Authentic AI Marketing with Molly Mahoney on Building AI Boston

Building AI Boston - Building AI Boston

Molly Mahoney shares her journey from Broadway to building a seven-figure AI-driven business, emphasizing authenticity and strategic use of technology in marketing. She reveals how she leveraged Facebook Live and AI tool

Key takeaways

• AI is a Trojan horse for teaching authenticity

Transcript preview

Welcome to Building AI Boston. Our guest today is Molly Mahoney. She's a digital marketing strategist, keynote speaker, book author, musical theater legend, both as a coach and performer from Broadway to Vegas and around the world. Today we break down her views on AI and how she created a seven-figure online business, the prepared performer that is proof that AI and authenticity are not opposites. Molly welcome to the show. Hey I'm so glad to be here we're gonna have a blast. We are gonna have a blast so Chris and I are excited Chris this is kind of a launch I feel of a friendship. So you know welcome to Chris and meeting Chris's superpower. By way of explanation Chris and I had a podcast doing storytelling and this was during the pandemic so we're on air every single day on podcast and radio and while we were doing this gig nobody thought to do social media right crazy and meanwhile Molly was busy cracking the code on Facebook live and and if I may say you were making bank teaching people to find their inner awesome do you want to tell us a little bit more about that story and what you were up to why did you go from Broadway to coaching business? Yeah I mean well and the live stuff was something that came out of an opportunity, right? So I had, after doing all of my work in New York and Vegas and cruise ships and all of that as a singing, dancing, musical theater lover, I met my husband who was a bass player, we toured the world of the flying car with the national tour of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was so fun, it was awesome. And we wanted to have kids, so we left our 400 square foot apartment in New York, moved back to California. And I found myself, do what I had done in New York and all of this. So I launched my company, the Prepared Performer, initially as a coach for singers and actors to help them both with their singing, their audition skills, and I launched a live event called The Ghost Light Vocal Jam. It was a Broadway-themed open mic. It was just, it was really awesome. And then I found myself realizing that I could do something more scalable if I taught them how to do things online. So I had this brilliant idea to be the cure for the cure for the artist syndrome and that was like the tagline for this program. And guess how many membership spots I sold in that program? Crickets. Zero. Like actually zero, which I'm so glad because then if I had sold one then I would have been stuck teaching that to one person. But I learned so much in that failed launch. I had pre-recorded the whole entire thing. Decided never to do that again. I now sell it first. I validate my offers and I'm careful about the messaging. someone a starving artist turns out they don't want to pay you. You remind him way they can't afford you. Right. Exactly. What was my thinking and I had such good intentions but it didn't work out. So I made a giant list of all the things I love to do. I made a giant list of all the things I thought people would pay me to do. And then I made a list of the opportunities that were available like in the world and one of the things that came together that clicked all the boxes was teaching people how to show up on camera on camera. and Facebook Live was brand new. So instead of teaching performers how to have a business, I decided to teach business owners how to perform. Much better idea. And so we brought in $50,000 within the first three months. It was so awesome. We launched the whole thing in an empty Facebook group. I had a spreadsheet where I wrote down 30 different things that I wanted to teach. So I went live every single day in that Facebook group. I sold it for 47 dollars for lifetime access. I had a spreadsheet. done. By the time we closed that camera confidence program, we were selling it for $5,000. And everybody who joined at the $47 rate got grandfathered or grandmathered in. And it's been just an awesome strategy to use in the future too. So it's been good. That's amazing. Chris, don't you wish we'd met her back in this day? I mean, we... How many Facebook lives did you and I do? Like two and four years? Everything was a struggle. for the record I was trying to do social media every we literally got poo-pooed about doing social media they were like that's not gonna do anything it's not gonna do anything it's crazy moly when I dive into your goodies online and everybody should check out your website remind me it's the perfect the prepared performer dot com yeah if you go there you'll find the archives of tap dancing and all that but I've I've actually decided recently because my tap dance terminology about a year ago and that isn't what I'm doing news flash so I decided to move to moly mahoney dot com but the prepared performer dot com still has loads of magic just moly mahoney dot com is the more up to date a i stuff and all of that yeah and so this is really crazy too chris she in like twenty twenty one long before a i was a buzz word you launched like the world's first a i focused content membership is that what you've been talking about or is that's it's wild yeah was called Camera Confidence. That was in 2016. So we had like three big major monumental moments. So 2016 with Facebook Live, it was awesome. And I ended up partnering with so many tools as their like spokesperson or brand ambassador where they would pay me to do videos about their tool, which was awesome. Then after Facebook Live, when messenger bots came out, I started combining automated messages with live video and it was. wild and that's where I first really realized this gift that I have for taking things that are technical and complicated and making them like you guys are doing, telling stories, making it user-friendly, making it engaging. And so many chat hired me to speak on their behalf about messenger-bots and automation. So my fascination with the robots actually started back in 2018. And then when AI came out two years before Chachi PT, we started working with the company. that's now called Jasper and man I just loved everything they were doing and so we launched the AI Content Club was actually called Dancing with Jarvis when it first started and it was about how to dance with the robots because you have to know that you're not going to get a perfect dancer every time and you've got it's like an ebb and a flow so that was wild and then now it's just gotten even crazier as we've grown so it's pretty awesome. that you had trying to get people to buy into incorporating that the automation. Well I think in the beginning the problem was actually the same as it is now. I was going to say there was like a change in it but I think really it's that people are fundamentally afraid of losing their humanity and so that is where we really, okay this is a big secret, we use AI as a Trojan horse. when people join our programs, yes we have amazing systems for AI but really the core of it is that you have to figure out who you are as a human being first and for some reason when you dangle the AI agent carrot on this side they'll actually do the work that is needed to be done before we had the AI carrot they were like yeah yeah I don't really need to know that but now because of how fast AI goes it like flaps them back in the face with how bad their messaging is secret. I was like, yes. You heard it here first kids. It's just a carrot. It's a Trojan horse. I love that. In a way it makes sense. I mean, it's the it's the shining new thing you're dangling in front of somebody that they haven't used before. Well, and I do think it's amazing, like, no joke. I think it's amazing and I'm certifiably obsessed with it. But I think there are a lot of people right now who I call easy-bake AI experts, where not actually taking the time to go and figure out who they are as humans and bring their own expertise in. And it's at no fault to them because there's a lot of people teaching you how to be an easy-bake AI expert where they're just giving you a template telling you to duplicate it and then giving you a script to go make sales. And that is where we get into trouble because people don't actually really take the time to bring their true expertise to the forefront. So it's an interesting tricky time. think. And you say something, one of your value claims is really like you don't have to sell your soul for the social media gods. I mean I've had people tell me you've got to be posting three times a day. You disagree with that. I totally disagree with it. And I can tell you if you want to go crazy viral, there's things that you can do. Like I had one video. I don't remember if we talked about this before, but I had one video that hit a reach of 39 million views. I saw that on your site. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Before I tell you what the video was, Facebook paid me $30,000 for that one 13 second video. Awesome. Facebook is not doing that anymore. They pay like $100 for 30 million views. Not really, but it's not, it's not like it was before. But I, the reason that I posted this was because I knew Facebook was doing this wild thing with Reels when they were trying to be Tik-talk, right? So rather than following my normal strategic system for social media, I went through my and I just scrolled until I found something that I thought was weird. Pay attention, Chris. Yeah, okay. And I'm going to tell you like the good about this and then I'm going to tell you the bad about this too. So I just scrolled the video that I found, which I don't always share in public because it's kind of embarrassing. But the video that I found was me holding I was like holding my phone so you couldn't see me. I wasn't in the video. And I was whispering, so it was very ASMR. I was recording the bathtub with a bath bomb in it. So it was like this pink. It looked like the slimmer in the newer Ghostbusters, which it was around the same time that that Ghostbusters came out. So I think that helped also, so it was like a trending topic. So it was like pink slime. And then it was me, when I first found the video, all you could hear was me saying, I was about to get in the bath, and I with this awesome bath bomb. And I thought, oh, is that lavender. little specs and then I say, no, they're flipping termites. That one went viral. Wait, because then, so I was like, oh, this video's weird. It'll grab people's attention. So then I put on top of that, I'm never taking a bath again, was the hook that I put. And then, no, I know, it was, I got in the bathtub and saw this, dot, dot,