ChatGPT Is BETTER Than Google for Getting Rich?🤔

So does ChatGPT actually have a higher conversion rate than Google traffic? Because a lot of people recently have been saying, oh my God, it converts way higher. Oh my God, you know, ChatGPT is the future. So I bet Neil has actually done a study on this. So Neil, what have you seen?

So we see when you look at analytics and visitor to conversion rate, yes, it is higher. What analytics is not reporting is when you ask people their journey and when they go through ChatGPT to make a decision and then purchase, the amount of times they interact with the brand before they visit the website and do their research is much more higher. So instead of someone searching on Google, going to your website, doing research, then going to another link, doing research, then going to another listing on Google, doing research, and then deciding which site to buy, They're doing this research on ChatGPT, so you're not seeing the visitor count. When you look at true impressions to conversion rate, we don't think it's higher. I don't have exact data because they don't provide it, but we don't think it's higher because people are interacting with the brand way more often than they're actually clicking over to a website and then buying. Typically, they're doing their research on ChatGPT, then when they're ready, they're clicking over and buying, but they've already done a lot of the research and they don't even have to go to the website to finish their research in many cases.

It's interesting because I saw these numbers this morning, but it took ChatGPT about 4 years to get to a billion queries a day, and then Google took much longer, right? But the caveat is there wasn't an LLM in the past. The way now we're asking a lot more questions, so naturally there's going to be more queries, right? So it's not exactly apples to apples.

It was just like Threads was the fastest app to— was it a million or 100 million signups or something?

Yeah, 100 million in like a week or 2 weeks, but it's like, dude, no, you just piggybacked off the distribution you already had, and So, but in this case it's like, no, the search behavior actually changed. And so it's not apples to apples. But again, like we're not saying we don't love ChatGPT, we do. But you know, Google's not exactly dead yet.

No, Google's not dead yet. And Sundar even, let's say ChatGPT is getting a billion queries a day. All right. Google's at 13.7 billion a day. And that was last year during the Google I/O event. Sundar said search has already grown like more than 10%-ish or something like that because of AI.

No, their search, their, their, uh, I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but their coding velocity has increased 10%. So actual productivity in their organization, it's not just like Meta's, like Mark Zuckerberg's like, oh, we're 30 to 40% more code. Sundar's like, what's more productive for us is actually looking at engineering velocity. Uh, that's the 10% that I remember.

There was also, you could be right, but I thought I saw some stat that he was saying search. Oh, cool. Uh, AI Overviews is driving over a 10% increase in usage. For the type of query, so they're seeing a 10% plus increase in usage on Google.

And what do you see on on X now? Oh, oh my God! Google is stealing our traffic. Da da da da da. It's like, what are you gonna do about it?

But let's just use rough numbers. If they're at 13.7 billion a day and you got a 10% increase, you're at another extra 1.33 billion searches a day. Yeah, which is kind of crazy to think about. It's just like, oh, our AI just helped us increase our search. volume by roughly the amount that ChatGPT gets on a daily basis.

This is also interesting. So Patrick Stocks, this product advisor, technical SEO guy, brand ambassador at Ahrefs, he wrote this post on how AI assistants are breaking web analytics and hurting their future. So the premise of this post, and it's a 6-minute read, but his whole premise is, look, search is moving from traditional search engines to AI assistants, but traffic from many of these sites isn't being tracked properly in your analytics. And it's not necessarily your fault. It's, it's their fault, right? So he was just saying, look, you know, their LLM filter in Ahrefs web analytics, notice some common AI assistants missing from the list. They're in our filters, but we aren't seeing any data from their sites, right? So you see ChatGPT, Gemini, whatever. And it talks about the invisible traffic problem comes from these systems stripping the referral value. So I think this is a minor problem for right now, but just keep in mind that we're still very early days right now. Even the CEO of AMD yesterday said we're very early innings of AI right now. Yeah, so just keep in mind this stuff evolves. Like Google didn't become what it became like overnight.

No, and I do believe that, I do believe that when you look at Google and AI and everything that's happening with ChatGPT, I think eventually they'll catch up to Google with a lot of the data and the analytics and the reporting functionality because they announced that they're doing $10 million or $10 billion in ARR and they are trying to—

ChatGPT.

Uh-huh, and they're trying to hit, or OpenAI, and they're trying to hit $100 and $20-something billion by 2029.

Dude, it's crazy because a couple years ago it was like $2 and then $3 and then now it's like $10. And so it's compounding pretty quickly.

Yeah, I don't know if it went from $2 to $3. I think the numbers, they got—

Sorry, that number comes from Anthropic. That's actually Anthropic, $2 to $3. That's recently. Yeah.

But ChatGPT's numbers is growing at a rapid pace. All they got to do is release more features, ads, and all this kind of stuff. And then boom, I actually think it'll grow much faster.

Yeah. So OpenAI's revenue through the years. Oh, here's an AI overview. Oh, this is a helpful AI overview. Look at that. 2023, $3.5 million. 2024, $3.7 billion. Okay, 2025 projected to reach $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, an 82% increase. They expect to generate $12.7 billion total revenue for the year. And then 2029, to your point, OpenAI aims for $125 billion in revenue.

So I was talking to a guy named Daniel George, and Daniel created this startup, Sequoia-backed or Sequoia outbacked. I don't know what you want to end up calling it. It's called Twinmind.ai. Here's an interesting stat for him, okay? They have a lot of users. They're growing virally, just mainly through word of mouth. It's never forget anything. It's pretty much your second brain. That's their model. So it can listen on everything that you're doing, create AI notes, to-dos, answer answers before you even ask during meetings, lectures, conversations. It can pretty much help you with anything they're doing in multiple languages. It's free. When you look at this company, they're leveraging OpenAI's API and Gemini and some of these other players. Their cost per user, I believe, was roughly $30 a month when they first rolled out. Now their cost per user is around $3.

You're talking about just cost of goods sold, really?

Cost—

To service a user.

The cost for all the APIs.

Okay, yeah.

So it's gone down around 10x in like a year, year and a half.

Yeah.

What's the cost going to be?

And that's 90%.

Yeah. What's the cost going to be in another year or 2 years? Because these models are getting more efficient. They're buying their own energy nuclear power plants and the chips are getting more efficient. So it's like, what's the real cost going to be?

And you know, every 2 generations it basically goes down like 100x, something like that. Every 2 generations for these models. Yeah. Like what used to be really expensive 2 years ago is now like cents.

So let's go back here. What do you mean by 2 generations?

Like models. Like, it's like, so right now we have O3 Pro, right? And then you had O3, and then you had 4.1, and you had 4.0, right? But then you had ChatGPT-3 before, right? Those, the cost for tokens used to be way more expensive. And to your point, they're dropping like 90%, 99%, right? And then you have DeepSeek come out, this 99% drop, right, from these tokens. And so to your point, it's becoming a lot cheaper. And they call this, remember we talked about Jevons paradox, the more something gets used, it actually proliferates even more. And so the costs are coming down, you're going to see a lot more queries, a lot more energy being used, a lot more compute being used.

And to go back when you're saying every 2 generations, you know, like there's 4, there's 4 mini, is that considered, do you consider that another generation?

Like 4, 3, from going from 3 to 4 would be one generation.

Okay, so you're not considering all the like sub-variations.

Yeah, yeah, no.

Okay. That's still, you know, crazy to think about. I don't know when they're coming out with 5. ChatGPT.

They say they're holding off a little bit.

I remember, um, oh, mid to late 2025.

Yeah. So they're holding off a little bit. Like they're pretty close already, but Sam Altman said like they're going to wait a little bit because it's that amazing.

ChatGPT-5 expected to be a significant upgrade, potentially surpassing the capabilities of 4.5.

Have you used O3 Pro?

I don't know which version I'm using.

So I just know I paid $200 a month. So you have O3 Pro. So they just came out with this like 2 days ago, right? And what it does is O3 is a really good reasoning model, but O3 Pro, here's what I did. I was like, okay, tell me what are the highest leverage things that I can do with this model that I cannot do with O3 or any other deep research, whatever other model out there, right? And then it basically talks crap to me in the beginning. It's like, you ask very, like, the things you ask me are like how to do things, right? It's like, no, here are the highest, like 12 leverage, highest leverage prompts. And this must be your kids. No, they're yelling.

They're calling for me.

Oh, they know you're here. Uh-huh.

Okay. So going back to 3 versus 4, when you're talking about— I thought when we're just using the interface on the website, we're just using the latest 4 model or whatever it has.

No, so by default you're on 4, right? But I keep switching it to O3 Pro. I wanted to see how good this is. Let me read you some of the prompts, right? So here's what it said. It's hard truth. Unless you push the model beyond straightforward tell me what to do requests, you will keep getting answers you could have stitched together from me, O3, plus a few hours of Google ChatGPT and Excel. The O3 Pro tier only earns its keep when you force it to synthesize large, messy, multi-domain input run deep quantitative or algorithmic reasoning, and deliver personalized decision-grade output that you struggle to reproduce manually. So let me give you 2 prompts and then we can move on. So the exact question to ask, ingest these 5 years of Single Grain and Carrot P&Ls plus my personal spending and create a Monte Carlo forecast runway of A, runway, B, probability of hitting $200 million ARR by 2030 under 3 hiring plans. Show the top 3 levers that shift the distribution greater than or equal to 10 percentage points. I dropped this in, it thought for 20 minutes, And then it gave me an answer. I'm going to give you one more. So write Python that optimizes my LinkedIn ABM pricing tiers using historical close rate data and price elasticity curves. Recommend the 3 highest EV price points and expected churn impact. So highest EV would be expected value, and then you would ingest data here. You would preload data from your, like, your close won loss data, your pricing and usage metrics. And so this stuff just getting a lot better. You're a data guy. Imagine all, so I just take all of these prompts and I just, I have 'em all running at the same time thinking about these 12 things and they're all right, like thinking for 15, 20 minutes, taking all the data you have. You have, it's an even smarter strategist in your pocket now. Yeah.

And I think it's just going to get better and better. I'm just curious to see what 5 is going to do.

Yeah, we'll see.

But it's already really good. I do believe it hallucinates.

For sure.

And I have that in one of the topic sheets because I was just in Calgary and I asked everyone in the audience how many times or how How many of you has used ChatGPT or any AI model and seen that just the answers are just really off? And I forgot what percentage in the room raised their hand, but it was something significant like 40-ish plus percent.

Yeah, and I think the rest are lying. I mean, it's— but it's like humans, we're wrong all the time.

Yeah, but even the ones that are hallucinating, I asked them, you know it's hallucinating, how many of you still use it to do research, figure out what products to buy and get help? And almost all of them still raised their hand because they're like, We know it hallucinates. You double-check it. The value it provides outweighs the times it hallucinates.

Right. And the only things, the only 2 things that are certain in life are death and taxes. So, you know, nothing else is certain. Even if you have a genius computer, who cares? Like it's just never that 100% right.

That is true. Death and taxes are certain, but depending on where you live, 'cause some countries have no taxes.

Yeah. But they'll find a way to tax you some way, shape, or form. Something else in your life will tax you. Inflation. Inflation will tax you. Something else in your personal life might tax you. You never know. You're always taxed in some way, shape, or form.

Now, did you see the inflation numbers that came out a few days ago?

No, no. What was it? What was it? Was it down?

It was down. Yeah. Less than expected.

But, but see, now, now the narrative is like, oh, well, wait till the tariffs kick in and wait until this and that.

Dude, that is what they actually said. They're like, well, we feel that the tariffs will kick in in the next few months and then go from there.

I don't know. The world's unstable, man. It's like, so, um, my, our mutual friends Syed and Yaniv came in yesterday. Once they left, I'm like, holy God. country got attacked, right? Iraq got attacked. I'm like, what is going on? So yeah, anyway, not a politics show.

No, not a politics show.

Here's another one that's really interesting to me. So we, I guess I'll experience share here. So you weren't here the other day, but I was going to have you come to this founder's dinner where we went to eat hot pot at Hai Di Lao and—

Was Syed?

Yeah, Syed was there. And then we had some other founders and we were just talking about AI. So one guy brought his head of AI, I brought my CTO and the same thread, I don't know if this thread's happening with you right now. It's like we don't really, I don't think anybody takes any joy in having to cut people, but we are looking for ways to spread AI throughout our organization. So obviously, the founders will trumpet it from the top, but that's not enough, right? You have to look for people who are willing, and if you're willing, like, I will teach you, right? But you're gonna have people in your org, like, especially when you have, you know, thousands of people, you're gonna have people who are unwilling and resistant, right?

Yeah.

And that's the problem. And so, Our whole thing is, and Syed was actually the one that brought this up, it's like you want to find, you want to get people to the aha moment where like you start using ChatGPT or Cursor, you realize you're all of a sudden you're 10 to 15 times faster. You just need to get people to that point and then they can activate on their own, right? But I think the problem is like, you know, the people that are kind of fighting against this, it's like, dude, it's like, it's the equivalent of saying like, oh, don't use power tools to build a home. It doesn't make any sense, right?

No.

I guess my question for you is like, how are you guys spreading AI fluency throughout your organization, or are you even thinking about it?

We don't think about it from that way of spreading AI fluency. We have a mandate. We tell people to use AI whenever it makes sense. It's a little tricky because quite a few of our enterprise customers don't allow us to use AI. So just some of them, we're not allowed to even use it contractually. And if we want to use it, we got to let them know what tools, get authorization, Even if their data's not shared. And then there's also liability issues that we have to worry about on our end if we use it, even if it is allowed by them with their notification. But we have quite a few contracts that are just saying you cannot use it. So on our end, the way we think about AI internally is if you can do things more efficient, by all means use it when you're— we're legally allowed to use it. I know that sounds really crazy to think that way. But at size and scale, you also start to think about wealth preservation versus wealth generation. Because for us, it's more important to keep what we have. Yes, I want to grow, but we first optimize for keeping what we have and not losing it. The way we really think about things is we have a team that's dedicated on disruption, and their goal is to just disrupt every single department through AI or any other forms of technology or efficiency or processes. And we found it, it's easier to have a team that focuses on disruption than it is to get every single department to try to disrupt themselves. That's just what we found internally. So, you know, that central team has been doing some really cool work, and then when they find some huge wins, we roll it wherever we can out legally.

So what— this is interesting. So Yaniv and I were talking yesterday and then we met a friend of ours and they do well as a company. And he was just saying, you know what, like, I'm just hiring a lot of people who are 17, 18, 19 years old, right? And these people are very motivated. They're coming out of college, right? And some of these people sometimes they'll ask, they're so motivated with it because they're just trained on this stuff. They don't know any other world where there is no AI, right? And they're just like, hey, can I sleep on the couch? Like they go to office and can I sleep? I'm like, Dude, that's amazing, right? And so, they're fully bought into this and they're kind of driving this world forward. And in his mind, it's like, and in my mind too, I'm like, a lot of people I talked to from UCLA over here, I'm like, I'd like to recruit more. And so, because again, they come equipped with this. And so again, I have no issue. And what we talked about at dinner is like, we have no issue teaching people who are willing. It is the issue where if the people who are unwilling, that means they don't align with, they don't necessarily align with maybe the future of where we're going. And that's going to become more and more of a thing. And so, I think my opinion is the founder has to keep trumpeting it from the top, but you need champions within the organization and people who identify other people and kind of spread this positive virus throughout the organization. Yeah.

If you don't have a culture where people want to embrace it, I think it's going to be hard. There was a guy that we hired a long time ago. He didn't end up working out. He worked for one of the largest ad agencies out there, publicly traded, massive. Call it 100,000+ employees. And his job, this was before all the LLM stuff that was really coming out. His job was to automate as many departments as possible and reduce headcount. So when he would go to the departments and try to help them automate and reduce headcount, no one wanted to help him out because it was just going to cause—

This guy's going to cause chaos.

Yeah. So you got to really have a culture that wants to improve and they want to embrace this stuff, or I just think it's really hard to get things implemented. Like we have a culture and a lot of people do want to embrace their technology. We're just restricted in a lot of ways legally, or legally is probably the wrong word, contractually with many of our clients not allowing us to use this new modern technology.

It's not even just that. I mean, you also have to make sure that from a security standpoint, things like we're talking like actual security in your company too. Like you can't, it's not like if you're starting a company, you can kind of do whatever you want instantly. It's not like that. And that's what we were talking about yesterday too. It was coming from a preservation angle, but how do you, How do you push this on people who are willing? Again, so I think, by the way, if you're listening to this and you work for a company, you know, you're hearing about all these companies, okay, this company cut 300 people over here, this company saved $8 million in payroll, Google is paying people to leave, Microsoft just cut 6,000 people, right?

Yeah.

And so I think, don't worry about AI slashing headcount. It's more so if you can adopt a willing mindset, and once you hit that aha moment where you've become 10x or 100x faster, that's all you really need to do. You just need to flip that mindset and you'll be okay. Yep. Yeah. So, but yeah, it's kind of crazy. Like what was the deal with Google? What will they pay you? Do you know the terms?

No, but I saw Google recently made a buyout offer for employees. Yeah. Google buyout. Let's see. Google offers buyout for employees in search across, or to employees across the company, including search. Let's see. The buyouts are part of company's effort to reduce headcount, which Google has continued to do in waves since laying off 12,000 employees in 2023. If some teams are mandating office returns for remote workers who live within 50 miles of an office, which is a lot of traffic depending if it's in Northern California or where it's at.

Or LA. LA's pretty— yeah, 50 miles is like 2 hours in LA.

Yeah, but it's their way of saying come to the office or quit.

Or else. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They're not— it's not sharing how much they're offering, but I bet you it's really nice.

Yeah.

From a severance standpoint, they can afford it. And it makes sense. You just start buying off people saying like, all right, you can leave.

You have this one on Reddit uses AI to translate millions of pages and Google's okay with it. I find that interesting.

Yes, because typically if the translations are crap in quality, search engines hate it, but they do have a deal with Reddit. They pay for a lot of their data. I believe this deal was struck before Reddit went public. OpenAI has one as well. And anytime you do a Google search, we all see Reddit results much more frequently. They're community-based. It offers a different type of viewpoint. I personally am not a biggest fan of Reddit results showcasing a lot or being included in a lot of top 10 results. I just think like it's not that accurate.

Yeah.

And people on Reddit either love something or hate something.

They're very biased.

Uh-huh. There's not too much neutral or facts-based stuff. It's just like they're very emotional. But yeah, they're showcasing it more. I do think Google's going to have to make a shift in their algorithm when it comes to showcasing these community sites. I think they algorithmically have too much weight on the community-based websites.

You know, we're getting more and more demand for Reddit, continued demand for YouTube, and then we're starting to see demand for people wanting AI workflows. Yeah.

So with Reddit and YouTube, are you talking about marketing or workflows?

Marketing.

Okay, so not workflows on creating videos and promoting.

No, when I say workflows, it's more so like using like N8N or Zapier or make.com or whatever to build these agentic flows. And I'm like, dude, Zapier has been around for a long time. How is this all of a sudden like this new thing when it's really not?

No, it really isn't.

And you know what really pisses me off? I've been tweeting about this a couple times. Just what pisses me off is like these people that post these N8N workflows and it's like these complex diagrams and all these things, right? And they end up getting a ton of engagement, but then like you have to comment to get access or whatever. And then it's like, then they end up selling you a course. It just makes the AI space look bad. But I do think it's valuable that if you can find great people to help you with these agentic workflows, someone like you or me can spec it out, like take it from 0 to 1, and then they can take it from 1 to 10. I think that's a valuable role to hire for in the near future.

Yeah.

Yeah. But that's interesting. And aren't all your content, isn't a lot of your content It's translated, right?

Yes, we have. And then we have been using AI to help translate, but we have humans review and adjust. And I'm telling you, the amount of adjustments they make is ridiculous.

Too many.

Yeah. It's, it helps us save time, but if it would have taken them 2 hours, call it, it takes them roughly an hour now.

Dude, speaking of, uh, translations, I was talking to our mutual friends yesterday about how we're effectively recruiting offshore using AI. So obviously there are a lot of agencies out there that recruit from LATAM, for example, right? Or Europe, for example. And so we use Lindy.ai and Lindy.ai will find people that have 2 promotions. And then you can say from LATAM, these LATAM countries, from agencies that have more than 200 people and it'll make an entire list. And then you have a human that can just double check, or you can have a machine double check. You can use like Manus or something. follow one of your Looms and the madness will watch your Loom and just log into your LinkedIn and just follow your process, right? Or you can have a recruiter do it. And so that's one thing that's been helpful. But clay.com is also great for this too, because people use Clay typically for sales lead gen, right? But you can use it for recruiting lead gen too. And Clay has some pretty good filters where you can set it to find all people in LATAM, and then you can set it to have like one personalized message. It'll scan their LinkedIn and have OpenAI come up with like a personalized message and it'll find their personal email too, in addition to their LinkedIn. and you can just hit these people up. But I look at recruiting from LATAM and you already have a good amount of people in LATAM, right?

Yeah.

I'm like, these people work extremely hard. Some of these people are very AI forward too. And you can find just like in America, it's most situations are diamonds in the rough. There's a lot of diamonds in the rough, especially in LATAM.

There is, but I would say there's a lot of diamonds in the rough everywhere.

Everywhere. Yeah.

You just gotta really search for it. It's also, do people's culture align with your company's culture? Because if it does, they're much more likely to work hard. Versus if they're there just for a paycheck.

You know who said, uh, Steve Jobs said this. Steve Jobs said that, um, he's found in his— and I'm paraphrasing— he's found in his entire lifetime, you cannot get someone to work hard who doesn't want to work hard.

Yeah.

And that's true. I agree with that. But like, you know, it's interesting, like earlier in our careers, it's like, I couldn't process, I couldn't fathom why people wouldn't want to work as hard.

Yes.

Because it's like the obvious thing to do.

But then people look at us and they, they don't understand why we work so hard and we don't have a work-life balance and they think we're crazy.

But let me ask you this. So hanging out with our friends yesterday, so we're just like, man, we've been working hard. Some of them, I mean, you know, like I've been working since they're 12 years old, right? You've been working since you're 14 years old. That level of grinding, like, do we really want to grind at that level anymore? That's a question for you. Do you really, do you feel like you're grinding at that level anymore or not really?

No, I'm not grinding at that level.

You can probably do that for like 15, 20 years. And then after it, you have to make adjustments.

You have to make adjustments. Like, I don't know how hard Elon Musk works, and I would say he's extreme, but he still has time to play video games and other things.

You know why? It's because he's the way he's blocked everything out. It's basically 5-minute meetings on everything. And so he's time-blocked it perfectly. Yeah. And so that's why he has time to play a lot of Diablo. Yeah. And plus like you look—

What's a lot? Like 30 minutes a day?

I'm talking like probably 10 hours.

A day?

Yeah, like he's probably playing like a 10-hour, 12-hour session. Yeah, it might only be once a week.

Seriously?

Yeah, dude, I used to play, no joke, 12 to 14 hours a day, the games I played.

But it's a video game, is that addicting?

Yeah, 'cause you feel like, okay, when you're young, you're 12 years old, 13 years, you have nothing going on, but in there you're somebody, you're part of the most elite team, you're needed, right? And it feels good, right? You get the dopamine hit. So that's my purpose. And so why wouldn't I spend all my time on it? Versus starting a business. You started a business at 12, 14 years old. That was your purpose, wasn't it?

15 and a half.

15 and a half, yeah. But that was your purpose, right? School wasn't your purpose.

No.

So yeah, if we have our purpose, you go all in on it.

That's true. That's a good way to look at it.

Yeah. So that's why I think like people that poo-poo on video games, they don't really understand it. I'm not saying do it forever. I'm saying learn and then move on.

But let's look at you for a minute now, right? You've had some changes that happened in your personal life. You've been a workaholic for Since I can remember. Yeah. Even when you were in college, you would try to play poker and do other things to make money. Yeah. And it was very calculated. It wasn't like you were just gambling. Do you still have the same work ethic that you did, call it, when you were running Single Grain back in the days?

No, I think I'll tell you what, and we kind of talked about this last time, but the moment my mom passed, I remember I realized 2 things. One, it's time to have a family. Okay. 2, it's, I'm not going to baby people anymore, which means I'm going to delegate a lot more and I just don't have the stamina or energy to be all over everything like I used to be. Because what my mom reminded me of again is she covered everybody to her detriment, like to her, like it hurt her to have to cover for everybody, right? And so yeah, that's what I would say. So I don't, and I don't think I have been, I think it's like we're older now, so we have systems. You have a lot of systems around you, you have a lot of great leaders around you, you have a lot more leverage than you used to have when I first met you. So it's a little different now for both of us.

Dude, I had a call with a buddy of mine who has a marketing agency a few hours ago before recording this podcast. He's older now and because he's older, you know, for him, he's not sure what he wants to do in life and where he wants to be. He doesn't work as hard and his agency does good revenue. Let's call it 9 figures. All right. The market's been up and down for the last few years. He doesn't grind it out. He's probably been doing this for 20-ish years if I had to guess.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know how old his agency is, but let's go with 20+ years.

Huh.

And talking to him, because things are bad right now, he's not willing to grind it out like the way he used to be. And I was telling him, I was like, dude, you don't have a work problem. I'm like, you have a profit problem. He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, you're talking about, oh, you just can't have it in you to work really hard to, you know, Focus on the business to make it grow 30% year over year. I'm like, some things just aren't in your control because the economy's just bad. I'm like, but you have a profit problem. I'm like, the solution to your business isn't, hey, we need to go change all these things and be a better business so we can grow faster. A lot of things you can't control. Like right now, you're right, Israel attacked Iran.

Yeah.

And Iran suspended nuclear negotiations with the US. So all this kind of stuff affects the market, affects revenue. It affects marketing indirectly. We're not saying, you know, we're concerned about marketing more than human lives or anything like that. It's just the reality that this all affects business and the economy. I was like, how about you just figure out how to cut $3, $4 million worth of expenses? He's like, I could, it'll be disruptive. I'm like, okay, will it impact your growth much? He's like, no, the economy's crap. He's like, I can just hire when things are good again. I'm like, will it cause a lot of churn and cancellation?

Yeah.

No, not really. I'm like, you got your solution. Your solution isn't to figure out how to rejigger your mindset to work harder. He's older. He has kids. His, one of his kids is getting ready to have another kid. He's gonna be a grandparent.

Oh wow. So this guy's like 50s, 60s? 60s.

Uh, I don't know the exact age.

Yeah.

I don't think he's 60. I think he had kids earlier.

Okay.

In life. And I was like, dude, you just, it sucks to cut. But if you just cut, you will solve your financial problems.

Yep.

Imagine just adding $4 more million in profit. It's not a big number for him because he's already highly— not, he's not highly profitable. His profit wasn't as good as it used to be. But if you cut it, he's like, yeah, it would be— he's like, my profit would start going back closer to the heydays. I'm like, you can just cut. You don't have to change tons of your lifestyle.

Well, what does that have to do with him working hard?

He's trying to— he believes the way to fix the business is to like work like he used to when he was 20.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, you're not going to do that. That's just unrealistic. The real solution is you just cut the fat.

Yeah, things change. They call it the 4-burner theory, right? You have family, you have work, you have friends, and then I think you have—

What's the 4th one?

I think it's marriage. Your wife, your spouse, I think. But my point is there's different— when you have— it's like a stove, right? Like you can't— you can probably only have 1 or 2 at the same time, but you can't have all 4 on maximum fires. You know what I mean? So in our 20s, maybe you're firing on work all the way. And you sacrifice maybe your friends and partying.

Family, friends, health, and work.

Okay, health, yeah. So like, I'm pretty focused on, I would say I've been focused on health, right? You would say health and work mostly, right?

Yes.

Right, and now it flips. It's like, okay, well, probably need to start focusing on family more. Okay, that means some areas need to tone down, right?

So does that mean the burners are not all going on at the same time or they're down a little bit?

You can only get like 1 or 2, yeah. And you can get 1 or 2 like very high, but, or you can kind of try to balance it a little bit. But if you try to balance it, how well are you gonna do?

Yeah, it's hard.

Yeah. So, you know, I think for you right now, it's probably more, you correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think family's a big focus for you. Yeah.

Right?

I would say health, you do pretty well. I would say work is still pretty big, but if you have— Your friends and work kind of go together, so.

Yeah. But yeah, 'cause most of my friends are work friends. Uh-huh.

Yeah.

So what would you say are my 2 burners then if you had to pick?

Well, you mean the ones that you're sacrificing?

No, the ones that I'm focused on. I finally could pick 2 because you're saying you should only—

Yeah. So I still think work's there.

Okay.

And I think you try to keep family there. Yeah.

I would agree with you. I don't focus on health too much.

You do it to maintain.

Yes, I do to maintain. And when I look at friends, I honestly don't have that many friends. I can count them like on 2 hands easily. I hang out with you more than most people. This podcast helps because we record it. But like, I honestly don't hang out with that many people. I actually see you more than anyone else.

But you know what, you'd be surprised. It's true. But like, and obviously, you know, hopefully your parents last forever, right? But at some point they're gonna have to pass, right? But I think what will be heartwarming is you realize that the— what was heartwarming for me the moment my mom went is like fucking 200 messages, right? And like all these flowers and snacks and things, right? Snacks are the way to go, by the way, guys. Flowers are a pain in the butt. But 'cause you have to like, rewater it and stuff and change the water. Right. But anyway, I'm grateful for it. But my point is, because you help so many people in business, you don't realize how many people you impacted until a moment like that happens. And so I think you probably have more friends than you realize.

Yeah.

That's my point.

No, I totally agree. I do have a lot of friends. I just don't communicate with them as often. Interesting enough, when your mom passed, my kids wanted to go get flowers.

Yeah.

Okay. So We tried explaining to our children, 'cause I'm going to the funeral soon.

Yeah.

And my kids wanna go grocery store and get you flowers.

Oh, that's cute.

And ask you questions. So we didn't let 'em do it.

I would've been down.

No, but the questions were not appropriate.

That's okay. Like, why did she die? Like, right? Straight up.

I would've asked her.

Questions like that. Yeah.

And then they're just like, what happens when your mom goes? How are you feeling? Like, it was just—

She ain't gonna come back.

Yeah. No, but like, it was just inappropriate questions. And then my kids were like, why can't we ask him these questions? And then they were starting to say like, when is— they were starting to ask about your dad and if he's— and I'm like, no, this is not appropriate.

I would've been down.

No, but it just wasn't.

They can come to the funeral too if they want.

It was just—

my friends are bringing their kids.

We're just like, my kids will just ask inappropriate questions.

It's fine. It's a learning experience. But my point is, okay, going back to this, okay, the 4-burner theories, right? What stage we're at in working. I think if you're listening to this and you're like in your teens or your early 20s, you work like hell because you have no leverage. The only leverage you have right now is you have time, right? Use all that time, be a loser, don't go to parties, right? That's what we'd recommend. And then by your 30s, hopefully you have some leverage, you have relationships, hopefully you have a little capital, maybe you've hired a team, and then you just keep building on that over time. And hopefully you're building for, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. But if you get a great crazy offer, maybe you just take it. And, um, you know, ride off into the sunset. But that's how this game typically works. It's very unusual for someone like, you know, love or hate these people, like Elon, like Elon doesn't have to work. And then love or hate Trump, like he doesn't need to work, right?

Same with Zuck. Yeah.

Zuck doesn't need to work.

Even though he's obsessed about work.

Yeah.

He can't be working as hard as he used to because he has time to like do MMA for a long time.

Not M&A, guys.

MMA. MMA.

He tore his ACL doing that. Yeah.

What did I say?

M&A. You said M&A because that's on your mind. Yeah. But yeah, no, any of these people, right? Zuck, Larry Ellison, all these people. I think it's always going to be wired within us. But again, there's different stages of your life and you might have to dial things up and down, but you can't get it all perfectly.

No, you can't get it all.

And by the way, the one thing I'll leave on this and we can move on to the next one is I told you that I had my mom fill out this story, like this keepsake book where she filled out all her stories. And then It got to a question where it said, what is your biggest accomplishment in your life? And I thought it would be about like her career, 'cause she talked a lot about her career in the thing, right? And usually, like, at least for her, like it's a lot based on, you know, her accomplishments, but her career accomplishments. But her greatest accomplishments was her friends and her family. And that hit me pretty hard. I was like, yeah, that is my greatest accomplishment. It's not like, that's actually more important than business in my mind. I was talking to Syed about this yesterday. He's like, yeah. That is the only thing that matters.

Mm-hmm.

But you don't realize that till later.

Even Syed.

Yeah.

Look how nice he is to his family and extended family.

Yeah. But like, this is another thing. It's like you don't realize how good of friends you have where they're just like, oh, I'm flying over. Right? Yeah. So those 2 that fly over yesterday, it was, it was like, shit.

Think about our marketing friends when we have problems in marketing and how many of them come and help us.

None.

No. Like, If you had a problem with like—

I just think about business friends. I don't think about marketing friends.

Sure, but—

When you say marketing, I think about the mastermind people.

No, but like just business friends. Like someone messaged me saying today, right now while we're doing this podcast, they need help with their YouTube account. So I will go and help them with their YouTube account after this.

Oh yeah, totally.

Where we will help people for things. And it's not like we're consultants. Well, technically we have an agency, but it's not like we're like, okay, this is going to cost this much. We just more so go and help.

And I think what we've realized at a young age is the phrase that keeps coming back to me is help others get what they want and you'll get whatever you want. And you just do that like every, every, like ideally every one ask you have, you have maybe 9 gives, maybe more than that. And you just get everything that you want. The world just kind of bends to your will.

Yes.

So yeah. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows, we think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. You know, funny enough, the guy that posted this one, um, we were partners before. On a little—

You and him?

Yeah, so we had a website called Store Mapper, but anyway, that's a side thing. And okay, so remember how I've talked about how the future of marketing is going to be one click?

Yeah.

So he goes a little deeper here, this guy's Tyler Tringas. So all SaaS is going to have to move upstream, not just selling software, but doing more of the job that their customers currently use their software to do, right? So when you look at, Cursor, for example, it's doing the job for you. It's writing code for you, right? And people are asking for the cursor for doing presentations now. I think marketing is going to go in this way too, where people actually don't want to log into like, you know, this web app or this mobile app and like go through this UX. They just want to say, okay, here are my goals and I just want you to do it. And when I say the future of marketing is going one-click, it's here's the suggestions, Click this button, do you just want us to do it for you? And I think a lot of SaaS is going to go in that direction. And so what's happening right now, especially with, and I don't know if you're seeing this, I'm keen to know from your side, but with ClickFlow and with Carrot, there are people just saying, hey, can you just do it for us? Like someone just came to Carrot the other day, can you just run it for us? And so I think the bridge right now, if you think about crawl, walk, run in terms of phases, the crawl right now is, okay, here's the SaaS, can you just do it for us? Eventually it's just going to be the computer doing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So dude, when you— I agree with that. I was talking to a corporation about ABM the other day. Have you heard of Fortive?

No.

F-O-R-T-I-V-E. Look them up, stock. We were actually talking about your solution on their marketing call, uh, with their team. $23.71 billion market cap.

Is that the logistics company?

No, no logistics.

Fortive.ca?

Industrial technology conglomerate. They work in all major countries.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you do. There's so many Fortives. I don't know which one it is. .ca?

No, no, just go Fortive. There's only one that's massive. It's a $23 billion company.

I'm just going to type Fortive stock.

Yeah, you can see Fortive stock.

FTV?

Uh-huh.

Not FTX?

No, it's a big corporation.

Okay.

Yeah. Annual revenue, $6.23 billion.

Wow.

But we were talking about ABM on our call and we were talking about your solution to the marketing department, right? They centralize things and they tend to have like a virtual event or in-person event each year. And we've been working with them for a long time, but going back to ABM, you're so right. When you look at these marketing solutions, they tend to be reporting.

Yep.

And if you look at like the gross growth of Cursor and a few of these AI-based technology companies, the reason they grow so fast isn't the marketing. It's because the software is helping you just do a lot more things efficiently and it saves a lot of money.

Yep.

So it's just growing virally and that's what people are expecting in marketing in which like they want to be able to click buttons and things just happen for them. And your product, your SaaS would just grow more rapidly. Hard to do though. Yeah.

And marketing changes so quickly too. Like coding is a little more like it takes longer to evolve. With marketing, the tactics change so quickly. So you have to be, the product iteration cycles are a lot faster.

It is. And it's, it's hard to just allow a click of a button because you're relying on so many other platforms where you're restricted on what you can do because based on what they allow you to do through their APIs.

And I think in that case, to your point, it has to, if you're going to do one-click marketing, it probably has to be simpler things. It can't be that complex. If it's going to be complex, complex, you need humans in the loop to review.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Yeah. So I think it's interesting, but that's what it is. You know what's interesting to this too, that's kind of tied to this? So I listened to a podcast with the Fiverr CEO, with Harry Stebbings, the 20VC dude. So I'm paraphrasing here, but the quote is, if you're not adopting AI, F you, you will be a burden on society. So I think that's a little intense. Yeah, I understand his premise of it, but it's like, His whole thing is, look, is it your spouse's job to make you a better person? No, you have to want to be a better person. Is it my job to help you have a fitter body or something? No, it's you have to want a fitter body or to eat well, right? And so his point is like, same thing here. If you're not willing to adopt this on your own, you don't belong in my company. You are a burden on society. I have no sympathy for you, right? Versus if you are willing, like we mentioned earlier, if you're willing to learn this stuff, Happy to teach you this stuff.

Yep. So, so I'm looking up Fiverr stock right now. And when I look at their stock, because I'm trying to see how much they're affected by AI, March 2025, when you look at their quarterly earnings, they're up 14.61%. So they're still growing in this economy. People are still using them for a lot of small tasks.

Yeah. Well, you know, people think he was intense. I know like some CEOs try to walk back what they were saying. I think the Duolingo CEO walked it back.

Wait, was the Fiverr CEO the one who said if you don't implement AI, Like, fuck you?

Literally fuck you.

So that wasn't Harry from 20 Minute VC?

No, no, no. Harry was interviewing him and Fiverr, like he's just, he literally says fuck you, like the fully.

So, uh, so, but yeah, I don't think people need to implement it everywhere. Just like in life, you look at some of these corporations that sell artwork, for example. Yeah, you could implement AI like in systems and processes, but like just me personally, If I'm buying art for a house, I don't want AI-created art.

That's interesting because there's NFT AI-created art that's sold for a lot during the NFT craze and they're starting to come back now.

I'm also the person, if I was buying art for a house, I want the cheapest art and I probably don't care for art in my walls. Yeah, same here. But if I had to buy it and I had to pay the money, I'd rather pay for a human piece of, a created piece of art versus AI. But that's just my personal Viewpoint.

We had an interesting conversation at that AI founders dinner the other day where it's like, hey, Eric, are you optimistic or pessimistic in general? And I don't know if we talked about this before, but what's your philosophy? Do you find yourself to be more of a pessimist or optimist?

About AI or just in general?

In general.

I'm more a pessimist.

Okay. And do you think it's, if you could choose, what do you think would be more optimal?

On how I should be?

Yeah.

I would prefer to be an optimist.

Why?

I'd probably be happier in life.

So I— this might actually— I don't know what— I want to see how you react to this. So if you think about it, okay, if you're a pessimist, right, you start off negative thinking about something. Now if it goes— if the, if the outcome is negative, you, you've been negative twice. Are you following so far?

Wait, repeat.

Okay, so if you start off as a pessimist, right, if you're thinking about a, uh, like a situation If that situation turns out to suck and you're right, so you're actually double negative, negative initially and then negative again. Are you following?

Yes. So if I'm a pessimist and then be right, I'm negative 2 times.

Yeah, you're double negative, right?

Yeah.

But if you're optimist and it goes wrong, you're at least happy and then sad, right?

Yeah.

But if you're optimist, like you're happy and then it goes right, you're double happy, right? So you're better off actually being an optimist.

Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Yeah. I'm optimistic on some marketing initiatives, but generally, You know, someone gave me an example of this the other day with me. They're like, dude, you tend to be negative. And they're like talking about the market and interest rates. And they're like, look at the S&P, it's close to all-time highs. I'm like, ah, it's inflated because a lot of these AI stocks and tech.

Yeah.

But I'm like, other than that, I'm like, I don't feel optimistic about consumer sentiment.

Yeah.

And I'm just negative. And the reason being is the economy globally is just terrible.

I think maybe the right way to think about this is I'm a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. And then I think you're actually the same way too.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Yeah. But it gets, if you're more pessimist, it gets people to do things with higher urgency.

But I'm optimistic in certain areas in life. Like when I look at marketing as a channel, I love how it adapts all the time. It makes our jobs harder, but it weeds out the crappy people. And It's entertaining for me like a soap opera.

Yeah.

I don't really watch soap operas, but the soap operas take you a lot of ups and downs. I kind of like how marketing changes frequently. Like, oh, Google releasing AR views is going to affect clips. Oh, everyone's starting to use ChatGPT. It's going to be hard to track impressions. How do you rank on ChatGPT? Oh, now there's AI mode. I like all the change. I like the chaos.

Yeah, I like the chaos too. You know, I was listening to Adam Neumann being interviewed by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Adam Neumann of WeWork fame.

Yeah.

And Marc Andreessen, so Andreessen Horowitz was like, hey Adam, like if there's one pattern I've identified with you, 'cause he had this fiasco with WeWork, right? He still ended up getting paid a lot, but he's like, Adam, are you gonna stop being that CEO who enjoys chaos and enjoys putting the company back into chaos every time? Right? 'Cause they tend to see in their portfolio companies, there's a lot of CEOs that love chaos.

Really?

Yeah. And I actually, I'm like, oh damn, I think that's me too. Right? Like I function better in chaos. Right? But it's like, no, you should stop like risking I think I do take more risks than I should. I think you're probably more conservative, which is the right way.

But I am chaotic and I'll change my mind very frequently.

On more personal stuff recently.

And even business.

Yeah.

Business, I'm way better than I used to be, but I'm still bad.

Yeah. Yeah.

Personal, I'm terrible, but I'm getting better on personal, but it's causing business to get worse. I'm not talking about from a revenue standpoint, but my decision-making changes.

Yeah. Yeah. We talked about that yesterday.

Yeah.

Dream home, sold it in a— finished building after 2 years, sold it in a month. It's like, had some homes here, got rid of it.

Uh-huh.

Might, right? Who knows what's going to happen with this one?

Uh-huh.

So yeah, you have this highlighted. I don't know if you want to talk about this one, but I saw that UnitLevers looking to hire 20 to 30x more influencers. And I thought this would be interesting to talk about too, Neil, because you've gotten a lot of influencer pitches. You've done a lot of influencer deals. And I'm finding that I'm getting more pitches in my inbox from companies like Meta, Snapchat, And Adobe. And so I want to talk about how we think about maybe handling these, but we could start off maybe with why Unilever is hiring 20 to 30x more influencers.

I think Unilever is making a smart move because they see the power of influencer marketing. They tend to have their own communities, and when they back something, elevates a brand. Publicists doubled down on influencer marketing. They've been buying up influencer marketing companies to scale up their offering. They think it's the future. They've been paying an arm and a leg for some of these influencer shops.

You guys bought some too, right?

We haven't bought any influencer marketing agencies. You started this from scratch. We have, we do influencer marketing, but we started from scratch. But we've, it's never been on our roadmap to buy an influencer marketing agency. We do have B2C and B2B clients, but influencer marketing isn't the biggest request we get. We tend to buy in areas that we get more requests for. Like we bought Yodle because we had more app store optimization requests and we were starting to lose some RFPs because not enough good case studies. So we bought a company who's been in business for like 17 or 20 years or something crazy like that for App Store optimization. I don't know what the timeframe was, but I know they launched when there was the first iPhone.

Yeah. Well, I think also the reason why they're spending so much more is because I do think influencers, influencers, it's so mispriced because it's such a, it's not like you can log into Google Ads or Meta. And so when I, when I see some of these offers and you've gotten great offers too, Not anymore. Really?

Well, technically we don't open them up and we don't respond to them anymore.

Yeah.

Every once in a while we'll respond to them because some of them are our clients, so we will respond to those. But every other one that's an influencer, I don't know if I'm getting hit up that often anymore, more or less. I know a lot of them don't come to me, but we have a mandate internally to just turn down all influencer campaigns.

So that's a good place to start. So why turn them down? This is, we're talking about influencer pitches to you directly.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Because the best use of my social clout, whatever I have, I'm not saying I have big clout, nowhere near a Kardashian or anything like that, but whatever small clout I do have, it's better used to promote our own products, our own services, and our own business because that'll not only drive revenue, but that increases my net worth.

Yeah.

On the flip side, if I go promote a company like Microsoft, I got paid, but the only value I'm adding is whatever I got paid. When I promote my own stuff, yes, I'm getting paid, or I'm technically not getting paid, but I'm driving revenue for the company. And that revenue has a certain profit and I'm worth either a multiple of revenue or profit. So it increases my net worth and creates, it's a better leverage than promoting someone else's when I look at the total ROI.

Yep, I agree. And some of these deals, by the way, they'll be like, okay, we like to start at like, you know, 60, 70 grand or something like that. And we'd like you to do this and that. And my response is the same one. I can just run my business and I can grow that faster. And I can also promote my own products, right? And services. You know, ironically for this podcast, Neil, I make the ads for you for your business.

Really?

Yeah. There's an NP Digital ad for you too. And so just to make sure it's balanced, right? So if you want an answer to the public one, whatever, just throw it in there. But that's my take on it because we actually do get good leads, at least from my YouTube channel. This YouTube channel yet for marketing school right now, it's not that big yet. But as it gets bigger, you should have your own ads. So yeah, yeah. But look, I think it's nice to see pitches from Meta, Snap, and Adobe and all that. And so that's a signal to me that they're ramping it up for B2B. It's mispriced. But if you run a business and you're getting influencer pitches as a business creator, it's probably still worth it to just pitch your own things because it's better for you in the long term and the short term.

Yeah, I don't think if If you're going to be an influencer, you should, you can look at monetizing your profiles and your channels and your brand in the short run. And then, but in the long run, you got to figure out how to promote your own stuff.

Yep. B2B CTV ads. You have this one. I'm assuming you're going to talk about some case studies here.

No, kind of, but I can't reveal the company, but we've been running more B2B CTV ads. It's not that competitive. Inventory's great. It's actually very affordable. The ROI we're seeing is way higher than B2C. Not too many B2B companies want to run CTV ads.

I think B2B companies, they just like to do what's tried and true and they're never really original. And if they're willing to take a shot like on things like this, ideally you're trying to get your clients to carve out like maybe a 10, 15% fun budget to go on things like this. That's what one of my friends said recently. He's like, hey, we want to work with you guys, but we also want to carve out a fun budget. We won't measure anything. And just see where it goes. And he's the type of guy that will like buy like airplane banners.

That's cool.

He'll wrap his car with his logo on it. Like he'll try stuff like that.

You must have a nice car.

No, it's a Tesla Model 3, which is a nice car. It's the— but we're not talking luxury car. So yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But speaking of brand dollars, that's where we're actually— because with B2B CTV ads, a lot of it is brand dollars. We're seeing LLM money come from branding more than the SEO side. Like if someone want— like if a company wants to optimize ChatGPT or optimize for ChatGPT or Perplexity or any of the other solutions out there, we're seeing the money come from the brand side. We're actually not seeing it come from the SEO side.

Interesting. So are they just not measuring, like what are they measuring, the ranking?

They're measuring the mentions, how many times they're being mentioned versus the competitors and the sentiment analysis. But we're seeing more of that money being controlled by the brand side versus the SEO side.

What do you think about all these? So there's a lot more case studies coming out from like Ahrefs, AROps, and then they're showing, you know, AI overviews. They're showing how many times you're popping up on ChatGPT. There's tools like Profound. I think a lot of this is just, these tools are just showing you the rankings, but like it doesn't ultimately help you like rank higher or do this.

It doesn't help you rank higher.

Yeah.

There's another one called Scrunch, I think it's called. It shows you sentiment analysis as well. Semrush has one version as well. But when we look at a lot of this data, it's not 100% accurate because people don't have the depth of a keyword base that they do for Google. So let's say these SEO tools scraped and crawled 7 billion keywords on Google. I'm just making up a number, but it's something large like that. They can track literally for any variation, is a company showing up in the search volume? Because you're getting this data, a lot of it from Google. When you look at the LLMs, you type in a prompt, you're getting more suggested prompts, They're leveraging those to see how many times your brand's mentioned, but that database isn't really robust yet. So the true sentiment analysis, or not sentiment, the true frequency of how often your brand's being mentioned is quite off.

Are you guys building anything for this?

Yeah, it should be releasing.

Yeah.

And ours will be a quote unquote freemium version and we'll just give a lot away for free.

Do you want to share the idea, the experiment that we That I gave you on this podcast?

Yes.

The form one?

So Eric and I were spitballing on this podcast a few weeks ago or a month ago, and there was an idea on Answer the Public or some of my properties that we're going to collect more agency leads from the tools. So when you register, it's just email, password, or authenticate through Google. And then I wanted to collect data for like name, phone number, marketing budget, URL. So then that way I can get more data. So Eric had a brilliant idea on, you know, you should tell them you're almost done registering, complete the rest of the information and you'll unlock premium features for free. The text wasn't that long. I'm paraphrasing here. Eric wasn't recommending that text, but that was the concept. Say, hey, you can unlock more premium features if you just fill out the rest of the information. So we did that, but instead of forcing people to, my team put a skip button at the bottom. And then we changed the skip button. I changed it the other day to, no thanks, I don't want premium features for free. And we were getting roughly 11% from registrant to completing the lead when there was a skip button to now it is closer to 30-ish percent.

Hmm.

I thought it was 100%, but it was a glitch on how we were tracking.

Mm-hmm.

So for a day and a half, it showed up as almost 100%. But I was wrong, but it's roughly triple, which is still good. But what we're finding when we start calling and dialing the leads is most of them wanted either A, help on how to use the tool more, but the majority of them was, oh, we're just using the tool for our own internal marketing department. We're not interested in any consulting. So then I'm reshifting how the team is thinking instead of saying, hey, Let's go and create tons of decks or material, not tons of call to actions and lead forms. Think about the flow. Like, is someone clicking on a keyword and will they say, you're like, yes, help me rank for this keyword. Okay, then for that, collect a lead, it's more relevant, then reach out. You'll have way less leads, but the leads will be higher qualified. You're not making as many dials, but it could be much more profitable.

Yeah, that's interesting. So it's interesting because you tested it very quickly after the idea, and that was just from a conversation.

Minus the AI call. Remember I was telling you how we want to test the AI call of having every lead being called by AI? Hey, this is like so-and-so from AnswerThe— or AnswerThePublic. Yeah, uh, we're an AI bot. We're actually using AI to grow your— our business. Do you want us to help you grow your business through AI as well? And this is how we're implementing technology and marketing, etc., to So we thought that could convert really well. That wouldn't be the script, but, you know, I'm just paraphrasing.

Roughly, yeah.

Yeah, we would fine-tune it through copywriters or I would sit down and write copy over an hour. We haven't done it yet. We talked about us doing it. Again, there's a lot of laws with AI because the way a lot of these tools that are dialing have in their terms of service on what they can do with our data, It would breach a lot of privacy laws and we can't just use dialers. We got to find ones that'll comply with the regulations and the rules that our customers or potential customers put us through. So we haven't been able to test that out yet. We want to, we're just working around the legal hurdles. Dude, this is the problem of having established business. I'm not saying anyone should break laws, But when you have a startup, you just go because what's the real risk? Oh, you get in trouble? What is someone going to really sue you for? When you have a company that's big like a Google, and we are nowhere near that size or even a fraction or a fraction of a percent, we're not even that big, right? Like we're a speck in their universe compared to their size.

Yeah.

But you look at like the Googles of the world, the reason they're not agile and they can't move Isn't because they don't have the labor. It's not because they don't have the culture. They have talented people who believe in it and want to execute fast. It's bureaucracy that gets in your way because of the size. You just have to deal with all these regulation issues because you constantly have a target on your back.

Yeah. Bigger you get, the more bureaucracy. Speaking of bureaucracy, by the way, maybe this is not bureaucracy, but I do think it's interesting. I didn't really think about how these, you know, this is more political, but the ICE stuff that's going on. So obviously we live in LA and downtown, you know, there's a lot of protests going on and things like that. And It doesn't affect you and I directly because it's not like my friends that have e-commerce businesses where their workers are scared to show up now. So they're scared to show up to work. And then you look at one of the open markets in downtown where there's usually a lot of trade happening. I think it's called Santee Row or something like that. Nobody's there, right? And so this is a situation where it's like, man, the way the media spins something, it's like it really causes a lot of issues. And so a lot of my friends, again, who have these warehouse Businesses, people don't want to come to work anymore because it's too scary.

I look at what's happening and I'm not saying it's good or bad. We, you know, we're not a political show, but I can tell you with Eric and I living in California, the media has blown it out of proportion by far.

It is.

They're saying it's much bigger than it really is. If you ask most people who live in Los Angeles, I would say like 99% will tell you it, the media's making it a much bigger story than it is.

And I think both sides blew it up. Both sides, right?

And just to—

so my point of saying this is that sometimes this is when marketing goes the wrong way. And there's unintended consequences, and people end up hurting for it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. Did you see that? So Ahrefs cited this. So Ahrefs is like an SEO workflow product, but 95% of ChatGPT citations come from content less than 10 months old. Did you know that?

I did not know that, but I assumed it was fresh content. We noticed that the more fresh your content is, the more likely you are to get mentioned.

So then it's like, okay, if you build like a SaaS product, like with, with our product, it's like, okay, how do we help people refresh? How do we make sure that they have the best H1 titles to get into AI overviews, right? But that stuff also is going to change very quickly too, right? And so it's like playing whack-a-mole. You have to be on top of it. And this is why I like doing this podcast because it forces us to be on top of it. I think if we didn't have this podcast, I feel like I'd be a little less on top of it. I don't know about you.

I don't think it— yeah, probably a little bit less, but one AI overview strategy that just works really well right now, but it'll be like playing whack-a-mole. If you look at any keyword that you're ranking on page 1 for, and it has an AI overview, Look at what they're pulling for. And no joke, if you take your content that's on page 1 and you add in like 3 bullet points summarizing, including the answers to whatever they're pulling AORVs for, we've noticed a drastic increase in getting mentioned in the AORVs within a few days of just making that change. So you're just adding 3 bullets towards the top of the article and you're letting them know, like, just, you know, in summary, CNBC does a good job of this. Like if you read an article like That's actually a bad article. That one's gated. Let's see. Archer drops 15% on 850. Okay, so it says key points and they'll just summarize 3 bullet points and then they go into article. The point I'm getting on is that's a really great way to just get included into the AOR views. We're seeing it super effective, but again, it's like whack-a-mole. Will that still be effective a month from now, 3 months from now? Who knows? We adjust as things change. Yeah.

I think if you're an SEO now, you just got to be Johnny-on-the-spot even faster, double or triple time faster. Speaking of AI content, by the way, did I show you the Star Wars VO3? You've seen Star Wars, right?

Okay, the movie?

Yeah. This is another example where AI content is actually starting to beat human content. So I showed you the one where the poem that was AI-assisted from my mom, right? So she wrote something in Chinese, 3 pages, and then AI made a poem that made everyone cry, right? But this is interesting because this is a VO-generated vlog series of Greg the Stormtrooper. So check this out.

They're growing things, Greg. Why are they so fast? We just got back from that door, still got juice in our armor, and now Vader's bitch-ass sending us to Hoth. Greg, what do you think? Cybertron? Yeah, that's what I thought, bro. Click! Can you fucking drive? I swear, if we die in this tin can, we'll freeze to death on Hoth.

All right, no, that's pretty good. Like, click.

We just landed. Really trashed out.

I can't feel my end.

Okay, so we're in the middle of an active firefight. Keep those straight.

Come on, it's pretty funny. This is funny.

It's pretty good.

So my— like, by the way, stormtroopers, I don't know about like, I don't think I've ever seen stormtroopers with a personality before. So if you've seen Star Wars, I mean, if you haven't seen it, it's like these soldiers in white, right? They're wearing like white armor and they have these masks on. But this is VO3. And this is interesting because I've heard from people 2, 3 weeks ago, oh yeah, VO's just not there, blah, blah, blah. It's again, The resistance, people will resist. So have you guys been using it for creative at all?

We do use it for creatives. We've actually made whole commercials using AI as well for our clients.

Yeah, but not VO3 though.

I have no idea what they ended up using to create it.

Yeah, VO3, if you pay $129 a month or whatever, you can text a prompt and it'll give you 8 seconds, right? And you can string things together and it comes out with audio too. So that audio is like Google creating the video and the audio.

Huh.

Yeah.

Dude, one thing I just realized having this conversation, as your company grows, like when you're asking some of these questions, I actually don't genuinely know the answer. Like when I say, when you're saying, did you use this technology? So then like, I have no idea.

It's just too hard to stay on top of it all.

Yeah. It's just too much in too many countries. It's like, uh-huh. Okay.

Now I just ask, like, just tell me what's the most impressive thing you're doing right now. With AI or your work? What's the most impressive thing you've done? What's the most impressive thing you're doing with AI right now? And again, how did you prepare for this call?

Yeah.

Oh, I just wanted to hear from you about the role first.

Yeah. Fuck you.

Yeah.

Dude, when people waste my time like that, I just get so irritated.

Do you end the call?

No, I tend to do the call with multiple people.

Uh-huh.

So then I just go on mute.

Gotta go ghost.

No, I go on mute and then I just go do my thing and I go back to work and let them take care of it.

Take your camera off. Yes. Very good. Okay, well we have a little longer here, so I found this to be interesting. You remember the guy who wrote The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes?

Yeah.

Okay, so he used to head up sales for Charlie Munger and so—

Really?

Yeah. So—

Chet Holmes?

Yeah, Chet Holmes. And so he wrote this great book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, and the whole premise of the book, I'll kind of explain it here, but this is how Charlie Munger's sales leader can teach you about closing every single deal.

Okay.

So back, I think he was selling magazine ads, right? For one of, because they used to have a lot of magazine businesses. And so what happened initially was that they had a target list of about 167 people.

Okay.

And he would hit these people with new direct mail. He would hit them, he would call them, and he would just constantly hit these people up. He got nothing for the first month, nothing for the second month. I think it wasn't until maybe the 6th month or so that he closed his first client of that 167 people. Who was that? Xerox.

Xerox was huge at the time, right?

Wow. And gradually, like the, as the year went on, I think he eventually got 29 out of the 167. Eventually he got all of these customers. So the whole premise of that book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, is you create this list of your dream 100 and you're constantly hitting them, but not just spamming them. You're thinking like, oh, Neil's really into the Green Bay Packers. Let me get him a jersey. Oh, they just won the other— congrats on the trade for, you know, Congrats on trading away Aaron Rodgers. Maybe that's not a congrats, right? But my point is, you're aligned with what they're interested in and you're sending them relevant personalized messaging on different channels. You can be SMSing them, you can be direct mailing them, but you're constantly hitting up this Dream 100. These are the top 100 people that you want to work with. And eventually over time, people will respect you and they'll work with you. They'll give you a chance. Because I remember probably earlier for you in your career too, When I had nothing, I would constantly hit, I would make 20 videos a day. Each video was about 15 to 20 minutes. I would upload the video. I didn't have Loom at the time and I would send, I would find their emails through, I'm using salesforcedata.com back then. I'd have their email and eventually I got clients, right? Because they respect you over time and you're just constantly hitting them with hopefully relevant content.

Yep.

What did you do?

So similar, but dude, when it comes to, this makes me remember the Frank Kern approach. Do you remember the Frank Kern approach where he would just deliver a cash-a-bag to your door?

A bag of cash?

Bag of cash. What did I say? Cash-a-bag?

You said cash-a-bag.

Bag of cash.

Yeah.

And that would be his version of content to get people interested. And then from there, you know, he would sell them on it. They're like, you're really going to give me $1,000 or $10,000? Like you literally have someone there with just cash.

Yeah.

It's a different way of content, but that was just, it's a question is how can you just get creative and think outside the box?

Yeah.

And I don't think enough people in marketing really do that.

I think this is something you can actually You can actually have AIs come up with good ideas and it's constantly scanning on what they're interested in and it creates you ideas on each one and do you just want us to do it for you?

Yes, but the question is, is a lot, I believe a lot of people are going to start doing things like that. So the question is—

How do you stand out?

Yeah, how do you stand out?

Yeah.

I think that's the hardest part really in marketing because anything you can do, I can do, anything I can do, you can do and other people can do. It's just a question of time and money. And if someone doesn't have those resources, Because someone will fund it. You're going to have competition. So the real answer, the real question is, is how do you stand out? What makes you different than everyone else?

I think the bar's just going to get higher. Just like when we did YouTube like 5 years ago, it was much easier.

Yes.

And the bar's gone a lot higher now. We think a lot, we have to go to the studio, we have to think about the headline, we have to think about changing the headlines, we have to think about the packaging and all these things. I will say though, back in the day, so this was when I was like 25 years old, you were 26 or 27. You have to be opportunistic. And so when I saw that Zynga, the gaming company, was planning on getting into poker, I was like, hey Neil, I emailed them, they responded. I was like, let's get on a call. I was like, hey, hey Neil, Neil, let's get on this call, right? We got on the call. Unfortunately, they decided not to pursue it. But that just goes to show you that back in the day when we're still in our mid-20s, we didn't have like a lot going on. People would still respond to us. You already had a good established brand going, but I was still starting out in my career.

But also we timed, you timed it right. Not even me. You saw the opportunity, you timed it right. I think that is a big part that people forget just in business and marketing. Timing is something that you can't always control, but if you get lucky on the timing, it can do wonders for you. But yes, you got to stand out. But if you can time things right, a lot of people aren't that Johnny-on-the-spot that you mentioned. They're not executing fast enough and you can be one of the first people and people are like, oh, it's worth a call.

Yeah. Well, I mean, like, look, if you listen to this podcast, it's like, what do we start to talk about? Oh, Oh, somebody passed recently, or Neil's kids, for example, right? Like for sure, that's the topic that's on your mind, right?

Yeah.

So how do you align with that? Oh, well, Neil's interested in buying things that makes his life easier, and oh, he should get a Matic robot. Did you get yours yet?

It never arrived yet.

Oh, mine just got here on Monday, so it'll take a little longer. But my point is, it's like you just do a little more research and hopefully you can set some type of workflow up for you in the future. And I'll just point out when is a good time to message someone and when did they mention something compelling.

Yeah, and on a side note, because I know we're getting close to the end, I think we should end off on how, do you see how Google dropped the support for several rich result types to simplify their search results page?

No.

They're going back to the old day. Remember how Google used to just have 10 blue links?

Yeah.

It was really simple. Then they integrated ads, then they had all these feature snippets and stuff like that, then AI overviews. But you, I'm assuming most people would agree when you look at a Google search result page now, there's just a lot on there.

I don't think I usually click to the organic result anymore.

I still do. I skip most of the paid results. I do look at the AI reviews, but I do skip to organic results. I, or I mean, I mainly skip over paid results most of the time. Most people do from all the data we've seen, but there's just too much from People Also Ask, to the organic results, to videos, to images, to audio. And I'm not saying these things are bad for Google search results. It's just sometimes it's too overwhelming where they're including too much on a page. I do think it's a smart move to just simplify it. We moved into a world where people just want the answers.

Yeah.

For the search queries. They don't want to just be bombarded with, you know, NASCAR logos everywhere.

And that's the way that I see That's how the web was in the beginning.

Yeah, and I think that's where it's gotten to in which there's just logos everywhere and it's just overwhelming. People just want simplified solutions that just give them the answer to their problems.

And when you say rich result types, are you talking about like the local pack or like what type of rich result types are you talking about?

They're testing removing quite a few and they're talking about what's being removed, book actions, course info, claim review, estimated salary, Learning videos, special announcements, vehicle listings. So they're starting to just simplify things. I think what they're doing, if I had to guess, is removing the elements, the rich results for the stuff that people aren't really engaging with frequently.

Yeah. Let's end it on this one because we still have a couple minutes here to hit our 80. So you have this one on, there's a summer slowdown happening for marketing agencies each year, even if your traffic doesn't Yet for some reason in the marketing world, people tell me like, oh, summer's not that bad for us.

We still see tons of traffic. I'm like, yes, but look at how much revenue you close. And the more upstream you go, the more you'll see it because you live and die by the deal because one deal can make your business or crush your business. We really see it where that one deal, or we really see it where it's harder to get those big deals during the summer months because a lot of the people who sign off on that stuff are on vacations. And that's why we actually see there's a slowdown. We see it in the US, we see it in Europe. We don't see it as much in Asia, but we definitely see it in US, Europe, and Latin America.

Because in Asia, all we know how to do is work. It applies to you too. You're Asian too, technically. But speaking of which, are you guys going on vacation? Have you started to set up this, this like yearly vacation with your family? What's the deal?

I already have our vacations planned. They're in my calendar. Technically.

Vacations?

Vacations.

Wow.

So next week I do New York, week after I do New York again for another event. Then the week after Disneyland.

Okay.

Okay. Then I go— have to go to Hong Kong for another event. Then I got a break, which is nice. Then another week of a break. Then I have to go to Bogotá, it looks like. Then I got a break. I tend to spend more time with the kids during the summer and then the week after We're taking them to Hotel Coronado. That's San Diego? Uh-huh. So we'll do like the zoo and all that kind of stuff.

Oh, so you're doing local like staycations?

We do local staycations. Kids are really young. It's a pain to take them on a plane.

Yeah.

I don't, I haven't really tried it.

5 and 3, no?

6 and 4.

6, yeah. I feel like I'm not a father, but I feel like that's a good age.

To take them on a plane?

Yeah. Is he as good as ChatGPT?

It could be, but I think it's just easier to do The staycations, we're waiting for both the kids to be 5, because that was the number Syed gave me. He's saying it's really easy to take them on trips once they're 5. Yeah. And they're happy with the local stuff. So we're just going to try staycations this year. Next year, because they'll be 5 and 7.

Wow.

So then, then we'll start thinking about trips that we can do on a plane. I am thinking this year sometime to taking the kids to Seattle to visit one of my buddies, Kevin.

Yeah.

Because his kids are the same age and our kids get along really well. And that's a short flight, 2 and a half hours. So I'm thinking that could That's a good one.

All right, cool. Well, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.