AI, Data, and the Future of Marketing: Building Smarter, Faster Businesses

According to the Cloudflare CEO, AI is killing the business model of the web.

Okay, so what, what's the backstory with this one? Because I think we have so many threads that are related to this. Um, so let's, let's, let's give some context.

There's, there's no real backstory. It was more so an article on, uh, Search Engine Land, I think, that was quoting him. And there he's pretty much just saying that AI is killing, you know, the model that we're familiar with. And I don't know if AI is actually killing the typical web-based business model, but I would say that technology, not just AI, actually I would go back, let's not even say technology. I would say platforms are killing the traditional business model of the web. Because if you look at all the platform providers out there, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn, Everyone's goal these days is to keep people on platform. I think it was YouTube last year that had $24 million in US commerce sales on their platform. $28 million?

You said million.

Yeah, $24 or $28 million, something like that.

Users?

No, dollars, dollars of transactions.

Okay.

In platform commerce. They're not really focusing on—

Okay, got it. You mean it's new, it's nascent. Yeah, yeah.

Yes. You look at Instagram, TikTok, of course they have much more. But the traditional model of the web is you get people, you send them off to your website.

Uh-huh.

You do marketing, you get clicks, you send them off to your website, and then you go from there.

Yep.

I think the thing that's really shifted is AI is making it where it's more brand related, kind of like television, but they're bringing that to the web, right? With the brand mentions. And I think the second one, and the second one's bigger than the first one, is platforms are trying to keep people on their own platform all the time for every single thing. In essence, they're copying the Asian model of the all-in-one app. The US apps have not gotten there yet, and I don't think they'll be fully quote unquote all-in-one due to monopolistic laws and rules. But I do believe, you know, Facebook has added commerce there. Why won't they? And you know, you can collect leads on Facebook. Why can't you talk to someone from a company through their WhatsApp application integrated within Instagram? And now all of a sudden you're talking to corporations, you're hiring them and you're communicating. You start cutting out tools like the Slacks, the Teams, and they start building all this stuff within platform.

So the other thing too is agents are ultimately going to be making a lot of decisions. So for example, if you want to code an app from scratch, let's say you use Replit or something. Ultimately, you and I don't want to figure out where am I going to host this? How am I going to deploy this? What am I going to use? X, Y, and Z. So the agents are going to be making that call. And so I don't know how that's going to look. Maybe there's agents marketing to agents, but there's going to be, there's going to need to be something there that makes the decisions for you. And we've kind of talked about this already, but we believe that website traffic's going to continue to decline over time. Not saying you should abandon your website right now. I think you should still have a website no matter what. But it is changing. I mean, just earlier this week I was just talking to just multiple different meetings. There was, I met with my YPO forum, so that's, let's just call that a CEO group, right? And, um, I think yesterday I was FaceTiming with, with one of my friends who, you know, and he's like, yeah, I haven't used Google this week. And then earlier when I was talking to that CEO group, most people are, you, they, they tend to be defaulting to LLMs more right now. That being said, I was at a coworking place yesterday and I saw like an older dude, you know, with Google pulling up and I saw his behavior. I'm like, it's, it's just, but behavior's evolving over time. Um, and then this actually brings us over to the fact that Apple said first time ever in 22 years that SEO on SEO traffic, more specifically Google traffic on Safari, has dropped for the first time in 22 years.

They've seen Google traffic drop in 22 years.

Correct. First time ever in 22 years.

But according to Datto, more people are starting to use Google. And if you look at the numbers Google has released, uh, Google has 13-ish or Let's, let's use annual. They went from, or actually let's use daily. They went from 8-ish billion searches a day, 8.5, to around 13.6 to 13.7 billion searches a day.

I believe it. I, I think, I just, I don't think they're going to be as dominant as they once were. That's, that's, that's what I believe.

I agree with that. And when I say, and I think we're saying the same thing when it comes to dominance, we're not saying Google's declining. We're saying that people are using multiple platforms to get the answer.

Yeah, I think I, I just, maybe you can speak from your, your, your back. I, I think, I think you have said that you still continue to use Google quite a bit. Um, for me, I'm defaulting a lot more. I mean, if you look at my home screen, I've had it like this for a while, but my home screen does have Claude on the left side, which I actually never open. Um, but the one I open the most right now is, is ChatGPT. Um, because it's, it's getting better. I think it's doing a better job, at least for me, in terms of searching things and, and finding solutions for me. Um, and there's just, I, I don't know, it just keeps getting better and better. So I'm, I'm getting like, humans are lazy. We want things done for us. Yes. Yes.

The big thing that I'm seeing right now is forget how you use Google and, and traditional search. If you look at your patterns right now for search, they're drastically different than 2 years ago.

For sure.

And I think that's a big thing that no one talks about because everyone's like, Google's dying. The data we're seeing, if you even look at their earnings and their ad revenue, they're not dying. Like their numbers are actually going up and to the right. But the thing that is dying for Google is they're not getting the new type of searches that people are typing in on, let's say ChatGPT, as frequently as Google would hope that they would adapt to Google Search, right? If you're typing in specific questions related to sleep or whatnot, or trying to get research done, your search queries aren't 2, 3-word questions or keywords. They're, whole sentences and some of them maybe 20, 30 words. A lot of people are not typing in those queries into Google. That's where they're missing the boat.

Yeah, I actually have this, this graph over here, so we'll pull this up. But this is just from SimilarWeb. This is April 2025 versus March of 2025. So you can see the blue over here. The only one that's gone up month on month 13% is ChatGPT, obviously, right? But everyone else down here is declining. So Google down 3.18%, YouTube's down 2.13%. Facebook down 3.5%. So anyway, that's not to say ChatGPT is going to be the big winner, um, long-term. I, I don't even have a prediction for that. I just think that these things happen slowly and then all of a sudden.

They're saying Facebook and Instagram's traffic and TikTok is all down?

Correct. Yeah. Wikipedia's down 6%. Reddit's down 3.77%.

It's interesting stat. The only problem I have with that, because we look at a lot of similar web data and we find that And it's not just SimilarWeb, whether SimilarWeb, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, a lot of their traffic estimations are just off and they're off substantially because we have so many people that authenticated with Google Analytics. A lot of times we see ChatGPT, I'm not, we see SimilarWeb showing traffic declines when we're actually seeing traffic increases. The big thing for me is I look at earnings calls because earnings calls end up revealing data from the corporation because these are publicly traded companies. I don't know for certain if Google's traffic is dying or not, but their revenue is going up and the number of people performing searches are going up. That could be the people who are searching are searching more, but they're getting drop-offs. But my hypothesis is if they're getting more daily searches, in theory, their traffic is going up. I do think ChatGPT is growing faster from a percentage-wise though when it comes to traffic.

So this is interesting. This is what you just touched upon. So in-platform clicks over here, this is the, the green line is Google. So it's moving up, right? This person that put this picture's name, Tylan Enberger. So he said, query growth is likely happening because Google is making users click on more in-platform links. So increasing pages per visit for google.com is an indicator that users are spending more clicks within Google search results. Since most surf interactions like paging, refining searches, or clicking images change a URL, but keep visitors on Google's domain. Higher numbers suggest Google's capturing more clicks internally rather than users quickly leaving for other sites.

Yes.

Yep.

But that doesn't necessarily mean Google, uh, based on that chart, it doesn't mean that Google's necessarily getting more traffic or less traffic. It could be users clicking more within app making up for traffic downfalls. Yeah. I don't know.

I think, look, I, I think Google's still going to be a, a fine business long-term. They've got a lot of data. I mean, they have YouTube, they have, they have Android, they have, they have all these things. Who, who knows if, if the, the DOJ's going to break 'em up. Um, but I, I, I've got something interesting for you and then we can give everyone kind of a practical take on, on what to do here. But what I've noticed this week, so from the SEO world yesterday, I talked to a couple people from a big agency. Okay. And funny enough, I'm interviewing a couple of them right now. They were passed over to me. These are SEO directors at these a— I was like, how come all of you are looking to leave this agency right now? They're all from the same company. He's like, they're like, oh, haha. Um, because we aren't closing any more, uh, SEO deals right now and it's, it's been a while.

Right?

So we can chalk that up to it's a poor economy. But we can also chalk that up to like the fact that they just aren't doing innovative work anymore and they can't charge those prices. The other thing I'll say too is for the first time yesterday, I kind of half-assed the post on LinkedIn. I'm like, hey, we're looking to hire some killer SEOs. This is the first time ever I've had so many people hit me up. I've had people hit me up from like these well-known companies. I'm just like, why are all these people hitting me up? I'm like, oh, the job market's a little shaky for SEOs right now.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and there was a company that actually poached one of our SEOs recently. And, um, I was talking to my, the, the, my, my, my guy that was poached. And then I was like, tell me about the company that you're going to now. And it is, let's just call it a very boring services company. I'm like, what do you think they're going to have you do there? You're going to be optimizing for traditional SEO and they're scared that they're losing all their traffic right now and you're going to have to fix that. And I'm like, you should take the job because all you've known is single grain. I want you to spread your wings. You're going to learn, right? Um, and maybe you end up starting your own thing afterwards, or maybe you come back to us. Like, I don't know, but I think you should take it, right? Just to see what else is out there. Um, and he's going to do that, but there are desperate poaching attempts happening. And on the other side, there's so many— first time ever I've seen so many SEOs desperate to find like another home because I think they see the floor is very shaky.

Yes. But when I look at search in general, again, I like looking at data. In 2022, Google's revenue grew to $282 billion. It was a 9.7% increase over the previous year, 2021. When you look at 2023, Google's revenue increased to $307 billion. It was an 8.68% increase in revenue. You look at 2024, Google's revenue increased to $350 billion with a 13.87% growth rate. So they're actually starting to increase in growth rate again. And it just goes to show, yes, a lot of things are shaky in digital marketing, but these platforms are doing better than before. It's just that the attention is getting spread to multiple platforms instead of just one platform. But the data's clearly showing that none of this is dying anytime soon.

Do you, are you familiar with The Innovator's Dilemma?

Uh, no.

Okay. So, uh, Clayton Christensen, so he wrote this book called The Innovator's Dilemma and basically describes the paradox where successful companies fail by doing everything right because they have to focus on sustaining what they have right now. Um, and they have to almost ignore disruptive innovations cuz it, it screws up their business model cuz they had this cash printing monopoly, right? Yeah. Um, let's call it what it is, and I think it's It's a great business. Um, and then it's like, because they have to decide what to trade off on, they, they could potentially miss the next wave, right? So you think about Kodak, they ignored digital photography. Um, Blockbuster dismissed Netflix, right? Or Nokia missed the smart smartphone shift. Um, Microsoft missed mobile, right? And they, they kind of got into a little trouble there, right? Um, the point is Google's in that innovator's dilemma right now. The good thing is they've got a lot of data. I mean, Gemini's a great model. They've got a lot of great products, YouTube and all that. So, I think they might try to ride the wave where they, once they see it really start to switch, maybe that's when they turn it on. Um, but I still think that's a long ways away. But I do think we're starting to see the, the cracks in the model.

Yes.

And I think they're, they have enough smart people, they have a lot of smart people at the company, um, to help them figure out maybe how to land the plane here. But I, I don't think search just dies overnight, which, which is, I mean, people like to blow this stuff up, so.

They do. I, I think search is gonna change and it already has changed. It's a question of who will be the leader. And I don't think one person is going to be the leader anymore. I think search is going to turn to social media or be very similar to it.

Well, it's the search everywhere optimization thing.

Yeah, but if you look at social media, Facebook is no longer the dominant player. I understand Meta as a company definitely is, but Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, they all are pretty popular. And in certain segments, some are more popular than others. Like I would say there's more political information on X that I see left and right than I would on other platforms.

Yep.

That could just be user behavior, but in general, I do believe people on X are more vocal about politics than some of the other platforms out there. Now, if you look at search, it has been— Google has been the leader for a very, very long time, and they've controlled the majority of the market share when it comes to traditional search. But now people are searching on social media because if you're looking for a handbag, A lot of times people just want to see inspirational images of who has the latest handbag on Instagram and which celebrities are wearing them. Because a lot of people copy these celebrities. That's not really traditional search, although traditional search has deals, like Google has deals with TikTok, so they're pulling in information. They own YouTube of course, so they can pull that in. But I think the same thing's going to happen with search in which it's going to be, you use Google for call it 10 or 20 different use cases, use ChatGPT for 3 main use cases and then The list goes on and on where you're like, oh, I'm going to use Perplexity for this and that. And next thing you know, it's like social media where you have 7 or 8 platforms and they specialize in different things.

Dude, I'm going to cancel my Perplexity right now. You just reminded me I never use it and I pay $20 a month for this thing.

Dude, that adds up. That's $240 a year.

Dude, it's too much money, man. But I think this is net— a net positive because in my mind, when marketing gets harder, it's more of an opportunity for people that adapt. Yeah. Or people who adapt. And so if you're willing to adapt, you're willing to learn. And this is what this podcast has always been about. We've been doing this for 7, 8 years now. And the thing that this podcast forces us to do is to stay up to date. And it forces, like in business, not even just marketing in business, you've got to be a relentless learner. And the one thing, the one knock I have on the traditional SEO industry is that they complain instead of trying to get better, instead of trying to adapt. This forces them into that, and I'm glad it forces them into that.

Yeah. And, and one other note is when you're adapting, you got to really look at the data. Like when Eric and I go to events and we ask people who uses Facebook, majority of the room doesn't raise their hands for Facebook. You agree with this, right?

Mm-hmm.

I experience that at most conferences. But if I look at Facebook stock, I understand they have WhatsApp, which doesn't really make 'em that much revenue. It really is mainly Instagram and Facebook. Um, I don't think Oculus generates 'em much revenue either. But in 2022, their growth declined 1.12%. They were at $116 billion in revenue. In 2023, $134 billion in revenue with 15% growth. In 2024, $164 billion in revenue with 21% growth. Even though people are saying like, oh, Facebook is dying, the numbers and the revenue is showing that it's not dying. It's still being used and they're making a killing from this cash cow. So just because certain people have opinions on what they think is what's working or what's not working, the data in most cases will tell you the true story.

Yep. Well, I'll tell you what, I just canceled my Perplexity account, so—

That's awesome.

Um, yeah, here, here's another thing. I'm just like, we, we had a demo from, uh, this, this demo request from this company. It's like, oh, um, can you, can we not do the demo and then can you just send us the deck instead and send us the pricing? And I was just like, sorry, we don't do that. So you have to sometimes just put your foot down when people try to do this and they try to change the thing on you.

Why won't you do that?

Because one, this guy seems like a tire kicker. Um, he works for a big company, but then it's, we couldn't find any information on him. Right.

Um, is his email address at that big company?

It's a company in Mexico.

Um, I'm just looking at it right now, but they don't use LinkedIn a lot in Mexico as an FYI.

They don't.

Yes.

Um, but when they start to ask for all these things upfront, I'm just like, oh, you're just trying to change a lot of this stuff at the beginning. And it's like, this is how it's gonna be working with you. Versus when you talk to like, you know, a couple companies signed recently, um, they're just, they just follow the process and they're just very easy about it. We just like, it's gonna be easier going in the beginning and we're only doing a limited amount of pilots right now. So that's not to say we won't entertain these in the future, but generally right now we just don't wanna deal with people like this who try to change too many things in the beginning.

Even if he's trying to change some things in the beginning, If you really believe he works for that corporation because he has that company email address and you don't, you know, he's not working for a competitor, you're better off just sending him the deck and the pricing because what's the worst that's going to happen?

We don't have a deck.

Oh, you don't have it? Okay, now I understand.

Exactly.

If you had a deck, I'm assuming you would send it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, that's 2 seconds. But now I'm just like, I'm no, like, I'll come back to you.

I agree with you because you have enough leads.

Yeah.

To go focus on the ones that fit the framework that you're selling right now.

Yep.

But eventually have AI help you create a deck.

Correct. And that's something we can talk about too. Um, all right, where do you want to go next here?

Uh, let's see, we already talked about search. Oh, one, one quick note. This is the power of a brand. When Apple, they said on air, or they were quoted, uh, it was by someone named last name Q. Apple said AI will replace traditional search. And Google stocks sunk 7%.

I thought it went down 8%.

7% is what it ended up at.

Oh, what is it?

At least that's what the CNBC article reported.

When I saw a candle going negative, it was, um, like a negative candle. It was, it was like negative 9%.

And people probably ended up buying it and started propping it back up.

I still think it's like, would I bet on it long term? Not, but I think it's, it's a great business right now, but it's not, uh, this is not financial advice, guys. This is just me. Thinking about this, by the, by the way, remember when we're in Miami, you're about to, I finished my talk already. This is in between your talk and my talk, and we recorded using a DJI Osmo and we also used Noah's second one. I actually, that one was really good. We got a lot of positive comments. Uh, one of the comments was like, this is, this is the content you guys should create. And the other one was like, this is like a real conversation with 2 smart people. 'Cause we just riffed for 80.

Oh, there was no topics?

No, we riffed for 80 minutes and you didn't have an iPad. I didn't have one. I still pulled out my phone a little bit just to, Yeah. Just look at the topics. Um, but they really enjoyed it. And then when I watched it, before I knew it, 40 minutes was, was, was done. I was just kind of watching it to see how it, like I'd feel about it. But it was like those types of natural conversations is what people really enjoy.

So we should, we stop just creating these ideas and just go for it.

No, I think the ideas are still good, but I like the classic stuff where it's like, hey, why you're shifting your marketing strategy to free over content creation, which you should go on. And then we can talk about what I learned from these conference ratings that made me happy but also enraged me. Yeah.

So I'll bust out some stats because I love numbers and you know that.

Yeah.

We have an exit popup on our Ubersuggest landing page. All right. The exit popup, it takes you to a quiz. And the quiz specifically says, it's a, I think a 7-part quiz or it's actually want more SEO traffic? That's a headline. Answer 5 quick questions. I'll give you a 7-week action plan showing you exactly what you need to do to get more traffic. We generate leads from it. So if you go to neilpatel.com/ubersuggest, which gets a lot of type-in traffic and traffic directly from Google that's branded, people go to the exit popup, a certain percentage of them. In 2023, we generated 9,973 leads for that. This is just United States.

2023?

2023.

Okay.

Okay. Just from that exit popup quiz from that one URL. And we close $1.7 million, $1.742030. So let's just call it $1.7 million in contract value.

This is services.

Services.

Yeah.

All right. Now that's just the original contract value. A portion of those people could renew. Maybe some people went bankrupt in between. I don't know. I don't have the actual data on the LTV. I just have the original contract. Internationally, from that same page in 2023, we generated $38,736 leads and only $338,000 in revenue. All right, so the international team didn't do as good of a job closing. 2024 in the United States, 7,331 leads and $2 million in contract value. Okay, it was literally $2,007,751. So let's just call it $2 million.

Yep.

And international, 33,458 leads, $939,979. So almost a million bucks. So roughly 3 million from that, uh, quiz. And then in 2025, it's too early. 2,231, call it 400,000, uh, 394,000 in the United States, 172,000, uh, internationally. Keep in mind it's early in the year.

It's also the worst economy.

This is a really bad economy recently. And we cohort, So the leads from 2024 that close in 2025 is counted towards the 2024 numbers. For 2025, our sales cycle is, it's actually gone longer. So we expect if we just close off leads tomorrow, the numbers in theory would be better a month, 2 months down the road because you still have a lot that'll close from the original leads. So I was telling my team, I was like, how many people If I just look at AnswerThePublic, forget Ubersuggest, just AnswerThePublic, because would you agree the audience is very similar? They're both keyword research tools.

Yep.

I was like, how many users go through there in the United States on a weekly basis? And they're like, users without registration or users with registration? I was like, with registration. They're like, we average 18,000 to 20,000 per month. I mean, no, per week, sorry. 18,000 to 20,000 per week. And out of the 18,000 to 20,000, roughly 16% of them are United States. So you're looking at roughly 1,000, no, 2,800 leads per week in the United States. I was like, huh, what happens if there was no pricing on the app and I just sold every single lead on services and opened up the app to be more free? and just ate the cost, how much more traffic would I get? Because I think I can double up the traffic because the traffic is down by almost half from 16 months ago, not a year ago, 16 months ago, because they've been more aggressive on the paid side. And I was like, dude, I just opened up double the traffic. So instead of 2,800, in theory, I would be at 5,600. You know how much more revenue I would just close if I just—

Open it up.

If I just opened up and made the app free from a service-based business. So in the next 2 weeks, I say 2 weeks, I'm hoping 2 weeks. On the 14th, people will open up parts of the app, not fully of the app, because we don't want to crush the revenue. But they, in the last like 40-ish days, they made it even more aggressive. And I was like, guys, go back to what it was. So I'm going to open a little bit more up. And then I'm going to just start collecting leads and run a test. And if the leads start panning out, it'll take me 35 to 40 days to get initial data on if we can close leads and they're interested and we're getting to pitch. Because the moment we get to pitch, we know our close rate ends up being really standard.

Yeah.

Right? So it's just like, lead to a pitch, I don't know what the ratio is going to be, but pitch to close, it tends to be standard because By the time we were pitching, they're super qualified. And I was like, dude, I spend so much time creating these YouTube videos, right?

That you don't enjoy doing.

That I don't enjoy doing. I had to create more scripts today.

Yeah.

Which I don't want to do.

Yeah.

And we spend money on paid ads and we spend money. I spend tons of time going to conferences, which I love interacting with more people, but you can take a guess if I enjoy going to conferences. Right? I want to just be home with my family. And if I'm home with my family for like 3 months straight, I miss conferences. But like this week I was at 2 conferences, one in Toronto, came back, and then the next day I went to Fort Lauderdale. I don't know why my team didn't—

Why didn't you just go down?

That's what I'm saying. I don't know why my team—

That's so dumb. I would be so pissed.

I think one was booked at the last minute.

Still, someone needs to be looking ahead.

But I was too cheap to change the flight. Oh, we knew a week in advance.

Well, that's on you.

I didn't want to pay $1,000.

You paid for the extra pain.

But the $1,000, it adds up, dude. That's the Indian in me. I couldn't spend the money, dude.

Okay. You have to fly back 5 hours to LA and then you have to fly another 5 hours to Fort Lauderdale and then, or 4 hours.

And yeah, but I just work on the plane and I didn't pay for either of the plane tickets. So if I changed it, it would've been my expense.

Well, you know what? It's, it's, it's still good to retain the cheapness.

It's good.

The frugalness is good. And we should talk about this cuz I, I was thinking about it this morning. I'm like, what are the first principles? What are the building blocks to building a generational business? business. We can come back to that in a second. Let's finish this point though. So, okay, you're pivoting. You, you're, see, you have a little bit of innovator's dilemma too. You, you don't want to sacrifice all that revenue, so you gotta—

Well, sacrifice it on AnswerThePublic before Ubersuggest, cuz it's a much smaller business unit for me.

Smart. So what does that funnel look like when they're coming in? Like what are you offering them like in that 7-step funnel or whatever that is?

Well, the 7-step funnel in Ubersuggest is not an Ubersuggest lead gen collection. My team just has an exit popup on the neilpatel.com site. Ubersuggest is on the neilpatel.com site. It doesn't have its own domain name even though we own ubersuggest.com. I just show the exit popup on that page. It's not related to Ubersuggest. It's just like, take this quiz, we'll give you an action plan to grow your traffic.

Yeah.

What's the difference from that? Because when they fill out an action plan, it's not like they're saying, hey, give me consulting. They're just saying, give me an action plan to grow my traffic.

Yeah.

People on Ubersuggest, try to go to their traffic. I don't collect a full lead on Ubersuggest. I don't collect a full lead on, uh, Answer the Public. The theory will be to collect a full lead, I need URL, website, uh, or budget, marketing budget, revenue, uh, phone number. Those are the 4 fields that are pretty much a must-have for my sales team.

Yeah. But you're not going to try to collect that unless you enrich them and it looks good.

What I'll do is I'll give more of the app for free, I'll be more generous on the features. There'll still be a lot of stuff that requires a paid upgrade, but I'll be more generous on the freemium side. And then on the second step, when you register, it says register through Google or just put in an email and password. The next step, I will force them for United States only because my US sales team is the biggest. It's the quickest for me to run an experiment. I will ask, Uh, you're, uh, step, uh, 2 out of 2 to finish your registration. So we can adjust the Uber, uh, answer the public data and reports to you. We need your website URL, your marketing budget, right?

To unlock premium features.

Thank you. That's a great idea to unlock premium features. I'll test that. Dude, that's a great— dude, that's a great idea.

Yeah, there you go.

Thank you. That is really brilliant.

Let us know how that goes.

Yeah, so then I think I'll get— dude, with that, I know I'll get a lot more leads. And then what'll happen from there is we will go and call, and if the numbers work out, I'll just blow it all up. And the biggest ATP features that cost us money is things like tracking. So when you put in a keyword, we're looking at things like Google Suggest or People Also Ask. How does that change from today to tomorrow to next week to next month to next year? And aggregating all of that data, that is actually the biggest expense on AnswerThePublic.

Yeah.

From what we can tell, right? Or at least what my devs are telling me. I don't know how accurate it is, but that's what one of the product managers told, or product, product people told me. Um, that kind of stuff, I would still charge for the premium features, and that's what a lot of people pay for. But I love your idea of Uh, fill out the rest of your registration to get more information. And then what I'll do is if that works, I'll do more of that and less traveling.

Yeah. Less traveling, less content creation. I think you'll still keep the content creation for—

I'll still keep the content creation even though it's painful for me to record 8 videos a month.

Yeah.

But if I cut down the traveling, it's not as painful because it gives me stuff to do.

Yeah.

But dude, the traveling is just so painful.

Yeah. The back and forth, it's, you know, when I get there and it's a new country or somewhere I haven't been, it's great. Like, you get to enjoy the local scenery and all that and maybe meet up with some people.

Wait, but is it really great if it's a new country?

I mean, I mean, okay, we had fun in Frankfurt. Frankfurt was cool.

Yeah, but do you really do anything that's touristy?

No. Well, no. So here's what I enjoy doing. I enjoy hanging out with friends and I enjoy trying different restaurants. And I enjoy like walking the parks. It's like old people stuff, right? I enjoy the old people stuff. Like getting in the sun and walking the park and being out in nature. And then I just work.

Like walking in parks, like the actual parks?

Yeah. Like, okay. When you go to, when you go to London, they have all these like Hyde Park. They have all these parks, right? It's great. I don't know. Parks are fucking awesome.

We're very similar. You want to know the number one reason I'm looking to move into my new house?

Why? Because you can walk around more?

Yes, exactly. I walk around probably for, I would, Outside, hour plus a day.

Yeah. And then you're probably on your phone all the time too.

Uh, I take my kids sometimes to walk with me around the new house. And what I do is we have, even though we're doing construction there, I have, uh, bikes, their bikes in a garage. So then I take their bikes out of the garage with them and they go and ride their bikes on the sidewalks and stuff. Cuz it's a safe, quiet street. Yeah. And I go run around chasing 'em.

Yeah. See, that's great.

And I love it. And I'll do it for like, I try to do it for an hour. They usually get tired after 30, 40 minutes, but it's fun. That is like one of my happiest moments of my life.

That's worth it. You know, it's, it's, uh, it's funny. After I was thinking about it this morning, I was like, the moment Neil had kids, he completely changed. Like, don't get me wrong, you're still very much optimized for money, but it's less, less of that now.

Yeah. It's really, it's a lot less of that.

Yeah.

Okay.

So just on, What we're doing right now, we're kind of doing something similar where I'm like, okay, we have this influence pipeline reporting feature, right? Which shows you how your ads are affecting like more, are they driving more events? Are they driving more interactions through email or are they changing your deals, um, in HubSpot or whatever, right? Because you, you want to determine if your ads are actually driving your pipeline forward or not. So we're just like, what if we just give that part away for free or at least freemium it, right? Which you, you actually have something here on freemium.

Yeah.

Um, or why don't we just give away for ClickFlow, give away 25,000 words for free while other, everyone else is still trying to charge like a lot of money for words, right? Why, why don't we just give that away for free? And so right now for us, we're much more aligned internally on go-to-market for a lot of these features that we're splintering off. Um, because those, as AI makes it easier to build different calculators or different ebooks and things like that, you probably wanna continue to move upstream. And you, to differentiate yourself. And you've done that for a long time with AnswerThePublic and Ubersuggest.

Yeah. What are you going to end up doing to really grow your top of the funnel? If you had a, your product right now just does ABM and that's it.

It does. Okay. So Carrot does personalized ABM ads. It also does personalized landing pages too. It also does influence pipeline reporting. So those are the 3 primary—

Wait, what's the last one? Influence pipeline reporting?

Influence pipeline reporting.

What does that mean?

That just, all the B2B marketers, they wanna know if like this stuff is actually working. And so we basically like, you know, have you opened, when's the last time you opened Gong? Never. Okay. So, yeah. So, okay. Gong shows you like when a, when a lead is very active, there's like more and more like larger, um, like clusters, bubbles and clusters, right?

Yeah.

So that's what our influence pipeline shows. It's like there's like these beautiful clusters, like, oh, if you had an email over here, it's a blue like bubble, but if you had multiple emails, it's a Bigger blue bubble and you just have all these things per lead.

So you know which ones are more likely to close. Yeah. Because they're engaged.

And then you can see a before and after. Hey, this is when you started running LinkedIn ads over here and then boom. Okay. This, you got way more activity. That kind of, you try to justify your, your, your job as a marketer, right? You, you need stuff like this. And so there's a lot of people that charge for it. We're like, why don't we just give that part away for free? Um, so just more stuff like this.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And so you're going to give that away for free?

Yeah, at least, at least, uh, a free version of it. And then for premium features, please enter more, more information.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, dude.

I—

the, the one trick though, because with the premium stuff is, uh, not just— it's not for more premium features, enter your information. It's, uh, the wording is going to be off, but for More premium features for free, right? You got to include the for free part.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they know that you're not just making them register and there's a credit card following up.

Got it, yeah, that's smart. Yeah, that's important.

The conversions drastically drop when you don't put the word for free. Like we've tested register to keep using and when we put register to keep using, comma, it's free, it drastically changed the signup flow.

Dude, see, this is what Josh who works with George Gammon said. He loves it when we share stories like this. And then we have data to share. So we'll, we'll try to bring the data back, Josh. Yeah. By, by the way, before we move on here, so the fact that you can pull out your phone and you have all this data already, you must have so much data on your phone and so many people texting you about all this like different, this different data, right? So I kind of wanna know from your end, how do you create a culture of data discipline in your organization? Because if the founders don't enforce this, it quickly falls apart. And you've, I think you've kept it locked in since the beginning.

Yeah. Dude, so check this out. Okay, data, revenue, lead channels. This is just text. No, that's it. This is just different threads. Okay, I'm just going to go images. Let's see.

You know, you can click on that person and just go to images.

Data. Well, this is a group chat. Searches by sources, what people are using in our channels. Every single day that caused, every date that they made a change to our applications. traffic over time by day. So then that way we can correlate, did it cause it? What caused the decrease in traffic? But like even like with charts, so—

And are these automatic every day or you ask for them?

Some I ask for, a lot, our majority are just shared within the team. Like here's another one. It looks per month, organic leads, organic traffic. It's total organic traffic, total new organic leads, DC scheduled, DCs happening. Pitches, contracts, deals, MRR, and it compares it for the last month, the last 3 months. And this is for our SMB division. I don't know what country because that's cut off, but it's for a specific country. You already saw this one.

I'm assuming you ask for it 30, 40% of the time because you ask for a lot of things.

Look, they're sending me a lot of charts and data and they're like, here's our internal charts, which ones do you want pretty?

Yeah. Oh, okay. This goes with content creation too.

This is content creation too. But they're just sending me like, data and they're just saying like, do you want us to make these pretty or not?

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, but yeah, dude, my team just shares data like every single day.

But you still probably ask 30, 40% of the time, or is it 20% of the time? Because you like these things all the time.

I probably ask like 50, 60% of the time.

Wow.

Okay. See, see, see. My team is sharing data constantly, but I'm— The, the problem with data is marketing teams love just giving data dumps. Like, look at all this cool stuff. And what I go back at them with is, but the data is irrelevant. What's the data that matters? Great example. I was talking to Caio Beleza. He runs operations for us, and I forgot the multiple that he used. It was like, Neil, a paid consulting client is worth like 500 times or 1,000 times more than a paid AnswerThePublic user. And I was saying, okay, sounds—

$500,000?

No, like 500 times or 1,000 times.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know what the multiple is, but it's large.

Yeah.

Because you could buy AnswerThePublic subscription call for a few hundred bucks per year or lifetime or whatever it is, but it's cheap. Let's go 200. I don't know what the latest pricing is, or let's go to 100 and something. So he's saying, hey dude, consulting clients pay, let's make it up at, $100,000. I'm just making up the number to keep them simple. And he's saying, uh, Answer the Public users worth $100. I'm using clear, easy numbers, so it's just easy to think about the numbers. When you look at from that comparison, that's 1,000 times difference. And I said, so he's like, we should just focus on getting more customers because one of those customers makes up for 1,000 Answer the Public customers. And I said, Kind of. And I'm like, what do you mean? And I'm like, well, you're talking about revenue. Our expenses in consulting is high. A new customer, every additional customer we get to AnswerThePublic is almost pure profit.

Yep.

You're really just paying credit card processing.

Yep.

Because you have a lot of fixed costs. I already have enough support people. Technology helps reduce support costs. Only need so many engineers. Only paying for data so many times.

Yeah, your gross margin gets better.

Exactly. I'm like, every consulting client I get, it doesn't. So he's like showing me this data. He's like, dude, this is why we just need more consulting clients. And I was like, the numbers don't make sense. Or when you're looking at data that's skewed. So I told him, hey dude, you're looking at data in the wrong way. And my team sends me tons of data like that. And I'm like, that's with a really skewed lens. It's also easier for me to sell something for $100 a year than it is to sell something for $100,000 There's a big difference. So my team sends data like that instead of data like, hey, we made these changes and our traffic went down or our traffic went up. Like the traffic drop that I showed you, these are from brand queries. It's specifically for people typing in our name. This has nothing to do with algorithms. So I said, brand queries are going down, which means you made changes to the product to keep causing the usage to drop. When you look at the graph over time, it's a steadily decline, but there's cliffs. And the cliffs, why would something just drop off all of a sudden during one week? It's not a competition doing anything. We look, go back and look at the dates. It's because my team implemented something and it's typically they implemented something a week to a month before, and then it eventually took time for it to hit and then it dropped off and it keeps going down and then it stabilizes and then they keep making changes and that causes a drop. So for me, when I ask them for data, I'm asking them for data that helps me solve specific problems while they just look at a lot of random data and they don't necessarily know what to do or they'll make informed decisions. The best example of this is, and this is what's causing the traffic drop, like Neil, did you know we get a lot of paid signups by putting, by blocking data for CPC and volume data with keywords? So like instead of giving people like 5 keywords of data, we're just going to give them one and then force more people to log in or force more people to sign up. They do that, the conversion rate goes from someone seeing to signing up. But then what they don't look at is the whole story in which, oh, over time that caused usage drop and traffic drop because there wasn't enough for free, and that caused total revenue decline and traffic drop. So being— having a lower conversion rate but more traffic Still made more money than having a higher conversion rate and less traffic.

This goes back to one of my favorite quotes. There are no trade-offs. Sorry, there are no solutions, only trade-offs, right? And I, I think the key thing here is one, you have to be adaptable. 2, you have to have a culture of experimentation and you have to be willing to change on a dime. But the 3rd thing that most people ignore is if you're a founder of the company, you can't ignore, you actually have to keep the pressure on in terms of asking a lot of questions about data because a lot, oftentimes people, when you start to, start to undress them a little bit, um, you start to ask them questions, they oftentimes will just kind of blankly look at you and then they won't know, right? And so nobody's gonna care as much as you as the founder if you're listening. Um, and even if you're an executive, you should ask deeper questions on this stuff. And that's why I asked you this question, cuz most companies don't have a culture of data discipline. Cuz even if you try to implement this stuff, they'll still stare at you blankly. And then if you, if you stop appearing in these meetings and you stop driving the intensity, it will quickly fall apart.

Yes. And you can see here, I asked them earlier, any idea when the limit rollbacks go out for ADP and Uber? So they're giving timelines. Answer the Public was May 14th. My text, all capital, WOW. They already knew I was pissed at that point.

Like, sorry, sorry, this is to make a change back?

This is to make a change back.

Wait, how long, how long was it?

They're saying May 14th. So next week on Wednesday.

And when did you ask that?

Yesterday. So I wanted it done today.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. So as a founder, this is also your job too. As a founder is, or as a leader, you have to constantly ask, hey, how can this be done faster? How come it can't be done faster? Because the default is, oh yeah, I'll, I'll do it in 2 weeks. Yeah, I'll do it in 3 weeks. The, if you don't give like a wow or more, it's more, more like an F that, people are gonna get too comfortable.

Yes. Mine was wow. Next one was why so long on ATP? Uber says was 2 days.

I'm like, all right. Your, your, your wow was F that. Yeah.

And then I'm like, and does May 14th include the new lead change I wanted as well? And then they said, I can't confirm that it does. So then I was already even more pissed. Uh, and then it just kept going from there. And then my texts just kept going and going and going. And then I had— this is all in a matter of like an hour.

You kept, you kept pushing them until they finally gave you the answer you wanted. Yeah.

Yes.

It wasn't like the, the good thing too is you didn't exactly dictate what you wanted exactly. You pushed the, you teased the answer out. And that takes longer, but that's almost, that actually is a form of coaching, Neil, even though you don't like coaching. That's a form of coaching. Yeah. I just spit really far. But anyway. Yeah.

But it, it helps teach him or helps, uh, it's coaching. It, it helps. Yeah. It helps train him and get him used to what I am willing to accept and what I'm not willing to accept.

Yeah. Neil Patel, a coach.

Yeah.

Oh, by the way, funny, it's a funny thing. There's an internet marketer that we both know and he's, he was very popular before. And today I just decided to open one of his emails. Um, maybe I'll let you guess who this is, but you can tell me afterwards. But, um, the guy still sends VSLs, still, still selling the same courses at the end of the day, still selling the same type of offers. He's just wrapping it around AI and things like that. Now, I don't think there's any, I, I think in my mind it's, you can keep doing the same thing or you can evolve. But this goes back to the same thing again. We just talked about evolving.

Yeah.

You and I have evolved as digital marketers over the years. I'm not saying we're better than anybody. I'm just saying that if you want to go far, because everyone has these big demands of themselves, you're going to have to adapt. Otherwise, you end up doing the same thing, and then those people end up complaining about how everyone is supposedly surpassing them, right?

Can I ask you a question before I guess?

Yeah.

Did this person own a conference before?

Maybe. This person started a marketing agency with another influencer. You can guess where this person lives. Try that.

Florida or Texas?

The influencer's in Florida.

The influencer's in Florida?

Yeah.

The other person's in?

Guess.

Texas? California?

Yes.

I know him well.

Yeah.

I don't know who it is.

I'll tell you after.

Am I following him on Instagram?

Probably not. I don't think so. You don't follow many people on Instagram.

100 and something, maybe?

You, you might, you might, you might follow them. But my, my point of saying this is, again, it's, We've seen the same. Um, the reason why info marketers get a bad rap is because they sell a promise that they can't fulfill.

With the influencers in Florida?

Yeah. The influencer that he partnered with.

It's a girl. No, he's— no, the influencer is a girl.

No, guy.

Oh, the guy.

Yeah.

Okay.

Anyway, point is that the, by the way, we were giving information out for free right now, right? We used to actually be in the education game. I used to work in online education. I think what internet marketer, info marketers cause is they, they, they sold, they do such a good job of selling. But when it comes to fulfillment, they can't fulfill for crap. Right. But then what ends up happening is they keep wrapping different offers and they keep, they know human psychology, so they bring people in. And then what happens is, okay, these VSLs convert, but then what, they burned the, the list out. Um, and then they have to move into a new offer and then they have to keep repackaging courses.

Is it Frank Kern?

Um, well, I have to tell you afterwards. I, I can't, we're not doing names, remember?

Okay. So yeah.

Yeah. You said I could guess. I'm guessing. You can, you can guess. I'll tell you after.

Uh, so you won't confirm it's Frank Kern?

I can't, I can't confirm or deny.

'Cause he has some of the best copy I've ever seen when it comes to sales.

Frank's an amazing copywriter.

Did you, do you remember his, the best sales video I ever saw in the marketing industry was his and it was him comparing a Rolls-Royce with a BMW, I believe it was. And he pulls out of his garage, uh, I don't know which car he pulled out first, but one was a Rolls-Royce and And then another one's a BMW. And I believe those are the 2 cars. And he's comparing them and he's like, you want to know the difference? And he's breaking down and he's like, did you know that they're owned by the same company? And he's talking about the little things that made a difference and what you're paying for like a logo or something like that. But yeah, the model worked out really well. One of his best converting videos.

One of the first videos I, when I was learning internet marketing was from Frank Kern. So anyway, but we're not doing any names for this one. Um, that's what I'll say. By the way, you have this— before we move on from this one, did you want to touch upon why freemium doesn't work as well anymore?

With AI, the cost to run software companies is just so much lower. You may not believe me, but I'm just telling you real data. Like, if you go out there and look at when I first created Crazy Egg with Ethan back in the day, dude, we had to go buy servers and go put that in a place to get our costs down and we had people having to connect them and program 'em. Software was expensive. Then the cloud came out. Cloud is so much cheaper these days than it was 2, 3, 4 years ago. Like my hosting costs are continually going down and down each and every single year just because data costs are going down. Secondly, AI makes it more efficient to run software companies because of things like design, coding, uh, cursors.

v0 for prototyping, Replit. Exactly.

Design, all this kind of stuff.

Yeah.

support. Um, so when you look at AI, it's making things more efficient where you can get stuff out faster and cheaper. Mm-hmm. Um, and the cloud costs are just going drastically down. And because of that, the barrier to entry is lower. You don't really need much to do, uh, uh, you don't need much money to start. And freemium is a great way to get people to sell. But the biggest thing that's increased over time is actually marketing cost. It's not the creation of software. So if you just give away the software for free, it's cheaper from what we calculated for most industries than it would be to pay for the marketing dollars. Like if you look at software for free as a marketing expense, it's more effective than paying for the traffic. Yep.

It makes sense. And actually this, this brings me into this, this little graphic over here that Kieran tweeted today from, uh, from HubSpot. So basically, oh, it's on the side now. So marketing today versus marketing tomorrow. So you can see this graphic over here, those of you that are listening, on the left side it says marketing today. So you see marketing at the top. And then right under it, it has product marketing, demand generation, and content marketing rolling up to it. And it says function first, siloed and slow. Now marketing tomorrow, at the very top, it's just an outcome, a goal that you're aiming for. So Grow traffic by 20% might be the goal. And then you have these other sub-goals over here, improve conversion rate by 7% and increase awareness by 2%. The point of this one, the marketing tomorrow is going to be mission first, AI powered and fast. I think we're going to be looking for, hey, I just want this outcome and then you're going to have one click, boom, it's doing it for you. And that's going to be the future, right? A lot of this stuff is just like, it's slower and it's clunkier.

Yeah, and if I look at the left side of marketing today, I, I struggle to run my business like that. I've run my business like Marking Tomorrow for a very long time where it's just, gimme the data points, gimme what's slowing down the business and what do I need to fix to grow it? And then you just have numbers and then you just go and focus on hitting those numbers and you dissect why those numbers aren't the way you want.

We're just not gonna wait anymore. I think if you're a leader, executive founder, whatever, you're just not gonna wait. Your tolerance is even lower now for slowness. Um, and if someone says, oh, I'm gonna make a PRD, which is a product requirements document, I'm just like, why don't you just prototype it? Right.

Or people still do that.

Yeah. People still create PRDs. Um, and guys, there's no need for PRDs. Just if you're serious about this, go prototype this using v0, make a mockup.

Yeah.

Cuz that takes like, you and I can just, it took, it'll take us 5 minutes to make a mockup that we like. Whereas in the past we would have to maybe Balsamiq, right? And then like wireframe it and then send it to a designer and they go back and forth to designer or take you like 3, 4 weeks to do it. Now you get it done in 5 minutes.

So I had one of my team members sit next to me and we were prototyping when I was in Brazil Web Summit. It did not— I was prototyping a new report that I wanted to end up creating. It did not take me 5 minutes, sadly, but I got it to a really good place where I sent it to my team to like figure out coding it up and getting it. We had to make a little bit of tweaks, but coding it up and making it work and integrated within our tool and our backend and everything. I was able to get it there within like an hour and 20-ish minutes. That's not bad.

But you're also very detail-oriented, so you're gonna put a lot more into it versus I'm 6% detail-oriented. So 5 minutes, I'm done.

Yeah. Yeah. But even after an hour and 20 minutes, if I look at what it would've taken a team to do that in the past, you're talking about back and forth for probably a week.

Yeah. So you're decreasing the cost by 99%, right? Um, so sorry, not the cost, the, the time to get it. The time to value is a lot faster now. Also that the cost. is a lot cheaper now. When you, you think about blog posts, 25,000 words for free, that's kind of an insane offer. Agencies are charging like 5, 10 grand for that, right? But, but now it's like, oh, just, okay, that's, that's the leading offer now. So a lot of this stuff's going to be deflated.

Well, the easiest way to look at it is what I just told you I'm able to do within an hour and 20 minutes. When I said a week, you're talking about 40 hours of team time. And it was just me and one person doing it. Well, technically if it would've taken a week, it would've just been one person As well. Yeah. But still 40 hours versus an hour and 20, that's a big difference.

Well, and let's say you're billing, I'm just making numbers up right now. Let's say your, your billable time is $250 an hour for your team across the team, right? So let's just call that 10 grand, right? And you can make up whatever numbers you want, but this stuff is good. And, and actually let me—

Let's say to get it done in an hour and 20, I spent $500.

Yeah.

Or actually 2 peop— uh, uh, yeah, let's call it $500 cuz I had to pay for the tool.

So 95%.

Yeah.

Savings.

Yeah. It's an amazing deal.

Let me give you, give you some examples here. You, you'll actually like this. I think this will, this will, this will, this will entertain you, but I don't think you'll do this. Um, so this is how AI helps create new work that was previously impossible. So we have this thing where we have people like Noah, for example, might say, okay, here are the top 3 things I got done yesterday, and then here's the number 1 highest leverage thing that I'm working on today. Now, if you have to police that, It would take you forever. You have to check, oh, like, is Noah actually putting in the highest leverage thing? You could say, oh, I'm working on a job description today, right? That could be the highest leverage thing. So now we, I use Lindy.ai, and then what Lindy does is it will look at all the, the standup responses. And if it's that, literally someone put job description, right? I'll say, hey Noah, um, I think the job description's nice, but can you be more specific here? Because we want you to work on the highest leverage things. Can you, And if it's not that, like if it's, if you're not hiring for, for some type of executive, this might not be the one, right? And then there's a leaderboard at the end of the month showing how everyone has scored and how consistent people have been with filling it out. But my point of saying this is that this is new work that was previously not feasible to do because it was previously impossible cuz it, it's too much work. Nobody has the time to do this and it was too costly. But now even if you look at Flexport, they're a logistics company. They have an AI call all of their truckers and say, hey, this gig is now available now. Or in a region say, this gig's available, do you want to take it? So I think AI's gonna be creating a lot more new work that was previously impossible while making a lot of the work that we were doing previously a lot cheaper too. Yep.

No dude, I, I'm with you. You can do more, you can do stuff that you weren't even able to do in the past, and you can do it all cheaper and faster.

Yep. Did you, did you see that, um, anti-Elon ad? No.

Okay.

So this ad over here, I'm gonna show you real quick. Those of you that can't see it on the screen, we'll, we'll probably pull up, pull it up on the, the, um, that's a tank versus— That's a tank versus Tesla. So we're gonna pull it up. This guy served in World War II. He's 98 years old.

So he's gonna blow up a Tesla?

He's gonna drive the tank.

So he's gonna drive it over the Tesla?

Yeah. He's in World War II. He's, he's like, you know, this is a Sherman tank that he used to drive. Right. And he's, he's seen enough. He's seen enough, um, fascism. Right. That's what he's saying here. Um, he's like, I don't— it's coming back. I don't want it to come back. You know, Elon is backing fascists, whatever. Right. And Neil and I, we're not saying we support either, either side. So he's like—

I'm assuming this is in Europe.

This is in Europe.

Yeah.

So the European license plate, it's this fascism license plate. And this is a Tesla that he's about to run over. Um, we've crushed fascism before and we will crush it again. So that's what he's saying. Right. Uh, so let's go, shall we?

So he's pulling it up. Oh yeah, it's crushing the car.

The tank is riding over to Tesla right now.

Now the tank must be extremely heavy.

The tank is heavy. Here's the thing though.

The Tesla does pretty well.

That's the thing. The Tesla actually holds up.

It does.

It doesn't get fully crushed. It doesn't get fully crushed by a super heavy tank, right? So this is not a smart thing for them to advertise. And then look at the very end. It'll say it made by whatever. So this is actually a positive ad for Tesla. But at the very end of this, check out what it says. You can read it out. It's coming up.

The ad's gonna backfire on them. I think some people will get enjoyment out of it, but a lot of people will be like, wow, Tesla's a really strong car.

Yeah. So led by donkeys. That's, that's the company.

So led by donkeys created it.

It says led by donkeys created it. Yeah. So that's not a smart name either. No, you made an ad.

I thought they were making fun of— no, Elon or someone.

But like whoever, like you guys are kind of saying you're, you guys made this ad and it kind of proves that you guys are donkeys for doing this. And so not all these things are, are smart at the end of the day. It's the anti-Elon stunt that turned into an accidental ad that shows that Tesla's a pretty good car. So, all right.

Dude, that's crazy.

Yeah. You pick one.

Oh, uh, does being transparent really help in marketing?

Okay. Where did that come from?

I was at an event called Seller Summit in Fort Lauderdale. E-commerce event.

Was that done by Steve? Steve Chu. Oh, that's so funny.

Yeah.

I did the very first one.

Oh, cool.

It was a long time ago. Yeah.

So Steve's here this weekend, by the way.

Oh, is he?

Yeah.

Great guy.

Yeah. So I met someone there. He stopped me before I went on stage to speak and he said, Neil, I'm really disappointed with your agency. And I'm like, who are you working with? What team? What department? Because we got like 1,000—

Oh, he's a client.

1,000+ people, or he was a past client, right? So I was just like, all right. And we typically do enterprise work. He was in this new program called Level Up. I don't know how much it was, call it $1,000 a month where we just help out startups just get things off the ground. And I was very transparent with him. I'm like, there's only so much we can do for $1,000. And he's just like, I get it. He got it. And I was like, if I gave you the people I put on an enterprise account, you know, a big global 1,000 company, I'm like, I would lose my shirt. Really, I would be just losing my shirt. So I was like, what was your problem? So he tells me some of his problems. I was like, cool. So I introduced him to someone on my team, the president of that division. I said, make sure you refund his last month's worth of money. And then on stage, right before I went on stage, I said, when are you free next week for a call? He's like, with who? I'm like, me. He's just like, what are we going to do? I'm like, you're going to give me your website URL. I'm going to get on the phone with you for 30 minutes to an hour. I'm going to break down everything I would change to grow your revenue. So then I was on stage and people were talking about marketing and stuff. And I was giving an example because they're mainly entrepreneurs. Did you sell channel? No, I was just speaking. But I was giving an example during my speech in marketing that not everything goes the way you want. And in business, cuz most of these people are entrepreneurs, you gotta adapt and you gotta take your licks and you gotta improve based on data. Cuz on one of my slides I was talking about reviews and this was an example of like a real life review. Now everyone in the, no one in the audience knew that he gave me this feedback other than Steve. Steve may have felt bad. I didn't care. I was, I was happy that he brought this to my attention. And I use them as examples on stage. I'm like, look, reviews are important. I'm like, you know, I was talking to this guy named Charles. Charles is the one who gave me the complaint. I'm getting on the phone with him for an hour next week. I'm like, how much did you pay Charles? I'm like, around $1,000? And he's like, yeah. And I was like, guys, do you think it's worth my time to go on the phone with Charles for an hour to break down everything he needs to do to grow his business? He wasn't happy with my company. And I'm like, we have some amazing people who are extremely satisfied. You're never going to have 100% satisfaction rate at scale. It's just impossible. And what he ended up telling me, he was happy at the end that I'm doing this. People are like, no, it's not worth my time. And I said, it is worth my time. The reason it's worth my time is one, Charles is now much more likely to evangelize my company. 2, I'm righting a wrong. 3, I'm learning what we did wrong in his opinion, so I can go back to my team and work on fixing it. to create a better experience in the future, which will cause less churn and grow my overall revenue faster in the long run.

Mm-hmm.

Assuming my team takes that feedback, which they're really good at, especially Sarah, who runs that division. But the point I'm getting at is I was just really transparent in front of an audience. And at the end of being transparent, I had a lot of people come up to me who wanted to hire my agency for marketing, even though I was transparent on stage. That Charles was not happy. He didn't get results and I was working on fixing it and just people didn't care.

People like stories too. It's, it's a, like us talking about this now might lead to more leads as well, right? Yeah. But the problem is there might be an expectation now where if they aren't happy, they get a 1-hour call with you.

I would do that. Anyone who's not happy ever hit me up. I'm always willing to get on the phone with them.

Would you do it with 100 people?

Yeah.

Would you do it with 1,000 people?

Yes. 10,000 people, if time permitted.

Yes. Yeah.

Um, I think, but I think it's a really important part.

I think you have to do this, especially when there's, if it keeps popping up, you have to get on all of them. 'Cause then you, you're the one that can drive the pace at the end of the day. You have to.

Mm-hmm. But I hate to say this. One, it wouldn't ever happen with 1,000 people. You just look at client count. Um, 2, a lot of people would've been fired if it happened with 1,000 people way before then. I'm not trying to be Rude, but it's just reality.

Yeah.

Because they're tarnishing our company's name. And 3, I look at every experience as a way to improve revenue and reduce churn, which grows revenue and profitability faster. If the team wouldn't take action on that, if I'm giving them solid data that's actionable, not fluff, not just someone saying, ah, I didn't like this creative, this is why I'm not happy. And if my team actually showed positive results and they didn't like creative, there's not much I can do on that other than to try to make him happier with the creative. But this guy was happy with the results, the actual revenue increase on his end. So I was like, all right, sounds good. I don't think he was in the program long. And at $1,000, there's only so much we can do from a consulting standpoint because it's just, it's hard. The costs are high.

Yeah.

But for me, the way I look at it as every interaction helps me make my product better. Which is how you build a big company.

Yeah. And you can't build a product or a service in a vacuum. At the end of the day, this is interesting cuz I, I talked to someone on my team, um, he likes to build products in a vacuum, right? Uh, sometimes, and I'm, he's not used to talking to customers as much. And the same thing with his last start. He's just not talk— used to talking to customers that much. Yeah. I'm like, we have to talk to customers a lot more and we have to, not only that, we have to be using our products and services ourselves. Um, and not only that, um, it's, it's not, it's talking to customers, but it's also talking to prospects too and understanding what their problems are because that's what business is at the end of the day. It's just solving problems.

So let me reframe, reframe the question. Would you rather talk to an upset customer or a happy customer?

I don't learn anything from happy customers. Bingo.

And I knew you were going to say that. And he's spot on. If you talk to happy customers, and I still think someone on your team should, I don't think it's a good use of your time. But someone on your team should, because if they can figure out what are the commonalities and they could push that messaging forward with your marketing, maybe you'll get more conversions on the front end. But the bigger thing is by talking to all the upset customers, you now know what to fix and improve. By talking to the happy customers, it doesn't tell you what you should change in the business.

Have you seen that show on Netflix called American Factory?

No.

Okay. So this is where a China, a Chinese company buys an American factory in the Midwest and there's a, There's a breaking point where the Chinese people are basically on one side and then there's the American people, right? And the Chinese HR was talking to the Chinese people, was like—

Wait, go back. I'm confused. When you say Chinese on one side, American on the other, are you talking about in the US factory or in the China factory?

I think they're in the US factory collaborating now. So this is a story that was told to me, right? So basically the Chinese HR talking to the Chinese people, just, you have to watch when you work with Americans, they really need compliments, right? Now, if you're Chinese and like I'm Taiwanese, right? So whatever, right? It's, you're, we're wired to take criticism. You're wired, like if you're Asian, you're, you're wired to take a lot of heat. You're just never quite good enough when you're growing up. Right. And so my point of saying this is I learned a lot more from criticism and my coach, my coach, haha, told me this. He's like, yeah, you've done something sick with your mind. You disregard compliments and you take criticism as compliments. Right. And so I think if you, I'm not saying you should be like me guys, but I'm saying if you can learn to seek out more criticism, you're gonna grow. 'Cause even, even, uh, Bill Gates himself, love him or hate him, has said that success is a lousy teacher. And it is. I don't learn much from, from successes.

Yeah, I, I don't either.

Yeah. And when I read like a biography, for example, I wanna know the tough things that they went through, the tough experiences, so then I can know maybe how I might wanna adjust. When that happens to me.

One of the best lessons I learned from Elon years and years ago, uh, not in person, but he just talked about this in an interview or somewhere online, was he reads a lot of biographies. And when he was asked by the interviewer why, he said, I like reading biographies of some of these successful people because I can learn from all their failures and mistakes and avoid making those same mistakes. And, uh, for himself, right? And because if you look at Technology, it's changed over time, but business strategy and concepts and principles, they've actually stayed very similar.

Human psychology doesn't really change.

Yes.

Yeah.

So learning over time from like the Rockefellers and people like that, it can help you figure out what mistakes to avoid going forward in the future.

Have you listened to the Founders Podcast?

No.

That's the one that's worth listening to because all he does is he, he, he reads biographies and he deconstructs it into like a 30 to 40 minute podcast. And, and he's done like 1,300 of these so far. And he'll deconstruct like Sony, uh, Microsoft, uh, Walmart, um, the freaking, um, Raising Cane's, which is like multi-billion dollar company. Yeah. You, you would like— Who does it? It's David Senra. This guy like lives in Miami and he's like, it's, it's great because you can get it really quickly. He did, he did a Michael Dell podcast, but the thing that's common with all of these people is they were maniacally focused and they did it for a very long time. Um, and that actually brings me to my next topic over here. I think we should kind of go back and forth here. These are the first principles of building a generational business or the building blocks. People like to say first principles. That gets a little confusing to me. I just like to say the building blocks, right? So let me start off first and we can go back and forth here. So if we're talking about building a multi-billion dollar company like a Walmart or something like that for the long term, or like Hermès or something, the, the very first thing that I think needs to happen is You have to build an exceptional team. And that's, that gets said so much, but when you look at the teams like Renaissance Technologies, for example, their team, everybody was, everyone's like expert mathematician, right? This was like a, this was like an investment firm. Um, he passed away, right? I, I, I'm not sure if he passed away or not. Yeah.

What's his name?

Oh, I think you're right. I think you're right. He did pass away. But point is, that's one of the first principles of building a generational business.

Jim Simmons. Yeah, he passed away. It was sad.

All right, you go.

What's, what's another one?

All right.

Um, I would say the next one is if you want generational business, you got to go after a big TAM. There's only so much money to be made from things like best man speeches. Reason it comes top of mind, cuz someone tried selling me a best man speech business a long time ago, and now it would exist today with AI. But, um, you, you got to pick a big TAM. You use Walmart as an example. Walmart sells food, they sell clothing, they sell stuff that you need. AI may disrupt the food industry, but AI is not gonna disrupt the fact that you as a human still need food in your body and you need to get it from somewhere. Um, so you need to go after a big TAM. If you don't go after a big TAM, I think you're just not gonna do well.

And actually the third one related to that, you can either sell something cheap to a lot of people or you can sell something really expensive to fewer people. That's when we talk about TAM, we are talking about more of it from a revenue standpoint.

Yeah. Uh, the 4th one would be you're, you have to have a culture of willing to kill your own baby, not real baby, but your business. If you're not willing to kill the business, um, by innovating, you're eventually going to get disrupted by someone else and they're going to crush you. Just like Facebook crushed MySpace and MySpace should have been where Facebook is today, but that's not the case. You need to really kill, be willing to kill off your business. If you kill off your business, by doing something that's more innovative, you'll keep surviving in the long haul.

Now, this is the next, the next one is when I look at all these biographies or all these founders that I've studied, they are all extremely frugal when it comes to their business. They watch their costs like a hawk. Neil's a great example of this. He's pulling up his Amex statements all the time. He's looking at every, every little thing. You have to do that in your business cuz nobody's going to care as much because at the end of the day, The cost structure is, is, it is the thing.

Yeah. The other thing, if you want to build a generational business, you got to think slow and steady. Too many entrepreneurs want everything right now. The Bill Gates quote, right? Everyone underestimates, or people underestimate what they can do in a year. I mean, people overestimate what they can do in a year, but they underestimate what they can do in 5 or 10 years. But you need to go slow and steady. A great example of this is, We've been doing acquisitions at NP Digital. I want to make sure the business is solid in a bad economy. I'm not going to go buy 5 companies this year, even though financially I could, because then I may struggle next year when things go bad and I don't have enough dry powder. So you got to be patient and you got to make sure that you're doing the right things for long-term growth. You got to be aggressive, but not Foolishly overaggressive where you're not prepared for, uh, downturns.

By the way, you, you actually shared this story. Remember you, you talked to this, uh, billionaire heiress, right? But when we talk about building, we're talking about something generational. We're talking like 30+ years.

Yeah.

That's what we're really talking about. The last thing I'll say from my side is you have, and I learned this the hard way, you, you learned this the hard way too, but you have to be maniacally focused. When you look at Raising Cane's, all they do is chicken fingers. Right. When you look at, when you look at Hermès, it's, it's, it's luxury goods, right? Or like LVMH, luxury goods. That's all they do. You look at Costco, what is it at the end of the day? It's buying, buying in bulk at discounts, right? So they're all known for one thing. It's really hard to do one thing really well for a very long time. That's why most people don't do it.

Yeah. They, they don't have the, they're, they're not willing to just keep going and they're not, I would say a lot of people don't do it long enough cuz they're also not passionate. But if I had to go with the last one, when it comes to building a generational business, is you got to figure out how to retain customers. Too many businesses focus on continually getting new customers. Big businesses are built from the same customers spending over and over again. They're not built by focusing purely on retaining or going after new customers. It is much more expensive I had this stat in one of my presentations. It was like 7 times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to get an existing customer to keep spending more. So focus on getting your existing customers to keep spending money. It not only grows your revenue faster, but it helps you generate way more profit.

Yep. One more thing here. We were kind of texting a day or two ago, and then there's just a lot of stuff that's happening in the business world, right? For just in the business world, but also for us, right? And I was just thinking about it and I'm like, you know, sure, it's a pain in the butt right now to have to go through all this stuff in a shaky economy, but I, I'm grateful for the pain because it is the journey that's fun at the end of the day. I don't want to be at the end of it, right? Like, it's like we're in the middle of it right now. So I, I'm grateful for it. And I think, um, if you're in the middle of it and you're dealing with it and you're not running away, I, I think you're on the right track.

Totally agree.

Yeah. Um, can I, let me just talk before we started recording here. I got the conference ratings back from the, the, the Global Marketing Summit that I helped with. And, um, it's really fascinating to me. And so, um, the good thing is we scored the highest of all business network events, um, that have more than 150 people. So that's nice, right? But when I was looking at the, the scores, first of all, when you're, I would say the audience is mostly affluent, right? We're talking average revenue, $41 million, something like that, right? The thing is, you can never please everyone. And so we did the event at the St. Regis Bell Harbor and people were complaining. It was right on the beach.

People were complaining about free ice cream, free ice cream, the gelato.

Amazing. You have the gelato, Noah? Oh my God.

You do not.

Oh my God.

Why not?

That's a screw up.

See what?

Oh my God.

Oh, you would've got it if it was free, right?

You knew.

I mean, I got it 3 times.

So we picked the hotel that had free gelato. It was amazing place. The amazing, beautiful spot, right? Um, that wasn't good enough. The food wasn't good enough. Right. Um, you know, uh, so-and-so, um, one person really loved this speaker. Okay, let's just talk about me. One person really loved my talk and said, Eric's speech, blah, blah, blah. You know, great. Right. And then one person was like, oh, Eric sold too much. Right. And then one person's like, there's nothing new from this. My point of saying all this is that—

So someone said there's nothing new from this?

Yeah.

I bet you they didn't use all the AI tools that—

For sure they didn't.

And frameworks that you were giving them.

For sure they didn't. And, and so, Um, but I, I'll give a couple key learnings from this, um, doing this event. So one, when you do an event, it's a labor of love. Um, and 2, I would say that I've used a couple teams in the past. I would say that I, I was grateful for the team that helped me this time, but there's also consistency things. So like Noah came and helped, right? Noah knows how I work, how I think about this. Also working with Deanna from, uh, War Room in the past.

Oh, she helped with that?

She didn't. No. But Had she helped, I'm just saying that a lot of the things, a lot of the issues that we had wouldn't have been issues. And so, for example, we had some AV issues, right? We had some issues with, for example, I, I never walked through and looked at the screen. Like, I think we should have had a bigger screen showing the speaker and showing that, like, you know what I mean? These are a lot of things that you expect to just be done. So this, this comes back to, if you're gonna do anything, not even just the event, you wanna have consistency. And when you don't have consistency, it makes it hard to get anything done. Um, but also you can't please everybody. And also, if you're gonna do an event, forget about the ratings. Do what works for you at the end of the day. Because had I done this for ratings, I think I would've tried to please everybody. Um, I, but I'm deeper in my career now and I've done a couple of these where I'm just like, yeah, I'm gonna do it my way. Um, and do what's right. And I will say one more thing too. If you're gonna help volunteer where you don't get paid for something like this, it actually compounds because now I'm gonna be helping with the Global Business Summit. So I'm grateful for this event. And now it's like the Global Business Summit is going to be 1,500 people, right? Um, so those are a couple of learnings that, that I had. Cool. Um, here, this one will be fun. This will be fun. Why our YouTube channels are finally starting to grow... again.

Well, one of the main reasons is, is YouTube changed the way they count views on Shorts. So they're all inflated. Huh? You didn't know that?

How are they counting the views on Shorts now? What's going on?

Your views are double on Shorts.

Yeah, I noticed that our view, we're getting more views on our Shorts for both of our—

Yeah, that has nothing to do with our content. Has everything to do with the way YouTube is tracking data.

How are they counting it now?

They're counting it to be more generous and inflated.

Ah, well, good. Well, I'm more so talking about the long form though.

My long form is going up in traffic and views because I'm creating long form. I wasn't ever publishing long form for like over a year.

Yep. Same for me too. I would say the thing that's helping for both of us right now is you and I are both spending more time on the outline. So I copied what you did. Um, Maya from my team will come up with 6 ideas that she's done research on, and I'll highlight the ones that I like. And she's, she'll show the thumbnails, she'll show like wide TAM or low TAM. I'll pick 2 that I like. And then what I'll do from there is each one, I'll make like a 10 to 15 minute Loom saying what I want to talk about. Then she'll make that into an outline.

Yeah.

And then we record at the same spot in Century City, uh, Visible Audible Studios, Visible Audible Studios or something. Great spot. Um, record there. It takes me an hour to get the long form, 2 long forms done. I'm assuming you're probably the same.

How long is your long form?

Usually I'll take 20 to 30 minutes to record each one, but then it gets cut to like 8 to 10 minutes.

So if mine gets cut to 8 to 10 minutes, it takes me for 8 minutes, probably 12 minutes max.

Yeah.

If not like 10.

That's what they said about you. Usually you're pretty good. Like we both take multiple takes, but usually you're pretty good at getting it done.

No, I just do one take. There's some parts where I'll reread, but if it's an 8-minute video, I'm usually recording 10 minutes worth of content, 12 max.

What I'll say about my videos, I don't know about yours, but when I do record in studio now, I'm just looking at it because a couple months ago, I was only averaging like 1,000 long-form views per video, which is not much, right? Now the average is going up to like, you know, 5,000. And then some of these I'll hit like, you know, I have one here that I hit 97K views about a month ago. Um, so it's, it's going up because point is we're putting more effort into it.

Do you use a teleprompter?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, but I, so I never used a teleprompter before.

Yeah, no, I'm trying to figure out how to get yours lower. Like if it's an 8-minute video, how to get it where it only takes you 12 minutes to film it.

I think it's because I start to, as I start to record, I start to think about other ideas. I'm like, oh, let's go back, let's go back. And so I start to add more and More to it. Um, but yeah, that's basically it. Anything else you want to add? Because you've been doing this experiment for, call it 4 months now, 3, 4 months.

We've been doing it for 3, 4 months. Um, the long-form videos are starting to do decent on some of the other platforms as well. We like it cuz it just makes us— the quality is high. I don't like the topics my team's coming up with, so I had to record, uh, audio notes and screen share or video notes for 8 more videos. Today. Um, so I'll do that either today or tomorrow, whenever I get time. But when I look at that, yeah, quality is important, but, um, this stuff just doesn't drive the revenue as like me going and speaking at a conference with 200 people in the audience that are my ideal customer. Or like, dude, I was just texting Amazon today.

Dude, what is this? You have all this millionaire and billionaire stuff.

That's what I'm saying. But that's going to change. That was only one script.

Yeah.

Or one batch. And I told him, dude, never again.

Yeah.

And I remember in that studio session, you know, they would have me record Shorts as well. And I was so pissed off that I refused to record the Shorts on millionaire topics.

You just went home.

I went home. And then the next round, I think only 2 videos were about money-related stuff, but 6 were not. This next round, none of them are. They're all marketing-related. But going back to what I was getting at, dude, I just generated a higher ROI speaking in a room with like 200 potential customers. Or I was emailing or texting, it was actually maybe a little bit of both, someone who works at Amazon in partnerships and someone who works at Google. And I don't know which one it was, it was either Amazon or Google. And we were talking about doing an event together. I'm like, dude, it's just so much easier to do an event at one of their offices or venues And invite a ton of people. They'll invite a ton of people. I'll speak, we'll bring in a few other speakers and just try to close revenue.

You know what? I, I think the benefit, well, my, my hypothesis, I, because we have gotten a couple customers from LinkedIn that just view like a short or like a mid-form video cuz we'll all repost it. Um, I think that might work with thought leader ads and things like that. The other thing I'll say before we get outta here, um, you're publishing the long forms also to Instagram Reels too, aren't you? Yeah.

I don't care.

How, how's that going?

They tell me I shouldn't be doing it, but I don't care because I have an audience there and some of them do well.

Yeah. Anyway, that's it for today, guys. We'll see you tomorrow.