BTS: Secret conversations with founders and new marketing hacks for Q4 2025

This in years. Neil, when's the last time we went live? Like 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years? Something like that. Something like that. All right, guys. So type it in chat, wherever you're coming from. We're going to start this marketing school and then maybe we'll address some of the comments as we go through it. But my take on this, Neil, is live streaming is making a comeback. You see Gary Vee live streaming. You see Hormozi live streaming. Everyone's live streaming, right? And then even us doing webinars is live streaming as well. And so I think there's a good argument for us to even livestream these, and the engagement has always been good. And I think it's always good to build community around it, and we can clip from it. So maybe that's a good place to start because your ass didn't put any ideas in this thing again.

I'm sleep deprived. I've only been getting 3 to 4 hours of sleep for the whole week.

Oh, that's no good.

Per day.

You know what you need for that, right? Let me tell you what you need for that. You need 20 to 25 grams of creatine and it cancels out your lack of sleep. Did you know that?

Really?

Yeah, I did that this morning because I only had like 5 hours of sleep the night before, and then the 20 grams, I'm like, I'm good, I'm sharp again. Huh.

I do the 10 grams. I don't take it when I'm traveling.

Yeah, you need to super dose it when you're low on sleep.

Yeah, what I started doing because I've been getting lack of sleep is taking— and I'm not recommending this as medicine advice or medical advice or health advice— was, uh, I started taking some NyQuil. I had some pills and that helped a little bit, but But I ran out.

Yeah. Oh, dude. Look, when I type, there's 2 responses. Thanks, Sean, from Main Street. So, there's a— by the way, so you're speaking at a conference, I think, right now. I just spoke at Main Street Summit Capital Camp earlier this week. So, we can even talk about some of our learnings from that as well. So, um, but the sleep thing, trust me. Once you take the 20 to 25 grams of creatine, not health advice, guys, but it's worked out really well for me. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I'll check it out. I usually do the 10 grams, but cool. Let's get started.

So, okay. So I was at this conference this week called Capital Camp and Main Street Summit. So a lot of good friends hanging out there. So Erik Jorgensen, who wrote the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, was hanging out with him. The guys from pray.com hung out with their co-founders. They have 4 co-founders. Hung out with a guy I used to intern for, Sean Kelly. And there's a lot of capital allocators there. And Tim Tebow, do you remember the guy that played football?

Yeah. The religious guy, right?

He's religious? Yeah. By the way, get this. I didn't know that this was a super religious business conference because I've been going to this conference for 3, 4 years or so. And I started looking at some of the talks. It's like faith-based business or whatever. I was like, wait, huh? I saw a bunch of these things. I didn't realize, I didn't put 2 and 2 together. But during my talk, because it wasn't a big room, it was a very intimate room of 100 people or so, So I dropped a couple of F-bombs in there, said, and then my friend who used to be a pastor, he's one of the co-founders of pray.com. He's like, yeah, this is like the Coachella for pastor businesses or Christian businesses. So anyway, all that to say, there's a couple of things I want to share and then I want to hear your learnings from this week as well. One of my friends, he's basically saying, look, all the people I have on my team, I mean, he has a smaller team, but But he's like, the more senior people on my team who are making $200,000 to $300,000 a year, I'm cutting those people. I'm cutting like 5 of them on Friday in favor of the people who are making $85,000 a year. I'm like, okay, why are you doing that? He's like, because those people are way hungrier and they're just shipping way more stuff. And they're running circles around the people that are used to making a lot more, right? Because when you're older, you're typically, you don't want to change your— or more further along in your career, you don't want to change your way of working. Versus these younger people, they're just all in on all the new technologies. And so I thought that part was interesting. Another part that I thought was interesting is there's a well-known investor that I'm not going to name, but a lot of these people are kind of moving up the stack. They're no longer doing early stage investing and they're all kind of focused on later stage investing. So I thought that was interesting. But from a marketing angle, I'll have to— I'll share. I was doing a talk with Kevin Espiritu of Epic Gardening. So he has like 8 million YouTube subs or so. So to him, blogging is dead. But for my talk, I'm like, blogging's not quite dead yet. You still want to milk it as much as you can, which we can go into a little deeper. But after our talks, one guy came up to me. I forgot what his name was, but he named 2 interesting tools, which I'm going to check out. I've kind of done my research on this, Neil. So Neil, when people text your company at NP Digital, do You might not know this, but do you guys send text messages to these leads?

No, we do, but it's done in a certain way because every country has their own rules and regulations and privacy laws.

Now, are they green boxes or are they blue boxes? You know what I mean? Yeah.

Green is Android, from my understanding, or we look at it as Android. We look at blue as iMessage.

Yeah. Right. So are they— when you get a message from NP Digital, is it a green or a blue box?

That I don't know. I haven't seen my own message to myself.

Now, if you were to guess which color gets a higher response rate?

My guess is blue.

Yes, exactly. So I didn't know of this product. You might know of this, but there's a product called Sendblue, which hooks in with your CRM and everything. And it basically sends blue messages and you can react emoji. You can send voice messages almost as if you're responding from iMessage. You can set automations in there. And so this guy walks up to me after, he's like, dude, I'm like, because I think he works with like 400 or 500 local clients. He has like a local SEO business. I'm like, how much of an impact has this made for your business? He's like, 9 out of 10. I'm like, wow, 9 out of 10? He's like, yeah, because the response rates are 3 to 4 times higher. I'm like, okay, I'm going to check that out and we're going to test that. But also there's a product called iClosed.io and it's like a little scheduling tool. And he said that helped a lot for his business too. And interestingly enough, our mutual friend Yaniv, He sent that to me separately this week saying, hey, have you checked this out? That's a little widget that you have on the bottom right of your screen. It has a little like, hey, we're running out of meetings. Then once you do a form fill or do a partial, it'll collect your information and it'll expand it out more. These are all interesting things that I think are worth testing, but those are just a handful of takeaways. One final takeaway I'll give you and then let's move over to your—

Keep going.

Because you're in London. This event I've been going to a couple years. I was like, I don't know if I'm going to go back, but it's because it's a pain in the ass to get to. It's in Columbia, Missouri. Great town that they do it in. They basically took over the entire town. And one of my— they basically, the food's amazing. So I don't know if you saw the picture of the fridge that I showed. The fridge had steak, chicken, and salmon, hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, chia seed puddings, and nice juices. My point of saying all this is that They spent $1 million on food for this conference and they went all in on it. And that's a very remarkable thing. And when you do a conference and you basically take over the town and you can do talks in coffee shops and things like that, that's also very remarkable. So the way that they've done their marketing is remarkable. And that actually gave one of my friends an idea to go buy a town in Japan and go buy a town in Italy, right? Because he wants to market it and make it like a super epic thing. And you actually can buy a town in Japan and Italy for not that expensive, right? And the final thing I'll say, I don't have the card.

Wait, they sell a town? I thought it was a per-home deal. So he's going to have to buy a lot of homes.

Yeah. I don't know what the deal is. I don't even know if you look— you sound like you've kind of looked into this. I haven't looked into this at all.

Oh, I was just in Italy. So I was talking to people about it.

Yeah.

It's these remote towns that are pretty much dead and they're trying to bring them back to life. So they'll give you a home for dirt cheap. Very few people live in the town. They're trying to You know, re-energize it, get people to spruce it up, but you're far from everything. It's like, imagine living in a countryside.

Those—

that's typically where you're gonna get like the free homes.

Dude, you want to see something? Um, so I'm going to move over to you. Okay, I don't know if you saw this here. I'm going to share my screen real quick for, for those of you. So, um, all right, can you see my screen now?

Yeah, I can see Eric looking like a real-life Mario brother.

Yeah, this is funny because this looks like— this doesn't even look like me. I, I look Mexican here. I look like, like Filipino Chinese here. Um, but so here's the interesting thing.

It's hard to tell because you're sideways, so I have to bend my head.

Yeah. Yes. So those of you that can't see on the screen right now, this is a picture of, um, it's a card. It's, it's— so this person basically did all these cards of the speakers from this conference, right? And they're like AI generated. They're really interesting, like Chris Powers, right? Um, Brent Beshore. And so it's interesting, like this guy over here, Dave Perell, right? And I don't know if you know this guy, Jesse Pujji. I think you did a little thing with him recently. Yeah?

Yeah.

So anyway, all that to say is I was like, okay, this is really cool. I retweeted it, right? Get this. I was walking down the street with one of my friends and then this guy walks up to me. He's like, Eric Siu? I'm like, yeah. He's like, hey, I'm the one that did the cards. I'm like, what? No way. And so he handed me like a physical, like the physical version of this card, where it has the holder and all that. I'm like, how much time did you spend? Hold it up. It's in my backpack somewhere. I'll go get it afterwards, but once you talk. But my point is he spent a lot of time making these and he has entire decks of all the people who spoke. And that's a good example of remarkable marketing because what's people's favorite subject? Themselves, right? And I think he went last year and then what he did was he bought a van and he toured people around in the city. And so my point of saying all this is that When you do marketing, it's all about— you can call it standout marketing if you want, but it's the things that get noticed when you go the extra mile. Anyway, those are the things that I learned from this conference.

A few things on mine. I did Milan, a few events there, same with Madrid and then London. I don't know how many events I did total this week, maybe like 5 to 7.

That's a lot.

I'm losing count.

You must be tired as hell.

Uh-huh, because I'm working both PST and whatever the local time zone is, which is, you know, doing it for a few days isn't too bad, but when you had to do it for— I've been gone for almost a week now. Technically, today is a week. It starts getting a little bit tough, but most of the people I met up with were really large corporations. And when I say large corporations, almost everyone that I met up with And the audiences were people working at companies that generate billions and billions of dollars in revenue, majority publicly traded. One thing that was interesting is marketers are facing a lot of issues with AI slop. Everyone is starting to complain that AI is causing them to start doing more work because of the slop. And I'll give you an example. In London this morning, I was talking to a marketer, And he works for enterprise B2B SaaS company that's waiting to go public. They're, they're massive, right? They'd probably go public between $5 and $10 billion. And he's just like, you know, we give ChatGPT hard rules and it breaks the hard rules every single time. And he's like, it just can't follow instructions a lot of the time and it just gets irritating and it costs us a lot of time and energy to fix these things when these tools should be really useful. Now, I'm not an AI expert by any means. I wouldn't even say I'm knowledgeable in AI from how it works and how it's coded or any of that. When I was talking to someone, what they were telling me is the reason it messes up on hard logic is because— and again, I'm not an expert here, but this is what they're telling me, and they work for one of these LLMs— is because they're saying if you hardcode it, it's like software, black and white, like accounting software. It does this or it doesn't do this. It helps you do X or Y. AI, these LLM platforms are supposed to think on their own and get better and improve over time. So if they put them in a little box and restrict a lot of the things that they can do, it restricts how they can think and grow. And they were saying because of that, they can't put as many limitations. And this is their excuse. I don't know how true this is, which is why you have a lot of basic problems. Like when you ask someone, again, I was in Italy and this girl's like, I'm looking for whey protein. without this ingredient because she's allergic to it. And it shows her 3 whey proteins with that ingredient. And she's like, I said without. And they're like, good catch, here's 3 other options. And they still had that ingredient in there. So she's like, screw this, let me just go on Google and search for what is the best whey protein that doesn't have this. She found a thread and then found a product from there. So a lot of people are having issues with AI creating slop. They still think it's great. It's helped them in many ways. The ways it's helped them has outweighed the slop that they're dealing with. But people are starting to really get frustrated with the slop. And the second thing that I saw is a lot of these companies, because we're starting to get to 2026, they're getting pressures from their CFO being like, so how are you going to use AI and what are we going to cut? How much money can we save next year? Because they're all doing budgeting and they're going back to their CFOs and they're struggling with this. Saying, hey, this AI has actually made our job harder. There's more channels now, more things that we need to do. We have to keep things more up to date. It's more competitive than ever. We can't actually do all of this with less team and use tools and cut down. That's the feedback I'm getting from most of these corporations, and they're pushing back on their CFOs. And on that same note, they're talking about how they're making cuts. They are seeing some efficiencies with AI, but a lot of them are telling me internally, and some of these are C-level execs within their region. So if you work at a big corporation that's global, they'll have a lot of CEOs, CFOs, etc., for each country. So they're not maybe the parent CEO or CFO, but they're the country CEO or CFO or CMO or whatever it may be.

still important role.

Many of them are still running divisions that do hundreds of millions, if not billions a year. And what they were saying is, yeah, our company, we like painting the narrative that we're cutting a lot because of AI, but the majority of feedback I got, because a lot of these companies are doing layoffs, was we're actually cutting because we overhired during the COVID eras and we're not seeing as much growth. some of the business units. It's either one or the other, or sometimes both. And they're making cuts, but they're painting the narrative of, hey, we're being efficient with AI. And one of them said to me in a funny way, he's like, you're a marketer, right? I'm like, yeah. They're like, imagine this, you have 2 options of narratives. Which would you pick if you're in marketing? Narrative 1, We hired a lot of people. We realized we don't need those people, and we were hoping that we would end up needing them because our business units were growing fast enough. But they're actually— some of them are not growing fast enough and some are actually shrinking. So we got to do layoffs. That's narrative one. The second narrative is, is, hey, we found a lot of efficiencies because of AI, so we're restructuring our organization and becoming more efficient and adapting this new technology. That's narrative 2. They tend to pick narrative 2 because it just paints a better picture. It's marketing instead of narrative 1 when they are saying sometimes AI is making 'em more efficient, but a lot of it is in the reality which they're not getting the growth, so they're cutting.

Yeah, I think ultimately AI is going to, it's, it's, we're, we're just going to be doing more if I'm being honest. Like we talked about this a week or, or 2 ago, like, that's a nice water bottle, but we're gonna be hiring more engineers for sure. We're going to be doing a lot more than what, for example, you and I are excited that we can do a lot more. We talked about it becoming like a video game, right? But that's also because we look at business as a video game too. And for those people that don't want to do that, by the way, that's okay. Go find something that you like. I think it's going to enable us to do the things that we like and to do more of it. And that's how I see it. By the way, you want to talk about slot, by the way? You want to see one of my posts over here on— by the way, nobody knows this. I don't think I really revealed this yet, but check this out. You see my screen? Yes.

Now I see it.

Okay. So this post over here has 147,000 views on Twitter. Okay. I threw it up on LinkedIn as well. It has like 50,000 views, which is pretty decent for LinkedIn, right? Guess what? This is AI generated. This is 95% is this is AI generated over here.

Yeah, but you still had the human in the loop. You knew how to modify it to make it better.

I barely modified it. You want to know where I modified it? I think I just modified it here. Truth is, so this was like talking about hired gun CEOs and how it doesn't work, right?

And so truth is no hired CEO CEO will ever match a founder's obsession.

They're playing with house money while you build the house. I definitely didn't write that sentence. And then the second part— No, let's go back up. Yeah.

Where are they getting the number revenue dropped 40% in 18 months?

That's made up.

Customer churn hit 35%. They stopped innovating.

It's made up. That's the problem with AI content.

You make up the views, but it's going to make you look bad in the long run if everything's made up.

Exactly. But I wanted to test it. I was like, my theory, because I was using one of my friend's product, It's called Stanley, right? He runs a company called stan.store, which is backed by Gary Vee and Stephen Bartlett, right? And so he came up with this new product. I was at a dinner and then he was like, hey, check this thing out. He's like, it actually generates a lot more views. I'm like, okay, I'm just going to test it, right? Because on LinkedIn X, these posts have a very short half-life anyway. They don't last very long, right?

Yeah.

But I'm like, holy crap, this actually performed well on both. And only one person called it out saying this is AI generated. I was like, no, no, I helped. I helped. I helped, right? But very little here. Um, like I think I only added these 2 sentences over here. Like these 3.

Keep in mind, Eric here was doing this as a test. Eric does not post AI-generated content from his profiles all day long.

No, because by the way, when you, when you release something out like this, it feels like you lose a piece of your soul. Like that's what I'll tell you. Like, and so, um, yes, I did edit maybe like what this looks like, what, like 15, 20% of this? That's about it.

Right.

Um, and then I made the em dashes like just one, one dash. So.

Yeah, but it shows you the power of it.

But that—

this is the problem. AI just has a lot of junk stuff that people are using that is not true, and it's just making stuff up. Um, dude, one of the people I met up this morning, he's in marketing, and we were talking about how we're finding mid-level managers who are older who are first starting to adopt AI. They're the ones— we're both seeing this pattern— that are starting to show us Work that was pure AI generated and they didn't check their work. And I'm like, I don't have that problem anymore. They're like, why? I'm like, my team knows if they send me AI generated crap and it just sucks, you know, you get a warning. If you do it again and you didn't even review it, you know, I'll write you up. The first time I don't get, you know, I don't write you up, but the second time you do it, I'll write you up. If the third time you do it and you're not checking, you're just giving me AI stuff, you're pretty much not working at the company.

Yeah.

And I try to be fair at this. I let people know because why am I paying someone to use AI, not check the work, send it to me, then I have to go and fix all their work? And not only does that cost me more time, but I paid the person to do this so I didn't have to deal with it. Like, what's the point of it?

It's double work. It's triple work.

Exactly. And there's just so much AI slop in organizations. Like, it's getting really bad. And, you know, you see the Michael, I forgot what his last name is, from, he shorted Palantir and he shorted—

I think Nvidia.

Michael Burry. There you go. Um, I'm not— this is not financial advice. Palantir is worth roughly 100 times revenue, right?

Roughly.

And they're growing at only 60% a year, but 60% at that pace is massive. But I really rarely ever see a company worth 100 times revenue.

I think he, he put $912 million in shorts for Palantir and like $100-something for Nvidia, right? I was just— yeah, like, by the way, he hasn't been that right recently.

Yeah, but dude, look at OpenAI. They're supposedly worth $500 million— $500 billion, and they supposedly will do $20 billion this year. That's 25 times revenue. Expensive, but they're growing at more than 100% a year, right? And we all know that's going to be game-changing. Are they worth a half a billion or trillion?

I don't know.

Time will tell. But Palantir, definitely valuable company, but should it be worth 100 times revenue?

Yeah. Here's what I'll say. By the way, Nvidia's not even that expensive. It's like 29 times or something like that, which is not crazy. They're actually growing accordingly with it. But going back to what you said too, I think it's really important that your company sets guidelines around AI-generated content. So for example, for us, if someone is going to come with an idea and they want resources for it, they're supposed to write a memo. And usually a memo in the past, would take them days or weeks to finish a memo. It's like an Amazon-style memo where it might be a couple pages. Hey, what resource I'm looking for? Here's the overview. Here's the press release. Here's what success looks like. All that, right? Now I have a MemoGPT, a custom GPT that people use. What I realized is that initially I was using that and I wasn't even spot checking the work. And I'm like, hey, I realized what was happening there. I was like, guys, you're going to have to spot check it. And then your job as a leader is to say, hey, when they send you a memo or they send you anything that's AI generated, that might be AI generated, you just ask, hey, is this your best work? And was this— did you check the work? Is this your best work? If not, I don't want to look at it right now, right? It's your job to kind of stop, put— stop people in their tracks just to kind of set this new rule. Yeah.

And then the other trend that I'm starting to see in marketing is corporations are hiring these consultants like from Deloitte, McKinsey, and all these places, and they're just like, You're paying too much for these agencies to manage your ad spend. Um, you can just use AI tools and you don't even need them. Like, or you can get them to spend like one charge— they should only charge you like 1-2%. First of all, it can't be profitable if it's 1-2%. You would be losing a ton of money. Second of all, anyone who claims that isn't going to put the time and attention. Third, if the AI tools were so powerful and amazing where you didn't need a human, Google and Meta would've already created them. And anyone who tries to claim that you don't need humans and you can run Meta and Google Ads, I can show you more case studies of humans getting involved in improving the metrics than just letting Meta and Google go on their own. I'm not saying their technology is bad, and I'm not saying humans are better than their technology. I think the winning combination is use their AI technology combined with a human, and we're finding the results to be better. But it's funny because we're seeing people like, hey, you know, you don't need to be spending all this money. You should just put pressure on your marketing teams and tell them to just cut back. They can do it for like a fifth of the cost. Tell them to use more AI tools and technology. Like, they think it's that simple. And no joke, it's coming from some of the ones that you have on screen here, like McKinsey, you know, Boston Consulting Group, Bain. No joke, because we're working with companies that are paying them and they're sending us the memos being like, You're spending too much on managing your ads. Tell them to do it, you know, it should be a flat fee of $100 grand. You want me to manage $100 million on a flat fee of $100 grand? Good luck on that.

Let me tell you something. So, um, one of my friends hired McKinsey, okay, for, um, her organization. And they're getting, I think they're paying McKinsey like $2 to $3 million a year, okay? And it's, it's like, and she has been thoroughly unimpressed by McKinsey, but you know what McKinsey, BCG, and Bain are, are good for? Like when I talk to founder friends, um, It's called CYA insurance. So we talked about this a week ago, cover your ass insurance, right? Because when you're an executive at a big company, you need CYA insurance so you can point the finger at these consulting groups if things don't go well, right? That is cover your ass insurance, right? Look at this, McKinsey, on track for what? Or they did $15 billion in revenue. What is this, $12, $13 from BCG and then Bain $6 billion. Look, they just continued to move up and to the right. This is the power of a brand here. This is really interesting to me, Neil. And this graph we looked at a week before, CYA insurance. So McKinsey, Bain, and BCG will probably be fine because they are CYA insurance, but the rest of the consultancy industry could be in trouble. And this we kind of debunked a little bit as well, but it's interesting to look at stock prices over time. Stock price doesn't affect— that doesn't reflect necessarily on the growth of the company all the time. Sometimes it could just be the market too. Yeah.

Yeah, no. And I just, I don't understand what a lot of these consultants are actually doing in areas that they don't understand, but I get it. They got to make money somehow.

Yeah. Okay. So there's some questions. By the way, the cool thing about us doing it live is that we get some questions in here. And by the way, you want to know how much the minimum it is to invest in Italy to restore? Guess, Neil.

$25,000, $50,000?

$100,000. So not as crazy as I thought it would be. And so let's see, Roland has a question here. Do you feel this behavior, this AI slot problem has been always existing in the space of copy editing, just that it's more easily exposed now with the introduction of AI leading content creation? Yes, the answer is yes. So we'll just move on from there. By the way, I have a lot of great topics here. So would you like to know the— You want to talk about Clue.ly? Remember we were talking about Clue.ly a few months ago?

Okay, but before you talk about it, can I make a guess on what's happening with Clue.ly? Because I haven't been checking up on them.

Okay, but first you have to explain what Clue.ly is.

It's an app that helps you cheat on everything using AI. Okay, and I don't know if it was some Stanford kid or something like that funded by Andreessen Horowitz. They talked about how they went from zero to like a million and then like 5 or 6 or 7 million, I forgot the exact amount, really fast. And they were using people to just create tons of social content. Hit or miss, some influencers did really well, some didn't. The numbers game added up, generated a lot of revenue for them. All right, can I take a guess on what happened?

Yeah. Or no?

Yeah. I don't think they're generating anywhere near the revenue they were. I think they have massive churn. Their growth has slowed down. Uh, maybe I'm wrong and maybe their revenue numbers are climbing a little bit, but I bet you it's slowed down and the company won't be worth a ton. of money. They use a lot of hype to gain, gain revenue really quickly, but they're not able to keep the revenue. And I bet you they're struggling. And here's why I think that, okay? The founder, I think, is some Korean kid.

Mm-hmm.

Did some sort of interview. Smart kid. I couldn't get into Stanford or wherever he went to school. It doesn't matter what school, he probably got into a better school than me anyways. Um, he talked about how, oh, I wish we never shared numbers. It creates a lot of negative stuff. Bullshit. The reason he didn't want to keep sharing numbers is because his growth numbers aren't good. That's probably the real reality.

And guys, we've talked about this years and years ago on this podcast. The reason it's not good to share, and people try to fight us on this, I'm like, it's not good to share your numbers because the moment your growth stops is when everyone starts to poo-poo on you, and then you get this unnecessary attention, right? And also you invite attention from your competitors too. So more often than not, you're probably better off just talking about something a little more abstract, like your employee count, But even that is not the best proxy anymore, right? So here, let me just share my screen and then we can kind of validate what you're saying here. So yes. So fascinating, Neil. You said, look, Li declined to share Cluely's financial metrics just 4 months after boasting about how quickly the startup is growing. It's what you just called out. Now, the fascinating thing is TechCrunch had him as the keynote speaker and they're just pooing on him, like poo-pooing on him everywhere, which is I'm just like, this gal over here, Lulu Chang says, or Miservi says, a reminder that not all press is good press and you can turn down interview requests. So it hasn't been good because they've pivoted into this note-taking app. And the reality is I actually just think if they're so good at virality, maybe they should just become the ultimate virality agency and just do that. That's what the Icon people did. They had this ad software and now they're just an agency.

No, but dude, here's the problem with these like people who say that they're really good at virality. They're very good at virality for marketing that doesn't work. And what I mean by this is, let's say if Clue.ly is a good product, that virality got them well known, but it wasn't creating sticky revenue. It's easy if you create an ad and just says, oh, no matter what you can do, you can just cheat on it. Just use Clue.ly, right? Like that kind of stuff, of course, is going to go viral, but is it going to create the right type of customers? Dude, do you remember Jasper? You no longer have to write content. Just, dude, you can just use Jasper. It creates all your social posts, your text-based content, yada, yada, yada.

Yep.

What happened to Jasper? No one talks about it. All they did was get a lot of quick signups that churned super fast. Doing the marketing that generates you the right type of customers that stick, keep spending, evangelizing the product, say good things, leave positive reviews is much harder to do. And try doing that for things that you can't market in a sexy way, like cheat on anything. Of course, if you say cheat on anything, it's going to go viral. But now try to say, hey, cheat on anything with our note-taking software. You're not going to get the right type of signups.

Dude, here, I'm going to ask you a question. So Peter Drucker, the business executive, thinks that there's only 2 major things that are important for a business. What do you think those 2 things are if you were to just guess, just randomly?

The 2 major things?

Yeah, the 2 major things.

I would say you're— I can name a few. Profitability is one, like your revenue and overall how profitable are your financials. If your financials suck, then who cares? And then I would say another thing, if you're just looking at the business metrics, not like the team, because if you have a shitty team, you're not going to have a good business, right? But if looking at other good metrics is how loyal are your customers? Can you keep them? Are they evangelizing? Do they keep paying over time? Are they bringing in more customers? Or do you have a churn and burn style business?

Yeah. Okay. So Michael here in the comments actually got it right. So good job, Michael. Peter Drucker said marketing and innovation. And so like these things kind of come downstream, like the things that you mentioned, right? Like if you're bringing in leads and you're innovating, that means hopefully that you're not just innovating on bullshit, right? You're actually serving your customer. If you keep these flywheels going, you're going to be fine, right? And then when, you know, you first started NP Digital, the thing that was the most important that even Mike, your co-founder, agrees with you on, is the leads were the main thing, right? The other things you can figure out over time because if you got the leads, you've solved half the problem already. And then in an innovation piece, we are forced, your business or my business, what you're doing with Ubersuggest right now or Answer in Public, what we're doing with ClickFlow and Karat, we're constantly talking to customers and figuring out how we can innovate and do better. Because if you're not delivering a great product, what happens? Then it's a bunch of smoke and mirrors, right? Which is unfortunately, I think that's what happened for Cluely, at least the first launch of their product. And the last thing I'll say around this, can you see my screen?

Yeah.

So this guy, Kerry, basically summarizes TL;DR. So Roy Li, the founder of Cluely, was explaining the Cluely pivot and a brief history, right? So 9 months, I built an interview coder, an undetectable translucent desktop, blah, blah, blah. So this guy's like, okay, TL;DR, too long, didn't read. We see ourselves as a viral marketing company, not a product company. So that goes back to what you were just saying, having a good product that can sustain, or service that can sustain the test of time, that's what matters a lot more versus a kind of this, like a quick like PR bump.

So the one thing I would disagree with that Peter Drucker guy, and I used to have a MasterClass subscription back in the day.

You did?

I think you did too, probably at one time.

Yeah. Well, our mutual friend maybe bought it for us. I never— yeah.

I don't know who ended up giving it to me, but someone gave it to me as a gift. I only used it for that time where I had the free masterclass. I think it was 1 year or something like that. And one of the interviews that I remember and it really stuck with me was a Howard Schultz interview. And he was talking about innovation. Innovation is really hard. And I look at my previous co-founder, my brother-in-law, Hiten Shah, He always likes doing companies that are in new spaces and trying to do new products that no one's ever seen. And Howard Schultz breaks down like innovation's really tough. It's a big hit or miss. You get really bloody being the first going through the door, and it's hard. Like most people fail at it. Elon Musk does a really great job at innovation, but most people don't. And he goes on to saying like, I'd rather be the entrepreneur, or I'm paraphrasing here, but he's like, I'd rather not be the innovator. I'd rather just go into a big massive space and just do something a little bit better. Now that could be kind of a form of innovation. It's probably not a true form of innovation. It's innovation. Yeah, a little bit, but not really like, hey, we're going to add— there's different types, but like, hey, we're going to provide better customer service or put your name on a cup. All those little things do matter. And what I ended up learning through this company at NP Digital, because it was one of the first companies where we started, and I truly didn't innovate much when we started. I was entering a massive crowded marketplace where most of the things were determined. And what we felt in this space was clients were really underserviced. And what I learned from private equity going through the process when we were thinking about selling and we decided not to was Private equity was just like, oh yeah, you don't have to create a new company. You just have to go after big spaces. We tend to just invest into companies that are in existing spaces that are just massive. And it's okay if they're just another lookalike company. The space is big enough. Everyone can get drunk and make money.

Yeah. That's something you learned a little. I mean, it's good. I think we're still relatively young, but I think it took us too long to learn about total addressable market and how that affects everything. But I would go back to And like a couple months ago, we did a pod where we talked about how when it comes to innovation, let's say we're invading like a beachfront, right? You're not going to be the first. You're not going to be in the first boat. Typically, you're like parachuting in on like a plane. You're like, you're not even the first or your second or third wave. You're like the fourth, fifth, or sixth wave, right? Once something is proven out. Now, for me, I like to come in on like the probably second or third wave, but I don't like to be at the first. I don't want to be like at the forefront of it because there's a lot of risk that's tied in with that, right? But there's different forms of innovation is what we're trying to say. Yeah.

So yeah, there's different forms. And same with marketing. I, I hear people constantly telling me, because Eric and I are marketers, hey, you need to do social media. Oh, you can edit your YouTube videos this way. Or oh, you can end up doing, uh, this with your SEO and getting more traffic. Look, I get it all. I found what the marketing that works best for my own company is me and my team, and we don't always have to do it together. They do it independently as well. Host events in different parts of the world because we're in so many countries at this point. And we invite really large brands, we educate them on what's new. And all these people who work at these publicly traded companies get to know us. They may not hire us ever, but a lot of them hop around. They respect the information. And a lot of them talk about us or potentially hire us at the new company that they go to. Even if they didn't hire us at the current company they're at. That's how we've been growing a lot. It's tactical, or it's, you know, I'm going out there doing hand-to-hand combat. It's not scalable. It works. And people are like, oh, that's ugly. That's a crappy form of marketing. But again, it works for us and it drives a lot of revenue.

You know what I find interesting? So you and I, we love traveling and doing these things, but I actually find it pretty stupid too, because Okay. Last year during this time, you and I were in Germany speaking at the This Is Marketing conference, right? And we were in, again, we were in Frankfurt. And so yes, we were recording podcasts and all, we were speaking, but what do we generally do? We stay in the hotel room and we work. And so I just like—

We ate ice cream and baklava.

Yeah. Yeah. But we enjoyed the local food and we're literally just sitting in our room working and we were probably ordering room service and all that. But at the same time, I really enjoy it, but it's pretty stupid if you think about it. Yeah, it's exhausting.

And we should experience the city more, but dude, we work too much to experience the city more.

Yeah, I tried to experience a little more. Like, at least I walked to the park. Hey, look, by the way, let me show you something real quick. Um, dude, you're in London. I mean, you, you deserve to go to all the parks. So anyway, um, do you see this thing on the bottom right over here on my screen? So I, I added this. Um, we're running a test right now on the singlegrain.com website, right? So, um, when you go on mobile, like, this thing pops up, ask AI about Single Grain, right? And then If you click on this, it pops up this prompt over here. So it's a very favorable prompt for Single Grain. It says, as a marketing leader, I want to know what makes Single Grain the best marketing agency to handle my campaign to hit my ROI targets. What are their biggest strengths and weaknesses? So the reason my—

No, what is their biggest strengths and wins, not weaknesses?

Oh, sorry. Biggest strengths and wins. I didn't put weaknesses. So I'm back on the original screen. Can you see the original screen or no?

Yeah.

Okay. So my hypothesis here is that ChatGPT has memory. Claude has memory. These other ones are all building memory into it. And so if someone's looking for a digital marketing agency, they land on my website and they ask a question about Single Grain, or maybe they appear in some other articles and they ask to summarize the article or whatever, we're going to have more citations. And the funny thing is my friend tested this and then immediately after he asked, what's the best marketing agency? What popped up first? Single Grain.

Single Grain.

So we haven't tested this enough. I want to see how this affects citations. Like, I see that face. Like, you might as well test it too. That's—

I want to try to test it right now. But no, I'm smiling because of something else. So over the past few months, I've been getting hit up by some of these LLMs. You know the names. I'm not going to mention the names because I'm not supposed to talk about it. But I'm allowed to talk about things from an anonymous perspective. And no joke, 2 of them hit me up and they asked me, hey, you've been SEO for a while.

Yeah.

How'd this game of cat and mouse work? And I'm like, why are you asking? And I know quite a few people that work at these LLMs, and they're like, dude, people are trying to manipulate the results, and we feel that the quality of, you know, their blank LLM is not as good as it used to. And I'm like, yeah, well, what do you expect? You create an algorithm, marketers go and try to tweak and work at it because it makes some money. And you're looking at spam, but it's not really spam. They're getting paid by really large corporations that you want as advertisers to go get them, you know, more placements because the big spenders are large corporations by far. They're like, okay, so they're like, we have this issue right now. And they were describing, they're like, a lot of people are just creating content and just mentioning how their company is the best. Mm-hmm. And our LLMs are are pushing it out there. And I'm like, I know. And I'm like, have you noticed that people can write how amazing their company is on their own blog and then you guys cite it as the best? And I'm like, Google would never do that. You know, I'm like, they're smart enough to sniff out a lot of stuff. Don't get me wrong, Google's not perfect either, but I shouldn't say they would never do that. They're less likely to do that because their algorithms are much more sophisticated. I'm like, I can go take an article on Joe the Plumber. I'm making up a site and talk about how amazing NP Digital is in marketing and you'll cite it. And I'm like, you guys aren't looking at enough metrics around the authority of the person who wrote it, the domain, giving a domain a rating and a score. They're not, of course, telling me their algorithm in full or anything like that. They're kind of giving me some sprinkles here and there, and I had to try to piece things together. And that was a purpose to me because I wanted to learn where they're going and the direction. But they're like, yeah, you know, a lot of them are looking at hiring engineers from Google and these other places that have dealt with this to try to make it more sophisticated. And I was like, it's not about fighting SEOs or marketers or business owners. You got to just think logically. If a random site talks positive about someone, it's probably not worth as much as if, you know, a really popular industry website talks about how amazing that company is. And it's not sponsored, it's not paid, it's not written as a guest post, it's written by a journalist who has credibility within that space. So like, yeah, good point. And this is stuff that they'll naturally progress to, whether it's now or whether it's 6 months or 2 years, I don't know. But they're already moving in that direction. And I think all the quick manipulatable ways to get mentioned more on ChatGPT, more power to anyone who wants to do 'em, but I think it's gonna be short-lived. Of course. And same with Perplexity and all the other ones out there.

This game, I mean, this is, I mean, this goes all the way back to the Yellow Pages or even before that. I don't even know what people used before, like maybe in the Stone Ages or whatever, like how people gamed it, right? But I would just say that this is why we've talked about ChatGPT apps as well. Okay, when there's a new app store that comes out, that is like you're just trying to be first, but that's part of the game, right? So as they continue to improve their product, these things will be patched up. And so I think even Google in the early days, you think about the— even when I came into the space in 2010 or so, there was still a lot of spam happening, right? But now they've gotten a lot better. So Google especially, it's much harder to game. So play the game, but play for the long term. By the way, because we're talking about content, did you see the pod that he did with— so Elon did a podcast with Joe Rogan and he basically said that all AI content will become— all content will become AI content. What do you think about that?

I disagree with Elon, but that's just his take. I know he's the world's most richest person, but he's been wrong in many cases.

Yeah. So what percent of content do you think is going to be AI content in the next 5 to 10 years?

Oh, the majority. When I say majority, more than 90%.

Yeah. So 90 to 95%, maybe more than that, right? So the question that I had, so on the drive over to Capital Camp, one of the guys in the car was asking, he was like, Eric, so if you think most content's going to be AI content, which is what I believe—

But you said all, right? Or is it most?

He said all. He said all. But I think for me, I think it's going to be 90, 95%. So, okay, the question is, and we should talk about this, it's how do we stand out in a world where the majority of content is AI content? You, you want to go first or I can go?

I think we both know the answer. This is simple. You do human-generated content. We always say it. You zig when they zag. You talk about your own experiences. You talk about new stuff that's not regurgitated. You be authentic, personal. You do all these other things that it's harder for AI to replicate. Yes, they could try to be authentic and show empathy and all this kind of stuff with a fake AI avatar. But if people know it's AI and they had to start disclosing it, I don't think it's going to do as well. And I bet you laws are going to come out where they're going to have to start disclosing what's AI and what's not AI content.

I guarantee you someone's doing some form of identity verification using the blockchain and they're going to make a lot of money doing it. I don't have time for that idea right now, but it's a great idea. So, and I'm sure someone's working on it. But my take on it is in a world with 90, 95% AI content, the way you stand out is One, you tell really good stories. You get really good stories by doing interesting things and you're able to tell interesting things, or you could do what The Founders Guide does, like David Senra. You tell good stories about other founders. You can certainly do that as well. Strategy goes a long way too. And so we've kind of talked about this, but when this is in the context of B2B, but whenever we're talking in a video or at a conference, whenever we go tactics, that doesn't do as well for pipeline generation. as it does versus strategy versus talking about something that's overarching, right? That's more related to B2B. But the other thing I'll say too is proprietary data. So you actually do a good job of this. Other players in this space like SimilarWeb, for example, they do a lot of good job with explaining data in a very interesting way and simple, easy to read visualizations, right? And so I think having proprietary data, having interesting products and telling stories about that product or stories in your space, That's going to go a long way. But that also goes all the way back to storytelling. And then the final thing I'll say is we always talk about this. So right now, guys, this is a live event, okay? This is also content creation, but this is a live event. But doing live events in person. So Neil just did a couple live events this week. I did a live event as well. And throwing your own live events too. And so the more, I think human-led stuff is going to go a long way. And even Sam Altman himself has said that human-led experiences are going to become worth a lot more. And at this event too, I had a couple people come up to me and he's like, hey, Eric, when are you going to do Leveling Up again? Which is the event, right? When are you going to do it? And I'm like, I don't know. They're a pain in the ass, but I do enjoy them. It's not like they're a moneymaker, by the way. When you do these events, they're not a moneymaker in the short term.

Yep. Yeah, no, look, here's a question for you, okay? I would say you're a startup still. I wouldn't classify us as a startup. I don't mean that in a bad way or a positive way. I'm just saying I would say you're more— I would say we're a startup.

You guys are like Like a mid-sized company, right?

Yeah.

Would you agree with that?

So, and you guys move faster than us, right? You have less people, less bureaucracy. The list goes on and on.

Yep.

We already know AI is changing marketing. We already know AI is changing business. As a startup, what are you doing to ensure that your content, your marketing is adapting super fast and is staying ahead? Like you, you just did that tweak on Single Grain, right? It would take me longer to do that tweak than probably your team to do it. Yeah. Because again, too much bureaucracy and then I got to do it in many languages and all this other crap that just takes longer. What, what are you doing right now to ensure that you guys stay ahead? And then I can tell you what we're doing as a mid-sized business.

So I think we should set the tone here. So our definition of startup is we have 60 people. Okay. Neil has like 1,000 plus. Okay. And that's what I refer to as midsize and startup. So that's the vernacular. And the things that we're doing, earlier I just showed it already, we're testing that little marker at the bottom where it's like, ask ChatGPT about Single Grain or whatever. So the thought there is like, okay, is injecting ourselves into the conversation from our website into ChatGPT or these other LLMs, is that going to help us? So we're going to be testing that and then we'll run it through these LLM trackers in a couple couple weeks to see how that goes. That's one element. The other element I would say is we use our internal product. I think you guys have something like this too, but we use ClickFlow to help us with updating, deleting, consolidating content, with finding the right internal links as well, finding the right Reddit threads to engage with. And they're also creating net new content for us too. We're talking production-grade content, not just AI-generated slop. And I would also say that In terms of, I mean, webinars are, we're just talking purely marketing right now, right? For our companies. Is that what we're talking about?

Mm-hmm.

Okay. So you and I both do webinars. That's a big piece of it. The other thing I would say is we try, we're trying to ingest more content from our Gong, our sales intelligence tool to give us more content ideas. Because when people are talking to sales, for example, those are the real pressing points. that people have versus us just kind of, olden days, you just look at keyword research, right? Now we're looking for real problems and real problems from real people to create content around. So that's at least a starting point. And I'm sure I have more that will pop up.

Yeah. So on our end, the way we're trying to use AI to go faster as a mid-sized company, because again, we have bureaucracy, we found that presentations work really well. So we try to do a ton of presentations. But we're using— I don't— I think my team said Mantis, but I could be wrong.

M-A-N-U-S.

It's something like that. It's Manus. I know it starts with man, and it helps them make the decks way faster, although it can go rogue. Yeah, it's Manus. So I know we're using that to crank out presentations at a much faster pace. The other thing that we're doing is we have such large datasets, we're using AI to analyze our datasets per industry and aggregate and try to find opportunities. And that allows us to figure out where to spend our time faster versus us doing a lot of trial and error. The other thing that we're doing is we're scraping the web. This isn't really AI on the third one, but we're scraping a lot of the web and we're looking for businesses that are constantly experimenting. And then from there, we're trying to track all the experimenting that they're doing. We then dump the changes into AI, and then AI ends up showing us what patterns are similar across all the datasets in the industries, and it ends up giving us ideas on what is probably going to end up becoming— what's probably going to end up working if we make those changes, like the probability of success. I jacked that one from Gajon's playbook from Spiralize. The other thing that I say that we're doing, because there's a lot of bureaucracy on what tools we can or can't use because some of them won't update their terms of service, to make them compatible to all the countries we're in and their laws. We encourage our team members personally and on their own time to experiment with these tools, not with clients, on their own personal PCs, not with company laptops or anything like that, to go experiment with them and figure out what's valuable or not. And that's helping us understand which ones we need to double down on and call and figure out how we can get customized contracts and negotiate because it just takes us a while to go through the hoops from a legal aspect. So it's easier to have our team on their personal time with their personal computers, non-client data, non-client work, just test out these tools and figure out which ones the company should be using.

Cool. I have a few more from my end, then we can move on to the next topic. By the way, we've done well with not actually pulling from the topics today. It's much more free-flowing. So one, we've done something internally where we call it the AI contest. Recently we had everyone make a Lindy workflow. That's just like an agentic workflow. It's no different than, or very similar to Zapier, N8N, Make.com. Basically winner got money. Second place also got money too. Third place also got money. We celebrated this. Everyone was required to make a Loom explaining what their product solved. I would say the overall engagement rate we had with this in terms of completion was about 52%. We want to get that higher. But the reason we're teaching everyone how to build these agentic workflows right now is so when we build other software, because ChatGPT Chat Kit's going to allow us to create these workflows and then connect them with our products, we're trying to get everyone ready for that. So people that are actually in the trenches working on these problems already, they're trying to make their lives simpler. And I've seen some pretty interesting workflows, very easy ones on like, hey, we're actually over budget on this client over here. Oh, we should do something about this. Or making sure that every single client request gets responded to or something like that. Some are fairly basic, some are a little more complex, and some will build an entire sales dashboard that follows up with people. So that's one piece of it. The other piece, I've been telling a lot of people about this. I'm pretty sure I told you too, but juicebox.ai, which raised $36 million from Sequoia recently, it is amazing at finding the 2 promotions at 2 different jobs. And we not only want to find people from a recruiting standpoint with 2 promotions from 2 different jobs, which I stole from Neil, but we want them to have an average tenure of 3 years and their current tenure also needs to be 3 years as well. And so literally you can recalibrate the agent, but it just keeps working on that. And each agent costs like $150. And so that's a pretty damn good savings in terms of paying a contingency-based recruiter. And that helps our recruiting team a lot. That's been good. Stanley, I talked about earlier, Stanley with Stan, it created those 2 posts that generated a lot of views. And then obviously you guys have heard me talk about MCPs quite a bit. I still use MCPs quite a bit in terms of helping me find pages that are doing well for us and from our analytics, and then using Ahrefs to find other keywords we should be going after, and then drafting blog posts based on our writer guidelines into our WordPress that we can review. And so those are just a handful of things that we play around with.

So I know this isn't necessarily marketing, but you want me to break down how we really try to recruit these days?

Yeah.

For like positions that make us money.

Yeah.

We used to do the model that I was talking about with you on LinkedIn. We still do it to some extent, but even when you do that, it really is hit or miss. There's some people just that don't work out. So we look in our organization on who are our best performers. Because usually best performers, and this only works once you already—

can I guess what you're going to say? Can I guess what you're going to say? Okay. You do referral recruiting where you go to that person and say, hey, who are the best people on your list over here that we should be hiring? Something like that?

Uh, it is referral, but it's not kind of like that. I'll give you a real example. When I was in Spain or Madrid a few days ago, so we're looking for someone to head up sales. So our head of— our managing director who manages EMEA, I think his name is Mark. I think it's EMEA or Europe, or I don't know what his title is. So we have him because we trust him. We know he's good. We look for our best players. They go reach out to their networks for the person we're looking for. So whether it's a head of SEO or a head of paid or a head of sales, and I'll give you the sales example because I had personal interaction with them. They'll be like, all right, let me go reach out to my network and say, who'd you work with that was the best salesperson ever in Spain or Madrid? All right, we don't pay any fees or anything like that, and they'll tell us who they ended up working with. And we'll ask a few people, and then when they give us the name, we look to who we know that's mutual connections because we ideally try to pull from within our industry. And then we ask them about them, and they'll tell them like, oh, so-and-so, they're amazing. They worked with me for 5 years and they always hit their number. They never once miss. So we're looking for cues like that. So then now we know they're good. We've of course already interviewed them at this point because we reached out, you know, got an introduction. Then let's say if it was a sales role, like it was in Madrid or in Spain, but I was in Madrid, I was doing an event. They were there, they were invited. And then people on our team watch how they work the room.

Yeah.

They're not working for us, yes. Who are they interacting with? Do other people know them? Are they well connected, right? Are they known in the industry? Because if they're in sales, if they have the relationships, existing relationships, they're going to probably generate more revenue versus if they have no relationships.

Yeah.

How are they doing in conversation? How are people interacting with them? Like, does it look positive from far away? Does it look like people just want to bounce away? Are they actually able to talk to people for a while and hold a conversation? So we're looking at all these kind of things. And even with sales roles, they'll introduce me to people not telling me that's the person that is there for the sales role. And then they'll be like, hey Neil, what'd you think about so-and-so? And they'll ask me about a lot of random people. So I don't know which person, because I don't know what everyone in the room does. Blend in. Blend in. And I'm like, oh yeah, I like the person. They dress really cool. They're funny, very personable, smart. And I was like, that person's American. But it was shocking how they can speak Spanish. Like, yeah, they speak Spanish better than English. And I was like, oh cool. They're like, yeah, that's the person we want to hire for our sales role. So we really put them through the wringer and we want to actually see how well they do. So same goes like with SEO. If we're trying to hire an SEO person in a specific region, hey, who'd you work with at so-and-so company that you would recommend for SEO? You go through it, you'll get some lists of candidates, you get some introductions, you interview the ones, and then you can then start spotting the ones when you talk to people. Who did really well when just results were crappy and you had no choice but to try to figure out how to fix them, right? Who didn't break under pressure when the business was doing terrible during downtimes and all that? So then you're starting to get a better understanding. Then we throw them into the fire before we hire them and we pay them for sample test runs. It's like, hey, here's a customer, you know, we'll make up a customer. Uh, Like not actually one that we're working with. And we're like, this is a problem because it's not hard to identify marketing problems that companies have. And it's like, I need you to fix it. What would you do and how would you do it? And then you get to see them actually do it. Like, okay, cool. Now here's your team. The team is our internal people. You got to work with the client and convince them to make the changes. Go do it. And then our people role-play like, no, I don't want to do this. And they act like a client and they have tons of fun because they get all the pushback from clients. So they know what they're already going to say. So they throw it at 'em, they see how they interact, and then we go from there. And then we also test 'em how they work with our team and flows and CMSs and project managers, how they communicate. And they get paid for all this. And then if it works really well, then we'll hire. But you're just cutting down the amount of time that you spend with bad hires by just being super thorough like this.

So your assessments, that process, how long does that typically take? Because that sounds like they do a written part and then they do the role play. Right. That's, that's 2 steps.

It depends which role, uh, whether it's sales or whether it's a marketing position. Uh, but it typically takes somewhere in the months from us finding a candidate to getting them through the process and hiring them. Months, not a month, months.

Yep. Yeah. And so here's what I'll say. So I, I, I, going back to the JuiceBox thing. So the amazing thing about it is it finds their personal email and it puts them in a sequence and it follows up with them. I think combined with the referral recruiting, and I think it's smart when you invite them to a room, because That just reminded me, a couple years ago we had the CEO candidate and this was like during Art Basel time in Miami. So it was very busy. So I brought this person around. This person could not work the room. This person was like timid in a corner. I'm like, oh, this person's going to be a CEO. This ain't going to work. Right? The interviews, like everything went well, the assessments, but like that part was like a signal to me where I just, we couldn't do it. But that's just to recap here. So Guys, referral recruiting, that works. Still looking for 2 people, 2 promotions, especially when you use JuiceBox, that works as well. And I think we both do the assessments and then you do the role plays as well. And then am I missing anything?

That's mainly, and we do most of this stuff for mid-level to higher level positions. If it's entry-level positions, we do have criteria, but it's not this strict.

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

'Cause you can't make mistakes on their mid-level. Like if you have a marketing team and you're trying to hire a marketing manager or, you know, someone, a director of marketing, and they're terrible, your whole team underneath them is going to be screwed in. A lot of people are not going to perform. It's too expensive of a mistake. You have an associate or intern and someone who is not that, uh, important of a role and they mess up, it's not going to make that big of an impact. You can replace them, train them, whatever you need to do.

Dude, check this out. Um, I checked this out. So Brian Halligan from HubSpot, so former CEO of HubSpot. So check this out.

The Sequoia guy. Which I just saw Pat Grady and who's the other guy? Alfred Lin just took over Sequoia.

Yeah. Alfred Lin comes from Zappos, by the way, back in the day. So Brian tweets this. Okay. He's like, the recipe to unbloat your scale-up is voluntary severance like this. So he says frontline is 1 month severance. Okay. So frontline workers, 1 month severance. Manager, director, VP, 6 months of severance. Executive is 1 month of severance. And then This person asked in the comments, why is the executive so low? And he's like, usually the middle, which is right here, is bloaty. So I think he's arguing to give the middle longer severance because they tend to cause more problems is maybe what he's saying. I don't know. What's your read on this?

There's probably a lot more middle people. And if you're giving them voluntary severance, like this is if you want to quit, here's some money. I've seen companies do this. it's probably an easy way to get them to accept. One month, people usually aren't going to accept, and you probably don't want your frontline and executives, uh, quitting as much. I'm assuming with your executive team, you'll know who's bloated pretty quickly and you can just terminate them, hence the one month. Frontline, you probably want a lot of those people, but I could be wrong. I don't know exactly why.

Check this out over here. So, um, this guy responds, Robertus. Um, so to be honest, this is probably the only thing that works. Frontline wants out anyway. Managers are deadweight unless they ship. Executives can't be trusted with clean exits unless they're squeezed. So incentivize bounce, not resent. I think he's saying not resentment. Yeah. So I thought that was interesting, but that's not the one I wanted to share. The one I actually wanted to share going back to marketing is, so do you want to know about this guy over here? Okay. Basically he created a fictional character. This company has a fictional character. that generates millions in pipeline. So here, I'm going to share my screen over here. You happen to be in Europe, so I'm going to— this is about this European startup over here. You see this? Okay. So those of you that can't see the screen, this guy Andrea Bozzani tweets this. This startup got 10 million impressions in 15 days using a parody account. Henrik, this is the guy, doesn't exist. He's a fictional character of Comp.ai. We'll go to Comp.ai in a second, but the brand awareness he drives is very real. He posts hilarious content about rules, regulations, and the EU's obsession with them. Not coincidentally, there's a strong correlation between the content and the product, an AI tool that handles compliance, right? CompAI. The founder told me they believe it added millions of dollars to their pipeline. So here's an example of a post, right? So this guy Henrik Johansson, so this is a parody account, attended a European hacker event last night. I asked the founder what was going on or what he's working on. But then I caught myself. I had just violated GDPR by soliciting sensitive information from a third party without proper consent and pre-approval. I promptly departed the event and turned myself into the police. It was a grave mistake and I profusely apologize to the community. This will never happen again. But this post alone, 50,000 views or so, and I can see how this generates pipeline because this is a comp— look, there's a Comp AI logo over here.

Yeah, it's entertaining.

Yeah. And this guy actually has a lot of followers. If I click through to it, it's Henrik. I guess this is just a screenshot, right? So here, let's just take a look at this guy's account real quick. All right, there we go.

Dude, as you're looking that up, I was— go for it. I actually pulled up.

Okay. This guy's tweeting. Look. So his posts, look, 41K over here. NYC entrepreneurs are shocked at the election results. I'm hearing over 100 million. And he had— he like— so this guy knows what he's doing. And I think he's created multiple types of these accounts. But imagine having someone like this on your team and look, 100,000 impressions over here, 50,000 over here, 154,000 over here. Like, what is that? That for sure is driving pipeline.

Yeah. By the way, did you see with the election results, did you see the Thiel email from back in the day?

I did. I did. Do you want to bring it up?

I can't bring it up. I'm on an iPad. Do you want me to read it?

Here, here. Okay, I'll bring it up. Just talk about it and I'll find it because— oh yeah.

So Peter Thiel, January 5th, 2020, uh, at 2:44 AM emailed Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg— I don't know who Nick Clegg is— Antonio Lucio— I don't know who he is— people probably high up. Then he CC'd Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Andreessen, right? Go for it.

Read it. The subject is Regarding Millennials.

Yeah. And this email came up because of the election in New York, right? And a lot of people were talking about the email related to Mondani winning.

Okay. You want to read it? Here, here. I'll read it. So I think we should just cover the key points here. And I actually, I do have some topics around this election that I think will be relevant from a marketing standpoint. Peter Thiel says, there are many themes that could be developed more here. Let me take a few quick points for now. This is again in regards to millennials, right? And Neil and I are actually millennials. So, Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why. And from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it. Yeah.

When I saw that and how millennials want socialism, the first thing that came to my mind, because I was trying to— It's not even millennials, I would say millennials, Gen Z, whatever generation it is, the younger generation. I totally get it. And the reason I say I get it is if you and I want to make decisions for a country or believe the decisions we would want to make would be better for 15, 20, 30 years from now, We have the privilege of withstanding a lot of pain and pressure. But if you're someone who's living, you know, month to month or day by day, paycheck to paycheck, you don't care about 10, 15 years from now. You just want your problems solved, and you don't care what happens to anyone else. It's not about left or right or socialism or any of this. You just need help and you want your problems solved. And, and I saw this firsthand with one of our mutual friends who worked for me. You know him, um, good guy. He has a high-paying 6-figure job. When I say high-paying, it's $175,000 a year. I won't mention his name. Uh, he does well. He's in marketing. And you may think that $175 grand is a lot of money, but depending on where you live in California and after taxes, $175 grand does not actually take you That far, even if you're really frugal and you count all your pennies. I, I'm not trying to say that he spends a lot or anything like that, just life in certain parts of California, especially if your job is there and you have to live close by, it can be extremely expensive. Or like renting a 1-bedroom is still $5,000, $6,000 a month. Keep in mind you have to pay taxes out of your money and then use the rest for things like, you know, that, student loans, uh, and this person had a lot of student loans. So that student loans, car payments, you know, just you start adding it up. Food, helping out family when they needed to help out family. But you start looking at the numbers like that, they're just like, look, dude. And he's talking to me, I don't feel like I'm rich. He's just like, dude, you're rich. I want change in New York and all other places because people like me need help. You're fine. You can weather the storm. You think about your kids in the future and what you know, the world is going to look like, uh, for your children. You're worried about that. He's like, I don't have kids. I'm worried about just making, you know, rent and payments for next month. He's like, we have different problems. He's like, I'm gonna vote for whoever makes my life easy.

Yeah. And by the way, this is why I think Mamdani and Trump won their respective elections, because both of them had really good marketing and they had messages that appealed to the audiences, right?

To the masses.

Yeah, to the masses. And so I think Mamdani's thing was like, hey, like, I'm gonna take care of you guys. I hear where you're coming from. This stuff is too expensive right now. And no matter if it's good or bad, no matter how you perceive it, if you look at the— I think the charts, it showed that I think it was Gen Z women, 89% voted for him. And then a lot of the Gen Z men voted for him. The younger you are, the more you vote. Because if you have no money, you're living paycheck to paycheck and you can't even afford rent, you have a lot of pressure on you. And when you hear that, hey, this guy's going to make sure that everyone is Is going to be taken care of. Of course, you're going to go with that guy. Like I think I would certainly in my twenty.

Yeah, if I was in their position, I understand it. Eric and I can't talk about it because we're not really in that position.

We're moderate, right?

So we just want to reinforce that. Yes, but also Eric and I don't understand how people are struggling because we're not struggling. We may struggled in our past, but we grew up in privileged households. Our parents struggled. They did well because things were more affordable at that time, but Eric and I did not struggle. It's not like we had to worry about college tuition or anything like that. Like, our parents helped us out. We had a pretty chill life, just being transparent. Our parents weren't rich, but they were well enough and things were affordable enough for them to give us the foundation where we were able to succeed, right? That's how I at least look at it.

But back in the day too, back in the day, it was a lot like if you had a minimum wage job, you could actually afford a house. Like, we're talking about the '60s, '70s. You can't afford It's way harder.

It's way harder. And then on top of that, you and I live in, you know, 1% type of homes in a tough world, so we have nothing to really complain about. But the point that we're trying to get with this is marketing that appeals to the masses really works. It's just like California's trying to pass this wealth tax, and I love the messaging on it. I'm not for it by any means or against it. It's for people to decide. I live in California. But they want to charge the richest 200 or so people in the state— that's not me— 5%. But I know if they end up getting that away, it'll end up trickling down to me eventually. Um, and I'm young, so hopefully, you know, I make more money over time. And they just want to give that money to the people who are struggling. That's a great marketing message. And the point of this topic for Eric and I is how can you appeal your marketing message to the majority of your customer base and make it really resonate with them. If you look at the Trump and Mondani messaging, it's very polarizing. Polarizing marketing works if you can target it for the majority of your customer base. That's the key.

Dude, you want to— okay, this is a perfect relation. Okay, watch. So Ramit Sethi, right? I Will Teach You to Be Rich, right? So bestselling author, all he talked about was finance and how he would make you rich, right? I remember reading his book when I was like— Stanford grad. Yeah, yeah, Ned for Grad. So I love his marketing. Let me tell you why I love his marketing, because he is hardcore marketing to the masses. Let me, let me tell you what I mean by this. So he supported, um, he supported Mom Donnie, right? And this is what he just posted. He posted this to Twitter as well. This is his Instagram post. So Ramit, again, finance guy, right? Finance content. You know, he's, he has, uh, education around finance. So, uh, after this week's massive political losses, it is time for the Republican Party to do some serious soul searching. Here's what they must do. So just so everyone knows, Ramit's on the left, right? Um, or at least his content is leaning left. So here's what they need to do to regain voters' trust. Shouldn't be too hard. They need to— he's saying he— they need to impeach Trump, all these things, right? Disband ICE, blah blah blah. Shouldn't be too hard.

I would say he's also more left-left, not just left, but yes.

Yeah. And then, but here's the thing, he knows— I think he knows that this content, he knows it's extremely polarizing. He's going to have a lot of people— look, the first thing over here that someone comments is I wish people that I admired would just stay in the lane of what made them admirable. And then this other guy, Logan, says, do not listen to this guy. He has some good stuff for finance and that's it. And so he knows he's going to get people to fight each other. And guess what? Who's the type of stuff to buy his book or his courses? People who are struggling more. They are more likely to buy it.

Yeah.

So the people who are doing well already, people that are maybe more right-leaning, he doesn't give a crap about them. And he knows they're going to fight each other. And so he's going to feed the fuel more and more, and he's gonna get more and more reach. And so he's done really well with his YouTube in the last year and on, on like his Twitter, all these things, by playing the game.

Dude, I'm just reading this— force Ron DeSantis to never wear those white boots again.

I didn't even know that was a thing. That's funny.

I didn't either.

I've never seen it, but like, I didn't know that was on his list.

I'm like, what the heck?

Yep, yep. But look, I, I think All this, guys, I think everyone that's listening to this right now, everything is— when you can appeal to the masses and you can tell a good story around it, you're going to do well. And when you know that stuff like Momdani was polarizing, Trump was polarizing. I mean, even Ramit's courses, those are polarizing, right? Now, it also depends on the business that you're in. For Neil and I, we probably can't play this game as much as you might.

No, we don't play this game. But with Ramit, his goal is to teach people how to do better financially, whether it's make more money, Or manage your finances better or invest more. So he's appealing to the audience who wants to make more money. So politically, if he starts marketing— and I'm not saying he's doing this intentionally— but politically, if he ends up marketing against the crowd that is wealthy and helping the crowd that is not wealthy, in theory, it should help him.

Yep. All right, so the last thing we'll end on— this will be the last 2 tweets I'm going to pull up here, and then we can, we can, we can wrap. Um, By the way, Hold Code Builder says, big fan of your work, guys. What is your take posting daily and making it either 10, 15 minutes or 45 minutes to an hour? How many people have time to listen? One, I have no idea how many people have the time to listen. We're just doing this because we do this anyway, so might as well make it live, right? And we're going to do the— when we record in person, we're probably going to make it live as well because it's nice to engage with community like this. But we record for 80 to 90 minutes and then we chop it up into 20 minutes. That's how we play this game now. And then we also chop up for short form. Now, interestingly enough, when we do the short forms, some of the stuff takes off, which I'm like, dude, you should just do the same thing too. But for whatever reason you don't. But let me—

Because the short form content does not appeal to my ideal customer. Most of the content on this does not appeal to my ideal customer.

Fair point. Now, if we look at what this might appeal to your customer, here's what public companies are saying about AI and SEO. This appeals to your customers.

This one does, yes.

Okay. So this is from Glen Allsup, who, great, great SEO. He now works with Ahrefs. So their message on AI is clear. I'm going to pull up this graphic in a moment, but traffic from platforms is small, but converts well and they expect it to grow. Their message on SEO, it's complicated. So many know traffic from search is fragmented and declining and they don't like their reliance on Google. On the other hand, they see that traffic levels are much higher than those from other sources. They're diversifying into other avenues such as apps, brands, YouTube, AI SEO. Social media. And basically one thing to keep in mind about these quotes is that they are companies often asked about their thoughts directly. They're not just randomly talking about AI traffic upfront. So here we go. So pick one, Neil.

Let's just go top, bottom. Angie, we're kind of rebuilding our content approach to be in play in AI through, though there's correlations with SEO. Dude, this text is so small.

Here, I'll read it. I'll read it. So what we got, I think you have to click on it to make it bigger, Neil. But here, I'm going to read some from companies that most of us know. Okay. So Etsy, early data suggests traffic from agents have higher intent. We're optimistic, but it's a very small dataset. So that's somewhat positive sentiment. Okay. Booking.com, AI search is transforming how travelers plan trips. We're moving fast on AEO, even if traffic is small. That's neutral. Now I'm going to give you a negative one. So IAC. Okay. IAC, what do they own?

They own a lot of stuff. It used to be, I think Ticketmaster, Expedia used to be owned by them, Ask Jeeves. The list goes on and on, but they tend to keep spinning them off. Okay. To their own independent company.

Oh yeah. IAB is the dating one, I think. Um, okay.

So yes, IAC— No, Match.com was from IAC.

Oh, I didn't. Okay. Yeah.

So they already do. I'm pretty sure.

Okay. So IAC says, yes, we're seeing declining traffic from Google, but we've known that these disruptions were coming. So this is negative. Okay. Let's pick another one. Shopify. Shopify says AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores is up 7x. Orders attributed to AI search are up 11x. That's positive. That's pretty crazy.

LegalZoom. We're seeing traffic growth from AI engines. Those visitors have a higher propensity to pay.

Somewhat positive. Okay, let's pick one more. Oh, Taboola. Taboola is going to be sponsoring this podcast, by the way, Neil. So our exposure to search traffic is in the single digits. Our total traffic grew year on year Fueled by in-app traffic. This one's neutral.

Let's go TripAdvisor because I know they get a lot of organic, or they used to. We're seeing both free and paid traffic headwinds. Google's taking more share for themselves. They're seeing more quote-unquote headwinds, but keep in mind, with paid traffic, most people are not seeing, uh, headwinds. Google has generated $115 billion in profit. A lot of that's from paid ads because it's working well for companies. $116 billion.

Yeah. Let's throw another billion in there. But TripAdvisor, by the way, just so everyone knows on this list, TripAdvisor probably had some of the most organic traffic. We're talking like, when I looked at them on Ahrefs a long time ago, we're talking like 100 million plus, right? So for sure, it's probably affected them. And remember, I don't know if you saw that report recently, but it was basically saying how AI search has not only decreased organic clicks, but it's also decreased paid clicks as well. Did you see that report?

I did not see that. We're seeing paid still do extremely well. Where we're seeing an impact, um, because you have to keep in mind a lot of companies bid on their own brand name, we're seeing an impact on brand queries, which is roughly 1 out of every 3 Google searches. So AI is pushing out more information about a company's brand so that way you don't even have to go to a website. That's impacting clicks a lot, whether it's organic or paid, from what we're seeing.

By the way, I just want to call out, this is great work by Glenn. So this is the type of content that does well, especially in B2B. If it's, you're telling an interesting story here and this to me starts to get me to think about strategy. This to me is interesting data and it tells a story, right? So this is kind of all in one. And so before Neil falls asleep here, Neil's about to yawn. I have one more here. Go for it. So this, remember earlier in this podcast we talked about How we believe that 90 to 95% of content will be AI generated. So this YouTube channel over here called Cosmic Atlas, um, all the videos on this channel are one-prompt videos, meaning that they did one prompt and all these videos were created. Look at this, 879,000 long-form views, 677,000, 441,000, 243,000. Dude, you know what?

Click it. I want to see one of them. Let's see what it looks like.

You act like I'm on YouTube right now. Okay, here, let me go to YouTube.

Oh, I thought that was YouTube. Dude, I'm half asleep. I've only been on like a few hours of sleep.

I'm gonna click on this right now. Here, you see this? Yeah. Okay, so um, it looks like the views are coming down, by the way. So so a couple days ago, because a lot of this A content is junk. Yeah, here, let's look at this monster has 22,000 views.

And you know, even if you get the views, good luck monetizing this stuff.

Here, let's look. Something outran the stars over Mars. October 2025. Has Perseverance's night sky cameras captured a star? Anyway, I think, um, to Neil's point, good luck monetizing this because the type of audience you're gonna get is more like, you know, students or like people that are just interested in entertainment.

So we have a mutual friend, Patrick Campbell. Eric knows him better than I do, who has a YouTube channel on stuff like, I don't know, bacon or toxic waste or farts or just random topics like that, right? I don't know exactly what the channel's on, but it's a lot of random stuff like that. Just general life stuff that's applicable to everyone. Patrick's a good entrepreneur. He sold his last company, ProfitWell or Price Intelligence. I don't know which one it was named.

ProfitWell.

ProfitWell to someone, made good money. Really smart guy, really amazing with data, especially in B2B, SaaS, and enterprise. But his YouTube channel gets tons of views. YouTube channel, extremely hard to monetize. That's what happens when it's on a topic like that versus if he just went back to SaaS. And I'm not saying he's doing it in a bad way or anything like that. He probably has a purpose and intention for it and it's thought out. That kind of stuff is hard to monetize.

Honestly, he's doing it for fun. So, so he's doing it for fun. He has some, see, he has some AI stuff that he's working on right now that has a, let's just say it has a very large TAM. Yeah.

Yeah, but not the YouTube stuff. Why?

No, because it doesn't have a large TAM.

Those videos are hard to monetize.

That's him proving to himself that he can do it and like, As a final thing here, I'll just share my screen and then, um, we can work on wrapping. Here, check this out. So if we look at his view stats over here, um, I think in the last 28 days, yeah, 11 million views. This is all from Shorts. Um, estimated revenue, $100 to $400.

Yeah. And it's, I really think he, I thought he was doing this to try to create a consumer-based company, but I'm wrong.

Um, no, he does have a consumer-based company, but a lot of this stuff is like, you know, like, uh, Why Kim Jong Un isn't isn't fat in North Korea. How Seth Rogen made millions. Why Kobe Bryant was a Swiftie. Why France's leader is suing Candace Owens. Yeah, okay, cool. Anyway, guys, hope you enjoyed this. Let us know what you think in the comments. Like, do you think we should do more live? Because we're experimenting with this right now. The reason we did this live was we wanted to see what the engagement will look like, and it looked pretty good across the board. But that being said. Neil and I are going to hit stop now and we're going to make sure this uploads. But hope you guys have a great weekend. Take care, everyone.