Episode 835 | The Right Way to Use AI in Your Startup Marketing

You're listening to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. In this episode, I talk with Taylor Hendrickson. He's been doing performance marketing online for well over a decade, including ecommerce, b to c, b to b, and has bought tens of millions of dollars in ads over the years. A lot of he said it was, both Meta and Google when I asked him in the interview. But I've known Taylor for about a decade, and he's just extremely knowledgeable when it comes to copywriting and making incredible offers, general marketing, getting people interested in something and actually paying for it. And Taylor is one of our coaches at SAS Institute, sasinstitute.com, if you're doing at least 1,000,000 in ARR and you're a SaaS company looking for a coach like Taylor. Before we dive into our conversation, I've been writing emails again, essays that I'm sending out to my email list. I haven't blogged regularly since twenty ten, twenty eleven, and I started a few months ago writing my thoughts. And these are new thoughts. Some overlap lightly with the podcast, but a lot of them are new thoughts, frameworks, etcetera that I'm mulling over. You can head to robwalling.com/emails if you're interested. And with that, you'll get a free sample chapter of the SAS playbook. But, realistically, the list is, you know, on my on my site says, hey. You want some proven cheat codes for growing your SAS in 2026, marketing channels that actually work, building a sustainable moat, refining your pricing. That's the kind of stuff that I'm talking about when I send these emails. It's one email a week, and it's an essay of my original thinking. Rob walling dot com slash emails if you're interested. And with that, let's dive into my conversation with Taylor Hendrickson where we cover several topics. But one of the ones that we focused on a lot was where founders of all types should be using AI in your marketing and where you shouldn't be using AI. And I really appreciated the back and forth that it was kind of, impromptu. I had some questions and an outline of what we're gonna cover, but it was so interesting to me the way Taylor was thinking about it. And then he and I piggybacked off each other a bit, thinking through using AI in marketing operations, content generation, all that kind of stuff. So that's that's a highlight of this conversation. Let's dive in. Taylor Hendrickson, welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us. Thanks for having me. Yeah. It's great to finally have you on, man. So you and I have known each other for at least ten years, maybe maybe eleven or twelve. You and I have hung out at, Rodeum. Chris Yates's, he had a mastermind going, and and we hung out for a weekend at one point. You spoke at MicroConf several years ago, Talked about was it funnels and ad ad stuff? Everything …