How I Run My 1.5M+ Follower Content Business With Codex | Riley Brown
Riley revealed his full AI stack and showed how he uses Codex to research video topics, write compelling hooks, and create viral thumbnails.
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Riley Brown.
Riley is a top AI creator and founder of Agent Native. In this episode, he showed me how he uses Codex to run his entire content business from creating engaging thumbnails to writing viral video hooks. Riley also shared his full AI stack including some lesser-known tools to edit videos, draw diagrams, and more.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Riley and I talked about:
(00:00) How Codex runs Riley’s 1.5M+ follower content business
(03:16) Demo: Using Codex to create animations and B-roll
(07:28) Demo: How Codex can reverse-engineer a top YouTube hook
(13:24) The BRENS framework to turn an idea into a strong hook
(17:24) Demo: Riley’s AI stack for diagrams, thumbnails, and posts
(22:01) How Riley creates so much content every week
(25:41) Demo: Using Codex and Paper to create viral YouTube thumbnails
(35:01) How to set up AI agents to find content ideas proactively
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Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode
Remix proven thumbnails with Codex and Paper’s AI design tools. Riley creates winning YouTube thumbnails entirely using AI as follows:
Ask Codex to collect thumbnail formats from top YouTube channels in Paper.
Use Paper’s image-generation features to mix his face with a proven format.
Riley’s AI stack helps him run his entire YouTube video creation process. In addition to Codex, Riley uses a few lesser-known AI tools to research topics, draft hooks, draw diagrams, create animations and B-roll. Here’s his stack:
Research topics using Codex and Supadata, which can efficiently pull transcripts for top-performing YouTube videos in a few seconds.
Draw diagrams using Wispr Flow and Excalidraw. He dictates directions to the Excalidraw MCP to turn into diagrams that frame his videos.