0-200k Subs with a Content Ideation Workflow [#12 Chase Hannegan]

Today, I think you're hopefully learning how to better use AI automation when it comes to content creation. Like everyone talks about AI slop, especially when it comes to, hey, just putting out AI generated content. Yet at the same time, you do see AI content out there that's really, really strong. So how do you actually use AI automation in the content creation process while still maintaining some control? We're actually going to talk about a system, a system that you can download and get used out of right away. You're going to get some amazing value by going and downloading the template and then inside the template library. In just over a year, Chase Hannigan has grown his following from zero to 200,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok using this content ideation in a den workflow that we'll be covering and giving away today. He is the founder of Chase AI, where he helps companies replace busy work with automation, AI agents, and systems that actually move the needle. Do you have a favorite workflow on that? You don't need to sit in a classroom for four years learning Python syntax. You just don't. Okay, what about the ideation side? What systems do you specialize in? What things do you primarily teach and train? Is there a favorite use case for RAG? Attention is one of the most valuable resources and everyone's fighting for it. So how do you optimize for it? Chase, so awesome to have you on the podcast. For anybody that is listening to this podcast episode, we have a special thing for you that we're going to be doing differently here. We're going to be talking about one of the best workflow in it in systems that Chase has built. And we're going to be making this available to you at the end of the podcast so that you can get up and running using his system all based around content ideation. So Chase, I want to kick it to you. What are the people going to be learning by going through this episode today? Yeah, thanks for having me on, Dylan. Yeah, today I think you'll hopefully learn how to better use AI automation when it comes to content creation. It's an area that's really exploding right now, but tons of different outcomes, right? Everyone talks about AI slop, especially when it comes to, hey, just putting out AI-generated content. Yet at the same time, you do see AI content out there that's really strong. So how do you actually use AI automation in the content creation process while still maintaining some control and making sure you aren't just a slop generation machine? Because it's harder than it looks. I think because AI is so easy to get into right now that it's easy to make slop. But like with any skill set, like I can give my one-year-old a paintbrush and I can give an artist a paintbrush. One's going to be lovely, but slop filled. And the other one is going to be just lovely. Love to dive into the system. Talk about it. And one thing I want to address here is going online to IDA is very powerful, but you can get distracted by the AI algorithms and then you wake up seven hours later and you wonder what happened to that period of your life. So excited for this journey. Let's talk about this most important piece, ideation, and how did you do it manually? And then if you want to talk to me about the systems that you've now built in with N8N to replace that important but difficult task with automations. I think manually was what you're talking about, where you just end up doom scrolling for hours and you tell yourself you're researching ideas, but in reality, you just wasted four hours doing nothing. And again, you are at the whim of the algorithm. And a lot of it depends on the niche you're into in terms of the content. And AI especially, I think it's difficult because there's something new every 30 seconds and everything is overhyped. And so you have no idea what's actually worth it to talk about and what's not. So there's a lot of data you need to filter through across a lot of different platforms, right? Should you just be on Twitter all day? Should you just be looking at stuff on Reddit? is a YouTube and you can't be everywhere at once. So manually it was, yeah, it was essentially just doom scrolling and hoping I found some inspiration that way. And I figured, Hey, how about we automate this stuff? Cause it, you have to do everything manually first, right? To really get the most out of automation. So after doing it manually for way too long, I was like, okay, I know who I like. I know whose content I like. I know where most of the ideas are coming from. What if I just automate this across these big four platforms, which for me was Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and then just like a general catch-all with perplexity. And so I knew what the sources were. And then all it does now is this automation scrapes data from those sources and those specific content creators. It then creates a report based on all that data saying, hey, here's what's going on the last 24 hours. Here's news that's trending. And then here's like actual links to the source material. And then I take it a step further where it then takes that information and then writes content scripts for me. So, okay, here's a hook. Here's the body. Here's a call to action. And the idea isn't to just speak to that exactly and just read off a script, but it gets you somewhere in a 50, 60, 70% solution rather than starting at zero every day. What I love about this also is if you're trying to play the game of content creation and build a brand or just build something online. And one of the things that are most important that will serve you is being able to create a channel that is valuable, but you have to prime yourself every day and remember that this thing is important to me. I was thinking about it more from a, my mind drifted off a little bit because I've been really big into home assistance, home automation kind of stuff is I'd love to have a speaker turn on as I'm waking up. It's like, it's a good morning, Dylan. You have your report of content creations. There is a new hot thing coming out of Google right now. It's called nano banana super pro get, get cracking. The day is young. I that's where my mind went in it, but I love the idea of getting these daily reports. I haven't built out a data report system, something I need to actively go in and look at. So we talked about what the system is. You maybe will open it up, take a look at it real quick, walk us through a couple of things. We can talk about some stuff. Yeah, let's do it. And by the way, this is my first time doing a screen share on the podcast. If people find it interesting and valuable, please comment down below. Let me know that you are. We will do more of these. If you don't comment that you don't like these, we may or may not do less of them. We'll see. This is the guinea pig. Yes, we are testing things right now. And this is a feedback loop. It would be really helpful to find out. So here's a look at this behemoth. and we'll zoom in some more so you can get a better idea of what's actually important. But big picture, again, what's the whole purpose of this whole thing? The whole purpose is it's going to look at all the trending data across different social media platforms, and it's going to create two things. One, that daily report that tells us, hey, here's what's actually trending. Here's the general articles and their sources. And then B, the actual content scripts, so you don't have to start from zero. So as you can see, it's divvied up into four big sections. And the first section we have up here is YouTube. And I'll just go in detail on the YouTube part because they all follow the same process. So it's on a daily trigger. You could have it run even 12 hours if you wanted to. And so first thing, it just gets the data. Now, for a lot of these, we use Appify, which is just a marketplace for web scrapers. But there are some built-in N8N native tools that do it already, like the YouTube one, right? So it just gets the videos. And then in terms of what videos it gets, we just filter it based on the length at first, and then based also on a query. So in this case, it's N8N. This could also be AI. This could be whatever your particular niche is. So it's the same as going into YouTube and just typing in a search bar, whatever that query is. And we also specify the length because we don't really care about shorts as much when we're looking for long-term stuff. From there, we then get the transcripts, right? We just find the videos, we get the transcripts, and then we do a transcript analysis. So that is using just a basic LLM chain. This case, I'm using OpenAI and it's just a mini model. It has a pretty long system prompt, right? We get pretty detailed as for what we actually want, but essentially, okay, summarize it, tell me what's important, and then figure out if there's something I would actually care about and make content on. From there, it then goes into two places. We track that inside of Airtable, but then it gets sent over here to the report generation. And if you look at this automation at large, that process is repeated for every single social media platform, right? Find the platform, right? Reddit, Twitter, Perplexity, do the analysis, and then push that analysis down the line to the report. And the Reddit, Twitter, Perplexity, Are those more, there's two buckets it looks like. One are content creators that I want to keep abreast of and what they're doing. And the other ones, are those news sources looking for trending new AI topics and or other topics? Essentially. So for the Reddit scraper, it's specifically looking at the N8N subreddit, for example. So this is more like Reddit's kind of interesting because you'll get topics there that are from people who aren't really content creators, but oftentimes have really good insights, right? These are like real users. And then the perplexity section is really just a catch-all, right? What's some big news stuff that maybe is going on that I didn't find from the creators? Got it. So I'm looking at now three buckets because I was thinking of in two buckets. One is content creators. The other one is news and ideas like Nano Banana Super Pro. And the other one is communities of people that are like jiving around a topic. Yeah. The Reddit stuff is almost like the grassroots stuff popping up. Or astroturfing. Yeah. Awesome. So for people that are listening to this podcast, right now we are looking at an NADN workflow that is available for you that Chase is going to be putting up in the future into the template library for us. There's four major categories that are basically pulling data from YouTube longs, Reddit, scraping out, I believe, Twitter and perplexity. We're moving that through into a digest report that is being processed and uploaded into Airtable and also sending it as a report via a Google Gmail node. Yeah, it just goes right into my email inbox every morning, but you could have it essentially go wherever. And then we have, again, the content brainstorming piece. And the cool thing about the content brainstorming piece is I don't just rely on AI for this. I actually, there's a really good content creator on YouTube. His name's Callaway. He's all about, hey, here's how you essentially do storytelling and social media. So I took a bunch of his videos through all the transcripts inside of Gemini and was like, hey, come up with a system prompt based on sort of his frameworks and fundamentals. And using that, it helps me come up with the hooks, the general storyline, all that. And again, the big value add here isn't that I got a script and I'm going to read off it. The big value add is that I don't have to start from zero every day. Because when it comes to content creation, a lot of it is a race against the clock, especially if you're trying to go for a lot of short form and for YouTube. And if I'm spending four hours every day just trying to figure out what to create, I'm not going to be in a good place. Yeah. And that's what's awesome about this. What I like about this, too, is that you say, okay, not only am I going to take this information that's important from these people, I'm actually going to – there's a terminology called copy and paste versus copy with taste. And so what you're doing is you're copying out what's going on, wherever it is, and you're adding the with taste part of going, how do I create this into a format that I find to be pleasing? You're putting your own spin on it, whether it's Callaway or anything else. And so I love this system. I think it's really neat on the backside of it. Now, you were saying before that, does this upload a vector store of your knowledge so it learns and understands how you write scripts? This goes just directly into Airtable. I don't have any sort of rag functionally built on that, which would be a thing. For me personally, I'm not a script person with my content, although I like having the script generated to give me something to think of. All my stuff tends to be off the cuff, so that would be wasted effort for me personally. But yeah, I like the system because it's very flexible, both in terms of, hey, where are you getting the data from and also how you filter it, right? For Twitter, for example, it filters based on not just the ideas, but also how many likes it's getting and stuff. You're not getting too much noise. Yeah. And let's talk about this from a results perspective, right? There's a couple of metrics, right? There is overall subscribers and then there's overall content produced. And a lot of people look at subscribers as the metric, but really that's kind of getting on the scale. It's not a proactive measurement. A lot of it is content creation. So can you talk to me about like how many videos do you create in a week, in a month or whatever? And then talk to me about like how many subscribers you have so people can understand the value of the system through the output that it generates. Yes. And so in terms of subscribers across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, it's a little over 200,000, I think at this point. And that came over about a year. So I started at the very tail end of 2024 with no content creation experience whatsoever. And I barely post on my private social media account. So that was definitely a big jump for me. But you're totally right. It's more about the process and the systems. And it's really hard to not get too focused on like the subscriber viewer count, especially at the beginning for people. So in terms of the volume that I shoot for, I try to do three pieces of content a day, split between like short form primarily because it's easier to push them out. But I want to do the goals like two to three long form YouTube videos a week. And so that's 20 pieces of content a week, which is no small amount, especially when you're in, I think, in more of a technical space. Is there anybody that doesn't know if you're like, oh, this is great. I built this workflow. Now I'm going to show people how to build this workflow. And then halfway through the recording, it stops working because the air is up for a completely different reason. You're like, but I'm in the middle of recording. That's not fair. I can't start this over. It's already 7 PM at night. Oh no. Okay. Okay. I'll be back. Yeah. So I love it. It's good to know how much content. So again, 200,000 subscribers in a year by posting two to three pieces of content a day, when you're making this content, so you're getting this report generated, do you then say, okay, cool, here's a report of the ones I like number one, number two, and number five, I'm going to make content on this as a short, long, or whatever. When you're going to make this content, talk to me the process. You now got this report. What do you do from the reporting into the actual creating of the content? What does that look like? Is there any other automation? So the report gives me definitely the ideas and more so the trends, right? Because I'm also saying, hey, if yesterday, 10 people posted about this particular new and an updated automation, hey, and they have a ton of views coming in, then I know that's something the audience is going to actually like, right? So it's almost pre approves my ideas to an extent. So I know the idea. And then I look at usually the script, and really, I'm focused on the hook, because unfortunately, people are going to watch the first three seconds and 90% of people won't watch any further in that. So on one hand, I have the report, which gives me the hook, but I also have my own custom cloud project, which has a similar system prompt to that script generator, but allows me to go back and forth in terms of figuring out the hooks I want to do. Beyond that, it's very much off the cuff kind of vibes based on how I use the tool myself, because I don't want to sound too scripted. And at the same time, I also don't want to watch other people's content too much on the same thing. So it doesn't come across as almost like a copycat type video. So it's a weird line to trend where it's like, hey, what's everyone else doing? But putting your own spin on it. Yeah. And some people like I am, if you look at any of my TikTok content, I'm an off the cover. I will just rant at a camera as we're doing right now with no bullet points. It is useful, though, especially if you're getting started and you're overcoming imposter syndrome or anything else. Having to say, I just say these words in front of the camera. It might be awkward, but I'm getting through it by just looking at the camera. That's great. I will say though, one of the lessons I got that was really powerful is that when you have a framework to communicate through say storytelling, like ADA framework, which is attention, interest, desire, action, that is a framework to follow. If you have these bullet points to opening a hook, that's going to be around topic or whatever. You can then rant much more coherently because then you can move through this framework with freedom without feeling constricted. And it comes through a lot more humanistically. So I'm a big bullet point fan as well, especially if you have a framework that you're running someone through. And, and so, yeah, I get it from that perspective. So you get this script, you come up with the bullet points, you're, you have a cloud code that you can go back and forth with until you're happy. So it's more of this interactive real time social media manager coach. You come up with that, you then sit down and record. What do you then do? do you then you turn on obs you yeah so i use obs because i'm cheap and it's free and yeah at that point then it's just sending it and saying the same lines 30 times before it actually comes out the right way and you don't stutter and then it's just a matter of just yeah just knocking out the content at that point a lot most of the time is spent on frankly the hook sadly the nature of the game especially in short form and short form is interesting because you almost have to come up with all these like tips and tricks to keep the viewer actually watching, which is almost the opposite of YouTube, which is why YouTube long form is so nice because you actually have sort of the room to express your ideas. And the audience is also probably willing to give you at least a couple of minutes to get to your point. So the ideation process tends to be a little different and more involved in YouTube, but the content stuff is interesting. And I think it just becomes more interesting in today's day and age. And you're seeing it a lot more in like the client because I also run my own agency, like the client work. There's just so much demand for the content stuff because everyone realizes how important it is right especially in terms of the personal branding type deal and for automation i think automation at this in as of today early 2026 i think the ideation portion and coming with these frameworks is actually where you get the biggest value add versus hey i found an automation that makes youtube shorts for me looks cool does it actually convert maybe on the margins there's people who manage to get that to work but i think for most people. I don't know if that's the value play. It can. I've seen it work with people. There's a couple of brands I know that get away with it only because of these unique situations. It does work. The most valuable thing, if you truly want to be a content creator, is a lot of people say, I don't know what to do. I don't know what ideas to come up with. The step one is figure out what you want to make content on. Make it as easy as possible for you to know exactly what to do. Lower the friction as much as possible when you're recording. So if you can't do OBS, hire somebody on Fiverr or do a thing where you get someone in that's just set up your environment for you. And then, you know, what can you do to make that content? There's a bunch of different things that you can do to make that content, but figure out a way that I call it self leverage. It's how do you get leverage on yourself to put yourself into a container to create something. So whether that's developing in it in automations or creating content, both of it is deep work. You kind of have to settle into it and avoid all the deadly algorithms that will steal all your time. besides that now that you get the content how do you post the content do you use in it in workflows do you what do you do so i have ended in workflows but to be totally honest i do most of it annually yeah i'm still actually light in that regard but i post on short form it's only on tiktok and instagram and youtube and i use cap cut for editing so essentially it's a one button press to do that and push it those so it essentially is automated inside of my editing system to an extent your own editing yes i subscribed as i think your same theory which is like lowest friction as possible i feel like if i was okay if i was huge right i'm an operation i have millions of subs sure i'd probably hire a video editor at that point but a i want to learn the skills and b i think in this space especially i don't think the audience is necessarily drawn to fancy editing. I don't think that's what's really pushing the boundaries. I think there's a very low bar you have to pass, a very low bar. But beyond that, I think it's very much like, all right, like what's the value here? What are we talking about? What are you actually bringing to the table versus me paying some guy to do some fancy editing? There's different ways to optimize content creation, right? And a lot of people, especially for technical users, hey man, just give me the sauce. And it's whether we're experimenting with something different in this podcast is what's what's some sauce that we can give away that would be useful like this ideation generation is huge as someone who makes content it's a big piece of the puzzle so how do we do that and then talk about some of the things behind this so we're going a little bit deeper hey upfront value if you want to hang out and listen to dudes talk about what why the importance of content creation is going to change your life and change your business because influence matters in this day of eyeball attention grabbing stuff great and then also i think a couple of key pieces that are valuable for anybody that's really eager and still listening to this podcast is the fact that there is a value of needing to learn how to cook in your own kitchen. I come from the background of running my own food business. I did very well. I started small. I had a number of employees, sold that. One of the biggest things that I thought was super important was learning how to cook in your own kitchen. And there's two different kitchens that we're cooking in right now in this modern day and age. One is the kitchen of InAidIn, which is the ability to create your own automations, your workflows, understanding how things get done, vector memory, and stuff like That's very important, especially if you are either going to run an AI agency or if you are a business owner and you want to learn how to automate your business to create more freedom. The second kitchen is content creation, which is if you want to be a personal brand and you want to grow influence online, then part of this is you need to get good at creating value. Now, that is the power of storytelling. If you're making workflows, that's great or whatever else thing that you're doing. But then also this whole editing structure and knowing how to cook in your own kitchen by editing it and kicking it out the door. There's different ways that you can optimize. I went to VidSummit, which is the professional YouTuber's conference. Bro, there is levels to this game that like I am. People go really deep and I realize that this is an endless game and you're optimizing for how can I transmit value to you? Part of this is the hook. Part of this is if you do short form edit cuts that stops with eye fatigue. There's people that look at retention graphs on the back end to see where the bumps and spike are that think about why do these people leave? Like it's all these different things that are, it's a whole game of right now attention is one of the most valuable resources and everyone's fighting for it. So how do you optimize for it? And to Chase's point, this was the best way to optimize is give you something free that's valuable that you can utilize that he actually uses in his own business to actually materially change his life by going from zero to 200,000 subscribers. So it's a valuable piece of the equation. I'm going to step off of my soapbox and rant about why this is so important and say, besides this, Chase, is there anything else that's coming up for you around content creation that you think is like a valuable insight or something that you think you want to share with maybe someone who's more technical and wants to learn and make content? The biggest thing with content creation is just the sort of mindset you need at the beginning. And I think it's almost a little harder for technical people to jump into it to an extent, because I think they tend to have a much more perfectionist mindset where at the beginning when we alluded to before is you very much have to divorce yourself from the outcomes at the start and you just have to put your head down for 100 videos and realize how bad they're all going to be part of that again which an automation like this helps is not only are you bad not only the video is bad at the beginning you're horribly slow at doing these things right you're horribly slow coming up with ideas horribly slow coming up with hooks, horribly slow at just executing. And so having some sort of automations on the margins, at least that can reduce the friction because the friction is the biggest thing that it takes people too long. And then their videos get zero views, right? You combine those things together. That's why everybody quits. So even businesses quit, there's tons of businesses who just don't even post nearly enough. And if you look at all your favorite creators, with few exceptions, they've been posting hundreds and hundreds of stuff for a pretty long period of time before they actually saw any turnaround. So I think the mindset's the biggest thing. And then again, anything you can use to reduce the friction, like this automation, the posting automations, you should be leaning on at the start just to give you any advantage. Yeah. And if you're looking at this, if you're, if you really are genuinely serious about like leveling your things up or whether it's in it in or the content creation is if you could focus on those input variables, right? Like how much, like how long does it take you to make a video and the video that is X amount of quality. If you can keep the quality up and reduce the time to make the video by taking out these different manual tasks, how long does it take to make a thumbnail? And what does that look like? And there's a bunch of strategies behind that. Optimizing those things with those to lower that friction as much as possible, then it gets the quicker you can make the content and the more valuable it is, the better you're going to see as a return. And it is a thing of kind of standing up on class in front of class like in your underwear or whatever it's a it's going online and making content and then people like your people are looking at you commenting on whatever it might be your looks your content your the sound of your voice it's a thing that will have to it's a forcing function for growth and it's very cringy it's very cringy to post content it's extremely embarrassing at the beginning i remember when i first started posting I was definitely afraid that people, my friends in my group chat would see it. You don't just get roasted forever. But ironically, you're kind of like mediocrity at the beginning almost saves you because your videos will be so poor. Nobody will watch them. But on the flip side, if your video did so well, your friends see it. That's you're actually doing OK. Yeah. Any response is a good response. You're getting feedback because you look at all this feedback and all I try to say for anybody that's that that looks at that and a moniker that I've tried to live by for myself is take the lessons, leave the emotion. So if you do get a cringy comment, someone says, how do I make, I get feedback on the podcast. And so I'm like, how do we make this better? Cool. Great feedback. What can we do? It's do I want to sit there and beat myself up and say, woe is me? What this is feedback. What can we do? One, is this my target audience that we're making content around it? Is this person's input valid for who they are? Right. If it is then, okay, what was, what can I do with this to get better at this stuff? Whether it's a better thumbnail or a hook, delivering more value, being consistent, being shorter. It's all useful information to help you improve. And I tell you, like the dead internet theory with all of the internet going away because of the AI-ification of the entire world. I think social media is one of the few places where you have your authentic self show up in a format is a way to actually build a real community. But part of it is like investing a piece of your soul that takes some time, but highly valuable, man. Can you talk to me about from making this content, is there been a thing that's happened in your life or in your business or relationship that has formed from it by making these connections online? Can you talk about something that's happened from that? In terms of the business, obviously the inbound lead generation purely from social media has been pretty life-changing, that for sure. I think the coolest thing has been I also run the online community on school with people who are essentially trying to jump, like my primary audience is, hey, non-technical people who are trying to jump into the AI space, really run their own AI agency. So I think the best connections, the coolest connections have been made there, just guiding people on that path, showing them, hey, here's what I did. And you can do it too. We had one student who joined pretty much immediately after getting laid off. He'd been in the same job for almost 20 years. And Hail Mary was like, hey, I'm going to try this AI thing. I'm interested. It's cool. I'm not a developer. I have no technical background. But within the first month, I already had signed a client for a 5K monthly retainer. And it's like seeing those journeys is really cool because I think they honestly the coolest thing about AI is the doors it's open for people who aren't technical like this world was not open to you if you did not have an CS degree, right, five years ago, or you didn't go to boot camp, it just wasn't it just wasn't realistic. And then today, right, like, you don't need those things really, you still need some technical know how, but you can pick it up along the way. If you're curious, and you're willing to learn, you don't need to sit in a classroom for four years learning Python syntax. You just don't. 100%. I completely agree with you is that you used to run a super high-tech VR multiplayer user studio. I built space robots for NASA and government contact, all this crazy stuff. And I had technical CTOs and I've gone through a number of them in my career. And part of this was when you run a company and you have a technical founder or whatever, there's always this thing that you maybe don't have full autonomy and full control because you're trying to enroll them on why it should be built or done this way or whatever those things are going to be. And so coming from that world, I was technical coder and that kind of stuff, but not as technical as those people. When I got rid of that business and I jumped into AI automation, I said, you know what, I'm going to learn how to cook in my own kitchen again, make my own automations, my own workflows, things like that. And if you join a community, if you get a coach, if you invest some times in it, you cut out all the distractions and you say, I'm going to go through this course, whether it's chase this group or another group, you go through and say, I'm going to complete this course. You now have this ability where you now have the power to say, you know what? I have an idea. I'm going to build this thing because I want this thing to work. So like I'm building like a health operation dashboard for myself because I'm fascinated. So I leveled the front end on the health stuff. I entered in the backend on stuff and I'm bringing in my whoop API so I can see my own health and track my own scores because I can, because it's fun. And it's a really empowering time to be able to use these core skill sets that all of a sudden, instead of me hoping that some other SaaS company built this or I'm whatever, try to enroll a CTO on this type of things, three months, six months into this type of process, you know how the ability to close these deals because a lot of people, there's all these boomers and no offense to the boomers out there, but there's people that don't want to learn these new skills. The older you get, the less likely you are to adopt new skills. And in this rapidly evolving space, if you stopped bringing on new skills from the last three years, if you refuse to do skill generation, you're going to be in an older company that is at a certain pace. And if you are willing to put in that time and energy in the last six months, you have the ability to step into that kind of company that won't adopt the new skills and then just leverage your skills, aka give you money, so that you can then bring that into a company. And the only way, not the only way, one of the most beneficial ways to do that is by putting content online, showcasing your skill sets and say, here's the cool things that I can do. Please give me money. Yeah, totally. It's a thing. You want a thing? All right. I'll give the thing to you. It's great. Yeah. That's why it's such an interesting time. Cause yeah, both sides of the equation on one, you can build anything without being technical. Right. And then on the other side with social media, you can also market it and pull, you can pull essentially the greatest marketing lever today for free as a person. And funny enough, you're going to get more traction as a person, as an individual, as a personal brand than a company is, right? That's a huge shift. And it's those two things have happened simultaneously, right? So you can market as one and you can build as one and you don't have to be technical. You don't have to be a marketer. You don't need a ton of liquid capital to dump it into Google ads. You can do this all organically and you can build it with right. And, and, and subscription and a cloud code. It's insane. You could download in it in fair use, self hosted and start running it out the gate. You could do this all for $0 in theory. You could OBS it for $0. You could in it in for $0. A lot of things you can get up and running for next to nothing. The biggest thing is just the investment in time and the willingness to say that you get the work you show. So if you make amazing work, but you refuse to show it, that's an issue. If you show a bunch of stuff, but you don't make anything valuable, that's another issue. So combining these two skill sets together could radically change your life. It's changed my life. That's changed Chase's life. And if you download this template from the template gallery today, it can download, it can change your life. So essentially that's the whole purpose of this podcast. Chase, this has been great having you on the show. Is there anything else you'd like to let people know about before you tell them how to find your YouTube channel and your school group? Oh, I think the biggest thing for people to know is that we've hammered this a bunch of times, but you really don't have to be technical. And then also just remember how early this is in this entire game. Think about chat GPT came out. What? Three years ago, GPT three. That was yet in the grand scheme of things. That was yesterday. Like it is so early in the game. Like you need to get started. Even if you feel overwhelmed on the technical side and on the marketing side, because again, you need both of those pieces of the equation. If you want to succeed in the space and really turn it into a career, but it's totally doable. It's totally doable. And if people want to find you, Yeah, you can find me pretty much anywhere on social media. Biggest stuff is on YouTube. So if you just search for Chase AI, you'll find me there. I have a free school community. Virtually all my templates are free to download along with the guides. And I also do have a paid community for someone who's a little more serious about trying to start their own AI agency. But the workflow you saw today will be on the official NNN template library where you can download it as well and get it up and running. Help you with some content. Chase, honor and pleasure, my friend. Much love. And I will see you on the other side. Take care now. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me, Dylan.

🎁  Download n8n Template Here: https://go.n8n.io/content-idea-template

Discover how Chase Hannigan grew from zero to 200,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok in just over a year without any prior content creation experience. In this episode, we dive deep into his AI-powered content ideation system that scrapes trending topics from YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and Perplexity to generate daily reports and content scripts.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro – Using AI Automation for Content 
01:06 What You’ll Learn + Free n8n Workflow Overview
02:24 The Real Problem: Manual Ideation & Doom Scrolling
03:45 Automating Content Ideation Across Platforms
05:25 Screen Share Begins – Live Walkthrough of the n8n Workflow
06:00 High-Level System Architecture
06:30 YouTube Data Ingestion & Filtering Logic
07:10 Transcript Analysis with LLMs
07:45 Multi-Platform Expansion: Reddit, Twitter, Perplexity
09:00 How the Daily Digest Report Is Generated
09:25 Airtable + Email Report Delivery
09:45 Content Script Generation (Hooks, Bodies, CTAs)
11:00 Why This Is Not RAG (And When You’d Want It)
11:30 Filtering Noise with Engagement Metrics
12:30 Content Volume Strategy 
14:00 Hook Optimization & Pre-Validated Ideas
15:15 Frameworks vs Off-the-Cuff Content
16:00 Recording Stack 
17:05 Why Ideation Is the Highest-Leverage Automation
18:00 Posting & Editing Workflow 
19:00 Why Fancy Editing Doesn’t Matter for Technical Audiences
20:00 Learning to “Cook in Your Own Kitchen” 
21:05 Attention Economics & Creator Optimization
22:05 Mindset for Technical Creators Getting Started
23:15 Reducing Friction to Stay Consistent
24:20 Handling Cringe, Feedback, and Early Videos
25:55 Real Business Outcomes from Content Automation
26:40 AI Agencies, Non-Technical Builders, and New Opportunities
28:00 Building Your Own Tools with n8n
29:40 Personal Brands Beat Companies
31:15 Why This Is Still Early
32:00 Where to Find the Workflow + Final Takeaways

What You'll Learn:
✅ How to automate content ideation without doom-scrolling for hours
✅ The exact n8n workflow Chase uses daily (available FREE in the template library)
✅ How to create 20+ pieces of content per week while maintaining quality
✅ Why AI automation works best for ideation, not full content generation
✅ How non-technical people can build AI agencies and land 5K/month clients
✅ The mindset shift needed to succeed in content creation