raw behind the scenes: AI, marketing, growth

Summary

a raw, unscripted update from the trenches. no hook, no script, just what is actually happening across my companies.

the podcast is becoming the most raw source of truth on me and my businesses. I am going deeper on YouTube with scripted AI and systems tutorials, and I am not going to push those audio-only here where you cannot see the screen. so this feed is for stories and the behind-the-scenes version.

why AI, why now: I am not chasing a bandwagon. I have spent 15 years building online businesses where technical ability was the price of entry, and I am a business operations guy at heart. AI just lets me hand the implementation to Claude and optimize every company faster. I share what is actually working on YouTube and in the free Better OS Skool community.

find atom: the smallest thing that gets someone in the door. most coaches and operators overcomplicate the pitch, “come change your whole life.” save that for your about page and your mission. your marketing has to be the single smallest promise the person actually wants. for better., the atom is the newsletter. strip everything else away and the marketing gets easy.

and what I am building: rebuilding jerred.com as the central hub, with AI doing the SEO heavy lifting (no AI slop, just optimized real content, kept current automatically). start somewhere with AI, optimize your site, and when you do not know the next step, ask Claude. go get your hands dirty. try harder.

Transcript

the podcast is the raw source of truth now

what’s up everybody? this is going to be a very raw, behind the scenes podcast. I want to update you on what I have been doing, what is going on behind the scenes, why there has been a bit of a break in podcast content, and everything in between.

first, podcast housekeeping, for the people who really like listening. I appreciate your feedback. what happened is I started to dive way more into YouTube. I do not want to push my YouTube content to an audio-only version when it does not make sense, and I am doing a lot more tutorials on AI and systems for business over there. it does not make sense to push those YouTube audio versions to a podcast.

I know people who do that and I hate it, because they say “hey, now just look at this,” and you cannot see it. so I am not going to do that here. I am just going to record this type of podcast. love it or hate it, I am going to be telling stories from in the trenches. honestly, the podcast is going to become the most raw source of truth out there when it comes to me and my businesses. that is the expectation moving forward.

the reason is, to gain any traction on social media or YouTube, you have to be quite scripted. you have to nail the hook, you have to keep people engaged, and I am starting to learn that game and I am okay playing it. but on the audio side, the podcast side, I do not want to do that. I did not spend any time coming up with a hook for this one. I just want very raw thoughts from me to you on what is actually happening and how I am scaling multiple companies.

why AI, why now

the first thing I want to talk about is that I am talking a lot more about AI. you will see it on YouTube and Instagram. am I just trying to jump on an AI bandwagon? the answer is no. I have been a business systems and operations guy. I have been front end and forward facing, CEO, COO, all of these different roles. but AI is opening the door to so many things.

where I have a unique advantage is that I grew up building online businesses when technical ability was a requirement. you had to know how to edit your audio podcast, write at least basic HTML for a website to work the way you wanted, and build complex automations yourself, because none of it was easy before. so over the last 15 years I picked up a lot of technical skills. I am more technical than most people think.

but the technical ability I have is not “I can write a computer program from scratch.” that is not me. it is still business operations, and I think that lends itself really well to AI, because now I know the ideas and the frameworks, and Claude Code can go implement them for me. I want to share what I am doing, because there are the AI nerds out there talking about building SaaS software in a weekend, and honestly, they are not really doing that.

what I am actually doing is implementing AI across all of my businesses so we can optimize them. I share it on YouTube, and we have a Skool community now called Better OS. it is all free. on a weekly basis I show you some of the things I am doing that are hitting, how I am optimizing my businesses with AI. so go get involved if you are not already.

I will be the first to admit I am not some AI expert going to all the AI conferences who cares what tokens are. I just want to optimize my businesses in the quickest, most efficient way possible. I knew the only way to learn AI was to go in and do it. I cannot watch someone else’s video or read an article, it is too new and moving too fast. I just had to get in and do it, and I want to share the process as I go. this is not a major shift, it is business as usual with a new tool.

the human element still matters

I am also going to keep talking about the human element. a lot of what people enjoy on the podcast is the straight-up truth: you have to do hard things if you want to get better. there is no easy path. AI is making some things easier, but it is also making people dumber, and there is a lot of hard work left to do. so there will be plenty of that here too.

find atom

now, behind the scenes, this is happening across multiple companies and we are seeing a lot of success. there is a principle I call finding atom. think about this for your own business: what is the smallest thing that can get someone in the door to work with you?

I work with a lot of people who run businesses that improve other human beings, coaches and clinicians who want to change lives, and we are all passionate about that. nothing wrong with it. but sometimes we overcomplicate how we want to help people. “come into my coaching program and I am going to change your life.” I cannot tell you how many times I have had to talk people off that ledge. they say “it is a fitness coaching program, but I also talk to them about their marriage and everything else.”

I get it. you want the whole well-rounded person concept, but you are going to scare people off. if you end up hitting all of those things in your practice, that is great, go build better human beings, that is the mission. but when it comes to marketing, that is not what you talk about. stuff those things into your about page and your mission. when you are marketing, you need to find atom. atom is the smallest part you can break something down to. go find what that is for your company, and that becomes your marketing message.

take Garage Gym Athlete. we talk about killing comfort, playing the long game, being well-rounded, taking care of your relationships, the whole-person concept. that is what we dive into on the podcast. but our front-end marketing cannot be that. it has to be: we can get you stronger, faster, decrease your mile time, help you lose weight, help you gain muscle. all the boring cliche stuff nobody likes, because as business owners we all feel more sophisticated than that. “I am more than the guy who helps you lose 15 pounds.” great, but you still start with the smallest possible thing.

we started applying this across all of our companies. all of them do quite a bit, and even our deliverables have 15 different ways we help you once you are in. but in our marketing we keep stripping away more and more, down to the bare essentials: what does the person I am talking to actually want? once you figure that out, marketing gets so much easier. if you have a lot of customers, go back and look at what actually got them in the door, have conversations with them, and center your marketing around that smallest possible thing.

I talk a lot about newsletters on this podcast. everyone needs a successful newsletter, it is where everyone can start, and it is my lowest-end offering. is that all I do? absolutely not. we can transform a business, set up KPI dashboards, scale with systems, two or three times your revenue without increasing lead volume just by improving your operating system. but I am not going to talk about all that in an ad. the ad is “come make more money and get more leads with a really well-polished newsletter.” that is the atom for better. start thinking about that for yourself. we are seeing a lot of success with it.

what I’m building: jerred.com

lastly, what I am working on right now. I put out content on YouTube about how to build websites with AI, so go check that out, I am Jerred Moon on YouTube. I am rebuilding jerred.com to be the central hub. you have to spell it correctly, J-E-R-R-E-D dot com. I do not know if the new site will be live by the time you hear this, but within seven days of this episode launching it will be, and it is going to be so much better.

what is crazy is how much AI helped build that site, and how much easier it makes search engine optimization. this is not me filling my website with AI slop, I would never do that. it is just becoming a central hub, optimized. think about any content you have in your business. I have tutorials on how to build these sites, but you need to embrace Claude and AI in general.

I know a lot about SEO, because it is how my first business ever got started. I had no money, so I had to rely completely on search engine optimization, and I got really good at it. so I know what I need to implement on my personal brand site, and we are doing it. the plan is to continually update it and stay on top of those things without me having to do much. how AI can optimize what I create and keep everything updated automatically is just insanity.

go get your hands dirty

my message to you is to start where I started. I am getting into AI and talking about it more because I am jumping in and doing all these things, and I will share what I can publicly on YouTube and in the Skool community. but I urge you to start somewhere. start with optimizing your website with AI, the basic search engine optimization stuff. find the smallest step to get integrated into AI somehow, and it will go a long way. go get your hands dirty. this is not complicated.

when I run into a problem and do not know how to do something, the first step is just to go to Claude and ask what the first step is. I have free trainings in the Skool community and on YouTube, but you do not even need those. you can go straight to Claude and say “here is my website platform, I want to optimize it for search engine optimization and I want it automated, what can we do?” and it will start walking you through the whole thing. that is how I build basically everything. I either know what can be automated and take action, or I do not, and Claude teaches me.

here has been my process with AI and websites. I started in just the chat window, asking questions back and forth. then Claude Cowork came online and I thought, “okay, now I can automate a lot of things.” Cowork is amazing, and I think it is the best place for most business owners, the least intimidating spot where you can still have a ton of automations. now I am in Claude Code doing really complex coding type stuff. Claude is doing the complex work, I am just giving it the prompts and the tasks.

the reason I say all of that is this: if I had not decided to set aside time every single day or week to get better at these things, I would never have made that full transition. I would not be launching this new site that I think is going to be amazing for SEO, across multiple companies.

try harder

so go get your hands dirty with AI. just go learn something. if you do not know how, you do not need to find a YouTube video, just ask Claude how to do it. and if you want to see what we are implementing, join my Skool community. go to better.biz and click the community link in the header. that is it. if I had to sum all of this up, what am I trying to tell you to do? something I have not told you in a while. try harder.