99% Of People Don't Understand How to Generate Leads on X

The part that everyone misses about the measure of an X account can be determined by what it opens for you in terms of real life, in terms of the doors that it opens, right? So let me share this with you. And really, we can talk about how this applies beyond X as well. So Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X, which ironically, you know what's funny? Elon gave him this job to be head of product at X because he's so good at X, because he was so good at posting before, right? So he still is. So the value of an X account can be measured by what doors it opens for you in real life. So, you look at this, 3.4 million views on this one. And then, Gary Tan of Y Combinator is like, it's priceless. Strip Mall Guy. And you have Nicole Benham here. And then, all these other people, it's like, oh my God, it's changed my life. Even your brother here, Dr. Parikh Patel, this guy, he's like, 100,000%. This guy over here, your brother, right? So anyway, all that to say is that I think about this, Neil. I think about, I'm going to share a couple examples and we can kind of go beyond this, but recently a lot of engineers have taken our Beat Claude challenge. They've all come from X. Okay. We've had an intern recently join us who's amazing, and he came from X as well, and he actually applied using X and he wrote like a thread. And so, and I think about, you know, the people that I'm able to talk to through DM, whether it's like popular creators or venture capitalists or entrepreneurs, All that comes through X and it's all because you spend the time to actually create something that actually intrigues someone else in terms of thought-provoking statements that you put out there, right? And you also get to test your thinking out there when you're on X. You can test whether your thinking is right or wrong. And for me, I personally like writing a lot and I think you do as well. And so it can be X, it can be LinkedIn, it can be whatever it is that you have. It could be YouTube or whatever. But I do think for me, the way X is able to kind of expand your reach to the right people at the right time and really smart people hanging out, I think it has been immeasurable. So let's talk about X and we can talk about how this kind of applies for everything in social.

Well, first off, did you try pushing it to LinkedIn? And is it mainly X driving the results for your Beat Claude challenge or you just mainly pushed it on X?

I've pushed it to LinkedIn as well. The funny thing is LinkedIn, you have to get in the algorithm's favor. I'm not in favor with that algorithm right now. And so whatever I push to LinkedIn, it gets like 5 or 10 likes, but whatever I push on my X account can go up to like hundreds of thousands of views.

Got it. Well, yeah, that makes sense on why you're getting more applicants from X.

You know what's funny though? When I spoke to Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew, and now he has that AI consulting firm, 10x. So he says that X is really good for engineers, hiring engineers, which is exactly what happened for me, right? But LinkedIn drives a good amount of, like a lot of pipeline. I'll just leave it at that kind of broad, which makes a lot of sense. But like obviously he's in favor with the LinkedIn algorithm right now. So how's your LinkedIn doing right now, by the way?

I haven't checked either, but I do know LinkedIn drives, because I get reports from my team every single month, LinkedIn drives a lot more leads than X does by far from what we're able to track. And we get a good amount of views on both.

Do you, do you have a rough idea of how much more, like a multiple?

On LinkedIn over X?

Yep.

It's not that much more. I get a report on that on a monthly basis too. It's not like 10 times more or anything like that, but the lead count from X, I mean, from, uh, that's a view count, right? But from a lead count perspective, it's more than 50x on LinkedIn over X. Wow.

That's a lot.

I think it's actually closer to like 56 or 57x more.

You know what's funny? Because Neil, when you, when you posted to LinkedIn, I'm going to pull up your LinkedIn and let's just take a look at it, right? So your posts are just reposts from your other channels, aren't they? Uh-huh.

So it's the same stuff as X and all the other channels.

Yeah. So I do that, right? And here's the— okay, let's look at— I'm going to look at Neil's and I'm going to look at ours. So let me share my screen over here. So Let's do a little analysis of our socials and we can even talk about how we would improve each other. So Neil, you see yours?

Yeah.

Okay, so this is short form over here. Neil published this 5 hours ago. Neil, just for context, Neil has 800,000 followers on LinkedIn. So 45 likes, 20 comments, 4 reposts, and literally it's— I'm sorry, it's not like the caption's amazing or anything. It's just like a normal caption. His team still uses tags. You probably don't need tags anymore too. But hey, 45 and 20, not bad for 5 hours. This will probably get, I would say, like 150 or 200. What do you say?

I have no idea.

Okay, let's look at some other ones here. So 19 hours ago, he published this chart, 51 likes on it, 22 comments. And then let's go down a little more, 57, 23. Okay. But I would say that I think Neil is, because he's reposting, it's almost like a slot machine. Okay. This kind of looks like a slot machine too, but like this one will get 216 and 72.

Not even that. If you look at the topics, the topics are very specific to our ideal customer profile. So like if you look at the charts, those few examples, they won't get tons of likes because they're tailored around local businesses and ideally ones that are franchises because that's what we're trying to get for leads, right?

Yeah. Well, what I'm calling out, Neil, is that— yeah. So check this out. You see 57 over here and then, but you have 200, you have 4x more. This is what I'm calling out. So I'm calling out like there is a luck component to the post. You just never know what's going to do well.

No, but that video is more generic than the ones that are charts. Like specifically, that video was more general for anyone.

Yep.

So this, this I know, those charts that are very specific that are industry related drive more revenue than the stuff that gets like 5, 10 times more likes.

Oh, this is a YouTube video. That's why.

Correct. It's, it's more generic. The charts are for a webinar that is specifically around franchises.

Yep. Okay, so let's continue. I want to look at more over here. So this is more about AI overviews, right? How to show it more.

Okay. And that's commercial terms. That's not just— and the reason I'm cutting you off here is I want everyone to understand, I'm like, if you look at that, how often are ads showing up in AI overviews? For commercial terms, right? This would be e-com, people selling services. So I'm trying to target people who are specifically my ideal customer. This is more e-com than the—

Yeah.

Than general. And what we found is when we get very specific, like the other ones were like franchises and multi-unit location local businesses, we generate way less likes, but we generate substantially more revenue than something that gets 1,000 likes.

Yeah. So let me just simplify this for everyone. So really what Neil's saying is, okay, some of the content might be wider TAM. Okay. You have Sam Altman in there, you have Elon Musk in there, and some of it might be a smaller TAM, but they have more money and it's in his ICP. That's what he's targeting. And so the engagement might be lower for like commercial terms or things like that, or talking about small business franchises, right? So by the way, like I'm looking through this, I'm sure you have one. I'm going to look for one that just really took off. 184, 175, 179 or so. I think if there's anything to call out, it doesn't hurt you to repost these things. And I think you're posting what, like 3 times a day or something like that?

No, 2 times. Well, we're about to kick it up to 3 times.

This is a YouTube video that Neil published. This one got 500 likes on it. Okay, so he tracked which brands show up in ChatGPT. Obviously, this is a wider audience. And this is like a breakdown of how ChatGPT is showing up in search, I think, or citations. So anyway, all that to say, let's just, I'm just going to look at today and the last 24 hours. So 5 hours ago you posted one, okay? 19 hours ago you posted one, 22. So in a 24-hour period you posted 3. That's what it is.

Yeah, but if you just break it down, we just post 2 times a day. We post morning and afternoon.

And by the way, like I wouldn't even, when people say, oh, like you should make sure that maybe you're only posting 3 times a week for the LinkedIn algorithm because they don't like you posting that much. I don't know, man, because you're posting twice a day.

Uh-huh. But what we found is if I post more wide audience stuff, and I know Eric uses TAM, TAM stands for total addressable market, but it can be interpreted in a few different ways. There's TAM like more population, okay? We don't focus on what appeals to the most, to a bigger number of people. We focus on TAM that is more dollar-oriented, so we optimize for what will drive the most revenue. Because if you look at, let's say, franchise businesses that need marketing, there's not as many businesses out there that are actually franchises. I'm not talking about a Domino's, like one actual Domino's. I'm talking about Domino's, the parent company, right? That's who we would be targeting. Or Everbowl, the acai bowl company that our mutual friend owns. And when you post content like that, we do not get the amount of views Compared to the more generic stuff that's quote unquote more beginnerish marketing. But what we find is it drives a lot more revenue.

Yeah, this is funny because we do get leads from LinkedIn, but you look at what we're posting here, it's like, it's a lot of the shorts, right? That are kind of repurposed from this podcast. You might get 6 likes on this one, 676 impressions, 6 likes on this one over here, 4 likes, 300 impressions or so, 182 impressions. But then when you click over to my X account, which is over here, It's like 22,000 views. Okay. You know, this one, we're live right now. And then some stuff, you know, whatever, but like 1,500 views here, 9,000 views on this one, 5,000 views on this one, 800. So I have an easier time on X and some of the stuff will get like 100,000+ views or so, but I just keep going, right? 10,000 over here, 5,000 over here.

But look at the titles of this stuff that's getting the views. What are the titles? I can't read them.

It's not specific. It's not specific to my audience, right? So this one's like more general. population, anybody that's using AI, right? This is how I saved money on my token optimization. This one over here is smaller TAM over here, 3,400. Traditional SEO is dying. And I just kind of quote tweeted this, right? But I would just say Neil's right. You don't— what I think we're getting at here, and maybe what you're getting at is more so you don't want to publish stuff just for the views because once if you get too focused on fixated on the views, it ends up becoming an audience capture thing where you want to focus more on that audience and trying to please everyone, right? But if you try to please everyone, It doesn't help you grow your business the best.

Correct, and that's what I found because I used to optimize for the views and we used to get way more views. I get algorithms also change, so some of it could be that, but deliberately we started getting more specific with our content and our webinars. We used to have webinars where 15,000 people would show up live, literally 15,000 people live. I'm not talking about registered, I'm talking about actually showing up during the hour we're doing the webinar. And what we found is When we had topics that were really broad like that, we generated very little qualified leads and that turned into very little customers. When we started doing webinars that had half, one-third of the people show up, but it was more specific, or even sometimes one-fifth of the people show up, it's only a few thousand. What we found was we generated less leads, they were much more qualified, and we generated more customers, and the customers actually spent more money with us per customer. Right? The average order value or whatever you want to call it versus going very broad with our messaging.

And how, so what data are you, I'm assuming, because this took you some time to switch. I don't know necessarily when you made the switch, maybe like what, 3, 4 years ago you made the switch. Like what was the methodology just so people can kind of copy what you did there?

So when you get the views, people don't talk about, and it's hard to measure, is there's some sort of brand value component to it. The more people see your face, your logo, your business, or hear about it, there is some value. Even if they're not your ideal customer right now, they may be your ideal customer later on. It could be that their business grows, or it could mean that they move jobs or they get rich somehow or whatever it may be. So we weren't sure if going broad or going narrow would generate us more revenue in the long run, right? So what we decided to do was we were posting once a day on social media. We decided to post one more time a day that was more specific. And as we started seeing the real revenue benefits from it and the brand benefits from it, we started then posting both. more focused content around our ideal customer profile, not every single day, but for the majority of our content. And then eventually we transitioned to trying to fully do that majority of the time. When I say majority, like 85, 90% of the time. And we found that model to work really well. And what we found on the brand component side is less people are actually familiar with our company because of it, or at least we're not top of mind as much. For many companies. And back in the day, I would get Instagram messages and direct messages on other platforms being like, oh, my dream one day is to grow my company so I can hire you to do my marketing. Once we get big enough, we're going to end up hiring you. Now we get way less of those messages, but we get messages from larger corporations asking us specific questions related to problems they have in marketing, and we generate way more leads, And we're building a stronger brand with our ideal customer profile. While before, our ideal customers weren't really messaging us on social media because the content was too broad.

Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now, but you can do it with Karrot. It's www.karrot.ai. Again, karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. Yep. So I think at a very meta level here for everyone to think about is you really have to understand the business that you're in. And again, like we have seen, we've seen mutual friends, Neil, that have just chased the views to the end of the earth and they become very popular influencers, so to speak, and they have millions and millions of followers, but it distracted them from their main business and their main business kind of looks like a Frankenstein now.

Yeah, I agree. Try chasing the views. Eric's friends, I've had dinner with some of Eric's friends who'd be like, oh, I read your article. The one you wrote on flying business class or how you spent all this money on Tom Ford and fancy clothing companies and what it did. That was so cool. No joke, some of those articles got millions and millions and millions of views. And so many people would stop me on the street and be like, oh, I read the article about you buying more designer clothes. Didn't generate crap in revenue. And at the end of the day, I do business to make money.

Did you meet this guy at my mom's funeral?

The what?

Did you meet this guy at my mom's funeral? The one that said that he read your article?

No, this is when we were in Vegas and we did lunch at Aria and you were gambling before dinner because I read this—

No, no, no, that was dinner. That was dinner at Aria. Dinner at Catch or something.

Uh, I don't know where the dinner was, but yeah.

It was dinner with my high school friends. It was a bunch of girls, right?

Yes, this is years ago, like more than 10 years ago.

Close to 10 years or over 10 years ago. Um, anyway, so that aside, let's move on to the next thing. Neil, you'll like this one because I've been sending Neil these, these stock charts where these things are going parabolic. So I want to emphasize, this is not financial advice. I'm going to show you a couple things over here. And, um, funny enough, Neil, I told, uh, I told someone yesterday, I showed him these stocks, he immediately told his wife to go buy them. I was like, hey, Hey, it's not on me, man. Okay, so I'm going to— I want to talk about how this AI stock is up 1,100%. There's another one that's up 5,000% year on year and what this tells you about business and marketing. Okay, so there's a business and marketing lesson here. Let me go into it right now. So check out my screen. So this guy over here. All right, I'm going to share my window. So what is the smallest object, Neil, that if it stopped being made tomorrow would freeze the entire AI industry by Friday? Just give me a quick answer. Do you know what it is?

Memory.

No. It's a polished piece of indium phosphide the size of a coaster grown in a furnace over 2 weeks, made by exactly 2 companies in the world that are not Chinese. It's not a chip, it's not a GPU, it's not a model, okay? So check this out. It's this thing over here. You see this? So this thing is extremely rare. Again, there's only— yeah, it's a circle, right? So that's what Neil sees on the screen. So he— this guy over here has done a lot of research on indium phosphide. I think I'm pronouncing that right, but 2 years of pulling on this story brought me back to the same conclusion. The 2026 to 2030 AI buildout is gated by 4 physical constraints and almost nothing else. Number 1 is indium phosphide wafers, 2 credible non-Chinese suppliers in the world, which we just showed you. Advanced packaging, 4 companies on Earth that matter. Power, industrial gas turbines sold out into 2030, 3 vendors at scale. And you have critical minerals, Chinese paws on gallium, germanium, and antimony. I don't know if I pronounced that correct. Export controls expires November 27th, 2026. So let me show you something, Neil. Do you see this?

Yes. AXT Inc. Their stock chart is through the roof and it is 8,484% growth in the past year, I believe it is. I could be wrong on this, but—

Yeah, it's a 1-year chart. Last year. No, I have it on 1 year. Check this out. Check this out, Neil. You see that? You see the different—

Wow.

Right. So they are an Indian phosphide maker, but they do have ties to China. You can see Beijing over here. But isn't this— okay, now I'm gonna show you one more. This is one of the other ones.

Wait, what's their revenue? Has it grown like crazy? Let's go back to the other one. What's their revenue? Go to their more, scroll. Yeah. Uh-huh. And then scroll down and then change it to annual.

Let's go to financials. Okay. Look at this.

Change it to—

so 17. To 28, 23, 26 million in March. This is quarterly. We can switch to annual.

There you go.

So annual income statement here. There we go.

So they've grown, but not that much.

They're actually doing less revenue now. They've gone down. Yeah. 137, 141, 75, 99. Okay, I'm going to show you one more, Neil. This one's one of the American or not American ones, but yeah, this is American actually. So based in San Jose, check this out. So last year they grew 1,100%. This is Lumentum Holdings. Okay. If we look at MAX, it's a parabolic chart as well. Okay. So if we click on them over here, right, let's go ahead and click on financials. Let's go to— let's look at this annualized. Look at this, Neal. So $1.74 billion in 2021, then $1.71 billion in 2022, $1.77 billion in 2023, $1.36 billion. So they went down in 2024 significantly, then $1.65 billion. So here's the thing, but investors are realizing this is majorly bottlenecked and this is one of the core suppliers. And that's why these stocks, you look at the story, that's why the story is going up so much.

Yeah, the story is causing it to go up. I would say just be careful financially with this stuff.

So here's what I would say, and I want to tie it to business and then maybe we'll have time for one more episode after this. One, the story matters a lot. The story can help with your valuation, and that's why they're up like 5,000% or 1,200% or 8,000%, whatever it is in the last 12 months or so. Story matters quite a bit. But also, when it comes to business, you have to think about the bottleneck. So Jeff Bezos used to have all of his managers, management team read the book The Goal, and that entire book is talking about bottlenecks. You're always going to have bottlenecks in a company. One thing's going to be holding up, like one critical process could be holding you back, right? And so you always want to be stamping out the bottlenecks in your company, the bottlenecks in your marketing too. You know, what's causing— what's stopping you from getting more leads? Okay. Is it something around sales, for example? Is it something around your outbound, for example? Is it something around follow-up? Is it something around speed to lead? So you always have to be stomping out bottlenecks in your marketing and your business. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to move the supply chain forward, right? In this case, If any of these bottlenecks get screwed over, then the AI supply chain is messed up, and that messes up everything for the world, right? And so I think this is a meta lesson in storytelling, and also in bottlenecks.

Yeah. And for the last episode of today, before we finish up, I wanted to talk about rebranding. Sometimes it's actually worth changing your name. And we'll use Eric as an example for this segment. And the one that many of you guys are familiar with is Intercom. So Intercom for a long time was known as that website chat and people just message you from there. They wanted to create a new product and they released it as Fin. The reason they did it is so they can have an AI-first product. They don't have to deal with old legacy stuff, and it's actually worked really well for them. We've talked about it in past episodes, how they've skyrocketed their growth and the revenue. And some of those numbers are public on X. Eric actually did something similar and he has been for 6 months or so. Maybe my timing is a little bit off, Eric. His agency Single Grain is known for digital marketing consulting. Eric's been spending a lot of time on AI and wanted to get into quote unquote AI consulting. If he just redid the Single Grain website to be focused around AI, I don't think it would've done well because the agency's been around for a long time, right? More than 10 years?

Since 2009.

All right. So way more than that. So 2009, you are, uh, what, uh, 17 years?

17 years. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I took over in 2013.

So I think if you ended up doing that with Single Grain, it would've been a harder sell, but you didn't. You ended up creating an offshoot or a new company called Single Brain. That just purely focuses on AI implementation. How would you say the— what lessons would you say you've learned from the branding shift or change? Now, to clarify here, he still has both companies and he still does both services. It's just he has an offshoot brand for the AI consulting. What would you say is the pros of doing it that way versus the cons of not just choosing single grain for both? And if you had to do it all over again, would you do it the same way?

So Neil, when you think about the brand Kleenex, what do you think about?

Tissue paper, toilet paper, like Kleenex, like, you know, like to—

Yeah, Kleenex. Yeah, so toilet paper or paper towels or something like that, right? But mostly tissue.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean toilet paper. I meant for like when you sneeze, like, you know, your nose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, when you think about Nike, it's mostly shoes, right? And so when you think about MP Digital or Single Grain, MP Digital is marketing, Single Grain is marketing, right? And so the reason why I decided to do Single Brain is because Single Brain is a lot of the— to Neil's point, it is the AI implementation, a lot of the stuff that we're doing internally that people are asking for. And what I would say, Neil, is it becomes a lot clearer to people when people come in for the singlebrain.com website. It's very clear on what they want. They want either AI strategy or AI implementation. And it's very easy to just focus the conversation on that. Now, when we tried to do it initially on the Single Brain side, it's like, okay, you want these marketing services, By the way, would you like some AI services too? It confuses the discovery call too much, right? So it's much easier to focus it on one thing like Kleenex. Oh, you do tissues. Google, you do search engines. Okay, Nike, you do shoes, right? And so that exercise, like we tried it initially to kind of mix it up. You don't want to mix it up. You want to keep it focused. And if you're able to keep it focused, that makes it easier for people to buy because the more confusion you add, the tougher it is for people. It's tougher. It is for you to get a sale. Yes.

And I think it is a good strategy. We did something similar. We bought a company called Yodle Mobile that's just known for app stuff, and we never changed the name to NP Digital. And when we acquired it, it started growing faster. And we had an internal discussion. I'm like, why? It's known specifically for this. They've been around, I think, almost 20 years or somewhere around there. And I'm like, leave it, it's growing faster. Wow. Don't mess something that's not broken, and especially when it's known for something very specific.

So there you have it, guys. Hope you enjoyed this episode, and we'll catch you next week. We'll see you later. Bye.