2500 LinkedIn leads on Retention.com, When should you sell?, The end of Google?

All right, so this one company got 2,500 leads just from LinkedIn and this is the product I've been talking about quite a bit, retention.com. And so, I'm looking at this here. So Adam Robinson, he wrote a post, in the past 90 days using LinkedIn, we generated 2,500 signups and booked 328 meetings with VP and C-level marketers for our new person-level ID inbound-led outbound playbook. That's what he's calling it, okay? So—

This guy owns retention.com.

He's the CEO of retention.com, correct. And I think they're doing like $22 or $24 million a year right now, run rate. And so, first thing he says is this. So again, inbound-led outbound playbook. That's interesting because that means he's basically enriching the traffic that's coming into his site and then he's just reaching out to those people and trying to generate a conversation. So, number 1, he says, create the best content, full stop. Okay, well, yeah. So, you need killer headlines. Each line has to be so good they want to read the next. Okay, great. He said, it took me a year to crack and it's still a ton of work. And then number 2, he says, DM me if you're interested in. So basically, if you post on LinkedIn, at the very end of it, it says DM me if you're interested in. So basically, he has LinkedIn consultants that he hires and they're monitoring his inbox. So if he's getting DMs, they're trying to generate a conversation that way. So he says, my LinkedIn consultants also do inbox management because Santosh, I'm assuming that's his co-founder, and I get hundreds of inbounds per month depending on what we're trying to accomplish to either set calls or put them on a waitlist. We have far more demand than we can handle right now. Santosh is taking 5 calls per day and Pete is taking Taking 8. We're using these for discovery and relationship building. There's a couple more steps here. 3, spend way too much time in the comments. So that's trying to form relationships with people, trying to add them. That's how you build your platform, right? Share success. Number 4, share successes and failures by working in public. He does that pretty well. He shares a lot of stories, makes a lot of videos. Number 5, get other people posting. So he has other people on his team now posting. So there's like a compounding effect, right? More and more people are seeing retention. Number 6, connect with your site visitors over LinkedIn and email. This is where he kind of plugs his product. So basically, Basically what he does was when someone, you know, they identify someone, someone looks like ICP fit, ideal client profile fit, they'll add them on LinkedIn, they'll send them a thoughtful email. Next day, 24 hours later, send a LinkedIn message. And the next day, send a second email 24 hours later. Final thing is use video. That's what it is.

You want me to tell you the honest truth?

The truth, you mean?

Yeah, that's true. It is just the truth.

Go ahead.

What works for them won't work for most people.

Yes.

And the reason being is their software, if someone visits your website and they have that email in their database, they tell you that person's email address without them even giving it to you, which I don't even know if it's legal in every country. I'm assuming there's certain countries where you can't use that software legally. Like we don't use it on our own websites. And they're pretty much getting people to be like, oh wow, how'd you get my email? Oh well, I got your email through the software that we own. Oh cool. Either people are going to be creeped out and upset, or they're going to be like, oh cool, how do I do that? Here you go. Do you want to pay us? It's like, dude, those coaches going on social media and running ads being like, look how much money I make. I can coach you how to make money like I make from coaching people like you. That's pretty much their sales playbook. There's not really much of a difference.

So what I'll say is to Neil's point, they have a novel offer. And it won't stay novel forever, obviously. But once the novelty wears off—

And there'll be legal issues eventually.

There will be legal issues eventually. And so, you know, this is a nice time that they're capitalizing on is what I think. And it's working well for them. Now, I do think there's elements from those steps that people can replicate, like, yes, create great content and then engage with people. That type of stuff will go a long way. And then the thing you— I think the meta thing everyone can take away here is Yes, have an amazing offer and that will get people to continue to want to engage with you, right?

This is all marketing basics. What he's doing, no one else is going to generate the same amount of leads with the same similar amount of effort. Even if your content's that great because he's capturing leads without people knowing it and letting them know and they'll be like, wow, how'd you know? This is cool. Either I'm creeped out or yes, I want this for my business because it'll help me grow. The sales pitch that works for him won't work for most people. It's like those people who pay those coaches to get rich. And I've met some of them and I've spoken on stage at the same time with the panel on one of them. And the guy was talking about how well off he is. And I was scratching my head and I was like, how'd you make your money? And I didn't question him too much.

Yeah.

But that's a big question. You know, and he's just like, he's like, I make my money by helping other people do well. I was like, okay, I was putting 2 and 2 together. I was like, so you made your money by telling people you'll teach them how to make money like you did, by just telling people you'll help them to make money. And there's not necessarily a specific skill set. And they help with everything. Like, I'll help you get more fit, I'll help you do better in business. I'm like, what business experience do you have? And this goes back to what I talked about ages ago. And we had an episode about this on the podcast.

Your tweet.

Yeah, why I hate coaches.

Yeah. Well, those coaches, yes, people should stay away from those coaches. There's different coaches. Yeah, but we won't go back to that conversation. We can go back maybe in the future. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. To learn more, and now back to the show. Alexander Volodarsky, so Volodar Derek on Twitter or X. So he has this great post over here. Let me just read you a couple lines. So Facebook famously Facebook turned down Yahoo's one billion acquisition offer in 2006, and now it's worth one point two eight trillion. It's probably more than that now. For many, it does not turn out well. So Groupon declined a six billion offer from Google in 2010. Since then, its valuation has dropped. to $600 million. Moz declined a $25 million M&A deal from HubSpot in cash and HubSpot stock. In 2014, HubSpot had one of the most successful IPOs of any SaaS company. Path. I don't know if you remember Path.

You remember Path?

No. It's okay. So Path was like the social app where you can only add 150 people max. It was super well designed.

That's it?

Yeah, it was actually around the same time I met you. Like we started talking, I was using this thing Path because the whole idea is like Dunbar's number. You don't want to go above 150. Path rejected a $100 million buyout from Google. It was eventually sold for pennies, if even pennies. I'll just zero it out. And then finally, I'll give one more here. Yahoo turned down a $44.6 billion offer from Microsoft in 2008.

I remember that.

It later sold to Verizon for just $4.8 billion in 2017 after years of declining ad revenue and strategic missteps. So what I titled here was really the question is when should you sell? Right? And then here, I'll give you my take first. My take on this is like, you should sell if this will get you your first nut, meaning Like it will make you set. Other than that, if you want to let it ride, you have your nut already, that's your decision.

When you look at a lot of these acquisition offers, Yahoo almost bought Google as well, right? They tried to, they couldn't work out.

Oh no, no, Google tried to sell, but Yahoo didn't want to buy it.

They didn't want to pay enough, or they asked for a little bit more.

It wasn't even that much money. I think back, it was like $1 million. It was like nothing much. Here, I'll search it up. You keep going.

Here's my big takeaway with a lot of these acquisition deals. Yes, if the money's enough and you're set and you're happy in life and you're content, take it. You could have had more, but there's always scenarios where you don't have as much and you're grinding out instead of taking something. The other big thing that I think about with a lot of these deals is a lot of entrepreneurs believe Their shit doesn't stink. In other words, like their company is the best thing since sliced bread. And I'll give you a prime example of this.

Everybody does. Clubhouse.

Remember Clubhouse?

Yeah.

Everyone was on it. You know who wasn't on it and who hated it?

You did.

Yes. And I was vocal about it.

I kept trying to convince Neil and Neil's like, no, I don't see it. And then he turned out to be right.

Because the whole concept was for me to get value from this platform, I had to be on it. The moment I left, there was no more value. I'm like, this is stupid. And then a lot of people and entrepreneurs would be like, I spent 4 hours a day on Clubhouse. I spent 8 hours a day. Look what I did. Like, what did you do? I'm like, I focused on making money in my business. I was not on Clubhouse for even a minute that day. Like, oh, okay. They're like, but you're missing out on these followers. I'm like, who cares? Followers don't necessarily equate to more revenue, but they should have taken the offer. Didn't LinkedIn try to buy them for a nice—

I think there was like an offer for like $2 billion or something from just Twitter back in the day. There's like talks about Twitter potentially offering $2 billion and Twitter just went and built Yeah.

And then everyone who built their own Clubhouse feature, none of them took off.

They shut them all down.

Yeah.

Facebook tried to do one. I think Spotify did one as well. Everyone did one. Yeah, it didn't work. But by the way, it was— so it says, the headline here is, remember when Yahoo turned down $1 million to buy Google? So Google was trying to sell to Yahoo for $1 million.

I thought Yahoo also made an offer to buy Google. Yahoo offers $1 billion to buy Google. Where was it? Uh, yeah, in 2002, Yahoo had a chance to buy Google for $1 billion, but executives dragged their feet. By the time they decided to pursue the offer, Google's price soared to $3 billion. They should have just paid the $3 billion.

And then fast forward to 2002, Google offered itself to Yahoo once again, this time for $5 billion. It was just too much.

They should have taken that for sure, and they should have just offered Facebook an extra billion dollars and had the investors try to force the hand.

I mean, they probably would have just Tanked the deal. Like, they would have tanked the company, I should say.

Yeah, that's true. The companies may not have been the same. If you look at Tumblr, Tumblr was soaring pre-Yahoo, post-Yahoo, and then got acquired by WordPress.

Yeah.

And dude, no one talks about Tumblr. Digg was—

do you know how much Digg was offered for?

$200 and something.

Uh, yes. So Digg declined a $200 million offer from Google in 2018 and struggled and eventually was sold In parts for about $500K in 2020.

I don't think that was a true story. From my understanding, Google looked at Digg and Digg was open to selling, but then they found a lot of it was manual and not automated.

Yeah.

And they didn't like that.

Yeah. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital. So Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services. Well, they have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. So this, this tweet is from Othman. I should stop saying tweet, post. So O-T-H-M-A-N. So here's what he says. Oh, you're gonna— you're the one that's like, Google's not gonna go anywhere. This guy's— this guy was a Google engineer. Okay, so like, here's what he says. Gen AI poses a much deeper pickle for Google than I initially assumed. The last few weeks echo— completely echo the time out I was at Google in the early 2000s when we were up against Microsoft, except this time Google is on the receiving end, right? So keep in mind, everyone, Microsoft used to be the big behemoth. Everyone looked up to them and they have all these antitrust issues. Um, and then it did— Microsoft did slow down and Google became like the, the young upstart, right?

Yes.

But now it's like, oh crap. So anyway, OpenAI might be the upstart. So here's what— I'm not gonna read the whole thing here, but let me give you some more context. Looking back, we beat Microsoft not because we had better tech, but because we were— we forced them to play on our terms and at our cost. clock speed, quote unquote. Many, myself included, were viewing Google's LLM problem as one of the catching up with the technology, specifically OpenAI. It stands to reason that with all its incredible talent, infrastructure, users, and data, Google can and will catch up to OpenAI and likely be able to build better technology. But I'm realizing that's likely to be wrong. The debacle last week, and even more Google's response— we're talking about woke Gemini— puts a point on the real and somewhat unsolvable problem Google faces now. Google isn't going to lose to OpenAI tomorrow. It lost to it over the last 10 years. We'll just leave it at that right now. And Marissa Mayer did respond to this one as well.

What did she say?

She's like, I agree with many of the points here. Some I disagree with, but, you know, mostly right.

I do see OpenAI taking a portion of Google's lunch. I don't see GenAI taking away search fully. I still believe there's a purpose for search and people will use it. You're not going to— like, if you're looking to buy new sneakers, and I know you started leveling up your sneaker game, right? After you met the Thriller CEO.

Thriller.

Thriller.

Thriller. Thriller.

Did I say it right?

No, you said Thriller. You keep saying Thriller. That's Michael Jackson's song. Thriller.

Thriller.

Thrill. Just say drill.

Drill. Thriller.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so the Thriller CEO, he helped level up your sneaker game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you're trying to buy some new fresh sneakers, do you see yourself using OpenAI or ChatGPT? Or do you just see yourself using—

For now, Google.

Yes.

Yeah, now 10 blue links for now.

But, but here's on the flip side, if you're just doing some quick research, would you rather do a Google search or just put in a query into ChatGPT or Gemini?

A quick search. You know what, it's actually changed a little bit for me now. I do use OpenAI quite a bit and I do use Perplexity quite a bit.

Oh, so I would have said the same thing. If it's research, like asking questions and stuff, a lot of times I just type it into ChatGPT or, you know, Gemini or anything, because you're just going to get the answer right then and there instead of going through the blue links.

Yeah.

I do see a use case for both. I do see this affecting SEO. I do see this not necessarily killing off Google. Will it change Google? Yes. Will there still be search? Yes. But what will the search be like? I don't know. Will it be 10 blue links? There hasn't been 10 blue links for a long time. A lot of times it's videos and local results and other things integrated. They've been taking away traffic from marketers for a while. By integrating other stuff, but what I'm getting at is for a lot of money-making keywords, like transactional keywords, I still do see people using Google search. It's like saying, hey, if you're looking for toothpaste, why would you ever just use Google? You would just search Amazon. But yet people still do search Google for toothpaste because you can see tons of different results. You also can search on Amazon. You may search in both places. I don't see a world where there's no Google Search. I don't see a world where OpenAI controls everything. I see a mixture of both in which there's a purpose for OpenAI and there's a purpose of Google. Google is going to have to make adjustments, but OpenAI won't get 100% of the market share or maybe not even the largest chunk of market share for search.

So I'm going to simplify it for everyone here. The way I see it is similar. It's basically, I think Google's going to lose some market share here. I don't think they're going to go away. I mean, it's It's still one of the best money printers in the world. It's a great business model for them. I think this stuff takes time. Things don't die. Microsoft never— they slowed down for quite a bit and then now they're back, right? Here's the big thing over here. The real problem, this guy Offman says, the real problem for Google is one of clock speed. It goes back to that keyword clock speed. Google all of a sudden has its ass on fire and is trying to innovate into the future, but That innovation now has to happen at the heart of its business. OpenAI doesn't care about messing up on an ads business model. They can just iterate with a product/quality purity that is impossible for Google to get. Now, all that to say is like, yes, Google's going to lose some share. They're not going to die. And search is probably going to be around for a while. Yeah.

And the big moneymaking revenue for them is ads, but it's from these transactional keywords. It's not from people Googling a specific question like, How tall is the pyramids? You know, like, you know, what's the average height of a pyramid in Egypt? That's not where they're making money. And if people start using OpenAI and things like that for those queries, you know, it's not bad. Does it mean that people won't be using OpenAI for some money-making queries? They will, you know, for doing research or picking a consulting firm, you know, sure, it'll eat at some of Google's market share, but I still believe there's a world, like you're saying, for both.

Yeah. And I want to finish off these last 2 paragraphs from this guy. I think that it's pretty prescient. I'm going to make a prediction here. So, I'm going to say that in the next 10 to 20 years, there could be an argument that if more and more people are using GenAI, generative engine optimization for— or GenAI for their searches, I believe that we could be moving into a world where it's much easier to do affiliate marketing and they're just giving these affiliate transactions at a much higher level, right? So we'll see what happens. I don't think it's going to take over like the ad model completely, but I think we're going to see affiliate marketing tick up. I think it's going to become more popular over time. So here are the last 2 paragraphs and then we can, we can move on from this. So Google isn't going to lose to OpenAI in the coming few years. It has lost over the past decade when it could have evolved, iterated AI into its model and its success encumbered clock speed. Now that game is on, but on a startup clock speed, there is no chance for Google to catch up and even less. win this next cycle. The problem compounds over time. This problem compounds over time because every single day that goes by, we are all feeding OpenAI our usage patterns, feedback, custom GPTs, integrations, etc. At this stage, there's no way for Google to shift its clock speed unless it's willing to give the middle finger to the market and its customers for a while and say, sorry, the future beckons. Feel free to opt out and invest your money elsewhere. So that's a good place to end. Yep. All right. That's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. And if you want to hang out with Neil and I to help you grow your agency, marketingschool.io/agency. We'll see you over there and we'll also see you tomorrow.