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Jameel and Manelay Talk about Growing a Veterans Hackathon
1k Plays1 year ago
Fall in is the premier veterans hackathon launched by a 5 year USMC veteran, Jameel Matin. Jameel was having trouble growing his business and connection with new audiences when he started using ZenAI. Check out his thoughts on what life was like before and after using ZenAI.
Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:01
Speaker
Okay. Hi, Jamil. Thank you for joining us today. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself to start off with and maybe what your business is called and how it got started. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Jamil from Los Angeles and I run hackathons and podcasts. And usually I'm on the other side of this where I'm asking questions. So yeah, I don't even know where to put my hands.
00:00:29
Speaker
my head's clasped or the triangle, and you take style. Right. It's weird being different on the other side. So yeah, I broke into tech a few years ago and I went through a couple hackathons and stuff like that. And I noticed that it definitely enriched my life. And I think hackathons and breaking into tech can enrich other people's lives as well.
00:00:53
Speaker
And so I started a hackathon business after reading this book called The Montes by Rob Fitzpatrick. And in that book, it talks about how to talk to users. And after reading that, that's when I decided to double down and create this hackathon business. Where are you coming out of before you broke into tech?
Transition from Military to Tech
00:01:16
Speaker
What made you want to enjoy this hackathon culture? Were you coming from a different sector?
00:01:22
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I was coming from, you know, I had left the military and kind of bouncing around trying to find my path where, you know, I was endeavoring towards a career in law and, you know, government. And I saw sort of the culture and tech and that's sort of how I gravitated towards it.
00:01:47
Speaker
Got you. So did you start a company, a podcast after this? Did you just start the hackathons? Like how did that grow?
Founding Fall In: A Hackathon Business
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah. So I started a hackathon business in the middle of COVID. You know, I was talking to users and one of the things I noticed was like, you know, you got to build projects to kind of add value to your resume. And one of the ways to do that is by attending hackathons.
00:02:15
Speaker
And they were like, well, it's middle of COVID. We can't, there are no hackathons going on. And that's when I was like, well, you know, I'll start my own. And so these hackathons, um, it's called fall in where it's designed to help vets, you know, level up, break into tech, build projects. You know, it's a great way to add value to the resume. We have, you know, DJs performing on our hackathons. We have guest speakers we've had.
00:02:45
Speaker
a Medal of Honor recipient, we've had the co-founder of Twitch, we've had directors of the VA, and we try to make these as premier as possible so that it's an all-around great event for the vets that participate. And yeah, that's how it's been grown. How have the vets benefited from it? Have you kept a network up? How has that been working?
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, so they benefit from building the projects and getting mentorship from all the different mentors that we invite. And they take those projects, they continue to build upon them. And we're noticing, you know, about 70% of our vets after about six months land a job in tech. So yeah, we've seen that it's been super helpful for them to attend these hackathons.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, it must be great for them to also meet like minded people that are also going through the same thing because I feel like when you're starting any kind of career, you really need to get into some sort of community. So that must be massive.
Challenges Before Zen AI
00:03:50
Speaker
How did you get the word of mouth out there? How are you able to grow your business before coming on to Zen AI?
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it was super time consuming. I wasn't really able to grow my socials. I mean, I was requesting help from volunteers. I was paying people like freelancers and you know, but they would take too long and you know, it takes so much work just to like edit it and you know, schedule it and schedule these like sort of social media clips so I can get the word out.
00:04:28
Speaker
And so it was taking forever before I was using zen.ai. And yeah, now that I've been using it, it's been a total game changer. That sounds like it was pretty time consuming. And you had multiple people involved for the different processes from recording your content.
00:04:47
Speaker
to being able to post it, to being able to have people know about it, and to be able to post on your socials, do the captions, all that kind of stuff. What did you do after Zen AI?
Impact of Zen AI on Growth
00:04:57
Speaker
How did you start using it, and how fast did you see the growth? Yeah. So after I signed up for Zen AI, I started seeing growth almost immediately. Within 24 hours, one of my videos got thousands of views.
00:05:15
Speaker
That's something that wouldn't have happened without using Zen AI. That's crazy. How is the process different? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty autonomous, like a self-driving car. You just press Go, and it'll take you where you want to go. It'll auto-caption the video. It'll auto-post it. It'll edit it, all that sort of stuff. So it's pretty autonomous. And yeah, it's super simple to use as well.
00:05:46
Speaker
How did the process work? You made your recording and then what happens after that? And how did that differ from what you were doing before as an AI? Yeah, before as an AI, I was basically cataloging all my recordings and they were just building up. And, you know, I would try to clip each
00:06:04
Speaker
single podcast and it would just take forever. You know, lose files like they're all over the place and it would take forever. Like you have to download them and they have to like upload them into another platform to edit it and then like re-upload it to like all the different social media platforms. And you know, all these social media platforms, they're so different. Like, you know, just to upload a video on YouTube, it's so different from like uploading a video on TikTok and
00:06:33
Speaker
You can imagine I have all this content just sitting here and super time consuming to upload to all these different social media platforms. Yeah, how are you selecting the clips and everything? Super manual process by going over the whole video and capturing the time stamps for
00:07:00
Speaker
the meaty portion of the podcast and recording those and then taking notes of that and then going back to it and then clipping it manually, stuff like that. Yeah, video is super massive. It takes up so much bandwidth and it's a lot to comb over. So I imagine this was a pretty different process. What was it like after you did Zen AI? Was it streamlined more? What would actually someone expect if they were able to use this platform?
Optimizing Content Across Platforms
00:07:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, they can expect sort of everything all in one place. You don't have to bounce around from platform to platform. You can automatically upload all your clips with the click of a button and it'll post to like eight different social media channels and it'll do the auto captioning. It will create a description. You can like, you know, you can even do editing if you don't like the clip. So
00:07:57
Speaker
I think yeah, are you still ingesting a clip or are you ingesting the whole podcast and then it breaks it out into clips? Yeah, I'm ingesting the entire podcast and then that will the Zen AI will break that up into many meaningful parts of that podcast into like, you know, I've uploaded an hour long video and it broke it up into like 20 different clips.
00:08:24
Speaker
No way. That's crazy. So let me get this straight. You used to hand clip those basically manually, take the meaty portion and how did those perform prior versus now? Yeah, since I wasn't consistent, you know, I think I was posting like once every few weeks and you know, you're not going to see great results if you're not consistent. So
00:08:49
Speaker
I don't remember the metrics, but it was pretty flat. And after using Zen AI for about less than a couple months, I've already reached 40,000 impressions across just a few different social media platforms. And it's crazy. I would have not been able to do that if I wasn't using Zen AI. Was it the fact that the process is so much faster that it allowed you to finally be consistent? Was that part of it?
00:09:18
Speaker
You know, it was faster. It was smarter. It was like a solution that's all in one in one place. And yeah, it basically does all the work for you and does it really quickly. And again, you don't have to like bounce around to different platforms. And with the click of a button, it does all the magic for you.
00:09:47
Speaker
Were you surprised that you were taking so much time to comb through and find the juiciest parts of your interviews and your content, and yet actually letting Zen AI find those clips for you without you overthinking what those segments were going to be, that it performed better? Were you surprised by that? Totally. I had no idea what to expect.
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, so I wasn't really sure going into it. But even after like a few, few clips being uploaded, I was gaining subscribers, you know, getting comments and all that sort of stuff. I definitely no, no idea what to expect here. That's huge. So in a way, it helped you find more of your community faster and more consistently than you were able to do so before. Yeah, absolutely.
00:10:41
Speaker
That's huge. And you mentioned different platforms. Was it able to basically cater to how those platforms upload? I know that, for example, you know, YouTube, you have more horizontal, you might have more vertical on Instagram, you might have captions on Instagram, or you might have like information for YouTube or different for TikTok. How did that help you streamline that process so you could be across all the platforms that you want to be on?
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah, you're right. Every platform is different and they have all these different like, you know, aspect ratios and such. And Zen AI has baked in
00:11:19
Speaker
a feature where it will understand the aspect ratio, the format for each of the different social media platforms out there and it'll repurpose it, reformat it to each of the different platforms for YouTube Shorts. It'll make sure it's less than 60 seconds and it's totally like
00:11:41
Speaker
You know, it's in portrait mode and nine by 16. And if it's for LinkedIn, it's 16 by nine. And it understands, you know, how to cut based on which platform it's distributing to. That's very cool. Is there anything else that you'd want to share about? I think let me hold on. Let me look at this.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think we covered this a little bit, but how soon did you start to see the results with Zen AI and how did it increase your
Connecting with Veterans
00:12:11
Speaker
views? I know you mentioned that it went up by thousands. Were you able to get more engagement on those? Like how meaningful was that increase? Yeah, I mean, within a few weeks, I saw about 40,000 impressions across my across like, you know, a few different platforms and I started getting really meaningful comments from people that, you know,
00:12:34
Speaker
I would have never thought I'd connect with and getting subscribers, tons of subscribers on YouTube. That's awesome. You're able to reach more veterans and able to help them more when they want to enter the tech sector and be connected with other people who are doing the same thing. That's a huge mission that you're accomplishing, so that's awesome. Yeah, thank you.
00:13:04
Speaker
Okay, lastly, let's see here. How much time do you spend clipping with Zen AI per month now? How do you think that's changed?
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think I spend, you know, probably less than 10 minutes a week. And I would say I spend less than half an hour a month. That is insane. You know, a half an hour a month and you're getting like 40,000 views across your platforms when you had a very small amount before those pretty flat. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, it is. For the time expenditure, I mean, it really can't be beat.
00:13:41
Speaker
Well, that's very cool. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. It's amazing that you've been able to reach an underserved community that is just leveling up in every way possible. And I really appreciate you coming on with us today.
Social Media and Contacts
00:13:55
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think if folks are interested in learning more about us, they can
00:14:01
Speaker
Check our clips out. That's made by Zenai. We're up on X at fall underscore in underscore vets. Same for IG and TikTok and our websites fallin.today.
00:14:17
Speaker
amazing fall in if you're a veteran, if you're someone looking to get into tech, if you want to just plug in with that community, if you want to talk to Jamil about how it's been pre Zen AI and post Zen AI, that would be the person to talk to, find him on fall underscore in across all platforms. What is that music?