126. Uprising Series: How Austin Armstrong’s TikTok ban inspired the launch of Syllaby

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This is the fourth episode of the uprising series, and you have to listen to the story in today's because it is wild. A fellow SaaS entrepreneur hitting a 1 million ARR run rate in the first six months of going live, only to have it feel like it's all come crashing down. Since then, Austin Armstrong has built a massive following on TikTok. We're talking hundreds of thousands of followers, and then one day, poof, it's all gone. His account was banned, and with it went his main source of leads, revenue, and brand deals. And. But here's the thing. Austin didn't let that setback define him. Instead, he used it as fuel to diversify his social media presence and create something even bigger. So in this episode, we're going to be diving deeper into Austin's journey of resilience and transformation. We're going to be exploring how he bounced back after losing everything on TikTok, the strategies he used to build millions of followers across multiple platforms, and the birth of his AI power, Howard's social media tool syllabi, and the challenges he's facing as a founder. If you've ever wondered what it really takes to succeed in the world of social media and entrepreneurship, you will not want to miss this conversation. In fact, this conversation was such a great personal reminder for me, a reminder to never try to compare yourself to anyone else you see or follow, because you never know what they might be going through and the challenges that they're currently facing. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder of Capsho. The fastest way to create content that helps you get more leads, this is win the content game.

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There's so many failures that are part of the entrepreneurial journey. I have been doing social media marketing for 19 years, and it really wasn't until about four and a half, five years ago now that I really started to gain a lot of traction in my personal brand. And that was on TikTok. And I went all in on TikTok. I was the TikTok guy for two years there, where I was doing public speaking, I was growing my account. I had gained hundreds of thousands of followers. And there's a dangerous thing that comes from putting all of your eggs in one basket and only specializing in one thing, and. And in a blink of an eye, it can all disappear for you. And then, which is exactly what happened to me. So I was at about the first time that my TikTok account got banned. I think I was at about 400,000 followers. And I just woke up. It was. It was the entire source of all of my leads for my agency at the time, and brand revenue, brand deals coming in and ad revenue, the whole nine yards. And it was also where I was doing public speaking, and I had started this whole thing. And I woke up one morning to log in and check my analytics, as I have grown addicted and accustomed to doing. And I was faced with that dreaded notification of your account has been banned. And what a terrible way to wake up and start your day is just a gut punch. That everything I had worked for over two plus years at that point was ripped away from me. The countless hours every day that I put into that platform, at that point, over a thousand videos that I had created, all gone immediately. Now, I was able to ultimately get that account back. I've actually been banned five times, and now I had to start completely fresh again. You know, the crazy thing is, like, I got so used to getting permanently banned on TikTok that it doesn't even faze me anymore because it just happens so many times. But, you know, when that happened, I was really faced with something that I. The error in what I was doing is that you have to diversify. You have to learn all of these other platforms if you're going to go down an organic route where a lot of your business comes in from your social media presence, your personal brand, you can't just have it on one platform. So I really had to figure out. I used that, and I was so pissed off at the time. I was so angry that it was happening.

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Yeah. When you got that notification, what was literally the first thought that went through your mind?

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Just, this has got to be a mistake. Is this a glitch? How could this happen to me? My content is not bad. I just share useful websites, and I still get angry about this to some degree. I still don't understand why my accounts get taken down and their videos get taken down. But, yeah, just anger, frustration, confusion. I thoroughly have read the community guidelines multiple times, and it's so broad and there's no customer service. There's nobody that you can talk to. It's so frustrating to have something ripped away from you on rented land. You know, all of these platforms we don't own, we put all of this time in and we get free engagement and following if our content is good, but we don't own that at the end of the day. So just so. It was so frustrating to deal with that. Yeah, very frustrating.

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Oh, my gosh. I can just imagine, because I'd literally like to be honest, I've not been banned from any, but, like, I've heard stories and even just thinking about that happening, it's the. I think for me, it would be the helplessness. Like, to your point, like, there's no customer service. They just make the rule. Like, you can't. It's not like you can talk to someone and be like, hey, can we just logically think through things and look at my stuff? And there's none of that. Literally, it's so. You feel so helpless, right?

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Yeah. I mean, you can appeal in the app, you know, which is really all that they give you. There's a yemenite or a legal form on the website that you can submit, and then they'll review your account. And, like, there's so many, like, multiple times I've gotten. No, sorry. After. After further review, we've decided to just keep your account banned. And there's no explanation. They don't. They won't specifically tell you, this is why your account was banned. Here's what you should have prevented. Here's what you can do again in the future. So, like, I have to this day, I have no clue. It's all best guess. I have no clue. And there's accounts bigger than mine and that share similar content, and there's accounts that are very much more risky in a lot of other areas than the digital marketing oriented content that I put out there. But for some reason, I keep getting banned, and I have zero explanation of why. There is nothing in the community guidelines that specifically says this. It just. They blanket label it as integrity and authenticity. What the hell does that mean? What the hell? What does that mean? So very frustrating. But it led to other successes. I mean, it led to, if I didn't have go through that adversity, I probably would not have millions of followers now across social media because the need to diversify wouldn't have been a straw.

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Let's talk about that now. So that is kind of your comeback moment. You did mention, you know, going through that, that band meant that you were like, this is ridiculous. I should not be putting all of my eggs in this one basket. So what did you do? Because it's not easy as well, being on multiple platforms in a, you know, intentional, like, in a way that can, where you do find growth. So what was kind of, what was the things that went through your mind and how did you kind of come back from this moment?

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Yeah, so I really started to dive in. Well, so what I was doing up to that point was I was reposting some of it haphazardly no individual cross platform strategy and dumping anything and everything. And so it took that moment to really say, okay, I wasn't gaining a lot of traction on these other platforms. Some videos were hit occasionally, most of them didn't subpar. I had to learn the individual nuances of every individual platform. One of my favorite stories of this is my YouTube story where I had, it took me about three years to get to 5000 subscribers on YouTube. And then in three days I went from 5000 to 100,000. And up to that point I had posted about 600 shorts on my channel. So not for lack of trying by any means, 600 failures, lessons learned. I dont think a single one went over 10,000 views at that point. And so I started every single day chatting with a good friend of mine, Jeremy Vest, one of the most brilliant behind the scenes YouTube coaches. Not enough people know his name but every, we were like, I got together with him and I'm like, we're going to figure out YouTube shorts together. And so we started every single day creating multiple videos, multiple styles, studying other content creators, studying hooks meticulously, looking at audience retention graphs, length of videos down to the single seconds, and focusing on not posting every piece of content that I was creating, but only the most viral, broad oriented content, testing different titles and ultimately that accountability and coach and just having a purpose there that worked. And so what happened was I realized that rather than posting random digital marketing, even though digital marketing wasn't niche, what really worked for me in particular was a sort of, was a listicle oriented content. So top five useful websites in a conversational delivery style. So it's like side profile of me talking to myself and it was, they're corny. I still do these types of videos, they're corny but the information is really helpful in those videos. And so I only started uploading those videos every single day. Similar topics. One exploded. It now has about 23 million views on YouTube. I think that one video has generated over 300,000 subscribers. And then we dove even deeper. So I noticed mine work star specifically on YouTube shorts is a 49 2nd video that I can get at least 38 seconds of retention on. If I can hit those very specific by the second metrics. Predictably every video, or more than 50% of those videos perform well. So that is my North Star. For every single one, I know the opening hooks, I know how long every single click needs to be in that video and that is what's worked for me. And then just figuring out the other cadence on other platforms as well. So yeah I mean, three years to get to 5000 subscribers on YouTube. I now have 600,000 subscribers on YouTube. I just crossed. So it's still continuing to grow, but it's just hyper focusing on what is working and testing, testing, testing that grit and tenacity to figure it out. And now I have a million followers on Facebook. I've got almost 800,000 followers on Instagram, 600,000 followers on YouTube. On TikTok, I was banned at 860,000. Again, I don't think I'm getting it back, but now I'm up to 170,000 followers again. I just did 100,000 followers on threads, which is ridiculous. It's such a silly platform that nobody talks about, but that mindset of figure out the subtle nuances of what works on each individual platform and then keep doing exactly what works on that individual platform.

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And this is the thing that I think a lot of people don't talk about or deeply understand is like, what you did to get to the numbers that you're at now is actually not something that the average person is going to do. Like, we all love the dream of, like, yes, I would love to have those many followers, but it takes what you did, which is not an easy thing. Like, super not easy. Like, one of the most difficult things to do to actually get there. So I just want to point that out because I know I can be guilty of this, where it's like, conceptually I'm like, yes, I would love this. But then the reality of what you needed to get there, it's so different. It's so different. Talk us through a little bit of what that actually took. I know you mentioned words like grit and resilience and tenacity, but why? What kept you going with all of that?

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So I was fortunate enough to have found what I wanted to do very early on in my life. I've been doing social media since I was 14 back on MySpace, and I had a lot of success. I had hundreds of thousands of followers on MySpace when I was 14. And that's in a very impressionable age where your prefrontal cortex is still growing and theres outside praise coming in now, because ive been surrounded by my business partner as a clinical psychologist, and so ive gone down that path of, like, disc assessment and all of the tons of meditation, and I constantly like to learn motivation styles and whatnot. And for me, just being transparent and through self reflection, recognition is my motivation. I like to be recognized that it is what it is, and I seek that validation. And I seek that recognition. I want to be recognized by people. I want to be recognized by people I look up to and peers and I've known for now 19, almost 20 years exactly what I wanted. And I celebrate every win along the way, no matter how small. But I've never burned out because it's all I've ever wanted. And I just maybe unfortunate, I don't know, like, there's so many years there, 15 years of, pardon my language, 15 years of eating shit. But you learn fail. Like, I'm a big Gary Vee fan and, you know, he used to talk that way. Now he's a little bit more empathetic, I think. But, you know, you're so young. You're so young. Put your head down and just do the thing forever until you get there. And I'm there. I'm there now. I've accomplished almost all of my goals, and I still feel like I'm just getting started, but it's because of that clarity and knowing and just having the understanding that all it takes is just repetition. It's just every failure leaves clues. You can learn something from every failure, so just never stop. You want to work on this thing, just keep doing it. Just keep doing it. And I've never had a problem with failing.

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That is so, so cool. And the great thing about that particular story, because I want to transition now into, because I know that for you, we're going to talk about two stories, but the great thing is that not only did you come back with even bigger, better, more success on these social media platforms, but it also actually helped you create something that is amazing. We met, gosh, almost, I would say, like two years ago. Almost two years ago, yeah. You were just about to launch. We maybe had just launched, and your story has been phenomenal with syllabi, but it's not, again, it's not all roses. Tell us a bit about that journey and specifically what you're kind of currently going through.

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Yeah. Yeah. So Syllabi is basically the collection of my social media thesis packaged into an AI software. My entire mission of what I do is that social media has changed my life, and I just want to provide the tips, tools and strategies to help change your life if you're willing to, as well. And so as an agency owner, I've worked in the agency space for ten years. I've owned an agency for over five years. And I really just systematically took the approach that I took to help grow my own social media following and all of our clients, and we turned it into what is syllabi. And when I had the idea for syllabi initially about three years ago, even this was pre AI, I started working on this. I'm a terrible product project manager, so I had hired a development team. Like heres my idea. It started off as a content strategy tool. Thats the biggest and most important part to creating successful content is being able to effectively do competitor research and develop a strategy that you can systematically follow. That was the first idea and mvp of syllabi. And I am very much in favor of build in public versus build incognito or right? Is it incognito right? Or say nothing until you launched it? It's like, here we are. No, I wanted to take people along the journey, so I built in public. I talked about the ideas, I did user interviews in public, I put social media posts out there. What do you think about this idea? Here's a tool I'm working on. What would you like to see, what features and when we act? And then we threw it two weeks before we launched. We threw up a landing page and leaned into FOMO and collected emails for like a 50% discount. We got over 10,000 emails. So we proved the idea. I completely self funded this project as well. And so when we launched, we immediately were profitable. Day one, it was a rocket ship. We actually got up to over the 1 million ARR mark in less than six months. Every single month was a rocket ship. I'm like, here we go. Nothing's ever going to slow us down. It's going to be perfect. And that's not what happens. It starts like, spoiler alert. So we hit a point where market saturation, how I was marketing it through my audience, hits a peak because there's only so many followers that are interested in your product, right until it takes off. We're not the cheapest tool. We are a premium price tool because it's a premium solution. It's not meant for everybody. And so we started to, there's AI tourism going around. So that's a big part of it as well. And part of the problem in that, I think, too, like where basically what AI tourism is, is people are trying a bunch of different tools rather than committing to one individual tool and workflow. And so we have a churn problem. And so we've been on sort of, we were on a downward slope. Now we're kind of level, which is good because we're able to really jump into like data analysis and churn reduction methods and cohort analysis type stuff because we were kind of feature driven for the past year and a half and now we have pretty much every feature that we've wanted to have. And so it's an ongoing problem. It's an ongoing struggle. You know, this is, this is startup life. This is founder life. This is entrepreneurial life. There's, you have to be okay with getting punched in the gut over and over again, but being able to stand up and learn from that, learning how to defend that analogy that comes through and just never quit. But yeah, I mean that's, you know, we're full hands on, all hands on deck right now, trying to work on our ux, our UI, doing deep competitor research, deep customer conversation, bringing on outside consultants and experts. Yeah. So we're working on everything. But yeah, it's an ongoing struggle.

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It is so tough because to your point, you know, you've been growing like it was like explosive growth. Right. And that becomes your norm where it's like, oh, okay, this, you can only go up from here surely.

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Yeah.

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And then it's like the first month that you drop in the second. Like talk us through that when that was happening, like what was going through your mind?

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Yeah, it's, it's scary because you start to have, or start to have thoughts like are we going to, did we scale the team too quickly? Are we going to have to let people go or am I going to have to like just full transparency as founders, like we all took pay cuts because we got to do what we got to do. Like we pay ourselves a salary, but like we have taken less money for the time being because we are going to ride this out before we take any cuts from our employees or start cutting staff in general. We are taking the brunt of that. That's how we're trying to get through. But you're faced with scary situations when you look at your run rates and your projections and in the middle of trying to raise, it becomes a different conversation when you're trying to raise and your numbers are going down rather than going up. Every investor wants to see straight up and they want the charter to be zero and one, every metric to look good before investing. But thats not really the reality. So you have to paint that picture of why this is happening, what youre doing specifically to work on and prove that, how you can prove or present without a shadow of a doubt because this is going to work. Yeah, it's scary.

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And is there any part of you, if you're open to sharing this, is there any part of you that obviously when you're trying to raise and you're trying to paint a picture. Was there any part of you that didn't quite believe it? And I'm not trying to say that you're, like, being a fraud or anything like that, but these things go through our minds, right. Where we're like, maybe we're not that good or like, because these objective things are happening. That is, revenue's dropping. And so did anything like that cross through your mind during this time?

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I don't let it. I so believe in the idea and what we've built. I think my only self doubt is maybe it's not packaged the correct way as good as possible, but I have zero doubts that this is going to. This is going to fail. I just. I don't think that way at all. And if it does, so be it. That's the, that's. But I have zero self doubt.

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That is phenomenal. And that in and of itself is, I think, such an important lesson like that I'm definitely taking. But I'm sure that anyone watching this is taking as well, which is like, it's almost back to your first story about the grit and the tenacity and the perseverance and the resilience. Right. It's like, part of having all of that is that you just cannot doubt this path, this journey that you're on, and that you will come back from this setback. And you're in the middle of it right now. Right. Like, I know that you mentioned, look, there's no, like, clean ending to the story.

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Not yet, unfortunately. Hopefully we come back to this. We'll do a. Yeah, we'll do a follow up. Yeah.

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Part two.

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This is where we're at.

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I would love that. That would be phenomenal. That would be so, so good. I really like that where you're like, you know what? Like, I'm not gonna let myself get into that self doubt. Like, this is gonna work. But what you said was, it's probably about the packaging, it's probably about the other things around it. So how did you kind of work out where to start and what to actually focus on? Because it could be a lot of things. Right. That is going wrong. Everything from, you know, are you getting the right leads to, is the offer the right. Like, are you messaging it in the right way to, like, there's so many things. So where and how did you decide to focus your efforts on?

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Yeah, so we're doing a lot of things. I mean, firstly, it just comes down to the users. Right. Like, you could have the best product in the world. But if the users aren't using it or aren't sticking around, then something is the matter, right? So we start, we have automate email automations in place to specifically set up calls with active users and churn users or users that have signed up and that have canceled for whatever reason. And we offer them gift cards in exchange for 2030 minutes of their time and just ask really specific questions of what did you like, what didn't you like, what would you like to see improved on? And you get common answers throughout all of that. The more user interviews you do, the more commonalities that you see. And then if you see ten people in a row, mention this one thing, you work on fixing that one thing until that disappears from the user interviews list and you just keep going down that traction path. The other thing that we're doing is going deep into data right now. So really looking at different cohorts, like groups, groupings of people, what industry that they're in during their onboarding process, where did they get stuck? How many videos have they actually published and scheduled? What are common drop off rates just in the data? What are the triggering methods that among the people that have stayed on 6912 months at this point, what are the commonalities between those individual people from a data perspective? Are they all in one particular industry? Do they have all one particular use case? Have they done one feature that after they got to that feature they realized that they weren't hooked? And this is the tool for that, really just looking at, because we are fortunate enough that we have a lot of users and we had a lot of users and we have a lot of data that we can look at. We do still have a lot of new trials coming in. So we do have a lot of old data and new data coming in that we can really study. And we're looking at hiring other external consultants. There's great tools out there, like clarity right now that you can hire on a, on a per minute basis experts from Microsoft, Google, startups in your particular industry and ask them specific questions like how did you resolve this churn problem that you went through? Can you help us go through our UI UX and get through? And we also have a continued learning culture at our team as well. So like we just for instance, bought a team package. Of Coursera, I'm leveling up my time. Like I'm taking, I'm about to take a product management course and we're different people on our team. Front end, back end developers are taking UX UI design courses. We're up leveling our team to run ads. So they're learning a bunch of ads campaigns and whatnot, and we're just continuing to learn. Another thing that we, another initiative that I had started a couple of months ago now is every week devold a competition for the development team to actually go through and make videos. Because my philosophy there is, they're not social media people, they're just developers. But if I can turn them into social media content creators, then we can turn anybody into social media content creators. And so just going through, having them going through the flow, basically they get incentivized. Whoever gets the most views on social from a video entirely created and published through syllabi each week gets dollar 25. So it's just a nice little game we share. But like, they share the video link, they share their thought process behind why they chose that particular topic, and they share feedback points of annoyances or bugs or feature requests, things that would make things easier, things that were confusing. And so we have that internal use case as well. So those are a lot of the things that we're working on.

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That's awesome. That is so cool. And this is the thing, like, this is exactly what you're talking about. Like, believe in yourself and what it is that you're doing. And the rest actually kind of starts to fall into place right when you put the problem solving hat on. Like, you think about things differently, which is so cool to see you do. Okay, let's talk about syllabi a little bit. I know you have a free seven day trial for everyone to try, so can you. Yeah. Where should people go and what should they expect?

[00:29:11 - 00:31:56]

Yeah, it's syllabi IO. That's s y l l a b y IO if you want to try it out. I really just took all of the problems and pushback points that I've ever heard or gotten from what's stopping somebody from being successful on social media, and we turned it into a tool. So what syllabi essentially does is it shows you the trending topics and content ideas in your industry so you can make educated decisions on what content to make. It shows you search, volume, data, hashtags, cost per click, if it's trending up or if it's trending down, so you can make the best decision what type of content to create it. Then we'll write video scripts for you if you want. You also have the ability to type your own script, or you can use AI. And we've done all the backend prompting for you to make perfect social media ready scripts from my personal philosophy of what goes into a good script and then creation of the videos however you want. So we create videos in a lot of different ways. You can make faceless videos if you want, or templated style videos that perform well. You can clone your voice with AI, so you can actually have your own voice in those faceless videos. And you can make talking photo avatar videos. You can upload a headshot of yourself or an animated character, and it moves the mouth and the head and the lips to record. Most recent feature that we released is AI video avatars. So real clones, so you can actually submit a one time recording of yourself and our technology clones you, so it looks like you, moves like you, sounds like you. So you can create infinite videos on topics your customers are searching for without needing to press record. Or you can just take the front half of that, the ideas, the script, you record it on your phone or your device and upload that into syllabi and then you can edit it. We built a custom video editor so you can actually, it's like similar to capcut. So you can actually edit the video, add in b roll, stock photos, music, anything that you want, and then you can schedule and publish it directly to your social media accounts. So you can link all of your accounts, you can schedule them out, you can publish it, and then you can actually track your analytics as well. So you can see all of your views, likes, comments from the videos that you've published in syllabi, all in one dashboard. It's really meant to replace five or six different software tools, or at a very low scale, replace the need to hire a marketing agency if you're just getting started, or if you're a marketing agency owner that wants to work in AI and manage all of your clients in one place. It's an awesome workflow tool.

[00:31:56 - 00:32:03]

That's awesome. All right, so syllabi IO. Thank you so much, Austin. This has been amazing. Thank you for being so transparent and open.

[00:32:03 - 00:32:05]

Thank you so much for having me.

[00:32:05 - 00:33:01]

Wow, what an incredible journey Austin has been on, from the highs of TikTok stardom to the lows of getting banned and then building something even better. It just goes to show that with the right mindset, setbacks can truly become opportunities. I'd love to hear from you. What's one thing from Austin's story that inspired you or made you think differently about your own content journey? Let me know through the link in the show notes. And speaking of tools to help you with your content, don't forget to check out Syllaby Austin's given us a special link for a seven day free trial, which you can find in the show notes as well. And if you want to get into the nitty gritty of implementing my entire content marketing system, the Honeytrap method, then you have to listen to my limited podcast series, content marketing tips. I break it down for you piece by piece, literally element by element, so you can actually get more leads and more clients with your content. So you will find the link in the show notes for that. Thank you for tuning in today's episode. My name is Deirdre Tshien and as always, stay intelligently lazy.