$100M in Email With No Employees? Neil Isn't Buying It

Yeah, let me, um, let me show you something real quick. Let me go in a different direction. I actually want to get your reaction to this. So there's a— this company called Eight Sleep, which I love. Full disclosure, I'm a tiny investor in this company and I love their products. Um, so I thought this was really interesting, Neil. I'm gonna play the video for you too.

So here we go.

So, all right.

Before we had an email marketing team, now we have zero. Everything is done through AI and email marketing Makes a very large amount for us and everything is run by AI. So what happened is we were forced to that, meaning the person leading— we had a team of 2, then the person leading the team was leaving. And at that point, my co-founder Alexandra jumped in and said, okay, let me see how I can use AI to really make this work. And within 3 days, she was able to build multiple bots that now run all our email marketing. So now we have a team of 0 and email marketing makes a Close to $100 million.

So what's your reaction to that, Neil?

So I saw it when it came out and it started doing extremely well because everyone's like, wow, he's using AI to make email marketing generate $100 million. And what was his team size before? 2 or something like that?

2 people on email marketing.

Yeah.

So let's call it he was spending $300 grand max for $100 in revenue. The first take on this is, Email isn't generating him $100 million a year in revenue. He's collecting emails through Facebook ads, through organic, through, I don't know, Google ads, the list goes on and on. So email is responsible for part of the revenue, but he's typically getting some of that traffic in direct, some of that traffic through other paid media channels. So other marketing channels are contributing to that $100 million in revenue. So that's the first thing I want to make clear here. So anyone who thinks like, oh, email, you can just make $100 million with no employees, it's not really the full picture. The second thing is, if he's getting $100 million or similar amounts of revenue without those 2 employees, I would say he should— I'm not saying he needs the 2 employees, maybe it's one, maybe it's a part-time, but they probably weren't doing the best of a job. And if he combines human with AI, I think you need to use both. He can probably generate more than $100 million in revenue from that channel. Of course, some of that revenue should be partially attributed to other channels as well.

Yeah. So what I'll say is that I was actually talking to a guy who runs an email marketing agency yesterday at a conference. I'm not going to name names, but he's just like, this like really pissed him off because he's like, well, you can't do really good email marketing without really good copywriters at the end of the day, right? And to Neil's point, I think what you're just saying is like, this $100 million, like there are other costs associated with it for the people that are running Meta ads and things like that, right? And so they're probably spending a very healthy 8 figures on this. And I think my takeaway from this one is that I've been saying this more to my team recently. In fact, I told some of my team members this week, I was like, hey, I want, you know, how many of you are actually doing 95% of your work inside of a harness right now, which is like you're not logging into like a user interface, right? I'm like, okay, great. I'm going to give you access to GPT-6 Astra because some of them have been asking for it. It's an unlock, right? Because most of our team is using Claude Teams, but I secretly use GPT-6 Astra on my own. So I was like, I think we're all going to be— when I interview people, when they get over to me, I'm like, hey, how do you think the future of your work is going to look like? He's like, well, I think we're just going to be managing agents. I'm like, exactly. So you're going to be managing workflows. And so I think this is kind of a microcosm of Humans are going to be managing agents or workflows more. Um, I think the whole with no employees thing is a bit overblown. I think you're still going to need people, but it's just a good headline that what we're saying to earlier, it will get you views.

Yes.

And if you look at Harry, I follow him as well on Instagram. He's been creating— and I'm not saying it's bad, I like his content, I follow him— he's been creating sensational content that just gets massive TAM views, kind of like Gary Vaynerchuk or Dan Martell or Alex Hormozi, and he's been going down more of that path, at least on social media. But when you look at what Eight Sleep is doing, what I hate in business just in general, and especially in marketing, people don't call spades spades. They try to adjust the numbers or paint a different picture than reality. And I really hate that. Specifically when it comes to revenue or profitability or growth. And if my team did that to me, they know I'll eat them alive.

Yep. By the way, I mean, let's just look at Harry Stebbings real quick. Okay, so—

You got to do it on Instagram.

On Instagram? You want me to go to Instagram? Why not his— what's wrong with his X profile?

It's very different. Go look at his Instagram versus X.

Okay, okay, let's go to— okay, Harry Stebbings Instagram. Uh-oh, is it this one? I think it's this one.

I think it is.

Yeah, okay, great. Okay, let's take a look at this because I have seen one, um, get by. Okay, let's scroll a little bit. Let's— okay, so just, just, I'm— those of you that can't see the screen right now, so the first video I see has 500 views and then the next one's 24,000, 5,500. So it's not like he's getting a ton of views, but let's go find a controversial one that has more views. What do you see, Neil?

Apple's latest launch is embarrassing.

Where is it? A little up. This one?

Up, up. Scroll up backwards. Right there in the middle.

Oh, this one.

Okay. So yeah, 40,000 views on this one. Let's see.

Turn us. I thought you were meant to turn us back to Apple, but God, we saw a breakdown of Apple's latest innovative products. And all I can say is, oh no. I mean, we just wanted serious.

Okay, so that's one, 40,000 views on that one.

Okay, and then the next one, Sydney Sweeney, the next big tech investor, right?

Could Sydney Sweeney be about to become one of the next great tech investors?

I see what he's doing. Okay, then this one has a lot of sensation around this too, like the people are terrified of AI.

He doesn't have tons of followers, keep that in mind.

At Anthropic, the last 24 hours have been wild and you cannot miss this. So first, this guy Jacob, an AI researcher.

Okay, so It's really talking about—

it's—

he's really just hitting on tech's most controversial stories of the day. Um, and he's getting on it quickly, and I think he's going to grow this account quickly.

Very fast.

Huh?

Yeah, when I said he doesn't have a lot of followers, he's getting a lot of views for the followers he has. His follower count will grow extremely fast.

Yeah. And by the way, Neil and I, we can play this game, right? But here's the thing, if I look at Hari as more of a pure content creator, right? Like, sure, he's an investor, but He started 20VC first. It was interviewing other investors, and that's how he got the audience, and that's how he's got his deal flow. He's investing. That's great. His job is to generate more awareness so he can potentially generate more investors. He can also generate more deal flow at the same time. That is his business, right? And so it makes sense for him to go into this world and attract a wider TAM. So that's how I look at it. More LPs for him, more investment opportunities. What do you think, Neil?

So when you look at the video in the middle, like $10 billion, I think $10 billion valuation and no revenue. I believe that's what it said. It was something like that that he just posted the other day. I watched it and then he was breaking down all the previous investors like Mahmoud, Sequoia, and all that.

This one, right?

Yeah, that one.

Yep.

So, uh, and he's just breaking down a startup that ends up integrating AI into text messaging so you can just text back and forth like iMessage and just get all your stuff done through an assistant. and why it's blooning up and, or blowing up in a good way.

Bless you.

I don't know if this is the kind of content that's going to get him more deal flow. I think the stuff he was doing before when he started 20VC, going very specific and going after like the Peter Thiels or the entrepreneurs who are super successful, I believe that kind of content, it did get him known. That's how I first learned about him. That's the kind of stuff that's going to get him the right deal flow and LPs who are going to give him money. That's my opinion. I don't think this kind of stuff is going to help him as much.

So Neil, let me share my screen with you because this is actually what he's talking about. This is the startup. So he's talking about this company Instinct, and I want to show you real quick because this is a— I actually use this agent. And Neil, I'll actually give you an access code if you want one. You probably won't because you're too lazy to do these things, but whatever. I'll give you an access code because this is really easy to set up, right? I actually gave one to one of our mutual friends. And so check this out. So What it did for me this morning, it's, it's basically just set it up as iMessage. This is the startup he's talking about, Instinct, right? So there's a $10 billion valuation on this one, which I think is way overpriced, right? But that's not to take away from the fact that this product works because you just open it up, Neil. You don't have to worry about what connectors do I need to add? What do I need to do here? What agent are we doing over here? It's just, it works, right? So, Neil, let's say you have millions and millions of points hypothetically for travel. So what it's doing for me over here, I was like, hey, I have, you know, X amount of points over here through these programs over here. I want to book travel for, you know, this country over here by this date, and I want you to plan out the entire itinerary. It can do that. Not only that, um, you know, I've been trying to get access to this, this tool called Jev, with J-E-V, which just came out. It's like one of the, uh, ex-guys that created, uh, ChatGPT. It's like a real fast AI. It can do like huge swaths of data analysis within seconds, right? Like huge. And I'm like, whoa, there's big implications there. So, I'm like, you know what? Today's Friday. I have a little more time today. Friday, I block out my afternoon. I'm like, I need access for that. And so, I go to Instinct. I'm like, hey, I need you to find the person who controls the waitlist for Jev and I need you to reach out to him. This morning, I checked. It's like I see, oh, he email replied. Done. So, I guess I'm in now, right? And so, my point is you can ask it to do all this. Hey, Neil, these are all the events I want to speak at over here. These are all the podcasts I should be going on that are actually out there, have good audiences, an enterprise audience, right? Like you could have it figure all these things out and then just hand it over to your team. But that's why I think this thing is great. I don't think— is it worth $10 billion? I don't know about that.

And Harry's a smart guy and I get what he's doing on content and I don't hate him for it. He knows when people put money in at $10 billion in valuation and there's no revenue, there's a lot of fine print on the contract on their potential returns and what they're going to get in exchange and liquidation preferences and, you know, it's, Are they guaranteed 2 times their money, 3 times their money, et cetera, right? There's a lot of things like that that come into play here that are important, but he's creating the content to get the views. I just don't believe this is going to get him the right type of deal flow. And I could be wrong, but that's just my take because I've tried this enough, not in venture, but I've tried it enough in so many different industries. But it's very rare that our clients are venture capitalists.

Real quick.

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Correct. And I look at like the biggest players in our space, like the Accentures of the world, right? They, I would say they are the biggest in the marketing space. And at least for a service provider, I know people look at Accenture as not a marketing organization, but they have a marketing division and it's probably larger than most of the holding companies, just being quite frank. And you look at Accenture, no one thinks of, oh, look at all this sensational content Accenture put out there.

Wait, Neil, can I show you something? So remember Cluely, they raised a bunch of money from Andreessen Horowitz, right? So Cluely, a16z, I think they raised like $16 million or something like that. So yeah, $15 million Series A. Okay, so Andreessen Horowitz backed them. Okay, so now the founder— I gotta, I gotta show you the content that he's creating. He's like 22 years old at this point. Okay, so Neil, have you seen this content? You definitely haven't because I don't even think I shared it with you because you'd probably just laugh. So this guy is Roy Lee. He's one of the co-founders or founder of, uh, of Clue.ly. He's the global ranked number 1 entrepreneur. All right, apparently. So, um, check this out. He makes this video.

The amount of times to jerk off in a week is as much as it takes before it starts to hurt, because that's how much people used to jerk off back when we were all cavemen. People would not fucking worry about semen retention. Or delayed gratification or any of this nonsense. This is ridiculous. This is a made-up construct. And I think people sort of tie this back to, this will teach me discipline for when I need to make money. But in reality, like, the dudes doing No Nut November to the very end be the poorest, fattest dude you know. And it's just like, dudes will do anything but do the fucking thing. You want to be disciplined and making money, then fucking go discipline yourself, make some money. Why are you doing this fucking roundabout way of disciplining yourself by fucking not nutting? You genuinely only harm yourself doing this. This is such an unnatural thing to do. Stop removing yourself from the thing that you actually want. The goal is never semen retention. The goal is always a better body. You want a better physique.

You want more money. You want Okay, so I get it. Look, he's trying to be inspirational and that view— look, this one got 270,000 views on it, right? And the funny thing is you look at the comments, this guy's like, bro, are you running out of topics? I can't imagine this brings more users to your platform. And then one guy is like, thanks to this, I have now considered becoming a user of Clue.ly. Like, they're literally saying this, it doesn't help.

Yes.

And when Eric read the thanks to this, I'm now considering being a user of Clue.ly, that person's being sarcastic.

Yep. But I just think it's funny, like this guy works at Stanford, right? And so, I get it, like what he's doing. But I think, you know, I would be curious to see what the results are from this. So, if Roy, you somehow see this video, let us know how it's going. Like how I stay skinny as a 22-year-old tech CEO. Maybe that's interesting. People might be interested in you.

No.

How I maintain perfect skin. Why I'm still ambitious after making millions. I don't know, man. I like, if you're selling to a wide TAM, if you're selling like courses and coaching, sure. I don't think he's selling that though. He's selling software.

Okay. A few things. One, you saw the TechCrunch post on Cluely a while back. I know we talked about it in our podcast in which he admitted he—

Juiced the numbers.

Yeah, he juiced the numbers. He was a little aggressive on what his stating what his revenue was versus what it was in reality. Okay. 2, if Clue.ly really blew up and was doing so well, because it didn't work as well for him doing all the social viral content because their stuff was doing so well. Cheat on a job interview, ace whatever test, like Clue.ly can help you solve everything. If their product really did that and was blowing up in revenue, do you think he would be creating all this content?

He wouldn't have time. It's growing too fast that you wouldn't have time.

Thank you. And you and I both know a lot of entrepreneurs. Out of the richest people we know, how many of them really focus on content creation? I'm not saying for their company, they themselves. Eric's holding up a big zero. He's so spot on. And Eric and I create content, hence we're not the richest people we know, right? So if you really have a big business, you don't care about just doing stuff that's sensational to just go and get the views. I think it's just so backwards. I don't know why people still do it. And I think the younger generation This is where I struggle with social media people who are younger. They really care about the reach and the likes. And I've gotten so many people pitching me, I'm going to make you rich. Dude, I was at the Beverly Wilshire because I know the All-In Podcast Summit was going earlier this week, but I was there for a meeting with the bank. And no joke, someone comes up to me, he's like, dude, huge fan. Let's do a podcast episode together. I have 1.5 million followers. I created this video for you on TikTok. Okay, and he links me to this video. Let's see if I can find it on my text.

We got to teach you how to use phone mirroring so you can share screen when you do it.

That's too complex for me. Okay.

So Neil's showing the screen right now. Let me, let me tell you what's appearing on the screen.

Oh, that's his— oh, that's the wrong link. Oh, this is—

here you go.

TikTok. He created this. The head of Anthropic, one of the largest.

This guy went from cleaning toilets to building a $100 million empire.

Okay.

Patel, the founder of N Digital.

So it was kind of like a bio on me.

Had 5 minutes. How many views did it get?

How do I see the views? I can't even tell.

How many likes does it have?

Uh, uh, 569 likes. I can't tell the views.

I don't know where it goes. Okay, well, finish the story. Finish the story.

But either way, what ended up happening is that he created this content on me. That's cool and all. I appreciate him getting my name out there, but like, it doesn't do anything. I never saw it. He said he sent it to me, but my bad. I do appreciate you creating it, so I am grateful for that. And I did try to make his podcast work. I just couldn't make the time work because I promised my, uh, daughter I would go watch her do horseback riding. But nonetheless, this type of content doesn't just— it doesn't generate revenue. And the younger people I meet, the more they're all about getting your brand out there. You got to build a personal brand. When have personal brands been worth as much as Coca-Cola or Pepsi? And I don't think we're going to get into an age where they ever are.

Let me say something. So just to continue on your example, Neil. So when you think about Elon Musk, Did he think about building a personal brand? Nope. He just think— he just thought about building things that are useful to humans. And that's why he's such a big brand now, right? What about Warren Buffett? Well, it took him a very long time. He didn't really start to really compound into like— he was rich already, but becoming really rich was after age 50, just so everyone knows, right? And then because he kept doing it consistently, consistent, consistently, now he's looking at— he's looked at as the Oracle of Omaha, right? But that brand came from actually just doing things.

Yeah.

When you think about Rockefeller, whether you love or hate Rockefeller back in the day, and now today, I think most people just don't know, but he spent time merging all these kinds, all these business practices. Like he got, he was winning so much that regulations had to be formed just for him. Right. Um, but he was, he became a brand in his own, right? Standard and Poor's. Um, no, no, wait, it was Standard Oil Company. That's what it was. But yeah.

Standard and Poor's is S&P.

Yeah. Standard and Poor's is S&P. Correct. Thank you, Neil. Um, but That's my point. It's like if you just focus on Neil's point, talking about Cluey, if Cluey is crushing it as a company, there wouldn't be a need for him to create so much more content, right? And that's what it really is. All right. So anyway, guys, that is it for today. We hope you enjoyed it and we'll catch you tomorrow.

Bye.