So I think that’s the first element is understanding those realms. The second element is once you know that, it’s about picking the platform. So right now what’s in is short form content. So, you know, that’s why a lot of people go to TikTok.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:17:23]:
That’s why a lot of people go to Instagram, you know, and they create these reels and these shorts. So once that’s done and you understand what your niche and who your, what type of content you should be creating, it’s now picking the platform. And so when you pick the platform, there’s a couple things that need to be done. Well, the first thing is these algorithms care about watch time more than anything. And what watch time is essentially how long is someone watching your piece of content? And if the, the higher the watch time of your content is, the higher the algorithm will pick it up and showcase it to more people because it’s signaling to the algorithm that as a result of your video, people are staying on the platform longer. And so as a result, these platforms can serve more ads, these people, and then that platforms make more money as a result. So watch time is huge. And with watch time, you know, you can double click into that and the elements there are like, you have to nail your hook.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:18:25]:
So your first three seconds have to be phenomenal and people have to be very intrigued by that. And then, you know, the content throughout has to be very engaging. So think about, like, know whether you have a good story to tell or you have, you know, interactive content like B roll and sound effects and transitions and all these different elements in there. So the biggest thing is watch time. The second element is then your SEO. So from that realm, it’s about. It’s about like, what’s your tags and all those different elements, because these. These platforms pick up on that front too, to understand what the video is about.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:19:08]:
So those elements matter. And then the other element is the engagement on the video. So obviously watch time is one, but then your comments, your shares, your likes, all those things all matter.

James Kademan [00:19:18]:
Got it. That is. That’s cool. That’s helpful. It’s interesting because I look at the videos that we have up there, and the videos that start doing well, all of a sudden they just. Hockey stick.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:19:29]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:19:30]:
And the videos that don’t do well, they just flatline. Keep the dust bunnies on them, man.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:19:35]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the. The element there is like the algorithm. All algorithm means is audience. So it’s not like a complex element. Just think about as audience. So every time you put up a video, these platforms are trying to work in your favor to find out what type of person is liking this video. And so it’ll serve it to a group of like 200, let’s say.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:19:57]:
And then it’ll see how they react to it. And if they’re reacting well, it’ll show it to more of that group and what that group’s tendencies and, you know, that lookalike group is like. But if it doesn’t, that group doesn’t like it. Then it’ll show it to another 200 group and then kind of see who’s fitting and flowing with this video. And then it’ll serve it to more of those people that look like that audience.

James Kademan [00:20:19]:
Got it. All right. I guess I didn’t. I didn’t even think about where the video goes first. I suppose that’s similar to what Amazon does. When you publish a book there, they throw it out and see what kind of play they get. If they get lots of play, they’ll keep throwing it out. And if they don’t get much play, then you’re stuck with the dust bunnies again.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:20:39]:
Yeah, it’s. It all works the same. All these algorithms work the same. Even when you, you know, buy ads on Facebook and Google, it’s doing the same thing. It’s trying to understand which group is liking this con. Is it liking your interacting with your product the most? And then it’s trying to find A signal and serve it to more of that group. So it all works the same.

James Kademan [00:20:58]:
Gotcha. You know, it’s interesting, the shorts thing, because I wasn’t messing with shorts at all until I saw on YouTube. I think YouTube was looking from a monetization standpoint. You have to have so many views of shorts. And I’m like, all our content is pushing an hour, sometimes more. So yeah, that doesn’t fit the shorts category. So that’s when we stumbled upon your software. We get Taja Rowan, we throw up the shorts.

James Kademan [00:21:26]:
We’re getting hundreds of views on shorts. I don’t know what a good number is, but in our world, hundreds is great. And it’s interesting how that volume just went way up, way up, which is cool on the one hand, but on the other hand I’m like, oh, man, there are a lot of platforms where people are watching shorts.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:21:46]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:21:47]:
I mean, tik tok, Instagram, YouTube.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:21:51]:
Yeah. Our attention spans are small. I mean, think about even, you know, like, I don’t know if you have kids, but you know, looking at them, it’s like the investment of watching a long form video now is very, very small because it’s just that’s, that’s such a big investment to make versus, you know, the old age or like older generations will watch one piece of content for two hours a day versus now. People want to watch hundreds of content in two hours.

James Kademan [00:22:20]:
Yeah. Even my wife was scrolling and I don’t know, people babbling. I don’t know what she was watching, but it was. I don’t even know if she’s stuck in there three seconds. And it was just, scroll to the next, scroll to the next.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:22:32]:
Yeah, yeah.

James Kademan [00:22:32]:
No, I didn’t even get out five words in three seconds. Do you know if you like or don’t like whatever it is they have to say?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:22:40]:
It’s crazy, the conditioning people have now on this stuff.

James Kademan [00:22:43]:
It’s very peculiar. And asking my kid to see a movie, like sit there for. Watch the same thing for two hours. What?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:22:51]:
Yeah, it’s not a thing. Even the movie business is in a, a bad spot. It’s like it hasn’t recovered real well.

James Kademan [00:22:56]:
At all since co. No, very true, very true. Yeah. And you’re talking to a guy. I used to work at a movie theater. I worked there eight years and so I’m a big movie fan and it’s, it’s sad to see. Oh yeah. When you go to the movie theater, sometimes you’re like, I get why this is dying.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:23:14]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, 100% so tell me a story.

James Kademan [00:23:19]:
The partner that you have with the business, you were with this partner for a while?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:23:25]:
Yeah, we went to college together, so we both went to Ohio State. Knew him from that time. Always kept a solid relationship with him throughout the years. And he was always in the startup scene. He worked at some venture back firms before that. So he’s always been in, in that space. And so, you know, the timing was good of me wrapping up what I was doing on my front and him as well with or not me wrapping up, but me wanting to transition from more agency to product and then him wrapping up his previous startup.

James Kademan [00:23:59]:
Gotcha. Okay, so he was not a partner with you in the, in the marketing space agency?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:24:04]:
No, he was not.

James Kademan [00:24:05]:
Gotcha. Okay.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:24:06]:
We were just good friends during that time.

James Kademan [00:24:08]:
Okay, so who went to who and said, hey man, we got a thing, let’s build this?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:24:14]:
Yeah, I mean he, he, like I said, he mentioned to me that that chat GPT had just came out. So that’s when he sent me Chad GBT at the time. And I started playing with it in like November, late November of 2022. And then he’s like, let me know this could help, this possibly help your agency. And then I started to think and then we started getting on calls and you know, and then looking at the pain points I had within the agency. And that’s how we kind of came at this, this thing. And we just did months of discovery and really understanding the pain point, understanding the value prop we’re providing and then we launched.

James Kademan [00:24:55]:
Nice. Tell me a little bit about the AI end because you hear about ChatGPT, whatever, four or five coming out, every time they come out with a new version. Does that break your old mold? So now all of a sudden you have to program new or does it pass stuff?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:25:12]:
No, it works well with past stuff. We just have to, we just update our models to the, to the latest version. So as OpenAI releases a new version, we update our model to that version. And so you’re getting constantly the updated output, but it’s not breaking our models.

James Kademan [00:25:28]:
Help me understand what that means. I’m not a programmer, so I just know it goes from the number four to the number five. Great. Tell me what does that mean on your end as far as updating the model?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:25:40]:
Yeah, so right now, you know, we’ll run on like, I think you know we’ll run on five right now. So let’s say six comes out. And six can do is better at like reasoning or whatever the case may be. So we’ll just switch to the latest model. And so for us right now there’s different elements. We use OpenAI. So for one, we use it for the metadata. So like helping us come up with titles, description tags, all those different elements, then helping us come up with shorts, like what are the reading the transcription of the video, identifying the key points in a video.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:26:15]:
So we’ll just update to the newest model and then as a result, our results get better because the model is better than the previous model. The main element that we have is we have our own proprietary data that we fine tune our models on.

James Kademan [00:26:33]:
Nice. All right. Because I imagine, I guess from my experience, I have a call answering service. And so now where we used to have a little bit of competition, I mean it was a healthy amount. Now everybody and their mother is like, I can get AI to answer your phones and be all great.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:26:51]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:26:51]:
And like in that, in that world, the hype is not nearly as good as the end product, but it’s only getting better. So I imagine in your world it’s a similar situation. Everybody and their mother’s like, I can make sure it’s out of your video. I have access to AI like everybody else. So you have to differentiate yourself. I imagine to make yourself less of a commodity and more of a product. Like Taj is the one that you need to make your shorts kind of thing.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:27:17]:
Yeah, yeah. 100. I mean there’s different elements that we do. I mean the biggest thing that we see in the market is like a lot of people, you said, whether with the call center elements, the same thing with us. It’s like a lot of people do turn long form videos into shorts. Now there’s a lot of competition in that space. The main element that we have over everyone is we’re a one stop shop solution. So we do multiple things under one platform.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:27:44]:
So whereas currently the market will purchase five different tools for the same job and pay for five different subscriptions, we just house it under one and then you can do all those five jobs into one tool and consolidate your workflow. So, you know, that’s one element that we provide. And the second element is we’re very channel specific. So everything we do is very channel oriented. So we optimize your channel.

James Kademan [00:28:14]:
Oh, did I lose you again? You with me, Ibrahim?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:28:34]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:28:34]:
Your screen. Oh, here we go. All right. Your screen locked up on my end and I couldn’t hear you.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:28:39]:
No worries. Yeah, I was just saying we’re. Let me know when we’re ready.

James Kademan [00:28:42]:
Yeah. All good? All good.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:28:44]:
Yeah, we’re very channel specific. So we give you channel specific output that you wouldn’t get on a, you know, generic level. So the, the output that you get is different than what another customer gets.

James Kademan [00:28:56]:
Gotcha. Tell me, you mentioned the five things. Can you help me just for the people that may not know necessarily what Taja is, beyond helping people create shorts, what are those five things?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:29:07]:
Yeah, so as an element, you know, I’ll just walk you through the steps. As the core of the business or the core of the product, people load, they create a video. They load that video in our system. We’ll optimize it for SEO. So we’ll analyze that video, give you your title, your description, your chapters, your tags, your thumbnail, all those different elements we instantly generate for you. So for that element alone, you could probably be using vidiq for the SEO, so helping you come up with the title, description, chapters, tags, you could use tubebuddy on that front either. So that’s one subscription. The second element is the thumbnails.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:29:43]:
So for that you could be using a different software. Whether you’re using like Dolly or, you know, one of the specific thumbnail generators, that’s another subscription. The third element is a Shorts creation. So once you, you know, optimize the video, you can now that you can then repurpose the video into shorts, blogs, threads, LinkedIn posts, all that. So for that element, let’s say you’re using Opus Clip just for shorts generation, for the blog generation and text and thread and all that, you’re using a whole nother subscription. So that’s four. Right. Then the last element that you can do within our platform is schedule your content across all your platforms.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:30:25]:
So for that, let’s say you’re using a hootsuite or you’re using one of the other tools that just schedules out content. That’s five different subscriptions right there.

James Kademan [00:30:35]:
Got it. That, you know, it’s interesting, the scheduling thing is that a fairly new addition.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:30:42]:
We released it in January.

James Kademan [00:30:44]:
Okay. Because when I realized that you could do that, it was like, what? Yeah, game changer there. Otherwise you’re right there trying to just hit publish, which, whether it’s me or one of my crew, depending upon the time of day, it may or may not be an ideal time. So, yeah, tell me a story. I guess I want to go down the rabbit hole in each of these just for fun. Scheduling thing is great. Tell me a story about what it uses for scheduling. As far as scheduling out, is it scheduling a week out, a month out, a year out? Is that adjustable.

James Kademan [00:31:16]:
How does that work?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:31:17]:
You can schedule up to like five years out if you wanted to.

James Kademan [00:31:20]:
Okay, so when I click, I think I just click schedule post or I’m sorry, click not schedule. What is the auto schedule? Auto schedule, I think that’s it. I should do this. But heart, but I don’t. So auto schedule, what is that? I just trust just putting out there at a good time. Help me out with when is that putting out there. I didn’t even pay attention when it was going out to be.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:31:50]:
Yeah. So that depends on how much content you have got gone out. But essentially what auto schedule does for those listening is it instead of you going one by one and scheduling each piece of short, you can just click a button and we’ll schedule all your shorts for you. And so what that will do is it speeds up the workflow for you. And essentially what you do is the first time you go through, you pick the days and times that you prefer. So say you want Monday and you want, you know, 10 to 12, 1 to 2, etc. You do the same for Tuesday, etc. So once you set the schedule that you want your content to go out every time you go to auto schedule, we’ll look at what’s the next available slot and then schedule the next piece of content from there.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:32:37]:
So you have 10 pieces of content and you pick 10 slots that you like from Monday through Friday. So each day you have two slots, we’ll schedule out that 10 and then the next 10, let’s say, will be the following week, etc. Etc. So that’s kind of how it’s done.

James Kademan [00:32:53]:
Gotcha. And working in the agency that you had and with Taja, have you found certain times of day or certain days are better or there’s just so much.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:33:02]:
It depends on the niche and the person. I always like to schedule out in the morning, so I like like 10am because it lets a post go through the whole day. So I kind of like that element. But it depends on the content, the niche. I mean YouTube Studio has it for you. It actually tells you when the best times and when your audience is active. So you kind of look at that to. To see.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:33:24]:
But yeah, I kind of just like the mornings.

James Kademan [00:33:29]:
Gotcha. Fair. Tell me a story about the blog things. I didn’t even know you had that as an option.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:33:35]:
Yeah, so that’s something where, like I said, essentially what we want to do is help you. You make the video, we’ll make the video work for you. So that one video that you make we want to figure out how can we make that into 30 pieces of content that you can put out everywhere and so that multiple people can consume it in different places, so. So that you can maximize your reach. So, you know, the blog’s a different element where a lot of people like to turn their video into a blog post. So we, you know, a lot of customers would come to us and be like, I really, before we had blogs and say, I use your transcription, take that into chat GBT and generate a blog. So we just decided to just build that out in the platform and consolidate that workflow so that now you. You’re not doing that process, you’re just using it under one, and we’re able to speed up that workflow for you.

James Kademan [00:34:30]:
Very cool. Okay. Yeah, I’ll have to dig into that more. And then you also said thumbnail creation, is that right?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:34:37]:
Yes.

James Kademan [00:34:38]:
So is there any guidance that an end user can put in the thumbnail creation? Or they just click generate thumbnails and whatever comes out comes out kind of thing.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:34:46]:
So there’s different elements there. There’s two elements. So you can have AI generated thumbnails. So based on your video, et cetera, you can generate an AI generated thumbnail, which will be like a compelling background, a person in there, all these different elements, captions, etc. You can go in and edit. So if you want to edit, you can put in a picture of yourself. You can do all these different elements. That’s one piece.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:35:09]:
The second piece is you can say you want thumbnails with your face in it. And so what that will do is if you have a talking head video, we’ll scan the video for emotional stills, pick those stills out, and then generate the thumbnail with your face in it. There’s options on the thumbnail side and each thumbnail. Each time you generate a thumbnail, we generate up to three.

James Kademan [00:35:32]:
All right. And something like this, where it’s long form video, we got two talking heads. Will it grab two?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:35:41]:
Yes, as long as it finds there’s emotional stills in them. So if it’s like, okay, so we.

James Kademan [00:35:45]:
Really got to use some expression here.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:35:47]:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it’ll. It’ll find. It’ll. It’ll try to scan the video for stills and then use that.

James Kademan [00:35:53]:
That. Gotcha. All right, and then what was the other thing you mentioned in there? Get blogs. There’s keywords, description, title of the video. Oh, I want to ask you about B roll, because I think B roll is an option on there as well, right?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:36:07]:
Yeah. When you Generate shorts, you can generate B roll.

James Kademan [00:36:10]:
All right, tell me about the B roll. Because sometimes I’m like, this is amazing. And other times, regardless of what platform you use, you’re just like, what were you thinking?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:36:19]:
That’s a miss. Yeah, yeah, no, we’re, we’re working on fine tuning that. We’re taking another level with our shorts here in the next month to two months. So you should see like a whole different level of shorts generation, but it is a hit or miss. We’re actively working to make that stuff better for you. So we actually want to get to a level where we generate shorts for you. And it feels like an editor made it not, you know, a lot of times now today with these AI tools you’re seeing, you can tell which platform it came from. Like, I can look at a short clip by opus and be like, that’s an opus clip short.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:36:52]:
So we’re trying to take that another level by just making it as if you hired an editor that you paid $30 to create this short for you. So that’s everything from like dynamically adding B roll, transition sound effects, all those different elements into the short for you.

James Kademan [00:37:09]:
Do you ever see yourself. This is purely selfish question because I got long, long form video. Do you ever see Tasha being able to do that with long form video?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:37:22]:
That is a different space that we see a lot of people in. So like you have your veeds, you have your, you know, captions is there now. So like a lot of people are there. We want to stick in the lane of like making the video work for you and we want to just master that. And then from there, you know, we can look into like the pre production production phases and how we can make that stuff better. But right now we just want to master post production.

James Kademan [00:37:46]:
Gotcha. Fair. I’m trying to think what else I had for questions for you. The. The time it takes to produce shorts from, let’s just say an hour. Hour video. I want to say, I want to use your nomenclature there. Long form content.

James Kademan [00:38:06]:
Hour long. Long form content. How. What is all going on? We upload that and you get the little spinny circle thing. I’m just trying to wrap my head around all that has to happen for those shorts to be created. The blog to created, the title, the keywords, the. I know I’m missing some stuff because thumbnails, but all that stuff.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:38:28]:
Yeah, right. Yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot. So first we’re pulling the transcription, obviously understanding what the video is about. We’re identifying Key moments at the same time, what’s happening is we’re downloading the video in the background, and then from there the downloader and the key moments are talking to each other. So it’s like here, the, Here is the. The timestamp of this key moment. From there it’ll go find that key moment in that timestamp and then crop that video vertically.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:39:04]:
So it’ll take that video from horizontal to cropping it. And that’ll do like face detection and different elements to help crop that. Once that thing is cropped, it’ll then put the. It’ll then try to find the caption for it. So the title that should go across. It should. And then subtitles it for you. And then from there it’ll associate the title, the description, the tags, all those different elements.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:39:31]:
And then from there it’ll present it for you in the interface with an element for you to be able to edit and download that video. So that’s what’s going on for shorts. And then from there the transcription is being used. The same element is being used to generate clips. So it’s, you know, our transcription is talking to our key moments to figure out what, what should the clips look like. And then from there it’ll just crop the clips for you and be like, here’s some compelling clips that you can repurpose. And then the same is. And then the blog is just taking the transcription and then generating a blog from it.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:40:03]:
Same thing with the LinkedIn post and same thing with the thread post.

James Kademan [00:40:06]:
Got it. So there’s a lot going on there.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:40:09]:
Yeah, a lot of things. That’s why it kind of takes like 15 to 20 minutes to generate.

James Kademan [00:40:15]:
Yeah, there’s. I guess there have been times where I just. You upload the video or give it the link or whatever and then just walk away. Come back tomorrow.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:40:22]:
Yeah, the. The biggest thing that takes time is the downloading. So it depends on how long the video is. Like, the longer the video, the longer obviously it takes to download, just because it’s a lot of data going back and forth.

James Kademan [00:40:32]:
Sure. How did you end up knowing or choosing a certain AI platform? Because there’s. There’s a bunch of.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:40:42]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:40:42]:
Of varying degrees of good and bad, and they all have the pros and cons. So did you choose one and just like, hey, we’re in it, so we’re running with that.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:40:51]:
I mean, the way this thing works, these LLMs are all commodities. So, like, if one fails, then we go to the backup, et cetera. But they’re all like relatively the same. We just like OpenAI because we feel like they innovate and release things the fastest and they’re kind of the brand leader. So everyone’s kind of using them as the main element, the main LLM and then everything else is kind of a backup. So we like OpenAI for those reasons. But you know, at any moment our model could easily go to the next or you know, another model.

James Kademan [00:41:24]:
Gotcha. Tell me a story about cost from you. I mean, you have to pay to use the OpenAI and there’s every time I look at a chunk of software that’s got an AI element, I don’t want to say every time, but most of the time they have credits.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:41:44]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:41:44]:
Sometimes it’s very vague about what those credits get you.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:41:48]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:41:49]:
And it’s. And I understand to a point because on the consumer level I’m like, what does it cost for me to do X? And on the provider side you’re like, it kind of depends how much AI juice we need to get it done. So can you just talk about that whole thing?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:42:06]:
Yeah, I mean for us we kind of, we don’t, that’s a differentiator for us. We don’t do a credits based system. We do a video based system just because it communicates better for the consumer about what it’s easier to understand. Instead of like this thing cost 100 credits instead of just being like it’s five videos a month or four videos a month, whatever. So but yeah, on the back end it is a credit based system. So every time someone uses our platform, we’re paying OpenAI for that service. And that also depends. Like, like I said, our tool is a one stop shop.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:42:40]:
So like a lot of these credits depend on how much how you’re using the platforms, like are using it just for the SEO or using it for shorts, or using it for blog generation, text generation, LinkedIn generation. So all those things cost and they’re using different services. So you know, the cost will depend on, on how you use it.

James Kademan [00:43:00]:
And for, in the case of Taja, can people toggle on and off stuff that they may or may not want?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:43:07]:
No, not at the moment.

James Kademan [00:43:08]:
All or nothing kind of thing.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:43:10]:
Yeah, yeah. Or that is something down the road.

James Kademan [00:43:13]:
Okay. Yeah, I’m just trying to think. I was like, well, I could save you some, some credits because there’s certain things that you guys pump out that we don’t use. I mean, there’s some, a lot. I mean the shorts are the most important thing that we do. You definitely use. But there’s other stuff for, like, I didn’t even realize that there was a blog that was being made.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:43:33]:
Got it. Yeah, yeah.

James Kademan [00:43:34]:
No, there’s utility to that.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:43:36]:
We’re. Yeah, that is something down the line where we just want you to come in and be like, I just want shorts. And then just put the video link in. We’ll generate shorts for you. So we do want to simplify that UI UX as well and not just give you everything, but just specific thing you’re looking for.

James Kademan [00:43:51]:
How have you grown your market for Taja? Getting the word out and expanded and gotten more people on board?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:43:58]:
Yeah, I mean, in the early days, AppSumo is a big platform for us because it’s just early adopters that will, you know, use the platform and give you feedback. And it’s a very outspoken community, which is great. That also helped with, like, making YouTube videos about us, et cetera. Our affiliate program is a good level there for us too. People talk about us, they share Taja with their friends and colleagues. So that helps us grow. We run ads, just like a lot of your traditional things you see.

James Kademan [00:44:32]:
Okay. I imagine the more, from my perspective, the more users you have, the better because the platform has to be great regardless of if you have one user or 100 million users. So it’d be much better, much more lucrative to have 100 million users than to have one.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:44:50]:
Yep. No, I agree.

James Kademan [00:44:52]:
Expand. But that said, you’re only a couple years in, so it takes time to. To build and grow and get the word out and move it. So that’s why you come on a podcast like this, right?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:45:02]:
Exactly, Exactly. For sure. So appreciate you having me on.

James Kademan [00:45:06]:
Where can people find you?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:45:09]:
Yeah, just LinkedIn, Ibrahim Momed. And then my email for Taj is ibrahimaja AI.

James Kademan [00:45:15]:
Nice. And then let’s see here. Tell me the website one more time.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:45:21]:
Www.taja.AI all right, that’s T a J. AI.

James Kademan [00:45:28]:
Do you know this is a curiosity question. So AI domains are way more expensive than just the dot com one.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:45:36]:
Yeah.

James Kademan [00:45:37]:
So is AI some country code or is that just.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:45:42]:
That’s just the next wave.

James Kademan [00:45:45]:
Say that one more time.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:45:46]:
It’s the next wave.

James Kademan [00:45:48]:
Gotcha. Okay, so where.com is the one now.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:45:52]:
It’S like the AI just to differentiate that word. AI brand or AI business. It just. It’s just the next wave.

James Kademan [00:46:00]:
Gotcha. Okay. I think I saw. I want to say it was 70 some dollars.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:46:04]:
And I was like, whoa, that’s crazy.

James Kademan [00:46:06]:
That’s more than the 12 bucks I was looking at for Dot com.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:46:10]:
So there’s a whole business now just buying AI domains and waiting for someone to buy you out.

James Kademan [00:46:17]:
This was, you know, it’s interesting that you say that because this was on. I use Pork bun for domains and they have a universal dot com is whatever, 12 bucks, something like that. And universal whatever. AI I think was 72.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:46:32]:
Wow.

James Kademan [00:46:33]:
And then they have the other ones, you know, dot, I don’t know, dot cake or dot PI, whatever, doesn’t matter. They all had different prices. But I was like, whoa, that’s a margin.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:46:41]:
Yeah, yeah. No, this, this world’s crazy.

James Kademan [00:46:44]:
So interesting, for some reason in my head, AI was or is a country code of like, I don’t know, Antarctica or something like that where it just. I happen to be lucky that those are the initials for artificial intelligence.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:46:58]:
Oh, interesting. I didn’t know that.

James Kademan [00:47:00]:
But at any rate, maybe like, maybe that country’s making money. I don’t know. Let’s see here. This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. We are locally underwritten by the Bank of Sun Prairie, Calls On Call Extraordinary Answering Service as well as the Bold Business Book. If you could do us a huge favor, give us a big old thumbs up, subscribe and of course share it with your entrepreneurial friends, your influencer friends. And even if you got some videos that you want to make some shorts out of, Taja is the place to go. Ibrahim, can you tell us again those five elements that Taj is putting out?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:47:39]:
Yeah. So you put in a video, we’ll optimize it for SEO so your title, description, tags, thumbnails. We’ll repurpose the video in a short clips text based content like a blog, LinkedIn post, thread, post and then you can schedule it out across all your different platforms.

James Kademan [00:47:55]:
That is crazy. And tell me about the platforms. Are there any.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:47:58]:
You’re talking Twitter, LinkedIn, Twitter LinkedIn X or sorry, X’s Twitter X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

James Kademan [00:48:09]:
Gotcha. All right, is Snapchat on there?

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:48:12]:
No, Snapchat’s not okay.

James Kademan [00:48:13]:
I don’t know the game. That’s all good. Let’s see what else we got here. My name is James Cademan and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls On Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country as well as the Bold Business Book book for the entrepreneur and all of us available wherever fine books are sold. I would like to thank you, our wonderful listeners as well as our guest, Ibrahim Mohammed, founder of Taja Ibrahim. I’m going to ask you for that website one more time just for fun.

Ibrahim Mohmed [00:48:43]:
Yeah, for sure. www.taja AI. That’s Taja AI.

James Kademan [00:48:49]:
Perfect. I love it. Past episodes can be found morning, noon and night at the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome. And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.