Elon Musk And Jeff Bezos Hate PowerPoints For This Reason

So Neil, you want to know why Elon, Jeff Bezos, and US generals ban PowerPoints from meetings?

Because they're a waste of time. You go over useless crap that could be sent in advance and then people can just review it. And I, and you know, I don't mean to keep rambling here, but I went through a PowerPoint presentation this morning and on the meeting, people were trying to read crap on the slide that I can read myself faster. And it's taking them like 10 minutes to go over something I'm reading in, no joke, 30 seconds because it's bulleted and I'm like, I can read this myself, move on to the next topic and I just cut them all off.

Yep, yep. So Sheryl Sandberg did this back in the day. So at Facebook she was like, no PowerPoints, but then everyone interpreted it as no PowerPoints in the whole organization, but she wasn't saying that. She's just like, no PowerPoints in my meetings, right? Jeff Bezos did the same thing. He says that no PowerPoint presentations from now on the S-Team. The S-Team was his best team, right? This is an email that he sent in 2004 and he ended up replacing them with the 6-page memos, right? Elon doesn't like them either. So no PowerPoint meetings must on real-time problem solving and pre— not pre-baked decks. And he told all CEOs to stop wasting time on PowerPoint meetings. And then finally I'll say General James Mattis, he says PowerPoints makes us stupid.

Who's that?

He's a US general. So basically it makes us stupid. It encourages oversimplified thinking, right? So here's the thing, what we talk about. When you do a PowerPoint, it's easy for you to create it. It is harder for the other people and then it doesn't foster discussion. We end up, having to wait for you to go through your PowerPoint, your stupid deck, go through all your slides. Maybe you designed them nice or whatever, but it doesn't get the best horsepower out of that meeting. And that's why I think it's lazy thinking.

So I love PowerPoints.

I like them in different scenarios, not in a leadership team meeting.

Even leadership team meetings, I like them.

Hate them. All right, you go. Why'd you cut people off today? Go ahead.

So why'd I what?

What was the context of your meeting this morning? What happened?

Going over our software division, Ubersuggest, and AnswerThePublic.

Okay.

So what I love PowerPoints for is our PowerPoints externally, when you and I present, we both have pretty slides. Those are designed.

Yeah.

Internally, when people present to us, they're really ugly. It's just white with just text on them, sometimes images. I love PowerPoints because I have my team send them to me in advance and everyone else, so then we can review it all. During a meeting though, I do not care to go over the PowerPoint. I care to discuss the problems and the metrics that aren't going the way we want and what we're going to do to fix them and brainstorm and actually try to solve problems right then and there in real time. But I like the PowerPoint for just an overview of what's happening. And I don't care if it's in a PowerPoint or a 6-page document. I just want bulleted out what's happening, what's working, what's not, issues, just basic stuff like that. And then from there, I can go and help people, but I don't like people presenting the PowerPoint. I do want the notes though in advance so that way I can be caught up to date. I have a small business compared to the guys you mentioned, but because I have so many different divisions and different countries, and I would say we're a small business, maybe a medium-sized business. I don't know what we're classified as.

Smedium?

Smedium? I think that's a good way. I still look at it as small. When I talk to private equity, they consider it a medium-sized business.

But compared to these guys, obviously we're talking—

Compared to these guys, I consider like a micro, small company, not even small.

I thought you were going to say something else.

I don't know what else. But dude, I don't have a trillion-dollar market cap. These guys aren't even multi-billions, they're trillion-dollar market caps. So compared to them, I feel like we're like a little speck. But let's just say we're a medium company. As a medium company, I just feel that still at our organizational size and our employee count, it's too hard to know everything in the organization. So PowerPoints are a great way to be caught up, but I think it's a waste for people to present on them. I think it's best for people to send you the materials in advance, and then you can discuss the important stuff. Where I do like PowerPoints for internal meetings, and I'm curious what you do here, We do all-hand meetings. Do you do all-hand meetings? Like everyone? And because people are in different departments all around the world and they don't know what's happening in every single department, for those meetings, I love a PowerPoint to visually show them what's happening throughout the world.

Yeah. So we like them for all hands. We like them when we present to clients, for example, and then we don't want them to stop using PowerPoint, right? That's not what I'm saying. But I'll give you my point of view on this one. Mainly selfishly, because I want this to be clipped so I can send this to all new people who join my team in the future and you're in a meeting with me. And especially now that we're hiring other people who have a lot of habits from other agencies where they love doing this stuff, the PowerPoint stuff and all that, I'm like, nope, guys, we're going to do a 6-page memo. The reason we do that here, Jeff Bezos said it too, you can't write a good 6-pager without really understanding your topic. PowerPoint allows lazy thinking, allows people to hide behind it. And also the other thing is when you want to call a meeting or whatever, You better think it through because— and you better write that thing because it shows how serious you are. And the other thing too is when we— when you do a 6-page memo, we don't do it. And I stole this from Jeff Bezos. The reason why he said this, you don't do this, you don't have people review it ahead of time is because there's so many people that know how to game the system and they know how to not review it and they know how to get by the meeting, right? He says we spend the first 20 to 30 minutes reading it, right? Sometimes it's a longer meeting and then they have a very messy discussion. That's where I think we agree on this. I think the messy discussion Actually talking through and figuring out what the actions are, that is the most important thing. But I think it's, it's very— it's lazy enough when people come up with a PowerPoint and it's kind of half-baked and it wastes everyone's time, right? It's kind of similar, like you just don't want to waste time. And so for me at least, what I found, this is what works for me, is yes, like if it's a big thing, people better come with a well-thought-out memo. And if it's not well thought out, it's not their best work, we're going to stop the meeting right there and we're going to move on to the next topic.

The one thing I do differently than Bezos, I do actually a lot of things not as good as him, but the one thing I disagree with him on, and I think it's more so because we're a small company compared to Amazon, and I think this still works at our organization size. Like if you have 1,000+ people like us, you can still do it where people send you the information in advance and expect them to review it. Because I know the people who I'm sending stuff are like, when we're in a, leadership meeting and a PowerPoint is sent to me, my co-founder, our CEO, our CFO, our head of product, I know those people are all going to review it ahead of time. So then that way I don't have to waste my meeting time with them for everyone just sitting there for 30 minutes or 20 minutes or 10 minutes reviewing a document that could just be done in advance.

So I see where you're coming from. My angle is Sure, you're saying you have very reliable people, right?

And I also— No, no, no, not reliable. Because we're still small in headcount, let's just round down and say we have 1,000 people. When you have 1,000 people and you know who's on your calls or your meetings with, especially if they're higher, they're not mid-level managers, but they're, call it mid to higher, you can even say some are mid, and you know them personally, I know in advance that they're going to review it. If I have low-level associates or junior people that I've never talked to before, I don't know if they're going to review the stuff being sent to in advance, but in my meetings particularly, it tends to be more with executives and I know they're going to review the material ahead of time. So I don't have to do it where everyone gets it during the meeting and spends the first 10, 20 minutes reviewing.

Yeah. So this is where I still disagree. So, and I agree more with Bezos because I've seen this happen. Even my best people, the most reliable leaders on the team, they'll get it maybe 90, 95% of the time, But still, when people actually go there and they start writing things into the margins and there's comments back and forth, there's much deeper thinking that happens there versus, you don't know, like if Noah, for example, comes, like Noah might be really busy. He might've reviewed it ahead of time, but maybe for 5 minutes, right? I know for a fact you skim things really quickly and I do too, right?

No, not for internal meetings.

I would just say for, in this situation, when there's that time that's allocated, it's a forcing function and you end up having a much richer discussion. And that's what I found, right? It's not to say I haven't done the PowerPoint thing before, but I've just found comparing these 2 things, I just, at least for me, for this clip, for me, guys, if you're going to join my organization, this is how you're going to do it.

Well, we tried the Bezos way where everyone reads it at the beginning of the meeting.

You've written a 6-page memo before?

No, where you review the PowerPoint in advance. We would always do slides because—

You mean during the meeting?

During the meeting. And the reason we prefer the slides is you can pick the main topics and you're just bulleting out the main key points, which for us makes it easier for people to digest than a 6-page memo.

Yeah.

Okay. But sometimes the slides aren't 6 pages. Sometimes they're 20 pages, 30 pages. We've had it where people review during the meeting. So, let's say our meetings are usually an hour. And what we found was there was no difference from them reviewing in advance. But what we did find was when we had junior people, newer to the organization reviewing, because every once in a while we have newer people, like a new dev who's focusing on a specific area of a product or a project, so they're joining the meeting. Or a new data person or a new project manager, I do see issues of them actually reviewing in advance. But when I'm dealing with executives who are really vested in the organization, I haven't had issues with most of those people. And most of my meetings, I try to keep it with those people when it comes to reviewing materials and figuring out changes. My meetings with lower-level people, And I'm not dissing the lower-level people, it's just they're more junior in age and experience. I tend to actually focus more with them on what's wrong in our organization that you see that people won't care to listen to you about.

Yep.

And I specifically want to know, what do you see that's wrong that no one will care to listen to you about? And that last part is the most important because if someone's listening to them, there's a chance they're going to make changes. But a lot of young people, see things that are off, and a lot of times they have biasness on why their way is right. But every once in a while, they come up with some really good stuff, 10, 15% of the time, that the organization should do, but no one's paying attention to them and they just dismiss them. And when I meet with junior people, I love that because 1 out of every 10 times, I have something that we should go change in our organization that I think will change us 3 to 5 years later.

Okay, I'm gonna come back to my clip, right? I'm gonna give some examples here. This is for my purposes only. So I see where Neil's coming from, but when you have generals, US generals, another general, H.R. McMaster, banned PowerPoint in his Iraq command, calling it dangerous because it creates the illusion of understanding and control. Some problems are not bulletizable. You also have Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs disliking bullet-heavy decks. But the clearest, well-documented ban or hate crowd is Bezos, Sandberg, Musk, and several military leaders. And so the bull case, I'm gonna give you the bull and the bear case here and then we can move on from this topic. I really just wanna do this 'cause this is pissing me off internally. So the bull case, one, for no PowerPoint, the bull case for no PowerPoint. So this is for like more memos, right?

Mm-hmm.

One is it forces deeper thinking instead of theater, right? So again, if you're writing a 6-pager or a 20-pager or whatever, you can't really write one without really understanding your topic. 2, you end up having better meetings, you end up debating the content, which I don't think is impossible with a PowerPoint. I think you can debate the PowerPoint. It's harder to hide weak ideas. really big too. So like if bullet points are really easy, like slides look really cool and all, it's really easy for people to hide behind them. And that's why people hate PowerPoint, right? And I think it is, to your point, it doesn't work for juniors, especially because it's, this is a situation where you need leaders in a room where it's really dense, right? It's a long document. And then it cuts meeting blow. Now the bear case against no PowerPoint, so this is favoring PowerPoint, right? Memos are really expensive. They take very long to write.

The bear case, you mean bull case against PowerPoint?

Bear case against no PowerPoint. So it's the reverse, right?

Okay. No problem.

Okay. Yeah, so memos are very expensive. Yes, it takes very long. Like sometimes it can take you 2 weeks to write a really good 6-page memo, 6-page plus. Not everyone thinks the best from like a written piece of content, right? People need to see slides, visual, like I do too, right? And then some content is really visual. Like Neil shares like a lot of slides and things like that. It's really easy to communicate through slides. And it's also tough to transplant the Amazon and Musk discipline. That's a big one, right? 'Cause for Musk, it's like one of my friends was, he was at a party with a bunch of SpaceX engineers last weekend. Okay, here's what he said. There's an engineer that was working there for 9 years, just resigned recently. And then the engineer was like, so my friend was like, why did you resign? It's like, well, I had a baby and I was working there 70 to 80 hours a week for 9 years. And then I came back and I realized I couldn't do it anymore, right? Point is, it's a very hardcore culture. Same thing with Amazon. So all that to say, I'm not saying PowerPoint is the right way or the wrong way. I'm just saying, In a meeting with me, if it's a high-stakes conversation, not for me, but we're not saying don't do it in your organization. I think it just depends.

No, because there's companies that are successful, whether it's Microsoft and many other organizations that do PowerPoints and they are a $4+ trillion organization. And I know people who work at Apple and they have PowerPoints and stuff that they go over in meetings, but I think every organization's different and you got to find what works for you. I don't think you and I can run a marketing organization like the NVIDIA CEO where we're pissing in a stall and asking people tough questions.

Why not? I can see you doing that.

Nah, I think that's awkward. I think it's like, I don't know, dude.

Typically all he asked was, how's it going? And the guy was like, so how's it going? The guy's like, no, not much.

When you're washing your hands, sure. But I think certain times, like, like, dude, just generally speaking, when you go into a bathroom stall, even if you're in a bathroom stall with a friend, are you talking to a friend while you're pissing?

Actually, when I see my CTO there, I start talking to him. I'm not lying. Yeah. And Noah's nodding his head. So I think it depends, preferences.

That's true. When I'm, when I'm hanging out with friends, I do talk when I'm taking a piss. But when it's coworkers and colleagues, probably not. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say like in this situation, like we're all friends, right? So it doesn't matter.

Dude, we've both been in the bathroom at the same time peeing. We've had a stall like in Vegas and we've talked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if it's like a coworker, I usually don't talk to them when I'm peeing.

No, I don't. Yeah, you're right. Okay, so this morning, maybe we can talk about this, 'cause last week when we recorded, right after, how many hours did you spend recording content that day after we finished? 'Cause we were supposed to have lunch after and then you ditched us again, so. 5 hours, 4?

More hours after you?

Yeah, how many hours did you spend like last Thursday recording content? You said you just got done.

No, you said after you or—

Or just total, total.

In total?

Yeah, yeah.

More than 5 hours in the day, 'cause I was doing content before the recording for marketing.

So like 7 hours that day?

Kind of like 6 to 7.

Okay, today will be 6 hours for me, right? And when it's a content blitz kind of day, you get a little tired at the end, right?

Mentally.

Yeah, mentally, 'cause it's like, oh, you have to record these short-form clips and you're doing a webinar and then maybe you're doing some long-form, then you're doing a podcast over here, you're constantly context switching. And I was doing a webinar with Adam Robinson today, today from our B2B. And I was just like, so how much time are you spending on content? He's like, content's everything. It drives all our pipeline, blah, blah, blah. He's like, I'll do it forever, right? But then on the other side, I saw Alex Becker from Hyros. Sam Parr shared this tweet earlier this week, but his whole thing is like, you know, you shouldn't build a personal brand because the problem is you're going to have to build this content forever. And it's true. We're like, I hate to say it, but we're stuck doing this content for a while.

We're stuck doing it for a while.

Yeah, so what's your take on it? I mean, like, I can read off that tweet for you, but it's the whole personal brand versus no personal brand debate.

I think a personal brand is great to kickstart you, but you should transition away from it. People still believe NP Digital is me, Neil Patel, and to some extent it is. I wouldn't deny that. But at the beginning of the organization or our founding roughly 8 years ago, it was fully me. And if I look at now, I don't think it's more than 20% me max. So I think you can transition away from a personal brand. Like Kylie Cosmetics is still Kylie Jenner, but the company operates and still does well without her.

Yeah.

But without the personal brand, I think it's harder to kickstart in today's world because it's just so much more competitive and more expensive.

You think if you were to go through a process in the future, if you were to do that before, you'd try to wean off your personal brand before you go through a process?

No, we already did. I don't have to wean it off anymore.

In the future? Well, you're off, you came off of this a few years ago.

Yeah, we went through a potential sale a few years ago.

So they said you didn't have to stay on?

We had 3 to 4 people who were interested in buying us. It was either 3 or 4. I don't know what the number was, but I know it was at least 3, maybe 4. During that time, people were having questions about key man risk. Okay.

You should explain that.

Key man risk being if Neil gets hit by a bus, what happens to the business? So the worry the business goes away with me. Now keep in mind, this wasn't the first time we thought about selling and we weren't taking it serious either this time. It was just more so an exercise and be like, is it worth it? Is it not? See what you get. Yeah. And we kind of went down this path. a year and a half before anyways. And we didn't take it serious either. And at that time people had a lot of key man risk and say this business—

You mean they were saying that?

Yeah. That business is too reliant on Neil. And the reason I actually like going to talk to potential buyers isn't the actual fact of selling. I don't really care about that part. When you talk to other people who are potential buyers, they'll look at your business in a very different lens than you. And when you talk to them, you get a lot of ideas on how they think about business and how they think about growth from people in your— who are acquirers in your space. And they've looked at a lot of other businesses in your space and even acquired other businesses in your space, and they can give you feedback that you may have never gotten before. So that's why I love that process.

Yeah.

So when we did it the second time, haven't done it a third time, But when we did it a second time, people gave us a lot of feedback. No one was really concerned about key man risks. Some people did bring it up, but no one was concerned about it. And the offers came in for more money because we shifted more towards enterprise. If you fast forward to today, a large chunk of our business is enterprise. The largest chunk of our business is enterprise, which is not reliant one bit on my brand.

Yeah. You said it was a year and a half. So what did you guys double, triple?

In that year and a half period?

Because before it went from key man risk to no key man risk.

I don't know. I would have to go back in time, but my guess is, because in our earlier days for a while we were doubling every single year. So my guess is from the first to the second time, at least double, if not more.

Yeah. So I'm going to come back to this post from Alex here. So should you have a personal brand or not? So Alex Becker says, if you're considering building a personal brand to sell your service in Info, etc. A warning: you probably shouldn't do it at all when you're 20 years old getting on TikTok and it's it's it's it's YouTube. You're it's all you know fun and games, right? But in your 30s and 40s, you probably don't want to do this anymore because if your income is tied to your you being popular and generating attention, you're going to be a slave to maintaining your personal brand. So he mentions Logan Paul here. So he's like not pooping on Logan Paul, but you know the difference is if you're Mark Cuban famous for actually you know building a big business versus Logan Paul famous like famous for being Logan Paul, the insane effort you have to put into maintain. maintain that brand, like WWE, like doing these things bigger and bigger, right? It's very difficult. But when you look at the number of tech companies, the AI companies and all that, like the ones that are— can you name the CEO of Lovable? What's his name?

I read an article on him today, but I still can't remember. Exactly, you don't know, right?

How about the CEO of Cursor?

No.

Right, exactly, right? These companies are growing really quickly.

If you start going with the bigger ones, sure.

I'm not going to name the bigger ones.

You're like Anthropic, you know?

Dario, Sam Altman, right?

You know Anthropic is brother-sister, right?

There's 4 founders, but 2 of them are brothers. And they worked for OpenAI before. Yeah, but okay, point is like this is what we're talking about here, right? We're not saying don't start and don't start off with one. Like it is very helpful in the beginning, but you probably want to diversify in the future.

But you can transition away. And I think that's what you mean by diversifying. And a great example in our space, in the marketing space is Gary Vaynerchuk. He has a massive personal brand. How much of his VaynerMedia revenue do you think comes from him?

Not much anymore.

It can't. Because if you look at all the content that he publishes, it has nothing to do with a marketing agency. You agree with this, right?

Yeah.

And then if you look at his customers, they're all enterprise Fortune 1000. Don't get me wrong. I think he's still responsible for a small percentage of the revenue. And yes, the business was built off of him. I'm not trying to discount him. I'm actually giving him more props because I think this is harder to do. And I'm going through the same thing. He transitioned it where the quality of the work and his team speaks for himself, where he is not required there to close revenue, maintain revenue, or scale it up. Don't get me wrong, he is a valuable CEO and he brings a lot of value to the organization. And because of him, it probably can grow faster than if he stepped aside, but the company would survive without him. Now on the flip side, I don't, I wouldn't say the same with VeeFriends. I think it's much more reliant on him.

It's literally Vee.

Yes. So I think certain types of businesses, yes, a personal brand is hard to step away from. And I'm not saying he can't step away from VeeFriends, But like VaynerMedia, even though his name's in it, I look at it as more like an Ogilvy. I hope he lives for a— Gary lives for a very long time, but I think 20, 30 years from now, the business will just do fine without him, whether he wants to do it or not.

Speaking of enterprise, yeah, so Gary's done really well. I mean, he kind of revealed his numbers on the School of Hard Knocks, $340 for VaynerX. He says $500 with everything combined a year, which is great, right? And, you know, with Gary, by the way, he's a good example of someone who's just very raw to who he is. He's authentic, right? And people like him for that, but people kind of underrate his operational prowess. He's a good operator. Yeah, very good operator, right? If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karat, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers. 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 karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side. So we talked about enterprise leads for a second and this, I had this topic here. If we wanted to generate enterprise leads from podcasts, which sponsor, which podcast would you sponsor? I have some answers and I know you don't listen to podcasts. So this would be—

For marketing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

None. So let me, let me tell you which, which, if I wanted to sponsor a podcast, which one I'd sponsor and why, and then we can debate this. So, you know, the— have you ever listened to Founders Podcast? I send you some episodes sometimes, right? Okay. So Founders Podcast, like you have like Michael Dell listening to it, the Dyson guy, Sam Zell, billionaire, right? Like you have a lot of the— I think people from the Trump family listen to it as well. And so, you know, he has an episode that just came out this week, How Rockefeller Works. recently, how Elon Musk works, right? And like he has all these like just super in-depth reviews on these biographies and things like that. So all he does is read biographies. And I think that's a very valuable audience. Too bad Invest Like the Best, like they took that over, right? They basically bought him out, I think. You have Acquired, which for, I think for if you want a mid-roll for a quarter, it's like $2 million, right? So they don't necessarily have the most downloads. I think it's like, you know, a million a month or something. It's like $100,000 for an episode. But they have a, that's a very, You have very, it's a very wealthy audience that listens in, right? And then you have Invest Like the Best, which you have some of the best, the smartest, you know, private equity VC people listening to that one. And so my whole take on this is not necessarily like you're gonna have all the enterprise like leaders listening, but you're gonna have a lot of the decision makers and that's the strongest people at organizations listening. And I want the mindshare from these people.

So you're gonna advertise on them?

I'm thinking about it.

You should.

I'm thinking about it, and then I'll let you know how it goes.

Yeah. You should. It's already going to fail. I already know it's going to fail. For enterprise, what do you consider enterprise? Actually, that's a better question before I tell you if it'll fail or not.

Yeah, well, we have different definitions of enterprise. Yeah. So there's, in my mind, there's lower market enterprise, right? So some of our logos that we have for Carrot, for example, are not exactly like the Microsofts of the world or whatever, but they're still publicly traded. They do well, right? And so that's what I'd consider enterprise. Like maybe they're doing, maybe they have, you know, a couple thousand employees, they're doing a couple hundred million a year in revenue. That's what we consider enterprise. For you, it's different.

Yeah. We define enterprise of a company that's doing at least a billion in revenue a year minimum, ideally at least a few billion in revenue. And there's a lot of them. People just don't realize because there's a lot of non-publicly traded companies that sell things like flooring and roofing material that you would've never imagined that make billions in revenue. Seriously, windows and doors. We work with companies that sell parts for gas stations and it's a multi-billion dollar organization just in revenue.

So enterprise for you is revenue and employees. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's that because you have a lot of like, you'll work with like furniture companies or manufacturing and all that, right?

Mainly revenue.

Yeah. Yeah.

More over employees because some are more efficient. And when I say revenue, I'm not talking about like pass-through revenue. Oh, we manage the ads for the— yeah. Not like eBay being like, well, you know, people listed $1 billion worth of products and we make 10%. So we made $1 billion in revenue because it was $1 billion plus the 10%. So $1.1 billion. We would consider that model as you made $100 million in revenue, not $1 billion. I'm giving the hypothetical. I know eBay makes way more than $1 billion a year in revenue.

Yep.

But for us, what we found is if I go and I sponsor that podcast episode, some of the ones that you're talking about, The companies of the size that I'm discussing are almost always procurement-driven processes where procurement and internal teams are picking and you're going through a process. We do not see any of those coming from— we haven't tried the podcast advertising, but the audiences that you're describing, they're not the people who are sending out those RFPs for what we consider enterprise.

You know what's funny? Speaking of RFPs, so I think I told you, so Procter Gamble came to us recently and then Hugo Boss came to us recently too. And then you look at the titles of these people, it's like strategic sourcing managers. And I'm like, so we got ahold of these people, it's like, how did you first hear about us? They're Googling and they're searching AI. And then one of them was like, oh yeah, yeah, we looked at, yeah, you appeared on AI Everywhere and you appeared on, you're just a very well-known health and wellness agency. That's definitely not us, right? But like the fact that it's showing up on a lot of different surfaces, like it's interesting that these sourcing managers are going around, right? But this is an example of how you are able to get some of these. It's not the way, but it is a way.

It is a way. You want to know another amazing way to get some of these?

You're talking about the events?

Uh, no, not the events. So when you do award submissions for work, that actually gets you? No, the award submissions do not get us. Who's judging the awards though?

The people.

The people who potentially can include you in RFPs.

So that's why you do the awards.

Has nothing to do with winning the awards.

That's so funny.

Has everything to do with who's judging the awards.

That's so funny. But years and years ago when we did a podcast, you're like, God, the awards are so stupid. Why are we doing the awards? Now you're like, it actually does something.

Yeah, because a lot of those people end up moving around to different companies and they reviewed your work and they like something and they hit you up. It's not a high percentage, but you have to keep in mind, we don't get a lot of RFPs, but the RFPs we do get, a lot of them are worth A ton of money dollar-wise and a lot we lose. Like if anyone's like, we win 50% of our RFPs, I'm like, bull. No one's winning 50%.

It's like 15%.

If you're 15%, I don't know if that's good. We're closer to the 30% mark for win rate. But it's expensive to pitch for these. And what we found is we get a lot of them because we did good work for a company. People move around to another corporation and then they include us in future work. I would say that's the number one way we get RFPs, but the shitty part about that is you need scale for that to work and it's expensive to try to manufacture the scale.

Yeah, I think you mentioned this on this podcast before. You were spending like half a million to a million sometimes, right?

To manufacture?

Not to manufacture, but to go RFP.

To pitch?

Yeah.

Nah, it never cost us half a million for one pitch.

Didn't you say a couple hundred thousand?

You can spend over $100,000 on a pitch, but not a half a million dollars on a pitch. Maybe some people are, but we're not pitching big enough RFPs to spend a half a million bucks on one pitch.

Yeah, I don't know where the half a million came from, but dude, speaking of—

If you aggregate it all per year, we probably spend more than a million dollars pitching RFPs.

Yeah, but it's worth it.

It's worth it. I don't know how many RFPs we get because we're in so many regions at this point, but it's well over 100. I don't know if it's 200, 300, because I haven't added up each and every single country, but still with it, it is worth it. And what I found with, if you're trying to generate enterprise leads, the thing that people forget in marketing, time helps more than anything else. And being in business 10 years is one of the biggest metrics. We haven't been in business for 10 years. You have, but that's the— I have 2 more years to get there. That's what I'm really looking forward to.

Yep. And did you see which software is selling today for $1.9 billion?

Yeah, SEMrush sold to Adobe.

Yeah, well, in agreement, right? So we'll see what happens there. But I saw the number is $1.9. The number is $1.9. Yeah, I'm not saying I don't disagree, but that's what Adobe tweeted, right? Which I think is interesting because if I'm SEMrush, like, this is a good time to sell.

I think it's a bad deal for them. I'm really—

Really? Let's talk about it.

I'm happy for the SEMrush founders. So I've been, I look at stocks quite a bit, at least in our space and—

No, no, you look at stocks everywhere every day.

Yeah, I do. One quick note for everyone. If you're looking at stocks and you're using AI, it is off so much. Like, so for example, you know, SOLT, the Solana ETF, that's leveraged, so it's 2x. So when it goes up, in theory, it goes 2x. When it goes down, it goes in theory down 2x, but there's a decay factor and it resets every night. So when it goes down, you can go down more. So I did an interesting exercise where I had ChatGPT and Grok analyze the last 30 days of SOLT, the price per day and the percentages up or down, and put it in a table comparison with the price of Solana each day and the percentage of it going up or down. And dude, both of them were so off. Because at the end I asked him, what's the current price of Solana? Grok told me $240. We know Solana right now is trading $130-something, $136, $138, $130, whatever it is.

Oh, you're really looking at it.

Right. And I've been watching Solana really heavily over the last, I don't know how long.

It's going to rip.

Okay. So then—

This is not financial advice, guys.

No, it's not financial advice, but it's telling me the percentage gain Up and down. If it's using the wrong price, the data's irrelevant. It's like a useless exercise. And then I had ChatGPT and it said the current price of Solana is $190-something in its analysis, which is not $190. I'm paying for this stuff like $200 a month.

This is why I want to set a new rule at my company. When you were walking in, this is what I was kind of dictating on my phone. I was like, guys, like you can't just rely on whatever AI site and then share it with your CEO or whatever. You need to actually verify and then rewrite it and edit it in your own terms. Because if you don't do that, Like, you're wasting my time. And like, I can see the way people are doing job descriptions. Like, oh yeah, ChatGPT did this job description over here. Like, no dude, you haven't even thought about what outcome you want from this role and what the mission is of the role. And you're just going to throw a ChatGPT thing over to like our HR team? Like, fuck that dude. What is wrong with you?

Yeah. So when I was looking at it and then I had them redo it, I'm like, your pricing is wrong. And they're like, oh, you're right. The price we used was wrong for both.

But it's always like, you're right. Absolutely. Oh, great catch. Yeah, yeah.

And it pisses me off. And Grok redid it and it was off again the second time. ChatGPT did it, some of the data points were off because I started just double-checking.

Yeah.

And I'm like, man, how can you guys just mess up on this and be a $500 billion company, right? So I'm just getting really irritated. I'm not saying they're not worth a lot of money, but I'm just getting really irritated because I'm now doing everything manual when I'm paying $200 a month for this, right?

Let— finish your thought.

Okay. So going back to SEMrush, so I've been watching their stock for a long time. Did you know earlier this year around February, it was a $3 billion market cap company?

I wasn't looking at it.

Okay. Do you know what made it tank?

All the AI stuff?

They announced a new CEO. They announced a new CEO. Boom. The stock tanks. Literally the stock tanked. It tanked hard.

Okay.

The public markets hate companies like theirs. Marketing companies tend not to do well. SimilarWeb also doesn't do well. HubSpot, I don't consider a marketing company.

Marketo didn't do that well back then, right?

Marketo got gobbled up by Adobe. HubSpot makes a pitch that we're a CRM company and we're going after Salesforce. Very different play and market than we are a marketing software company. Which marketing software company does well in the public market? Most have never done well. I can't recall one. SEMrush is going 20% a year. They don't have a ton of debt. They're slightly profitable. They could run that business at way higher margins if they wanted to. And they do call it around $105, $120, between $105 and $120 million a quarter. Let's call it $105 or something like that. They do over $400 million a year, less than $450.

Okay.

Selling for $1.9 when they have net negative churn and the customers stay, it's a good deal for Adobe. That company should be a $3+ billion company when the market turns around. They're just getting clobbered by the public markets because they don't like their story when it is an amazing company, great execution. I think they should have just cut costs, potentially taken it private. I don't know how many shares the founders own, and I would've just kept running it because they've done well adapting and people could say, oh, it's a dead company. A dead company that's growing 20% a year. How dead is it really at their scale?

It's interesting. You look at Ahrefs. So they say that, I think it's like 140 or something like that. And then you look at BrightEdge, 9-figure company as well. And then Semrush, it's like they've all kind of done it in their own different ways. And so there's no right or wrong way.

Out of which, out of those companies, which would be your favorite? I'll tell you mine.

I think I like BrightEdge.

I would go with Ahrefs.

Why do you like Ahrefs?

Bootstrap, no outside investors, I believe owned by one person. I've never met the founder. I know Tim decently well, probably not as well as you, but I love Tim.

Tim's great. Yeah.

Tim's great. I don't know what Tim runs. I know he's in marketing, but my guess is he runs more than marketing, but I love Tim.

I think we need to define it. So are you saying Would you rather own the company or what would you say? Like what?

How it's run. So forget the software.

How it's run.

The ownership structure and how it's run because—

Well, those are different.

No, I think it's, to me it goes hand in hand because the ownership structure of Ahrefs is owned by one person in theory. I don't, I can't verify that data, but that's my assumption. I know they've never taken outside investors based on what I've read online and what Tim's told me. I think you're right.

Yeah.

So they can run the company as a lifestyle business. They can run it as a growth business. They can do whatever they want. They can do projects like a search engine that they did. I forgot what it was called. Was it Hey or something like that?

No, that's Basecamp.

Basecamp was it?

What was it again? Basecamp had an email thing called Hey.

Oh, what was Ahrefs' email?

The fact that we don't remember.

Yeah. Okay. But I'm not trying to hate on them.

No, no, no, not at all.

Some things are going to not work out and some things will. You and I have both done stuff that doesn't work out.

Many times. Many times.

But because it's lifestyle, because it's run by one person with no investors and I bet you no debt, he can do whatever he wants. And I think that's a great way to run a business with optionality. And I love that over someone dictating how you should run your own company.

Yeah. So, okay, here, I'm going to give my answer. Maybe it's a little complicated. So I see where you're coming from. I think from a pure freedom aspect, Ahrefs wins hands down at the end of the day, right? Now where I think there's a little bit of a struggle, like he, and he can fix this by the way, I think there's a little lack of focus problem, right? There's the search engine stuff and I've I've had some other conversations. It's like, it's very easy to get distracted when you have so much optionality right now. I like the discipline around BrightEdge. So you and I have met Jim, right? Jim's a very disciplined founder. He was out a little bit. He came back into the business. He does have investors. The investors force discipline. He sells only to the enterprise. And I think he has less, in my mind, there's, you have a different set of headaches to deal with, right?

Yeah.

When you're not selling all the SMBs, like you have less customers to deal with, right? You can argue that they're easier to deal with, whatever. I think I just like that element of around how it's ran, because we're talking about that piece right now. If it were for me personally, I prefer Ahrefs, but if we're talking about how it's run, I like BrightEdge.

The ideal structure, the reason I picked Ahrefs is because there's no investors, and I think his name is Dimitri. Is that the founder's name?

I'll look it up. You keep going.

Let's go with Tim. Let's call Tim the founder. I know he's not the founder, but we love Tim. So let's say Tim's running the show there. I'm giving a hypothetical.

Dimitro.

Dimitro. Sorry, Dimitro, for messing up your name. So let's say Dimitro's running that business, right? As a CEO. What I love about the business is he's in control of his own destiny. He can do whatever he wants. If I had to pick, it would be his ownership structure and freedom and speed of execution combined with BrightEdge's customer base of pure enterprise. That would be the sweetheart combo.

Yes.

Because I hate The SMB type of business.

Yeah.

Higher churn, they have much more unrealistic expectations.

Yeah.

And your multiple on trading a business is actually much worse when it's SMB versus enterprise.

Yep, 100%. Dude, I mean, 'cause we're talking about SEO software right now, I do want to talk about all these GEO startups, right? 'Cause you had another one that just raised money this week about, let's just call it like tens of millions of dollars.

It was like, starts with a P or something. I saw an ad in Europe for it, the tech—

Oh, you're talking about Peak, Peak AI. I wasn't even talking about that one.

Peak, it was sort of like para or something.

Profound?

No.

Check out, I have a table over here. You like tables, okay? Yes, I love tables. So, okay, BrightEdge, they raised $61.9 million, current AR is $120 million, okay? Moz, 2004 founded, they raised $30 million, $50 million AR, they sold to Constant Contact, right?

Wait, their current AR is only $50 million?

Well, that's 2015, this is old data. Semrush, so current AR is higher than this. This says $171, but it's higher than this.

It's $400 million.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, but they raised $40 million, right? And then you have AirOps, they just raised $60 million, um, $8 million ARR. And then Profound 2024, they raised $60 million, $3 million ARR estimated, right? Peak AI just raised $8 million and $715K ARR. My point is how—

Wait, $750K?

Yeah, $715K ARR. It's probably higher than that.

And they raised $15 million.

$8 million on Peak, uh, $60 million for Profound, um, and then basically $60 million for AirOps.

TechCrunch, GEO. I don't know why it's putting geothermal. I'm trying to type in GEO on TechCrunch.

As you pull it up, if you look at traditional SEO platforms built in pre-2015, they raised $126 million combined, okay, over 6 to 8 years. AI GEO tools 2024 to 2025 have raised $168 million in 12 to 18 months, only $11.7 million in proven ARR. And so that's $0.07—

I don't know how Perfound's doing in revenue. There's another one that's called Scrunch.

Oh yeah, yeah. Did they raise money?

It's P-E-E-C.

That's what I said, Peak. I said AI.

Oh, but mine is they raised $21 million.

Even more. So my point is, I'm like, my thing is like, are these GEO startups like, are you fucked? Like what is going on here? Because it's 0.0—

Annual recurring revenue is now more than $4 million for Peak. Great.

So here's the thing though, if we go back in time, pre-2020, Pre-2015, $126 million raised for traditional SEO platforms. Now, the revenue now is BrightEdge $120, you know, Semrush $400. Let's just combine those 2, like $520. Let's add in Ahrefs, well, they didn't raise money, $520 million, okay? So you basically have like a 4x revenue per dollar raised. On the AIGEO tools right now, you have 0.07x revenue per dollar. Now, that's not saying they can't figure out some new things to grow into it, but I'm just like, what is the moat here?

Yeah.

Like everyone's talking about LLM service tracking, all these things.

HubSpot bought a company.

Yeah.

There was an analytics company, Amplitude, that gave away a lot for free.

Yeah, we're giving stuff away for free. We're building around this area too. So like, what is the moat?

There's no moat.

Right. I do, you know what? I actually like the spot that you're in and I am in here because it basically, you upsell them the services and you're okay.

Yeah.

So we have the infrastructure for this.

Yes, because what I believe is going to happen is these AI tools, we're seeing it, They have these content writers that help them get quick rankings and it's not going to be as effective unless you combine services like digital PR and link building. Some of them are doing reciprocal link farms, which I don't think is going to last.

Yeah.

The only real way to keep scaling this in the long run as these algorithms get more competitive is digital PR. You and I can offer that. Our competitors are going to struggle to build that fact-checking.

Oh, we need CRO too. Oh, we need a human in the loop to review. Oh, we need all this other stuff. And then it just grows and grows. So So I think the model here, if any of them are listening, is you want to build services in the backend, and that's how SaaS eventually goes into services anyway, and it becomes service as a software.

One of my favorite people who speak on this is Ryan Deiss, and he's like, man, everyone takes their agency revenue to go build software companies because they think it's more lucrative and sexy, and their services business is funding software that keeps losing money, and their services business keeps growing because it's easier to generate revenue. scale up. I'm not saying it's more scalable. It's easier to just hire more and scale up than it is to collect software revenue because it's so much more competitive and expensive. And the pool for people paying for services is just much more massive. And I agree with him on this. It's like people don't want to do services because—

Enterprises are used to paying for services.

Dude, I have a friend who has a service-based business. He's been in business for, call it roughly how old I am. And he didn't take any outside money. Take a guess how much profit he makes on an annual basis. He's the only shareholder.

$200 million a year?

No, around $500 million a year.

I was going to go $500 first, but the way you said it made me want to go lower. Okay.

No investors. No debt. He doesn't really acquire companies. He's acquired some over the past, but doesn't really acquire companies. He does every once in a while. He's just been doing it a long time. Has over 10,000 employees.

How long has he been doing it?

Roughly the age I am. So roughly 40 years.

40 years. Yeah.

Roughly.

Yeah. You just keep compounding.

Yeah.

This is why, aren't you so grateful to have what you have right now?

Yeah.

Are you so grateful you didn't sell?

Yeah, I'm happy. But 40 years, that's a long time. And he's not on the Forbes list. No one would know that he has money, but $500-ish million a year in profit.

That's exit every year.

That's an exit every year. That's so much. And let's say he doesn't collect all the money and he only sees $300 million because of cash flow.

Who cares?

He can't even spend $300 million. You buy whatever you want. Like that's, that's like filthy rich.

Yep.

And if I had to guess, because he's still growing, the company, my guess is probably worth, call it $10 billion. You know, some could say less, some could say more, but I know some of the offers that he's gotten. Some of the offers were way better. They do quite a bit in the AI space right now, but let's just say the valuations are lower. So let's call it, you know, $5 billion to $10 billion valuation to be conservative on the $5. I think he can do potentially better than $10 because I've seen him get offers better than $10. But yeah, it's really good just having optionality. And like you said, you get to exit every year. Dude. Okay.

So Dyson, I think the founder owns the whole thing. Basically, because nobody would've given him money. He failed for the first 14 years. Dyson, the vacuums.

Does he own the whole thing?

I think he does. So 2024, 6.6, this looks like euros here, 6.6 billion in 2024. 2023 was 7.1. I don't know what 2025 was, but sluggish economy growth. What does it show you?

He owns 100%.

Yeah. And dude, this guy failed for 14 years and he, I think he had over 1,500 vacuum inventions and he kept working on in his back shed. Nobody believed in him. He kept trying to get money he couldn't get. get it. Same thing for Raising Cane's. Could get—

how old is he?

14. Okay. He's worth $14.8 billion. How old is he? He's like 76.

I'm trying to pull that up. 78.

78. Okay. So my point of Raising Cane's, this guy's like fairly young right now, right? You know that. Have you had the Raising Cane's chicken fingers ever?

I didn't even know there's a Raising Cane's here, but I saw his story. He's worth a crapload of money now.

Okay. So that company's worth $20 billion. He didn't take outside money. I don't— I think he took like very small outside money to save the company. He took like a bunch of debt that he shouldn't have taken, Right? And he almost lost everything. And so, but he actually said this, he's like, look, if you end up selling your company to private equity, your baby will no longer be special. And that's why he always wants to be involved. It's the same thing with Dyson, right? It's the same thing with what you're doing too. And so Trader Joe's, you know what Trader Joe's, remember it started in Monrovia, which is right where I grew up in Arcadia.

Okay. Yeah, you're right. $22 billion. Raising Cane's, I didn't know he was worth that much. I knew he was worth Like $5 billion or something like that.

I've never had it. I actually want to try it one day.

Yeah, me too now.

So when you land in LAX, there's one right there. Maybe I'll stop by next time.

Which terminal? Oh, you're just saying by the airport, not inside?

Yeah, yeah, by the airport. Yeah.

Okay.

Trader Joe's, the founder sold. This was like in the '70s and he wrote a book about it. He wrote a book about his journey. The one thing he regrets at the end of that book is what?

Selling?

Exactly. He regrets selling it. He did consulting and real estate and he sold his baby. And what he says is he sees people that sell And all he sees is regret most of the time. So how lucky are we to be in control of our destiny to keep compounding for a long time? And that's what we want. The message I think is just keep going. I actually have a bookmark on my X thing. It's no longer called philosophy. It's just keep going. 'Cause I realize all the shit that I save that you see me post on my Instagram is just keep going. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm with you. Just keep compounding and going if you love what you're doing. I think the moment you don't love what you're doing, And you really don't want it and you can look yourself in the mirror and be like, I really don't want to do this anymore, by all means, sell it.

Totally fine. Yeah, totally fine. Do you have something you want to add?

No.

Okay, I'm going to pick another company here. So what's a pop quiz for you? Okay. What is the best bootstrap company ever that does $17 billion a year and $3 billion in profit?

The best bootstrap company?

Or just tell me which company do you think it is?

I know the biggest bootstrap company, but that's not them.

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

Probably Cargill.

Cargill, Cargill.

Cargill's probably the biggest bootstrap company, but they don't do that. I think they do $160 billion in revenue.

Okay.

Family owned.

Do you know what, here, watch. I'm giving Neil a headline over here. Inside billionaire Gabe Newell's new $500 million superyacht, which has a submarine garage and its own hospital. Who is this guy?

I have no idea.

You didn't play games, of course you wouldn't know. So I wouldn't know. Valve. So Valve is, they did like—

Half-Life?

Half-Life, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Half-Life, which led to Counter-Strike and everything.

So bootstrap— Wait, he still owns it?

Yeah. So $17 billion in gross revenue, $4 billion in commissions paid out, $3 billion profit, only 336 employees.

$3 billion in profit last year or in total?

Yeah.

Last year?

Yeah. Look it up.

Wow. What's his name?

Gabe Newell. N-E-W-E-L-L.

Yeah. He's 63 years old. Mm-hmm.

And they have one of the greatest—

I love it. Forbes is like, he's worth $11 billion when he does $3 billion in profit per year. How many years has he compounded the profit?

Yep.

But yeah.

Yeah. By the way, like, let's talk about the Forbes thing real quick. You can, it's nice to look at, but you can never trust it.

No, it's so off.

Yeah.

I know so many people who aren't on the Forbes list that have money. Dude, remember that California's trying to pass a wealth tax where they charge people?

That didn't go through.

They're going to try to get it on the 2026 ballot. So if you have over a billion dollars, you would pay 5, you would pay 5% of your net worth and you own the cash and whatever you defer, you pay, I think like 5 or 7% interest on per year. So it compounds. Okay. I don't know if it'll pass and I'm not saying it should pass or not. I'm not trying to get into political discussion, but here's what's interesting. Forbes does this rich list, billionaire list for marketing. So someone said there's like 200 billionaires in the state of California or 200 and something. I don't know where they're getting that from, but I'm assuming it's somewhere like Forbes.

Mm-hmm.

I could be wrong. I personally, like personally know 7 billionaires, all right?

Mm-hmm.

That are close to me in Southern California, not California, I'm talking Southern California.

Mm-hmm.

That's a good amount of billionaires.

Yep.

And like really know 'em.

Yeah.

And I know their businesses well, 'cause like they'll hit me up for marketing advice. And some of 'em generate amounts like $300 million a year in profit with no investors.

Mm-hmm.

And no one knows who they are and they have ugly growing businesses. And they've been doing it for many years and they own hotels and apartment complexes, or they parked in a lot of stocks and they've had these businesses for a long time. Most of them are quite a bit older than me. Call it 20+ years older than me. I'm 40, so context, they're 60+. How many of them do you think are on the Forbes list?

0.

2.

Out of 7.

Out of 7.

Yeah. So I think what—

And out of the ones that I know who are worth the most, The 3 that I know that are worth the most—

Are not on there. Are not on the Forbes list. Yeah. Because it's better to be wealthy anonymous.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I think part of the reason us saying this too is like, if you look at compounding, which is what Neil just mentioned, if you're at a certain, even if you're like, let's say, I don't know, 40 years old or whatever, and you have a nice exit or something like that, you're going to compound to a very healthy amount over a long period of time, unless you're like really stupid with your money. So guys, Long-term, if you love what you're doing, stick with it, keep compounding, and there's no doubt that you'll do very well.

Yeah, dude, the richest guy that I know, there's a group of 4 of us that are on a text thread. And he was trying to figure out how to grow his declining business. And it's only been declining during the downturn, but it's been doing well. The business is more than 30 years old. And he's like, man, we're having a really bad year. I need help. If any of you guys can give me advice on growth, Or any ideas on how to implement AI to make things more efficient. He's on the older end and he's like, Neil, what can I do to get more business from ChatGPT? And then I'm like, is it really bad this year? And he's just like, yes, profits down. We'll only do $670 million. I'm like, $670 million? He's like, yeah, a million. I'm like, in profit? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, that's really a bad year. Perspective, right? And I'm like, I wonder, I didn't ask him, but I'm like, I wonder what a good year is like. And it's self-owned by him, no one else.

Probably like $1.5 billion.

Yeah. Even if it's only a few hundred million more, he probably gets close to a billion dollars in profit on a good year.

And by the way, guys, we're not saying money is everything because I do believe that if money is your goal, you're going to live a shallow life. And Neil and I have seen this, like we have very successful friends that have some of the ones that are wealthiest, they end up being the most miserable, right? So money, we're not saying money's everything, but money's a nice scorekeeper. So that's what it is. So Naval has this topic here. Actually, no, I want to talk about this because we're talking about friends right now. So before we started recruiting, not recruiting, recording, we talked about the difference between a real friend and a transactional friend. And a real friend, we should define this. So in your mind right now, What is a real friend versus a transactional friend?

A real friend is someone you can count on.

That's—

I really just break it down to that. Like if I really needed something from you, even Noah, who's recording this, I don't hang out much with Noah. I actually really hang out with you more so when we record than anything else similar to Noah. But I genuinely, if I believe I needed anything from either of you and I texted you, I think you both would genuinely do your best to try to help out.

And not think about what I can get back from it.

Totally agree. To me, that's a real friend. You don't have to see them all the time. They're there in your time of needs, whether it's— I'm not talking about financial support. Sure, if they can help out financially, sure. But I'm talking about more like emotional, you can rely on. They're there like if someone gets sick and you need help, whatever it may be, your tough moments in life. And people usually don't have a lot of them.

Mm-hmm.

And they— people may think like, I got a ton of real friends. Well, when And shit gets really bad. So excuse my language. If you reach out to most of them, most of them will not be there to help you out in your time of need.

They'll disappear. Exactly.

Correct.

And then let's define a transactional friend. What do you think a transactional friend is? And then I'll give you this story.

Transactional friend is you only hit them up when you need something and they probably hit you up only when they need something.

And this is weird because we've made a lot of internet friends. Okay. Most of our internet friends that we made are transactional friends, whereas some, there's a very small percentage that become real friends, right? So when I was in Thailand with Patrick Campbell last year, had ProfitWell, right? He was, we were talking about real friends versus transactional friends. And he's like, a transactional friend is someone who always wants something, okay? But a real friend is, to your point, going to be there no matter what. And then we mentioned someone and he's like, this guy's very popular, just leave it at that. Like, we'll just leave it at that. He's like, this guy's extremely transactional. And he looked at me, he's like, Eric, you know, you're different. You're a transactional friend when you start, but you're a real friend once you let people in, right? It's kind of similar to you too.

Yeah.

You don't let many people in, right? But my point is, you know, we talk about business, we talk about money, we talk about being more successful, things like that. But what matters ultimately at the end of the day is the real friends, right? Because Neil had a situation where Someone was— someone would always go to him and ask for something. Always. He'd be very engaging, right? But the moment Neil goes back to him and asks for something, that person ignores him. Not only that, actually, I'll just leave it at that. Well, I don't want to reveal any more, but the point is like you don't want to go in life just thinking about money and then just think about how you can get more out of people because people can see right through that and they don't want to engage with you anymore.

And by the way, I wasn't asking for anything that's material or anything like that. It actually would have helped them out, but I was just curious and I messaged them. But for me, I like the definition of how you see friends versus transactional friends. I look at it mentally as friends and acquaintances. So to me, you're not a friend unless I can really count on you and you can count on me. And I don't care if you're rich or poor, if you're a shit person, you'll never be a friend.

Yeah.

And I'll give you an example of this. And it doesn't have to be something that you do for me. A lot of it has to do with your character. So I was meeting with someone who was trying to convince me to let them manage my money. Right. And they're like, you're married, you got kids, what's going to happen with your legacy? Let me manage your stock portfolio, your cash, help you set up a will and trust and all this. I'm like, dude, I already got a lot of this stuff all figured out. And they're just like, who's going to manage your estate, take care of bills when you're gone? Don't you just want peace of mind? And they work for a really, really massive bank. Everyone's heard of their name, probably globally. That's how big the bank is. So they're trying to pitch me. They bring me into their office. I don't know how expensive their office is, but it's probably over a billion dollars.

Mm-hmm.

So it's super expensive. And this is just one of many offices, right? This is a really large organization. So when I'm going in there, they take me out to dinner. They're trying to wine and dine me. I had a few buddies with me because sometimes I travel with friends. They were really rude to the waiter.

Ah.

And they told the waiter, hey, stop interrupting me. I'll tell you when I want you to come over. Can't you see we're talking business? And usually when you get wined and dined, they try to pay for everything. And they were, they invite me to like things like Formula 1 races, golf tournaments, tennis tournaments. Like I'm talking about the final, right? These are really expensive tickets.

Wimbledon. Yeah.

All this stuff. And I get invited a lot by this bank because they want a relationship. And they even offered to invite my dad and get him a ticket. And I'm like, dude, I'm good. I'll just buy my own ticket. At that dinner, they tried to pay for the meal. I refused to let them pay for the meal and I paid and I tipped the waiter double.

Yeah. Right.

And you know me when I eat, I'm a really cheap date. Would you agree with this?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Chicken, chicken salad, always chicken salad.

Chicken salad or just chicken. Or if I go to sushi joint, it's avocado with rice. I don't even eat fish. So like, and I don't eat much. No, you agree with this?

You're undernourished.

Yes. So I just, I don't really have appetite. So I'm a really cheap date. So if a bill comes out to $100, of that, maybe $20 is me. So if I go to expensive place, I don't know what the bill was, call it like $600, $700. No more than $40, $50 of that was me for 4 people. And I will never work for them. And they want to be a friend.

Work with him.

Work with him or her.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

And I will never let them be a friend and they still hit me up and they want to hang out because friendship to me is not how successful you are. It's not just how you can rely on them because I could probably rely on this person if I needed it.

Yeah.

But they're just a shitty character. It's just like, if you don't have a good head on your shoulders, why do you want to be around that person? And I think the same goes with business. Like when people talk to me about growing your marketing and make it successful, And, or growing your business, dude, yes, we both want people who grind really hard. We want people who are smart. We want people who understand systems and processes and can execute really well. But if they're not a cultural fit and they don't believe in the vision and we're not similar from that aspect on our values, screw them. I don't care how good they are. I don't want to work with them. Yep.

And by the way, you guys might be wondering like, well, how does this relate to business or marketing? It has everything to do with it because everything is driven by relationships. And your life is so— your time is so limited that you don't want to waste your time spending it with people that have low character. And it's not— it takes work to become kind, and it just shows you that these people didn't put in the work, right? So that's why we think it's important to talk about friend friends versus just acquaintances. At the end of the day, it's everything because we realized as we've gotten older, relationships are everything.

Yeah.

So that's why, by the way, guys, Just because you become famous as a content creator or whatever doesn't give you permission to become a transactional person because it's so easy to see through that. Yes. So easy.

Yes.

And what is, what feeling does it give you? It gives you the ick.

Yes, it gives the ick.

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 organization. Also, Neil 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. Yeah. All right. I have so many topics in here, but since you brought nothing, I'm going to give you a chance to bring something up.

All right. So if you were to build a marketing team in 2026, I actually had this question asked to me this morning.

Oh.

How would you set up your marketing team?

Of what kind of business?

It can be software, it could be services, it could be e-commerce, and people already know the basics. But if you had to pick 3 key hires, this was actually the specific question that was related to the marketing team because I asked something similar. I was like, well, how is the marketing team already set up? Is it new? Is it not? So then it got narrowed down during the podcast interview to what would be your 3 main hires in marketing for 2026?

So this was actually spawned from a Twitter thread that we actually went over a couple of weeks ago. So I, 'cause I remember this thread, it was from one of the Marketing Operators Podcast guys. And I think for me, if we're talking D2C, I think you have to have an influencer marketing person. I think you have to have an influencer marketing person. What's your first one?

So let's combine it. I also believe in influencer marketer, but I think you need an influencer marketer whether you're B2C or B2B. I think it has a huge edge, but influencer marketing only works if you go after micro and nano influencers.

Yeah.

So like sub-100,000 followers. Sometimes you can go a little bit more, but the 10,000 followers, the 5,000, the 20,000, we're finding huge ROIs in them in both B2B and B2C. We're not seeing the economics or in the ROI pan out well from larger influencers. The cost basis is just too high and we don't see them put enough time and energy. And you have to reach out manually to get a lot of these smaller influencers, but we're seeing the numbers add up and it become extremely profitable. We see that as a really good revenue generation opportunity in 2026 that not enough businesses use because they don't want to reach out to the masses. And when you look at your biggest competition, your biggest competition isn't the SMBs. It's actually the enterprises because the enterprises have the dollar amounts. They're what's bringing up the influencer costs because they're the ones with bigger budgets. But if you look at the enterprises, they tend to just pay the ones with larger follower accounts and they outsource to other agencies and they don't want to go after 1,000 smaller influencers because it's too much work. So they'd rather just spend more money and get fewer people.

Yep. So we agree, you need an influencer director/manager.

Okay.

Now, I do think if you have an internal creator slash producer, so either they're the creator or they're the producer, organic short form, especially for e-com, I think even for B2B too, is interesting. You know what's funny? This is a complete side note thing, but you know how we kind of talk about how like short form isn't going to generate you conversions directly, but it will generate views. And if you're lucky now, we're actually generating more emails using ManyChat on the emails. So one of my videos, we were talking about ChatGPT ads, right? And that one, it didn't do like, it didn't go viral. It got 80,000 views, which is decent. But who followed me from that? Afrojack, the DJ.

Oh, that's cool.

Hassan Whiteside, the basketball player. And then the founder of T-Mobile, John Legere or whatever. So my point is you never know who's going to happen. And these people all know other people too, right? Which eventually might come back to you. But that's my number 2. How about you?

My number 2 would be data and analytics. We see too much wastage in marketing spend just across almost every industry, every company, all digital channels, even all traditional channels. And the reason I think data and analytics is more important than ever is there's too many more channels. AI's made things worse. There's more new platforms that you got to mix in because the old channels still drive volume and results. And you need people who know how to use AI to be more efficient in data and analytics. And if you don't have good data and analytics, what ends up happening is you keep spending money, but you're not fine-tuning as much because what people believe is a source of truth is just off. Like the numbers are off and they're not really the numbers you should be making decisions off. And that just crushes the business. Like everyone thinks to grow, you need to keep spending more and more and more and fine-tuning. And I think to really do that, you need clarity. If you don't have clarity around your numbers, everything else is screwed.

So we got the influencer director, we have the data person, and what was the third one on your side?

Influencer person, which we both agree with. I have data on my side. You have an AI content creator on your side.

No, not AI content creator, just content creator. Either they're content creator slash producer. Okay.

So let's go for 3. What would your third one be? And I'll tell you my third.

My third one's actually going to go in your direction on the data side, the data side. And a big bonus would be if they're actually, this is a huge bonus, but if they're actually really good at data research as well, which ties in with data visualization, which makes more content.

Yeah, my third person would be a digital PR person. It drives a lot of citations and I think not enough corporations focus on citations. I think if you're not getting cited enough, you're not going to see the ChatGPT, the Perplexity mentions and rankings.

Bless you.

Sorry about that. Thank you. But I would say that's very important in this new ecosystem where people are reliant on LLMs. And you gave a great example earlier. I think it's going to improve, but it's really bad at this point. Like someone hitting you up and being like, Eric, I want to talk to you about your marketing agency because you guys specialize in healthcare marketing. Now you're a good marketing agency, but would you agree with the statement? I'm trying to— I'm not trying to talk trash. I love you to death. You're not a healthcare marketing agency.

We're not. Yeah.

And that's a problem with LLMs is they're really off right now and they're going to get better.

Yep.

And when they get better, they're going to become even more popular. So I think it's more important to have the citations and get there. Now, all props to you on the healthcare. If you get more of those, you'll get enough healthcare clients and then you will be a good healthcare marketing agency.

Sometimes they call it fake it before you make it, right? So this is interesting because we're talking about marketing roles right now and I want to talk about the death of the CMO and then also this Vibe growth marketing manager one. So we started late, so we have 10 more minutes. Kieran Flanagan from HubSpot tweeted this, or not tweeted this, but brought this up. So did you know that Ramp is hiring a vibe growth marketing manager? Do you know what that is?

So they just figure out how to grow through like just vibe marketing, vibe coding, and philosophy like that?

Similar. So it's like with vibe coding, obviously you're just kind of vibing and then you're using Replit or the new Google one that came out yesterday. I forgot what it's called already, but vibe analysis is when you use Cursor to analyze all your data and then you have a vibe growth marketing manager.

So here's what's in the role.

You have Ability for someone to do the work autonomously, end to end, from idea to execution. It literally says in the job spec, without needing support from engineering, okay? Number 2, being skilled in AI workflow tools to build agents that improve speed, personalization, and targeting across marketing channels. Marketers will gradually become AI agent trainers and managers. And then your prototype plus ship versus meeting and memos. This to me, honestly, if I'm looking at this, is if I'm 21 years old or whatever, I'm probably this already. And this is what they're looking for, right? This is going to be the baseline expectation. So like, you know, we're looking for Vibe Growth Marketing Manager who's a builder who prototypes and ships faster than most teams can spec in a brief, use AI tools, LLMs, no-code, low-code platforms. I'm almost tempted to say this is a requirement for our new, maybe the more junior people, and eventually it's going to be everybody, right? But like, you got to know Python, GPTs, making Zapier workflows, APIs, and fast scrappy builds. So I think we're going to see a lot more of this, and I think this probably scares people that don't have high agency. What do you think?

Yeah, I agree with you on this.

So then if you agree, that brings me to the death of the CMO. So this person posted this. This is a Twitter conversation, but starting to think that the CMO role is on its way out. I've spoken with a dozen CMO-track executives recently, and every one of them is trying to shift into a chief operating officer role or CBO, chief business officer role, instead of staying on the CMO track. And then this guy says, I have learned recently that CMOs suck at marketing and develop bad habits from 2015 when you can just spend on Facebook and everything works. Building a brand and winning consistently is hard. You cannot just media buy.

I would disagree with that because it depends on the organization size.

And I think—

I'm going to give you an extreme example.

Yes, go.

I meet up with CMOs who, no joke, manage marketing budgets. I won't tell you the full amount because if I give you the full amount, you'll know the company name.

Give some examples.

But like this CMO that I met up with spends more than $1 billion globally a year on marketing, literally more than $1 billion. You know how much, like, that's a crapload of money to spend more than $1 billion. I do think when you have spend levels of that high, the CMO understands marketing. They may not be the expert at everything, but what they're really good at is strategy and managing a P&L.

I think the death of a CMO doesn't apply to like a global organization, but I think to a smaller organization, I think the role, I don't think there's a death of that role. You always need a leader. But I think the role changes pretty drastically because even the last few years, the last 10 years or so, we've seen that CMO tenure going down and down and down. And you and I have met a lot of CMOs, like the global ones. They have a lot to manage, right? They're very impressive people on their own. But the smaller, like very small company CMOs, like let's just say like 100 people or so, they've probably got to change.

On the global level, when you're looking at big organizations, what the CMOs are really good at is they're just good operators more than anything else. You're not just there understanding marketing. You truly are an operator. but you're an operator for everything related to marketing.

Yeah. I got a question for you. This will be the last one. So there's this concept known as the make money button, okay? So when you look at your email list, you might have, I don't even know the last time you opened your, you open your ESP every week?

What do you mean?

Your email service provider.

I know, but you're talking about like the tool to send out emails?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or are you talking about our internal lists?

No, you, because you're still writing your own emails, Yeah, but there's 2. Yeah.

There's one that are like auto done, like, you know, your own software solution plugs in with SendGrid and it just sends it out and you don't log in.

Yeah.

Or like, you know, like a Mailchimp.

Beehive, Mailchimp.

Yeah. Mailchimp where you log in and you're sending out emails.

Okay. So you're, what's your open rate right now across the board?

For the Mailchimp type of campaigns or the other ones?

Mailchimp.

I haven't looked at it in a while.

Yeah. Use Kit though, right?

Yeah. If I had to guess, somewhere around 30%.

Okay.

Maybe a little bit down now.

So I was looking at, I typically don't open my beehive. I was looking at the list and I was like, dude, our open rate's like 60%, but then half of our email list opens at 82%. And then, 'cause—

Yeah, 60%?

Yeah.

How many emails are you sending?

65, 60%. We're sending like 4 or 5 emails a week.

You must be scrubbing your list. There's no way they can maintain—

We scrub it once, we scrub it every month.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah. So Matt Paulson, you know Matt Paulson? He's MarketBeat, right? They do about $50 million a year. He has an email business, great guy. So he tweets this, introducing the Beehive make money button. Step 1, make a segment of your most active users. So that is the people who have clicked in the last 7 days or opened at least 3 emails in the last 7 days. So very engaged people on your list, okay? Step 2, make an automation with your 5 to 10 best affiliate marketing sales emails. Let's just call it your sales emails, okay? Whatever is performed for you, just make a list list, have 5 of these emails and then send an email, one email, wait 2 days, send another email, wait 2 days, right? It's just a sequence of these 5. And then step 3, go back to your segment and open it. Then you just export into this new segment, right? But the key thing now is you want to make sure that this automation has a conditional reentry, meaning that if people fit this segment again, after 21 days, it puts them back into the segment. So it just keeps running it, right? And I'm like, Like this is, I think you and I have known this for a while, but email marketing is just so underrated. It's stuff like this prints money, right? You run a lot of emails to drive people to your webinars. Email is such good ROI.

Dude, it's huge ROI. And I first learned about the power of email from a guy named John Reese. Do you remember him from income.com?

Yeah, yeah.

And John would have this image back in the day, this is a long time ago, of someone cleaning a fish tank in his house and it was a scuba diver because they would dive into his fish tank, it was that big, and clean it from the inside. He just had a massive fish tank in his house. And everyone's like, what the heck does John do to have this big of a fish tank, nice house, nice cars, all this kind of stuff? And he would always tell everyone, he's like, oh, I just have my own ATM machine. People are like, what do you mean you have an ATM? You're in the business of like banking? He's like, no, I have an email list. It's my digital ATM machine. Every time I need money, I just click send.

Yeah.

And that's when I realized the power of email lists. And since then I've always pushed hard on it. I think it's one of the best marketing channels.

Yeah. And Neil has a great setup or had a great setup when his organic traffic was ginormous and it was just an email collecting machine. And that's what it was.

It was an ATM machine. You know, we still collect at least a few hundred thousand new emails a month.

Huge.

Huge.

Yeah. We used to collect probably more before. So all the people that tried to poo-poo on you like 2 years ago and say, oh my God, Neil lost all his traffic. It's like, dude, a couple hundred thousand emails. That's a couple hundred thousand dollars a month that you would typically be paying to Meta. So in my mind now, I'm like looking at these numbers, I'm like, Why are we not just dumping a lot of this money back into just building our email list for?

But for us, we found that it's not as valuable as it used to be. So same with like the website traffic. And I'm not saying traffic's bad. We used to have mass quantity traffic. And when I mean mass quantity, it would be for anyone who's talking or interested in marketing.

Mm-hmm.

The problem with that is when you're trying to go after companies that generate over a billion dollars a year in revenue, there's only a finite amount of companies. And what we found is changing our marketing approach, we still do focus on generating traffic, but a different kind of traffic that's more tailored towards enterprise brands.

Yeah.

But doing marketing in different ways from in-person events to partnerships to award submissions because of the judges that we really care for, not necessarily winning the award, right? All these things have helped us generate more of the type of leads that we're looking for. But yeah, I think people just need to adapt based on where— It's a different game. Is your ideal customer.

Yeah, it's just a different game that you're playing. But in my eyes, I'm like, why am I not doing this? Because I just look at the people on the list and sometimes you have enterprise people on the list, but still it's a different buying motion for what you're looking for.

Yeah, and one really quick thing, if you're ever trying to do marketing for a specific customer, like you're going after a really specific customer type and you're like, hey, we want to do what Neil does and just do award submissions. So we're going to do a ton of award submissions. It can also backfire for you and create a negative impression and hurt you with those potential customers because those people hop around to different companies. So for example, if we're doing award submissions and our award submissions were really bad compared to the competition—

And you keep submitting.

And I keep submitting, it would actually cause us to generate less future business.

Because they remember you.

Yes.

It's like that company.

When people hop around, they'll be like, oh, you never want to work with them. We've seen some of their work and results. So you have to be careful on the type of marketing you're doing. Just because something works for me, I'm not saying you can't do it. You want to be careful because it can actually backfire. And hurt you.

Yeah. And I think the key lesson from this one, guys, is marketing 101. You want to go to where your customer is hanging out and you want to talk to them how they expect to be talked to, right? So if you're going enterprise only, that's the motion that you're doing now. So yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.