Ep. 3011: AI Won’t Replace Your Website, Cluely’s 700 Clippers, 2% Creatives = 53% Ads

AI replacing your website. You know, we talked a little bit about the cookie company. What is it? Warm Cookie?

Warm House Cookies.

Warm House Cookies. You know, I do think less sales will happen on a website. I just don't see AI fully replacing a website. And people are already telling me, like, I was on a call with a big global company. They're publicly traded, they're in the energy space, and they're just like, We don't know if our website's going to be important anymore. We think people will just deal with agents and agents will take care of everything and there's going to be no need for our website. So we're thinking about spending less and less money on our website. And I was like, well, first off, people go to your website to pay their bills, energy, right? I'm not talking about like petroleum. I'm talking about like energy, like electricity and stuff like that.

Yeah.

There's not tons of options in their space, but they still want the brand and A lot of these energy companies also make money in other avenues than just selling electricity to homes. And I was just like, I think this is a big mistake. Not only do you got to keep up the website for people logging in and paying their bills and making things easier, and it is an acquisition channel for them because they're in some markets where there are choices. And I was just like, and they have multiple product lines. I'm like, some of the products you sell, Are, you know, contracts for like $5, $10, $15 million. Like, yeah. I'm like, you think someone's just going to use an AI agent and just sign a $15 million contract without it going through checks and balances and people reviewing stuff on your website and all this stuff? And they're like, I don't know, maybe in the future. I'm like, it could be. I don't know how many years from now, but it's not going to be happening in the next 5 years, guarantee it. Most people aren't going to sign $15 million B2B contracts. Through AI agents. I don't see that. Do you see that?

No. And Aaron Levy from Box tweeted something interesting today. I think what's going to happen is you're still going to get usage-based pricing, like per seat, right?

Yes.

But the agents, the AI agents that are doing the work, they're going to get— they're going to be charged on like a usage basis because you're going to have so many agents on the web, right? But to your point, I don't think this is going to happen for like 5 years or so. So I think websites should still be prioritized. I think over time they'll become more and more deprioritized because I saw this tweet from Elon the other day. I think Greg Eisenberg tweeted something like, oh, which browser is the cool one? Right? And then Elon responded like, what's a browser? So I do think long term, like he's usually right about trends, right? Let's just call it what it is. But I think there's still— websites are like a cigar butt type of thing too. I think don't throw it away right now. It's too early.

I don't look at them as like a cigar butt. I look at them as more like oil. There's alternative energy sources, but you still need oil. Like, people don't talk about, you know, when you build like a lot of these like windmills in these areas where they're trying to do clean energy, you know how much cement they're using and how much oil is needed to make those cement trucks or to make that cement and those trucks that are there to, with the cranes to pull it that are using diesel fuel to get that, you know, big pole up in the air. Like, you still need it. Maybe you don't need it as much, but I don't see it going to zero.

We need all energy. Right now. And I think with websites, you're still, I think you're always going to need to have something to show off your business online, whether it's a website or something else. And so, yeah, that, that, that, that's my take on it.

So, and yeah, whether it's your website, but at the same time, I think businesses are not investing enough onto their presence on like social media because they're not seeing as much direct ROI from the organic stuff when that is a version of your website, just like with Warm House Cookies and their Instagram profile. And you can also run transactions on a lot of these platforms. So you need to make sure that you're taking what you're doing with your website, but porting that over to all the channels that you're on.

Dude, speaking of organic social, I was looking at the Clue.ly founder's post this morning on Twitter. So he actually shared their strategy. So what they do is Clue.ly, they hire— they hired 700 clippers. So I want us to kind of give our take on whether we think this is smart or dumb, but let me just give the The strategy here, right? So clearly, just so you guys know, it's cheat on everything. Like you have this interface. Like if I'm talking to Neil on a Zoom call right now, I can see, you know, Neil is from this county over here. Here's what companies he worked at and all that type of stuff, right? Like a heads up display. So what they do, number one, is they find clippers. As always, the answer is to scroll more. So they scroll on Instagram, TikTok. Every single time you find a clip of anything, DM the account. What he DMs the account is paid clipping opportunity. Okay. Paid clipping opportunity gets responded to 9 out of 10 times. So 90% response rate. And so he says here, the people running these accounts are hungry Slovakian teenagers. Okay. Number 2, pay per view, not video. We pay clippers $0 per video. We only pay per— we pay bonuses, right? So maybe let's call every like a dollar for every 1,000 views or so. This makes sure we lose nothing from bad clippers and only pay what we want. Number 3, when you find someone good, pay them more. Power law exists in everything, including clippers. 1% of your clippers will generate 99% of the views. Make sure the top 1% are rewarded well and stick with you. Number 4, and then the number 5 is last one. Make sure you have enough content to clip. I go on at least 2 podcasts weekly. Everyone at Clue.ly creates content. Our clippers clip everything. The biggest reason not to have 400 clippers is because you don't have 400 clips a day to post. Make more content. Number 5, not sure about this one. Tracking ROI. Don't do it. Clipping is cheap and its value isn't in direct product ROI. It's in squeezing all the virality out of potentially viral moments. Everyone has made a single post that flopped, posting 699 more times will make sure you get the virality it deserves. So what do we think about this?

It reminds me of the Andrew Tate model.

It is the Andrew Tate model. Yeah. Yeah. So what's interesting is—

But his was better in which he just pays per sale.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I know he probably had more clippers than 700, but the question is like, is this smart or dumb? I think if you're in consumer, I think this might work. This is interesting because I asked the— there's a MrBeast guy that we were talking to, the guy used to work for MrBeast, and I showed him this post. post, right? I was like, this morning, I was like, what do you think about this? He's like, one, he's like, I hate the Clue.ly founder. I was like, yeah, you know, he can be a little polarizing. That's fine. You can have your opinion. Two, he's like, I think this is stupid and won't work for a long time. I actually sent him a reply saying, I'm like, hmm, like, why don't you think this will work? Because it's clearly worked for Tate. I think MrBeast has done this as well. And then now you have a SaaS, a consumer SaaS company doing it. And so I think it'll work for them. I just, You know, I think it's smart. I think it clearly works right now, so we'll see where it goes.

I think it can, it won't be as effective for B2B, but for B2C it's effective. I think this works extremely well for personal brands who create content. So if you want to become famous and you create a lot of content like Alex Hormozi and the content's good and already does well, you can pay a crap ton of people to start clipping and you can go viral and you can probably like 10x your views and get your brand way more out there.

I think, look, The Andrew Tate model is you're just very controversial. Okay. Whatever you say is like, it's going to get views, right? This guy tries to play a little controversial too. I think with Alex Hormozi, he's very well-spoken and he does— it takes a lot of work to actually simplify a topic and most people don't see that, but that's why his stuff does really well too. It's like he simplified these topics and he spent a lot of time and effort on them. So yeah.

Yeah. And it's, I think it's worked out really well for all of us. And I think with Clue.ly, one of the biggest reasons why the clips work is because they are controversial, like you said, and they have been that way because it's, you know, if you look at their business from day one, it's not like, here's our software and it can help you with X, Y, and Z. It's cheat on everything. They're taking a controversial take and because they know cheating is bad, but they're just like, people still like cheating. It makes life easier. So we're going to help you cheat everywhere.

Dude, did you see that 2% of creatives drive 50% of volume on Meta?

I did not see that stat, but I believe it. I assumed it would be like 1% drives the majority. I would assume it's more than 50%.

So this Meta post over here says matching creative volume to audience complexity helps you reach more people. Just 2% of creatives in gaming categories account for 53% of total ad spend. So this is known as the Pareto principle. So like 20% can yield 80% results. And then it says advertisers in non-gaming categories are increasing creative output by 18% year over year, with the top 2% of creatives accounting for slightly lower share of spend, 48%. So it doesn't matter if you're gaming or Whatever, that's what it is. See, I assume—

yes, I assumed it was like 1 or 2% on Meta, more so 1%, makes up like 70, 80% of the ad spend because there's so many creatives and people running account, uh, ads. It's just most of them just suck and don't work.

Yeah, and I think most people don't run enough creatives. I think the cool thing about organic is like you just keep pushing it until stuff works and then you make it a creative, right? 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, K-A-R-R-O-T.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. I want to show you how marketing yields a 98% profit margin on a commodity. So have you seen this before? This is like one of these like water sprays. It's called Aveen. Have you seen this?

What do you mean water spray?

Literally, it's a can of water where you can spray water.

Oh, I don't get the purpose.

So, okay, um, here's what it says.

Can't I just turn on the faucet?

This guy, this guy, Levels, yes, you can. So, so Levels tweeted this. He's like, I need to learn how women marketing works. They are able to sell 300 milliliters of literally water in a pressurized spray Wow. Cost of water, cost of water is $0.005, and with packaging is $0.30. 98% profit margin. It's exceptional.

Good for them.

When you look at the bottle, it's like written in French and all that. It's, it's, uh, it seems really like, I don't know, high-end, right? When you look at it.

Like water from the Swiss Alps or something like that.

Or like, you know, when you buy like an Acqua Panna or like a Fiji, it's like, oh, it's from Fiji, right? Yeah, I should pay more for that. So that's, I mean, that's the power of marketing. But like, he's asking a question. I don't quite know how this works either. But did you know that 80% of spend, consumer spend comes from women?

In general? Yeah.

Look it up.

For women-related stuff like them buying for themselves or them buying for the household?

I heard, I heard it's just in general, like everything all in.

I know the majority of the people who make purchasing decisions in the household are women.

Yeah.

And they tend to buy for the house.

I'm sure that factors into it too.

Yeah. But what I'm getting at is, is that 80% that they're spending on themselves, because I'm assuming that's too high, it's women are spending 80%. You're saying, I'm assuming it's women are spending 80%, but that's for household and themselves and everyone else in the family.

All in. They basically make the call. So I mean, the interesting thing about Level saying this is like, I need to learn how women marketing works because I guess that product is for women. So Yes.

For consumer, I agree. 80+% of— I don't know if it's exactly 80%, but I'll go with it.

Yep.

Cool.

You pick the next one. We have like, we can do like 1 or 2 more.

Google Shopping ads. Have you seen the click surge 18%? Tanuti actually had an interesting graph on this. And they're surging while Amazon and Temu pull back.

Dude, hold on. I'm sorry. You finish and then I have the consumer data here.

Yeah. So, you know, Google has been doing exceptionally well and they've been picking up a lot of ad revenue where there's been pullback in places like Temu. But some of that's impacted by things like tariffs and stuff like that that Temu can't control. But Google Shopping ads are surging and doing extremely well for marketers right now.

Google's a great— look, I don't know what your holdings are, but Google is in there for me. So I think it's a great company. You look at all the things, right? Like Waymo, Android, you know, they still have the main browser, just all these things, quantum computing, all these things. Right. And the search, like people like to say, oh, it's dead. It's not quite dead yet.

So. No. And in theory, from what I've seen on television and what I've read, Google's ahead on quantum computing.

Yeah, quantum computing. And you can say they're right up there with self-driving right now too. So they've got a great business and then they're up there with the models that they have too. Gemini, pretty good. V03 is great too. I don't know how much you guys have used V03, but it's pretty great.

I have. I've used it a lot. Even me personally, I've used it.

You make it for your kids?

Sometimes to tell stories and stuff like that, but like I'll talk about my kids about like someone taking a stroll down Rodeo Drive and actually have it create the video and stuff, but it doesn't really look like Rodeo Drive. It's trying to make it look like Beverly Hills, but it's off, but it's good for a free tool.

Imagine if you wanted to teach your kids a lesson and then you hire like a kid that's really good with VO3 from like high school or college, and then they basically storyboard everything out for you on basically like, here's why you shouldn't steal or whatever, or here's why you shouldn't walk into dangerous areas. And then it tells a story and it like, I watched one video where it's about genetic engineering and it was all VO3. I don't know if I linked it to you, but that guy spent $500 on the video, spent like 16 hours on it. And it was like a 15-minute video or 30 minutes. And it was like really well done. It was like watching a movie.

Huh. I thought it was free. It costs money?

No, dude. I pay like $100. Right now it's a discount. It's $129, I think. But when the discount's over, it's $249 a month.

I've used it. I thought it was free.

No. Well, you're probably using where it gives you like a couple, but I pay for Google like Ultra or whatever.

So yeah.

Yeah. But I should probably cancel it.

And I don't know if it makes a difference that we have Google Corporate.

No, you'd have to just add on. It doesn't make a difference. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. So, okay. I want to go back to Despendero.

But yeah, that makes sense because my usual video clips are really short. Yeah. I'm not making anything long.

Well, no, I think each one caps you out at 30 seconds or something like that. And then you have to figure out how to stitch them together. And then the problem is also the character consistency. Gen Z is like they keep making new characters every time.

Ah.

So, but like this video that I saw, they seem to keep the characters consistent. I don't know how they did it, but okay. So the question I asked ChatGPT, I was like, do women handle 80% of consumer spend? So the answer is yes. And guys, ChatGPT isn't gospel, but let's just go with this for now, right? Yes, it's commonly cited that women drive around 70 to 80% of consumer purchasing decisions in the US and other, many other developed markets. Here's the breakdown. Purchase influence. While women may not make every transaction themselves, they are the primary decision makers or influence influencers for the majority of household purchases, which you were saying, right? Including groceries, healthcare, education, home goods, and even cars and financial services. And that sounds like Michelle mostly handles that.

Do you know how I know this?

How? Because you look at your bill?

No, no, no. A lot of conversations and working with Procter Gamble and Unilever, household goods. And I, you know, I've been to their offices all around the world, like Procter Gamble Brazil, Unilever UK. Like I've literally been to so many of their offices, given speeches, worked with them on projects. And they all tell you the same thing. Doesn't matter what country you're in.

Yeah. And look, there's sources here would be like BCG, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey sort of cited in here, HBS— sorry, not HBS, Harvard Business Review, Forbes. But I think it's interesting. So it's, it's, you know, you have to figure out how you can make your marketing favorable in the eyes of women, right? Because they call 70%, 80% of the shots.

Assuming your product is for household goods.

Yeah.

If you're selling like trousers for men, I don't know if you need to go that far.

Yeah. Trousers. Who calls them trousers? You call them trousers? Uh, just trousers. Dude, we're getting old, man.

Okay.

This will be the last thing here. So Dharmesh posted this on LinkedIn. This is interesting because we've heard this, right? A jack of all trades is a master of none. You've heard that, right? But the full version, we don't— do you know what the full version of that is?

No.

Okay. The full version is a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one. Okay, so which turns the meaning around actually, I didn't know that. So now it's basically saying that being good at many things, like being a generalist, is often better than being great at one thing, i.e., a specialist, right? So I think this distinction is even more relevant now because the age of generative AI is the age of generalists.

Yes.

So, okay, people might look at you as a marketer, look at me as a marketer, but if you look at us over the years, like I've known you for 14 years, 15 years maybe, you've evolved a lot over the years, you've picked up a lot. Like, did you know about M&A in the beginning? Not a lot, no. Did you know a lot about like organic social? No, you didn't. Did you have a family? No. Like, did you know about marriage? No. Like, you learn all these things over time and you become masters in these other areas too, or jack of all trades, I would say.

That's true. And if you want to just focus on marketing, you and I are both pigeonholed by a lot of people as SEOs. And we both know how to run our own paid ad campaigns, like actually logging into Meta and running them. It's funny because when I get on the calls, I'll tell people how they're doing it wrong and—

And they'll look at you like an idiot, right?

They'll look at me as they're like—

What do you know? Yeah, exactly.

And then when I tell them what they're doing wrong, they're like, oh no, it doesn't work. And then I'm like, oh, try this. And they're just like, oh, okay. Or I'll be like, oh, you're not running high ROAS, try high ROAS and you'll get a higher ROI depending on the campaign type. And they're just like, oh yeah, no, it doesn't work. And then you get them to like, oh, it did convert better. And what I found over time is people still pigeonhole us, but you and I have learned everything from running our own paid ads To modifying our own website, to writing copy, to doing our own organic social, to scripting, to video editing. We've tried it all.

I find it's good to be pigeonholed because it's easy to focus. Just like when you think about Kleenex, you think about tissue, right? Or when you think about dude wipes, you think about wiping, you know, your butt, right? So like, it's, it's good that that's happening, but don't let that stop you from continuing to learn, which is what we've done over time, right? Like, oh, did we just become good at sales all of a sudden? No. Like we learned how to talk to customers. We become good at customer development. Yeah. Did we learn how to work on product? Like, those are all things you learn over time. And by talking to, like, you talk to people a lot. I like to read a lot. I like to do like these little networking things. It just, you figure out what works for you. Like, did we know how to do events before? Well, actually you've done events before. Yeah. But like, we learned that over time is my point.

But same with the talking to people and doing sales. When you do sales and you learn what resonates, this also helps guide you with your marketing campaigns because you know what works. When you're testing different marketing campaigns, you know what resonates, what messaging, what value proposition, All that kind of stuff and you're A/B testing, you know what's more likely to work on a sales pitch based on the data that you're seeing from advertising. It all, a lot of it ties in with each other.

Yep.

And you got to continually, you know, sharpen your knowledge and your skill sets.

And this will be the final thing I'll say, but if you think about any of the founder friends that we know, are they a master of one? I don't think I know one.

I think they're more generalists.

Yeah, they're generalists.

They may have, they more, they may have specialty and they typically all have a specialty in one area over another.

Mm-hmm.

But they, if you want to classify They're more generalists than anything else.

They're T-shaped, right? They might be deep in one area, but they're pretty broad. And it's also because they like to learn. Yeah. And they learn in different ways. So anyway, that's what we'll say. A jack of all trades, guys, is better than a master of one. See you tomorrow.