Ep. 3010: I Hired a Cursor Coach, Why I’m Hitting My Entire TAM With 400K Emails

By the way, did I tell you I hired a cursor coach?

You did tell me that. Mike, from my end, also has a cursor coach.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay, tell me how it's working for Mike's and then I'll give you mine.

So Mike's main reason for a cursor coach is—

And Mike's your co-founder.

Mike's my co-founder of NP Digital. We do a lot of stuff manually and we of course try to leverage AI and automate it. We have an internal team that does it, but sometimes Mike and I just want to do stuff on our own. Mike's been spending way more time on this than me, but like to just get it set up and get all the data feeds integrated with it, it's a real pain. And just knowing how to prompt doesn't mean that Cursor's going to work the way you want and it's going to output the things the exact way you want. So he had a coach who helped him set it up and he has a coach who helps him get over roadblocks and things that aren't working. And it's actually been working really well for him.

How much does he pay for the coach? I'll tell you mine.

It can't be much because he got them from— my guess is he got them from Upwork. So my guess is no more than like $30 an hour, if I had to guess.

Yeah. So mine's $50 now. He invoices me $50 per session or whatever. And it's the same thing. So the reason why we're even talking about Cursor, like neither Neil and I are coders, especially not me, but Cursor is an IDE. It's an interactive— I believe it's an interactive development environment, something like that, right? Where you can— it helps you code edit, it helps you correct your code mistakes, things like that. Now, the cool thing with Cursor, is you can integrate with different MCPs. These are model context protocols, just meaning that you can have it talk with different apps. So I can query, hey Gong, how many discovery calls did we do last week? Okay, what's the open pipeline right now? And there's a HubSpot MCP too. There's a QuickBooks MCP where you can pull your financial data too. There's a Google Analytics MCP, there's a Google Search MCP, Google Search Console MCP. So I can pull all this data if I want. I can also, you know what I can do, Neil? I can use Apify and I can scrape the Facebook library, the LinkedIn library. I can scrape a bunch of Instagram posts and I can have it I can even have it input websites or copy for me and things like that. So basically I can work within these IDEs and even like using Comet, which is Perplexity's browser, or Dia, these browsers, you can work within them now. And I feel like we're going to be working within these a lot more. And this is all just to just make us faster. And I think it's good that you have Mike doing it and then I'm doing it because then they'll just show you— we'll just show you how to do it later. Yeah, that's probably easier because it's really frustrating setting it up right now. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. I believe it. And I used to be at a point in my life where I would spend a lot more time on like technology and learning it. What I find my highest leverage point in today's, you know, where my business is, is like dealing with stuff like, hey, we're getting all these leads and this is what we're pitching and our discovery call to pitch ratio has gone down. Let me figure out how to rework the pitch and create a message that resonates with the market. So I'll do a lot of testing on like X and ad channels like Meta, and I'll run ads with different types of copy that I would include in my pitch. And the ones that resonate the most, I know they're most likely to work the best on our discovery calls to get more people to want to pitch.

So you know what I want to do with this in the future? I want to take, let's say, all of your ad library data and you can see the historical performance, right? Or I want to take all of, let's say I have tens of thousands of Gong calls. We talked about this where I want to make a synthetic customer persona and I can just talk to it in Cursor instead of me having to to a customer development call. I can have an infinitely patient thing that's trained on all my data and say, hey, what's the next angle here? What should we build? I have this angle over here, let's work on it, right? And then it's based on all the, like, why do I need to wait for customer development anymore?

Dude, Masalo from my team did something really good, and even though he's not the CMO, he really does run marketing. He did something that was really interesting where we can automatically crawl and dissect using AI the top-performing YouTube ads within any category, and then it'll create a variation that's relevant to any business we want and then it creates an output and we just do it at mass scale for testing.

That's great. Wait, so you're doing it now? So how many are you making?

How many ads are we making?

Yeah, at a time based off of that.

Like maybe like 16, 17 a week.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good amount.

It's all automated.

Dude, I saw a recent YouTube video you put out and it was like an AI-generated thumbnail.

Yes, but the video isn't using AI, but I saw the thumbnail. I was like, what the heck is this? This doesn't look like me and my teammates at all.

It's like a crazy version of you. Yeah.

use AI. And what they're doing right now is they just test a lot of different variations because, you know, YouTube allows A/B testing natively. And then once we have a winning variation, either they'll redo it with my real picture, or if it's doing extremely well, they won't mess with it. And they're like, people will see the real you in the video if they watch. And I'm like, okay.

And did you pick a new studio too?

No, same studio.

Oh, but they have a nicer setup now. I was like, that's a nice setup. Oh, that's the big conference room in the back. Isn't it?

I don't know.

I'm gonna have the same setup.

You'll have the same setup. I don't know.

I'm just kidding. I like my setup.

Yeah. I have no idea which one it is or it isn't.

It looks nice though. I like the nice— so Neil has a new background now where there's like a little monitor in the back with NP Digital on it.

Oh no, that was temporary.

Oh, what? Where? Where was that?

One of my buddy's place, 'cause he's just like, hey, do you wanna do it for free here? I got this free space.

And I was like—

Free sounds good. Free sounds good. I had to pay $20 for parking though.

Okay.

But it was still cheaper than paying for a studio.

But where is that place?

It was a 32-minute drive.

Oh no, see, that's too far. That's too far.

It's even further for you because you're more west than I am.

Mine's a 10-minute walk.

Yeah.

Yours is what, a 10-minute drive to get there? 10, 15 minutes?

Yeah, but I went for the savings.

Got it.

This time. But I don't have that anymore in my future videos. Yeah. What's nice though, It wasn't free forever.

Yeah, cool. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing, And at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. So by the way, I'm doing something right now. I was talking to a guy yesterday. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit my entire TAM, my total addressable market, with 400,000 emails per month. They're only going to get 2 emails. It's a 2-email sequence, right? And I was talking to one guy that does this for other companies, right? And basically for one company, he's booking 12 to 15 meetings per day for like this one's for an agency and then for another person, and I think Adam Robinson would be okay with me saying this, for retention, our B2B, he's booking him and they're not sending nearly this amount of volume, but booking him one meeting a day, right? And so I'm like, okay, sure, let's try it. Let's hit 400,000 of my TAM. Let's find everybody in it and let's see how it goes. So we're going to give it a shot.

What do you mean 400 on your TAM?

So 400,000 people in my TAM, because let's assume there's 20,000 people in B2B or whatever, 20,000 companies, but there's still a lot of people that work within these companies. So we'll hit them. The key thing I was like, so what is the key thing here? He's like, well, the key thing is offer, right? And one of the companies, they're just sending AirPods. I'm like, AirPods are so old. Like, that's something you would do like 2, 3 years ago. It's like, he's like, well, AirPods are back. I'm like, are you sure they're back?

Like— It's in the cheaper generation.

Yeah. Or older version. Yeah, you save money, right?

Yeah.

But basically they're doing something to stand out, right? And so to book these 12 to 15 meetings per day. So I'm like, well, the thing that works for Adam Robinson is he kind of has a name around B2B. So they're using his name. I'm like, okay, you can test my name, but just If we overuse my name, it can get associated with spam. So I will report back on how this goes in a couple episodes and then you'll talk about your experiment with how you might, I don't know, I think we had one earlier where you might partner up with someone. I don't know.

Yeah, that's true. But on a random note, going back to the video topic, you know what's interesting that I learned from that new background that I would have never thought? So that new background doesn't look as good as the one that we were doing in studio, in my opinion. The editing is really good quality. And I assumed the background had a little bit of effect, like what people will think and whatnot. And I was going through the comments and stuff like that. And I did tell them I was wrong on the background. The background doesn't make that much of a difference. Editing, I already knew doesn't matter that much. It's just a nice to have. And one of the video views did really well. The other one didn't do as well.

They were both—

arm and a leg was spent time-wise on scripting between me and the other person, you're probably talking about 7, 8 hours just on scripting each video.

Each video?

Each video.

Each video is like what, 15 minutes?

Yeah.

Wow.

So we're spending a lot of time on scripting. And I was telling him, I'm like, the duds are duds not because of the editing, that I already knew. The background, I was like, man, is it going to make an effect on leads and all that kind of stuff? Because people don't think it's as professional. Didn't really make a difference. But the big thing is, is, and we know this more than any, you know, you and I have experienced this so many times. It's what are you talking about? Is it something new that people are interested in or is it just regurgitated information? And if it's new, you're probably going to do well. If it's not new, even if your hook's amazing, we're in a world where there's just too much content. It just doesn't do well in today's world.

Yeah. And what I've learned too is you have to hit them with like some, like a really good nugget in the beginning to keep them going. If you save the nugget for later, It doesn't work. They're just gone. Yeah. Because they can easily just find another video. Yeah. Yeah. So by the way, I'm looking at my YouTube right now. It's, um, I posted something like a couple of weeks ago, but basically I'm just like, the YouTube algorithm just never stops working for you. Right. And then this, look, this video was like a nothing burger for like a year or whatever. Like it just kept— Look at that.

Now it's just shooting and it's an old video.

It's old video.

Yeah. How many days is this? Like 300 and something or 2 something?

362 days.

Wow.

Yeah.

So pretty much a year.

Yeah, pretty much a year. And now it's at— this is a short, by the way, but now it's at 739,000 views. Yeah. So, but it's like just the YouTube algorithm never stops working for you. So you always try to work on your packaging, try to fix the thumbnail, the headline and all that, you know, with whatever time you have.

Yes.

Anyway, that's all I'll say. A jack of all trades, guys, is better than a master of one. See you tomorrow.