Edward and Nicole chat all things tech and virality. From going viral on social media, growth hacks, and networking as a form of social growth, we dive into a true tech talk for those seeking to grow their business via networking and social media.

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Website: edwardsturm.com

Instagram: @edward.builds

TikTok: @build_in_public

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Edward, welcome to the Work Wealth and Travel podcast. I am so excited to have you on today to talk all things crypto, ai, social media, decentralization, business travel, all of the things. So, Edward, you are a founder from New York who has been going viral on TikTok a lot recently. We are going to dive into this and so much more today, but before we dive into everything, why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, your story, and how you got to where you are today.

And during that time I was promoting at New York City nightclubs which is really crazy. And instead of going into instead of continuing with YouTube, which is probably what I should have done I, I decided to go into tech because a lot of my friends from nightlife were getting into tech.

And I got really interested in search engine optimization. I got interested in that because I made a video information product about how to go viral on YouTube. And I made this with a friend and it wasn't showing on YouTube on Google. And I'm like, how do I make the show on Google? And then I got just really interested in ss e o so I went to a really big company to do SS e o.

I was doing it for like a d p and Proctor and Gamble. I started my own agency here in New York. I was doing it for Microsoft and Time Inc. And a lot of SMBs. And that was going really well. I also had like crazy, I had like heads of marketing agencies all over the world writing articles from my personal website, Edward serm.com.

Really a wild. And I was running several meetups about marketing. It was really like a wild time. And then one of my mentors from meetups, he showed me how to start all these meetup groups and who was teaching me about like front-end programming and how it related to ss e o. He asked me to get into blockchain with him, blockchain and crypto.

I kept saying, no, no, no, like the ss e o thing that I'm doing is going so well. And then I found out that one of my old friends from New York City nightlife ended up becoming a founding member of Ethereum. And so I'm like, okay, well I guess I have this like easy in, into crypto and I have to take advantage of this.

I'm from Brooklyn originally. I went to college in Boston, but aside from that,, I pretty much like never left New York City and my friends would go to Europe, my friends would go to South America and I would say, why do I have to leave New York City? Why should I leave New York City as everyone and everything?

And I lived in all sorts of different places. I came back last year for three months. Then I spent the last, I guess like 10 and a half months in Romania, Italy, Spain, and Poland. And now I'm back in New York and I don't know where I'll be next doing some other things. Now we, we have an AI startup that, I mean, it's just a voice startup, but we we're like the first company to enable speech to speech.

Every other company that has tried this has done speech to text, to speech. We do speech to speech where you can speak and transform your voice and your emotions and your tone into any other person. So, so we just put that in. I'm trying to make that go viral on TikTok. Oh, and TikTok, I don't know how it happened.

I have like 33,000 like tech and business viewers on TikTok. Also doing, starting to do well on, on Instagram and YouTube. And and then I have another like another habit building app called Commit Club, which we finally started to get users on. And yeah, I guess I'm doing a lot of things and I've done a lot of things and I committed, just like yesterday, I said, you know what?

I wanna like really take advantage of me being back in New York. And so I committed to going to five events a day. Sorry, not a day. That's, that'd be crazy. Five events a week, five events a week. I wanna go to five events a week. Last night I went to an event. I got, because of my, this, this was crazy because of my TikTok.

It was like my first invi like invitation is press and I got a press pass to go see the founder of Duolingo speak, the founder and c e o of Duolingo speak. And today I'm going to an event tomorrow I'm going to like a Forbes conference. And yeah, life is just like, I was thinking this morning over breakfast, I'm like, oh my God.

I personally am swept up in how crazy my life is. My, my problem is I, I swing in like one direction. I'm either, I'm either the guy who never leaves New York or the guy who never comes back to the United States,

So you mentioned so many things, but I would like to first touch on kind of the tech space and have a chat about that. Now you have a somewhat polarizing statement that I would love to dive into. I think this is, especially as of the last few months, the hot question.

So is s e o on Google Dead, I know that this is something that you have questioned, and so I would love to hear your take on this and then how ss e o on social media plays into this, how AI plays into this.

I did SS e o for, I ran the New York City Search Engine optimization meetup. I think at this point, I, I mean I've literally traveled, through Europe and Eastern Europe, meeting other SEOs. I think I'm probably one of the best SEOs in the world. I can say that pretty confidently now. I just wrote an article about how search experience optimization would be.

The new will be the new search engine optimization, and it was picked up in and actually put in my favorite daily s e o newsletter, which I'm really proud of. Search Engine Roundtable. Amazing for s e o News. And basically what I said is, you know, you need to now optimize your website for the experience of searching and not for search engines.

And a lot of searchers, including myself, have moved to asking conversational AI their queries. And so, s e o, like, I think actually s e o is in two years. It's like the traffic that webmasters get from Google will be so much lower than it is now. And in 10 years I think we're all just gonna be relying on AI assistance for our questions.

That's like you write a, you write a long article about how to do that. That is top of funnel content. Top of funnel content is people are trying to learn, they're trying, they, they don't know much about a subject and they're learning about that subject. They read something, it brings 'em down another rabbit hole, which brings 'em down another rabbit hole and so on and so forth.

Mid-funnel is like, maybe they might think about purchasing and they're kind of just exploring that. And bottom of funnel content is, or a bottom of funnel search is somebody knows what they want, but they don't necessarily know the vendor who will sell it to them. They know that they want a certain type of shoe that's good for their feet, but they don't know that, for example, Puma is the best brand for them or something like that.

And so they just search exactly what they need, exactly what they want to buy or use, and then the brand comes up. That's bottom of funnel. Top of funnel. Again, if someone is just exploring, there's really no purchase intent. Top of funnel content is typically a lot longer, and it's what a lot of our searches in within chat G P T or Bard, which is Google's chat, G P T competitor.

That's what our, our searches are looking like. The thing about top of funnel content is it brings the most traffic to a website. It's not qualified traffic, but it can be converted into like newsletter signups and different points. It can be converted into people who can move through your funnel. It takes a lot of effort to do, but the flip side is you get a lot of traffic from it, a ton of traffic, and it can be, if done right, it can be really, really lucrative.

But now, because so many people are and will continue to move away from doing searches within Google for top of funnel queries, explorational queries. They're moving to these conversational ai, which don't cite sources. And even if they did, they give such concise answers. You don't need to go to the source to check it out.

That writing these long explorational articles that explain everything, these top of funnel articles, it's no longer lucrative like it was before. And it used to be very lucrative. It used to be what all the Ss e o consultants at via on. But what is still lucrative and what will still remain even for generative ai, even for bottom of funnel searches for people looking to buy, is writing articles with the direct language of what your user or customer is looking to buy or use.

If you're like, in our case, we have a voice app, which you record your voice, it stores it in the cloud, then you can share it with the link anywhere, and it gets a lot more sophisticated than that. Now we have like AI voices built in. One of our early use uses were teachers who wanted to record themselves reading, and they would literally just Google, like have my students record themselves reading.

That was an actual search term. It got us like 500 users a month, and I made a page because I saw that teachers were using this. I made a page for have your students record themselves reading. That is a bottom of funnel search term. And now as a, as a result, when you search things like that on chat G B T or binging AI chat, which you use the GPT four or Bard, in a lot of scenarios, we come up for these bottom of funnel searches.

So that is still lucrative for for webmasters. But the, the top of funnel thing, like writing these, these explorational articles, these articles that explain to, to people who are exploring a topic that's no longer lucrative. And it actually poses a very interesting and a very big threat to the internet as we know it.

I was on a Twitter space a few weeks ago talking with an AI engineer at Google about this, and Google is really worried because if there is no incentive for webmasters, people like you and me for online writers, people who have websites to write these articles explaining how to do new things, where are people going to learn?

Well, you can make the argument, you know, people will will learn from TikTok videos and they'll learn from YouTube, and then there'll be transcripts and the AI can just use those transcripts. But I don't think enough content is made on those platforms to explain a lot of different things. And I, I still think like articles are pretty useful.

And TikTok could easily like, A lot of these platforms could and probably will. I mean, YouTube is owned by Google, so maybe it'll make it so like Bing can't crawl YouTube transcripts, Bing can't use, or, or Chachi PT can't use YouTube's transcripts, but Bard can. And then who's gonna be able to use TikTok transcripts and, and it gets really messy as people stop putting out as much content.

A lot of searches are now done on TikTok as well. And that's been drawing away a lot of market share. And so like the search engine landscape is going to become way more divided in fractionalized. And so to answer your question, is s e o dead? I actually think yeah. It's pretty, it's pretty dead.

I think the best thing to invest in and, and this is something that we lightly touched upon before, is like, I think a lot about how to hedge against ai. And there are like two ways to do this. Even if you have your own company, that's hard. I think one of the best ways to hedge against AI is to have a personal brand and a story associated with that personal brand.

Be someone who people know and they care about your story. They care about your life. They care about what's happening in your life.

I'm curious, so how did your partner blow up on TikTok? What was the video about? So the first video, we went to a football game, soccer game here in South America. And it was a rainy day. There was nobody at the game, and we make content every single day. So this was just like his daily piece of content.

And he in Spanish, of course. And he was saying, you know, like, there's nobody at this game. Like it's a professional first tier football club and there's no way get this name. He was, he was saying it in Spanish. In Spanish. Yeah. Yeah. Because everyone here speaks Spanish, so that is also kind of a key component to it.

But you know, everyone here is so passionate about football that it immediately just blew up. And then all of the clubs were contacting him, wanting him to go to their stadiums. Wow. And he started kind of going, so we've been to many of the stadiums here now.

What a story that's, see, like that type of thing that TikTok brings, . That social media and short form content brings when you go viral because of the algorithms. It's so incredible and like I mean, I wouldn't have, I don't think I would've gotten into this event last night with the founder of and c e o of Duolingo had it not been for social media.

It was at capacity. I learned about it literally a few hours before it started, I thought. And I thought it was gonna be some like, I don't know, some like event at an auditorium, and there was gonna be like a ton of people and all the people were gonna be like starting their careers. But actually it was, well, it was a small group of handpicked, well-established people and, or like a really exclusive event.

I've been to cool events before, but this specific event, , I got into it because I, I have this social media and it's amazing when that happens.

So I think you'll, I think you will like my reasoning for why TikTok is the biggest social media hack

you need to be doing this. I'm gonna tell you it, you're gonna, you're gonna be like, wow, mind blown. I picked TikTok to start on because I didn't really know any better. And it was just a lot of my friends really loved TikTok too

and I guess I would've done it the same way had I known, I I really like my workflow now. So I, I started like, experimenting with TikTok when I was living in Rome in October last year, and I opened up some TikTok and I was just making, I said, I'm gonna make like several videos every day, just kind of experiment, try to learn how to make videos on TikTok, like what TikTok likes, all these things. I have to say why I did that. Are you familiar with the movement, like build in public with the build in public movement? It's really big on Twitter. I think it even started on Twitter, so build in public. It's, it's like to show what you are working on day in and day out, especially if you're doing like a tech startup.

So it's to show what you're building and it's a publicly show what you're building. It's, it's the opposite of stealth mode. It's, it's, you, you had this big success, you closed this, this big client, or you failed and this is what you learned. Or you, you added this button to your landing page. Or you, you just engage, embarked on a new ss e o campaign or a paid media campaign that build in public and just talking, talking, talking about everything that you're doing, where you're going, where you are, what you're learning.

That's build in public and it's huge. On Twitter, there is a huge build in public community on Twitter. Even Elon Musk, probably the biggest build in public person. He's always talking about what's happening with his companies and he is talking about his plans for Twitter as an example. And, but it's also very popular for small people who are just trying to get m r r monthly recurring revenue for their startups, for their tech startups.

And so when I was, when I first got to Rome, it was, I think like the be, it was the end of September and I said, okay, I wanna try build in public on Twitter. 'cause I really like this community. And I tried it and it was just a lot of work and it was very hard to stand out. It's a very saturated market on on Twitter.

The frustration that I was feeling there, plus like a lot of, I was going on a lot of podcasts, all these podcasters were like, you need to have your, you need to have your own social media 'cause you're an amazing speaker. You, you need to like be sharing your voice. My friends were telling me to get on TikTok, so I started TikTok.

And I did that for two weeks. And then I started thinking, and it was just a random TikTok, I was really actually was talking about digital nomad stuff. I was talking about traveling. I was talking about why you don't want to be a digital nomad, but instead you wanna be a digital somad. It's why you wanna like stay in one place for like a long amount of time instead of bouncing around like I was doing.

So then when I got to Barcelona after like I'd been on TikTok for two weeks, I was thinking like, okay, build in public is saturated on Twitter. Maybe it's not saturated on TikTok. And so I, I did some searches for just Build in public on TikTok and I saw that it wasn't, and I, and I named my channel Build in Public 'cause I thought it'd be cool if you search build in public on, because if you search build in public on Twitter, it's very competitive.

And I thought it'd be cool if you search build in public on TikTok. If I was like the first one to come up. It's just some, let's let's my ss e o Mind. And so. I named my channel Build in Public. Now, if you search Build in Public on TikTok, of course I'm the first one to come up and, which isn't as much of a, an accomplishment as I thought it would be.

I should have just like created my own brand. But anyway, I said, you know what? I'm just gonna make videos every day. I started this new channel first day in Barcelona. I said, I'm just gonna make videos every day about what I'm doing for my startups, for my brand. And, and it's really just, actually it was just my startups and it was one single startup at the time.

It was a startup commit club, which we still operate, which just started getting daily active users. Really exciting. And I said, yeah, I'm gonna make videos for this one startup. I did that for a month, I think it was like day three or four, and I'm like, well, I'm putting out these videos every day and I feel like

I'm leaving views and awareness and subscribers on the table by not having the videos come out on every other platform. 'cause every other platform uses short form mobile video like TikTok. And, and this is where the biggest hack comes, comes. And so I, I actually think I searched on TikTok, like, is there a way to repurpose content?

And I found this tool reuse video.com and it makes it so you connect all of your social medias to it, and then when you put out one video on one platform, it comes out on every other platform. The video that you saw on my IG reels about Twitter ads, I made that on TikTok that originally came out on TikTok, and then it came out without the watermark on IG reels.

It also came out without the watermark. On Facebook reels, on Twitter, on Pinterest, on YouTube shorts, and on a LinkedIn page. And so I'm growing on every social media platform just by putting out videos into TikTok.

And it's like I am their biggest power user. I'm also their biggest affiliate. The the reuse video.com is an affiliate link, but I like, I shamelessly promote it because I think it's just it game changer

And it takes me 15 to 20 minutes to make a single video, sometimes less. I made a video in a minute and a half and it got 2.3 million views,

I shoot all of my videos in TikTok, I edit them in TikTok, and then I put them out and then they come out everywhere else without the watermark. It is the biggest game changer. It makes it so easy to make videos every day. And so I, I started these videos just trying to get users to this one startup commit club.

After a month I'm like, what else am I? And these videos were appearing everywhere else. And then after a month, I wanted more things to talk about. So I started talking about other things that I was working on. And I slowly then started like talking about like tech news. I ended up making the most viewed video in the world on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.

I've had many videos that have gotten millions of views and I'm growing steadily on all platforms. I, I went viral on Instagram recently from a video that was repurposed from TikTok to Instagram. Just increased my follower account a ton. And I think to actually Instagram is the best for building community.

It's the best for building community. I love Instagram to death. Twitter, now I'm learning is I'm figuring out how to do Twitter. Twitter ads are really cheap. Like, like we talked about. I got a, for a, for $1 ad spend, I got 135,000 impressions in 40, 41 followers for a dollar ad spend on Twitter. 'cause Twitter has these new ads now, which are follower ads.

The call to action is a follower button. And, and, and the only reason it's so cheap is because everyone is hating on Twitter now, and it will not be like this for very long. I think Twitter ads are not gonna stay this inexpensive. And yeah. So, but, but I think, I think everyone should be building their own brand. The other thing is a lot of people, 'cause I've told so many people about, about this, I'm like, you should be doing this.

And the biggest concern that I hear is I am nervous about, about like, my friends seeing me trying to learn how to make these videos, which is very fair. And I was nervous too, but no one saw. And the reason for that is because you don't have to on on a platform like TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts, you don't have to do promotion for your videos.

You don't have to let anyone know that you have an account. The algorithms will test your, will, push out the videos and test them against other videos on the platform. And if one video is good, the algorithm will just push it out. You don't have to share your content with anybody, your friends, your family.

No one's gonna know if your content sucks, no one's gonna know. If your content's good, fine. It blows up. And then maybe your friends will see you, but at least they'll see you because you're going viral. Everyone should be on TikTok, IG reels, Facebook reels, YouTube shorts, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, like everyone should be doing this.

It's a good hedge against ai. If you do it every day, you will be shocked at where you'll be in six months. One year in two years, you'll be shocked. And I'm only six months into my journey and I'm shocked. I'm shocked. Biggest hack.

I shoot it, I put in my cuts. I like do the cuts in TikTok. I add transcriptions in TikTok, like the TikTok app. It transcribes it for you. I edit the transcriptions. I keep it literally on the default style sent and just leave it in the center.

Then I find like, trending music or not, or just music that I think is good. And I add them music from the TikTok app. And I put on four hashtags and that's it. It goes up and the description that I put for the video goes up everywhere else as well. Yeah, I, because for me, my biggest K p I is fun.

But for me it's just so easy to do it inside of TikTok.

Where can people find you and your personal brand online?

Edward Dot builds on Instagram ins. Instagram is my favorite channel now. Edward Do Builds. On TikTok, I am build in public. So if you search, build in public, I proudly am the first thing that comes up. Not that amazing for getting followers anymore, but it is, it is cool. It's like a bragging thing. And Twitter, I'm on show progress.

You can that's my handle on Twitter or you can add me on LinkedIn. My web website is edwards term.com. I have everything on it. I just like hearing from people. If someone listened to me talk and found what I said interesting, like, please say hi. 'cause I, I really like, I like to talk, I like to hear, I like to listen.