Copying as a marketing strategy: the impact on YouTube shorts, AirChat, & more

YouTube copied, uh, YouTube copied Instagram and TikTok, technically TikTok. You want to guess how many views they have on a daily basis for their Shorts?

Overall?

Yeah.

A couple billion?

70 billion daily views.

Okay, I was a little off. A couple billion, I was off by like 10x.

A couple billion is a good guess. That's a— that just shows, dude, the power of copying.

Right?

Like in marketing, everyone talks about like, oh, you can't copy. That's not good.

Ethical.

Yeah.

No, I used to get a lot of crap.

Yeah. Dude, remember when you copied someone else's feature in a tool?

Oh yeah.

And then I got the crap for it.

Yep.

I'm like, it's not even mine.

There's nothing like— I don't, I don't— look, you know, when you made Crazy Egg and then like Hotjar came out, like they took a couple of features from you guys.

Like, they took a lot.

Pretty simple.

No, Pagan did the same thing.

Yeah. Noah Kagan with SumoMe versus OptinMonster, right? There's Syed's tool. But then Syed took from other people too. So it's just like we're all building on the shoulders of titans.

If you look at the largest companies in the world, they copy. HubSpot is all-in-one marketing platform. Oh, they do CRM. Where do they get the CRM from? They copied Salesforce and then they tried to undercut them on pricing by making it free. If you look at Google, they've countlessly tried to copy other people. Remember, What's the Google Circle thing? Their own social network?

Google Plus.

Google Plus, their own social network. What about Microsoft Teams? Microsoft Teams copied Zoom, right?

Zoom? No, no, no, Slack. Teams is also Slack and I think it's chat too.

You are right. I don't use the Teams chat feature. My company does though. You guys pay for Teams?

You guys pay for Microsoft?

Yeah, we use the whole Microsoft Outlook suite. I mainly use the Teams video conferencing.

Makes sense.

I'm also not on Microsoft from an email perspective. I still use— You're still on Gmail? Yeah, I'm still on Gmail. I was one of the only ones who didn't switch. But yeah, like copying, it happens all the time. Facebook copies everyone, right? They copied Snap back in the day. They copied Foursquare and really crushed them by doing the check-ins. Do you remember that? That really crushed Foursquare as a company. But copying is a great marketing strategy. I don't know why people hate on it. And it's like, if you don't, you're going to just get crushed. I remember Patrick Campbell did this whole thing because Jeff Bezos from Amazon talks about how you should obsess about your customers, not your competitors. And Patrick Campbell was just like, actually, you need to obsess about your customers as well.

Mm-hmm.

And if you look at most big companies, if you don't obsess about your competitors and the features that they're doing, and they're gaining a lot of market share, you're going to lose market share eventually if you don't start copying some of their features.

Yeah, well, I think what you're saying too is maybe not obsess over your competitors, but pay attention for sure. Obsess over your business, but pay attention to your competitors.

I'm a big believer that you should obsess about your customers and you should obsess about your competitors. You should know the whole market you're in.

You can only obsess over one. You can't obsess over multiple ones.

Do you obsess over one person when you're dating or multiple?

See, I knew he was going to do that. I knew he was going to do that. Hey, we're moving on topics here.

Speaking of copying. Speaking of copying.

Speaking of copying. When Clubhouse got copied, right? And then everything went to poo-poo, right? But you know who copied Clubhouse? Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, right? But now there's a new, there's a new Clubhouse. It's not really Clubhouse, but AirChat. And then you had thoughts about AirChat. I started using it last week. I just played around with it. And then Neil didn't even use it. He's like, this is a bunch of crap, right?

Yep.

Just because it's new.

No, I already read enough articles and I already knew it was crap, in my opinion.

Did you try it? Did I send you an invite yet?

No, but I got like 5 or 6 invites outside of you.

Yeah, I'm probably like— I'm— look, I think it's novel. I don't think I'm gonna use it a lot, but I think it's cool, right? It's, um, because I'll give you an example. You haven't used it, right?

Oh no, I have. Remember you said invites to AirChat?

Oh yeah, I baited you into using it.

Yeah, so long story short, Eric and I were chatting about AirChat over text when I think I was in Brazil or Canada or one of these places. And Eric was just like, oh yeah, they stopped signups. So then I'm like, I don't think they stopped signups. I don't know what he's talking about. Why would they when they're getting all this hype and they're ranked in the top 30 on the App Store for a social network? So then I click on one of my invites, I sign up, and I'm like, see, I told you. And you're just like, Yeah, no, I knew they weren't blocking new signups. I just said this so then that way you would sign up.

Yep.

And I literally spent 5 minutes on this and I'm like, this is crap. All it is is someone reading out a tweet or a message. That's really it. I can consume that content on Twitter faster if I want someone to read it. Elon, just go add voice. No one cares for that feature. This is going to be one of those other social networks that Doesn't get that much traction. And if I had to pick between Airtable, AirChat, AirChat, or Threads, I would use Threads way more than AirChat. Not because I like either of them, it's because Facebook is pushing the reach on Threads. So if you put something on there, it gets seen and it gets tons of engagement. AirChat, waste of time. Mark my words, give it 6 months. I'm not saying someone won't buy them out or anything like that.

Yeah.

But I'm telling you, it will not be a really popular social network like a TikTok, Instagram, or any of those.

You know what's interesting? I had a chat with Heaton on AirChat. So Heaton's worked with Neil on a couple of projects before. And we were just talking about how it's just too early to know anything. Do I think it's going to be humongous? No, I don't. And then if it does become humongous, I actually said this on Twitter. I said, look, if it does become humongous, The other social networks are just going to copy AirChat. And then, you know who liked it? Naval Ravikant liked it.

And then, you know what's going to happen to AirChat once they copy it? It's going to get crushed. I don't look at AirChat as a social network.

You know AirChat's Naval Ravikant's, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. So he's just like, oh yeah. Right.

So— And Norregaard, who lives here.

Brian Norregaard. Yeah. I've never met him before.

Yeah. Nice guy. I've known him for years. But when I look at AirChat, AirChat isn't a social network. To me, it's a feature that other social networks should have.

That's how I see it too. And this is— this to me from that respect is like just like Clubhouse.

Like, why don't you—

why not just copy the feature? The thing is, to your point, it's not sticky enough because it takes— this is a problem. This is why I hate it when people send me voice notes. Never send me a voice note because it puts more of the work on the reader. And that's the problem with it, right? And so like, I don't have that much time to listen to everything when I can read a lot faster and then interact. That's the problem. It is nice to hear people's voice though. All right, real quick. I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association, and this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO. By the way, Neil and I are both in YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you could be at six figures, seven figures, eight figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketing school dot io slash agency again. That's marketing school dot io slash agency, and you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. There's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly, and you can at At least with the online community, you can cancel at any time. So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video.

Here's an interesting stat for you. We crawled well over 5 million pieces of content on Instagram and TikTok and all these places that create short-form videos. Do you want to know what the number one common factor for a viral video was?

A good hook? A good story.

Nope. The number one factor, guess again. So something they all had in common, almost all of them, the retention. Uh, subtitles, so people don't have to turn on the audio. Oh yeah, it was literally the number one thing.

So how did you measure that? What's number 2?

Uh, I don't have number 2 in front of me. I have to find the chart. It's on my Twitter. Um, but we looked at tons of different factors. The most common factor was subtitles, like Uh, or text transcript, whatever you want to call it, so that way people don't have to have the audio on. Imagine how many times you have your phone, if someone sends you an audio message, there's a lot of times where you actually can't listen to it, but you can pick up your phone and look at a text.

Yep.

And read it. That's the power of these transcription services, right? Like, or just having transcription. When you watch a video, or my wife does at night, and sometimes I'm sleeping because I sleep earlier than her, I don't hear it. She's just reading the text on the, on the Reels or whatever it is, and it's just going by. And she's—

that's how she gets her sleep. You guys are both watching stuff on your bed before you go to bed?

I'm typically watching on the TV. Yeah, um, we typically talk or stuff, but I'm watching on the TV. She's just on the—

Here's a good one I got too. Um, no— this is from Jim Kwik— no screens 30 minutes before bed and no screens 30 minutes after waking up. And that's been great.

30 minutes before waking up?

And then 30 minutes before bed, no screens.

Why?

So, I don't know for you, I don't think this happens to you, but when I look at my screen for too long, I start to get a lot of anxiety. Because there's so much— like Andrew Huberman said this, right? Like we're not built— when you have like an Instagram, like to have like 50 different contexts at once and just keep swapping around, like your mind starts to get warped. And that's how I feel. So, like when I go for a walk in the morning, right? I'm like walking around towards the sun, right? Because that's what you're supposed to do. When I don't have my phone, I feel a lot happier. So, but I don't think it affects you. Like, your mind just doesn't work like that. But for most humans, I do think it affects them.

Not one bit. But I do something really interesting. All right, so I'm gonna unlock my phone. What icons do you not see on my home screen?

I see AirChat, I'll tell you that.

Yeah, I need to delete that. Okay, but what do you not see? You don't have—

it's minimal.

Try texting me right now.

You don't have notifications, you don't have your messages.

I don't have messages or WhatsApp. Try texting me right now.

You don't have notifications on.

Yeah, text me, you'll see.

Me neither. Here, let me text you.

Um, hello. So Eric's typing and texting me right now.

Yeah, nothing.

It'll buzz once I delete— when I get—

Oh, see, that's annoying. I don't even have that for mine.

I don't mind the buzz, but I don't get distracted by people messaging me. If it's really important, someone will call me. And that's changed my life. It makes me just focus more because I don't have to worry about people texting.

You know, but I would say this is not really a but, it's more of an and. Neil's trained people to call him because he calls everyone.

Yeah, I don't text. If I need something from Eric, I'll call him. Eric is a texter over calling. And if he doesn't answer, then I'll text him. And then I usually get a response. But I typically am a phone call type of person.

Yeah, you have to train people to do that.

Yeah. And the same with like the email. I don't, um, have my emails buzz or notify every time because life would be a little too hectic. I've also learned because I travel often that if I go a day without answering messages, it's not the end of the world.

Doesn't it feel good?

No, it feels shitty because then I have to get off the plane and then I go through the emails and messages really fast.

Yeah.

Um, and I'm also cheating too because I have a massive team. So my— the overload on communication isn't that crazy because I'm not the CEO or president or COO.

Yeah. Otherwise you'd be overwhelmed.

Yes. I think that's the big difference with technology between you and I. I don't have everyone in the company messaging me. Like you're, you're on Slack or is it Teams? Which one do you use?

Slack.

Yeah.

I'm not on any of these. When I wake up in the morning, it's notifications from everyone. Well, I don't have notifications on, but you can see there's like a message from this person, this group over here. And it's like, 15 of them, 20 of them, at least in the morning.

I don't even have a login or username for our company Teams.

That's great.

So people dismiss me. I focus on what's important, what's going to move the needle. I still work a lot. But I've learned that you can take yourself out of a lot of stuff. And it doesn't have that much of an impact. And that was the biggest life lesson I've learned in business in which I thought you need to be involved in everything and do everything. And the key is, How do you just hire people that are competent or better than you and you have trust in them and you just let them do their thing?

I think the right way of doing this, you have 2 ways of doing this really. So we talked about Dharmesh Shah and you, how you don't really have any direct reports and you're really just focused on strategy and the things that you're good at and marketing too. Now, I talked to Jim Yu today, the BrightEdge CEO. So again, enterprise, he does enterprise SEO software and he's in a chairman role now. I was like, so what happened with this? Because he didn't— I don't think he had a co-founder before. To my knowledge. And so, he basically hired a COO 5, 6 years ago and then he slowly groomed that COO into becoming CEO and then he became that. I think you can either start with a co-founder like you did and Dharmesh did or you can slowly groom someone up, up to when you fully trust them.

Yeah, that's right. And mine was a little bit unique versus Dharmesh, although Dharmesh is in a similar situation now, much bigger company. My co-founder was a CEO, like his was Brian Halligan, who was a CEO.

Dharmesh's side.

Yeah, on Dharmesh's side. And then Dharmesh, eventually they put in a new CEO and that was recently. But Brian, I think, was a CEO for like 15+ years.

Yeah. You know what Dharmesh said? He said, look, I'm not going to have any direct reports and there's going to be times where this startup needs me to come in and, you know, be a CTO or whatever temporarily. I'm not even going to do that. So, so I just want you to understand, like, I don't want any direct reports because he had been a CEO 2 times before. He had like 2 startups before. So yeah, it's like, why? And his logic is good because it's like, why optimize for something that I'm average at? Why don't I just focus on what I'm good at?

Totally agree, dude. Even with my co-founder, he was a CEO, I think, for 2 to 3 years max.

Mike?

Uh-huh. And then we put in—

where was the CEO? Oh, for, for MP Digital. Yeah, before. But he wasn't a CEO before.

No.

Yeah.

But he's always been really good at operations and sales. And even though he didn't have the title, he was running his dad's car dealership.

Yeah.

Totally different industry.

So he had been a CEO before, technically.

Technically, but, and really in this industry, we hired all the people who understood the industry. All Mike had to do was help generate revenue. And that is his best strength as well as hiring.

All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are— even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills, and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Dude, I listened to an interview with Sam Altman yesterday and the COO of OpenAI. You know what they said about hiring for experience versus not?

What?

So basically, it's just their answers both come down to it's if you hire people who are experienced, they're usually not going to come up with the best ideas, but you, you have a mix of perspective with the younger people. The younger people are going to come up with the ideas, but the people, the experienced, are going to have perspective and they can kind of hold things in check. So you need a mix of both, but that's, that's also for their company, right?

I was about to say, yeah, I think it really depends per industry because if you look at OpenAI, They're innovating like crazy.

Yeah.

You and I, not to talk trash, but you and I are in old school saturated industries. You could say new stuff is happening, but the innovation is coming from the OpenAIs of the world, right?

Mm-hmm.

And they're bringing it into our industry. The executive team for an industry that is 100+ years old, all you really need is people who've been in it before that can help. I do agree that having young fresh blood bring a new perspective is great, but it's not like OpenAI where you're innovating. You're more so just entering a crowded space and trying to take a slice of the market.

Yep. Yeah, the answer is it depends again. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to join the Agency Owners Association. That's a group Neil and I have to help agency owners grow. And yeah, we'll catch you later.