ChatGPT vs Gemini 3: It’s Game Over for ChatGPT?

Dude, have you seen Gemini 3?

Yes.

Have you been using it?

Yes.

I think it's a godsend for marketers. You look excited about it. I can tell you've actually used it. This is not BS. So how do you feel excited about it? What's so exciting to you?

Haven't I been saying since the beginning that I believe Google—

Google's going to catch up.

Catch up and dominate and not necessarily make ChatGPT go away, but they will become a dominant player in this space.

You have, to your credit, since the beginning, 3, 4 years ago you have said this.

Because I'm a big believer that data helps you create the best LLM, and Google has more data than anybody and than anyone else. And if you look at the person who created ChatGPT, they came from Google, and then Sergey Brin decided to come back in and just handle crap himself when they lost their person. And eventually—

What is this bureaucracy? This is stupid. Like, have you seen the All-In interview he did? This is like, this is so dumb. Like, no, we're just going to do this. He's He's like, just, and then someone gets in his way, he's like, he goes, what's his name, Sundar. He's like, Sundar, just deal with this person. Like, he just doesn't want to deal with it, you know?

But only founders can do that in an organization.

Yeah, founders have a, Jason Cohen, remember Jason Cohen from WP Engine? From WP Engine, yeah. Yeah, so when I did the interview with him, he's like—

Smarter Bear.

Yeah, and Smart Bear, a smart bear. So he was like, founders have this invisible hammer where they have the only power to actually go around and make these types of moves. And when someone comes back in and does this, only the founder can, not even Sundar can do this.

Yeah, because you know what? When founders want to do stuff, we, and I'm not Sergey Brin and I don't think like him. I'm not a crazy mathematician or anywhere near as smart or successful. But generally speaking with founders, we don't look at things like budgets and, oh, this is what's realistic. And, you know—

It goes right over our head.

With planning and politics, it's like, I just want to do this. I don't really give a crap what anyone else thinks. I want to do it. And the same goes with our company because we're recording this podcast literally on Black Friday. And we have most of our 2026 budgets set in stone. So I get a text message from Mike.

Co-founder Mike? Okay.

My co-founder Mike, right? And Mike's like, yo, you know, I want to hire this developer and get him to start sooner because we already have our hiring planned out for 2026. Okay. Keep in mind, we haven't started the year yet. So, you know, if this is how we start the year—

Yeah, it's going to go off.

Yeah, it snowballs and makes it even more worse and it's probably going to irritate people over time. So quick question is how quickly will it irritate? Not if, it's more so how. So like, this is our budget for 2026 and—

You didn't say that, your finance said that.

Our finance says, so they sent us the budget per division. So Mike and I, hop around different divisions whenever we decide. Right now we're in the software division. When you hire engineers, you know, it's not necessarily that you have a budget for 2026 per engineer. It's also when do they start? Because if an engineer costs, to keep the math simple, $120 grand a year, that's $10 grand a month. I know there's other miscellaneous costs, payroll costs, HR, et cetera. Insurance. Yeah. Yeah. But let's just say it's $10 grand a month. Well, if this person was planned to be hired middle of the year, you would only have $60 grand worth of expenses, not $120 grand. So Mike's messaging me the other day and he's like, yo dude, I want to hire this engineer sooner and do this. And oh, by the way, it'll cost us $96 grand that's not budgeted. And him and I are looking at him like, well, we have to make all these product changes to really get the product to where we want, right?

So we need maybe more engineers.

Yeah, so him and I are like, so why are we waiting to do this? Well, this is the budgeting plan that was created. I'm like, yeah, we were both texting like, who cares? It's our company. Yeah, let's just hire him. How quickly can we get him? Well, it's going to take 30 days to recruit him. We already started recruiting. Yeah, right. And this is for engineers that we're supposed to hire. No joke. That's why I give them 6 months out. Yeah, 6 months out. He's like, we already started to recruit for how many of the engineers? He's like, Well, the one that we were supposed to hire in beginning of the year, we already started, but already started for the 4 that we're supposed to recruit middle of the year. That's not part of the 96. He already found one.

So you're at $400,000 now.

Yeah.

Or whatever's going to come. I don't know what we pay engineer, right?

But probably more than that or more than $100,000 a year, depending what country we're recruiting them from. And I don't know what countries we're recruiting them from, but he's just like, yeah, might as well just start getting them now so we can just do all this stuff we want. I was like, okay, sounds good. Same with other bureaucracy in a business. Like the reason our product moves slower, check this out. So when you have products, you have monthly pricing plans, right?

Mm-hmm.

For SaaS, as you know, and then we have these things called add-ons so that way people can just like upgrade for different parts of it. Did you know the add-ons on our system, because it has so much more logic, it slows down development an estimated 40%?

Wow. 40%. 40%.

40%. So I'm not an engineer, you know this. So I just got on the phone with the engineer. I'm like, so plans are less efficient, right? He's like, yeah. I was like, all right, I got a solution for you. He's like, what? Remove all add-ons. He's like, Neil, this would be too complex. What would we do instead? Create a plan for every single add-on.

Wait, add-ons for Ubersuggest? What are you referring to? You're talking about like feature add-ons?

Feature add-ons, or I'll give you a very specific example. Let's say you are tracking your rankings and your visibility on ChatGPT and you want to do it for Gemini. It's an add-on. So I say forget the add-ons, just keep plans that we have in our backend that aren't visible on our pricing page. And you can do a new plan for someone who has ChatGPT plus Gemini. And then if they don't want that, just drop them to the older plan that just has ChatGPT.

So à la carte and different bundles, is that what you're saying?

Kind of. I'm just grouping all the add-ons. So let's say if we only had 4 plans, just have 30 plans. And then, and I broke this down with my engineer. He's just like, yeah, if you end up doing that, then we wouldn't have—

And that speeds up capacity, your development rate. Yeah.

And I was like, all right, sounds good to me. And he's like, yeah, that works. He's like, you okay with 30 plans? I was like, yeah.

30 plans. How's that going to look?

Not visible on our backend.

Okay, got it.

So it wouldn't slow things down.

Got it, got it. Okay, that makes sense. This is interesting because literally I'm doing the same thing right now. I was like, there's a sales guy I've been trying to recruit for the last 3 years. I also talked to my co-founder CTO. I was like, hey, how many more engineers do we need to move this a lot faster? How much faster are we going to go? And this, none of this is budgeted, by the way. This is a bet on the future, right? But all that to say, so going back to Gemini 3 is a godsend for marketers. In what ways are we using it right now? Because I've seen so many examples. I'll give you an example. So we've talked about Replit, we've talked about Lovable, we've talked about these vibe coding tools, right? And Google Gemini, the Gemini AI Studio, the things you can build now is absolutely insane. Like, I don't know if you've tried this, but literally I designed— so I built the front end for a product, right? And then I designed it. I literally went to a website, I dragged— I took a picture of a product that I thought was cool. I said, make it look like this. Boom, it makes it look like that, right? And then it's actually finding— because I keep talking about Juicebox, the recruiting tool. I was like, I wonder if I can make a Juicebox for like sales and for like partnerships and like conferences and all that, right? And it—

What do you mean by that? I'm a little confused.

Juicebox does outreach for recruiting. I already got that part. So what this product is called is Nexus. Like Gemini actually named this product Nexus, right? So it will basically look for people that we should reach out to partner with, that we should do content collaborations with, that we should do sales with, and it'll make like a web and like it shows me who I connect with over time and that web will just continue to expand.

Wow.

And it'll do it automatically like JuiceBox so I can make agents doing it. And so I'm just working on that right now and like it's finding real emails, it's finding the right people, and I'm like, dude, if I just keep playing with this for like a couple hours a week or whatever and I do it over a couple months, like I can actually build something real, right? Imagine how this is going to be in a year, but like, This is the first time, like sure, Replit's kind of cool, you know, Lovable is cool, but like it hasn't, it's not at this level.

Dude, I think, I know everyone's like Lovable is a big company.

$200 million, they just broke $200 million.

Yeah, in ARR.

Yeah, yeah.

And they crossed the extra $100 million in like 4 months or something like that.

Yeah, really fast.

Yeah, really fast. I believe Gemini and ChatGPT and Anthropic are going to end up in the long run, Crushing the Lovables, not necessarily meaning Lovable's gonna be worth $0. They're gonna take over the market share for that.

Dude, 'cause at least for right now, AI Studio, Gemini's not charging me for it, or maybe I'm paying for the pro version, right? But they're not gonna, like, they don't care about that so much because they just want to have people using their products and they want them in their ecosystem. That's how they make their money. It's not from the SaaS revenue.

Yes.

Yeah, and you've played around with the new Nano Banana, right? The new Nano Banana, you can take a picture of like this and then drag in like a scene that you like and then make like an Instagram feed. There's so much you can do with this. I wish we were like 20 years old again, 'cause we'd have a lot of time to mess with this. We don't have as much time today, so.

No.

Yeah.

But yeah, like these products that Google's creating, I think they're moving at a faster pace and doing a better job than ChatGPT.

I think so too. And I think this is where I read something on The Information last week, 'cause I still have a subscription to The Information. And it's like Sam Altman is like, basically the article is like how Sam Altman's like, oh crap, this is like, oh crap moment. And like internally he's like trying to push the team now, 'cause they need to be pushed because This Gemini situation, like they are starting to get left.

So yeah.

Yeah.

And I think this is going to really change what is going to happen in the whole marketing ecosystem. But yeah, no, it's—

And their TPUs too. So they, they're not as reliant on NVIDIA chips as the other companies are.

You saw the Facebook deal, right? It caused NVIDIA stock to go down.

No, what happened?

Facebook bought Google TPU. I don't know what the exact name is, but yes, it could be TPUs or whatever. They also have, I know it wasn't their quantum computing—

Tensor processing units.

Yes. I know it wasn't their quantum computing chips, 'cause I'm assuming they're not for sale, but they bought their quote unquote NVIDIA copycat clone. I'm not trying to say it in a bad way. I just don't know which version they bought, but it caused Google stock to go up. It got close to a $4 trillion market cap and NVIDIA went down. Uh, Nvidia announced a statement, you know, how they love their partners, including Google, because they're a big buyer, but they talked about how they're like a decade ahead of everyone else. And I'm like, you may say you're a decade ahead. Everyone can catch up very quickly and they don't need a decade's worth of time.

When your margins are that high, it invites competition, right? And so I think they're probably like 3 to 5 years still very, very, very solid. I think Nvidia is still very solid. That's what I think. What do you think?

It is a solid company. This is not financial advice, guys, but Google and all of them will just start dumping a ton of money in and catch up really fast.

Yeah. When you have a A cash machine like they have, like, it's, you know, it's, I was talking to my dad yesterday about this. Like, do you think AI is a bubble? And I'm like, because you have these companies that generate so much free cash flow that are kind of reinvesting into this space, I don't think that is. And then we're actually seeing real-world use cases from the AI side of things. And then you look at, if we're talking about Nvidia's, you know, PE, it's not crazy. I think maybe 90 to 95% of these AI startups are a bubble. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of like, I don't know if you're reading this, but I'm seeing on Twitter now, like one of my friends retweeted this, he's a VC, you actually know him. But what's happening is these AI companies will raise a bunch of money and then what will happen is they'll keep the money. They won't talk to the VCs anymore. And that's how easy it is to raise money in the AI space right now. So I think 95% of these AI startups are a bubble, but I think the scale-ups are not.

When it comes to raising money from startups, For sales. In the AI world, I believe it was easier 6 months ago. I think it is actually starting to die down because there's too many AI-funded companies and they're not doing as well. And we're seeing them. We were talking about Clue.ly, right? It's just like, it's obvious they're not doing as well. I'm not saying they're not growing or anything like that, but they must have retracted backwards.

They should just become like an influencer agency. That's what they should do.

That's not a venture-funded business.

It's not. It's not, but like, you know, what are you going to do? Like, they're very good at finding virality, right? It's like, you know, it's maybe they should just return the capital and go do what they're good at.

Yeah.

That's not— it's just my thinking here. So anyway, that's why we think Gemini 3 is a godsend for marketers, also for businesses as well. I mean, the AI Studio stuff, Nano Banana, Veo 3.1 is amazing. Dude, I can— you know what you can do? I messed around with this. I was like, okay, find me the best like Coca-Cola ads, right? I took that YouTube link and I went to Gemini for this, and then I was like, hey, gimme a script for VO 3.1, and I just dumped that script and then just like alternated a little bit. So we should be able to get a lot more creative, which leads to another question.

How—

what percent of your company right now do you think you're happy with from an AI fluency standpoint? Like 10%, 20%, 50%?

Per employee, or are you talking about our progress in leveraging? Because it's 2 different things.

Second one.

Uh, the second one was our progress overall implementing. I would say I'm probably 30-ish, 40-ish. 30% of people. 30 to 40% satisfied.

Call it 35%. 35% adoption rate where it's like, hey, these people know beyond just ChatGPT, they can do other things that are a little more advanced.

For our specific industry and field being marketing. Yes.

Yes. Okay. So are you saying 35% satisfied or 35% adoption rate?

35% satisfied.

Okay. 30 to 40%.

So we'll take 35%.

What do you think the gap is right now?

Our biggest problem isn't the adoption. Our biggest problem is the efficiency. So let me give you an example. I'll use one that everyone who does marketing can understand. Let's say you use AI to do keyword research. You then take the keyword research, you find the gaps between you and your competition, and then you focus on writing content. And let's say you have humans in the loop and then you're modifying the content. Okay. I would say 35% of the output, 30 out of all the people in the organization, I'm happy 35% of the time.

Okay.

The biggest issue isn't the usage of the product. The biggest issue is the slop that's being created with AI. Part of that slop is technology, which I'm assuming you agree with. Part of the slop that a lot of companies don't want to talk about is the actual people using the AI and not working better at prompting or training.

And checking.

Uh-huh, and checking. Checking, I put as standard. If they don't check, there's a problem with them and they shouldn't be in the organization if you're not willing to check your work. But a lot of it is, I wouldn't call it human error. It's how humans use AI. And if you don't get what you want, you can modify it. The easiest way is, is if it's giving you wrong information, you can then end up going and being like, okay, go pull from this source. You know, you can leverage MCPs and you can say, hey, I'm going to use MCPs so then that way I can get a better output when I'm using AI. We already pay for all these tools. We have access to a lot of this stuff, but are they using it correctly? And what I find is 30 to 40% of the time, some of it is people, some of it's time, but I would say 30 to 40% of the time we're happy. The other remaining portion we're not.

Yeah.

And it's just fixing these little things and it's not by age either. What we're finding is it takes a little bit longer for us, what we've experienced for getting older people to adopt, not always, but I'm seeing that and not just in my company, but across the board. But on the flip side, with the younger people, they're quick to adapt, but a lot of times when you give them feedback, They believe they know how to do it better and they don't keep in mind business metrics. Like they'll show like, look at all this cool stuff. Like there's this guy in San Diego, he's really on top of with AI, crypto, social media marketing specifically out of all marketing channels. And he has this Gen Z lingo, like he'll use words like bet, not know and stuff like that. So sometimes I have a hard time keeping up with him, but he updates me on the lingo and what it means.

Yeah.

And I'm like, instead of not no, why don't you just say yes? But he's like, nah, dude, that's not what people say. I'm like, all right. I still say yes or no instead of the not no.

Not no.

But he'll tell me like, no, dude, this is what's wrong to do marketing with this crypto company. This is what we need to do. And I'm like, he's like, look how cool this is. And he'll show me his— I'm like, dude, I get this, but this doesn't actually move the bottom line. This company will eventually want to go public. They're large or they're going to want to sell to someone. They've already raised a ton of money. If we're not getting more depositors and the depositors don't keep trading, it doesn't matter. But look at this cool campaign, in the long run it'll work. I'm like, dude, this is not tied to any KPI. We're getting paid to help them move the KPIs.

Yeah, dude.

Like it's just going around in circles.

Dude, you know the Rippling CEO, right?

Yeah.

Parker Conrad. So, you know Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, started a new podcast and I was like, oh, he's interviewing all these CEOs. I'm going to listen. I listened to Parker and this is a really interesting tactic that I started trying actually as soon as this week. And so what you just mentioned, if we're talking Gen Z, even a lot of people struggle to be held accountable or talk in terms of metrics. You would agree with that, right?

Mm-hmm.

Many people. And so what Parker does is he actually sends recruits that he's going to talk to, he sends them the investor decks, all these things, the strategy around the company. His expectation is when you come into the meeting with him, you're going to talk, you're going to have questions, and you're going to have a deep strategic conversation. And you can tell by that conversation over 30 minutes or so. If that person is, they know what they're talking about when it comes to metrics and how they think, how their motor is, right? Then after that, he just focuses on backdoor reference checks and really focuses on, hey, here's the goals of the company, here's what we're trying to do. But I think that part is interesting. You share, like you can share your strategy for the next, like let's say you don't have investors, right? You can still share your strategy for the next 6 to 12 months or so and see how that person communicates with you. If they're just kind of pie in the sky, Or are they nailing down brass tacks? Hey, like, what's your net revenue retention? Um, you know, what's, what's MRR going to be? Okay. What's your hiring plan? And then it's like, okay, you know that you can have a deep conversation. This is how it's going to be working with this person. I thought that was interesting.

That is interesting.

Yeah. Worth trying. I tried it this week. I tried it on one person. Okay. And she could not hold it together. She was just like, she kept talking about herself. She kept going back to herself and she made it, she might've just asked like 2 or 3 questions around the document that I sent, which is the plan for next year.

So what will you do with this person?

We will not hire this person.

Okay.

Yeah.

And what will you do with— you have a good amount of people on your staff, right? And they probably all don't fit within this formula that you just tried.

No.

What are you going to do?

And unfortunately, so what I would say is, and I think this is a broader thing, which is, this is good. This is actually one of the topics I had in my mind too. I think every time you double as a company, like a lot of things are going to break. Processes are going to break. People are going to break as well, right? And so some people will scale, like Noah has seen this, right? Some people will scale, some people will not scale. be able to. And it's all about making sure that you're setting the right standards, right? And this is one of the standards, but you also can't, like, what I've learned too is you can't set too many standards at once. It's gotta be like one big thing at a time. And this is one of those things. It's like, hey, like if you're gonna be a leader on the team or anybody on the team, you gotta be able to speak and tell stories in terms of the numbers. Because like nobody cares if you bring, like we have the same people on the team too. They're really on top. Like, oh, we're using Figma over here. We're using this over here. Oh, I found this new VO 3.1 hack over here. But like at the end of the day, who cares if it doesn't drive business value?

That's right.

Yeah.

Now you make a good point. Typically every time you double the size of a company, some people will be a good fit. You'll have some turnover as well because they're not necessarily the right people for the next stage of growth. And it's not necessarily double, it's just saying that people have in business, but you usually notice big milestones from like a million to 10, 10 to 100, 100, call it to half a billion or a billion. I also believe There's a time to weed out the bad people when things are flat, growing slowly, or declining. And what you'll find is some people just aren't able to cut it during bad times. And the ones that are tend to do really good during good times as well. But you can really see people's true colors during hard times.

Yep.

And you'll quickly know who's in it and will just do whatever it takes to succeed. We're not, of course, telling people to break laws or do anything unethical, but still like just who's in it, willing to grind it out and fight it out and who's not. And there's a lot of people who aren't.

You know who I stole this question from? Vinod Khosla. So I'll let you finish in a sec. But his question, one of his favorite interview questions, like, tell me about a time where you worked your absolute hardest. Like, what were you working on? Why was it important to you? But more importantly, how many hours were you working per week? I still talk to people sometimes like, oh my God, it was so hard, like working so hard. So you're working like 40 hours a week? Oh yeah, 40 hours a week. I'm like, okay, so You don't know how to be punched in the face, but that's another great question. Go ahead.

Dude, I had someone ask me that question.

Ask you that question?

Uh-huh.

Why ask you?

They wanted me to be the CMO of their company, and this is a publicly traded company, and they wanted me to move to New York. I didn't want to actually do it, and they were just like, I want you to Come join our company. And I said, dude, I already have a company. I'm not going to end up joining the company. And then I already know what the CEO gets paid because it's publicly traded. I'm like, the economics aren't going to work out because I have a business and I'm the majority owner. Economics are easier when you're on your own.

There's no incentive.

Right. And he's like, just come on, come on. I'm like, dude, I'm not going to take this. And I know the CEO personally. And it's a big company. They're not worth like, you know, $100 billion or $50 billion, but they're not worth $2, $3 billion. They're north of $10 billion. So they're a good-sized company.

Yeah.

And we're talking back and forth. He's like, just humor here, like, let's go through it. I'm like, dude, I promise you I'm not going to end up taking this. And I also said too, I'm not the right fit. So they're like, he started asking me, he's like, why don't you think you're the right fit? I'm like, let's take money aside. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's take money aside. Why aren't aren't you the right fit? And I'm like, your organization has too many people. I don't do well with big organizations and bureaucracy, especially in marketing. Once I get frustrated in this, I just want to—

You quit.

Quit. And I just want to go back to being my own boss because I have no one who can tell me—

You get to be yourself.

I can be myself and I don't have to deal with like— it's like Sergey Brin. I'm a much smaller company, but still, if Sergey Brin didn't like anything at Google, he's like, Sundar, you go deal with this. I'm going to do whatever I want. He doesn't care about a Or what someone says or—

Dharmesh, probably same deal.

Probably same deal.

Yep.

So he was asking me different questions like, why don't you think you're a good manager? How many people do you manage? Like, you know, what would you change differently? One of the questions he asked was—

I would change nothing. I would want to be myself.

Yeah. One of the questions he asked me was about like, you know, what was the time like that things were really hard and like that you worked really hard? And he was asking me how many hours I work. And I was like, dude, I don't count how many hours I work. I work a lot of hours. But when he asked about that tough moment, Yeah. And I was just like, that I really had to grind it out. I'm like, I think you're missing the aspect of being entrepreneur versus a hired gun.

You're always on.

I'm like, I'm always on. I'm like, those tough moments that I really had to, they weren't really about hours or working harder. It was more mental because things weren't going the way that I wanted them to go. So you feel it more when things just keep not going the way you want versus when you're working really hard and things are going the way you want, you're on cloud nine and you don't feel like it's work. You feel like it's work and things are just terrible when you're doing all these marketing experiments or changes and trying to get more traffic and you just keep getting slapped and things go backwards and conversion rates go down and competitors come out and start charging less than you. I'm like, that's when you feel it and you got to figure out how to persevere. And you may or you may not, but that's when it starts getting to you.

Yeah. Well, so here's another thing because you mentioned the founder aspect. So going back to that pod, and I should send it to you because it's actually a really good one, but So at Rippling, they have, I think, 50 or 75 founders on a team, and they like to look for founders. Why is that? Because founders know how to bend reality to their will. Like, well, this is made by a founder right here. This is made by a founder right here, right? All these things. And so my point is, like, if you're lucky enough to find a founder who actually wants to work in your company, or maybe you acquire a company or whatever, and you've done this quite a few times, which I actually want to come back to in a second, because you've done a handful of these acquisitions and you keep the founders. They're, they're a different hybrid. I'm not saying it's founders versus employees or whatever. I think you need a good mix of both, but tell, tell, like, talk about your experience. You, you, like, you, you got that design firm, right? Um, the creative firm. Like, how did that work out? Founder's still there?

Founder's still here.

Yep.

And, uh, uh, done with earnout. No more earnout.

And still there?

Still here. Uh, she'll take a global role. We had one in Asia that we did where the founders are not here.

Mm-hmm.

We didn't, when we bought the company though, one of our leaders who's a managing director of a few different countries in APAC worked for them. Okay, so his name is Gary. So Gary worked, manages a few regions for us and he worked for them. So we had a lot of color on that business from his perspective of being an employee. And he's done well for us and he's produced not only from management cleaning stuff up, keeping clients happy, growing revenue, bringing hunting and bringing his own business. So we trust him. So we knew that organization had a good name, had a lot of employees, had a culture that wasn't fit for our culture.

Mm-hmm.

But they had everything that we were lacking in the 3 countries that they were dominating, and we kept going against them in those 3 countries, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Yeah, those 3 countries. And when we were dealing with them, the first thing we knew was like, if people on their team said, hey, we have a lot of work, we need more people, they would keep hiring them. They never looked at what people are actually doing. So when I went there to go visit the company for the first time, at this point we already bought the company, the deal already closed.

Yeah.

But my team already met with them in person. I was talking with the founders for probably 6 months to a year before, no more, probably a year before the deal closed. Yeah, actually closer to a year. Got to know them and I quickly realized that they're great people. They're just not a similar mentality. So if there are people like, we need more people, we need more people, they just keep listening to them. And when I was there in their office and it was a client event, a lot of people decided to play ping pong or whatever game instead of talking with their customers and helping them out. This is an event where we're inviting clients. And you know what I said? I said to Dan, who runs the region, I was like, this person's not going to work. This person's not going to work. This person's not going to work. And I just started firing them off. Not necessarily firing the people.

Severance.

Not severance. I would say at this point, we've turned over almost the whole company. It's taken us—

Oh, wow. You kept the logos at least.

Kept the logos, kept the key players. We turned over everything else and the client results are better now. There was some turmoil in between when you do that, but we knew that going into it. We knew that before we bought the company that we needed to make a lot of changes culturally because we knew where their weaknesses were because not only did we have people that worked in our organization that worked there previously, We knew other people in our organization who also looked at that deal in the past.

I think the point we're getting at here is sometimes if the founder wants to stay, there's a good cultural fit, you keep them, right? Sometimes there's, 'cause there's a lot of power you can bring with the founder. They bring a lot of, again, they make things happen, right? But sometimes if it's not a good cultural fit, you're gonna have to make some changes, which is arguably a pain in the butt for you guys 'cause it's, that's a lot of work, right? Ideally you buy a company where it's like it slides in well, but it's not gonna be the case a lot of times.

Yes, but within that region, there wasn't a ton of companies to buy as an option, and I just wanted it, and we knew this going into it, and I was okay. But when you say founders being a fit, I want to know that before I buy the company. So we already had a transition plan from them before we bought the company.

And they knew.

And they knew, and we made it very clear. So one of the founders, he wasn't on payroll and he wasn't part of the company from day one. He was checked out for a while, but we're just like, cool. And then the other one, we set up a transition plan so it wouldn't be too much of a cultural shock. And then, you know, my personality and attitude, there's only so long that I can deal with things not going the way I want. So I'm like, oh, let's just—

It's very short.

Let's just do this much quicker and just pull off the bandaid and screw it. But the Rebel House acquisition—

That's a creative shop.

That's a creative shop. We knew from day one we liked her and we wanted her to stay on. And same with like Mick Verma, our app agency that we ended up buying in the UK. When we met him in advance and his personality, I'm like, I like this guy. I'm like, he'll be a good fit. What I just want to change is how they— I want to tweak, not necessarily change. The company was pretty fine-tuned, but I just wanted to make them more operationally grown up. And then we made those tweaks and the company started growing faster.

If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to with Carrot. It allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.io. And you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, speaking of people, I had this thought in mind too, because I'm debating people on my team right now. And so there's always a trade-off when you make a decision, right? Like the Thomas Sowell quote is, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. So I accept that. But there are some people that believe that there is an explicit trade-off between hiring top talent versus scaling. Now my examples, and I actually want to hear from you because there was a period of hypergrowth that you guys had, right? Over the first 7, 8 years that you've been around, right?

This will be year 8.

Yeah, year 8, right?

Not the 8th year or not the 7th year because the economy's been bad, but sure.

So my point of saying this is like, okay, you look at Netflix when they're scaling quickly, right? They scaled quickly, but they're always about culture, right? I've read their culture book, you know, their culture code and all that stuff. They've always been on top of hiring people. Not to say they're perfect on hiring A-players, right? But they've been on top of it. When you look at Google back in the day, it was very hard to get into Google back. It still probably is hard to get in. Can I stop you on that?

Netflix thing, because there's a big misconception there.

Yep.

You know, people go on maternity leave for Netflix and they come back and they have a whole new team, right? And they don't know anyone on their team.

Isn't that— that they move through people quickly too?

Netflix moves through people extremely quickly.

Like butter.

From people who I know who work there in recruiting and the, the whole philosophy was you need to work really hard, produce. The moment you stop producing, we move on and we replace you. Yeah.

So my point of saying this, and so I think we're, we're aligned here, it's, they have a But they actually have a very intense culture and they're very explicit about it.

Oh God, I thought you meant like, I haven't read the book. I thought you meant like they have a really friendly, nice, good culture.

No, no, no, no, no, no. It's like, no, these are our standards, these are our expectations, right? And so this is my point is this, like if you have very high standards and expectations and you enforce those expectations, I don't think there's that high of a trade-off. Like you're still gonna screw up on hiring no matter what, right? But if you look at Netflix hypergrowth, you can look at Amazon back in the day, Google back in the day, they had high standards. Their CEO, the DoorDash CEO, they stayed in interviewing the first 1,000 people or so. And so I don't think there's an explicit trade-off. Like, let's, let's go over you guys as an example, right? When you guys were growing very quickly, like, did you just say, let's just throw people at the problem, even though agency is very, you know, people-focused, right? Much more people-focused than like a, like a software business. Did you trade off and say, hey, let's go ahead and accept like C and D talent?

No, but when we were hiring really fast at the beginning, we got more C and D talent and we quickly I wouldn't say, uh, it depends what you categorize quickly. It took us, because we were growing so fast, we couldn't just get rid of them right away, but we worked at the same time of getting rid of them and we wish we never got them in the door in the first place.

But would you say that's a mistake you guys made and then you fixed it? Now you guys are much more— so my point is like, once you set the standard, it's a lot less Cs and Ds coming in, right?

Correct.

That's my point.

We didn't have as rigorous standards coming in because we were just growing fast. And when you're growing fast, You drink your own Kool-Aid, at least we did. And we're like, oh, things are going well. Yeah, let me interview them. Few good references. All right, they're a good fit. Get 'em in. Let's grow faster. We can close more revenue. We just need more people.

Yeah.

And we shouldn't have done that.

Yeah. So you and I, I mean, we've seen the same thing. I've seen the same thing like 4 or 5 years ago, right? And so now I've got the process by the, you know? Yeah. Right. And, and, and, and so like, they don't like it that I'm so involved with hiring, but like, I feel so good about it because we do this exercise called top grading where you can, you rate people like Noah's an A player, right? Uh, you know, there's A1, A2, A3, there's A potential, right? And then there's B players are disappointing. C players are just like fire, right? I look at this 4 or 5 years ago when we did this and we had, so it was like a lot of Bs and Cs in there. Now it's almost all As, right? And so my point of that is like, it's the standards that you set and a lot of times it comes down from the founder too. Yeah. Maybe not from you, maybe from like Mike Kamo, but yeah, 'cause you're not as involved with people, so.

I'm not as involved in people. I don't do well. I love people, But I don't do well managing people. I'm very direct. In marketing, there's this guy named Salo who helps run the whole thing.

You're marketing leader. Yeah.

My marketing leader. I think my official title for the company is CMO. I'm not really the CMO.

You're just co-founder.

I'm just co-founder. And Salo is VP of marketing, but I meddle in marketing a lot, but I meddle in everything else as well when I want to meddle. And with marketing, so I was talking with Salo the other day, And we have someone who's not going to come back after maternity leave. They let us know. I was like, all right, no problem. So I go to Salo and I'm like, give me a list of everything they did. And I'm like, while you're at it, give me a list of what everyone is doing within your whole department. Because we're at the end of the year, right?

Yeah.

So he's giving me a list of everything. I'm like, why isn't this done? Why isn't that done? He's like, Neil, there's a lot of other reasons on why things— I'm like, okay. I'm like, let's go back. You just sent me a list of what people are doing. And he's like, yeah. And I was like, I want you to give me a list of everything people's had as tasks. I want you to give me the timelines on when it was assigned, when it was completed. And I want the timelines in chronological order because you can't just look at when it was assigned and when it was completed. Because what ends up happening is they may not work on it for a while and they worked on something else, but you can see when they finished the last task and when they did the next one and how long it took to complete. And you're just like, oh wow, this is really easy. This took a few hours. You did this in 3 days. And then you start finding the ones that have those gaps. Hey, find out what they're doing during these timeframes, what else they were doing in between. When they come back with, I wasn't doing anything else in this timeframe, this took a long time, I then try to understand why. Just like an engineer telling me add-ons reduce our speed by 40%. Cool. I came up with a solution in my head, no joke, in 1 minute. I'm like, this isn't rocket science. Just get rid of add-ons. Just create tons of plans and you don't have to show it to consumer because their first thought was, oh no, consumers will see it. I'm like, no, on the front end of the screen, show it as an add-on and call it an add-on. On our backend, just switch the plan. There's no difference. Yeah.

Yep.

They're like, oh yeah, that works. And then you go find out. So when they don't have good reasons why, it starts making me think inefficiencies, inefficiencies, inefficiencies. And then I figure out, all right, well, what happens if I have a person who's doing things the way I like? And no matter how long you've run a company and how involved you are, you're always going to have inefficiencies and people who aren't performing, and you're going to have the overachievers as well. And you just got to figure out and decide what do you want to do to rejigger things or no, more so where do you want to spend your time? And for me right now, my camo is spending majority of his time on software. I'm spending part of my time on software. I would break it into 3 buckets, 1/3 software, 1/3 revamping marketing right now because I have a huge opportunity to revamp marketing. And 1/3 of a time on closing deals. And—

You being personally involved.

Me being personally involved.

Yeah.

And when I say closing deals, dude, the amount of times I message Nick on how many RFPs did we get? Where are RFPs coming from? And then other things like, what is it called? Hey, I introduced you to this deal. What happened? Oh, they didn't follow up. Let me ping the CEO. I know the CEO. Oh, CEO didn't respond. Let me ping the CMO. CEO didn't respond after 4 or 5 days. Let me just give the CEO a call. Oh, my bad, Neil's busy. Dude, your team's not following up. What do you want to do? You're missing out on potential revenue.

So you're, you're, you're pushing it. You're not necessarily on these proposals is my point. Like you, you're not on the pitch calls.

I'm going to Monday to meet with a potential client in person at their office. And this company spends over a billion dollars a year on marketing.

You weren't that involved with pitches. The fast— the past few years, right?

No, I won't be involved in the pitch.

Yeah.

I'll be involved on trying to get it to the part where—

Just to jumpstart a little, kick it a little bit, right?

Not the kick. The moment I can convince them that we're the right agency—

You're out.

I'm out.

Yeah.

And I'm not out where from the aspect of helping the client or coming to the office or giving speeches or even working on the account. I'm out from the bureaucratic part. Hey, we now need to go through procurement and deal with legal and, you know, terms and conditions. Like, that's not me and I don't have the patience. I'll be out on that. Or if they're like, we need a 100-page deck and we need to just go over this with their executives. Like, that's not me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I'll get back in when it comes to dealing with problems with the account or growing it, not from growing it and getting them to pay me, but growing it Like getting the client better results. Stuff that I enjoy, I'll double down. Stuff that's bureaucratic, I just don't have a tolerance for.

You know, I feel like that's a founder thing too-ish because we have similar-ish skill sets. And so I'm good at getting them excited and then I hop out. You talk to me about decks and all this stuff, I'm out, right?

Yes.

But yeah, getting them excited or pushing it forward or texting someone, like I can do that all day.

Dude, I was just in San Diego, the Bowl. Last week. Yeah. Everbowl, right? My team pitched them on a phone call and it didn't go well. The email thread, I'm not going to read the whole thing because I probably shouldn't read it all, but let's see. It's loading. Oh yeah, now it's loaded. Okay. So So he messages my guy on my end, right? Hey Nick, sorry for the delay response to our team. We've met, but we've been scattered. I have a couple of thoughts and clarifications here and happy to discuss further so we can discuss moving forward. First, I understand you divided X amount. I'm not going to say a dollar amount. And retained under 3 buckets. I need more clarity. Second part of proposal, but you know, yada yada. As it sits today, I'm not sure how we would be able to move forward with either of these 2 options given the cost. For us to see real ROI for spend, we would need to prove that we could increase our AUVs by over X dollars per store based on this spend and nothing else. Happy to discuss further. Maybe we can schedule subsequent calls for next week.

Yeah.

Okay. So I was like, all right, call up the founder. I was like, hey, let's set up a meeting in person. And call up my team. I was like, dude, with franchise-based businesses, as you know, there's portions that the franchise pays for marketing. And there's also stuff that individual stores can or can't do depending on the franchise. I was like, this is what we're going to do. I'm like, and he had his own ideas. I'm like, okay, let's meet in person. I messaged him, met up in person. I drove down there, took me—

Fire truck?

No joke. Yeah. In rain, Drove my Honda. It was raining like crazy on Thursday. I drove there a day earlier, not this week because this is Thanksgiving, but the week before. Took me 4 and a half hours to drive to San Diego from here.

Bumper to bumper?

Most of the time.

Yeah.

Not always, but most of the time. Or most of the hours.

Right.

Because I got a lot of miles in, but it was also raining. You know, my driving skills.

Horrible.

I'm pretty good. I keep quite a bit of a distance. It's when I daydream and stuff like that and think about business. But like, I'm steady. I put— the Honda Odyssey has this lane departure notification that stays and it kind of adjusts the steering wheel.

Does it stop you from hitting the car too? Uh-huh. Yeah.

It gives you brake notifications. And I also put it on cruise control. So I was in the right lane, think about around 40, 45 miles. And then you can put the distance between you and the car ahead of you. So it slows down automatically, but I had my foot close to the brake pedal at all times. And it was just, the visibility was terrible. So it's 4 and a half hours driving there. Meeting Friday morning, 1 hour. The only time I could get a meeting, I had a 30-minute overlap. I told Jeff, my buddy who owns the company, I was like, dude, I can't be there for part of the call. My call ended 15 minutes earlier. I missed 15 minutes. My team's already pitching, going through a deck.

They're in person?

In person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2 people showed up from my team. By the time I got there, it was only like 15 minutes left. So I missed half of it. And then the remaining 30 minutes was just discussion. It ended up, I was just like going through it, the pricing and plans. They had questions like, no this, yes this. And I was just tearing it apart in person. I'm like, let's go forward. Jeff and I had a handshake. He's like, start December 1st. Sounds good. I'm like, we're not going to get contracts done by then. He's like, dude, we've known each other for over 10 years. Do we need a contract? Tells his, you know, his right-hand man. He's like, December 1st, good? I'm like, good. My team's good. I'm like, cool. Let's start.

Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. Was the juice worth the squeeze? For the 4 hours going down there and the pitch?

ROI-wise?

Was the deal— yeah, ROI-wise.

For us?

Mm-hmm.

No, it doesn't move the needle.

Yeah.

But you know what? Every little bit adds up.

Yep. And it's the habit.

It's the habit.

You nailed it.

Because if my team doesn't see that I'm willing to do whatever for deals, they're not going to.

Yep. Yep. They look at the leader from the top. If Elon is willing to sleep in the office and work as hard as he is, then other people, his message is other people should.

Uh-huh.

So by the way, like, so that's a good story. Like, you have to set the example as a leader. And let me give you something. So I'll just say one of my friends recently was hanging out at a SpaceX party with a bunch of SpaceX engineers, okay? One of the engineers just had a baby recently, okay? So she was on maternity leave. She came back and then she quit. She promptly quit. Why do you think she quit?

because she didn't want to work the hours.

She can't take it anymore, right? It's like she thought she could come back and work the 70, 80, 90, 100 hours plus, but she couldn't. But then the thing with Elon is he has extremely high standards. He's going to work so hard, he expects you to work that hard, which is fine. Those are his standards, right? But it's very hard to sustain that, especially when it's not your own business too. And so for some people, like when your mission is so hard, like you can drag them for like 9 years or so, but at a certain point there's going to breaking point. But I thought that was just interesting. Like this is a whole, like the SpaceX is great mission and every— everything, but it's not for everyone all the time. And so—

I have a buddy who worked at SpaceX. Dude, his wife had a kid, then they had a second kid, and then he left and now he works at Boeing. And I said, why'd you make the move? And he said, the hours were too much for me trying to raise a family. So I picked Boeing 'cause I could get paid well.

And work-life balance.

Work-life balance.

Yeah, work-life balance is a thing. I got to tell you a funny story about my relative who's an agent. I'll tell you at lunch during our business lunch, but—

An agent? A real estate agent?

No, no, no. An agent for the government.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I'll tell you later. 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.

So anyway, on that note, let's talk about how we're going to modify our marketing in 2026 because we're getting closer to the end of the year.

I was thinking about how we're revamping our marketing for 2026. Maybe let's talk about what has How our experiments have gone recently. So we've talked about our long-form YouTube experiments, our short-form experiments. We can talk about how our experiments have gone and then we can move into how we're revamping.

Sure. Yeah. Because we've done a whole year worth of experiments. You want to start with long-form video or video stuff, video marketing first?

Yeah. So I actually just started this again and you and I, I think we go to the same place to record still, the studio in Century City.

No, I don't go there.

You don't go there anymore? So I still go to the same—

I don't want to spend the money.

That's good. That's good. Good. So that's another thing we should talk about too on the spending piece. But I was reading off the teleprompter and I had like multiple people scripting and all that for these long-form videos. And you can just see it's like, it's so stiff. It's like I have a stick up my butt, right? And it's like, you know, sorry for the image guys, but like, and I'm just like, dude, this is so boring. And then like, I look like I'm so tired. I just like, I look like I don't give a shit, right?

Yeah.

And so we switched it where I went back to just riffing, right? So there's a headline first and then I'm riffing. Like yesterday we put out a video and it's actually a 1 out of 10, 1 out of 10 meaning like in the last 10 videos, it's number 1, right? And I like, I watched the video, I was like, why is this in the 1 out of 10? It's like, it's not that interesting of a subject line, right? And then I was looking at it and I was like, oh, I'm just talking like this because this is us, right?

Yes.

And like that, those videos do much better. Those videos are way more shareable. Those videos are where You and I are just like sharing stories, right? Even when I watch some of your videos and I'm like, yeah, this is kind of stiff, right? It's even the way you're talking. It's not like that anymore, right? Or like marketing has changed and I'm just like, this is so not you, right? And so I think when we're ourselves, like the videos just do way better. And I'm excited again. I wasn't excited. I was dreading recording these videos. And that's a big change that we've made, at least on the long form. I'll start with that first.

Go ahead. What other changes have you made? You want to just keep going?

Yeah. On the YouTube side. Yeah. We, I would say on the YouTube long-form side, we're a lot more intentional with the thumbnails. We're using Nano Banana for the thumbnails.

Okay.

And they look like 90% Eric Siu.

Yeah.

Okay, like 90% Neil Patel, but like I realize they don't care that much.

No, people don't care as much, but still, it just bothers me and I hate it.

Yeah, it bothers me too. I look at our Marketing School channel, which is, it's funny because when we have good, interesting packaging, like that still works, right? I was looking at it just before we started recording. We talked about why Elon, Jeff Bezos, and US generals hate PowerPoints. Okay, that one was the outlier on our channel, right? Even though you and I just like complain about, or I complain about PowerPoints for like 23 minutes, that one did well. It did well, yeah. And so the packaging goes a long way, but I think more than anything though, you can have good packaging, but if you're not just riffing, if you're just reading off the slides, people can tell. And I'll finish off on the short-form piece. So I've been using this agency, which I really like. They give really good scripts, but I was also reading off the script. I was like, guys, I'm like, I'm not going to keep reading off the scripts. I want to riff. And because the way they package and they structure the videos, like I have like scenes where I'm walking in, I'm like doing different actions. I'm like, this can do well. And they're like, yeah, you keep doing this. Like it's going to really compound and I can see it starting to compound. And so I'm like, okay, let's keep doing the scripts that way, but let me riff. And I've realized the biggest change I've made is I make a video every week on Loom saying, hey, these are the topics I'm most interested in talking about right now. And they'll work around that versus just creating, you know, how to make money with your agency or like, Like how to hit 7 figures fast. So those are some changes I made.

So if I look at my year, we started with that agency that a lot of people have used, right? Dragonfruit. Hormozi's used them. I've used them. Did Cody ever use them? Cody Sanchez?

I'm not sure.

That doctor friend of yours, a British doctor, he's used them, right? I think that's who used them. British doctor?

British doctor. Oh, Ali Abdaal.

Yeah, I think he used them, right?

Dan Martell used them, I think.

Dan Martell. I think Dan still uses them. Good Um, we decided to just take it in-house because the content topics weren't the type of topics that we were looking to talk about. EX my life story, or, you know, uh, something about you broke. Yeah, I was just like, I don't want to talk about any of this stuff. It's also really awkward.

Yeah, I can— you just— I can tell you don't enjoy those videos. Like, I hate them. You disdain them. Yeah. Yes.

And then you get a call from your kids' school, like, or I dropped my kids off to school Lady rolls in and she's like, oh, I saw one of your videos about your life's journey. I'm like, damn it. You know, like—

You're hitting the wrong people.

Yeah. Like, I'm like, why did I have to produce these kinds of videos? So started doing them internally more, picking the topics and it's gone well. We started to optimize for the views, you know, like the same thing you said, like, you know, is it 1 out of 10, 4 out of 10? Because YouTube gives you a ranking. And we started doing that too much and we started getting better views middle of the year. But what we found was it wasn't driving the revenue we were looking for.

Mm-hmm.

So we went back to still doing it internally, taking the topics that we like and talking to our sales reps on a weekly basis, technically marketing, because marketing gets it from sales on what topics are actually causing the most people to sign up with us and the topics that are causing most people to reach out to us. 2 different things, right? Because one's a conversion, one is, you know, just because someone's talking to you about something doesn't mean they sign up at all.

Yeah.

And someone could talk to you about something and you can sell them on something else. So we wanted to find out what are people paying for and what are they coming in the door for? We started getting that feedback from our team on a weekly basis. It helps create a backlog. We then started creating content around those topics and then we started producing video content around it. So for example, we've been getting a lot of people last few months talking about, hey, a lot of the ChatGPT results are spammy. How do you think the algorithms, like how can we adapt for the next year or 2 years or be more resistant? Because people are starting to get worried that they're doing well on ChatGPT right now, but it may not last and the algorithms change because they've seen algorithms change.

Mm-hmm.

Just like, you know, a lot of people have posted how referral traffic has gone up or down. Substantially percentage-wise, right? Not total volume because it's always been a small percentage, but percentage-wise, the numbers have gone down. And when we start talking about it, like my last videos on ChatGPT's algorithm, what I think is going to change in 2026, I think it's only gone like 5 or 6 or 7,000 views. Very little views. But that's a topic that people who are converting are interested about. And a lot of those conversions come from existing clients upselling into more services. So we're trying to be very specific with our content to make sure it has ROI, even though it's harder to measure. And the next thing that I would say that we made a big change that we're testing out is you nailed it. I don't like scripted stuff as well. You and I just like talking.

Yep.

So we started doing these roundtable talks. I don't have an example to show you, but it'll go live in a few weeks.

It's like the Gary Vee 4 Ds. Remember that one?

I haven't seen the Gary Vee 4 Ds.

So there's like a roundtable of like business owners and they're just asking him questions, kind of like that?

No, it was kind of, the setup was a couch on the other side. 2 of my colleagues were sitting on that. I was sitting on a chair and we were having a discussion. So the discussion for that episode was on search everywhere optimization. So we're discussing like, Like, do we think Google's going to kill ChatGPT or ChatGPT killing Google? And then another portion of the conversation was, you know, search and social. And how would you create content for search from a social aspect, right? Just a lot of different topics.

So they're teeing you up and then you're answering kind of—

Not my team. The person filming is teeing us up and that won't be, Their voice will not be part of the recording. And then we have a discussion as a group.

Who are the people around you?

Chad, who leads up content, and Nikki, who leads up research.

Okay, so people on your team.

Yeah. But we're just having a conversation and they're giving their inputs. I'm giving my inputs. We may not all agree or disagree with each other, and we just have the discussion for an hour, or maybe it was more, probably get shortened down when it goes live, but So we're going to end up rolling out. I don't know if they're going to roll that out as one long video or one short.

I think you need both for that.

Yeah. But when I say one long is an hour version or like 15 minutes, because they can still be considered long.

I call those mid-forms.

Yeah. But one thing I learned from that, someone was teeing us up and we were just riffing and riffing. Well, I'm like, oh, I don't want you to tee us up anymore. Just let me, let us talk for 30, 40 minutes. And they're like, well, we want to keep you on script. I'm like, who says there has to be a script? Because Chad and Nikki on my team deal with clients 24/7. I deal with clients.

You're off script the whole time.

Yeah, we already know what people are interested in. We all 3 of us speak at events and I'm like, we could have just ripped. Just give us an overarching topic and then go from there. But I'm thinking of doing something with them kind of like If you look at, uh, what's Will Smith's wife's name? Jada?

Jaden?

Jada Pinkett Smith? Is that what's his wife's name?

Jada.

Yeah.

I think he has Jaden's the son, Jada.

Jada Pinkett Smith, right? Something like that.

I think so.

I could be wrong on the name. I apologize if I'm wrong on the name. They used to have these Red Table Talks and they'd sit around on a table and just have discussions. But you may have like 5 or 6 topics that, you know, you want to discuss here. You may get through all of them.

You may not.

Yeah, that's the format.

You know, it's almost like, you know how when they do like the spicy wings or whatever, and like you almost need like a prop where it's like people come back for that, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah. But no, I think that's interesting. And I think that's great for not only just long form, I'm talking like 30 minutes plus, but mid form, like 5 to 15 minutes and short form too. And I think those should do well. Yeah.

But I was excited to record them. I'm like, this is fun. We should do these more often. And I'm hoping they do well enough where I no longer have to sit in front of a screen and do the—

And so you don't need to be the talking head anymore?

Yeah, because I want to get away from me being the talking head altogether. And eventually it'll be, you know, keep doing the group setting. So no more just Neil Patel. So then the people see NP Digital and then keep doing that for years and then slowly not be in all the videos and then slowly not be in. Any of the videos.

You know what? You know what's a good idea for both of us actually? There are a lot of popular influencer SEOs that work for these agencies, right? That are out there. I'm not going to name any names, but they share interesting data all the time. I'm like, how do you collect all of these influencers and just have them at your company?

I already thought about hiring a lot of them and paying them more.

How did that work out? Did you talk to them yet?

I've talked to a few of them.

Yeah. But you have an interesting reputation.

Yeah, no, I could have got some of them to do it. Some of them asked for upfront money for their Yeah. Business, because they make, you know, money on the side speaking or whatnot.

Yeah.

If I talk to 5 influencers, I can probably convince 3 out of the 5.

To join you full-time.

To join us full-time.

Okay.

I'm just giving you averages, like, so you can see percentage-wise, right? So you're looking at roughly 60%, assuming the—

That's high.

You know, complex. Keep in mind, I'm not hitting up people that I know hate me.

Yeah. I would say a good chunk of these influencers don't like you.

It depends what you consider influencers. There's a lot of people who are well known in marketing and not just, you're thinking probably just SEOs.

I'm thinking purely in this context, SEOs.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking of marketing.

Broader marketing. Yeah. I think marketing.

Digital marketing specifically.

I think you're generally well respected and liked in general marketing. Correct. Yeah.

SEOs particularly.

No, you're generally hated.

I'm generally hated. And if you look at the SEOs, most of those influencers don't work for corporations.

They're solo entrepreneurs. Would you agree? I'm not talking about those. I'm talking about the ones that actually work for significant agencies with thousands of employees.

There's not a lot of influencers that work for—

That's what I'm saying. There's like a handful of them that you can collect like Pokémon.

No, but there's a lot more that are individual influencers that don't work for companies.

Yes, I agree.

I agree.

Okay.

In just digital marketing, whether someone is really well known for YouTube or Facebook. And what we thought about is reaching out. We went through that process. We actually did an experiment. We hired one of them. So we started off with one years ago. It did not work. And the main reason being is they wanted to push their brand and not the corporate brand.

Oh yeah.

Okay. And then we interviewed a few more. We're going to go down this path. What we found is it helps them build their brand. You kind of are building your corporate brand, but enterprise, which we made a decision years ago to shift to, they don't give a crap about influencers. They just give a crap about Who's on my account? What's their experience in my industry? Are they working for a competitor right now? If not, they can be on my account.

Cool.

They're really good. When you pitch me, I don't want you, Neil, to pitch me. I want the people pitching me at our office who are going to be working on our account. And if they're not going to be on our account, don't need them in the pitch process.

Yeah. I think the influencers I'm visualizing right now, they're very, you know how you share Interesting data and graphs, right?

Yes.

So these people share very interesting data and graphs and they work for larger agencies with, you know, I would say like 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 people or so, right? Like midsize agencies, right? If you want to call it like, be a little more specific. Those are the people that I think are interesting because they kind of talk corporate too. And I'm like, those are interesting versus the ones that just are like, you know, maybe individual consultants that want to promote themselves.

So Mike and I were having a discussion. We tried one. And we came up with a revelation after this.

Same one?

No, we came up with the revelation after we went through the first one, and this is why we stopped doing more.

Mm-hmm.

How many of those influencers that work at agencies, or the agencies that have the influencers that work for them, which ones are actually large and make a ton of money? Let me show you this one.

I, I think this one makes money.

Yeah. That are at least my size or bigger.

Yeah.

Okay. I'm curious.

Yeah, I'll show you, but, but continue, continue.

Almost all of them do not. You agree with this statement? Majority, almost more than 90+% of those people.

I'm really talking about like a diamond in the rough, but you know, we're always looking for diamonds in the rough.

But if that person works for a really big agency, the chances are they weren't the one who made that agency.

No, they didn't. Yeah.

So I'm talking about which person works at an agency and caused them to grow drastically.

Through their influencer work?

Yeah.

Oh, almost none.

Correct, so that's why, and then we started looking at the agency—

But we're talking about trying to get your head, your talking head off.

Yeah, but what we came up with—

Why do you have glitter on your face?

I don't have glitter on my face.

Yeah, you do. Maybe it's from—

No, do I have glitter on my face?

Yeah, you do. You can't see, you have to like look up. There's like one little speck, but continue, sorry.

It might be from my kid. But what we came up with was we don't need a talking head. We're going to have everyone within our organization just speak and get well known. That's fair.

Yeah, that's fair. I mean, like, the distribution's already there and your email list is very nice. Um, so you're—

It's not the email list. I know a lot of people think it's the email list.

It's not just the email list, but email list is a big part of it.

It's not.

It's a big part of it. Give me your email list.

No, I can't legally anyways. I'll get sued. But the, the biggest reason for our success, if you want to talk about the recent years and scaling and growing from a marketing aspect, was expanding a lot internationally, willing to stomach the burn. I'm still stomaching the burn to some extent. And then marketing to the public, we're a global agency. We have people on the ground in all these regions.

Mm-hmm.

That has probably been the Biggest driver of growth in recent—

Yeah, you've said that already, but I still think the email list is nice. So it's not the main factor, right? I would say it's still a factor.

It doesn't drive that much, that many enterprise businesses.

But how much revenue does your email drive, email list drive per year, you think?

In the millions, of course, but—

Yeah, so I'm saying it's still like a factor, you know?

Yeah, it's in the low single-digit percentile.

Yeah, so it's still like, you know, even if it's a pimple, it's still a pimple.

Yeah, it all adds up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, we're going back to what were we talking about here? So we're talking about marketing experiments that we're running. One more thing on this one too, on the YouTube side. So we've been doing webinars, but I, so because we have a little more money now, we're going to start streaming this live again because we do get good engagement when we go live. And I'm just like, why don't we just go live more? And this is our way of our like engaging with the community more, but it's always gone well for us. Like, why don't we just do it more? And like last week I did a live with Adam Robinson from RB2B and it was fun. We just like engaged for like an hour. We're shooting the shit. I'm finding out what he's doing. We're just going back and forth and like, you know, it did well, like a couple thousand views on it, right? For like a webinar. So not bad.

One marketing experiment that we're running is instead of spending money directly on ads, spend that money to acquire the property that already has the visitor base or user base that uses the product, even if they don't—

That's a continuing strategy for you.

Yeah, we've been doing that for years, but we're going back to it.

Yeah.

Like, I don't know the company name. I think we just bought something for $30,000. We reviewed the product, product was great. We're like, cool, demolish it, has users integrate it and move on because it was cheaper to do that than it is to send traffic to ads and get that audience.

You can try to buy a lot of these failing SEO tools in the next few years if they don't work out.

Because they're not adapting.

Yeah.

And another thing that we've been doing on our marketing is corporate webinars. So when I say corporate webinars, we now do outreach to corporations about interesting topics that we know that they'll want to hear about. And we usually— bless you, bless you. We usually do that around planning because a lot of corporations, you know, when their cycles are over because because they're publicly traded. So reach out to people in marketing and offer virtual webinars just to their own teams for free. And we've been doing that a lot.

It's tailored to help them with their planning and people would love to have you think for them, right?

Yes. And we've been finding that to work extremely well for us to get us in the door and get more leads.

That makes sense. And how many people typically attend from the corporate team?

Corporate team, depending on the time and the region, Anywhere on the low end, like 30, 40 people, on the high end, maybe a few hundred people.

That's great.

And this is just the marketing departments. It's sometimes maybe every once in a while you'll get like an exec run come in like from finance or a CEO, but it's usually just only marketing.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of this goes back to, it's, you mentioned, okay, the EverBowl deal, okay, in person, okay. You mentioned the in-person things you do when you're like these little mini events that you do, okay. This one is also like an event too. You might do it virtually, you might do it in person, but a lot of it comes down to, Like this to me, this is all a form of live streaming because you're spending a lot of time with these people and you're building a deeper relationship. And that's why we even talked about live streaming.

So yeah, I think live streaming is a good channel. But yeah, I would say for next year, the main things that we're going to end up doing, you know, we'll double down on our experiments from the roundtables. We'll double down on product-led growth. Paid advertising has worked out well for us in 2025, so we'll double down on our—

For direct-to-lead-form fill?

Uh-huh. Wow.

So we will— That's retargeting or cold?

No, cold. We will increase our spend by, my guess is at least a double. And then we'll start rolling it out for the international entities as well, because we've only been doing this in the US. More in-person events have been working out, whether it's in person to a corporation or in person to, we're inviting like 50 people to come to our event. But we found out the ideal formula for that is we go speak at a conference that already has our ideal customer, and then we have them set up like a luncheon where I'm giving a talk just to the attendees that we invite.

You ask the speakers to set that up, or sorry, not speakers, the organizers.

Conference organizers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And to set it up with the core businesses that you want to talk Yes. Yeah. Which is what we tried to do that in Dubai. That didn't work out. Remember that?

It was the wrong event.

That was the problem with that. Yeah, it was an affiliate event. Yeah. Yeah. No, these are good. It's, um, we're, I mean, we've kind of talked about most things already, but, um, similar to you, we're pushing harder on, so, you know, you and I get invited to speak at a lot of like random events. Um, and so like, I kind of used to use it to like, oh, this is a cool place to travel to, but now it's much more intentional. Right. So a lot of it's more focused on B2B SaaS. For example. So that's what we're going for. Or like, could be like a marquee event, like a HubSpot inbound or something like that. But like, you actually, like, you actually have to reach out to these people. I would say that content collabs too, right? Could be like a content collab for a webinar if they have our audience, right? There's some go-to-market podcasts out there, some B2B SaaS podcasts out there. And whether it's webinar collab or podcast collab, like these things always work. So why not do more?

We're also both doubling down on GEO or AISE or whatever you want to call it.

Yeah.

We both still do SEO heavily.

And we try to be smart about it too. We're not just spamming, so.

Yes. We both do webinars. We both produce a lot of content on social and just be out there. I produce a lot of charts and data. I think you guys every once in a while. We don't.

We, yeah, we're trying to get into that. I would say that we, I think same for you too. I don't think we do the best. I think we do worse than you do in terms of posting natively to like like X or LinkedIn or whatever. So we're actually, we're starting now, we're a lot more intentional about the things we write. 'Cause for example, okay, you and I have like a 5-minute clip from this. If I just throw it onto X, it's not gonna do well.

Yes.

But if we have a good caption for it, it's going to get a lot, like some of these captions I'll throw up, like 30, 40, 50,000 views on X. That's actually pretty good. And so why don't we just spend a little more time, maybe decrease the volume, but increase the quality.

Yeah. I don't really look at it as decreasing the volume and increase the quality because the quality isn't from a production or material standpoint. The quality is actually what you're referring to is writing the correct hook for LinkedIn versus Instagram versus Facebook versus X. And that you can just probably hire a contractor or have some of your internal team work on a unique hook for each platform.

Yeah.

For that same piece of content.

Yeah. So what I'm referring to is that there's an internal constraint I'm not referring to right now. There's the team that's working on it, but they're already capped out, right? And so we do need to hire more to, because to Neil's point, he's right. So we do need more shots on goal when you're playing social media, because you don't know what's going to take off.

Yes.

And sometimes you might repost and something might take off like a second time. So you never know. Yeah.

We're going to also in 2026, we're going to start sponsoring Really? We're going to try that out. And when I say sponsoring events, not sponsoring the aspect of having a booth, we've already tried that. Sponsoring specifically from me paying to speak.

Oh yeah. Yeah. So I just want to emphasize this piece real quick before we talk about the speaking piece. Booths haven't really worked for me and booths are expensive. Same for you, right?

Yeah. We've done quite a few booths over the years. We haven't found it to work.

But on the paying to speak piece.

We haven't really done much paying to speak and we're curious on how that's going to work. Because I usually get paid to speak. And then I told you I didn't care about the speaking fee. And if it's the right event and they'll cover costs, I'll go for free. They just pay for flight. Sometimes I'll do it where we pay, I mean, we pay our own costs to speak. Like when I spoke at Google, they had a room full of our ideal customers. I had to pay for my own flight and everything.

Yeah.

Did not care. It was a room full of some of their biggest advertisers in their HQ in New York or their New York headquarters, or I don't know how many offices they have there. But it was worth it, right? But now we're going to actually test paying to speak because there's some of these events that have a lot of our ideal customers.

To Mexico.

Uh-huh. And they don't accept free speakers.

The question is like, this will be interesting once you come back and like we come back on this in 6 months or so, is you paid to speak? Like it's almost like you have to negotiate the right stage too. Because if you get like a crappy, like 15-minute slot or whatever, it doesn't matter.

Correct.

Yeah.

So, but a lot of them want me to speak because they think I would help sell tickets. So they'll put me on the right stage, but they also want me to pay and they'll give me a deal versus what they normally would charge.

And more props to them. I think they realize there's a lot of value in that and they know what type of pipeline they're driving. So for example, like the Google one that you did, how much pipeline do you think you drove from that? Do you know?

I don't know. I never asked my team, but they said it's worth it.

Yeah, well, that's good. That's all you need to know. Speaking of which, we're talking, okay, so did we talk about how we're, is that all the things we're doing to revamp for 2026?

Oh, one really quick thing. So if I'll do like a Google thing and a speech there, the benefit isn't just collecting new leads. We'll try to work out with organizers where we can invite our customers as well. So then you add more value to your existing customers.

Free tickets, or are you—

Free tickets, or we pay discounted rate or whatever it may be. I don't know what my team works out, we then get some of our clients in. So not only are we meeting new potential clients, we're helping out our existing clients. They're happier. It ends up creating more revenue.

That's so smart. Like, by the way, guys, when you listen to this podcast, what I'd recommend that you do is take this YouTube link, go to NotebookLM, take all of our podcasts, and you can literally make an infographic. You can make slides from it. You can then take that into Nano Banana and make a nicer version because there's a lot of these little tidbits that actually don't end up getting clipped anyway. So if you can get these, then like that's another little strategy that I think we should try. All of the time we spend, these 80 minutes each time should just be an infographic every time posted to social or some of these lists of takeaways. I think that's going to become a strategy or more so of a tactic. But do you have anything else before we move on here?

No.

Okay. So did you know Peter Thiel had one way of getting people to lock in on one thing? This is a thing that earlier we talked about how people struggle to focus in, right? Do you know what that one thing is for Peter Uh-uh. So when Peter Thiel managed people, let's say I'm Peter Thiel, I'm managing you. I'd say, Neil, you might talk about 5 or 10 different things that you're working on, but I'm only talking about one thing. Like, no, Neil, you only have one thing. Like, how's this one thing going right now? How's this one thing going right now? So he's maniacally focused when he's at PayPal in making sure that people wouldn't talk about other shit. It was just like every person has one main thing and he'd always hammer away at that one thing because it gets too complex when people start talking about other things, right? And I do think like you need a leader to do that because people do like to, like, Especially if they're behind, they're going to put a lot of smoke and mirrors in front of it.

Yeah.

Yeah. You haven't heard of that before?

No.

Okay.

But I'm similar. I, not with—

Do you hold them to a metric?

The leaders?

Yeah. Is it one metric you're talking about all the time or is it just one project you're talking about all the time?

Are you talking about to my CEO or other people? Because CEO has to deal with everything.

Let's go executives. Yeah.

Uh, they have one metric.

Yep. And you're just talking about that all the time.

So like Mark, who runs Upemia, I only talk with him with sales. And that's it. What's a new pipeline? When I say sales, it's more so revenue. What are we generating for new revenue? Upsells, client satisfaction, right? Return, all those things. It's only focused on revenue. Your job is to make sure everyone's driving more revenue. With Mike, Kamal, and I, we mainly only talk about software.

Yeah. With you and Mike, and I'm going like this because like with Sean and I, right? We just talk ideas and we talk about software, we talk about scalable things, we talk about the biggest problems.

Yeah. So him and I will talk about biggest problems, not necessarily from a company standpoint, but software, because he's only focused on software right now. And what do we need to do to get the product to naturally grow without doing any marketing?

And my point of even bringing this up is because those of you listening right now, let's say you have your own company, or even if you're a leader in the company, it's really— so when we have a one-on-one document with someone, there's always their primary KPI front and center. And I just like the way we look at that is like it's red, yellow, or green. If it's red or yellow, then you're going to come up with a remedy. You better come up with a remedy. Like if it's red or yellow 2 times in a row, you're going to come up with a remedy. And that's all we talk about. We don't talk about anything else until that thing feels good. And especially if you're someone who forgets easily like myself, Neil doesn't forget easily. He's pretty on top of it with his memory, but I forget pretty easily. So with all my documents, primary KPI front and center, things operate a lot better that way because there's no room for debate.

Are you going to take the model of just hopping around different people in different divisions and help and solving one problem at a time in 2026?

That's what I do.

But not fully. You still do multiple things right now.

I still, no, I do hop around quite a bit. Like if there's—

No, no, no, no. What I mean by this is like, if I'm going and I'm dealing with sales, I can just go and focus on sales because I don't have to run the business. Right, right, right. You are the CEO. So if I'm trying to help Salo figure out our video marketing and make it way better, I can just go spend 5 days a week, 2 weeks just dealing with that and ignore everything else.

Yeah.

Like when I say spend a third of my time on sales, product, and marketing, I'm not spending a third equally each day. I just hop around, but I don't have any other distractions. You have to deal with hiring, firing, you know, revenue numbers, forecasting. You have to deal with everything.

Yep. So I'm on top of, to answer your question, this is a live audition. This is being recorded right now. This is a live audition for the COO this year to see if she can hold to a profitability number for 12 months. If I can see that happen for 12 months, then I can slowly hop off more and more. I'm really on top of hiring right now. I'm really on top of, more and more on top of product because it's like, especially with ClickFlow and Carrot. And then I would say those are kind of the 2 main things. And I do hop around with like a lot of fires right now that are happening. So, but the test is, can the COO hold to this profitability number? I hit this number and that's all I'm going to look at.

Yeah.

So, yeah. So short answer to your question is—

Or where I'm getting at is to be more direct, when are you going to, are you going to ever transition out of CEO?

Yes. Yes.

Okay. So you're trying to do it. This is your version of a test right now with your CEO. Yeah.

It's a test run, right? And I think what an idea I guess this is working with my handy ChatGPT here, is it is good for me to work on product. It's good for us to work on like content, things like that, right? Or help with sales when that's needed. And so, you know, we'll see like there, if the CEO can prove herself on the, especially the agency side of things this year, then like, great, I can let go a little more and then focus a little more on this, the software pod side of things.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we still have 2 minutes left. I'm gonna give you one more thing before we go here. So I'm actually curious to hear from you too. So there's one sales hack that we use that works when selling to enterprise. So this one was a multi-trillion dollar company, okay? They have many divisions and this one division that we're working with or pitching right now, they have a lot of divisions, okay, under their company and there's a lot of GMs that they have and—

So this one division has many divisions underneath them?

No, no, sorry. He basically has other like peers that who are GMs of other divisions. So imagine if you're Google, you have like, You have Google Maps, you have Photos, things like that.

Waymo, the list goes on.

Exactly. So he was like, you know, he saw one of my talks talking about GEO, AEO, right? And he's like, I don't think this is right for us. Again, keep in mind, multi-trillion dollar company, okay? And then I started showing him all his division competitors, his peers, and each of those divisions when it comes to organic traffic, AEO, SEO, whatever you want to call it, millions and millions and millions of visitors, okay? I pull up his zero. I was like, how do you think that looks?

Right?

And so my point of saying this is like, when you're selling, you focus on them, them, them, them, them, not like how good we are. Because nobody gives a crap about how good you are. They care about how they look to their other division peers and their boss at the end of the day. And if you, if you can speak to their language and their incentives, you're going to have a much easier time of closing. At that point, I can see the light bulb go off. And he's like, okay, yeah, we need to do this, right?

Yes. It's an easier close because they also don't want to look bad to their peers.

Exactly. We're talking enterprise, like they don't, that's a big component. They don't want to look bad, right? And it's more about also preserving their status. But do you have anything you want to share around this before we hop out?

If you also do a really good job for them and you can beat the peers, they'll start making referrals to the peers on how you're amazing.

That's a good one.

Uh-huh. And because then if you do well for them and then you start doing well for the other departments, it makes them look good because you did well for them, they referred you, you crushed it for these other departments. So then their peers will thank them saying, oh, thanks for this intro.

Everyone wants to look good.

Uh-huh.

Yep. All right guys, so that is it for today.

Or not just look good. The better way to put it is how can you help someone get a promotion? If you can help someone get a promotion, they're going to be your biggest evangelist. The way you help them get a promotion is you figure out their KPIs, you help them And then if they can keep looking good, they'll help you out because you just helped them.

Exactly. And it scales well. So anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you next time.