10 Counterintuitive Marketing Truths After 3,000 Marketing School Episodes

The 10 counterintuitive truths. So you can see it on the screen over here. I'm going to start with number 1, okay? Free products are better marketing than ads. And I'm actually going to let you take this one because you've done this quite a bit with the products that you've given away in the past.

Yeah, I agree with this. And when you look at free products is advertising continually gets more expensive over time. Just look at Facebook and Google's earnings. But what changes is when you give away something for free eventually because ad costs are so high, It's cheaper to build this stuff and give it away for free, especially now with AI, than it is to pay for the ads. And you got to figure out what can you give away for free, but sell them on the backend that's more expensive to make up for your costs of the free offering.

And that's exactly what we're doing with ClickFlow. We're going to, we have a, we're going to, there's a free trial version, but we're going to have stuff in the backend. There's going to be buttons to upsell. And then also we're going to look for product qualified leads, people that are good fit ICP for product, but also for managed services in the backend. But to Neil's point, So I'm looking at a lot of these prototypes that I'm building right now within Claude Code. I'm like, oh, I should just give this away for free. These are nice lead magnets that you can make now. And that's why, Neil, I don't know if I mentioned this on this podcast, but we're mandating in my company, when the first year, when the new year starts, I'm like, okay, everyone's got to learn Claude Code within the next 6 months. Everyone's got to be proficient. We're going to help them get there. It is a requirement. We're doing these office hours now. We're doing these hackathons, all these things. And I still don't think like it's enough, but—

Yeah.

We're going to have to get it there. So anyway, all that to say, that's number one. Number 2, Neil, is boring marketing makes the most money.

Yes. Channels like SEO that are really ugly.

Email, direct mail.

Pay-per-click, conversion optimization. They tend to make companies way more money than being like, let's try to go viral on Instagram or Facebook, or let's do this cool creative TV ad. If TV ads were so effective, I'm not saying they're not effective, they actually do generate profitability if you know how to do it right. But if they were so much better than the boring Google pay-per-clicks, Google wouldn't be the most profitable company in the world. They're worth more than all the TV companies that I know of. If you combine them, they're worth roughly $4 trillion from something that's boring.

Yep. Now, number 3, high agency beats intelligence in the AI era. And what that means by high agency is someone who has that bias to action, someone who's willing to move quickly on things, because the faster, the more rotations you have, the more shots on goal you're going to have. You're going to make mistakes, but you're going to learn from those mistakes versus someone who's really smart, but it's slow to get things done. You want someone who's quick, and if you have that, those people are going to get the most done and those people are going to be the most successful.

Yes.

Number 4, micro-influencers outperform celebrity endorsements. I'll give it to you.

Yeah. So we found that the celebrity influencers just charge way too much. Micro-influencers are way more effective because not only are their rates lower, they try harder. They tend to care more. Their audiences are more tailored around your product versus where the big celebrity ones and macro ones have followings for a lot of different things, not just one. And that makes it harder to monetize. So go for the micro and nano influencers.

See, look, these topics are great. See, AI did a good job here.

Uh-huh, keep going.

Yeah. Let's keep going. So deleting content improves SEO. So this is definitely counterintuitive because you would think that the more content you create, the more shots on goal you'd have to be able to rank, but you're actually making it harder for algorithms and even these answer engines to scan your website And so the more you optimize your website, the more crawlable you make it, the more it's easier to find your good stuff because it's ultimately the quality that rises to the top. Yep. Next one?

Next one.

Human plus AI hybrid beats pure AI content.

Yeah. When you look at AI content, a lot of it's regurgitated. When you look at humans, we can talk about new stuff because we're not just scraping the web. If you combine humans with AI, you're going to be better off than if you just leverage humans or if you just leverage AI. We're not saying AI is better. We're not saying humans are better. We think the world is both HAI, humans combined with AI.

This topic is a perfect— this topic that we're doing right now is a perfect example of this. This is AI-assisted. We didn't come up with this topic. It actually did a good job of scanning our, let's just call it our wisdom over the last 10 years or so. So you want to keep a human in the loop. I call it HIL, human in the loop. So you can have whatever acronyms you want. The riches are not always in the niches. And I remember Neil did an episode. We've talked about this a few times, but Neil was very adamant about this. Like the riches are not in the niches. I remember.

Yes. If you look at the biggest companies in the world, they go after massive TAMs. TAM stands for total addressable market. They don't sell things like a course for best man speeches. You can start in a niche and then expand into a larger and larger market, but the niche needs to be something that is much larger. If there isn't a large market, like if you're like, I'm going to do best man speeches and then go into bridesmaid speeches, you're still in 2 niches that are terrible and you're not going to make a ton of money. You can go from wedding speeches to then into You know, birthday speeches, funeral speeches. Again, these are all niches. It's not a big enough TAM. If you go after like, I'm creating CRM for just the travel industry and then I'm going to do CRM for the car industry and then just the general CRM market, that could be a very big market. Just look at Salesforce.

You can start vertical and then go horizontal.

Yes.

Yeah. Services outperform pure SaaS long-term. So Neil and I both come from SaaS and I used to poo-poo on services, but a lot of SaaS companies you've seen, they actually end up adding services because A lot of these, they're big customers, they need the services, they need the handholding, right? And so what we found over time, both of us, is that maybe you might have SaaS in the front end, but in the back end, that's where you actually make your money and have a lot bigger deals that way. So Neil, I'll let you build on this one because you were purely SaaS first and then you layered on— actually, no, you were services first, then SaaS, and then back to services.

Eric is not talking about valuation, to be very clear here, when he says When we're talking about services, it's easier to generate revenue and more revenue through services than SaaS. SaaS companies are valued much higher than service businesses because service businesses are valued on profitability. SaaS businesses are valued on revenue, which makes it easier to increase your net worth. The point that we're getting at here is you shouldn't just do, you shouldn't just do SaaS or services because one is more uglier or prettier than the other. You should pick whatever you're passionate about. And if that happens to be a service, that's okay. There's a lot of money in it. Just look at companies like Accenture. It's not a dead space. AI hasn't replaced services. Yes, it'll impact services, but the really good people will still be sought after and hired by corporations for services. Yeah.

So this one's interesting, Neil. So specialization beats being well-rounded.

Neither Eric or I are jack of all trades. We don't try to be. We've been talking a lot about AI, Claude to Code. You don't see me trying to do everything. Yes, I've used some of these products. I'm not the best user for every single product. I spend most of my time doing deals. I understand marketing extremely well. I focus on where I'm the best at, and then I hire people around me who can fill in the gaps. That's how you win. You don't win trying to be great at everything because you're never going to be great at everything. There's not enough time in the day.

And that's not to say you shouldn't specialize in the— actually, we are saying you should specialize in the beginning because both of us, when we started in our career, I would say more around SEO. And sure, we did branch out. We started learning other stuff like how to do deals, how to close things, how to, you know, tax strategies.

Pay ads, conversion optimization, email marketing, right? The list goes on and on.

In the beginning of your career, maybe you start more T-shaped, which is where you go deep in one area and then you might learn these other things. You definitely should learn these other things, but we're not saying you should try to do everything. Because what we'll say is from a business standpoint, what we've learned is a lot of entrepreneurs we meet in our 20s, they come up to us and they're like, oh, I have 10 different businesses right now. That is an example of trying to do too many things at once. And we've learned that after you get punched in the face, you know, sometimes kicked, you know, a couple of times, then you learn that specialization, that's what worked for the biggest companies in the world.

Yep.

Yeah. Last one, but not least, in-person events beat algorithm optimization.

Deals are meant to be done in person. And if you want to start closing big deals, we're not talking about a $1,000 deal or $500 or even $10,000. You want to close really big deals, they're done in person, whether people like 'em or not. I don't know too many people that are signing, you know, $10 million deals or $5 million deals without meeting people.

Everything comes down to relationships. And the older we get, the more we realize that whether it's friendships or recording this podcast or doing deals, Everything is relationships. Like, for example, I was talking to a guy and he just partnered with one of the most popular football players in the world for, you know, his, one of the brands, right? But that came from him knowing someone and that came from him knowing how to do things, right? To be successful as an entrepreneur. And so I think that the more— I used to just think that I can just do business in my boxers at home. That's not how you do it. You have to get to the in-person stuff. All right, see, look at that. Claude Code did that.

Uh-huh. All right, now let's do, and I'm curious on this one, the death of rollups. This is a tweet from Mark Cuban.

Yep.

So there was a guy named Andy Kessler who pretty much links to a Wall Street Journal article, WSJ, Go Around and Strangle Things. That's the title. I'm not a fan of rollups. Amazon didn't roll up local bookstores. Tesla didn't buy Chrysler. Facebook didn't buy Yellow Pages or local newspapers. The famous Facebook motto, Move fast and break things is cute, but a better Silicon Valley mantra is, or a better Silicon Valley mantra would be, go around and strangle things. And I totally agree with this, right? It doesn't mean you can't roll up companies. And the reason I say you can't roll up, you can still roll up companies. If you're going to roll up the same companies over and over again, I think that playbook's been dead for a while. But I'll give an example for the agency world. Let's say my ad agency, NP Digital, starts off and we're doing SEO, and then we add in paid advertising, and then we add in social media marketing, and we're getting client inquiries for App Store marketing. Let's say on Apple, the Apple App Store, for the Google Play Store, and companies are looking for that. So we, this is a real example, acquired Yodle, which was a UK shop sometime last year in 2025 because they specialize in, they're one of the big players in App Store marketing where they help companies do better in App Store rankings and even manage the App Store ads. Now, even though my company did this, we didn't have all the case studies and the pedigree that Yodle did. And I believe Yodle was Yodle Mobile. Founded date, I think they were founded in 2007. So not 20 years old, but close enough, 19. It's hard to go and create that from scratch. It takes time. It's easier in many cases to buy, roll that in, and go buy other ancillary services or features or whatever maybe that you don't have, because you can sell all your customers on their stuff and they can sell your customers on your stuff. Where I don't think rollups make sense is you just go and you go buy, you know, like if you're Amazon, let me go buy all the local bookstores. When that model is broken and you think there's a way to disrupt it, you shouldn't waste your time buying it. Or Tesla believing electric cars are the future, why would they go buy a Ford when, if they believe electric cars are the future and at that time Ford only believes in gas cars?

Yeah. So it sounds like you, you're saying it depends, right? And I'm saying it depends.

Yes. Because if someone offers a feature that you don't, and you can cross-sell your customers to theirs and theirs to yours, that's creative. That isn't 1 1 2. That's 1 1 potentially equals 3.

Let's just look at Google. Okay. Google bought DeepMind. Oh my God. Best investment, right? They bought Android. Okay. What else did they buy?

YouTube.

Yeah.

YouTube.

Facebook.

Facebook. They say in here, Facebook didn't buy Yellow Pages or local newspapers. Yes. Because that was dying, but they did buy Instagram and WhatsApp. M&A is not dead. You just gotta buy stuff you don't do that you think is also the future.

It should be accretive. Like when I think about some of the ones I did last couple years ago, they weren't exactly accretive. They were actually damaging to my company.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah. So I think it's the— this guy, whoever wrote this, Andy Kessler, right? This is on the opinion page for Wall Street Journal. So this is one person's opinion and like most things, it depends.

Yes. And Mark Cuban may agree with it, but that's Mark Cuban's opinion. I have nothing against him or for him. I don't follow much of him. I, I think he sold a basketball team, right?

He, he sold a minority. No, he's a minority owner, owner now, but he can make decisions. And I think he wanted to do that to get involved with the casinos.

Oh, well, I, I think what he's doing with cost-plus drugs is awesome.

Yeah.

Just making drugs more affordable because I think they just cost so much money.

Well, you know, I mean, I think Ozempic is, is dropping from like $1,000 now to like $159 for Americans Because we're trying to, I forgot what it's called, but the fair, all the other countries get like a lower price. But what was happening was these pharma companies were charging the US more 'cause the US could pay more. And now, you know, this administration is bringing that down. So I don't know how that's gonna affect cost drugs, but maybe they're, maybe not. So I don't know.

Well, hopefully it reduces our health insurance costs 'cause I think you and I both pay an arm and a leg for corporate health insurance.

That's the one thing that's gone up because we talked about the gross margin thing that just didn't make any sense. You can't cap gross margins like that 'cause they're gonna find another way to game it.

Yeah, what Eric's talking about was a law, I think it was during the Obama administration.

Obamacare.

Yeah, and it was, they couldn't make more than 15%, was it?

Yep.

And then if you limit a company and say you can only make a certain percentage, call it 15%, another way they can make more money is keeping that 15%, but just grow your revenue by double. So if you charge people more, keep your cost basis at the same percentage, you make more money.

You know what's funny? I was looking to troll on Threads. I didn't do it this week, but I saw this recently. So this is, guys, this is not being political, but we are talking about politics for this one. So I guess I am. So Gavin Newsom, right? He's known for being, right, Democrat?

Yeah.

Okay. Now remember the wealth tax bill in California? So those that don't know, there's a wealth tax bill that's being floated right now. It's like, we'll take 5% of your assets, right?

Kind of, but yes.

Around the same thing.

There's some nuances.

Yeah, a lot of nuances.

Like if you have a lot of voting power, like the Google founders, then they can take, call it, I think the number was like, $50 billion from them. So whatever it ends up being, like 25%, 25% net worth, but then they had to sell more, pay taxes, and then pay that. So maybe it costs them like 40% of their net worth.

Yeah. The point of me bringing this up is like I logged into Threads to see where I could troll, but then someone had already trolled. So it's interesting to me, and I don't even know why I'm bringing this up right now, but I just thought it was funny. So usually what happens is everyone on Threads is like, oh my God, Gavin Newsom is the next United States president. Okay, he's our guy. He's our guy. He's our guy. Right? And then the moment the Wall Street Journal is like, Gavin Newsom does not support the billionaire tax because mathematically it doesn't make sense. Right. And there's actually people leaving now. And because the problem with this is that if you roll something like this out, then when's the next one coming and the next one coming and the next one coming? It starts to go down a slippery slope. Right.

And what they're saying on this is, is it can move from billionaires within this proposal.

Yeah.

Like they can just naturally start taxing people.

Go to 100, go to 50. Yeah. Just keep like it's a slippery slope. Right. And I agree with that part. Politics are not throwing that aside. But the funny thing that I saw was someone posted the Wall Street Journal headline. It's like, he's not our president anymore. And then all the comments Like, yeah, screw him. You know, he's not our guy. I'm just like, dude, guys, you can change, you change on a whim like that.

Come on.

Like, right? So I'm not, I'm not on the left or the right here. I'm just saying that's kind of funny to me.

But it is also very logical too. And people don't realize this. Income tax started with just like the 1% or the really wealthy, and then it moved down to everyone. That's what happens with all taxes.

Dude, speaking of the wealthy, I'm going to show you one chart over here. This is the, guys, this is the only chart you need to see if you want to become wealthy. Okay. So this is the chart from Lenny, from Lenny's podcast shared this revenue chart from a recent investor update. Just don't die. You can see 2022, nothing. 2023, nothing. And it just goes 2024, nothing, right? And then boom, 2025 skyrockets.

So it's from nothing to something in 1 year.

Over 2 years or so. But the point, and we said this on this podcast, the only thing you need to do to become wildly successful is one, you stay curious and you stay consistent and you stay focused.

On a decent enough TAM.

Yeah, yeah. A lot of caveats, but if you're curious and you're focused, you should eventually figure out that part. That's what I think. And so I think that's interesting because a lot of people are like, You know, there's all these books you can read, whatever. You don't need all that stuff. You just need to look at this chart and just understand this stuff takes time and just don't die.

Yeah, that's all.

Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. So yeah, uh, we get one more.

Yeah, let's see.

I got a fun one. Why you should build for women and not men. How about that one?

Uh, go for it. Uh, wait, what's the topic again?

Here, I'll start it off. So here's why you should build for women and not men. Okay, so check this out. When you look This guy tweeted this over here, Ernesto Lopez. Okay, so he says, women are overspenders. Source, sister and fiancée. He's kind of just talking about his own life. So there's this app over here. If you build an app, the male version makes $5,000 a month. The women version makes $400,000 a month. Okay, this is basically all you need to do here. So let me show you this. It's like a fitness goal thing or like a sizing thing, this app over here. So you see this?

Yeah.

It's a workout planner, 30-day fitness. One's for men, one's for women. You can see how much money is being made. This one's $5,000 a month. This one's $400,000 a month. Okay. And he's like, just make the same app. Just make it pink.

I think it does vary per industry.

Yeah.

If you want to sell like—

But consumer, 80% of consumer spend comes from who?

Women. And usually they lead up the household.

Yes.

So they pick a lot of the expenditures, but if it's certain things like a car, like a sports car, men tend to be more purchasers of sports cars than women. Same with like motorbikes, right? It doesn't mean that women don't buy motorbikes. It's just majority of them tend to be men. I think for certain industries, designing for men can make you more money and certain ones designing for women can make you more money. But yeah, like if you're Procter Gamble, if you notice them, almost all their ads, majority of them other than like the Gillettes of the world pitch to women.

Yep.

And when you even look at razors, There's, I think it's the men's version's called Gillette. The women's version's called Venus. Is that correct?

I actually have the Gillette women's version.

There's a women's version?

There's a, yeah, there's a women's version.

What's a, what's a, you know, a lot of females, what's a women's version called? Is it Venus? There's Venus.

No, but I, I have the Gillette razors for women. Do you know why I use it? I went to Reddit. It's like, it's better. It's actually a better shave. And, uh, there's all these people talking about it.

But they're all very similar. Yeah. Yet they just repackage it and say it's for women.

They just made the, the, it's, it's a white, it's white instead of like orange or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah. By the way, it's actually 85%. According to Google, 85% of all consumer purchases in the US are driven by women. Look at it this way. What Noah wears, Noah looks great. Neil looks great. Okay. I look okay, but we don't really care about what we wear. Okay. Not as much.

Yeah. I'm just wearing yoga clothes. Yeah. I don't really give a crap.

This is like yoga.

I stopped buying clothes.

This is yoga as well. This is, yeah, whatever. And I'm wearing my gym shoes right now. So anyway, all that to say, this is why you should design it for life.

This is a great example. So in my home, we're going over furniture. Okay. So then forget what we spent on it, but it was a lot. Right. And the first thing that comes to my mind is I'm like, I could have bought another home. All right. I'm not saying I could have bought—

You're like, forget the cost, but it would've cost a home.

No, no. I was about to say, I'm not saying a home in my same neighborhood, but I could have bought a home somewhere in the United States. I'll leave it to people's imagination. So I was looking at this and I was like, got a 6-year-old, got a 4-year-old. How much spaghetti, food, crayons, markers is going to be on this furniture? So I'm having a conversation. I'm like, so we're going to spend all this money on furniture with kids jumping around and you want playdates and birthday parties here? And they're like, well, what's the point if you're like not living your life and you're just worried about stains? And you know me, I'm OCD.

You're OCD, yeah.

Yeah, so it's harder for me. And I'm like, totally get it. Why not just go spend like $100 grand on furniture, $200 grand? I don't know what furniture costs, but like, let's say $100, $200 grand.

You're not supposed to give numbers.

Yeah, but I'm saying what you could spend. It's like, because you can probably buy a lot of nice furniture for $100 grand.

Here, I'll make it simpler for you guys. Instead of going to Restoration Hardware, you can go to like, you know, uh, West Elm.

No, I'm saying go to Restoration Hardware.

I know, I know that's what you're saying. I'm like trying to make it simple for everyone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Instead of going to Restoration Hardware, go to IKEA.

Yeah, that's Too low, but you—

no, but there's nothing wrong with IKEA.

There is nothing wrong with it.

I've been there. Their furniture is great. I wish they handed out free food like Costco.

Did you actually have IKEA furniture before? I did.

I had.

Yeah, all the time.

Yeah, nothing wrong with it.

I would always buy new beds and rebuild it, right, in college, and it was great. But point is, this is why you should build for women and not men, even though like the stuff that— the only stuff we care about is this, right? The technology that we have. That's it. We're very simple.

My favorite is they showed me my office furniture and it was like all this like elegant stuff and I'm like, uh, Can we replace these chairs? And they're like, with what? I'm like, Herman Miller. Looks way more comfortable. This stuff isn't practical. And then it's like big bulky chairs. I'm like, when I film, my chair's usually behind me.

You can't see it. Oh, you don't want to sink into it?

Yeah, I don't want to sink into it. It's going to look really awkward for filming. And I'm like, yeah, this is no good.

Dude, Herman Miller. Okay, I use a Steelcase chair. These are the best office chairs, right? Sure, they're expensive, they're the best. Yours probably costs like 5 to 10 times more than those.

My Herman Miller?

No, not the Herman Miller, but I'm saying the chair that you're going to— the sinker one.

I have no idea, but I told him to get rid of it and give me a Herman Miller chair.

That's the point, guys. And by the way, guys, leave in the comments too if you actually enjoyed the 10 counterintuitive truths, because Cloud Code will give us a lot more from where that came from. Those used to be hard for us to plan, but when you just stare at it, it's pretty easy to do.

We should do those a lot more often.

Yeah.

Next one, we'll do the timeless marketing.

He's starting to like Cloud Code now, guys. Starting to like Cloud Code. All right, guys, we'll catch you later. Goodbye.