Holy Macaroni, AI is now, not later

Dan Gudema
6 min readJun 19, 2024

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I am in the middle of my own AI Armageddon, where I have joined with 500 other AI startups all marching towards customers. It’s really happening.

An AI image we created within our own tool PAIGN AI, https://cam.paign.ai

About 7 years ago the first couple AI consulting companies emerged on the tech scene in Miami. They were meeting with big corporations getting fat contracts to either reduce jobs, crunch data or create more opportunities. That was then.

About 2 years ago I got familiar with Jasper and its predecessor, generating AI content for digital marketing and SEO writing purposes. In fact, we were big users of that program until ChatGPT came about and caused us to switch.

A few months after that, around the time of ChatGPT 4, I was starting to come up with the idea for PAIGN AI, a new startup we’ve developed at https://cam.paign.ai which allows solo-entrepreneurs, agencies, and marketing consultants the ability to reduce their time in creating content, publishing content and posting content to socials. Here is the PAIGN AI video channel to see what it is about.

But the truth is, about a year ago I started to see this all as a race! And the race had already been started. The question was whether or not I was going to jump into this race, which reminds me of a relay race, and that’s because we are in different segments of this race.

It took us a few months for us to get on board and start developing. 10 months later we have a product in the market and paying customers, some customers who absolutely love our product (I will get into why later in this article)!

We are still learning every day and week.

Our product was developed from listening to customers. I was the first customer with my ideas, and then when we had a Beta version, we met with a bunch of potential customers and they gave us their ideas. From there customers keep giving us feedback.

What is most important with this AI race, is the reality that with generative AI working well (which takes a village), it is the beginning of a major change in how marketing content is created and valued.

If I ask a digital agency what they charge for monthly digital agency services, they often quote me $4000 a month for a client to be onboarded. Those are the smart agencies, with a great history. Top ad firms who also do digital marketing probably charge $15,000 to $20,000 a month for these services or more.

But think about who these high-end digital agency services are for, who pay these high monthly fees. Large successful entities can afford to pay for high-priced, well-developed digital agency services. But that leaves out 97% of small businesses. They don’t pay these types of fees.

If you are paying that much for digital marketing you are a serious enterprise. There is a reason why, and you just don’t have the skills.

And there are something like 10,000 to 20,000 digital agencies in the US alone, many of which know what they are doing. They are experts more about presenting themselves quite often than doing the work!

But the truth is only a small percentage of US businesses can afford these levels of digital agency services. The truth is there has been a shift from services to products for quite a while in the digital marketing space, and a DIY, do-it-yourself revolution that took hold with Saas platforms about a decade ago with the intro of MailChimp, Salesforce for the big guys and more recently products like Canva are a cutting edge for agencies.

We are all marketers today and the reason we pay for services is “time savings”.

Is it worth your time to do these digital marketing activities and become an expert yourself?

As a small business you can’t afford to pay $4000 a month, less $2000 a month or even $1000 a month for the kinds of stuff you really need completed for all your digital marketing activities.

The first place many small businesses turned to was overseas workers. That’s because of the “time savings”. Quite often it was not for the quality, though that is changing as well. But what if the cost of overseas workers was low, plus the quality was great. There is a different equation for small businesses today and AI is the catalyst.

What small business need for digital marketing could be blog writing, social posting, pay per click advertising, managing a Facebook Page, or managing a website. Often it’s just managing Instagram. The list goes on and on. I know, I do a ton of marketing activities for my business(es) and my wife’s business. And it is stuff that we know needs to get done to get the business.

So when I started out with my new tech partner to build a product I said “What If Marketing Just Happened?” That was a vision and a goal. We are not there yet and we will never be there a 100%, but I feel for many small service businesses we are 80% there. And that means the AI revolution has started, is quite underway and everything will be different in the end.

That’s because AI, when done efficiently, can be amazing in its quality and product. That’s because if you combine AI with automation (what we do with PAIGN AI), you end up with a new kind of super-tool that can do stuff that was not easy a year ago, even with ChatGPT.

For instance using PAIGN AI you can create ideas, blog, branded images, publish to a web page and post to 4 socials in like 20 minutes. That is a miracle to marketers and small business people unto itself. The key to PAIGN AI is you don’t have to log into 5 different platforms, or learn a complicated platform to get results. You just sign up, configure your subdomain and socials and you are ready to push out new content.

Now, you’d think that agencies would love this tool. They should. But what we are experiencing talking with agencies is a bit of fear and apprehension. That’s because when they see our tool working, and the content is great, they may be disheartened that their area of expertise may be under attack. And quite frankly it is. But they should embark on this journey in AI either way because you can’t stop the world from changing, you can just stand still and ignore it.

Now, with our first couple of paid customers using this tool, what I heard was “it’s amazing”, “I can’t live without it”. I even went as far as asking an early customer if it’s like crack? He said “Yes and I need it”. I wanted to know how badly he needs it and wants it.

That’s because, for this particular customer, he was finally free from agencies, which he may go back to, but he wants to do his own online marketing, especially since this tool has the quality and reduces the time it takes to do the marketing activities he requires.

So, once again PAIGN AI can do all these things:

  • Generate Campaign Ideas for content
  • Generate Branded Images with your logo that are unique to your brand colors.
  • Generate Content based on the right keywords that is high quality written content that you can edit before publishing.
  • Automatically publishes the content and images to a subdomain in seconds.
  • Automatically posts or schedules an excerpt about the article or blog to up to 4 social networks with a beautiful image in seconds.

That is what PAIGN AI can do. Now, if you are a smart agency you would sign up with a demo with me here to learn and see this tool… Click here to get on my calendar for a demo call. When I talk to some digital agencies, they seem to be overloaded with AI companies trying to get their attention. But we are different and higher quality. Either they they refuse to see the future or don’t want to adopt for the future. If I were an agency I would be all over this thing.

If you are a small business, just go to https://cam.paign.ai and sign up for a free trial. We offer both DIY and Done For You, if you don’t have the time. But the fees won’t be $4000 a month. It will be fair-valued and easy to use!

For more info about PAIGN AI, please email me at my PAIGN email, daniel.gudema@paign.ai. Please email me questions or ask them here on Medium!

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Dan Gudema

CoFounder PAIGN AI, https://cam.paign.ai. Writer, Speaker, Consultant. Email me at dgudema@gmail.com to contact me.