Beckham's Brand Playbook, Gumroad's AI Payroll & Ben Affleck's $587M Netflix Sale

I was speaking at a conference in New York last week and one of the MCs, he's chairman of the board for IM8, the David Beckham brand. And I noticed he was wearing these really nice shoes and I was staring at his shoes before he went on to speak. And as I was staring at his shoes, he walked up to me and I told him where I was going. He's like, where are you going? I'm like, I'm going to Lake Como next week. He's like, oh my God. And he pointed at his shoes. He's like, this is where I got these shoes from, right? I never even asked him about the shoes. And he's like, yeah. These are these like super craftsman shoes. And these are shoes that typically you could probably buy them for like a grand or more. But he's selling them for like $100 to $150, right? There's this brand called Rolando in Lake Como. So anyway, I go to his store and then I buy from him. But then the hotel that I'm staying at is like a pretty decent hotel. And I noticed that there was this little— I don't know what to call it. It's like this little display of his shoes and like all the stuff that he makes. And every day I was walking by it. But then when you have like— I was just thinking about the hotel traffic. You have all these people that are doing pretty well in their lives to stay at that hotel, and they're just walking by that case every day, that display case, right? And then so I went back to the store and I asked him, I was like, how much are you paying for that advertisement per month right now? What do you think he's paying for that advertisement?

0% of sales instead?

No, no, he's paying— it's actually really good deals. I'm not going to reveal it, but he's basically paying like a couple thousand dollars a month, right? And if you think about it, if you're having, you know, pretty affluent people visit the store, like it pays for itself many times over. But not only that, Neil, he has a 4th generation store, which means, you know, his grandfather started the store, right? And then that hotel was also a 4th generation hotel too. So these connections go a long way. So it just kind of reinforces that, It's more about— sometimes it's about who you know, but also when you have a really good advertising budget, you blow it all on that ultimately, right? And then what ends up happening is— and, you know, there is— I was thinking about it, I was looking at the quality of the build, right? Like, sure, you can have private equity come in and then they could definitely charge 4 to 5x their price so they can definitely scale. But the other business lesson here is like, sometimes you don't need to scale. Like, I was doing the math on the business. I'm like, maybe he's making, you know, $4 or $5 million a year, maybe a little more than that. But if you're living in Lake Como, that's a beautiful lifestyle, right? You don't need it. You don't need much more than that. So some people might come in and say, okay, well, he could be charging a lot more. And that's true. But sometimes, you know, the trade-off from not scaling is you get to live a beautiful life and not have to deal with a lot of headaches. So those are just a couple lessons that I learned on this trip so far.

I thought Lake Como was expensive. I didn't know that a few million bucks gets you a long way in Lake Como. I thought real estate was just absurd.

Real estate's crazy. No, real estate's like $50 million plus if you want waterfront, like $90 million plus for like— there was a George Clooney— we drove by like a George Clooney lake house. And that one, he bought it for $10 million about 20 years ago or so. So it's definitely appreciated. You're talking $20 million plus for lakeside property.

Wow.

On a side note, did you watch the World Cup?

I did not watch the final. I just know— oh, let me— I have a few stories to share, but you go first.

Yeah, it was so A lot of people in North America, or specifically in the United States, a lot of people, as you know, don't watch soccer too often. The World Cup was extremely popular. Haaland was getting a ton of praises.

I don't know if you've seen all the Instagram posts of Haaland.

Like, someone will take a picture next to a cardboard cutout of him and he's like, if Haaland comments, I'm gonna lose 20 kilograms over the next 3 months, or something like that. And then he'll comment like, starting now, you know. And I would say he was a big winner of the World Cup from a marketing and brand standpoint. I think he's just very authentic. The word— the way he used— the way he adapted to not only American culture, but some of the funny stuff that he said, like with Dallas. I won't go into what he said, but you can assume what he said based on the name Dallas, or Him just working out and he was on like a bicycle, just pushing hard. He's just like, my body's tired, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he's like, my body's tired, but I know it's good for me, so I'm gonna do it. Why stop? You know, and people like, oh, this is how he thinks. Yeah, he's human just like everyone else, but he just keeps pushing it forward. But interesting enough, I watched the World Cup and I watched it with quite a few different people over the series. And the constant thing— I was watching a lot of the England games. You would see David Beckham, of course, because he's a big supporter and he's English. Everyone's just like, yeah, he's one of the best soccer players, he's super popular. They're correct on super popular. He is a good soccer player. But when people are like, he's one of the best, he isn't. I don't even think he ranks in the top 50 best playing players. But what's interesting is—

Of all time.

Of all time, yes. But because his brand is one of the biggest, people assume large brand equals big. And in marketing, we all strive for massive brands because we think massive brands create success. In Beckham's case, he has made a killing, but he made a killing due to his brand popularity, not necessarily being the best. And there are some cases where being the best or being the most popular makes you quite a bit of money. But in many cases in business and marketing, being well known doesn't necessarily equate to financial success. I get Beckham did really well because of his stardom, and he had a deal in which by playing in the US for MLS League, He had a deal where he could open up his own MLS team for pennies on the dollar. I think it was like $15 or $20 million. And he eventually, you know, cashed in on that deal. And he made a lot through sponsorships. And he was really popular. And his wife is really popular. She's a Spice Girl. But in business in generally, some of the most unknown companies that we work with are some of the biggest and most profitable and, you know, financially fast-growing companies. And all I'm getting at is, you know, being the most well-known doesn't guarantee financial success. An example that I can use for everyone here is a lot of you marketers know about Anthropic and Claude, but if you go around the world anywhere, OpenAI, specifically ChatGPT, is much more popular of a brand than Claude or Anthropic by far, right? And if you look at a lot of data, like you can look at Google Trends, let's see, I'll actually pull it up right now.

Let's do ChatGPT.

Which one should I use, Eric?

Claude or Anthropic? Let's go to—

You can type Claude. Claude is probably more popular. Do both.

Yeah.

Anthropic.

So to put it in perspective, if I just look at July's data, it looks like ChatGPT is a 77 on a popularity scale. Claude is a 19. Anthropic is at 3, yet Claude or Anthropic is crushing ChatGPT in revenue by far, right? And they're supposedly already profitable too. They may hit $100 million in— $100 billion, sorry, in revenue just alone this year, which is kind of ridiculous. So, you know, yeah, you can optimize to be super popular, but it's not everything.

Yeah. So I think, by the way, one of the things to call out too is when you— the issue that Anthropic/Claude is having right now is that they didn't bet hard enough on data centers, right? Meaning they're compute constrained right now. So when you look at OpenAI's Solve 5.6 right now, they're not compute constrained. They can offer it to everybody and they're letting you go to town on it, right? Whereas when you looked at Claude, Anthropic, a few weeks ago with Fable 5, Um, they're like, oh, we're gonna, you know, let you use it for a little bit and then we're gonna move you to usage-based, right? They can't do that anymore because if they do that, they're gonna be at a competitive disadvantage if they don't allow their best frontier model, um, available to the public. And so, um, they just made Fable 5 available to everyone. But, um, it just goes to show you, like, I think Dario from maybe a year or 2 years ago, he was just talking about how, um, you know, the problem with, you know, data center investing is that you don't know, like, you can actually end up like upside down, right? But the problem is they didn't do it. They didn't make the bet and look at where they are now. Now, I'm not saying that's an easy bet to make, but OpenAI did make those bets and now they have more compute, right? And so we'll see what ends up happening there. But Neil, I wanted to call out something else with the World Cup too. So one of our mutual friends, he was texting me because he was at the game, right? And he saw a group of my people, so Chinese people in front. It was like 4 daughters, right? And they're just all on their phone, right? They didn't care about the game. In fact, he kept taking pictures of the family and like they just disappeared. The 4 chairs disappeared. Then he saw a Chinese businessman right next to him. I'm assuming it's the father. And the father bet $1 million on the Spain game, right? He bet $1 million on Spain winning, right? And then when it went to extra time, he bet another $400 grand. So you have to assume this guy's probably a billionaire. And so all that to say is that our mutual friend was like, dude, this World Cup, it didn't seem like the final, that there was actually a lot of people that were interested, that were true fans of the game. These were people that just wanted to be there to be there. You know how typically people just want to go to the nice clubs or be at a summer Europe location, right? So it's like a place to be, a place to be seen, and it took away from the authenticity of the championship game.

I think that's actually with a lot of sporting events. So when I was at the Super Bowl, right, I did not care for the Super Bowl and I couldn't wait to go home.

You went to the Super Bowl? When'd you go to the Super Bowl?

I had the time to watch. Rams versus, was it, what is it called? Kansas City, I think it was.

Patriots?

A few years ago.

I think it was Kansas City. Was it Rams versus Kansas City?

Rams won.

Rams ended up, I forgot who they played a few years ago, but yeah.

Yeah, but But exactly, and I should know being that I was at the Super Bowl and I bought 6 tickets and they were literally in the dead center, very close to the field, right? So I spent an arm and a leg, but like, I look at that, I didn't want to end up being there. I was just like, man, I can't wait to go home.

So would you do it again? Like, did you get any value from being at the game?

No, I did that. I did the World Cup in Moscow. I think that was like 8 years ago or something like that. I took my dad, he wanted to go. And I started going to a lot of these finals because it was on my dad's bucket list, like he wanted to go. So same with Super Bowl, I ended up taking him and a few other people. But when I was doing that whole experience, I was like, man, this stuff isn't for me. It's a pain in the butt. We have a client, a really cool client called DHL. It's a shipping company that everyone knows. I was in Singapore, and when I was there for Singapore, F1 was going on, and DHL is one of the biggest sponsors of F1, and they're just like, hey, you should come and join us. We have amazing suite tickets, whatever you need. And I'm like, I'm good, this isn't for me. Like, you know, I appreciate the offer, but I've learned that a lot of the sporting events aren't for me. But every time I go to one of those finals and sporting events, no joke, most of the people I run into aren't there for the actual game.

Yeah, I think At least what you and I have learned in our— I guess we're crap in our 40s now, but even in our 30s too, I think you'd rather just be at home in the comfort of your home working because the working part is actually more exciting than being at the game versus being at the game to be seen is really not that interesting and frankly a waste of time. And I think a lot of people are like that. But by the way, no knock if you're a true fan of the game, but being there to be seen, I think, creates different incentives.

Yeah.

You know, it's just not your, your and I thing. And I think you have to think about, you know, what, what matters to you and be authentic to who you are. Anyway, one more thing to call out. So Neil, you mentioned you don't have to be the most like the best player in the NBA. So do you know who Junior Bridgeman is?

No.

Okay, so Junior Bridgeman is a former NBA player. So he played 12 seasons. And he's mostly like a 6th man or like a guy that was on the bench. Okay, he played Mostly for the Milwaukee Bucks, a little bit for the Los Angeles Clippers. So he never made more than $350,000 in a single season during his playing career. So keep in mind, this is in the '70s and '80s. But Neil, he ended up just buying a bunch of Wendy's franchises, okay? And eventually he grew his portfolio of Wendy's franchises to 450 fast food locations. He has a bunch of Wendy's and Chili's.

Wow.

And he basically ended up selling all his restaurant holdings to become a massive Coca-Cola bottler and distributor to a bunch of states. And then he ended up amassing a net worth of $1.4 billion, so making him one of the few 10-figure former NBA players. So you have Michael Jordan, obviously, you have LeBron James, but then you have Junior Bridgeman, who actually passed away last year, so rest in peace. But he basically, like, he just kept compounding over time. So it's kind of similar to David Beckham, but David Beckham was always really popular, but he was just never quite the best, you know, so.

Yeah, and don't get me wrong, he's extremely talented in the field of soccer, And he's done well in business. He's, you know, like I was watching the England game because I sent my dad there. So I was watching TV and my dad's like, watch me, maybe I'll go on TV. And I'm like, Dad, no one's going to end up showing you. But they're showing Beckham. And you're talking about it was extremely hot and this guy's just wearing suits every time he's at any of the England games. And I started Googling, why the heck does he wear— why does he wear suits? And it was answering He's very particular on his style and his image and how people perceive him. And he's well off. And I was like, man, I would never wear a suit just for image if it's hot. Like, what's the point? But hey, you know, he's where he is because he's David Beckham.

Well, let me tell you something. So here in Italy right now, whenever you go outside, it's hot, right? And it's humid, and they're wearing suits all the time. Now, the thing is this, right? Like, that it is a brand image thing. And it is like, I'm sure these people don't want to be wearing suits because these are people working there. But you do have businessmen kind of like riding their bikes around or driving in cars. And it's an image thing, right? I think it's just, again, it goes back to being authentic to yourself and deciding what's important to you. But going back to Beckham, like, he was always popular, but he wasn't, he wasn't always the best player necessarily, right? But that being said, if you think about What he's done so far. So, you look at IM8, right? That's the fastest growing supplement brand right now. They just raised $1 billion. And in fact, one of the co-founders, Danny, he listens to this podcast. So, shout out to Danny. But do you know how he got the billion? And I don't even know if it's okay for me to share this, but— so, I probably won't share it. You already shared it. Danny, if you're okay with me sharing it, I'll share it. I didn't share it yet though.

Okay.

So, here's what I'll say. I'll say this. And maybe I'll get in trouble for saying this. So Danny, let me, let me, um, like, sorry if this reveals anything, but basically he was gonna get half, um, half a billion dollars. Okay, so what ended up happening is like, he, and he was like, why not a billion? Right? So that's how he got the billion dollars. He's like, because a billion sounds a lot better than half a billion dollars, right? Or like $500 million. He's like, why not just a billion? So sometimes when you think about— yeah.

I'm confused. So he went to go raise money Okay. Is he raising money to sell portion of the company or raising it to use to grow faster or both?

So they raised the billion dollars to grow faster because they're growing so fast right now as the world's leading supplement brand, basically, or one of the leading supplement brands, one of the fastest growing, I should say.

What the heck do they need a billion dollars for?

That's for them, growth capital. Let's just put it that way.

I wonder who they raised it from. Takes billion dollars from General Catalyst.

General Catalyst. Wow.

Custom Value Fund, the company announced today, CH does not meet standard for offers. They didn't raise a billion dollars. They took a loan for a billion dollars.

Great. Well, let's just— they got some capital. Let's just put it that way. I didn't even see the terms of the deal. What do you see right now?

I know they took a billion in funding from General Catalyst.

VF fund, which is a customer value fund, and they don't make standard venture equity investments, but offers what are essentially loans with some non-traditional repayment terms so that way they can just use the cap money to just keep going. So startups funded by CFE repay the loan amount along with a fixed cap percentage of revenue they generate.

Yep. So my point of saying this all is that David Beckham is a very good businessman, right? He's partnered with amazing guys and that he's not, by the way, he's not just used as a celebrity endorsement. He actually is involved with the business from what I read. Danny, feel free to correct me on any of this and we're happy to talk more about this and reveal kind of the story more. But Junior Bridgeman, okay, wasn't necessarily the best but became a great businessman. Like he kept compounding over time. Michael Jordan, he was the best. He kept compounding. LeBron James, one of the best. Kobe Bryant, one of the best. They kept compounding over time. Shaq, right? One of the best big men in the game, kept compounding. And so all that to say is that going back to Neil's point, you don't necessarily have to be the best in the game. You just need to continue to be interested and continue to compound. So that's all we're trying to say ultimately.

So IM8, did you know, is owned by his other company that's public, Prenetics?

Yep.

So yeah, I didn't know that.

I thought it was a— it is another company, but it's owned by him.

And they may keep the revenue separate, but Prenetics has quarterly revenue of $35.95 billion.

Yeah, so Prenetics was the publicly traded company that Danny founded that was a COVID testing company that became really big during COVID And they just kind of nested IM8 under it. So I don't know what's going to happen. Then, but Neil, I want to show you something real quick. So I don't know how strong my internet's going to hold up here, but I wanted to pull this up to kind of get our reaction on this. So I don't know if you saw this. I'm pulling it up right now. Give me one second here.

So here we go. Let me share my screen and let me go over here. Okay, so here we go.

All right, you see this?

Yeah, I can see it. Okay, great.

So Sahil, the founder of Gumroad, apparently he works for the IRS now, but he has an agent that's running Gumroad right now. Okay, so June 2026 was the first month that Gumroad spent equal amounts on AI tokens and human payroll. So if you see this over here, AI token spend is in the pink, and then in the black, that's human payroll. So you can see in June 2026, the payroll was $43,000. And the AI token spend was $43,000. So it was equal. But if you go to June 2025, it's $203,000 in human payroll, W-2 plus contractors. AI token spend was $13,000 for that month, right? And then before, obviously, the human payroll token was a lot more. So this one, I mean, it got a lot of engagement. I think Garry Tan even retweeted saying this is going to be the future. So my take on this right now is I think we're going to continue to see this go up. Maybe it'll reach parity, or maybe for a lot of companies it'll be half. But I don't know. You know, I don't know how fast it's going to be. Like, I think we're going to see this become a lot more common, but it's just, it's just a matter of how fast it's going to happen. So what's your reaction to this?

Yeah, I'm curious to see what happens at a company of scale, right? I'm not saying he doesn't have a big company. I don't know too much about Gumroad, but if his payroll is— it looks like $43,000 in a month from my terrible eyes at this point. I'm guessing his company is not at scale.

Yeah, so the highest it got to was about $400 grand in scale, which is, you know, let's call it $4.8 million a year, right, um, in, in, in payroll. So, you know, it's, it's dropped quite a bit, um, from the $200 grand to $43. But also keep in mind, in the last year he got this job at the IRS, right? And so, um, he's— he claims that Gumroad's being run by this Gumclaw right now, which is like, you can just call— he's saying it's run by this AI. I don't know if that's the case because I actually bookmarked another post from a guy saying, oh, I'm the human that actually runs this. So I don't know what's true and what isn't. But I think this is the start of, you know, we're going to start to see more and more of this over time. Maybe it's not going to be equal, but it's going to become much more significant.

Yeah, I'm curious to see what ends up happening. Did you ever watch the Elon Musk Economist interview?

No. So I saw clips of it. Can you talk about what you saw? I didn't see the whole thing. Did you see the whole thing?

I did. The majority of the interview is not like the clips. So like the clips are taking like the hot takes on like them asking about race and what he thinks about people who are Muslim, or they're asking him about AI and it's the future, or they're asking about Doge and if anyone ever died because of the cuts he made from USAID. You know, I'm not trying to get into the politics here, but that wasn't the majority of the interview. The majority of the interview was on AI, where it's going to go. And he made some comments, some of them it's obvious. But it really hit me watching the interview. Like, he was talking about how he's responsible for a lot of what's happening in AI. And you think about it, he was a co-founder of OpenAI. Dario worked at OpenAI. That team spun out and created Anthropic, right? He was the one who poached the guy from Google because he believed they had a monopoly on AI at that time. So, but like, it really just hit me that I'm like, huh, Elon is actually responsible for a lot of the stuff that we're seeing in AI, whether it's directly or indirectly. And, uh, you know, his big whole thing was— and, and I think he's off on this— but his big whole thing was within 10 years you won't need any money, um, you won't have to worry, everyone will be on extremely high universal, uh, you know, income, and there'll be abundance of everything and there'll be deflation. I'm not saying he's Not wrong on the concept, but it's not as simple to go— it's like, who's going to pay for it? Even if you go to a world where there is no currency that's needed and government debt somehow miraculously gets paid off or whatever, they figure it out. I'm not saying you can't have this utopia that he's talking about, and he did say it's going to be a bumpy road to get there. What I think is really off is— or let me actually reverse it. What I think is really fascinating, his view of the future, and I think he is correct that a lot of it can happen. Well, I think he's really off on his timelines, on when he thinks that things can happen, because there's a lot of things that stand in his way, such as the government, right? Regulation, people getting in the way from that aspect can really slow him down. Uh, Or the whole industry down. The other thing that can slow things down is people coming out with a pitchfork. You know, The Economist talked about 70+% of people are worried about AI, and I do agree. If you talk about the majority of the people who don't have tons of money and they're worried for their jobs, forget what the future could look like, they're going to be coming out with pitchforks, right? That is just the real reality if there's that much displacement. Assuming people don't have a way to buy food or have a home. And, you know, we just as a society can't figure that out. I would say one of the most interesting things for me listening to that interview as a marketer is when he was talking about Dario and Mythos and how he was really afraid of Mythos and felt it was really scary. And then— when he released it, you know, there was issues with releasing it. And Elon's like, yeah, you got to choose your words more carefully. If you're talking about how you're scared or afraid of something and then you want to release something, of course people are going to be afraid as well. And, you know, he was talking about how some of these guys need to choose their words more carefully when it comes to AI because it's creating a lot of quote-unquote fear in the market, but it's self-inflicted fear from them. And then they get upset or not happy that things don't necessarily get released when they want, but they created the fear.

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And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. But also keep in mind, Neil, we've talked about this on this podcast, but the reality is the majority of Americans are afraid of AI. But when you look at the Chinese, the Chinese are, the majority of them are, I think I think it's 87% are net positive on AI, right? So it is about how we market it internally. And to your point, when you have some of the top AI players like Adario, for example, talking about how it's going to cause so much trouble and this and that, of course you're going to get people paying attention, right? Oh, this model is very powerful. It's too powerful. It causes a lot of fearmongering. But here's the challenge now. You have a KIMI, the newest version of KIMI, which I think it might be KIMI 3, but that version is almost as powerful— they're claiming as powerful as like a Fable 5, or a 5.6. Even if it's not right now, eventually the open source models are going to become as powerful. But then at that point, what do you do? Because you had OpenAI, their strong Frontier model actually hacked Hugging Face a couple days ago or so, as of this recording. And so when you do stuff like that, and by the way, when Hugging Face was trying to defend themselves using the Frontier models, the Frontier models locked themselves down and saying, we can't defend you. And so at a certain point, you have to decide what's more important. And I think Dario, for example, is like, oh, the open source models, they're trying to kind of regulate them away, but you can't do that. I think you need to have a free market. You need to have an open market and then let people choose what they want to choose and let them go from there. But all this regulation stuff right now, I think the genie's out of the bottle and you can't really stop it at this point. If you want to stop it, you have to shut it down completely and you can't now. Yeah, so my point is on OpenAI and Anthropic and Hugging Face is you don't want to let governments do the regulating. You want to let the free market play itself out. And I know it's not very black and white, but majority of the time you want to let the free market play itself out. And when you do this negative kind of fearmongering marketing and you get an entire population, like an entire nation like the United States, being fearful of it, and then when you have like a foreign adversary like the Chinese, they're net positive on it 87%. You know, who's going to end up being ahead in the next couple of years or so? Right. That's really the question that I'm posing. So that being said, Neil, let's, let's move to the next thing. What has been happening in your world in the last couple couple of days.

Dude, for me, I haven't been traveling as much, and I'm not used to it. Like, it is a weird feeling to not travel for work, but it's also kind of really nice to just be at home. I haven't had this experience in a very long time to stay weeks at home without having to be on the road. But I have to say, I kind of like it. I like it so much so that I thought about every country that I had to travel to for work. And I was like, should I just buy a business there that I can integrate and make us at scale so I don't even have to travel anymore? And then I was like, well, knowing me, I would do that. And then I would travel more to try to make it even grow faster. But, you know, I was I'm genuinely thinking so much so, dude, that for anyone listening, this is our second time trying to record this podcast this week.

I have been, uh, I've been waking up super early, uh, to talk with companies to potentially acquire them in the regions that I travel to very often.

And I was like, oh, this is worth a shot. I'm like, I wonder, you know, what would happen. if I did this. So I just thought it would—

it was an interesting experience being at home, and I kind of can see how people like being at home. I do have to say this, I don't actually get as much work done at home versus on the road, but I still like it.

That's interesting. So by the way, if those of you that have been listening to this podcast for a while, if you look at the ebbs and flows of this podcast, you'll see that There'll be times where I'm traveling a lot. Neil's always been traveling quite a bit, but there was a period of time where he's like, you know, I'm over it, no more traveling, right? And then he stops for a little bit and he starts to back up again. And in this case, he's like, oh, it's nice being home. And he's like, maybe I'll buy some companies and stay home. But it's like, no, it's like, it's always— there's the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and there's the ups and downs of, you know, how you make decisions can change from time to time on a dime. And Jeff Bezos was very famous for doing that, right? And his whole thing was— If you're not changing your mind often, then maybe you're not that smart of a person.

Yeah. And I wouldn't say I'm smarter or anything like that, but I probably do change my mind on some of these things too often.

Buying companies, if I get a good deal, I never really change my mind on that because that's just financial.

Those are the easiest black and white things for me to decide on and control. But yeah, no, it's It's— that's been my last few weeks. The other thing that I've been spending a lot of time on is organic growth, you know, and when I say organic growth, it's like basic things like what can we do to grow our tools faster?

And when I look at our SaaS division, people are like, oh, there's massive churn. I was like, okay, then what can we do to go after enterprise, right? So some of it is email sequences, some of it is cold calling, some of it is Just figuring out the right scripts and testing new things out. Some of it is lead comes in, so a portion more qualified, me just calling every single one up and trying to sell them on an enterprise package and see what happens. But I've been focusing more on fine-tuning, and what I found is when you don't travel as much, you can just be more in the weeds on certain things that you can't do when you're traveling as much, like cold calling. So I've been spending a lot of time just fine-tuning a lot of different aspects of our sales pitches, our marketing. It's been fun, interesting, but fun.

Yeah. So I'll share kind of the other side. Neil and I were talking about this over the weekend, but let's say we're talking to investors, right? And there's been interesting conversations around or interesting takeaways around the single brain side of things, right? And so one thing I learned through this process is that a lot of companies are trying to— they're trying to build this right now, right? Which actually shows there's market demand for this. But I found that one of the firm's questions was— let's just say that I think when you ask this question today, it's probably not the smartest use of a question because the question was, if anybody can build this right now, what is the moat? And so when I was asked that question during this process, I still answered it, right? I was still very calm about it. But I think This question has to be tweaked a little bit because it's used quite a bit from, from VCs over the years. And so in the past, you might say, well, if everybody can build this, what is the moat? Well, today, because you can vibe code and you can build everything a lot easier, it's like my answer to that question was, well, if anybody and everybody is building right now, who's going to maintain this stuff, right? Who's going to maintain it? Who's going to optimize it? Who's going to upgrade it? In fact, what we said before on this podcast is that If people are going to be building a lot more stuff, then more people are going to be hired, right? You're going to need more services at the end of the day. Like these, you know, people might poo-poo on agencies or services in general, but you're going to need a lot more. So that was my answer to that question. Neil and I were kind of talking about it over the last few days. And I think if anything, I'm grateful for this one firm because they did the customer research for me. What they did was they talked to all their portfolio companies and they talked to maybe like they talked to maybe 3, 3 of their CEOs in the portfolio companies, not all of them. And the CEO's like, oh, uh, we're gonna try to, you know, build this ourselves right now. And, you know, they'll see how it goes, right? But that actually reinforces to me that one, there's a demand for this stuff, but two, don't go after the companies that have the engineering teams or engineering resources already that are maybe, um, tech startups. Uh, maybe go after traditional companies. Um, like we have like a 9-figure custom homes, um, you know, business that we work with, right? And, um, you know, they're the types that need this stuff because They might not have the engineering resources or the know-how around this. And that's what I thought was interesting. Like, they did some customer validation for me already, which I'm grateful for.

Yeah. And I think you nailed it too. It's just like I talk to my brother-in-law frequently enough and, you know, he'll talk to me and tell me things like, you guys don't use Zoom? Or he'll be like, you guys don't use Slack?

He's like, everyone here in the Bay uses Zoom, or everyone here uses Slack.

I tend to focus on getting contracts from companies and marketing to companies that are not on Slack and are not on Zoom.

A lot of the companies on those 2 things are more tech-ish startups, and a lot of them have venture funding, and a lot of them believe they can do everything themselves, whether it's true or not, yet to be seen. And I think it's more company by company.

But culturally, a lot of them believe that they need to figure it out or they can do a lot of that stuff.

On the flip side though, when we go after people who are on Outlook and they use Teams, a lot of them are large, older enterprises that are just more flexible paying people to get stuff done than, you know, than trying to do everything on their own.

And I think that is super important to realize that and target the right type of people because Not everyone wants to do everything themselves. You know, I've met people who are like, with AI, I no longer need a Salesforce. We're just building it ourselves.

Most of the people that tell me that narrative are startups or tech-enabled companies.

The bigger companies that we work with, I would never see them do any of that kind of stuff, and they wouldn't care to. They're like, it's so cheap compared to our overall revenue. I'd rather just focus on something more important than reinventing the wheel and saving a million bucks a year.

Yep, 100%. So by the way, I don't know if you saw this, Neal, but did you see that Netflix paid $587 million in cash for Ben Affleck's AI startup? Did you see that?

I did. I liked it and I was like, good for him. He was one of the co-founders and it was all cash. Like, as you mentioned, it was a good deal. Good for him.

Yeah. So I'm going to give the audience here a little background. So this startup was called Inner Positive and it was built built in stealth since 2022. So, um, here I'm gonna talk about what it does at a high level, and then I'm going to talk about what the takeaway here is, and we can react to it. So, um, here's the thing. When you think about AI in Hollywood, so this— what Inner Positive does is it doesn't generate new footage from text prompts. It trains a custom AI model on specific— on a specific film's own raw footage, from the lighting, the lenses, the camera, the angles, the color, the style, right? And then it helps fix and enhance that footage in post-production. It handles relighting shots. It does— each project has its own model. And then basically Affleck made it because existing AI tools didn't understand how real films are made, right? So obviously he does. But the main thing here is this: it's an AI filmmaker. So it's basically an AI tool for filmmakers. And Netflix bet half a billion dollars on how Hollywood's going to adopt to AI by not replacing creators, but giving them better tools, right? So the key takeaway, I believe, in this case, in terms of Ben Affleck selling his, um, his AI startup for $587 million in cash, is that, you know, when you're building specific tools, like vertical tools, um, when you really understand the— when you understand the craft and you understand the ins and outs of it, you're going to know how to build something that, um, is valuable to that industry, right? Versus someone like saying, oh, if anybody can build it, like if an intern were to build this right now, they wouldn't have that experience, um, and they wouldn't know necessarily what to adjust with the product, where to start with the product, and all these other things, right? So I think that industry experience becomes more and more important in a world where you have all these like open source models, frontier models becoming powerful in their own right. So I think we're going to see that in marketing for sure. We're going to see that in sales. We're going to see that— we're going to see that in design. We're going to see that everywhere.

I definitely do believe we're going to end up seeing it everywhere too. And What was interesting when Affleck, Ben Affleck, ended up talking about it, he mentioned how his goal is to also protect humans from his, you know, and people in the film industry with what he's creating and not just try to replace humans.

Yep.

So let me pull up the next thing.

Give me one second. Which I think is important from a marketing role too, right?

It's just like If you're reliant on a big group of people and you're in that industry, and then you tell them, hey, I'm trying to build something that just replaces all of you, I think it just goes against you.

Then you have people inherently who are rooting against your company from day one.

So let's see. So I wanted to call out this next thing. This is Chamath Palihapitiya posted this. So basically, there's a— I don't know what has happened. This happened about 4 days ago or so. But basically, there's a tweet about how the Trump administration is considering restricting cutting-edge Chinese AI models with momentum reviving after the launch of Kimmy K. $3 per Axios. And so Chamath tweets this and he's like, the Lady AI already has forked into 2 options. So A is closed-source American that costs $26 to $56 per 1 million tokens. And then B is open-weight Chinese that costs $0.50 to $1 per 1 million tokens, right? And so his whole thing is like, if you force American companies to spend 50 to 100x more than their competitors abroad, basically it's— he's like, this is the equivalent of the US government saying we can only buy oil at $800 a barrel, even when the free market sells some of the same oil for $80 $80 a barrel. So it actually makes us, um, you know, we have to fight headwinds and it makes us less competitive. Um, and so, you know, he also said that in the short term, the revenues of the closed American labs maybe remain high, but the revenue will also crater because their customers in the US will be impaired and their customers abroad will have already flipped to cheaper solutions. So because you and I both have a business tied to this right now, and, you know, our business does spend on tokens, uh, what is your thought on, on this overall?

Companies will figure out how to use the cheapest and best solution for them, no matter where it is in the world.

Like, for example, if a US company is banned, I don't know the legalities. Can my European company use it? Can my Singaporean company use it? Can my Hong Kong company use it? I'll figure out how to end up making it the most efficient for my business. If I don't, my competitors will, and because their costs will be way lower than mine, they will displace us.

So we'll figure it out.

So Reid Hoffman, one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, he basically tweeted something around building a network, right? And I'm struggling to pull up the tweet right now, but I wanted Neil and I to— because we continue to get asked this question. I know I frequently get asked this question. I remember when Ali Abdaal was interviewing me on his podcast, he asked me the question like, how do you know these people, right? So, I think more important than ever now, maybe we want to talk about how to effectively build a network. And I think, Neil, we should start from scratch here, right? And so, I think if you're starting in like high school or college right now, because there's kids that are entrepreneurs in high school and college, how do you start from there? How do you start as, you know, like a, you know, someone that's coming out of the workforce? Maybe you're going from an employee to an entrepreneur and you want to build a network or you just want to build a network in general, right? You know, I'll kick it off first because I actually see people doing this right now. And then we can talk about what we— how we built our networks, Neal. So one thing that I see is that kids right now are going to college not because college is necessarily valuable from an education standpoint, but it's valuable from a networking standpoint. Right. And so, like, if you go to Stanford or Harvard, for example, the network is going to be very strong. It's very prestigious.

Yeah.

But also, even if you go to like a lower-tier university, I don't think it's a bad thing. Like, you're going to meet amazing people. Maybe these are people that you can partner up with in the future. I think about— I'm reading this book right now called Thinking Machines, which talks about Jensen Huang. And, you know, he still remembers a lot of his colleagues from whether it's from college, right? He still remembers those people. He even remembers his best friends from when he was coming out of like, I think it was like a boarding school, right?

Yeah.

So, all that to say is that maybe if you're in high school or college right now, maybe you can think about going to college and think about building your network that way. That's certainly a way to do it. I would just say that my preference would be that you're actually building and shipping things online, that you're building things in public so other people can discover you. Maybe you can work for other companies for free to begin with, and then you can start building a professional network that way. And then you start to get invited to events, you start to hang out at events. But I think one of the best ways is to actually start to build, right? Because you have no experience right now, people will start to notice you online. As you start to build, you start to gain more experience and you start to build interesting things, people will notice you, right? Whether it's potential job opportunities or potential friendship opportunities or potential speaking opportunities. Content's done a lot for both Neil and myself over the years, which is why we continue to make this podcast. So that's the starting point, Neil. I'll let you— I'll move over my monologue to your monologue now.

So I look at networking as something very hard to build by just wanting to build a network.

I know some, some people are just great at mingling and are social butterflies, but the way I look at building a network is you build a network by not inherently trying to build a network. You build a network by doing things that are valuable and helpful to others. So whether it's creating content like Eric mentioned, whether it's being in one specific industry and trying to grow it, and that could be growing it by speaking at conferences or paying for booths or going to events and talking with other people. When you naturally run your business, whether it's you or people on your team, you should naturally be building your network as well. I don't think it's actually hard to get to know a lot of people. I think most people do that without really realizing that they do that. The big gap isn't getting to know a lot of new people. It's actually building deep relationships so you can leverage that network. And the issue that you have is most people will meet someone, they don't follow up. They don't try to get to know them. Okay, so I'll give you a real-life example from the other day. So a few days ago, my kids are entering this box cart derby. Like, you build a car out of wood and then you end up racing them. And my kids did that last year in Beverly Hills. My daughter placed second, my son placed third. This year there'll be more competition. It's growing in popularity every single year. So they're splitting up by age groups. this year versus the previous year. And while we were building the boxcars, you paint them, you put decoration and glitter on them, you put iron plate on them to try to make it go faster, and you have to figure out where's the right area to put the iron plate. And during this whole process, my daughter gets her hands really dirty with paint. So, my wife looks at the table over next to us, and there's some wipes. And remember, Beverly Hills set up every single table that people were building cars on with a lot of random stuff. Our table didn't have wipes. So, my wife goes over to the next table, takes some of the wipes, and washes my daughter's hands. Now, during this process, she quickly realized that someone was sitting on the table. This is after she pulled the wipes. And the wipes were brought by them and they weren't actually provided by the city. So right away she apologizes. She said she's sorry. She felt bad. The other table didn't care. They had kids. You know, when you have a family and you have— you meet another family, they're usually almost always helpful. They were a nice couple. And as we're going through the process and building the boxcars, and I was focusing on my sons, my wife was focusing on the daughters. The guy from that table who we took the wipes from comes to me, he's like, hey, are you Neil Patel? I was like, yeah. He's just like, oh, I used to, you know, be part of ClickBank University. I was like, oh cool, you live here in Beverly Hills? He's like, yeah, I was able to walk here. He's like, yeah. I'm like, yeah, I live close by as well. And I was like, oh, we should trade numbers. Now, I didn't just do this because we took wipes from their table. I didn't actually do it at all because of that. I don't know much about him. I don't know what he does. He lives in the city. And I said, oh, we should meet up. So I took— I'm like, you have iPhone? He said yes. Took out my iPhone, he took out his. We bumped so that trades numbers. And then from there I texted him. I'm like, hey, we should do lunch. And we've been texting back and forth. We haven't been able to figure out a date because when I'm traveling and busy, he's here. When I'm here, he's on a family vacation. I was like, we should just grab lunch and And get to know each other. And I think that's the key. People don't spend enough time actually building real relationships. And I'm not saying this guy is rich. I'm not saying he's poor. I'm not saying he's successful or not successful. I'm saying I don't know. And honestly, I don't really care. I'm just meeting other people and I'm trying to get to know other genuine people for who they are and what they do. Because no matter where people are in life, Mm-hmm. you can always learn something from them. The second thing is you also don't know who those people are connected to. So there's a guy on X, Matt something. I think, Eric, you follow him as well, or he follows you. I've talked to him quite a bit, and I'll give you a real-life example from this, Eric. Matt, where is he? Matt Gray. Have you followed Matt Gray on X?

Yep.

So I met Matt at a mastermind and we were sitting and he was a paid attendee and I was getting paid to speak. Matt runs a business. I don't know what size of his business he runs, but he's pretty public about it. My business is larger than his. Doesn't mean I'm smarter than him or anything. And he's calling me for advice. I remember sitting down with Matt at that mastermind and somewhere in Mexico. Matt's just like, oh, what are you trying to do? And we're talking about some businesses. I'm like, man, I really want to buy one of my competitors, but they're owned by Hearst and there's just no way they'll sell them. He's like, dude, I know the person in charge at Hearst, or I know a buddy of mine knows a person in charge of Hearst and he can get you an introduction and they'll tell you if they'll either sell the business to you or not. So he gets me the introduction. I talk to the person And at Hearst, right, the Hearst family is one of the richest families in the world. They own like part of ESPN and a lot of big businesses. He, no joke, tells me, all right, what business do you want to acquire that we own? All right, let me think about it and I'll get back in touch with you. They were not interested in selling it at the end of the day, but he got me in touch with the right person. It doesn't matter how successful someone is or how unsuccessful they are or where they are in the journey. You don't know who other people know and what doors they can open up for you. And you should genuinely take the time to get to know others. And the key is to not just get to know them because, oh, they can help me out in this area or another. It's more so get to genuinely know them, figure out where their problems are, and help them wherever you can. And don't worry what they can do for you. And it all works its way out in the end. That's truly how you just build a big network.

Here, so I'm gonna give a couple examples on how you can build a network here. So When I think about you and me, for example, right, it was me reading your blog posts, okay? And you and I started talking on Skype, and then we met at Taco Bell, and then, you know, things continued to go from there. Okay, well, in that case, you were writing a blog post, I was reading, I was trying to learn, right? So I was doing something. Now, when you think about one of our mutual friends, like, let's use like a Syed, for example, right? So Syed, very, very successful on his own, right? Owns a bunch of, you know, WordPress businesses. How did I meet him? Well, when I was working as a director of marketing for an online education startup, I had messaged Syed asking for a link, right? But from there, him and I ended up at the same mastermind maybe 5 or 6 years later, something like that. And he walked up to me at the mastermind, we started talking and we became fast friends, right? But in both cases, I was doing something. He had something that he was doing something interesting too, right? And then we both were doing something at a mastermind, right? It goes back to what Neil was just saying. Now, let's look at one of our other mutual friends, Yaniv, for example, right? So, he listened to my original podcast, Growth Everywhere, now called Leveling Up, and then he invited me to speak at his conference, right? And then, you know, what eventually happened was that he invited both Neil and I to speak at his conference, and then Neil became a friend of Yaniv's as well, right? But all these friends that I have, I'll use one more example here, like David Hensel, okay? So, he is a guy that met me in a computer game that I was playing when I was 12 years old and he was 21 years old, okay? In all of these occasions, so everyone's an entrepreneur now, everyone's done well for themselves, um, but we're all just doing something and trying to get better. And when you're doing something, you're trying to get better, you're going to meet like-minded people. And I think that's the main thing, whether it's a mastermind, whether it's a conference, whether it's a podcast, you want to find like-minded people who are trying to get better every single day. And that's what it is. And by the way, if you're doing something, you're hanging out at a club all the time, you're partying all the time, if you're— what kind of people are you going to meet? Right? It just depends on your goals ultimately. And if you're just focused on meeting people doing interesting things around business and you want to grow your business, well then that will probably grow your business. If you meet party people, you're probably going to grow your partying skills, but maybe that's not going to help your ultimate goal. So that's what I think about it. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called MP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. 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, totally. But it's just like, don't expect to build an amazing network in 6 months or a year, even 2, 3 years. It takes like 10+ years to build an amazing network, and people just don't want to put in the effort. But if you look at it as like, I'm building a network, It becomes tiresome and you're not going to do a good job. But if you're just going out there and just being you and doing business and trying to be helpful and maintain your relationships, you'll build a network without even trying. That's the reality for most people.

Yep. So that, by the way, it's most people that try to build a network just to build a network. And most people that are professional networkers, like I used to go to all these networking events, it kind of feels— it feels very transactional. You're just handing out your card all the time. I would just see people in the room walking around, handing out their business cards as quickly as possible. You're better off going deeper with maybe just 1 or 2 people max instead of trying to hand your card to 20 different people or 30 different people that aren't going to remember you. And by the way, business and more so networking and relationships is more about giving more than you get. And if you can nail down that equation where you're giving a lot more than you're getting, like 4 to 1, something like that, you're going to do a lot better. So anyway, wanted to cover that piece because I thought it would be a good one for people. Yeah.

And then Eric has a topic here, which I thought was really interesting as well on the sheet. Solve 5.6 versus Fable 5, what's better for marketing?

Yep. So I basically ran a test and your mileage may vary. In fact, I think your mileage may definitely vary. So Neil, have you done like a head-to-head test yet or no?

I have not.

Okay.

So I'm going to speak to this and then we can react to this. So I basically, so I ran a test with Solve 5.6 versus Fable 5 to test which one's better for marketing. And I actually was really surprised by the results. And so Soll 5.6 is ChatGPT, obviously Fable 5 is owned by Anthropic. These are the frontier models as of this recording. And so when I tried Soll 5.6 for a, like, analysis on the best— if I were an investor, how would I— what bets would I choose if I were running Amazon? Okay, so Fable 5 said it would bet on the same-day grocery service for Amazon, right, as like an investment. They would like bet all in if they're running Amazon. Sol 5.6 was like, I would bet all in on the Amazon, uh, the supply chain service that they just launched recently where you can basically use their infrastructure to, uh, ship out more, um, ship out goods, right, using their infrastructure. And then it, it kind of outlined how big the industry was. Um, so I'm just saying from like a technical analysis point or like an investment analysis point, um, Sol 5.6 chose the one that had the bigger opportunity, whereas Feeble 5 missed the big opportunity. So that's one that I reward to just Solve 5.6 to start. Okay. So number 2, what I did, Neil, was I had— and I wish I could share my screen right now, but I had Fable 5 make a website and I had Solve 5.6 make a website. The thing is Solve 5.6, it made the website, which is like a scrolling website, meaning that every time you scrolled your mouse down, it would zoom in into this world, the world would get bigger and bigger and bigger. And it did it in one shot. Fable 5 kept asking me more and more questions. And so as I continued to run more and more of these tests, I realized that Solve 5.6 is like the employee that you just tell it to do it and it just does it. Whereas Fable 5 always has to keep asking you questions back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, right? Which is really annoying. And by the way, Solve 5.6 is cheaper too. The third example I'll give is that when it came to making thumbnails, I just told Solve 5.6, I was like, hey, take the transcript. So for example, us recording this Marketing School right now, I can just take the transcript and I just say, hey, Solve 5.6, look at my YouTube channel. And take this transcript and I want you to make the thumbnails. And literally we published those thumbnails and they're getting like a 6-7% click-through rate, which is good for B2B. Whereas Fable 5, it failed, right? It needed a lot more context and it needed a lot more connectors. And again, it was just like, it was too much back and forth, right? So I can't remember the 4th example off the top of my head right now. But based on my— I've read 4 different, 5 different tests. And keep in mind, it's just one person. I found that Sol 5.6 was not only cheaper, but it got the job done faster without all the back and forth.

So you would say Sol is better?

I find myself using Sol 5.6 a lot more now because Fable 5 is a lot more token hungry. And by the way, I'm not going to say that Fable 5 is bad. You can definitely use it. It's really good for planning. It's really good for adversarial code reviews and things like that. But since I've been using ChatGPT more in the last few months with Codex, I find it to be more convenient for me. And the skills that I'm making, all these things, like ChatGPT's image gen is really good as well. Fable 5 and Claude in general, I just, I don't use that harness as much. And this might be different for someone that uses the harness a lot more when it comes to Claude.

Yeah, dude.

Yeah, it's, it's an AI I've always seen with these models, never to get hooked on one. One company will have a better model one month and the next one someone else reduces, releases a better model and then you just end up going back and forth. And then what you end up finding is different models are better at different things and your team just adapts. But I think the key here is don't get— don't have your marketing reliant on one model. Or one company and their stack. Things change. You need to adapt with it, especially in AI. It's like every week shit changes.

So, Neal, let me, let me show you something real quick. I don't know if I can— I'm going to share my screen with you real quick.

So can you see this?

Yeah, I can see it.

Okay, so not, not bad, right? Like, basically, by the way, this is just me talking to ChatGPT. I was like, hey, by the way, shouldn't all the Claude icons be Fable 5 icons instead? And it's just going back and forth. These are the thumbnails. So, and I'm sharing my screen right now so those of you watching can see it. But Neil, do you see like these thumbnails? They aren't— I wouldn't say they're the best in the world, but they're not bad, right?

Yeah, you just whipped them out. They're not terrible.

Yeah, I whipped them out. So 6-7% click-through rate is not bad. And by the way, when I asked it to switch the Claude logo over here, it switched it to the Fable 5 one. Like, this looks pretty legit, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Okay, so let me, let me show you more. When I go back to my profile, I actually can pull up the examples here on SAW 5 versus Fable 5 over here. Okay, so 5.6, what's better for marketing? So basically this website that I'm sharing right now, this was the world that it made. One took about 30 minutes. What the other one took about a couple hours or so. So Solve 5.6 took about 30 minutes to make this website, and this is what it looks like. So Neil, keep in mind when you're zooming on the site, it goes deeper and deeper and deeper for for single brain over here that you can see, and for thumbnails, you can see the difference with the thumbnails over here. So these look pretty good, I would say. And then oh, by the way, Neil, it did a really good job. Okay, this is the fourth thing. So when it comes to clipping for marketing school, I said, "Hey, I want you to put a hook at the beginning of each of these," and then here's the entire export. So I could literally take this export that we're doing right now, and it'll basically find like 10 different moments, um, and it'll put the hook in the beginning, and then— because you need to hook into the, the, the user, right? And then it'll put the meat of the content, and it'll have a transcription. I used to have to go back and forth with my Hermes all the time to get it right. I didn't have to do that. So my point is, it gets to the point a lot faster, um, and that's what I would say, right? So, um, it did it. It works a lot faster. It costs less tokens overall. I even have it running like a recruiting loop as well and this Amazon analysis as well. So all that to say is I'm not going to say like, again, your mileage may vary. I think both of them are very strong frontier models, but I've just found it to be with the tests that I've run to be more, more helpful in general.

Dude, yeah, I'm with you.

And on a random note, I just got this message on my WhatsApp. So one of my team members said, Check out our user acquisition on AnswerThePublic. 62% comes from direct. Does this make sense?

Then he says, the same with Ubersuggest.

Does this make any sense? 62% of direct traffic is super high, you know? And I said, It does. Not super high. When you build a strong brand, most of your revenue ends up being direct. When I look at all big companies, and I'm not saying my companies are big, but when I look at all big companies that we work with, the number one source of revenue is direct. It's because they've built built massive brands. It beats out anything else. And the key is good product, good brand, be in business for a long time. It's, you know, doing all the stuff you did for years— SEO, paid advertising, social media— it all helps build a brand and all feeds into each other. But if you're measuring your marketing and if your direct sales and direct traffic isn't increasing year over year, You're doing something wrong.

Yep, totally. And by the way, I mean, how long would you say you've been building your Neil Patel brand for?

Intentionally or just in general? Intentionally.

Intentionally.

Intentionally, I would say 20-ish years.

Wow, dude.

20. That's 2 decades, guys. I just want to call that out. And I think for me, what I think it was, it's probably been maybe 13 years or so. So this stuff takes time. And we've said this before on this podcast, if you want to start to build a brand, you might not see anything for the first 3 years or so. And that's usually the case for whatever reason, usually is around 3 years. Sometimes you might hit lightning in a bottle. But even if you look at MrBeast, Like, he struggled for such a long time to get it going and I think it took over 3 years to really get it going for him. And, you know, I think it's just— to even get 10,000 subscribers, I think that took him quite a while, like longer than he thought it would take. And if you look at his videos in the beginning, they're really bad, right? And so, I think you have to embrace the suck, you have to embrace the cringe. I would say again, if you're starting from scratch right now, go out there, create in public right now, build in public and then other people will start to follow you. You might even find partners to work with as well. You know, I think there's one last topic we can hinge on here, lean on here before we, before we hop out. So let me share my screen again. Neil, do you see my—

do you see my screen?

Yes. Okay. So there's a lot of talk about, you know, building an AI-native services company or AI-native whatever company. Right. And so this is a post that that our team put out in terms of the structure of how this team might look. And so I'm going to keep it very high level here. I really— I'm really talking about any AI-native company in general. And I think the way, whether it's your business or my business, Neil, I think both of our businesses need to evolve, right? And so what I mean by that is, you know, your team is maybe— there's this human judgment layer over here. So they have these strategy calls, taste calls, client trust calls, all these calls over here, right? Then you have these operating roles, processes that I'm showing on the screen over here. And so I think the way you structure a company now from an org chart standpoint, or even how you structure it from a process standpoint, is going to be very different because you're going to have a lot of different skills that your team might take on and the agents might take on. You're going to have different knowledge and memory layers that the agents might take on as well. You're going to have an agent fleet, some that might do paid media work or SEO work, and then you might have all these loops. So there's all these things that you have to consider. And Neil, I won't pretend to say I have all the answers, nor will I say you have all the answers. But I think the key thing now is that we start to talk about this because, um, you know, we're all kind of just figuring this out as we go. But I don't think people can kind of just sit still and think that they're going to get by with the same original structure. So how are you guys thinking about how you guys will evolve this over time, or are you even thinking about this at all right now?

I'm not thinking about it, but my team thinks about it. So it's just something that I don't spend my time on. We just divide and conquer and we focus on what's the most important for us as a company and individually to get done. And I don't worry about some of the stuff that my team handles because I trust the people that are working on that stuff.

Yep. So do they even bring this stuff to you at all?

No.

Oh, what a life, Neil. What a life.

So they tend not to bring me much stuff. I tend to bring them stuff.

By the way, we should talk about that.

Like, I focus majority of my time on just growing revenue. I don't actually spend most of my time on operations. I genuinely focus majority of the time on revenue.

Well, Neil, let's talk about that because I think that's great. So the reason this is important, I think it's worth double-clicking on, is because Because if you— let's say Neil has an amazing executive team, right? Which he has said many times that his team is really good, and he's been very complimentary of them, right? Now, here's the thing. If you have to continue to tell people what to do versus them, like them kind of just figuring it out, that probably means you haven't hired right, right? And so I'll tell you, if there's one thing Neil's gotten right with MP Digital in the last 7, 8 years or so is he's hired correctly, that when you have to push people And pushing is probably— you're always going to have to push them. But when you have to tell them what to do strategically, that means that you have to dedicate your brainpower to that. And that means, unfortunately, whether they're good people or not— and I tend to think that most people are nice people— it's not a good thing for your business because then your mind becomes split in all these different directions. The good thing is Neil's just focused on, let's say, the M&A piece, right? Or he might just be focused on driving more revenue right now, doing more deals, right? He focuses on what he's good at and he hires people for the things that he's not so good at or that he's not interested in doing. But I would say that my observation of Neil over the years is that he continues to keep the energy high, he keeps the temperature high, he continues to push people. But if Neil, like, you hired me for sales and I keep— you have to keep telling me what to do, what ends up happening to me in like a couple weeks or like a month or two?

All I was asking is, when you were saying, when you're saying, hey, what would you do if I had to keep following up with you. Are you saying this is your organization or you're working for my organization?

I'm working for you.

There would be a problem.

Yeah, and very quickly, right?

Yeah, very quickly. But my team and my culture is very sales-driven. So, my co-founder Mike messages me at 5:41 AM. All right, I'm on PST, he's on PST as Well, he sends me a screenshot. Good news for Friday, X company signed. And then someone else on the team, amazing. They're mentioning the team member's name. Absolutely brilliant. This is a country where we made changes to recently because we felt it wasn't working out, especially on the sales end, right? When I said I made changes, you can assume it is people changes. So, and I didn't, my management team did, Because they also are very sales-driven and it wasn't working out. So I said, oh wow.

And I said, yeah, Mark told me a few days ago that it was going to happen.

And then he responds to me, what's the elevator pitch you give to agencies when you talk to them for the first time? And this is in context for them acquiring. Okay. At the same time, my CEO's on vacation, all right? 5:51 AM, he's talking about a country, I won't name the country, and he says, X country finally closed something, €75K. Mark says a few more to come. So you can assume it's in Europe somewhere. He's like, good sign of life. And he's talking about, you know, he's updating me because he knows we made a change. We're investing a lot of money in change. It takes time to see results, and they're just keeping me up to date. We get these messages constantly. Now, for a region like the United States, they don't update me on like Hey, we just got a new deal. There's too many deals to end up going through, but they do keep me in touch about the big deals, right? So even though he's on vacation, I got a message yesterday at 12:39 PM. Hey, I'm sure Nick told you, but we finally got red lines on X, and this is a really massively publicly traded company. And he mentions the person's name and he He has what he needs for the billionaire, and he's talking about the person who owns the company. This is a private company. I don't know if I said public or private, but if I did, I meant to say it's private, like it's owned by an individual. It's not out there like where you can go buy the stock. So they'll keep me up to date on the really big deals, or even the smaller deals for the regions that we're making changes. And this is just stuff that we continually do as a company because we make sure everyone knows what's happening that's important. When you're trying to grow, you're making changes, sometimes you're disrupting, people need to know what's working and what's not working. If they can't figure that out, you know, people assume the worst when they don't know what's happening.

Yeah, I think the main thing before we hop out of here is that One, you know, you want to hire people that are smarter than you. Steve Jobs used to say that you hire people that are smarter than you that tell you what to do versus you telling them what to do, right? And then Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are just like, yeah, we don't hire people that need to be coached. We just hire people that have kind of been there, done that, right? In many cases, you still want to have maybe like 10, 20% are, you know, new blood. But, you know, majority of you want people that have been there, done that. The other thing is, You want to be just observing Neil's organization, how Neil's always been even before he had this organization, is that you move quickly when it comes to people. You move quickly when the first sign that you know it's not going to work out, you start having these conversations. And then if it continues to not work out that way, you make a move, right? And so, it's not to say that humans should be expendable and just throw them to the side. It's more to say that you want people to do their best work, and sometimes that best work is not necessarily with you. And there's no use to continue to try to fit that square peg into a round hole. So anything else you want to add, Neil?

Yeah.

What I've had for majority of my business life, and I've also taken into my personal life, is I expect people to be on it 24/7, whether others believe that's fair or not, at least the people I work with. And I found with that, if they can do that, it works out. If they can't, it's not going to work So for example, I live in a house. The house has gone through some renovations and construction. I got a letter from the city asking me to fill out some assessments on some changes we made so they can readjust the tax bill. And there's this lady that works with us. She's part of a company called Real Construction. And I messaged her, 5:45 AM, got a letter from the city on property assessment that they want us to fill out. That's all I said. She knows I'm not going to fill it out. She knows I'm not going to I didn't even read it. And she responds by 6 AM. This is not someone who works for me. It's a company. She works for a company that I pay. And she's like, I'll pick it up today. I was like, cool.

That's it.

It's just like, I expect amazing communication and people to be on it 7 days a week if I work with them both on a personal level or business level. And if it doesn't work for people, then it doesn't— then that person's not going to work for me. And I found that if someone's just in it and willing to do all— put everything that they have into something and just willing to work hard, and not give excuses, things just progress. The moment you work with people who only want to work 8 to 5 or aren't always going to be on it or don't want to respond after hours about how things are going, I find it just never works because they're turned off. And that means they don't care about your project, your house, or whatever's important to you when it is important to you during that time.

Neil, I'm going to ask you some questions here, okay? I'm going to take— I'm going to play devil's advocate. But Neil, it's your business. Why should I care as much as you?

Because I'm paying you really well. And if you don't care, that means you're not passionate about it, and you should go do something else in life, and I'll try to help you find whatever you're passionate about in life. If you have the attitude that you only work certain hours, or you may not care because it's not your business, usually has nothing to do with ownership. It has everything to do with passion. When someone's really— when they love what they do, people don't look at a career or a job as a specific set hours. Or they clock in and out, or they can turn off and they can just ignore it. And whatever problems happen, it's not their issues.

But Neil, you have more upside than I do at this company.

And you have less downside than I do, because when times are really bad, I make sure that you're taken care of because you've put everything that you have into this business. So when times are bad or you have some personal issues, Like, your kid may get sick. I'm here to help even if you don't need my help because we're a family. And I look at it as if I win, you win. If I lose— and you won't win as much as me when I win because I'm the owner. But when I lose, yes, you may struggle, but nowhere near the amount that I do. And I'll take the brunt of that, the bad times, and I'll make sure that you and your family are still okay.

Last thing, Neil. So when you're talking to people, I think this is good for everyone. Like when you're pitching people, because when I like, I've done a few interviews here when I was in Italy. So I anti-sell them at the end, right? So it's exactly what I said. So I'll tell you what I say and then you tell them what you say in the anti-sell. Okay, let's do that. And then we can end the episode. So I say, here's why you shouldn't join Single Grain or Single Brain. Okay, either or. One, it's not a nine-to-five situation. We operate like a tech startup, right? Expect to not necessarily like you know I'm going to be on you all the time, but more so like you're not it's not a clock in clock out environment. That's number one. Two, you better be AI pilled because if you're not, you're going to fall behind the people who are right now, and it's not going to be fun for you at all. In fact, it's going to be hell for you, right? So don't join if you're not AI pilled, right? And we know if you got it. We know we know if you don't very quickly. So there's that, right? The third thing is expect direct feedback. But it's not only just direct feedback, but it's public direct feedback sometimes too, right? Because we're— it just works for us. It works for me. I found that whenever I tried to hide that, uh, when I try to, you know, just bring it to, you know, uh, behind the scenes, um, you know, it, it disrupts the ability for everyone to alert— to learn. So when it's public feedback, like, it's got to be respectful, but it's going to be public feedback. So I'll say those things, right? I'm just curious, Neil, when you do your anti-sell pitch, why people shouldn't join NP Digital, what do you tell them?

Yeah, and mine's not really an anti-pitch, it's more so what I'm expecting. It's similar, it's just, you know, how you want to end up describing it. I usually mainly interview managers or executives, and I'll straight up tell them like, hey, we're looking for people who are passionate about the business, love marketing, love it so much they're willing to work 7 days a week, even on holidays, and they're willing to put the job in many cases ahead of their family because they don't look at it that way. They just love what they're doing so much, they want to just keep working. And no matter what role you're in, we expect people to get their hands dirty. You know, our CEO works a lot. He doesn't just sit there and manage. If you have to spend all your day managing, then you've hired the wrong people underneath you. You should be a player and a coach. And if you can't do both and you're not willing to get your hands dirty and you're You don't want calls from me on the weekend, this isn't going to work out.

I love it. Okay. Well, guys, that's it for today. Sorry for the technical issues. It's not Neil's fault. It's all my fault because I'm in Italy right now with bad internet. So, that being said, we will catch you all later.