Fictional Character Generates Millions in Pipeline

Basically, he created a fictional character. This company has a fictional character that generates millions in pipeline. So here, I'm going to share my screen over here. You happen to be in Europe, so I'm going to— this is about this European startup over here. You see this? Okay, so those of you that can't see the screen, this guy Andrea Bozzani tweets this. This startup got 10 million impressions in 15 days using a parody account. Henrik, this is the guy, doesn't exist. He's a fictional character of Comp.ai. We'll go to Comp.ai in a second. But the brand awareness he drives is very real. He posts hilarious content about rules, regulations, and the EU's obsession with them. Not coincidentally, there's a strong correlation between the content and the product, an AI tool that handles compliance, right? Comp.ai. The founder told me they believe it added millions of dollars to their pipeline. So here's an example of a post, right? So this guy Henrik Johansson, so this is a parody account, attended a European hacker event last night. I asked the founder what was going on or what he's working on, but then I caught myself. I had just violated GDPR by soliciting sensitive information from a third party without proper consent and pre-approval. I promptly departed the event and turned myself into the police. It was a grave mistake and I profusely apologize to the community. This will never happen again. But this post alone, 50,000 views or so, And I can see how this generates pipeline because this is a comp— look, there's a Comp AI logo over here.

Yeah, it's entertaining.

Yeah, and this guy actually has a lot of followers. Like, if I click through to it, um, it's Henrik. I guess this is just a screenshot, right? So here, let's just take a look at this guy's account real quick. All right, there we go.

So dude, as you're looking that up, I was— GoPro actually pulled up.

So, okay. This guy's tweeting, look, so his posts, look, 41K over here. NYC entrepreneurs are shocked at the election results. I'm hearing over $100 million. And he had, he like, so this guy knows what he's doing. And I think he's created multiple types of these accounts, but imagine having someone like this on your team and look, 100,000 impressions over here, 50,000 over here, 154,000 over here. Like, what is that? That for sure is driving pipeline.

Yeah, by the way, did you see with the election results, did you see the Thiel email from back in the day?

I did, I did. Do you want to, do you want to bring it up?

I can't bring it up. I'm on an iPad. Do you want me to read it?

Here, here. Okay. I'll bring it up. Just talk about it and I'll find it. 'Cause, oh yeah.

So Peter Thiel, January 5th, 2020, uh, at 2:44 AM emailed Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg. I don't know who Nick Clegg is. Antonio Lucio. I don't know who he is. People probably high up. Then he CC'd Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Andreessen, right? Go for it.

Read it. The subject is Regarding Millennials. Yeah.

And this email came up because of the election in New York, right? And a lot of people were talking about the email related to Nandani winning. You want to read it?

So here, here, I'll read it. So I think we should just cover the key points here. And I actually, I do have some topics around this election that I think will be relevant from a marketing standpoint. So Peter Thiel says, there are many themes that could be developed more here. Let me take a few quick points for now. This is again, in regards to millennials, right? And Neil and I are actually millennials. So Nick, I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialists, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try and understand why. And from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

Yeah. So when I saw that and how millennials want socialism, the first thing that came to my mind, because all the time—

It's not even millennials, I would say.

Millennials, Gen Z, whatever generation it is, the younger generation, I totally get it. And the reason I say I get it is if you and I want to make decisions for a country or believe the decisions we would want to make would be better for 15, 20, 30 years from now, we have the privilege of withstanding a lot of pain and pressure. But if you're someone who's living month to month or day by day, paycheck to paycheck, you don't care about 10, 15 years from now. You just want your problems solved and you don't care what happens to anyone else.

Yeah.

It's not about left or right or socialism or any of this. You just need help and you want your problems solved. And I saw this firsthand with one of our mutual friends who worked for me. You know him, good guy. He has a high-paying 6-figure job. When I say high-paying, it's $175,000 a year. I won't mention his name.

He does well.

He's in marketing. And you may think that $175 grand is a lot of money, but depending on where you live in California and after taxes, $175 grand does not actually take you that far, even if you're really frugal and you count all your pennies. I'm not trying to say that he spends a lot or anything like that. Just life in certain parts of California, especially if your job is there and you have to live close by, it can be extremely expensive. Or like renting a 1-bedroom is still $5,000, $6,000 a month. Keep in mind, you have to pay taxes out of your money and then use the rest for things like, you know, that, student loans. And this person had a lot of student loans. So that student loans, car payments, you know, just you start adding it up, food, helping out family when they needed to help out family. When you start looking at the numbers like that, they're just like, look, dude. And he's talking to me, I don't feel like I'm rich. He's just like, dude, you're rich. I want change in New York and all the other places because people like me need help. You're fine. You can weather the storm. You think about your kids in the future and what You know, the world is going to look like for your children. You're worried about that. He's like, I don't have kids. I'm worried about just making, you know, rent and payments for next month. He's like, we have different problems. He's like, I'm going to vote for whoever makes my life easy.

Yeah. And by the way, this is why I think Mamdani and Trump won their respective elections because both of them had really good marketing and they had messages that appealed to the audiences, right?

To the masses.

Yeah, to the masses. And so I think Mamdani's thing was like, hey, like, I'm gonna take care of you guys. I hear where you're coming from. Like, this stuff is too expensive right now. And no matter if it's good or bad, no matter how you perceive it, if you like— if you look at the— I think the charts, it showed that, um, I think it was like Gen Z women, like 89% voted for him, right? And a lot of the Gen Z men voted for him. Like, the younger you are, the more you vote, because like, like, if you have no money, you're living paycheck to paycheck, and you can't even afford rent, You have a lot of pressure on you. And when you hear that, hey, this guy's going to make sure that everyone is going to be taken care of, of course you're going to go with that guy. I think I would certainly in my 20s.

Yeah. If I was in their position, I understand it. Eric and I can't talk about it because we're not really in that position.

By the way, we're moderate, right? So we just want to reinforce that. Yes.

But also Eric and I don't understand how people are struggling because we're not struggling. We may have struggled in our past, but we grew up in privileged households. Our parents struggled. They did well because things were more affordable at that time. But Eric and I did not struggle. It's not like we had to worry about college tuition or anything like that. Our parents helped us out. We had a pretty chill life, just being transparent. Our parents weren't rich, but they were well enough and things were affordable enough for them to give us the foundation where we were able to succeed. Right? That's how I at least look at it.

But back in the day too, back in the day, it was a lot like if you had a minimum wage job, you could actually afford a house. Like we're talking the '50s, '60s, '70s. You can't afford shit now, right? It's way harder. It's way harder.

And then on top of that, you and I live in, you know, 1% type of homes in a tough world. So we have nothing to really complain about. But the point that we're trying to get with this is marketing that appeals to the masses really works. It's just like California is trying to pass this wealth tax. And I love the messaging on it. I'm not for it by any any means or against it. It's for people to decide. I live in California, but they want to charge the richest 200 or so people in the state. That's not me, 5%. But I know if they end up getting that away, it'll end up trickling down to me eventually. And I'm young, so hopefully, you know, I make more money over time. And they just want to give that money to the people who are struggling. That's a great marketing message. And the point of this topic for Eric and I is, How can you appeal your marketing message to the majority of your customer base and make it really resonate with them? If you look at the Trump and Mondani messaging, it's very polarizing. Polarizing marketing works if you can target it for the majority of your customer base. That's the key.

Dude, you want to— okay, this is a perfect relation. Okay, watch. So Ramit Sethi, right? I will teach you to be rich. Right? So bestselling author, all he talked about was finance and how he would make you rich, right? I remember reading his book when I was like—

Dan Ferragrand.

Yeah. Dan Ferragrand. So I love his marketing. Let me tell you why I love his marketing, because he's hardcore marketing to the masses. Let me, let me tell you what I mean by this. So he supported, um, he supported Momdani, right? And this is what he just posted. He posted this to Twitter as well. This is his Instagram post. So Ramit, again, finance guy, right? Finance content. You know, he's, he has, uh, education around finance. So After this week's massive political losses, it is time for the Republican Party to do some serious soul searching. Here's what they must do. So just so everyone knows, Ramit's on the left, right? Or at least his content is leaning left. So here's what they need to do to regain voters' trust. Shouldn't be too hard. They need to— he's saying they need to impeach Trump, all these things, right? Disband ICE, blah, blah, blah. Shouldn't be too hard.

I would say he's also more left-left, not just left, but yes.

Yeah. And then, but here's the thing. He knows, I think he knows that This content, he knows it's extremely polarizing. He's going to have a lot of people here. Look, the first thing over here that someone comments is, I wish people that I admired would just stay in the lane of which made— what made them admirable, right? Um, and then this other guy Logan says, do not listen to this guy. He has some good stuff for finance and that's it. And so he knows he's going to get people to fight each other. And guess what? Who's the type of stuff to buy his book or his courses? People who are struggling more. Mm-hmm. They are more likely to buy it. So The people who are doing well already, people that are maybe more right-leaning, he doesn't give a crap about them. And he knows they're going to fight each other. And so he's going to feed the fuel more and more and he's going to get more and more reach. And so he's done really well with his YouTube in the last year and on like his Twitter, all these things by playing the game.

Dude, I'm just reading this. Forced Ron DeSantis to never wear those white boots again.

I didn't even know that was a thing. That's funny.

I didn't either.

I've never seen it, but like, I didn't know that was on his list.

I'm like, what the heck?

Yep. Yep. But look, I think all this, guys, I think everyone that's listening to this right now, everything is, uh, when you can appeal to the masses and you can tell a good story around it, you're going to do well. Um, and when you know that stuff like Momdani was polarizing, Trump was polarizing. I mean, even Ramit's courses, those are polarizing right now. It also depends on the business that you're in. For Neil and I, we probably can't play this game as much as we like.

We don't play this game. But with Ramit, his goal is to teach people how to do better financially, whether it's make more money Or manage your finances better or invest more. So he's appealing to the audience who wants to make more money. So politically, if he starts marketing, and I'm not saying he's doing this intentionally, but politically, if he ends up marketing against the crowd that is wealthy and helping the crowd that is not wealthy, in theory, it should help him.

Yep. All right, so the last thing we'll end on, this will be the last 2 tweets I'm going to pull up here and then we can wrap. By the way, Hold Code Builder says, big fan of your work, guys. What is your take posting daily and making it either 10, 15 minutes or 45 minutes to an hour? How many people have time to listen? One, I have no idea how many people have the time to listen. We're just doing this because we do this anyway, so might as well make it live, right? And we're going to do the— when we record in person, we're probably going to make it live as well because it's nice to engage with community like this. But we record for 80 to 90 minutes and then we chop it up into 20 minutes. That's how we play this game now. And then we also chop up for short form. Now, interestingly enough, when we do the short forms, some of the stuff takes off, which I'm like, dude, you should just do the same thing too. But for whatever reason you don't. But let me—

Because the short-form content does not appeal to my ideal customer. Most of the content on this does not appeal to my ideal customer.

Fair point. Now, 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 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. If we look at what this, this might appeal to your customer, here's what public companies are saying about AI and SEO. This appeals to your customers.

This one does.

Yes. Okay. So this is from Glen Allsopp, who, great, great SEO. He now works with Ahrefs. So their message on AI is clear. I'm going to pull up this graphic in a moment, but traffic from platforms is small, but converts well and they expect it to grow. Their message on SEO, it's complicated. So many know traffic from search is fragmented and declining and they don't like their reliance on Google. On the other hand, they see that traffic levels are much higher than those from other sources. They're diversifying into other avenues such as apps, brands, YouTube, AI SEO, social media. And basically one thing to keep in mind about these quotes is that they are companies often asked about their thoughts directly. They're not just randomly talking about AI traffic upfront. So here we go. So pick one, Neil.

Let's just go top, bottom. Angie, we're kind of rebuilding our content approach to be in play in AI through, though there's correlations with SEO. Dude, this text is so small.

Here, I'll read it. I'll read it. So, What we got— I think you have to click on it to make it bigger, Neil. But here, I'm going to read some from companies that most of us know. Okay, so Etsy, early data suggests traffic from agents have higher intent. We're optimistic, but it's a very small dataset. So that's somewhat positive sentiment. Okay, Booking.com, AI search is transforming how travelers plan trips. We're moving fast on AEO, even if traffic is small. That's neutral. Now I'm going to give you a negative one. So IAC. Okay, IAC, what do they own?

They own a lot of stuff. It used to be, I think Ticketmaster, Expedia used to be owned by them, Ask Jeeves. The list goes on and on, but they tend to keep spinning them off to their own independent companies.

Oh yeah. IAB is the dating one, I think. Um, okay. So yes, IAC—

No, Match.com was from IAC.

Oh, I didn't. Okay. Yeah.

So IAC— I'm pretty sure.

Okay. So IAC says, yes, we're seeing declining traffic from Google, but we've known that these, these disruptions were coming. So this is negative. Okay. Um, let's pick another one. Shopify. Shopify says AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores is up 7x. Orders attributed to AI search are up 11x. That's positive. That's pretty crazy.

LegalZoom, we're seeing traffic growth from AI engines. Those visitors have a higher propensity to pay.

Somewhat positive. Okay, let's pick one more. Oh, Taboola. Taboola is going to be sponsoring this podcast, by the way, Neil. So, um, our exposure to search traffic is in the single digits. Our total traffic grew year on year, fueled by in-app traffic. This one's neutral.

Let's go TripAdvisor because I know they get a lot of organic or they used to. We're seeing both free and paid traffic headwinds. Google's taking more share for themselves. They're seeing more quote unquote headwinds. But keep in mind with paid traffic, most people are not seeing headwinds. Google has generated $115 billion in profit. A lot of that's from paid ads because it's working well for companies. $116.

$116. Yeah. Let's throw another billion in there. But TripAdvisor, by the way, just so everyone knows on this list, TripAdvisor probably had some of the most organic traffic. We're talking like, um, when I looked at them on, on Ahrefs a long time ago, we're talking like 100 million plus, right? So, um, for sure it's probably affected them. And remember, I don't know if you saw that report recently, but it was basically saying how like AI, um, AI search has not only decreased organic clicks, but it's also decreased paid clicks as well. Did you see that report?

I did not see that. We're seeing paid still do extremely well. Where we're seeing an impact Because you have to keep in mind, a lot of companies bid on their own brand name. We're seeing an impact on brand queries, which is roughly 1 out of every 3 Google searches. So AI is pushing out more information about a company's brand so that way you don't even have to go to a website. That's impacting clicks a lot, whether it's organic or paid from what we're seeing.

By the way, I just want to call out, this is great work by Glen. So This is the type of content that does well, especially in B2B. If it's— you're telling an interesting story here. And this to me starts to get me to think about strategy. This to me is interesting data and it tells a story, right? So this is kind of all in one. And so before Neil falls asleep here, Neil's about to yawn. I have one more here. Go for it. So this, remember earlier in this podcast, we talked about how we believe that 90 to 95% of content will be AI generated. This YouTube channel over here called Cosmic Atlas, um, all the videos on this channel are one-prompt videos, meaning that they did one prompt and all these videos were created. Look at this, 879,000 long-form views, 677,000, 441,000, 243,000. Dude, you know what?

Click it, I want to see one of them. Let's see what it looks like.

Act like I'm on YouTube right now. Okay, here, let me go to YouTube.

I thought that was YouTube, dude. I'm half asleep.

I've only been on like a few hours of sleep. I'm gonna click on this right now. Here, you see this?

Yeah.

Okay. So, um, it looks like the views are coming down, by the way. So, so a couple days ago—

It's because a lot of this content is junk. Yeah. Here, let's look at this monster. It has 22,000 views. And you know what, even if you get the views, good luck monetizing this stuff.

Here, let's look at this.

Okay.

Anyway, I think to Neil's point, good luck monetizing this because the type of audience you're going to get is more like, you know, students or like people that are just interested in entertainment.

So we have a mutual friend, Patrick Campbell. Eric knows him better than I do, who has a YouTube channel on stuff like, I don't know, bacon or toxic waste or farts or just random topics like that. Right. I don't know exactly what the channel's on, but it's a lot of random stuff like that. Just general life stuff that's applicable to everyone. Patrick's a good entrepreneur. He sold his last company ProfitWell or Price Intelligence. I don't know which one it was named.

ProfitWell.

ProfitWell to someone, made good money, really smart guy, really amazing with data, especially in B2B SaaS and enterprise. But his YouTube channel gets tons of views. YouTube channel, extremely hard to monetize. That's what happens when it's on a topic like that versus if he just went back to SaaS. And I'm not saying he's doing it in a bad way or anything like that. He probably has a purpose and intention for it and it's thought out, but that kind of stuff is hard to monetize.

He's doing it for fun. So he has some— see, he has some AI stuff that he's working on right now that has a— let's just say it has a very large TAM. Yeah. Yeah.

But not the YouTube stuff.

Why?

No, because it doesn't have a large TAM. Those things are hard to monetize.

That's him proving to himself that he can do it. And like, as a final thing here, I'll just share my screen and then, um, We can work on wrapping here. Check this out. So if we look at his view stats over here, I think in the last 28 days, yeah, 11 million views. This is all from Shorts. Estimated revenue, $100 to $400. Yeah.

And it's, I really think he, I thought he was doing this to try to create a consumer-based company, but I'm wrong.

No, he does have a consumer-based company, but a lot of this stuff is like, you know, like why Kim Jong-un isn't fat in North Korea. How Seth Rogen made millions. Why Kobe Bryant was a Swiftie. Why France's leader is suing Candace Owens.

Yeah, okay.

Cool. Anyway, guys, hope you enjoyed this. Let us know what you think in the comments. Like, do you think we should do more live? Because we're experimenting with this right now. The reason we did this live was we wanted to see what the engagement will look like, and it looked pretty good across the board. But that being said, Neil and I are going to hit stop now, and we're going to make sure this uploads. But hope you guys have a great weekend.