AI Marketing Trends from Private Conversations

So let's talk about personalizing your LinkedIn ads at scale. So I was sharing an image with Eric a few minutes ago. There's a company called User Gems, I believe it is.

Mm-hmm.

And they'll say like, hey, NP Digital, but they won't write NP Digital. They'll actually slap in our logo.

Mm-hmm.

And the example I sent Eric of these screenshots They have variations for all like, hey, AVI SPL, hey Frontier, hey CGS. I don't know all these company names.

Mm-hmm.

But in essence, what they're doing is they're running targeted LinkedIn ads to each and every single company with an image just for them, which obviously you can do really quickly because of AI. And when I was showing Eric, because he has Carrot, which is not karrot.com. What's the URL?

karrot.ai, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai.

Yeah, so when you check out Karrot, and we were talking about this, because with LinkedIn ads, they're super expensive, but we all know personalization is important and targeting specific corporations that are your ideal fit is important, especially if you're going to do LinkedIn ads because of the cost. But why not just do creatives that are super personalized at scale? I did not actually check out their ad library, But someone on my team's like, they have thousands. And I don't know if they actually have thousands or they're using that as an expression. But yeah, you can, you know, personalization's nothing that's really new, but you can just do this with ease now while before you couldn't. And I was asking them, I'm like, have we done this for any clients? What were the results? And they were just like, yes, it produces for when we tested it out and we've done it for a handful of customers, they were saying that it produces anywhere from a 7 To a less than 20% better ROI for the same spend, which isn't bad. Every little extra dollar really does add up.

So what are you guys using to personalize LinkedIn ads at scale?

We use your solution.

Oh, you do?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

Wait, how do you use it?

We use it.

Huh? GlassSala. What?

Yeah.

That's not possible.

It is possible.

But you're not paying for it.

That's good. Yeah, we're not paying for it. Okay, that's good.

That's good. Okay, good. It's good to know that. So it's good to know that you're using Carrot because here's the thing, here's the interesting thing here. Personalized, especially in AI world, people want personalization. They want to feel like they're being spoken to like a human, right? I actually think, you know, so User Gems has one. There's another competitor in the space, they're coming out with one. And these, so User Gems, I was just checking their LinkedIn. I think they're Series B. Let me just look that up. Series A, $20 million, okay? And then there's another player in the space, maybe raised $50, $60 million and then—

Wait, User Gems raised how much? $20 million?

$20 million, yeah.

Yeah.

And then there's, then there's the, the player in the UK who copied us pretty quickly on this feature. This is, this is the feature that we came out with in November. So these people ship relatively quickly, right? That, that's a whole thing we can talk about in a second. Like in SaaS, you're better off just looking at what seems to work and just copying very quickly. Like no feature is too safe.

But these ads I think would work really well for you guys.

They do. So here's what we've seen from a numbers standpoint. We have one customer who's willing to pay about $1,500 per lead, right? Because they're enterprise SaaS. They're getting leads using Carrot for $500 a pop for these LinkedIn personalized ads. And then we have another customer, they were struggling to get this large beverage company that everyone knows, and they actually ended up shaking it loose from their pipeline and getting that deal done, right? So they know it's driving customers. What I'll say to any of these people who are listening to this, this personalized LinkedIn ads thing is nice, it's not enough. It's not enough as a feature, right?

Yeah.

So that's why, you know, we copied other people, which is like the personalized landing pages, right? And then we're adding in, website deanonymization, which there's a lot of products that have that. But then we're also adding in, like for example, if I engage with one of your posts and I'm part of your ICP, we'll reveal that it's your ICP engager is happening and we'll say, hey, do you want us to customize an outreach? So there's a lot more that we need to build within this, but the very start of this personalized LinkedIn ads at scale, yes, it works.

It definitely does work. And when you're saying you're deanonymizing visitors, you're talking about providing their email address because you know who's visiting what site, correct?

Yeah. More than that though, it's saying, hey, we found this person over here. Here's what we think you should be messaging this person. And then the more integrations we have, we can say, okay, you emailed this person like 12 months ago. Here's the conversations you've had in Gong or like email. Here's the recommended outreach we think you should do to revive this lead, right? So we think B2B, it's just like, how do you make it easier? Because, and this could be the next topic, I just came back from a B2B SaaS founder retreat where there's a bunch of 8, 9-figure founders there.

You didn't go to Vegas?

No. I wanna go to Vegas. Oh no, no, Vegas is— no, no, no, don't reveal Vegas, but Vegas is supposed to be this weekend.

It's supposed to be? So that means no go on Vegas.

Well, that's 'cause our mutual friend was gonna come, but we might do it the next weekend because the hotel rooms are $3,000 a night for this weekend.

Forget that.

I went to perplexity. I was like, why are the hotel rooms $3,000 a night? And it's like, oh, 'cause it's like a U2 farewell concert or something like that.

Oh, at the Sphere or something?

Or no, AC/DC. AC/DC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's like the I remember Beavis and Butt-Head. I think Butt-Head used to wear the AC/DC. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, you want to know what I learned from this little retreat?

So before I want to know what you learned, I want to know the type of people that were there, roughly how many. And when I'm saying type of people, I'm talking about like their roles, but also company size. And the reason I want that is I can then You know, think about the learnings respectively for a company size and if it could be applicable.

Yeah, totally. So this event, I was there from Sunday to like middle of the day Tuesday, and we did it in Temecula. So it was easy drive for me. Some people had to fly from like Toronto, some people from Miami and all that, and a 2-hour drive for me. But so the group, one, I'll just give you kind of the breakdown of some of these people. So there's, they're all founders, okay? They're all founder CEOs. And I would say that some of them have built their SaaS companies to 9 figures and then sold it. Some have built to like mid-8 figures or so, call it $40, $50 million or so. Some have sold their companies for like $50, $60 million or something like that. So everyone is, they're all part of YPO. So there's a certain level. And then one guy in the group, he actually helped build Calendly. And so, you know, Calendly became like a big thing as well.

Yeah.

So that is the setup of the group. It's a group of guys and then we just ended up chilling in like a home in Temecula.

So all 8 figures, some 9 figures. Uh-huh. A lot 9 figures or more so like maybe 4?

Let's just say like 2 out of 8.

Got it. So most of 'em are 8 figures, call it like $10, $20 million-ish in revenue.

$10, $20, some like $40, $50.

Okay.

Yeah. So that's the groove. Like what? And then let me just give you something to take away.

Wait, and they were all founders or they were hired guns?

Everyone, it seems like everyone's a founder. Maybe one might be a hired gun, but that's a different story because he works with his spouse. So yeah. And then the spouse like founded like a really big company in the past and sold for like, uh, I think a healthy 9-figure amount.

Good for them.

Yeah. So here's what I learned. The big thing is people in B2B SaaS, they have no idea what to do with go-to-market right now. Zero clue. And a lot of people, it's like a sunk cost fallacy. They're like, oh, but I invested so much in SEO. I'm like, so what? Doesn't mean you deserve traffic right now. All right. So everyone seems to be confused about go-to-market. But what it were, I kind of left them all. It's like, guys, like it is the search everywhere optimization thing. I said, guys, you have to be creating content like in some way, shape, or form. I don't care if you hire an in-house influencer and pay them like $200 plus or something like that, maybe give them some upside or you have to figure it out on your own. Well, I don't like being on camera. Well, I'm like, so stop being selfish. Like your job is to figure out how you can help other people with the knowledge that you have. And we started talking about the Clue.ly people, right? And then one of the guys in the group, he has like— He has like a, basically it's like it'll screen for weapons in a school, right? Imagine that. Like, like there's a lot of school shootings that happen.

His, his SaaS will screen for weapons?

Yes.

How? Like through a metal detector or something like that?

Something like that. Yeah. I don't know enough details, but I basically started telling people, I was like, guys, like what, what is like the most outlandish stuff you guys can come up with? And that guy was like, oh, I'm just gonna walk into a store with a cowboy hat with a gun and see what happens. I'm like, that's a little outlandish. Like you might get in trouble for that.

Depends on the state, but yes.

Texas. It'll work. It'll work in Texas.

Yeah.

You can carry in Texas, right? Yeah.

Um, but that's That's what his current software does.

Yeah. Yeah.

That's a cool concept.

Yeah. And so everyone has like interesting stuff, right? Where they have a lot of data. Some might be in like KYC, which is know your customer. Some might be in like real estate where they can offer you a deal where like, for example, if I register, okay, let's say I registered for an apartment. Let's say you're the landlord, right? Let's say you reject me, but I had to go, you pulled my credit, you did all these things, right? I did a lot of work. You rejected me 'cause I'm too risky. But what if Noah over here and like 3 other people all of a sudden can appear and say, hey, you've already done the work, we're going to approve you, right? So that's a really cool offer. I'm like, how do you not just float that offer everywhere? And so I think it's just pushing these people a little more, but everyone seems confused on go-to-market right now because the game has changed so rapidly from a, from a marketing standpoint. So that's number one. Do you have any follow-ups on that before I go into some others?

No, keep going.

Okay. I think the second part is it's Everyone wants community, right? Like we've talked about this quite a bit, like human to human. And it's apparent that a lot of people don't. I think I've gotten lucky with, you know, being in part of these different groups, right? Where I'm able to meet with multiple people once, like 2 times a year.

Wait, let's back up. Are you talking about they want community for their customers want community or they themselves want?

For engineers.

So they themselves as founders and operators want community.

Yeah, it's lonely. Yeah, 'cause they say they don't really have, you know, hangouts like this, right? Whereas I have like 2 other groups at the minimum.

But they're in YPO now.

They are, but they don't have— so in YPO, we actually talked about this a little bit. In YPO, their forums, their core group back home, they don't really talk about SaaS and business all the time. It's more like personal stuff, right? So you would actually like a group like this because all we talked about was business the whole time. So that's what I would say.

But their YPO group is mainly personal.

Correct. Yeah. And the same thing with mine. My YPO group is more personal and my YPO group likes to, they like to go out and party, right? And so like, you know, every group is different.

Yeah, you mentioned that when you guys travel, you want to go to sleep and they want to drink.

Drink or yeah, you know, it's, they like going out. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's, everyone's looking for community. It's about founders. It's a very lonely game. And I think the other piece is everyone is, I'll tell you one other thing I learned. I don't want to reveal this person, but it just reinforces the fact that you don't want to have outside stakeholders as much as possible. Like some of these people have raised multiple times and sold multiple times. But they would prefer not to, 'cause one company was forced to sell by not necessarily their investors. Well, you can say investors, but a bank forced them to sell because the bank thought the business was too risky, even though the business was starting to take off. The bank forced them to sell. Isn't that crazy?

That means they had debt and they were struggling to pay the debt, or else the bank would've never forced them to sell.

It was a combination of debt, but also it was their contract sizes were not like pure-play SaaS. You had some that were like government contracts that were like maybe like one-offs, And then maybe like only a portion of it was like actual recurring revenue SaaS.

Yeah, but they breached their covenants. For the bank to put pressure and be able to force a transaction, that means they had debt from the bank and something went wrong and they weren't able to make their payments.

But we talked about this too with, you know, we were talking about this a little bit. It's like ideally, ideally you don't have these covenants. And ideally, what did Charlie Munger say? Men go broke through 3 things. Ladies, liquor, and leverage. And the first 2 are for fun. So it's really leverage.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it sucks because like he clearly had something going, right? The other thing I learned too is there's one guy in the group. He has leveraged everything, by the way. So we're talking about leverage, right? But I don't—

again, I don't know. What do you mean leverage everything? Like give an example.

Home, home, everything. Like, you know, you leverage out the wazoo for like your— you basically, you've pushed, put all your chips in the middle for your business. Like—

So he's maxed out his mortgage, his car loans, everything. Everything. But no investors, that means.

He has investors too. And he's, I think he's like pulled like some crazy terms too. Like I think the interest rates are astronomically high. Yeah, we're talking like 30%. I don't have the exact numbers here, but it's insane.

Wow.

But it's like, this is like, oh man, you have really put all your chips in the middle and like, I applaud you. I'm scared for you, but I applaud you for having the guts to do it. I couldn't do it. I can't do it either. I just, I think that would hang over my head.

Is that person married with children? Yeah. Oh, I definitely could have done it. If I was single, not married, no kids, it's a different story.

But you know, his whole thing is like, I look, no matter what, it's going to be a great story. I'm like, that is true. It's going to be a great story, whether it's good or bad, it's going to be a great story.

Imagine your kids not having a roof over their head. That is not a good story.

It's not a good story, but hey, but it's still a story.

Yes.

Yeah. So those are just a couple of high-level things I'll say.

And by the way, I wish that person the best of luck and I'm knocking on wood for their luck.

I don't want— I think they've got something good and I hope they can figure it out. One final thing I'll say here and then we can move on. So there's one person in the group, you know how you and I talk about like the, we've had to learn our lesson with focus, right? How long did it take you to learn your lesson of focus?

More than 10 years.

Okay, same for me, right? More than 10 years. Now there's one guy in the group and let's just say he has a couple businesses, right? More than a couple of businesses. And he was basically like, what am I supposed to do with all this? Like, you know, he wants like a very big outcome at the end of the day, right? But, you know, we, I kind of shared my experiences and everyone in the group was basically like, you're going to have to kill some of these things, right? But he's like, well, there's an opportunity here. There's an opportunity. There's opportunity here, right? And even though the lesson was focus, I don't think he necessarily is going to take that advice or that those experience shares. And what my conclusion afterwards was like, dude, maybe that's okay. Maybe he enjoys having all these different things and maybe he says he wants the multi-billion dollar outcome or whatever, but maybe he doesn't really want it inside. I think he enjoys what he's doing already. So it just let him do it, right? There's no like right or wrong, but it's, I don't genuinely believe he wants a huge outcome and he already is doing really well. And so I'm like, maybe just keep doing what you're doing. Like forget whatever we shared, just do what's comfortable to you. I just learned that I get less anxiety from focusing, so.

Yeah, focusing makes things easier. I agree with you on that. But some people perform well with a non-focused business. It kind of can be focused. A great example of this is we have a mutual friend named Syed who lives in Florida. Most of his businesses around the WordPress ecosystem.

Yep.

But he has a lot of businesses. He invests in quite a few, doesn't always own majority from my understanding. Sometimes he does, or sometimes he owns 100%. That's what I know.

Yeah.

And he also owns businesses outside of tech. And I look at him as an entrepreneur. I'm not saying that'll limit his earning potential because I don't believe, you I've seen people not have focus like private equity funds and people become billionaires from that. And they just continually buy a lot of different businesses in different verticals.

We both would agree that they're, that is their business.

That is their business. But I look at like Syed, for example, I think he thrives in that environment and enjoys it. I think you get bored with just one business.

I think so. I look at Syed as more of an investor. And the reason I say that is because the forum that he's in, in YPO, is like a fully invest decked out investor forum. Right. And I think you're going to like, I agree with you. This is minority Yeah.

I mean, I'm not saying he's a minority, although technically he is under US classification.

Yeah.

But I meant more so when he's investing, he's taking a minority chunk.

Yeah. He's very much a student of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. And so, and when he, even just when he talks in general, he thinks like an investor. And if he has to roll up his sleeves every now and then, like he'll do it. But for the most part, he stays pretty hands-off. So I look at private equity, I look at Syed more as investors. I look at this guy as he really likes getting involved in all these different things. And I'm like, Okay. Yeah. You know, I would say focus, but just do what works for you.

Yep.

So yeah.

On a random note, what do you think's gonna happen to WordPress with all these changes with AI and like Lovable and all these solutions that can just—

Are you talking about this 'cause of the thread? I saw a thread the other day on Twitter.

I, I, I did not see a thread, but I've been messing around with Lovable a lot recently.

Yeah.

Um, and—

You like Lovable?

I was using it to help create a better version of one of the reports, uh, a design report that one of my product team ended up sending me for Ubersuggest.

Yeah.

And I wanted to make, come up with my own variation. So I'm like, let me just use Lovable and see what I can do with it.

You got to use v0 for that by Vercel. Did you do that?

No, I did not. I'll do that next.

v0 is better for front ends.

And I did not get the best results with Lovable. So I was like, all right. But generally speaking, I'm just like, you know, WordPress as a business, I was starting to think about it. I still think there's a big ecosystem for them, just like I think there's a big ecosystem for Shopify still and their stock price, at least with Shopify, shows it. But I think their model is going to have to change on how they adapt. Shopify is easier because they'll just create partnerships with like the ChatGPTs if they already have it, make it easier to buy within ChatGPT, which is great for them. But WordPress, I would say, is much more slower moving organization, in my opinion. I don't have any data on who's moving faster, but like when I actually look at releases and progress, I've seen Shopify make way more progress over the years than I've seen WordPress make. And it's not to knock WordPress, WordPress, they've built a bigger company than I have built. So I'm not trying to be negative here, but I don't know how they're actually going to adapt to this new world.

So I was reading this the other day, but I think it was Jason Lemkin that made this point. But basically, if you look at Lovable, you look at Replit, you're basically paying $20, $200 a month or whatever versus what used to be free, which is WordPress, right? So it is going to— I think it's going to take some time. I do think WordPress will eventually quote unquote become dethroned or won't be the king in the space anymore because they power 40% of the web right now still, right? Websites. I think that's going to continue to go down because people are now willing to pay for what used to be free. And that's, that's again, you look at Lovable Replit, like that is happening now, right? So I think the model will eventually become disrupted. And I think you and I—

Well, let's go back. I don't think they're willing to pay for what used to be free because what used to be free to get what they want a lot of times involved paying someone to help Whether it's a full-time employee or a developer or a designer. I know you can do a lot with WordPress for free, but a lot of the people using Lovable, from my understanding, are doing stuff that would have required them to pay an engineer or a designer.

Yeah, I'm looking for that. Okay, so, okay, here we go. Here we go. This is what I pulled it up. So Jason Lemkin, WordPress powers 40% of the web. Lovable and Replit are targeting that market and more. But they get to charge you $25 a month and for every token you use. WordPress in its most basic form is free outside of hosting. And your argument is it's not free because you do have to find developers and people to figure out what you said.

Yeah, and even with the plugins and all that kind of stuff, if any business running on WordPress, majority of them that I talk to, when I say majority, I'm talking about like 99 out of 100 pay people to manage their WordPress, to design, create plugins, tweak code, all that stuff. Yep.

Now to continue here, much as, much as ChatGPT gets to charge for what Google provides for quote unquote free, Lovable and Replit get to charge for what WordPress provides in many cases for free or very cheap. That adds up to a lot of money very quickly. AI is getting us to pay for a lot of what we used to get for free, for more value, no doubt, but a lot more than what we used to. So like, I think your argument is fair. Like I didn't actually think about that. Like you do have to pay developers and people, like you do have to pay for plugins, hosting and all that stuff. It starts to add up. And there's mental bandwidth to figure that stuff out too.

Dude, we spend for all our WordPress instances throughout our organization, and I don't know how many sites we have, But if I just look at our main 3 websites, I would say we easily spend like $300,000+ maintaining them per year, easily.

I still think though, even if most people start to move over to Lovable and Replit and Replit can ship and deploy these websites, 40% of the web plus pricing, that's a large amount of revenue that's going to come out.

Yes.

And I do think though, even if you deploy something, Lovable, Replit, But you're still going to need something to manage. So whether what used to be developers or someone that's actively on the site, I think that's probably going to be some AI agent doing it. But I also think that's going to happen for WordPress too.

Yeah.

I think costs will come down for both sides, actually.

Yeah, I think costs will come down for both sides.

Yeah. So like, I think, I think, I think our conclusion here is WordPress is probably going to lose market share. And it's fine. You know, things change over time.

Unless they adapt. I just haven't seen WordPress really adapt.

No, there's, I mean, I think, I'm sorry, I think their founder is distracted.

So I don't know much about what's happening with the founder, but when I look at the overall progress that WordPress has made, I haven't seen really much improvement from Tumblr, that acquisition. Maybe they acquired it for other reasons. They've acquired a few other companies in the last year or 2 years that I read about. I forgot exactly when, but I was looking at some of these acquisitions. I was like, why'd they even buy them? And it was like the same thing. He's like, we both love HubSpot, but remember the rumor that was going around that Google was going to buy HubSpot?

Mm-hmm.

And I was like, it doesn't make sense for Google to own HubSpot. And I don't think that rumor was valid. And I don't have any proof or data on this. I know Dharmesh, but not well. But, and I don't think that Google's really circling it. It doesn't fit into what they're trying to do. If you look at Google and Facebook, they're trying to paint this story of you don't need agencies and marketers, just use our software and we'll do it all for you. And then when people don't get the results they're looking for, they turn to agencies.

Yeah, I'm looking at, by the way, I'm looking at Grok right now. I'm like, what's going on with Matt Mullenweg, which is the founder, or I think he's still CEO of WordPress, is he?

I'm pretty sure he's the CEO.

Yeah, so the loss, so they got in a lawsuit with WP Engine, which is like a hosting—

Oh yeah, yeah, that's right.

So WP Engine, by April 2025, a US district court granted WP Engine preliminary injunction forcing Automatic to restore access and lift discriminatory measures. 'Cause I think WP Engine was going out to market there. I think they're trying to sell, and then I think WordPress WordPress automatic, they said they, Matt Mullenweg said they wanted a piece of it. And, you know, they got in this lawsuit. And then I just, I think, you know, this stuff is a distraction. And in January 2025, Matt Mullenweg disbanded the WordPress Sustainability Team. He deactivated WordPress.org accounts of several contributors, including Joost de Valk. Yeah. And just calls for him to step down have grown, but he's been there, right? So I think a lot of this is distractions versus when you look at Dharmesh, for example, He's always posting to LinkedIn, he's posting to Twitter, sharing new experiments. He's like, he bought agent.com, he bought this domain over here, he sold this domain. He's always trying new things. And I think that's always a good signal of whether a company is kind of on top of it or not versus like for him, it's more, he's either not posting or you see it like it's like lawsuit-related stuff.

Yes. And Dharmesh, a lot of the content that he's posting is even new features and news related to OpenAI and ChatGPT and stuff that they're doing. But what's interesting there is, I think he'll make a killing from—

OpenAI shares?

OpenAI shares. I don't know what his net worth is and I'm not here to try to predict, but I'm guessing he may make more from that than he did from all of HubSpot.

Dude, imagine getting $15, $20 million or whatever just all in OpenAI stock. And this was like a year or two ago because he was selling chat.com.

I think he sold it to ChatGPT.

So you figure $15, $20 million for that, right? Let's call it $15.

I'm assuming he got a good deal for him and it's probably worth hundreds of millions easily based on their latest valuation. It'll probably go to a trillion-plus dollar company. The interesting thing with HubSpot, he's done an amazing job building a great company, him and Brian Halligan. I don't know the lady who's the CEO right now, but when you look at—

She's Indian.

She's Indian, right? When you look at HubSpot, they built an amazing company that's roughly worth $30 billion. I'm looking at their stock symbol right now live. It's like $29.34 billion, which is amazing and very hard to do.

Do you still own any?

Do I what?

Do you still own any HubSpot?

No comment. So, and then what you end up seeing with this company is, is it was not only hard to build this big of an organization, but what people don't always realize is, is Brian and Dharmesh, to build this kind of organization, had to pump in a lot of cash. So they had to take in tons of investor money over the years. And when I say tons of investor money, I'm not talking about the amounts that the Ubers or the ChatGPTs raised, because the time when they created their startup, which is similar times to when I was getting started and raising capital, people didn't raise as much money. It's like if you raise $100 million, you typically would go public. Not in one round, in total, right? And I don't know exactly how much HubSpot raised, but I don't think it was that much. I don't think it could be more than a few hundred million dollars before they went public, but it took a lot of capital to build the company that they did. And it's actually worked out quite well.

Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Karat. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, speaking of trillion, because you just said the word trillion, if you think about Elon versus Zuck, Elon is spending $1 billion on compute versus Zuck is spending $1 billion on humans because Zuck is poaching all these people from like OpenAI or whatever, right? The top, these top AI researchers. Whereas Elon, did you see the new Colossus? He's good, like Colossus 2 that he's going to build. It's like an order of magnitude bigger than all of the other kind of data centers combined.

And he'll do it faster too, I bet.

Yeah. And then, but it's like he's betting more on compute. He thinks that that's real intelligence, right? Versus Zuck betting on a human. So Who knows which one's right or wrong? This is just another reinforcement that there's no right or wrong way to do business. But it's just, it's just, it's so, you gotta have guts to make either of these bets and these guys aren't afraid to do it. It's funny because you see Zuck over here with a Thanos. These Infinity Stones over here are basically AI researchers.

So that's all the ones he's been taking.

Yep.

Yep.

And you know what's funny?

And he's paying Meech like $100 million or something like that.

What's funny is they're all Asian and Indian people.

Are they really?

Yeah, that's so funny.

The one thing to keep in mind with Elon, and I was talking to my brother-in-law, Hiten, about this yesterday night, what I admire about him as an entrepreneur, forget his views and what you think about that, right? If you just look at it from like an entrepreneur standpoint, like he has a diner here. I don't know if you've been to it.

Yeah, I want to go.

But the lines have been ridiculously long and sometimes it takes hours and hours just to get in.

Yeah.

But if you look at what he tends to do as an entrepreneur, he tends not to do what the status quo is. And a great example of this is when everyone's talking about software and AI, he's building that. But for years he's been building actual robots that can do stuff, not just fill up popcorn in the diner, but actually clean your house or live in your daily life. If you look at what he did with Tesla, You already know my opinion on the Tesla car. I don't think it's a great car.

I love the car.

I hate the car. I think the seats are crap and he won't put in more parts because he doesn't want to make the manufacturing more complex. But I'll give him credit for 2 amazing things that Tesla has done with the cars. The first is I think they have some of the best technology and I think they're going to end up being a technology company that's licensing out that technology to all the other car companies over time, especially with things like self-driving. The second thing that he did is he pretty much owns all the gas stations for electric. He has the infrastructure. You want to charge your electric car, it doesn't matter if it's a Chinese one or a German one or a US one, you're probably using the Tesla network in Europe and in America and probably in LATAM as well.

You know what's interesting too? So this retreat, so 3 people drove there, all 3 people had electric cars. None of them were Teslas. One was an Audi, actually 2 were Audis, and then there was my car, right? But when I used to have a Tesla, it was so easy to charge everywhere and it's fast charging.

No, it's still charge fast for Porsche. Porsche is compatible with their network.

Yeah. But the thing, no, I've tried charging it in those networks. You have to find specific places. Like they're, they're only opening up specific ones. Not every charging station is open to like a, like an outsider car like mine.

But eventually I believe he'll change it.

He said that years ago, but he's still not active. Yeah.

But, and he'll make more money from it. He'll, he'll juice the revenue from it.

I think that's— I think the most impressive thing about Elon is not even just the, the tech, it's more so the manufacturing stuff, right? Like you, you look at how quickly he's built these Colossus centers and, but you look at the factories he's built for Tesla. He's actually proudest of that. And I actually think that's harder. I think that it would take me years and years and years to learn that. And the same thing for you too. And I still don't even think we'd figure it out.

Yeah, I don't know if I could actually learn that.

I don't think we'd figure it out, yeah. Yeah.

But I look at what he did with SpaceX is revolutionary. I think of what he's doing, not with Grok, but with the humanoids or whatever he wants to end up calling it, that'll end up being revolutionary, right?

Robots.

Yeah. He ends up focusing on stuff that is innovative, And really, really hard to do.

He just wants to make humanity better, honestly.

Yeah. Same with like Neuralink. If you look at what he's doing as an entrepreneur, I don't think— and I'm not saying Zuck's done a terrible job— I don't think it's challenging to pay people a lot of money. I think it's challenging to do stuff that no one else has done.

I just wish before, you know, Elon does the next thing or whatever, someone releases a book on how he works, because that is worth studying for everybody in the world. You get what I mean?

Yes.

To work on so many different things and play Diablo and have 12 kids, like how does it work? And that is worth, like I wish one of the biographers revealed that.

Yeah, but if you look at his company versus the competitors, like if you look at Facebook, what Facebook's done really well is M&A.

Yeah.

Microsoft has done M&A really well. Look at GitHub, what they bought GitHub for, I believe it has roughly that much now in revenue annually or something like that. It was crazy the numbers I saw. Look at YouTube. They bought YouTube for what, $1 point something billion?

$1 billion.

And it did what, almost $10 billion in revenue last quarter?

I think more. It does more revenue than Netflix.

Yeah. So it's like, if you look at Google, they've done extremely well from M&A. So has Microsoft. So has Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. I know people talk about like, oh, WhatsApp, they haven't monetized yet. The user base, the amount of people that use WhatsApp is ridiculous. Majority of the world. But if you look at Elon, what has he done well from an M&A standpoint?

SolarCity?

Exactly.

Cousin's company.

All right. Like what he's done well is not M&A. What he's done well is build.

He likes doing things the hard way, it seems. Yeah. It's always the hard way. Maximum difficult. I mean, even when he plays Diablo, like I mentioned last time, Diablo 4, he plays on hardcore mode, which means if you die, you lose it all. I think that's how he plays life too. Like, might as well just go for it all. Yeah. So anyway, you guys can choose how to do it. You pay one person $1 billion or buy $1 billion more compute. That's how you play it. Yeah.

But what personality are you? I'm more of a buy it than build it.

I don't, I think I'm more of a build it kind of guy, but also, you know, it's It's interesting because Single Grain was an acquisition, right? I think had I just been involved with the other 2 acquisitions, I think they would've worked out anyway. But I don't think I'm like against either, but I do like building stuff from scratch, so.

I would say when it comes to software or like SaaS, I prefer building. I don't prefer buying. I've bought a few, but I just tear apart the product and I'm just buying it for its traffic or its brand. I'm not really buying it for the tech. Yeah, same with Answer the Public. So I prefer building when it comes to SaaS. I tend to buy when it comes to service-based businesses, but I don't understand service-based businesses as well as I understand software.

Yeah. So I think it just depends. There's no right answer here. Yeah, I don't think there's a right answer. I think because of my experiences, I have PTSD because I know humans are so— we're all different, right? And you add a lot of complexities each time you buy, but you have a good integration team for that. I think I do believe the future's going to be smaller teams. And so I'm a little gun-shy on looking at anything to buy right now. So that's where I sit.

Dude, randomly, you want to see a change I made with my team on the homepage?

What?

I forgot what they had it. I think it was something like digital marketing agencies believe Google and Meta own the attention, but LLMs is proving otherwise, right? They had something like that and the call to action was like, Something like, let us help you be found everywhere. And I changed it. It took iterations. I was just texting my team yesterday and we were just doing it on the fly. Took 4 iterations of it and they all got sold.

Search is everywhere. I like it. Yeah, there you go.

And then I put marketers believe. I was like, why do we have digital marketing agencies? Like, oh, we get good traffic from that keyword. I'm like, we already have it on some of the other slides. So we removed that from the homepage. I'm like, just put marketers because we're not pitching to digital marketers and they know that. Or I mean, they're not, we're not pitching to agencies and they know that. And I was just like, marketers believe Google and Meta own attention. And I changed LLMs to ChatGPT because when we talk to most companies, like even when I was in Hong Kong and ChatGPT is banned unless you use a VPN, it's not really banned, but ChatGPT is not available there and they all use VPNs to access it.

Yeah.

No one talks about LLMs, no one talks about Grok, no one talks about Perplexity. They just assume everything is ChatGPT.

Yeah.

So I'm like, we should just nail it head on and just focus our messaging purely around ChatGPT.

Yep.

And yes, we can do Perplexity and all the other ones, but ChatGPT is what everyone's talking about, so we should just focus on that.

That's what we call the first mover advantage. Typically first mover, if you have a good product and you're known as the brand in the space, you're going to get the attention. And you know what's interesting? I was looking at our traffic stats, just website traffic, and whenever we talk about like AIO or ChatGPT optimization or like any of these LLM or whatever, it's always 5 to 10 times more traffic than anything else that we publish right now. So I'm just like, guys, why don't we just keep doing that? Like forget all the other stuff, right?

Same with social content.

Yeah, just forget about it. Oh, and by the way, I was reading something, a bunch of SEOs were complaining again, haha, right? They're complaining again on X.

About?

They're complaining about how traditional SEO is dying, but there was a silver lining to it. The silver lining is they've never been busier than ever right now. So we have some mutual friends, maybe some mutual enemies as well in there. And they were just saying that they've never been busier because when things get tough with traditional SEO, people are like, they want to get that traffic back. They want the same thing back. And it's no different than this SaaS founders retreat I was at where everyone wants to get their traffic back. I'm like, guys, like it's on its way down. I'm, I'm, don't abandon it, but it's, it's a sunk cost thing where you don't, just don't, it's okay if you spent money on it. It's time to move on.

Yes. When Eric says move on though, because I think a lot of people are going to—

Not throw it away.

Use it in a wrong context. He's not saying SEO's dead. He's not saying Google is dead. He's saying that you need to adapt with the platforms and you need to be there when people ask questions to Google in AI mode or whether it's in the AI overviews. But also you need to be there whether it's Perplexity, Grok, or ChatGPT, not just for bottom of funnel, but also top of funnel, middle of funnel. And you need to adapt.

Yep.

What he's saying is throw away your mindset of, oh, I spent all this money on traditional SEO. And I'm losing traffic. What Eric is specifically saying is that's fine. A lot of those factors are very relevant to optimizing for AI and LLMs. Adapt with it. Don't fight and go against the grain.

And you know, we talk about search everywhere optimization. It's a term you coined, but it's more so you need citations everywhere. So I had that group, that SaaS group. I was like, hey guys, just go to ChatGPT right now. Search for what's the best marketing podcast. 7 out of 8 people, Marketing School was at least number 2, if not higher. Right? And so, but what's the reason for that? It's because we're cited on YouTube. We've been publishing, we're over 3,000 episodes on Marketing School. I don't know if you know that.

Wow.

Yeah. You publish all the time on your YouTube. I publish all the time on YouTube. We're publishing on Twitter. We're everywhere, right? It's not just links anymore. And you actually published something on X today. I don't even know if you know this. You scheduled something.

Yeah, I was like, I don't know what I'm talking about.

But basically it does talk about how like, yeah, you need to have like some type of brand reputation. There's sentimentality around your brand as well.

Oh yeah, we did one on how ChatGPT evaluates brand reputation.

So why don't you talk about that? Because I think this is related to this.

Yeah. So I had a post on a data post that my team ended up creating. I can't see the footnote. Oh, there you go. I can see the footnote in it. So looked at over 100 sites in 14 different verticals to see why ChatGPT recommends certain brands more than others. And we wanted to really look at brand mentions and we looked at domain authority. It doesn't really have too much of an impact on ChatGPT. So if you get mentioned on a high domain authority versus low domain authority, Not too much. Context, like what is the context of that you're being mentioned in? That has a high score. The thoroughness, if someone just says like, oh, NP Digital or Single Grain is good, but without being super thorough and giving reasons why, the thoroughness does matter. Age, the age of the business and the more people mentioning you over time, that's helped. Quantity was another one that was really high. Relevance of the site, a little bit lower. That was medium-ish. And I think that's going to change over time. Sentiment had a high rating as well. Is what they're saying about your company positive or negative? So if you had to pick the main factors, you want to focus on context, thoroughness, quantity. So a lot of these brand mentions and sentiment, they want to be positive. Those are the four main factors to focus on when it comes to brand mentions to get site ChatGPT to cite you more often. Yep.

So again, it's not just based on like links still matter, but like you look at the internet now, if you're an LLM, you're crawling a bunch of different things, you're multimodal, and you want to try to be in as many places as possible. And by the way, a lot of this stuff now is just republishing. You're republishing short-form content. And when I think about SEO now, when our blog posts, we're more aggressive now with the transactional, you know, bottom-of-funnel content like programmatic SEO, right? Because we're just I'm just like, why not go for it? Why not have more shots on goal? It's no different than organic short form. Why not have more shots on goal? So I was kind of lighting into my brand team yesterday because I pulled up Opus. So our 80-minute conversation, there's actually a lot more moments that we miss that my team doesn't publish, right? Whether it's you say something interesting or I like, I'm like, some of these are actually good and some of them are like duds. They're not that good. But then when I look at the ones that we manually choose sometimes, I'm like, that's not even a good moment. Like, why is that even being published to Instagram, right? It's got to be something that you're willing to share with your friends or share with your mom or something like that. And so why would you not use something like an Opus or like an Overlap or something like that? Anyway, I did ask again, what's the best marketing pod to Grok? We're number 2 again. I don't know why we're constantly number 2.

Who's number 1?

Amy Porterfield. Amy Porterfield? Yeah, you see, you knew that.

Yeah.

Okay.

She has a good podcast.

Okay, who do you think is number 1 for ChatGPT?

Amy Porterfield.

No, Marketing Over Coffee. And I don't know why this is like—

I don't know.

Yeah, I've never heard of this one. John Wall and Chris Penn. Marketing School with Neil Patel and Eric Siu is number 2. Gary Vee Audio Experience is number 3. But Gary's constantly still everywhere, you know?

Yeah.

So, and then I searched for it on Claude too, but—

How's he adapting to the AI role? I don't hear much about him and AI.

So, you know what's interesting? I look at his YouTube channel from time to time and all of his content, you know how they've repurposed him speaking, right? It's always social media is in there or AI is in there. So I think he's trying to capitalize on driving social media or AI traffic to drive more leads. leads for his business. That's what I think.

So he is talking about AI?

Yeah, he is basically like, if you're not using AI, you're screwed. And then he has to talk about VeeFriends a little bit too, 'cause he's pumping that. But I think he's mostly focused on his business now.

Yeah. Yeah. Good for him. He's also had quite a few exits. People don't realize that about Gary. They look at him as a social media personality. He's a great operator. He's an amazing operator and he's done very well building companies and flipping them. And flipping them for a lot of money. And I wouldn't say flip because it sounds bad, but more so building them and exiting them to a strategic buyer like American Express or whoever it may be.

Resy. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, people don't talk about that.

I think he's very good with people too, right? He has a— I have a guy that used to work at Single Grain, Raghav, that works. And I talk to Raghav all the time and he's worked there for a long time. So he treats you like once you're in with him, he treats you really well. But what I noticed and like, it's not like I'm close to Gary or anything, but he'll message me every now and then and say, hey, just hope everything is well, like on Instagram, right? And I think that level, I know a couple people from like my high school that do that just to check in. That goes a long way. I don't do that personally. I should do it more, but I'm just not like that. But on Claude, who do you think is number 1?

We are.

Yes. Why do you think that?

I just guessed because the way you asked, I was like—

The way I asked.

Okay, cool.

Gary Vee is number 2 though. And then number 3 is like call to action from Unbounce. But we're constantly number 1 or 2. Why is that? The only solution, the thing that makes sense to me is we're cited in a lot of different places. Yeah.

For a long, long time. Many, many years.

Yeah. And that is a moat. If you can stay consistent for a very long time, because Gary constantly appears here too, you're going to have an edge over other people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I haven't checked out his social profiles lately, but I didn't realize he's pushing out AI content. I still thought he was pushing out a lot of motivational content.

No, I think he's locked it in a lot more. Yeah. Okay. So you have one over here. I don't know if you want to cover this one around why partnering can be a better form of marketing.

Yeah. So on a side note, you're spot on. I was looking at Gary's YouTube channel right now we're talking. The first video is Business Playbook. The next one is AI Content, the Only Business Strategy That Still Works.

Yeah.

The next one is Social AI, the New Media Empire. Yeah. And he's getting some good amount of views on this. You know, Cody Sanchez, Nobody's Ready for Where AI Live Shopping, Like he's pushing hard on talking about AI, wave 2 and 3 of AI. Yeah, he is.

All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, as a side note, how often are you going on Podcasts every week right now.

I'm not going on podcasts at all.

I think I'm gonna try to jack it up to like 1 or 2 per week or so, because I want the clips.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, because sometimes, by the way, when it's in person, like, that's why he's doing them. He's doing it for the clips too. And so we— that's my take on it. Yeah.

Well, I found that's easier is I go to a studio, I record for an hour to 2 hours, And I have enough content for, if I record for 2 hours, you have enough content for 2 weeks.

Clips, that's like one per day. So 14, you're recording for—

Long form and short.

How many short forms are you getting out per day?

One.

So yeah, you're doing 14 in that session.

Yeah.

That's a lot. Yeah.

And 2 long form, but I don't do the short form.

I just do the long form and they take the short form out of the long.

Oh, got it, got it, got it. But the script is planned for short forms to be taken out. So instead of like using Opus would be like, what are the good soundbites?

Yeah.

Literally the script is written where we already know what short forms we're creating from that, uh, that we're pulling out from.

Do those do well for you?

Like, uh, not as well as me just filming short form—

Where it's native.

Content. Yes. And we have— we do have scripts for it. I just haven't had time to record. Yeah, I'm focusing more on, um, scaling it out and just doing a long form a week, a short form every day, a chart every day. And we're happy with that frequency.

Yeah. You know what's funny?

And then speaking in person at conferences.

You know what's funny for you? You actually posted something on Twitter the other day about how like this is what leads to short-form success. A really good hook, a really good story, and like something else, right? Like a couple other things. And like, I think, you know, this intuitively too, if you just focus on like a native post, it's going to do a lot better. But, you know, on average, like I don't think you need to, and you know this too, because on average your videos are getting anywhere from like 15,000 to 35,000 views or so. That's already plenty good, right? On YouTube. On your Instagram Reels?

Yeah, we more so like focus on YouTube because we see more qualified leads from YouTube than Instagram.

I don't think Instagram Reels drive a lot of leads anyway, so there's no need. Like it's just air coverage. That's the phrase that's used.

Bingo. You're right. We look at it as like air coverage and we need to be on there.

But it's funny, our ratio, like my usually whatever reel I publish is like 1,000 to 2,000 views on average. And so it's like a fall. I do think Instagram does look at followers a little little bit. bit because you have 629,000. I have like 100,000.

Yeah, it could be. I just more so focus on, I'm like, guys, how do we just do better on YouTube and LinkedIn?

We just ran our first webinar experiment yesterday where we spent to drive. Okay. So I'll share some results. So we use StreamYard, which I got from Neil. We used to use Restream. So we started using StreamYard. And so we streamed to my Instagram, we streamed to YouTube, LinkedIn, and everything.

And do you like StreamYard?

I do.

I like it. It's more reliable from what we I like it. It doesn't have as many errors.

But I think we're missing some things where like you can't, like I don't think you can do the QR scanning.

Yeah, we do.

You can?

I don't know if we can do, it doesn't show the counter of how many people signed up.

The reporting's not good, yeah. So that's what I think is missing. So we might use a tool called sequel.io. You can search it up, sequel.io.

I'll check it out.

So they, 'cause they might actually do a deal with us and then maybe you guys can get hooked up with a deal too. But a lot of B2B SaaS companies use Sequel. But anyway, StreamYard's great. So we spent $5,000 on this webinar and we got 800, registrants. And the high point concurrently was maybe 250 or 275 people. We'll have to take a look. But we did get, it seems we got at least, I want to say at least 10, if not like 15 qualified leads from it. These meetings still need to happen though, because this webinar was done yesterday. And then I would say the offer that did well was the ClickFlow offer, which is 25,000 free words, right? That offer did well, but also people signing up for like a free AI marketing consultation, which is still a proposal anyway. That got a few as well. And so, so far we're like, oh, that's actually pretty good. Let's start to hit this a little harder. And so $5,000, if we get, if we even break even on this one, great. And we'll just keep running them, but you don't need to spend, yours is a little different. Yours is you need 5,000 registrants and you'll make $400 grand, right? Is that what it is?

No, not 5,000 registrants.

5,000 Attendees.

I think it's attendees.

I could be wrong. Which is a lot, by the way.

I'm pretty sure it's like attendees and not registrants.

Dude, I'm going to do— you speak to it for a second. I'm going to do the math on this real quick.

Yeah. But our average, when we have a webinar that hits, we typically will get at least 10,000 registrants. I don't know if we've ever hit 15,000, but we can get like a solid like 10,000+ registrants.

You know what's funny? Okay. So on the math for this one, because our CPA was 8.5, right? So you pay $85,000 to do one webinar. Each webinar would typically cost, if Neil had to pay for this, you could pay $85,000 for it.

We would not spend $85,000. That's too much. We tried running ads to webinars.

You did?

We find that it works out decently well.

But you don't need to.

Yeah, we have so much value.

Neil has a lot of organic traffic, so it goes to his email list and he just drives it through there and that works.

And then I call the salespeople or some of the people on the sales team. I'm like, did you guys go prospect to start looking through all the people registered? No, there's too many. I'm like, Okay, no more budget for paid webinar ads.

Yeah, which it makes sense for me because my email list is not nearly the size of yours. It's like minuscule. So, but like this is a great way for me to drive not only email signups but registrants too and to keep it going because it's like a fun event, right? And then I think we're going to have guests coming in. So you're welcome to come at any time. But I think having guests come in, making it entertaining and all that, it's a fun thing because I do think people look forward to it too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Webinars are fun.

Yeah.

But sometimes, you know, like my team will put me on virtual speeches And I appreciate them making the effort. And sometimes like people will pitch us, we got to get better at this. They're like, oh, direct audience, we have X amount of community and all this kind of stuff. And then I'll show up and I'm like, so this is only 5 people on here.

Oh no.

I'm like, oh cool, there goes the hour. I'm like, very bad use of time. And my team's like, sorry, didn't know. But like sometimes people pitch us and they overexaggerate, you know? Like I had one of events, I spoke for free in Florida and there's like, we're the largest home service marketing event. Yeah, you know, like we have big events, like, you know, up to 1,000 people. These are all business owners.

Up to 1,000 people? So it could be like one person?

No, but they're just like, you know, they're like usually 600, 700, maybe up to 1,000. Um, but they're just like, that's roughly the size and it's all your ideal, uh, buyer pool. And I speak and I'm like, there wasn't even like 40, 50 people in the room and it was all mainly agencies and providers. I was like, cool, great use of time.

Well, you know, I mean, at least you get the clips, right? For content.

We don't even care for the clips from that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

I mean, because we have enough clips and content. Like, what am I going to do? Start posting 2, 3 times a day for short-form clips?

Like, I think so. I think so.

We've tried it out. It doesn't get that much more engagement.

I don't know. I just look at it as a slot machine. I want more at bat. Yeah, that's true. I want Brat Pats. 'Cause you never know, like, okay, I could just be talking about a discount, you talk about a discount, 8 million views, and then I might talk about like an Instagram hack, 500,000 views. I'm like, you just never know what's going to hit.

But typically for me, the posts that hit drive the least amount of customers.

Yeah. But remember I told you I was at this, uh, this, this YPO dinner and then 4 people came up to me and said they saw a video and I was at a conference and 3 people said they saw like a short-form video.

But did any of them purchase from you?

Absolutely not.

Exactly.

But sometimes I'm just saying in that big pool, you might get some of the right people. And sometimes I'll see my cousins at a family event, they'll be like, oh, I saw your video. I was like, oh, that sounds good. Makes me feel good.

But no revenue.

No revenue. No revenue.

And this is why you went from doing content that makes you feel good to content that produces ROI.

I'm like, I don't need the views anymore. You know, let's talk about this real quick. Go ahead.

No, no, but let's go back.

Yeah.

Your webinar, you paid for it to get people on there.

Yeah.

Generated you revenue?

I think it's going to generate revenue.

Okay. Will people come up to you and be like, I saw you on this amazing webinar?

No.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

What would you rather have?

I'd rather have the revenue.

Exactly.

It's cool. Like, okay, so this is what I want to talk about. I have a topic here and then we can move on to one of yours. But the question is, what level of fame is worth it, right? So, you know, I would say you and I, I would say in the marketing niche, maybe I'm like, you know, a B-level star. You're an A-level star. Okay, let's just call it.

I don't know if I'm A-level.

I think so. You get noticed a lot, right? When I go to a conference or you go to a conference, we get noticed and people ask for pictures and things like that. Like, it's nice. It's a nice dopamine hit to get noticed at a conference, right? And say hi. Like, I'm very grateful for that, right? Now, but the question is, if you're super famous, you get noticed all the time. Like, if you're like Logan Paul or something like that, it starts to become a nuisance, right? So the question is, what level of fame is one?

So I would consider in the marketing world or business world, Gary Vee would be like an A. Gary Vee, yes. Okay. I'm not—

You're A for sure.

No, I wouldn't say I'm A. Okay, but let's just go with Gary Vee.

I've ChatGPT'd this before. I said, who are the top?

Okay, so let's go with Gary Vee being an A, right? The amount of times he must get hit up when he walks down the street must be irritating.

For sure.

Okay. So Mike and I were discussing this, I don't know how many more months ago, months ago. And he's like, dude, one day, you know, he's just like, would we ever, you know, sell the business if we have a right offer? And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, we don't really discuss it. But he's like, do you know what would be amazing for you if you ever sold 100% of the business? He's like, not a portion, but 100%. And I'm like, what? And he's like, how stoked would you be that you would never have to create content again or post on social media again? I'm like, dude, 1,000%. He's like, no one would, you know, know who you are. You would fade away. And I'm like, this would be so amazing. And I would be ecstatic with that.

You do get noticed on the street.

Yes.

Yeah. And so, you know, and I would say at a conference you get noticed more and then you get stopped. And then sometimes we talk about, because we'd be walking and you start to get irritated over a period of time because it's too much, right? And you're grateful for it.

I'm very grateful. I'm grateful for people. Without them, I wouldn't have a business. I'm not actually— the conference part doesn't irritate me. What irritates me, and I'm still really grateful, is like I take my kids to a play place and get 2, 3 people hounding me and I appreciate them, but then my kids get pissed off that I'm distracted instead of me spending time with them.

Yeah.

That's for me where it starts getting a little irritating. Conferences and stuff like that, I don't mind at all. When people want to ask questions, I'm happy to answer as many questions as possible. The only part where it gets irritating for me at a conference is if I have to be on stage at a specific time and I tell someone that and they still want to talk to me and I can't actually be late when I'm going on stage and I had to tell That, hey, I can answer after or whatever. And they're like, oh no, no, no, this is really quick. That part, like, I get it. They want their feedback, but like, I also contractually cannot miss going on stage at the time that I'm supposed to be there.

Yeah, I see that.

So I have to say no and I feel like a prick. And then I'm like, man, I wish they would just— some people would understand that I have to go on stage, but I'm like, and I'll give them my phone number, email I'm like, gladly, when they get on the phone or whatnot. And I did that at Web Summit. I was at Web Summit in Toronto and I had to leave, not because I was on stage, but I had to leave to go to the airport, right? And this guy was like, huge fan. I just have some questions. I'm like, dude, I hate to do this. I'm changing. I changed my flight right then and there to get an earlier flight because, you know, some of my interviews, one of my interviews bailed on me. So I was like, wait, there's an earlier flight. Let me just switch everything up. And then my team's like, oh, you're going to have to go economy. I'm like, who gives a crap? I'm flying from Toronto to SF. It's like a 2-hour flight. I'm like, I don't care if I'm in the middle seat, just get me there sooner so I can hang out with my sister and my niece and nephew. I haven't seen them in a while, right? I'm like, why wait 3 extra hours?

Yeah.

And the guy really wanted to pick my brain and I'm like, what's your phone number? So then when I was in the taxi cab getting to our Uber, getting to the Airport, I gave him a ring. He didn't answer. And then I texted him, and then he's like, "Oh, I didn't know it was you." I gave him a ring. He's like, "Oh, I'm busy now. Can I call you back in like an hour?" No, no, no, no, no. I picked up the phone with him in the hour because I was at the airport. I answered all his questions, and then I gave him some action items on what he should do, and I told him once you do it, follow up, and I'm looking for next steps. Although he never followed up with me. That's what I'm saying.

The way the way he He should have jumped at the opportunity to take the call with you if he was such a big fan. And then it didn't seem like he was serious about taking action.

Oh yeah, he didn't take action.

That's what I mean.

But I told him, once you take action, just give me another callback.

But going back to this, okay, so the level of fame, like it's cool. You know what's cool? When I'm like getting on a plane and the guy at the gate recognizes, oh, you're Eric Siu or whatever. Or maybe like I'm walking with Syed, 'cause Syed flew over, we're at a coffee shop and this guy's like, this huge guy, right? He's like, sup Eric? And I'm like, hey. I don't know what to say, right? But like, that's fun, right? To get noticed like with your friends or whatever. But I think for you, 'cause I actually was talking to a friend yesterday or the day before, 'cause you mentioned that your brand caps out at $10 million, right? But so the argument is actually your brand probably does more than that that's intangible. Because the thing is, when you go, when people like are, you're trying to recruit people, people know who Neil Patel is, right? It does help from a recruiting standpoint.

Or it hurts. 'Cause some people hate me.

Okay, but yeah.

Remember at the last event someone said I murder people?

Yeah, but okay, so you can be polarizing, but some people really love you. Some people might really hate you, right? You agree, right? So, but you've also said before that, okay, if it helps you recruit people, a lot of these people bring clients and they bring people with them too. So it's this thing that stacks, right? And then it also does help you, like, sure, some companies don't, but at least you get thrown into RFPs, right? So I do think from a measurable standpoint—

No, my personal brand does not help us with RFPs.

But it helps with recruiting.

It helped in the early days. It doesn't help really at all anymore.

So a lot of people that join don't know who you are.

A lot of the people who join don't care who I am because they're executives and they're seasoned from other agencies. Because in the world of AI, you need, as you know this, less grunt workers, more high-level talent. They really care about who they're working with, who they're reporting to, knowing them for many years, and more comp. For sure.

But if they like a Gary Vee or if they like a Neil Patel, for example, it helps. It definitely helps, right? And so I think it's, I think the measurable piece is for sure at least 10 million, but I think there's probably a little more than that. Yeah.

Uh, $10 million, definitely measurable. There's probably a lot more that's measurable if we accepted the revenue. So like, I don't take most speaking gigs and I don't care how much they'll have to, uh, pay. I just turn them down unless we think it's a good fit for not just our brand, but for also potential customers. We also turned I turn down brand promotion deals, like where I'll be evangelist for a company or take shares in a company or give—

You still do that?

No, I turn it all down. Or like post on social media and get paid. Don't care for it. So when you look at, or like book deals, I turn down pretty much all people who hit me up for book deals.

I think you have scar tissue from that.

Yeah, I don't even respond to 'em. And like I can go get like a half a million bucks in advance, maybe more, but—

It's not worth it. You make way more from your business. But I do think my main point is at least $10 million is measurable, but I do think you have some intangibles that's a little bigger than $10 million.

Yes, but I think where you and I are different on the branding side is I've been doing this longer for you.

Than me?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

So then I've had, I've been used to for so many years of people saying hi, hello, and wanting pictures. Where for you, you've been having this for years as well, but it's been getting bigger and bigger. Like I texted you the other day when I was at that hotel in San Diego.

Yeah.

And the person's like, he's like, you're Neil Patel, right? And I'm like, yeah. He's just like, I know you. He's like, you're Eric's friend. I'm like, I follow Eric and I've seen his ads and content.

That's so funny.

And I was like, yeah. I'm like, Eric and I are really close friends.

Yeah, yeah.

And he's like, cool. He's like, dude, I'm going to pull up your car and just park it out front and just leave it here. I've learned so much from Eric.

Yeah, that's awesome.

I just want to show my appreciation. And I told you, I tipped him well. I was really stoked because I was like—

Huh? Thank you for tipping him.

Yeah. And I was like, I was stoked. I was like, cool. And then I was like, cause he's like, are you leaving now? I'm like, no, my kids are making some bracelet thing cause they had like some activity. And he's like, dude, just leave everything here. I'll load the car. I'll just leave it out front. Take as long as you want. And I know if he didn't leave it out front, I would have to wait like an extra 5, 10 minutes. So going from San Diego to LA around 1 o'clock, you're going to get traffic coming It would take you forever. Yeah. And it was already our 2-hour car ride turned into a 3-hour car ride because of traffic.

Was this the Odyssey?

No, the Bentley.

Okay, got it.

So, but he was just really nice. I tend to drive the Odyssey. It is my favorite car. And it's really funny because I was at, where was that place? I took my kids this week. They don't have school or summer school.

Legoland?

No. Well, that was in San Diego, but yesterday I took them to Century City.

Oh.

Yeah. So then I took my wife's car because my car doesn't have 2 car seats in there. One of the car seats broke. So we're waiting for another one. Hence we didn't take it to San Diego. So then going to Century City, the guy's like, you got a really nice car. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. This isn't my car. This is my wife's car. He's like, if this is your wife's car, I can't imagine what your car is. He's like, you got a Bugatti?

I have an Odyssey.

And I'm like, guess again. So then he's like, Ferrari? I'm like, nope, Honda Odyssey. And he's just like, wise man.

That's dope.

And then I told my wife this story and she's like, you're making me look bad. He's going to think that like I just spent all of this money. And I'm like, no. I'm like, well, if he assumes that, he assumes that. Because the only reason my wife has this car is because I got it for her. She can get it on her own as well. But the first Bentley I got, My daughter was a Christmas gift and it stayed in the garage for 2 weeks before she even drove it. And the first thing she said is, why'd you get me a car? My existing car is only like 4 years old. It still works.

Yeah. You have a lot of cars. I don't know why you have a lot of cars.

No, I only have 2 cars.

You used to have a lot of cars.

I have a lot of cars.

Yeah.

I've sold most of the cars.

And it wasn't even like you're a car person, but okay. But going back to this, as we talk through this level of fame thing real quick, well, I think my conclusion here is the level of fame is worth it if it helps you recruit amazing That's what ultimately every— by the way, as I've gotten to the Bill Gates section of that $500 book that I was talking about, Bill Gates is like, we just got really lucky with people. Everything is about just people. People and product.

Yeah, he had an amazing team.

Amazing. And he's like, I just got— like, he's like, when he's interviewed, he's already super like billionaire already in the mid-'90s. He's like, I still work 12 to 15 hours a day, but without my people, I would be nothing.

Yeah. I do agree. Like Mark Zuckerberg trying to poach these AI specialists. I believe he himself is making the effort to recruit these people.

He's calling them. It's, it's, dude, these are like, you'd read about MBA-level contracts all the time, but these are like $300 million deals, $1 billion deals, and people still wouldn't join.

Yes. And I think the Zuck style of doing business is more my style than Elon. I think Elon version is much harder, but I'm big on, if I look at my business and why I've done well, it's all people.

I think you like Yeah. Yeah, you like deal-making. You're similar to the, you know, we have another person in the country that likes deal-making.

Yes. I'm more, if I had to pick my entrepreneur type, I'm more of a private equity guy than a creator.

Yeah, you're a deal-maker. And who else likes doing deals?

Are you talking about the president?

Yes, the president likes doing deals, right? But that personality, I'm not saying you guys are the same people, but like they like pushing to get deals done, right? Versus I think Elon, I don't think that's in his personality. He likes pers— like, he's just like, I'm just going to do it. So yeah. Anyway, you have this one over here, which I think is interesting on why partner marketing can be a better form of marketing. Because I was just thinking about this. We're both speaking at HubSpot's Inbound, right? I'm like, huh, for Carrot, I want to talk to more of these integration partners at HubSpot's Inbound. So I'm like, I'm going to set up a dinner, right?

Yeah. So dude, I got this idea from our last recording session. It was either the last one or the one One before, and we're talking about getting customers from these LLMs.

Uh-huh.

And I was telling you, you're like, yeah, you're seeing it too, but we're talking about 2 different things. I was talking about people working at like a Perplexity recommending our agency. You were talking about getting mentioned in like a ChatGPT or Perplexity when someone's doing a search and then ChatGPT recommending you through their website, not actually an employee referring you. And then you were talking about, we were talking about Scrunge, Profound, and others, and I was like, let me hit some of these guys up. So I started emailing the founders of these solutions and I was like, I should find one and just partner with them.

Yeah.

Because even though we ourselves have been developing AI products and we've been doing AI products since, I don't know, maybe 2 years ago, 3 max. I don't know when we first came out with our AI writer. I know February of 2020, 2025, we had a big meeting in Brazil and we were discussing all the AI stuff that we were creating, including like tracking on LLMs and stuff like that. And just because we have some of these features, our product isn't based on a Profound or a Scrunched or a lot of these other solutions. We're basing it off of what our customers want, and it's a very different customer segment. I'm assuming you agree with this. Right. What we're doing with Ubersuggest and Answer the Public, you've seen some of the designs. We're not trying to do what they do. We're trying to help SMB and a roadmap. I don't know what their roadmap is. And I don't even have like a login myself to Scrunch or Profound or any of those solutions. I don't think our dev team does either. But more so we're building stuff for how can we help SMBs? be from soup to nuts, not just learn what's happening on the LLMs and all the channels out there because we're big on the search everywhere optimization like you and I have talked about with YouTube traditional, but also help them execute and actually get results in a way that's as automated as possible. And a small chunk, a fraction of a percent, but our user base is high. I think we have over 5 million users on our software tool. will be an ideal user for a Scrunched or Profound or someone like that. I was like, wait, we should partner with them and send them revenue and we should try to work with them and get revenue from their end. And I was like, why not?

So how many deals have you done?

I have calls set up this week and next week.

Yeah, see, see, sometimes when you talk about this stuff, idea babies spawn.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And I was like, let me just email. And I just start Googling these people's email addresses.

Yeah.

And 9 o'clock at night while I'm in bed and I'm just shooting off emails.

Dude, you know what I do now? So I run Perplexity Labs, which does 9-minute research. I was like, tell me who are all the people Carrot should partner up with at HubSpot and then find me the contact information too. And then you can probably set up with ChatGPT agents now where it'll find the contacts and then it's connected with their Gmail because you can do the connection, right? And you can email these people and just set it up and just do like a private dinner because I'm going to arrive on the 2nd and then stay there until the 6th.

So yeah.

I like that. Yeah. So, and that's the move too. I'm going to throw dinner. Neil will probably be there. I usually throw dinners when I, when I speak at HubSpot. So that's what we'll do.

Yeah. Why not?

Yeah.

I don't know if I'll be there at a dinner. I'll probably be spending time with my niece and nephew.

Oh, that's right. Because this time it's local for you. Yeah. Local-ish.

Local-ish.

Yeah. All right. Yeah.

My team's like, how long do you want there? And they'll be like, what do you want to do with the hotel? I'm like, none.

You're usually in and out. Yeah. So you're just going to Arrive? Are you packing all your speaking into one day and just going to—

I'm trying to, and then spend more time at my sister's place.

Got it. Cool. So maybe guys, maybe dinner. We'll see. Yeah. All right.

Eric will still do a dinner though.

I will for sure do a dinner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm bad with the dinners. Even on the Miami event, you're like, do you want to come? Just leave to the airport from there. I'm like, it's okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Your dinners aren't your thing.

So yeah. No. Yeah.

All right, pick one. We got 2 more to do.

All right, let's talk about—

Oh, can we, can we? Okay, go ahead. You pick, you pick.

Go for it.

Okay. So, I mean, this one's interesting. So here's the quote, and I don't think you're going to agree with this. If you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. Do you know who this quote comes from? Comes from Jim Sinegal, the founder of Costco, and also Leonardo DiVecchio, who is the Luxottica founder.

What's Luxottica?

Luxottica owns like Ray-Ban and all these companies. So Mark Zuckerberg paid $3 billion, I think, for 3% or maybe a billion, something like that to buy. He's passed away since, but like phenomenal with M&A. He bought all these glasses companies like, and you know, based in Italy. And then Jim Sinegal, Costco, obviously huge, right? So again, they're both, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. So they're very hands-on, very involved, and they're teaching people how to do things in their organization. So I thought it was an interesting quote.

Yeah, I don't know if that's right. I know a lot of people, like if you actually look at like Mark Zuckerberg, they say he himself like will actually just do work and focuses on not just operating but actually doing. And then you have different management styles. Like if you look at Elon, he gets his hands dirty instead of teaching. I think he's just going in there and actually doing it himself. Does it mean that Jim from Costco or the founder of Costco or Elon or Mark or, you know, Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates is right or wrong. I think it goes back to what we discussed earlier. When you're meeting up with these SaaS companies, there's many ways to get the same outcome and people just have to choose what's right for them. And even though like you and I teach, I don't think we spend 90% of our time teaching. It may look that way from the content that we push out and that's helped us build an audience, but I think we spend majority of our time doing.

I think also to your point about people having different ways of being successful with business, there's also different ways of teaching too. Sometimes you do things and then I more often than not now will record a lot of the stuff and then just teach by doing sometimes. Sometimes I'll just get on a call with someone, I'll screen record with them because I want to pass the knowledge on because that's much more scalable. And so in my mind, you know, what do I enjoy doing? Because people ask me, it's like, what are my life goals? I just love learning. I love doing and I love of teaching, right? And that's like a self-reinforcing thing. So I think people can have different definitions and I don't even know if Jim and Leonardo DiVecchio are talking about the same thing here, but they both kind of ascribe to like just ultimately I think what it comes down to is being involved and you're teaching in some way, shape, or form. Maybe you're doing, maybe you're actually mentoring someone, but I do think maybe this comes down to involvement.

Yes. And that's why when at my organization, it doesn't matter if it's a CMO or anyone in marketing or any division, even sales, I expect people to be a player coach, especially executives. You not only have to go and do work yourself, but you got to teach others and level them up and get them to perform better.

Yep. All right. Have you seen that this one business podcast charges $450,000 per episode?

So you can't listen to an episode for free? Sorry, sponsorships cost $450,000 to sponsor this I've never heard of that kind of sponsorship unless, because you said business podcast, unless it would be like a Joe Rogan or something like that.

Yeah. So click on the link. It's row 5754 here. I'm going to, I'm pulling it up right now, but this is the Acquired podcast. So I'm looking at their media kit right now. And basically when you look at the founders, this audience, it is, they have mostly entrepreneurs that listen to it, mostly CEOs, mostly entrepreneurs that listen to this. Right? And, you know, you have the CEO of LinkedIn, COO said, I love your podcast, I'm probably in for 80 hours. You have the Chief Product Officer from Meta, I recommend you guys to friends and colleagues all the time. 20% of the audience is founders, executives 35%, technical operators 26%, capital ecosystem 21%, right? And when you scroll down, you look at the sponsorship cost, Neil, it shows you the packages, right? If you're looking for For a presenting sponsorship in spring 2026, you're going to pay $1.875 million for 4 episodes. And then a mid-roll is going to be $1.25 million. And then the costs continue to jack up. Fall 2026, mid-roll is going to be $1.5 million, presenting sponsors $2.2 million.

Wait, so how much for— so for 4 episodes, it's a million bucks. That's what it shows here.

So 4 episodes—

That's in— it depends what season.

Yeah. But like if you go into 2026, 1.5 per mid-roll, presenting is 2.2. Yeah, right now if you and I wanted to go for fall, assuming this is a really good audience for us, right? We'd be paying $1 million. So $250 grand an episode and then it just, it continues to jack up. But this is like the pinnacle, I think, of podcast ads that does well. And this is nice, but I still like our businesses more.

Yes, I don't like running a media company.

Yeah, it's tough. And I think Acquired has done a really good job. I think what I would do is try to look for episodes. Like if we're trying to podcast, do podcast ads, I know for a fact a ton of founders listen to Founders, but you can't buy ads on that one, okay? I know a ton of founders, executives listen to Invest Like the Best. I know they listen to Acquired. And so this is one of those situations where it's like, oh, the attention is there, but try to buy the underpriced attentions for maybe the up-and-comers. Unfortunately, Founders and Invest Like the Best are not up-and-comers.

Yeah.

Maybe you need to find some others that are up-and-comers. up-and-comers, but $450 grand an episode. Good job to them.

Yep. On a sad note, did you just see Hulk Hogan just passed away?

He did? Yeah. No way.

Cardiac arrest. Oh, that sucks.

What?

Yeah. 71 years old.

Hulk Hogan was a great marketer.

Great marketer.

Or was it the WWE?

Probably a combination of both. I think it was also his personality. I remember watching his show when I was a kid or much younger. No.

The one where he's on a boat?

With his family.

No, I didn't see that.

He had like a reality TV show.

Oh, it was like a Kardashians but Hulk Hogan.

And then he regrets passing up on the grill, like the George Foreman grill. I think they reached out to him earlier and that was one of his regrets in life.

Dude, Hulk Hogan was The Rock and Stone Cold before The Rock and Stone Cold. So that's sad. Okay, pick one more before we—

All right, last one. Let's go with The Coldplay affair, CEO daughter did something diabolical.

Ah, okay, this is a good one. This is a good one. Okay, so do you want to explain what happened with the Coldplay? Just to set— anybody, if anybody's been living under a rock, this happened like maybe a week ago.

But so the astronomer, I believe it was astronomer CEO, was at a Coldplay event. I believe it was in Australia.

I don't know.

Or wherever it was, somewhere like that. He had a picture of his head of HR or something, human resources. I forgot what department. I'm pretty sure it was—

Not a picture, but you know the kiss cams when you're at sports events? Yeah, kiss cam.

And they were like hugging or, you know, like a Titanic pose.

Yeah.

And they turned away because they realized they were on camera. And Chris Martin, I believe his name is, Coldplay, right? The singer. He said, either they're shy or they're having an affair.

And turns out he was joking, right? Yeah, he was joking, but it was an affair and they both have family.

Although the CEO, I saw an Instagram account with his daughter, but I'm like, he doesn't have a daughter. He only has 2 sons if I'm not mistaken.

Yep. So here's the deal. The daughter of the Astronomer CEO racked up 100,000 followers and over 15 million views on TikTok overnight, right? But to your point, the only problem is the Astronomer CEO doesn't have a daughter, right? So someone stole some girl's photos on Instagram and then told stories that made them go viral. And what happened was, this was really smart. They plugged all the stories, everything eventually went towards a meditation app, right? Yeah, I saw that. So this is diabolical marketing.

So it's like, this is like some, it's just some random girl here.

It says, reconnecting with life after your dad's affair makes national news, right? And look, like 3.5 million likes, 1,158 comments, right? And then this one over here, 127K followers, 4.4 million likes. Mariana is her name. And then look, it links to this, I think, download Copia.

Ah.

I guess Copia is the meditation thing. And you can see, I bet you're sobbing about this on a yacht or a PJ. I don't feel bad for rich people, right? She's like, hashtag true. But this person doesn't exist. And so everything's going to be okay. Breathwork, please. I got the Copia app. It's letting me log every time I freak out, right? And manifesting, so cute. So basically it was all made up and this person capitalized on the attention because everyone on the internet was talking about it. And sometimes you just have to be very fast on these things and creative.

Yeah. Not the type of marketing that probably either of you or I would want to do, but—

I'm just not that fast.

So it's not even about that fast. It's just, I think it's too It's too deceitful.

It is, it is. But you know, that's— I think if you're in your 20s, you're down to try stuff like this. I think in our 20s we probably would have tried things like this, but it's just, um, we're a little older now, so it's not for us. Anyway, that's it for today, guys, and, uh, we'll see you tomorrow.