Ep. 3008: The Best New Cookies in LA, Podcast vs. Influencer Ads, Profound’s $20M Pitch

So Neil, let me tell you about these new cookies I got over here. So guys, in the camera you can see these are these Biscoff cookies. They're nice and fancy. And those of you listening, Neil, do you want to describe what you're seeing right now?

I don't know what the base is, but it looks like some sort of cookie. I don't know if it's chocolate chip or oatmeal or whatever it is, or just a plain cookie. Uh, a Biscoff standing up, and I don't know what the white thing is.

Yeah. The white thing kind of looks like cheese, but it's not. It's white chocolate. And then she made the cookie. My friend Stephanie made the cookie from scratch, and then there's like some salt on it as well.

But what kind of cookie is it?

Is it chocolate chip? It's a Biscoff cookie.

Oh, the base is made out of Biscoff as well?

Oh, no, no, no. I don't know what the cookie is. It looks like a regular cookie. I don't see any chocolate chip or anything. Maybe some oatmeal or whatever. But this is really nicely done. And by the way, she started this company 3 weeks ago and it's called Warm House Cookies. So @warmhousecookies on Instagram. I think when you, when you design something like this from a marketing standpoint, it stands out because I bought this for Neil's kids, right?

Thank you, Eric.

Yeah. And I'm like, dude, the fancy ones, let's give it to the kids because it's like, whoa, like I've never seen a cookie where there's a Biscoff standing up from it and then there's like a white chocolate. So sometimes you can say the design itself sells the product, right? Especially when it's food.

Yeah. But here's what's really interesting. And we're bringing up this cookie company for a reason, not just to promote them or anything like that.

Sure.

You know, any Great buzz is great buzz, but there's actually a different reason why we're bringing them up on this episode. I asked Eric when he first brought them to me, is I'm like, hey Eric, what's their website? He's like, they don't have a website. Now I was like, how do I buy cookies from there? He's like, you just have to go to Instagram and go to Warm House Cookies. And do they need a website? Yes. But the bigger lesson here is for especially a lot of marketers, You can just get started and it doesn't have to be perfect. Everyone just overhypes everything and thinks it has to be perfect. And they're like, I need the perfect launch. I got to figure out PR strategy, hire a social media company. I need to go and figure out how to get my website and Facebook and then do TikTok Reels and get influencers. And what does she do?

She just started.

She just started. And I asked Eric, oh, where's her location? And what did you say? Home.

Exactly. Yeah.

Because when I look at the box, it looks very professional.

Professional, super fresh. And then she has a sticker with a logo on it and the Instagram. You look at the videos, the, the videos are well done too.

I didn't see any videos on Instagram.

On the Warm House, @WarmHouseCookies?

There's one video. Yeah.

Sorry. Okay. Even the one video itself is fine. Right. And then I'm just like, it, the, the product itself is good. And, but the fact that she started this 3 weeks ago and then she has boxes and then she has logos and things like that, it's already pretty crazy.

She only has 335 followers. She's following 26 people. 7 posts. This is it. She doesn't have a ton of business. So how is she generating business? Because you're not the only customer, but like, what's her model?

I actually asked her yesterday. I was like, how many customers do you have so far? So keep in mind, it's 3 weeks in. So how many customers do you think she has so far? It's not a crazy number.

Like 10, 20?

Yeah, exactly. 10, right? 10 customers is what she has right now. And so I'm like, whoa, this—

Wait, were you one of them?

Yeah. Okay.

I'm one of them.

But it's like, you just need a couple customers to get validation to show that you should keep going. Like, you're not going to build a giant business in a day. And I don't even know if she's trying to build it into a big business, because once you get into the cookie business, that's a legit thing, right?

Yeah.

And so, by the way, I have a friend, YPO, his mom makes these amazing cookies in batches. I got those for your kids too, right? And they actually had a major cookie investor. There's one of those, right? That really liked the cookies. Hey, like, I'll invest, but I need to ask you, do you enjoy what you do right now? And are you ready to make this into a business? Those are 2 separate things. If you want to do it for fun, do it for fun. But if you want to make it into a business, it's going to be a lot of pain and suffering.

Yes. And when you look at her model for Warm House Cookies, you know, people ask like, how are you differentiating? What's your unique value proposition? And honestly, there's some cool designs and stuff like that, but you don't have to overthink it all. If you're going after a big market like cookies or food, it's, you know, as I was once told when I was talking to a guy in private equity who's a billionaire, he ended up telling me, We were talking about the agency space at the time. He's like, look, it's a big punch bowl. It's big enough where everyone can get drunk. And if you're in cookies, whether you're Crumbl or Warm House Cookies or someone else—

Or Levain's coming out nearby.

Do you see that?

Which one? Oh, you don't know Levain? Okay, Levain's popular in New York. It's coming right by, you know, Honor Bar.

No, what's Levain?

It's a new cookie. We're going to see it today. Watch, when we walk there for lunch, it's L-E-V-A-I-N. It's a very popular cookie thing in New York.

Okay, sometimes you just got to go out there and just do it. And it's okay if you're not differentiated. In marketing, everyone's like, I need to have a unique value proposition. Sometimes just go and get launched and then figure out the rest later on.

When have you ever done a business plan?

I did a business plan when I was starting off.

Yeah, very beginning. You're like 14, 15 years old.

No, a little bit older than that. I would say early 20s.

Okay.

I was looking to raise money at that point. And there was a company called Fruitcast, I believe it was, that we had. It was one of the first podcast advertising companies.

What?

And—

Fruitcast?

Yeah, I did it with a guy named James. Was it James something? I forgot his last name. It was his idea. He and I put in the majority of the money. We even had good meetings with Yahoo about M&A and stuff.

This is when, this is past ACS time?

Very early during ACS. Okay.

So you guys were cash flowing well?

We were cash flowing well. And the whole model was when podcasts first came out, like literally when they first came out, the way people did advertising is, hey, let me go call you, Eric, for marketing school or leveling up and see what the rates are and do some insertions. And we had this model where we're like, we're going to create interface kind of like Google, which we did. And podcast advertisers can go in there, they can slice whatever moments, and they can just buy ads on an impression basis. And it was just more automated and it was going to create in essence a marketplace.

Mm-hmm.

Where we struggled with was the technology end. Not that we couldn't create a marketplace, it was a lot of people would just record their podcast episode and it was meant where you can put ads just at the beginning, it was hard for the podcast advertiser to follow, get them to follow instructions on where to put breaks so we can insert ads in the middle.

Yeah.

And then the other big problem with the business was we were looking at CPMs in the multiple like dollars of like $15, $20 a CPM, which was really high for certain categories.

People weren't ready for it yet.

And they also weren't ready for it, but that's really high when you're talking about like, Call it 18, 19 years ago or something like that. That's extremely high CPMs. Yeah.

So, okay, you did a business plan, but since then, have you really done business plans?

I think a business plan is a terrible way to raise money, and that was the only reason we created a business plan.

You thought you needed one.

That's what we were told.

Yeah.

And then the person sold us on 3 business plans, not just 1, 3.

Oh, a business plan seller sold you on a business plan. Of course he's incentivized, just like a real estate agent.

And guess how much we raised from all the business cards?

Zero.

Zero, yeah.

Exactly. So I think the point we're trying to get, going back to the cookies thing again, is like you just need to start sometimes. Like the software or a lot of the stuff that you've built, you just, me knowing you, you've always just launched things, right? In the beginning.

Yeah.

And it's, you're better off doing that and then seeing if you get some customers and then go from there. The fact that she has 10 customers in the first 3 weeks shows that she's already like, she's doing something about it. She's not just waiting around for the customers to appear. You can't just say, Oh, I have a great product and then hope the customers come. And then, by the way, the flavors are unique. The one Noah and I just ate, probably like 300, 400 calories, but like passion fruit and like jelly on it, right? The ones your kids are getting, white chocolate and Biscoff. Biscoff? Biscoff, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. We'll cut it up into chunks before I give it to them.

Oh, 'cause they can't have too much or else they're gonna go crazy.

300 calories for someone who weighs like 30-something pounds.

Oh yeah, you should chop it up. But dude, when we see the Levain later, you'll see like they were huge in New York and they're expanding Right by you.

So that's cool. I'm going to check it out.

By the way, you just mentioned podcast ads, and then I want to talk about the deck that you had earlier. So what I think is interesting is right now, like I'm looking at all the podcast ads that we're running that I'm recording. So, so it's, I want to talk about podcast ads versus influencer marketing, because you've seen this with influencer marketing. Sometimes you'll get like 6-figure-plus deals. And then right now I'm getting like a healthy, like 5-figure deals. Like they'll come out to us and reach out, whether it's like a, like, you know, a big advertising company or something like that, right? Now, what's interesting to me is last week I mentioned I was at some AI event and one gal was like, oh yeah, you know, we work with so-and-so, you know, big multi-trillion dollar company and we just throw $50,000 to $100,000 at people just like that. I was like, do you track attribution? Nothing, right? Whereas when we have like a Dell reach out, like Dell, the computer, or now it's like a server company, right?

I thought you said Adele.

Not Adele, yeah. When I said that, I was like, it kind of sounds like Adele. But Dell, still very big company. They cash flow well, right? Michael Dell. They'll reach out and they're like, I'm like, okay, so how much are we going to make from this? $3,000. I'm like, like, so, so like, are we just going to keep making like $3,000 each time? I'm like, what is this?

Right?

And this is no knock on, you know, who we work with on the podcast side. It's not even their fault, but I'm just like, we're better off doing any type of influencer deal than doing like, one, the influencer deal, they don't, they're not tracking attribution or anything and they're paying way more.

Yeah.

And then on the other side, I'm just like, $3,000 for a month. You know what I mean? So like podcast ads—

It's a lot of work for $3,000. Yeah.

And then like I have to record it too. And we've resorted to using ElevenLabs now for my voice. And I'm sure you do the same thing, but I'm just like podcast ads versus influencer marketing seems like podcast ads, like pricing seems to be going downwards right now. Whereas influencer is just going upwards.

I agree with you. I don't see unless you're like a Joe Rogan or something like that, where you just have a really massive audience. Podcast advertising is a very difficult business to make an arm and a leg for. And one of the hardest reasons is attribution. Yes, you can send people to landing pages. Yes, it's great for branding, but it's becoming a more saturated place. I'm not talking about podcasts. I'm talking about the ads portion where podcasts are recording 3, 4, 5, 6 advertisements just in one episode.

Mm-hmm.

And they're not really tying it into episode. And that's a great example of us when someone's advertising Eric's using ElevenLabs or he's recording it and they're just slicing it in. While when sometimes when Joe Rogan has a sponsor or some of the other big podcasters I've seen, they intertwine the ad within the episode and they make it more relevant and it just works better. But that costs a lot more money and it takes a lot more effort.

Yeah. Even Joe Rogan doesn't necessarily weave it into his episodes that much. I've been listening to a lot of podcasts recently, like Lex Fridman, he'll load the first 8 minutes all like just reads, right? He's not really weaving it in. Only a, you know who weaves it in pretty well? MrBeast.

MrBeast does.

Yeah.

But with Lex Fridman, I just skip the beginning.

Yeah, I just skip the first 10 minutes and I just go into it. So yeah, but anyway, that's what we think about podcast ads versus influencer marketing. I think, you know, anytime someone reaches out to either of us for influencer, we should just try to push them into the podcast and include that in it. That's what I think we should do.

Yeah, but when you look at Joe Rogan, when I look at a version of a successful ad is what he did with, what was it called? Onnit?

Onnit, yeah. Well, he owned a piece.

He owned a piece, but that was really well integrated and that did well for him and it did well for Onnit and that allowed them to exit. I forgot who they sold to, but—

Dude, you know what you should weave into it? Because your YouTube gets views, right? I'm like, why don't you just weave these little mid-rolls into it? Because when I weave the mid-rolls into like Karat or ClickFlow or Single Grain, we actually get leads from it.

What do you do for your mid-roll rolls?

It's simple. Like the video will go for like 2, 3 minutes or so, and then there'll be like an ad. If it goes for another like 3, 4 minutes, there'll be another ad. And then that's, that's how we just keep rotating the ads.

And then do you just pop it up on the video with the CTA on the screen?

Yeah.

All right.

You should do that because you're getting like hundreds of thousands of views sometimes, right? Per video.

Over time, yes. Not usually in the first video.

I think it's worth it. Just do that. I guarantee you, you'll get more. Yeah.

We should try it out.

If you buy me more cookies after that. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about this deck that you pulled up.

So Profound has a pitch deck. You can end up seeing it online. You may need an account to Adweek and their deck pretty much just goes—

I'll show you that removepaywall.com/whatever the URL is, then you're good.

What Profound is, is for anyone who isn't familiar with the tool, it's a tool that helps you track how well you're doing on the AI search engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity when it comes to getting mentions. And what was interesting is they raised a few million bucks and then all of a sudden within less than a year after that, they raised $20 million. And their whole pitch within their pitch deck or part of their pitch, which was really interesting is, you know, when you look at, or at least within the article as well, but when they were telling the story for Profound, they're like 10% of searches happen in AI search engines or start with AI search engines now. And if you look at the fintech brand Ramp, which has a crazy high valuation, their mentions in AI search rose from 3% to 22% after using Profound's tools. So they're talking about the value. And if you look at Profound's pricing, I believe it's somewhere around like $400-ish. I could be a little bit off.

$500.

It's somewhere around there. $400, $500.

Yeah.

But either way, it's not the cheapest tool, but they're showcasing how companies are getting more mentions, how that's driving better results for these organizations. And that's causing them to continually pay Profound, and they're using Profound's tools to specifically get included in more the AI engines. Now, obviously, Profound's tools can't just get you included a ton of times. You actually got to do work, or AKA marketing, but that's a pretty attractive pitch. Instead of just saying, here's our company and this is why you should invest, they're saying, here's your company, Here's why people are using it because there's a shift happening with search in which 10% is starting to happen with these AI search engines and it's increasing. And look at these brands like Ramp who have used it to grow their brand mentions, their brand, their traffic, and their revenue. Yeah.

So I was kind of giving my opinion on this one. So here's the thing. Last week I had someone else show me like on a demo, a competitor to Profound, and there's a handful of these competitors already. I think there's— I think maybe it's Glenn Ossoff from ViperChill, or maybe somebody else shared this on Twitter, but there's— I think there's like 15 or 20 of these LLM services companies. I mean, you're doing something similar that's coming out with Ubersuggest, right?

Yeah.

So I'm like, okay, they raised $20 million. Okay, let's assume like $80, $100, $120 million valuation. It's— I think the problem with raising so much, and you've raised money, we've both raised capital, but I'm just like, You end up having a board and you start to have expectations and the expectations mean you have to grow at this rate. And if you're not growing at that rate, there's a lot of pressure on you. And I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong, but I just, I think for something like this, I guess my question is like, what is the moat?

I don't think there's much of a moat, not for Profound and not even for us at Ubersuggest or AnswerThePublic when we're copying some of these features, just to be really transparent. But I think the mistake they made, because I saw the cost structure. So my team sent me a document depending on the usage. It can be anywhere from, call it like extra, and we have good usage, call it like $30,000, $40,000 on the very low end to like $200,000, $300,000 a month on the high end.

In cost? Yeah. On cost.

Yeah. That's not a lot in cost. We're giving away a lot of it for free because our costs aren't that high. And keep in mind, when you do a search and you have a lot of usage, That keyword or prompt or whatever you want to end up calling it, when other people are interested in that data, you don't have to pull right away. If you pull the previous day, you're going to get similar results, right? And even with a lot of these solutions, you're pulling the prompt multiple times to see what brands, because it does change. You may pull a prompt like 10 times to see the different results and then average it out.

Yeah.

But still, even then, like the costs aren't that high and we included this all in our cost formula. And it's just like, I think they raised too much money. Do I think they should have raised the $3-ish million? I think it was $3.5, yes. But I think they should have went the route that Zapier went. Raise a little bit of money, you get to profitability and scale, and then you got a great business. If things don't work out well for you, then—

They only raised that YC round that they gave it like 7% and that's it. That's all they ever did.

I thought that round took a lot. Zapier?

Zapier, yeah, yeah.

And then from there you just go and you can keep going and you can paint your own journey.

Yep.

Now if Profound's trying to go pure enterprise and they want to go all or nothing, I think, all right, go for a raise $20 and then go raise another $80 after, you know, swing for the fences.

Yeah.

But I think a better solution is when you have a business that doesn't have a big cost base, which this kind of business doesn't. And if you look at AI costs over time, will drop. It has been dropping. So it's like, why would you raise that much money? But that's just my 2 cents. And you and I have been really against raising money just generally.

Well, I think the times I've worked for companies that have raised money, I've seen it go poorly.

You've also raised money.

I've raised money. You've raised money too. You've seen it. It just, it doesn't work for our personality styles. And we're not saying it's wrong or right. I think it's just a matter of like what your preference is. But I just, I think in this situation, when you have so many different competitors and there's not a big moat around it, I, maybe this is the wrong way to look at it, but when I think about the SEO space, okay, you have BrightEdge, right? They're a 9-figure company, $100 million, right? I think Semrush does what, $400 million? $200 million a year, and they're publicly traded. And then Ahrefs public, last public data was like $140 million or something like that, right? And they've all done it differently. BrightEdge raised money, they only target enterprises, $100 million, right? And then Semrush, they got to a certain point and then they, you know, then they went public, right? And then you have Ahrefs who's just been bootstrapped the whole time. So I don't, the question is like, how big can this market get? And I don't know if we just compare it just to, you know, kind of the SEO space and it's not just SEO, but you get what I mean.

Yep.

Yeah. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. You know, this is interesting because, because we're talking about these 3 different competitors right now. I was thinking about it this week and I'm curious to hear from your end too. So my thought here is, okay, on the Karat side, so Karat is our account-based marketing product. We have one main, like one competitor who's raised tens of millions of dollars, right? We have another competitor based in Europe who has raised a couple million dollars, but they're very inexperienced, right? And then you have us, we're bootstrapped. And so you can say, well, you know, the big company that raised money, maybe their advantage is, well, they have a lot of capital, but I would argue that their greatest strength is also the greatest weakness too, meaning that, okay, they raise a bunch of money, but they have the board to report to. They have to grow at a certain rate, right? And they're subject to the whim of other people's opinions, right? Because when you have a board and you've raised a bunch of money, there are expectations, right?

What's the total raise?

Let's just call it like $50 or $60 million.

Then the other problem you have, and how many rounds?

Looks like I would say 2 rounds, I think.

And then the other problem you have is founder dilution. And then if you don't hit the growth numbers, the founders get—

You get screwed. Liquidation preferences.

Yes. And then the founders just aren't as motivated to keep pushing forward. And the main reason being is you're like, oh cool, I'm not going to really make any money from this even if I own 20% because I raised a lot.

Then the motivation to work on it is gone, right?

Correct.

Now the second example is, okay, these guys raised like $3, $4, or $5 million, right? These were the guys that copied our features a couple months ago. I don't think they're doing much with it now, but so they raised $3, $4, $5 million. I think they're in their early 20s or mid-20s or so. So you can argue that they're inexperienced as startup founders. Now I might say, oh, they're inexperienced, we're going to crush them. But no, that's not the right way to look at it because they're inexperienced. They might try things that I would never try to think of trying, and they might just, they might just grow like crazy, right?

Yeah.

So again, their people's greatest strengths are their greatest weaknesses. And then on our end, we're bootstrapped. But what does that mean? That means we can move very quickly, but that also means we can do whatever we want. And if we can do whatever we want, we might build in the wrong direction. So if we're not very focused and we're not— if we're not very focused and locked in, we're going to start to build a bunch of random things, right? And so there's also— there's always like a trade-off to all this stuff. And that's why I say your greatest strength is also your weakness.

I totally agree with you. And you got to figure out how to use your greatest strength to your advantage. And I think it doesn't matter what route you take in business, You got to execute fast. Like when we look at marketing campaigns and you and I have seen so many over the years, perfection is really overrated. It's about speed, execution, just getting stuff out there and iterating and continually improving it over time.

Now here's the flip side of that, right? So I know you as one of the fastest executors, right? But there's a downside to that too.

Yes, it depends on what aspect of the business, but Me moving fast has also cost my business millions and millions of dollars in expenses that should have never happened. Yeah, because I make mistakes sometimes moving too fast and not thinking things through enough.

Yeah. And by the way, here's the, here's the catch. So, because I remember Neil's personality test when we compare to each other. So Neil's really fast, but he's detail-oriented, right? I'm pretty fast. I'm not as fast as Neil, but I'm pretty fast, but I'm not detail-oriented. So I'm subject to make more mistakes. But even if you're super detailed like Neil is, and he's really good with his memory, You're still going to make mistakes. It just doesn't matter.

Correct.

Yeah.

When you, whenever you move fast, you need to understand that you're going to make more mistakes than compared to when you move slower. And it's just an equation. Is it worth it? Is the risk worth moving quicker? And this brings me into, you know, something that was interesting in this economy. It's been a bad economy. You and I have moved pretty quickly. Would you agree with that on executing? You got Carrot. You've adjusted Single Grain to focus more on B2B, if I'm not mistaken. And we've both been just cranking along, moving fast. And I'm assuming because you've been doing more stuff, you're also investing a lot more, which is—

People. I'm spending so much of my time on recruiting right now.

People and tech.

Yeah, yeah.

And R&D.

Yeah.

Which means your margins must be lower. You're making way less profit than you normally used to, right? I had this interesting conversation with a friend yesterday. This is like, when do you keep pushing forward and when do you cut? Like when do you draw that line in the sand on your end on when you think you should cut?

I don't have that answer right now. I feel like for me it's just keep going. Like to me it's just you keep building equity in this thing, right? And you're not trying to draw down right now. And to me it's like I just keep building. I think if I were you and I had kids and a family, I think I'd have a different answer right now, but I don't. So I don't really have an answer for me. It's just keep going.

I would agree with that because before when I was not married and I did not have kids, I would've sold everything I had, homes, cars, Etc., to just double down on the business.

The thing you can control. Yes.

And it's more risky, but I'm like, YOLO, I'll just go live with my parents. Even at my age, I'm 40 right now, I would still have just some mentality. I'm like, I'll just live with my parents. They bought their house for a few hundred grand. Worst case, I'll just take it over.

I think it's risky to the normal person, but it's not risky to us, right? I think we should clarify that. It like, it is risky, but—

It is risky even for us because there's things, technology changes, market conditions change, but it won't go to zero.

Yeah, we don't see it that way.

We don't see it that way because we know it won't go to zero and we'd bet on ourselves than something else that we can't control.

Yep.

But when you do have a family, it's harder to do that. I'm still really aggressive on the investing side. And for years, you know, when I look at this crap economy, our business has grown each year.

Mm-hmm.

Which is really hard to do in the marketing space when a lot of our competitors are declining. Our margins have gotten really compressed because of all the reinvestments, But at the same time, when my buddy was asking, he's like, how do you know when to cut? And I was like, I don't think there's necessarily an exact moment where in the business, oh, I got to just start cutting everything. I look at it as more as like, I'm willing to make X amount of bets a year with X amount of dollars. And when the signals are showing they're not working, I cut them.

Yep.

Because it's foolish to keep putting money at something when you know it's not working and the data's showing it.

You cut pretty fast too.

I cut pretty fast. And when things aren't working, it doesn't mean that the idea was bad. Like, you know, we've tried a lot of paid ads with our agency and because we try to service really well and optimize for the LTV, you know, people look at it and be like, oh, you got an 8-to-1 ROAS. And I'm like, 8-to-1 ROAS does not work well for me based on our cost structure. Right? Because then you got to pay commission on sales and then you paid for, you know, that account or the ad to get the account. It's profitable overall, but you know, in year 1, you're eating a lot of money. And what I was explaining to my team is that doesn't mean paid ads doesn't work. It means we may need to try a different approach and cut the old approach. So the way I look at cutting is if something doesn't work out for me and I really believe in it, I'll cut the person or the technology or the contractor who's working on it, and I'll replace it with— I'll try to learn from why it didn't work, then replace it with a new variation that I think will work. And if I keep going multiple times and I can't get it to work, eventually I'll just move on to something else that's bearing better fruit.

Yeah. And by the way, sometimes you might even come back to this in a year or two. Correct. And then it works again.

Yes.

Timing might be better. But like, for example, the podcast thing that you did, the CPMs actually are like— the CPMs are even higher today, right?

Yes.

It's just a timing thing sometimes. So, yeah. Yeah. So like, by the way, it's interesting for me because I look at the last, really the last week or so. This is weird. I don't know if you're seeing this, but I remember there's all these deals that like all of a sudden they're all coming back out of the woodwork in the last week. I don't know why.

Like client deals.

Yeah. Like, yeah, client deals for Single Grain, right? Like all these, either they're past clients or they're proposals that maybe Single Grain lost in the past. But they're all coming back and it's like middle of July right now. So I don't know what you're seeing.

SMB divisions, not bad this month. Our enterprise division, July is the slowest month out of the— for the whole year, every year for us. So on the enterprise side, we are not seeing things pick up, but this is in line with previous Julys for us.

And are you seeing— so what we're seeing on our end is, is again, more continued interest in Reddit. Like today I just looked and it's like, okay, Multibillion-dollar company, they want Reddit. A lot of Reddit interest, a lot of YouTube interest, not as much LLMo that I would expect. And then there's also like people that want agentic workflows. That's what we're seeing.

We're getting a lot of RFPs for LLMo.

Yeah. And you've positioned yourself that way.

Yes. We've changed a lot of our copy, a lot of our pitch decks. We're trying to go hard on that area and we're trying to do it globally, which gets a little bit difficult because like, Things like ChatGPT aren't available in every single country, right? But yet the clients, either they'll use VPNs or they'll want different versions based on the LLM that people are using within that territory. But yeah, at SMB, we're seeing things starting to get a little bit better, but I'm cautiously optimistic because next month could be bad. Enterprise, we're seeing things being really slow, but July's always slow for us.

It's interesting because there's 15 or 20 of these Profound, right? I'm wondering how you partner or buy some of these eventually down the road.

I won't do either.

I mean, They have, they have the, these enterprises working that they need like a referral partner. Don't you partner up with like Google and then like ask for referrals?

Oh, I thought you meant like the software companies.

No, no, no, not the software. No, I do mean the software companies, but like partner, just being that, that, that agency, that, that key, like main referral partner.

I haven't thought about it. Yeah, I look at it a little bit different because we already have the usage on Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. Like we'll have more website visitors than them.

You're a competitor, but you can also be a frenemy.

Correct. That's a great way to look at it. But I don't think they'll want to refer to us the moment we release a lot of their features for free and say, hey, instead of $500, you can get a lot for free and it's free every single month.

You just want to be a very democratic person.

Trust me, I will try and my partnership team will try, but it's going to be a hard pitch.

Yeah.

Not for us.

Yeah.

For them to accept us will be the hard part, right? We can pitch it all day long.

It's free to do it. So yeah.

Oh, we'll try.

Yeah.

We think we'll get more business from the LLMs.

Yeah.

Versus the tools.

Dude, we got some really— I'm sure you're seeing the same. We're getting some really good leads from the LLMs.

Let me rephrase. We think we're going to get really good business from the LLMs referring us business, not someone typing in a query on an LLM platform. So like someone working at ChatGPT or Papexy, like an employee there referring us business.

Yeah.

Because if you look at the ad business for Google and Meta, do you know how you get some of the best ad accounts?

Well, we mentioned this last week with Meet at 6.

Yeah, it's employees. that manage the agency or client relationships, recommending agencies to you. And if you look at Marketo, remember they got bought out by, I believe, Vista, then they sold to Adobe. The way Marketo grew very heavily in their early days is they partnered with Salesforce sales reps and Salesforce sales reps also went in and sold Marketo for them.

Dude, you want to know a fun story? Just a little tangent with Adobe because Adobe is one of, you know, you've worked with Adobe, right? Yeah. So that book I'm reading again, that In the Company of Giants, that, that, that little book, um, it talks about how Adobe started. Do you know how Adobe started?

Uh-uh.

So do you remember, do you, you've heard of Xerox PARC before, right?

I've heard of Xerox, the company.

So Xerox, like they were known for what? Copy machines in the past, right? And they're multi billions and billions and billions, right? They actually started a division called Xerox PARC, and this is where Steve Jobs went to visit, and that's where he found the GUI, the graphical user interface, and he saw the mouse and the keyboard. Xerox PARC. had a division that was coming up with all these new products, but products— or sorry, research. They were researching these new products. Research and product never connected, so they never got these products out to market. So these things went to die. The 2 Adobe co-founders worked there and they were very frustrated that their stuff, their— the cool stuff they were building was never making it out because they were printing money with the copy machines. That's why they started Adobe. And I think they started with laser printers or whatever, and that's how it became what it became.

And Adobe is much bigger than Xerox at this point.

Yeah. I mean, is Xerox even around anymore?

No, they're around.

They're for sure, yeah, but like much smaller now. Yeah.

Xerox is a $626 million company.

So what's interesting to me is you look at Xerox, they had, they had all the cards, right? And they just had— they just said, hey, let's take the research stuff and maybe let's productize some of this and not just focus on the cash cow. Maybe like 10% of the resources focused on the new stuff. Like, who does this well? Google does this relatively well. Yes. With the new stuff, right?

Google does it pretty well and Google's willing to kill off their, their baby.

Yeah.

Slowly.

They'll kill stupid stuff too, like Google Plus, right? They'll try Google Plus and won't work. Yeah. What, what worked? Waymo. Longest time it didn't work. It's starting to work now, right? Um, well, they bought Android, but you know, it works. And then now, now their, their baby, there's their baby, their search baby looks like it has to go in a different direction, but they're, they're not afraid to make changes.

Is, is, is the Tesla robotaxis available here in LA?

Not yet.

No, not yet.

Yeah.

I think people are really enjoying the Waymo experience. I don't know how the Tesla—

Have you done it yet?

I have not, but I see them all the time. Now I was dropping my daughter off to school today. There was a Waymo in the middle lane. It was a 3-lane row. And I always go in the lane where there's no Waymo because the Waymo tends to be the slowest driver that has extra space. And, you know, in LA traffic, you know this better than anyone else, dude. Like the moment someone has their car a little bit out, the Waymo won't go around and it'll just hold up traffic.

I'm aggressive with Waymo. So I know because they'll like, they'll, they'll, they'll concede to me. So I'll always drive ahead of them and like cut them off or whatever. Cause I know they won't do anything to me cause they won't have road rage. So yeah.

Just don't get too aggressive where you get into a car accident.

That hasn't happened before.

You've never gotten in a car accident?

Oh no. I've had cars hit me. Knock on wood. Yeah, I've had cars hit me. It's like, and then they'll try to blame me. Like, you hit me. So anyway, that's what—

Dude, the last time, this is a random tangent, a car was parked, someone reversed into us and they tried to blame us when we were parked.

Yeah, I've had that happen.

Like literally I was parked, the car wasn't on in a normal parking spot within the lanes. Someone reversed and they got mad and they came in like, you did this and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, All right. And then the good news is there was a camera system right there.

Yeah.

Not in our car, but right there in one of the store owners'—

Dude, you want to know what good marketing is? And then we can move on here. So I've been watching on X. So the Tesla Autopilot, right? There's one picture, one video where this car's about to turn on Autopilot, but then the car stops. Like the lights are green, right? The other car goes ahead. It's green, right? But then a truck comes by and just T-bones the other car, right? But the whole thing is the Tesla knew that it was coming and it stops. That's real. It was real. Yeah. And then the next day Tesla posts, it's like, hey, show me videos of you getting like preventing you from a car accident. Right. And it tweets it out and everyone's responding. Right. So not only was that good marketing that got millions of views on X, but Tesla then went out there. Their marketing department was like, hey, look, give us more videos like that. So then they can make it, stitch it into an ad, I'm sure.

Yeah, no, that's amazing. I didn't realize Tesla could actually detect if someone on the—

It detects like an accident. Yeah, basically. Yeah.

That's really cool.

Yeah. Anyway, that's always a jack of all trades, guys, is better than a master of one. See you tomorrow.