This AI tool is bananas! Whenever people ask me what I use to supercharge my content creation, this is my top recommendation.
It all started with two founders following their curiosity and refusing to give up when others didn’t buy into their vision. Then, one viral moment changed everything!
Poppy AI is now fueling a quiet revolution, while everyone is still focused on the big-name players like ChatGPT and Claude. [affiliate link ]Listen in on today’s episode to hear all about it from Rafeh Qazi and Nazariy Dumanskyy!
The minds behind Poppy AI share their full story in this awesome interview. We hear how they went from zero users to changing the game for creators and entrepreneurs like us.
You’ll learn how this tool combines AI power with a visual canvas that just makes sense for how we work. Qazi, Naz, and I share the real ways we’re using Poppy for everything from writing newsletters and planning video essays to pulling insights from hundreds of podcast episodes.
If you’re looking to learn faster, get inspired, and create more without sacrificing authenticity, don’t miss this chat!
Today’s Guests
Rafeh Qazi
Rafeh Qazi is a Pakistani-American founder and educator who immigrated to the US at age 9.
After building Cleverprogrammer, a coding education platform with over 1M YouTube subscribers and teaching 100,000+ students to code, he made the bold decision to quit everything and co-found Poppy AI.
A former University of Illinois student and accomplished chess player, Qazi combines his teaching experience with his passion for building products that solve real problems.
His journey from creating coding courses to building a SaaS product reflects his belief in building tools that he would actually use himself.
When not working on Poppy AI, he’s known for his authentic approach to documenting the ups and downs of the founder journey on social media.
Nazariy Dumanskyy
Nazariy Dumanskyy is a Ukrainian-American founder and developer who immigrated to the US at age 9.
After building a successful software agency and helping grow Cleverprogrammer YouTube channel to 1M+ subscribers, he quit everything to co-found Poppy AI – a visual AI tool that helps creators and marketers organize their thoughts and create content more efficiently.
A former University of Michigan graduate and James B. Angell Scholar, Naz combines his technical expertise with his own experience with ADHD to build tools that work the way people naturally think.
When not coding, he stays connected to his Ukrainian roots by teaching folk dance at the Kolomeyka Dance Ensemble.
You’ll Learn
- Focusing on product-founder fit to find your best idea
- Finding the right target audience for your business
- The viral video that changed everything for Poppy AI
- How to research and create content fast with AI
- How Poppy differs from big-name players like ChatGPT
- Following your curiosity and connecting with the right people
Resources
- Find out more about Poppy AI [affiliate link]
- Subscribe to Unstuck—my weekly newsletter on what’s working in business right now, delivered free, straight to your inbox
- Connect with me on Twitter and Instagram
SPI 877: My Favorite AI Tool for Content Creation with Rafeh Qazi and Nazariy Dumanskyy
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Me and him were literally in the apartment, in the living room in our boxers, brainstorming,And it was like 1:00 AM and we started to get like a bunch of like bing, bing, bing messages right at first, like the first one came in and then two minutes later, another one came in. And like it would just consistently like more and more and more and we’re like, what is going on? How is this even possible? And then we end up calling one of the customers and then the customer was like, oh, I found it from this TikTok.
Rafeh Qazi: By the time it hit a million views at TikTok, we made a hundred thousand dollars from that one TikTok, please relentlessly follow your curiosity. I promise you something amazing will come out of it.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: So imagine a canvas. You could throw a voice recording on that canvas, a YouTube video, a TikTok, just as easily as copy pasting a link. You could connect it to the AI chat.
Rafeh Qazi: And then you go, Hey, write me a script like Pat Flynn just wrote for this video that he got like a hundred thousand views on, and make it similar to my voice. So the video is how I would make it, but using the viral proven frameworks that maybe Pat Flynn has already proven with his video. And I get this amazing new piece of content that has a very high likelihood of potentially going viral.
Pat Flynn: A lot of people ask me, Pat, which AI tools are you using right now? And of course there’s like a million of them, but there’s one tool, this isn’t an ad, by the way, this is actually set up for this interview because I’m about to interview the founders or the co-founders of Poppy AI. And out of all the tools that are out there, including Claude, ChatGPT, all of those, Poppy is the one that I’m using more than anything.
And you’ll discover why as we go. But just let me say it, it’s probably the easiest to use and it has given me the most benefit. More than anything. And if you wanted to check it out, even right now, you can go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/poppy. You can get 25% off your subscription. But before you do that, listen to this interview.
You’ll hear a fun origin story with the co-founders, but more how I especially have been using this to save hundreds of hours of time. I mean, I’m not even kidding in that. And I’m not just saying that ’cause we’re an affiliate for Poppy, but because literally this is one of the most helpful tools that I’ve used in a while.
It’s been helping me with my newsletter, my copywriting, and even research. And so sit back, relax, listen in on a tool called Poppy, which a lot of people don’t even know about yet. And hopefully I can help amplify it because, number one, these guys are awesome, but number two, what they’re building has been so helpful for our workflow.
Many other people’s workflows who I’ve shared this with, and hopefully yours as well. So here we go. We got Qazi and Naz from Poppy.
Rafeh Qazi: Let’s go. We’re on the Pat Flynn podcast, baby. I’m your host. I’m just kidding. Pat’s the host.
Pat Flynn: Hey you, you can take it, dude. Isn’t that the purpose of ai? To let other tools do it for you?
This, it’s like actual humans now.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: So we’re like, welcome to the Pat Flynn podcast.
Pat Flynn: We got Qazi and Naz here, co-founders of Poppy ai. And I have to say before we even like dive into how the company was formed and best use cases for the tool. It has been the number one tool that I’ve been using in the last couple months, more than anything, more than Chat GPT more than Claude.
So I just wanna let you know because I know you’d love to hear that. So thank you for what you built.
Rafeh Qazi: Yes, thank you. It makes us so happy. That is absolutely beautiful. Pat And I just wanna start off by saying like, you might have read this message, but me and one of my really good friends long time ago since like bro, before like 2012, like 15 years ago, I would say, when we were like growing up and starting our entrepreneurial journey, his name is Tenon, he showed me.
Smart passive income blog and you were writing about how to make affiliate income and you would show all these tools. And so that’s the kind of journey I started my entrepreneurship with. And then I got inspired to make these WordPress videos and sell people on like basically I was trying to make an affiliate income with my friend at the time.
So to go from there and you know, I have super fans. Your book and all this stuff been falling for so many years and. All those years later, right. 15 years later for you to be like, Hey, this is my favorite tool, bro. It’s like a full circle journey and a half like, this is wild.
Pat Flynn: That must be crazy, dude. And I mean it too.
And I, and I’ll tell people why in just a moment. But, so it sounds like you started. Experimenting, trying other things, affiliate marketing and whatnot. We’ll, we’ll figure out how you guys got together, but now before Poppy, what were you up to?
Nazariy Dumanskyy: For Poppy, I was building a software agency, and then before software agency I was actually working with Ksi.
We were doing a basic clever programmer where we taught hundreds of thousands of people how to code, and then we helped thousands of people get jobs and you know, jobs at companies like Google, Facebook, et cetera. And so that’s pretty much what I did before then.
Pat Flynn: That’s amazing. So you guys kind of already were working together.
Where did the. Origin story for Poppy sort of come in. I don’t know which one of you wants to start with that. ’cause it may be from one brain or, or maybe both or, I don’t know how you guys came up with it, but Qazi, maybe you can take that.
Rafeh Qazi: Absolutely. Yeah, so Naz and I basically gave up everything when we wanted to work on Poppy.
’cause we knew we wanted to build a software company and at the time. I was growing Clever Programmer, which was a YouTube channel. Naz has also helped me with, and we grew it past a million subscribers, but Naz and I had parted ways after a while and Naz was building his own software agency. I was growing Clever Programmer.
We got together at a mastermind and Naz and I looked at each other and we’re like, you know what? We’re growing this agency. We’re growing a education company. We are software developers, and we keep teaching it to other people. We keep building it for other people. Why don’t we just build it for ourselves?
And we just decided one day and we ended up shutting down. He shut down his business that was making money. I shut down my business that had YouTube subscribers and was making money, and we essentially moved to San Francisco. We ended up breaking up with our girlfriends too at the time. We just like dropped everything, moved to San Francisco because we knew our family wasn’t there.
Our friends weren’t there. Nobody we knew was there. And we wanted to build Poppy. And that’s really the starting point of it. And I’ll let you know if you Naz if you wanna add onto this, but that was like the pivotal moment. That’s crazy.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Yeah. Yeah. That was a huge, pivotal moment. But to even backtrack it even more from there in terms of how me and Ka met, uh, to give you guys a little bit of an overlook, basically me and him met like, what about six years ago at this point?
Or something like that? Yes. Where, where. I was doing, uh, inst like videos on Instagram, teaching people how to code. He was doing clever program at the time, and I’ve always wanted to teach. I’ve always wanted to like, make content and I was making like very funny videos. And then one day, funny enough, he messaged me up and he’s like, oh, you’re making cool content.
And we ended up actually doing like an Instagram live where I taught. People, you know, and I told them what I do, you know, for work and how I do freelancing, for example. That was the start of the relationship literally from an Instagram message. Wow. That’s where the whole relationship started. We did that.
That was part one. And then part two was I randomly was in Las Vegas for a conference and I really wanted to go to California and like meet this guy. I had tickets to go to Michigan and literally like the same night before I was supposed to go to Michigan, I was like. I wanna go to California. And so I booked plane tickets to California and I didn’t even tell him I did that.
I arrived in California. I called them up and I was like, yo, Qazi, I’m in California. Can I stay at your place? And he is like, let’s do it. And then I end up staying at his place and. The crazy part is it was supposed to be in one week trip. Me just meeting up with him and then going back home, it ended up being a full month trip.
We became best friends. We ended up loving working with each other, and we just had so much fun that we just did not want to stop, and that’s where the whole relationship started. I.
Pat Flynn: Wow. That’s amazing. I mean, that sounds like a, like a romance, uh, novel. Like the beginning of a romance novel. No wonder the girlfriends left.
They’re like, it is, bro. We’re we’re basically in a marriage.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Yeah, pretty much. Exactly.
Pat Flynn: Like who’s Poppy? Why is she always taking up all your time? No, it’s the software we’re working on. Okay. So. AI obviously huge right now and it’s very easy for somebody to go, I wanna make an AI software, but like it’s really difficult to come up with something new or come up with something that stands out.
How did you approach building this software when everybody and their mom is building an AI software at the same time?
Rafeh Qazi: Yeah, so we did have that thought that everybody’s building a software, everybody’s building an AI company, and I wish. The company that we were looking for existed, so, uh, we wouldn’t have to spend millions of dollars building our own.
Like I was looking for a $20 a month or like $30 a month subscription that would just do what I wanted it to do. We saw all these tools like Miro, whimsical and, and tools that I actually love, like we love them whiteboarding apps, and none of them just did the thing we wanted it to do because I wanted to be able to talk to AI on the thing and.
Ideate and then make a video. All of that I wanted to be able to do in one place rather than going to like five different places. When we were originally trying to do that, the problem was there were all these different tools that existed, and I’ll name some of them. For example, Jasper ai. I don’t know if you know of it, but it was a copywriting tool and the problem that all of these other AI tools were doing, where they were going a hundred percent AI and anything a hundred percent AI just doesn’t work.
At least in today’s day and age. Maybe in future it’ll get that good, but I am a good copywriter. And when I am writing copy, it would give me something that would be 50% of the way there, 40% of the way there, but it would force its own writing style. It would force its own constraints on me, and I hated that because I was like, this copy is just not good.
It’s always sounded like generic chat, GPT copy, revolutionary game changer, like. You know, all of those things that when we see greeting attention, we’re like, yeah, like you, you can, you can tell that it, it doesn’t sound real, it’s not opinionated enough. It is not brutally honest enough, it’s missing all the punch.
And I wish that there was something that allowed you to infuse AI with the humanness factor and with Claude or whatever. I would have to go fully manual and then with Jasper or any of these other existing tools, I would’ve to go a hundred percent ai. And so. We just kept trying to solve our own creative problems.
Like, hey, writing a good email from a YouTube video. And so that is really where Poppy was born, and that’s what I feel like makes it stand now from all of the other people’s. Like how you ask the question, you said, Hey, everybody’s building an AI app. Our goal wasn’t to build an AI software. Our goal was just to solve a problem that people or we had.
That was the main thing. And that’s where we actually went down that path of building a software because it was like, okay, this is solving our exact problem. And initially we tried building software that we knew solved other people’s problems and we would get paid for it. And so I was taking Noah Kagan’s advice.
Alex Ozzy’s advice, launched something, and Naz and I launched things that quickly made money, and that was good. It was making money, but it wasn’t something we truly believed in or got behind. It was good cash flowing. We had market validation. We tried some other software before Poppy, actually. But the weird switch that happened for us with Poppy was we talked to one of our really good friends, and he’s a founder of company called Speechify.
They have over a hundred million users and it’s one of the top ranked apps in the app store right now. And Cliff on the Zoom call with us told us something really profound and he said, forget about product market fit. He’s like, look for product founder fit. Yeah, because I remember being very envious of him on the call.
I actually remember that because bro, he used his software so many times on the call. It blew my mind and I was like, that’s incredible. And you know, I’m sharing this with you, pat, and you’re a founder yourself. You’ve built products yourself. I remember it was something like Switch Pod, I think, what was it called?
Switch Pod or, yeah,
Pat Flynn: I mean that was our physical product. Yeah,
Rafeh Qazi: that was your physical product. But it was an actual thing that solved a very real problem. And I remember purchasing it. For myself, I was at Craft and Commerce at the conference where you revealed this product, and then Peter McKinnon ended up doing a video on it, and that product like blew up even faster.
And I just remember it was very useful because I didn’t need a massive, I even have it right now, like my video editor right now sitting next to a massive tripod, and this thing is stupid. It’s massive. I will never use it. It’s so clunky. But the thing you built, you could put it in your pocket or carry it with you.
You would just move it around and it would turn into a thing so you weren’t like. How do I build another tripod company? You thought, how do I solve the specific problem that I have? You were literally building a product founder fit. It so happened to also be a product market fit. That’s what happened in our case where we were looking to build a thing that does it for us, and then for months we made no money.
For months we made like bro, we would work our ass off and in last May, 2024. Two adults that have business knowledge working 15 hours a day. We made $553 in that entire month. To go from that to now in this May of 2025, making $555,000 in one month.
Pat Flynn: Gee,
Rafeh Qazi: absolutely insane.
Pat Flynn: Wild.
Rafeh Qazi: The main thing was we had product founder fit that gave us so much conviction and belief.
Even though we couldn’t find product market fit, we kept going over and over again. Until one day we found our Peter McKinnon. It was this girl, she made a TikTok, blew up, and then we were like, okay, there might be something here.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Yeah. I mean, when we did go ahead and we launched the product and as he said, we were getting zero, absolutely almost like no sales.
It’s also considering the fact that we had. Also a million subscribers on YouTube cover Programmer, right? We had up between 150 key subscribers between me and Qazi on Instagram, and we would try to sell this product everywhere. We would make videos that would get millions of views, like I remember a few videos of it where we got 7 million views each.
And guess what? No sales, like barely any sales. And so for us to consistently work through that, how that felt the moment was like, no. Agreed me on this. He actually said this himself, which is like, it’s the people who don’t understand the product. It’s, they don’t understand the product. They’re not getting it.
Rafeh Qazi: Yes, yes. And
Nazariy Dumanskyy: then finally, until we finally reached out the right audience, that’s when we realized, oh, okay. It was just the audience that was the issue. Yes.
Rafeh Qazi: I just remember him and I would look at each other and, and we would just go, I’m like. No bro, these people are just stupid. They don’t get it. We had all the proof going against us at the time ’cause we were promoting it to so many people and not making any sales.
But because Naz and I kept using it on a daily basis, and I’m a heavy software user, like and so is Naz and we’ve literally used every app and we sign up and use everything I enjoy. I love software. And so when I kept finding myself using our thing, I’m like. Ah, there’s something here.
Pat Flynn: Yeah, I mean, this is fascinating.
Number one, to have an audience and yet have them not even though they were following you, buy your thing. I mean, how number one, humbling that might feel, but then also like the drive to continue to push it forward to then find the actual audience that was a different audience than what you have initially built.
And the fact that it is a product founder fit. I love that. I never really heard it that way before, but I’m using my switch pod, like literally right now. I use it every single day. It solves a problem and therefore other people. Who I eventually found who had the same problems, wanted it too. And that’s what you found too, and it, you said that there was a person on TikTok that really kind of blew this up for you, who maybe she had the right audience or was she was able to reach the right people.
What was it about that video specifically that you think really launched this thing into the stratosphere? And it’s crazy. There’s like one person, but I mean sometimes it just takes one really influential or random tipping point to, to make that happen. I don’t know who wants to. To speak to this person and kind of what that video was like, but I’m curious, what did they do specifically that was different than what you guys were trying to do?
Nazariy Dumanskyy: What we realized with, with what she did is she reached the right audience of content creators, which is something that we just didn’t have.
Rafeh Qazi: There were a couple of really interesting things that we noticed with her. She had hook at the start. Then she demoed the product and then she did a call to action.
But here’s some interesting insights on it. It was a three minute long plus TikTok, so it was kind of like a long form video and we hadn’t really seen that many long form short videos before, so that was fascinating. The other thing was she just built up intrigue of the product for the first like minute.
She never even showed it. She just kept talking about what it could do and then when she demoed it, she really demoed it for a minute and a half plus, like actually showcasing how it works, what it does. So you can actually visualize and see it. Those were some of the key things. And then luck. It wasn’t like her audience because she had 40,000 or 60,000 followers, but the video ended up getting like 1.5 million views, so clearly it had to go out of the sphere of her.
Following circle,
Pat Flynn: right. TikTok was able to find the audience for you, for that particular type of hook, for that particular type of creator. Naz, keep going. What, what’s on your mind?
Nazariy Dumanskyy: It was just consistently like, because what we would do is we would get on calls with a bunch of these people. Like what happened is after we started getting much of these sales, and this is a crazy story, basically like to take you back a little bit even on that, is me and Zy didn’t even know this video was, was pushed out until like, oh.
The night off. Oh, yeah, yeah. Until the, until the night off. Me and him were literally in the apartment, in the living room in our boxers, brainstorming, like just talking. And it was like 1:00 AM and we started to get like a bunch of like bing, bing, bing messages right at first like the first one came in and then two minutes later, another one came in
Rafeh Qazi: $97.
$97 97. Exactly.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Exactly. That’s
Rafeh Qazi: so
Nazariy Dumanskyy: cool. And like it would just consistently like more and more and more and we’re like, what is going on? How is this even possible? And then we end up calling one of the customers and then the customer was like, oh, I found it from this TikTok. And that’s when we even found out that she even posted the TikTok fully.
Rafeh Qazi: Yes. It was crazy because it was like clockwork, bro. Every a hundred thousand views she would hit on that video, we would make $10,000. Then she went from a hundred thousand to 200,000 views. Another $10,000. And so by the time it hit a million views at TikTok, we made a hundred thousand dollars from that one TikTok, and it was like we knew it and now the world is catching up.
I was like, yo, no, let’s go.
Pat Flynn: That’s insane. That’s insane. How soon till you reached out to her and kind of like, what was that conversation like? I’m curious.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Yeah, I, I mean, we reached out to her before, so how we got in touch with her actually was I saw her like one of our posts on Instagram and I actually, I saw her content, I liked her content.
I DMed her. I was like, Hey, you know, would you be interested in like working with us or climbing with us? And she was like, yeah, for sure. Can you guys gimme access? And then I’m like, a video for you guys. And so we literally, we gave her access to the product and then she end. She ended up making the video for she making, we’re laughing because up
Pat Flynn: behind, uh, Qazie that somebody, there’s like an a phone flying in the air can, taking pictures from behind the door.
So I’m getting, getting was flying
Nazariy Dumanskyy: slowly. There we go. That’s so funny. Hi Olivia. And then, so what happened is, I remember the day I gave her access to product and I, by the way, I haven’t seen anybody react to this yet before. I think she was one of the first people who reacted like this. I give her access to the product.
And then I was like, Hey, let’s get on a call. I’ll show you how to use it. And 10 minutes later I get on a call. She’s like, oh my God, you, what? What? How is it even possible like this? This, I cannot believe this not exist. What? Like, I did not even even have to show her how to use it. And so to me, like she was that person, like who understood it so well and as a result, that’s what allowed her to make that video so well at the same time,
Rafeh Qazi: yes,
Nazariy Dumanskyy: because the other people we would talk to people would be like, oh, what is this?
Like, this is cool. You can paste on YouTube videos. So like what else you can do? You know, nobody reacted like this besides her. She was like that first person I would say so.
Pat Flynn: Qazi, can you, for everybody who might be listening to these amazing stories, has heard my already testimonial for this in the beginning, but. Still isn’t quite sure what Poppy is. I mean, maybe they haven’t even heard about it before. Let’s get specific, like what is that thing that Poppy AI solves? How does it help you as founders?
How does it help this person who was on TikTok? How does it help all of us? What? What does it do exactly?
Rafeh Qazi: So if you’ve used a visual tool like Mira or Whimsical, any of those whiteboard tools, it combines that with ChatGPT, and it’s made for creators specifically. So I’ll take you through kind of logically how it works.
So imagine a canvas. You could throw a voice recording on that canvas, a YouTube video, a TikTok, just as easily as copy pasting a link. You could connect it to the AI chat. So imagine Claude, ChatGPT. Whatever model that you prefer to use. It doesn’t really matter, you just connect it right there on the canvas.
And then you go, Hey, write me a script like Pat Flynn just wrote for this video that he got like a hundred thousand views on, and make it similar to my voice. And because it has my YouTube video and Pat Flynn’s YouTube video, it can actually write me a new banger script using the frameworks that maybe Pat used in his video that went viral, but using my specific knowledge.
So the video is how I would make it, but using the viral proven frameworks that maybe Pat Flynn has already proven with his video. And I get this amazing new piece of content that has a very high likelihood of potentially going viral. That’s a gist of it in 60 seconds. Yeah.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: A lot to that though. It’s like, besides just the content creation, it’s to use a lot for creating emails, newsletters, for creating blogs, pretty much anything.
The goal of Poppy AI is to become like the one-stop machine for content creators instead of you having to go to all these different tools. To get content, to script out content, to do the research, to potentially even make a video. Our goal is to make it where it’s just all in one. And it’s also visual because as content creators we’re all visual, I feel like, and we love like seeing like things on the board.
To me it feels like right now Chi GPT is like V one still and Chit is like. This linear thing. I could just talk to like a Google doc. It just feels like we’re back in the two thousands. Yes, it’s smart and you know, I’ll give it that, of course, for sure. But it doesn’t feel playful. It doesn’t feel exciting to use.
And so what we want to do, uh, you know, we want to make it in a way where it’s exciting to use, where you can bring anything you want. You have, you have an idea, record it, you got a video, throw it on there. You’ve got a document that you need to use as a framework, throw it on there, then you connect it all to the ai.
Visually, and then you can do anything you want with that at this point. Uh, between content creation to email newsletters to landing page copy, sales copy, you name it.
Pat Flynn: Yeah. The visual component of this is really the genius. Because I’ve attempted to do similar things using chat GPT, which, like you said, NAZ is very linear.
It’s like, okay, let me write an email, but I, I don’t wanna just write from scratch here. I want it to kind of look at my samples from other emails so it kind of understands my voice. So I’m gonna either create a project which can start to get a little complicated, or I’m gonna paste like four emails. And then be like, okay, I’m gonna paste four emails and then I’m gonna ask you to write a fifth email about my upcoming book, lean Learning, which then I’m gonna have to like paste parts of it, but then it doesn’t want to accept all of it.
So then it’s like, it just gets really convoluted. Whereas with Poppy, I can create a group. The canvas is the perfect thing to, to think about here. So I can create like a on a canvas, a little group, and I can paste, literally copy and paste like five. To 10 of my emails from my own emails from the Unstuck Newsletter, and it’s there, and then I can put my book up there too there.
Here’s Lean Learning and here are two podcast episodes I was on where I talked about lean learning as well. One of them is mine, one of them is another person, and then I can connect all of them to essentially what’s like a chat window and that chat window. I can see the lines coming out of it and what it’s connected to.
It’s connected to all these newsletters, and then I can say, okay. I’m going to write a newsletter for my audience, and I want it to be about this chapter in lean Learning. Please write it in the style of my other newsletters, and then it just like writes it, whereas chat, GBT or some of these other tools, Jasper, et cetera, will take you like half the way there.
This tool takes you like 98% of the way there and sometimes even like a hundred percent. Which is absolutely crazy, and so I use this to help me with my newsletters. Now I’m not writing from scratch ever anymore. I can use it to ideate if I have inspiration out there, because I’m seeing there’s this trend I can pull from different news articles, I can pull from different podcast episodes.
I can put an audio file in there of my buddy and I just talking about this and I can put it into the same. Chat and say, Hey, I wanna create a newsletter about this conversation. My friend and I had, I’ve also included some research articles to use as the basis for a lot of the stuff we were talking about, and then boom, it’ll come out and it’ll be like near perfect, which is again incredible.
My more recent use case that I think is really exciting I wanna share with you guys is I’ve been looking to, with the success of lean learning and how well the book is done. I wanna do a video essay, but I’ve never done a video essay before, like almost like very serious kind of documentary style type of videos on YouTube, right?
Where it’s not just me. It might be like some voiceover with B roll and stuff, but I’ve never done this before. I don’t know the formula. I. But you know what? There’s a hundred videos on YouTube that teach the video essay formula. So I found like five of my favorite ones that are teaching how to write a video essay.
And I put ’em into Poppy and they’re there and it’s literally copy paste, boom, you see the video thumbnail. And then I pulled out video of some of my favorite video essays, some about like video games, some about Pokemon cards and other things like that I really vibe with. And I put that in a separate group and, and then I connect my book.
My book is connected there. It’s already there actually in a PDF file that I just uploaded. And then I say, I want to create a video essay that’s about 20 minutes in length talking about the history of how we’ve learned as a society and how broken it is now. And I want to insert my book as a solution.
What do you got? And then literally in an instant, like I have this script for a video essay that follows these tips that other creators have had. And you know, I’ve argued with a few people about this. I’d love your take on this as well. ’cause it’s like, it almost feels like cheating and it’s like, okay, well.
I’m utilizing these other creators and their work, which on the surface, some people are like, that’s bad, right? You’re stealing from other people. But if I was to learn how to write a video essay, I would’ve watched all these five videos anyway, and I would’ve downloaded that into my brain, correct. And then I would’ve had to learn and then implement.
Essentially. Poppy is just fast forwarding that process for me, because what I want from these videos is the structure and all those kinds of things. So I’m utilizing the videos and I give credit to them as well, but I’m able to move faster through that. So that is the video as like how I’m using Poppy to.
Learn how to do something new based on content that is teaching how to do that already. Anyway, it’s just super cool and it’s saving me like literally hours of time. So, Qazi, tell me about your thoughts on like how I’m using it and as well as your thoughts on people saying like, AI bad, like this is like you’re stealing from other people and all that kind of stuff.
Rafeh Qazi: Yeah, I love that. I would say every generation that goes on to the next. Our speed of learning and application just gets faster and faster, and each time there’s a revolution that happens. So a little bit before around my time, like internet was being born and so when internet got born, a lot of people were probably like, it’s cheating.
Like remember when they used to do math with their own bare hands on the chalkboard? Like now they’re getting to use like internet and get answers. Like that’s cheating. Or calculators might have come out. And I feel like there are always people who complain and who moan, and they’re always find, even the whole people with the AI apocalypse or whatnot.
I’m sure every new technology that came, there was a fear of everything extinguishing. Right? Like internet coming, oh my god. What about nuclear warfare? But people use a lot of those technologies for good, and so in our case, we just get faster and faster. So for example, before we didn’t have pictures or videos, so I’m sure people were like, Hey, you had to go and learn that experience on your own, whatever that experience was.
But then we got videos and things that were written in audio, and now people could learn while watching a video or listening to an audio, and they got to learn and apply faster. So that same cycle, that would’ve taken a year. Took people two months or one month, they didn’t even need access to the resources.
They didn’t even need to buy the stuff. They could simulate it and visualize it through a video of somebody else’s. Somebody could learn how to become a really good director without having access to that equipment. ’cause they could watch videos of how other people became directors. And it’s the same way with Poppy, I would say with ai, you’re getting to learn and apply faster before this technology you, like you said, pat, you’d watch those videos, you’d synthesize that knowledge, you’d have notebooks filled with all that information.
You’d build a new framework of how to make a video that would be kind of built off the shoulders of a giant, so to speak. That’s how any good knowledge happens. Any idea that happens, there’s no such thing as a unique idea. An idea is a combination of two or more ideas combined into one. Even how a mop got developed or how these things got developed.
Like people combine two things. Somebody took like a brush and somebody took a stick, combined them together, and you got a mop. So it’s two ideas combined into one solves a unique problem or an interesting way. Same thing here with Poppy. It’s like you’re getting to learn and apply just instantly faster.
You’re just putting those frameworks and essentially what you’re doing is you’re saying, Hey. I have this amazing book. I have this amazing message that I wanna share with people. I want it to have the highest chance of impact, and let’s say shareability or virality. I’m just gonna pop in these frameworks and share that message in that way, and it’s making your progress so much faster because now instead of you spending all your time trying to be a content creator, you could just focus on being an innovator.
You write books, make new products, make new stuff. And then let it do the way of marketing that work for you.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: And on top of that, you can only synthesize so much as a human, right. If you’re gonna watch a video at Alex Mo video, let’s just say on how to do copywriting, let’s just say. Or I mean, you know, any video or how to write hooks, you can only synthesize so much or learn so much.
So you might take have like one key takeaway. Another key takeaway, right? And they’re like, okay, well how do I now apply this? And so you have to do, use so much brain power to now figure out how to make, properly make this and apply this, versus if you’re like, Hey, let me just teach the AI and give that knowledge to the ai.
Well, the AI’s a lot faster. Right. And the AI is a lot smarter in this scenario, right? It can think through multiple things all at the same time. And it has much bigger context windows than we do sometimes, right? Even though we’re pretty smart human beings. And so what happens is like by just giving it all this knowledge, it’s able to synthesize and actually take away and produce results a lot better than if you just do like and watch a video yourself, for example.
You know? And I think that’s where the power comes in. And this is where, you know, as Kaia said, like. We as human beings consistently become more efficient and we will continue to become more efficient. When we went from horses to cars, we went from not using AI to not using ai, right? We went from a potentially having to film our own videos.
Now we got faceless content. We’re literally as, as somebody, as a cologna view. It’s gonna consistently happen. And for people who are saying, oh, this is no good. Well, the reality of this is the rule moves and the rule moves forward. And unless you move with it, you’re gonna be stuck left behind.
Pat Flynn: Yeah.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: And so that’s what I would tell to a lot of these people who are like, Hey, you know, this is not good.
Let’s not this, this shouldn’t be happening. The reality is it’s, it’s happening and it’s gonna happen like it or not.
Pat Flynn: Right. And in order to remain competitive, especially in this fast moving world as entrepreneurs, as creators. What I feel is the advantage of a tool like Papi AI is the input velocity that can happen.
And that’s where I feel it’s very clear why we need to use tools like this. Because whereas like if I’m studying how to write a video essay, I’m only watching one video at a time. And you know these videos are sometimes hours in length and I can only have one input at a time. If I try to have, like if I have five screens going, I’m not gonna learn anything right.
Like that. That’s obvious. You kind of have to focus. Whereas with Poppy, I can put like. 10 videos and they’re all pointing to this chat window, and I’m able to get input from five to 10 different things all at once, and it’s up to me still. It’s not like automatic, but it’s still, I have to understand prompts and I have to, I have to understand what questions to ask, but it can process through and even find patterns that I, I would’ve never been able to find myself.
Right? I could even ask like, Hey, where are there? Conflicting pieces of information here so that then I can make a decision based on where I want to go. One thing that I’ve seen for use cases for tools like Poppy that I wanna dive into more as well, is a little bit more of the sort of role playing that AI can make, right?
So for example, if I’m running a sales page and I’m trying to create some copy to help a person purchase my podcasting course, I wanna find information on Reddit and on YouTube of people who. Hate podcasting and why they think it’s dying and you know why they dis they don’t want it. And I can plug that into Poppy and be like, okay, I want you to be.
Like these people who hate podcasting and let’s come up together with different reasons or, or arguments or rebuttals on why they’re wrong or what I can do, what, what could I possibly say to help convince them otherwise and well, like, what are their obstacles? Please lust them all out. Let’s come up with a argument for each of those points altogether.
All coming from like a hundred different concerns. There’s just so much power and scale and velocity that can happen here that that’s really why I like Poppy, because especially. Yes, that is possible with other AI tools, but in a very manual hack kind of way. This is like, the canvas is really the magic here.
It’s exactly why I moved from AWeber to Infusionsoft to then ConvertKit back in the day because it gave me more visual understanding of everything that was going on in my business and that this is it in the AI format. So I first of all just wanna congratulate you guys for, for what you’ve built and you know, you keep continually innovating and adding more things there.
Like the fact that I can paste. Like my podcast and it can automatically transcribe it and then I can use that as sort of like a foundational piece of input for something else is, is huge. And I have like 800 episodes of my podcast that I can pull from to then discern or take like, it’s incredible dude.
Like, I can even go in and, and paste like, sorry, I’m just getting so excited about it. Like, I could paste a hundred episodes and, and I can be like, pull out every dad joke that I ever made in every podcast. It will find those for me. Dad, jokes are like a part of my culture, so it’s freaking crazy, man. Just congrats on everything.
And so like, as we finish up here, you know, NASM, I can start with you more the, the sort of technical person. What are the things you guys are working on now to improve it and stay ahead of the curve and kind of what, what can we look forward to? With Poppy in the future.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Our biggest goal with Poppy is, and Zi will build on top of this with me, we want to allow people to use Poppy to now build stuff with, so, you know, there’s always three layers that we have with Poppy.
The first layer is like the research layer, right? That’s where you could throw in stuff in and then kind of put your research together. The second layer is almost like you are building layer. Maybe you’re writing scripts, you’re writing newsletters, landing page copy. And then we have the acting layer, and that’s the layer that we are still, uh, are yet working on.
And we’re have, there are some very exciting things behind the scenes that, uh, Qazi can probably share as well.
Pat Flynn: Acting layer? Yes.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Acting layer, which is like, our goal is to where you as a content creator can now take your. Your email or your landing page and maybe even fully create a full on landing page, maybe create a full on video, maybe create and cut up all your clips that you have from podcasts, for example, like we want this to be your one stop shop for everything.
And with the infinite canvas that we have. I think we definitely can, and we’re gonna continue just to build more and more. It’s such an exciting tool and, and Qazi agrees with me on this. Like we are all so passionate about this because we love it. It’s like you get to be in this game of fun every single day.
But yeah, that’s some of the things that, that I’ll share and I’ll Qazi continue.
Rafeh Qazi: Yeah, this is awesome. I’m so excited. But the next 10 years are gonna be incredible. But basically there, there’s three pillars to it that we think about and how Naz was saying it, and it’s like, think build. Make money. And so up until now we allow you to put stuff in there.
So that allows you to kind of think and put your stuff right. And then the build part is you can talk to ai, build scripts, content, all that stuff from the AI chat. And then the make money part is exactly do stuff with your thing. So send emails, send like, uh, for example, there’s some stuff that we’re working behind the scenes right now and we wanna roll it out for you guys.
But one is being able to post to social media right from within Poppy. And so you can just write your script and then just choose what platforms you wanna post to. So you can just click LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, whatever. Hit post and it, it’ll be published. You don’t even have to leave the platform.
Another one that we have that I have actually used, and it’s sick. And it’s the ability to send emails. ’cause I personally hate going into any email marketing platform. It doesn’t matter how awesome they are. Sometimes I forget my logins. Sometimes I have to like refresh and do two-factor authentication.
Then I have to create broadcast and then like follow the builder and add segments. And sometimes I forget which one I should choose and it usually kills my excitement for building a relationship with my email list. An email list, as you would know, is so important. You have taught other people about email lists.
I have learned so much about that stuff from you, and so that is so important to me. But usually when I put that much friction, I never want to send a message to my email list. So what we built recently is like you literally talk to the chat and you tell it to write an email. It will write the email in the chat for you, and then it will like literally.
Poppy will allow you to send the email to your entire audience whether you’re using ConvertKit or customer io or whatever platform. You can just press a button, you could choose a segment and then just send it. And I was able to do an email, send it to the Poppy audience within literally five minutes.
’cause I used voice Note to like write it and send it from within Poppy. ’cause I was able to choose a segment instantly. And then that email like. A hundred replies within an hour. And I was like, yo, this is crazy. So just yesterday we made a VSL for it, and we’re gonna now start sharing it with people on how they can actually get it.
But those are just some of the things, so, so excited about that.
Pat Flynn: That’s crazy and I know you have a lot more in the pipeline that you aren’t able to share right now. So first of all, again, just wanna thank you for this. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, I wanna get involved and check it out, you can go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/poppy.
That’s our affiliate link. I know you guys have a great affiliate program there and thank you for sending some commissions back our way for people we send over and, and we know you’re just trying to grow this thing and. Help people out. It’s definitely been helpful for me. I don’t say this too much about a bunch of these kinds of tools, but wanted to bring you on today to, to share it publicly here and, and thank you again.
So SmartPassiveIncome.com/poppy, Qazi and Naz, thank you so, so much for being on the show. Any final words for anybody out there? Creators, entrepreneurs? I know you work with hundreds of thousands of them through your tool, but from your perspective, any final tips to help the the struggling creator out there?
Qazi maybe we’ll start with you.
Rafeh Qazi: I would say if you’re a creator, whether you’re a content creator or you are trying to be a founder, relentlessly, follow your curiosity. It will always lead you to the best thing. It’s scary because sometimes it doesn’t make sense why you’re following your curiosity. We had to take advice that was opposite of Alex Hermo, opposite of a lot of these really famous people.
And it’s scary to do that. We were about to go bankrupt. Naz and I were deciding between if we’re gonna sleep in his parents’ basement or he is gonna sleep in my parents’ basement. My parents don’t even have a basement, unfortunately. So it was gonna be really tricky. Garage was gonna be it, and we just kept following this.
I. We ended up building something amazing and we get to work on something that is like a 10 outta 10 dream every single day. Even if it didn’t make money, it was still a 10 outta 10 dream that we got to work on. So my message to you would be, please relentlessly follow your curiosity. I promise you something amazing will come out of it.
Pat Flynn: Amazing. Nice. Take us home
Nazariy Dumanskyy: and I think my message is gonna be to either content creators or founders, anybody who is trying to create in this world overall. That is, I feel like find the right people, surround yourself around the right people, and consistently, consistently push the standards forward.
Because I feel like a lot of people nowadays, they maybe they’re like, Hey, I just wanna do my own things. I wanna do it by myself. And honestly, I feel like. Having the best friends to build things with, like how I built it with Qazia, for example. This would pop, it would not exist without this. Like, it just would not, like, would not without him, like without this, between me and him.
It just would not exist in any shape or form. And so I always like, I always push people to just find, you know, fi find your tribe, find your best friend, your best few friends, for example, you can be around with that can continuously push you. You will see your life change. Like my life changed when I, when I met Qazi and to this day, this is how like about to be 30 years old.
I met him when I was 21. This is what, nine years later now like I cannot even imagine my life being like this without that guy.
Pat Flynn: Amazing, amazing. Same goes here bro. I love you.
Rafeh Qazi: Same goes here.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: 100%
Pat Flynn: Qazi. Naz, thank you so much for this. Thank you to the rest of the team. I know you guys are working hard and appreciate you, so thanks.
We’ll hope to hear from you again. Thanks guys.
Nazariy Dumanskyy: Thank you, pat. Thank you so much.
Rafeh Qazi: Thank you so much, pat. Take care. Right.
Pat Flynn: I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Qazi and Naz, the co-founders of Poppy. Again, if you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/poppy, you’ll see a page where you can go to redeem 25% off your Poppy AI subscription, and thousands of people are using it.
I use it almost every single day and you kind of have to see it just to experience it and, and what it’s like the canvas part of this and the ability to take all these inputs and put them through something to get an output has been so helpful. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/poppy, check it out and we get a little kickback if you go through and use the code SPI when you check out.
So thank you again. Take care. And all the best.