GameStop shoots up 91% off a meme, L'Oreal fails at Kickstarter, How VCs use podcasts, and more

By the way, speaking of money and marketing, did you see what happened to the meme stocks again? GameStop and AMC?

I have a good headline for this. GameStop shoots up 91% off a meme. That was my headline here.

Yeah.

Yeah, go, go.

It was ridiculous. So the meme started again. GameStop shot up like crazy, but unlike last time, they started going down much quicker. It was not as long-lived, but both AMC and GameStop did benefit from the whole meme trend all over again.

So editor, if you click on my link, um, so we can show this on YouTube, but the Roaring Kitty— so you've seen this one, right? So basically it's basically a guy sitting and then he switches into gaming and then everything starts shooting up because this Roaring Kitty guy, he hadn't posted anything for years and he's the guy that got the GameStop thing going the first time.

You're telling me that's all he posted?

Uh-huh.

Just a dude sitting on a chair and switches to game mode. And it switches to game mode and GameStop shot up from that one image.

That's what I believe happened. Guys, feel free to fact-check us, but I believe that's what happened. So because look at this one.

No, from my understanding, it was Roaring Kitty that posted something that caused it, but I didn't know it was that image.

27 million views.

Wow.

On this, on this image. Because this, because this guy caused it last time, right? So it's like if he does this, it's like, oh crap, he's back, right? But what else is he talking about? He's talking about games. So Huh.

But unlike last time, the stock didn't keep going for months and months at a time. Instead, it had a pretty—

It's still net up in the last 7 to 14 days. Yes.

Dude, it had some really bad beats in the last few days.

But is it up still?

Uh, if I look at 1 month, uh, it's up by double.

Oh, still a lot.

Still a lot.

Yeah.

Their market cap is $6.8 billion. So call it $3.4 billion that they're up by.

That's still a shitload of money. They're still up because when I— this, keep in mind, GameStop shoots up 91%. If they're up double, that's still more than 91%.

Yeah.

Yeah. So still good.

But if you look at the peak, it went from like $10 to, I think it peaked out somewhere like around $48. No, $60, $64.83. That's much better. It's better to be up 6x than it is to be up—

yeah, I still don't buy it. But like the point here is the guy has Has brand equity. Okay, the second thing is the power of a meme still pretty good.

That's true. That is true power. And this is also the power of social networking. No one knows who Roaring Kitty is. Maybe someone does, but most people don't know who Roaring Kitty is.

Most people don't.

And this is the power of social media.

27 million views is a lot. Yeah.

So it's like Elon Musk boosting up Dogecoin. Remember when he puts out those Dogecoin?

Dogecoin. Yeah.

But either way. The thing would just skyrocket and make a ton of money. And, you know, he wasn't trying to make money off it. He's already rich.

That's what's wrong with crypto. Like this, all this, like all these manias, like it's just, it needs to get cleaned out to make it more legit. Yes.

Because dude, people know a lot of this shit is fake out there and they're just like, oh yeah, let's just ride the wave. Until you start having a lot of those things washed out and then you just have legitimate businesses or coins or tokens or whatever you want to call them or companies, then you're going to start having, you know, people take it more seriously.

Dude, speaking of legitimate companies, you know L'Oréal is a $250 billion company, right? They failed at Kickstarter. Did you see that?

They did a Kickstarter campaign? Yeah.

So basically here, I'm reading this from Sean Franco, who has a company called Ridge. L'Oréal, a $250 billion company, is running a failing Kickstarter. Weird viral marketing thing? Bad scam? What is this? So basically this Kickstarter, they're trying to launch this new product that has like these CES awards and all this, right? at-home hair color device, Colorsonic. Okay, so they're trying to raise $39,000. They've got 18 backers and they only raised $2,300. And this is a $250 billion company.

Wait, so they already have awards for this product?

Mm-hmm.

Well, that's the first—

Or sorry, a CES award.

For that product?

Yeah.

That's the first problem in which Kickstarter is meant for people who want to build stuff that's not out and doesn't have awards and it's just starting out and it's small companies needing money.

That's a good point because look, it says L'Oréal on the bottom left and it shows 2 awards on the bottom right. So that's, that's the mistake. That's a big mistake they made.

Yeah. People would be like, why does L'Oréal need money? It's a $250 billion company. Kickstarter is for people who don't have money, who need it to fund the build, and they'll give things at a discount.

It's like you guys just anti-marketed yourself. So like, that just goes to show, even though it's a $250 billion company, you're going to have B and C players. And sometimes you have to check, just like the Apple ad, like, you know, they got backlash for it, but like, was there someone to trust but verify? It goes all the way back to trust but verify.

Dude, with the L'Oréal one, the biggest issue I bet people are going to face in the comments would be, is this a scam? Because everyone would be like, what does a $250 billion company need? You know, $39,000.

People aren't stupid, right?

So— Well, no. And it also costs them more than $39,000 to do that Kickstarter campaign with their own employee times. If that's actually them doing it, I bet you they spent more than the $39,000.

Oh, for sure. For sure. All right, everyone. Quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6 figures, 7 figures, figures, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. There's this other piece over here on how VCs are— they're using podcasts to lure in founders. And I find this interesting because that's how I got in on a couple of these angel deals like a long time ago, to lure people, like get the founder on and ask right after, off the air. I'm like, hey, by the way, do you have a little allocation? So basically, like, you know, you got Jason Calacanis, you have Ben Horowitz, right? You have Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman.

These people all have podcasts now. I didn't know Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen have a podcast.

Andreessen Horowitz podcast. It's actually pretty good. And then you have Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley, right? BG Squared. And you have the All-In podcast. And I think what they're doing is— one angle is you bring these people on to build a relationship. And then you can figure out how you can get into their deals too. So, because it's relationship-based.

Dude, haven't you had VCs hit you up trying to get their portfolio companies on your podcast?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, literally like 2 weeks ago. It's like this company is doing like $15 to $20 million in ARR. They're going to grow 40% this year. And I'm just like, yeah, well, okay, back up.

What's their pitch? You're like, okay, so you finished interviewing them or did you not even interview them?

No, no, no. This is a straight up text message. Okay.

So VC texts me and she's like, hey Eric, can you—

yeah. Hey Eric, um, you know, I have a portfolio company doing about $15 to $20 million this year. They're going to grow by 40%. Um, I think you'd find the conversation really interesting, blah, blah, blah. And in my mind, I'm like, you know, just no thank you, right? It's, it's— I want to talk to—

Do they actually make a direct ask like, hey, would you want them for your podcast?

Yeah, it's a direct ask. Yeah. But what I'm realizing, by the way, going back to interview podcasts, is I only want to talk to the people I want to talk to. Whenever someone's, you know, recommended themselves to me in the past, it just isn't a fun conversation, right? Um, it's also like when someone interviews you on the podcast and doesn't do any research, you know what I'm saying?

Yes. No, and Eric's talking about a tweet that I put out on interviews are dead. Because I was really irritated. I did an interview for someone on a podcast, their podcast, and they were asking really basic questions that I've answered a lot and so many other people have answered. And the reason I was upset wasn't, you know, it's at them or anything like that.

You know, I felt bad.

Well, I felt bad because they're just wasting time. And I'm not talking about my time. They're wasting their time as well as mine. And they're going to do all this effort to create a podcast, but it's going to get very little views. And the reason being is people want to hear others talk about new stuff. If you're going to do podcasting, it needs to be covering new stuff that others have never talked about. Whether it's you talking or interview, it has to be new stuff. And if it's not new stuff, it just doesn't do well because people are tired of the same old regurgitated information, you know, and seeing and hearing it over and over again.

Yep. You have to do your research. And by the way, it doesn't take that long to do research. You can just listen to a couple of your interviews, one or two, That's research because then you just you just ask follow-up questions that the other interviewers didn't ask. That's how you do research.

Yes, or if you have friends who know the other people, like Eric's interviewed some people, he's like, "Hey, you know so and so. What are some good questions that you would want to know from them that have never been asked?" Yep. And that's a great way to also get insights on new stuff. Just ask people in your network.

Yeah. Geez, could close some deals for you. You know what I'm saying?

It is actually Nick, who is our head salesperson.

I saw that.

I'm like, yeah, probably has a deal.

I saw that. That's awesome.

All right.

So I wanted to take a second to tell you about Leveling Up Founders. This is an event/mastermind for people doing 7, 8, 9 figures. These are founders that are doing that amount, and we've been doing this event for a couple years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people. What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people, and this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber, and we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are, even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that, we're not necessarily going to let them in. We do this event in Beverly Hills and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com/founders. Again, it's levelingup.com/founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host, is going to be there. I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balkhi, he will be there as well. And again, it's It's going to be a great time. levelingup.com/founders to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Side note, did you know that you can manipulate SEO results using LinkedIn posts, LinkedIn Pulse?

No, I did not see that.

So this tweet is from Go Fish Krish. So he works at a— he works at an agency that has fish in it. I think maybe it's his agency. So he says, here's an AI overview result. Just FYI for everyone, it's no longer called SGE. So it used to be called Search Generative Experience. It's now Google did a whole like conference this past Monday. It's now called AI Overview Results, where they give you the AI result, right? So he says, here's an AI overview result where 2 sources are pulled from LinkedIn Pulse. This is another way people can manipulate the search results. Want to be in the top answer? Create a Pulse article because LinkedIn has a lot of strong domain authority.

Yeah. So if anyone doesn't know what AI overviews look like, you know, think of it as just SGEs just reading—

We'll pull it up on the screen.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

What's really cool is Search Engine Land has a really good example of this is how do you clean, what is it? I couldn't see the whole query. They typed it in, but I missed it. It was something like, how do you clean fabric cushions and pillows or something like that? They'll show you a response and then they show you all the links that they're pulling the source from. It was, how do you clean a fabric sofa? All right. And then they'll end up breaking down how do you do it? And then again, right at the bottom of it, they show you all the sources that they're pulling information from. And they're saying that the click-through rates for those sources are through the roof, but they're not actually sharing how high of a click-through rate they actually are. Which I'm curious, I'll end up finding out sooner or later because we track a lot of the sites.

You know what's interesting? So I tested on Perplexity. I was like, what are the best marketing agencies out there? First result, Single Grain. And this is the problem with LLMs, right? They will find one article and they'll cite that article as gospel and they'll just pull the results from that article, right? Because that article is a list of agencies, right?

Yes.

And it listed from that. And earlier today we did it when we did the Agency Owners Association call. One guy that was on the call, his name is Mario. He has like a WordPress dev shop, right? And he's like, he tested all the different like Grok, Perplexity, all these things. Guess who showed up as number 1? Oh, you don't even know this yet. So Syed has a WordPress agency that he partnered up with. And so all— he has strong domain authority, right? So he's like number 1 on all of those. So I see that being a potential problem. Good job, Syed, by the way. But the potential problem here is if it's only citing from one article and it's not kind of combining answers, that could be an issue because that's pretty easy to game.

Yeah, no, it is. And we're seeing similar things. Like we've gotten hit up multiple times with people saying like, oh, found you on ChatGPT. and they recommended your agency. And I love it, don't get me wrong, but what are they actually pulling for? And I don't think you or me are the number one agency.

I agree.

And the reason I say that isn't to throw shade at Eric or myself, is we don't do everything. If someone's looking for an agency to run TV ads, VaynerMedia is going to be a better fit than Eric and I's agency. If someone wants an agency for SEO, Eric and I agency is better than VaynerMedia, right? Because we specialize in that more than them running television ads.

Yeah.

Now, does it mean that we can't run TV ads? No, we can do it. They've done more Super Bowl commercials than we have. We've done more SEO campaigns than they have. And it can go for many different things, whether it's email marketing or conversion rate optimization, or if someone's like, oh, you're the best SEO agency out there, or you're the best pay-per-click agency out there, but you're in the United States and we're in 36 countries. We need you for 36 countries. Well, that's not going to work. Well, our agency is in a lot of countries. We're not in 36. I think we're in 20-something at this point. But the point I'm getting at is depending on what your needs are, there's someone who's going to be the best fit for you. And it's not a simple ChatGPT response.

You know what is the best marketing agency? If it's Marketing School, that for damn sure is correct.

That's it.

So go to marketingschool.io/agency to grow your agency faster. That group is growing really quickly. And by the way, we're increasing the price in increments. And Neil's gonna— after we get 16 more paid signups, Neil's gonna appear for one of the Hangouts that we do, and those Hangouts are really fun. Yeah, and then don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. We have to spend time with each other to record these. We spend resources recording this. Yeah, so don't forget, and we'll catch you tomorrow. Bye. Bye.