GEO, SEO, AI SEO, AEO… Which One Will Win?

GEO, SEO, AI SEO, AEO, Search Everywhere Optimization.

Which one will win?

Let's talk about that.

I think I already know the answer.

What's the answer?

What do you think the answer is?

Well, here's— this is interesting because I just spoke at an SEO conference this week. You spoke at a conference this week, but it wasn't an SEO conference, right?

I spoke at 2 this week. One was South by Southwest.

Which is not?

And not an SEO conference. One was High Levels event.

In Dallas, which is also not a SEO conference. So let me tell you this. So Patrick Stocks, who works for Ahrefs, he was speaking at the conference and this was right before my talk. So I was watching his. And so I spoke at the Ahrefs conference, shout out to Tim Soulo and the team. And he actually ran a poll to see which one would win out. And interestingly enough, search everywhere optimization won out.

Yeah.

And so like, I'm like, Like, I'm like, somehow like yours won out, but the credit wasn't given to you, but like it won out. Like I just think it's funny.

And they hate me the most too.

Yes, they hate you the most.

So it's shockingly that they picked it. And I didn't come up with that. I don't know who did come up with that. I know Nikki on my team has been using it a lot. I don't know who came up with search everywhere optimization. It's not me. I don't know if it's my team or not, but I know it's definitely not me.

I got it from you and I just started adopting it.

But I think I've been pushing it more than anyone else. I don't actually think search everywhere optimization is going to win.

We're talking about vernacular here, guys. So which one do you think is going to win, GEO or AEO? It's one of those.

Nope.

What do you think it is?

Doesn't matter. What will win is whatever the client tells me on the phone. And that is what I'm going to talk about. If the client wants to use the word GEO, I will say GEO. If a potential client wants to say AEO, I will say AEO. If they want to use search everywhere optimization, I will use that. And this is the biggest problem with this debate. And the reason I had this topic in here, I see it so much on LinkedIn. People are like, guys, stop calling it all this stuff. This is just SEO. Or guys, it's AEO. You're answering questions, right? Or answer engine optimization. And I'm like, dude, these people have it all wrong. They're picking and choosing the vernacular they want based on what they like or what they feel is right. You and I know this very well. The reality in businesses is the client is always right. If a client wants to call something specific or potential clients want to and you don't optimize for that, well, you're not going to get their business.

Yeah. So here's what I'll say. So actually today, this morning, I was actually on a Carrot enterprise call along with my CTO. So I'll appear on these calls sometimes just to see how these are going, right? And what had happened was that he was speaking in terms that wasn't considering their goals, right? And so when you're talking to a customer, you have to think about what they care about ultimately. It's not what you care about, right? And we've talked about this vernacular actually a couple weeks ago. And so if you can show that you can adapt and they feel like you understand them, ultimately that's what they care about ultimately. But if you try to push back on it and you try to correct them, guess what? Is that going to increase or decrease your chances of landing that deal?

I think it is going to— if you push back, I think it's going to decrease it overall. I think some people will be open to the open to your opinion being like, no, this is why it's called this and here's a reason and I'm going to educate you. But if everyone's searching for something or talking about something in a specific way and you can't adapt to them, they're going to go look for companies that are adapting to them and they'll show up and they're the ones that they're going to talk to. Because if you're calling it, this is a hypothetical here, Eric's open to whatever suggestion, but if Eric's calling it GEO and a client's calling it AI SEO and they're looking for AI SEO shops, but Eric says, and again, this is a hypothetical, This isn't really how he believes. But if Eric's like, no, it's only going to be called GEO. This is the right vernacular. This is all I'm going to talk about. Well, the client's not going to look for him because they don't call it GEO. So they don't know what he's talking about.

Yeah. It's cognitive dissonance and they're looking for something. For example, if I tear my ACL, probably going to go to an ACL surgeon, right? And if you tell me, oh no, it's actually called TCL now. I'm like, well, I'm confused now. So I'm going to go find an ACL surgeon. Right. So, so, so That's what it is, guys. I mean, it's, it's the deep— the debate doesn't really matter. But look, if I had to pick one just for the fun of it, if you had to pick one just for the fun of it, for the debate, what would you pick?

I honestly would pick search everywhere optimization, not because I don't think there's something called AI SEO or GEO. I look at the overall category is there's search on multiple platforms. A lot of platforms are adapting to AI. So Meta of course has AI whenever you search on Instagram. Google has AI overviews even with their traditional Search results. So is that still called SEO? Is it still called SEO to optimize on Instagram? It's easier to just go after search everywhere optimization because there's so many platforms that people optimize for now.

Yeah. So the reason why I think the new phrase is search everywhere optimization, it's still SEO. The acronym's still SEO. It's because even at this, this SEO conference, the Ahrefs conference, everyone was talking about searches everywhere now. Like every other person's talk was searches everywhere, meaning that If you do GEO or you do answer engine optimization, you're just talking about the LLMs. But if you're talking about search everywhere, you're talking about YouTube, you're talking about Reddit, you're talking about all these other things, right? And that's genuinely where it's going. Like when you and I first started, like when I first met you, all you were doing was blogging. All I was doing back then was blogging. But it's so, we literally have a podcast now. You even did a podcast for a little bit. We have our YouTube channels. We, as much as we hate doing Shorts, we do Shorts as well, right?

Yeah.

It forces you to adapt. And I think that's the common theme that we saw at this event.

Yeah. But speaking of podcasts, you've done your own podcast, Leveling Up, for a long time, longer than we've done Marketing School. I failed at doing my own podcast. I think I lasted 3 or 4 episodes max.

I don't, I— most people give up under 5 episodes. You know that? You didn't even make it to the average.

Yeah, I didn't, I didn't make it to the average and I don't, I'm pretty sure we released some of the episodes. I don't know where they are, but I'm assuming my team did. I could be wrong though. It was just, I couldn't do it, dude. It was just too much work.

Yeah. It's a lot more work on the, the person asking the questions, the interviewer versus the interviewee, because the interviewee, you just pop up and this is a little easier for us because we just have a conversation. We just pick a few topics. We just talk.

But I also think it's easier for me than you.

For what?

This podcast.

This one?

Yes.

Oh, because why? Why?

Uh, a few reasons. One, We do it in my, uh, the building that I live in versus Eric. So that makes it more convenient. I still have a hard time showing up on time. And I do apologize to Eric and Noah for that one. I'm working on improving it. Lunch is on me today.

No, I'm paying for lunch. No, no, no, no, no. I had to pay for lunch.

Uh, Eric beat me to it last week. Was it last week?

Yeah. No, it was a couple weeks ago. You know, that's a very Asian thing. Only Asian people fight for the bill like that.

Yeah. And I sat down, Eric sat closest to the waiter, and then he's like, here you go. And I was like, This guy. And then the second thing that does make it easier for me, Eric puts in way more work than I do from the podcast. And it isn't just recent, it's been like this from day one. You used to fly out to Vegas. Remember when we first started the podcast?

That was the very beginning. That was the very beginning. That was the very beginning, yeah.

You set up the mics, you figured out how to edit, all the software.

Yep.

Eric also had experience because he was doing it for Leveling Up, but even now he puts in way more time into that idea. So Everyone, you know, if you, if you love Marketing School, give Eric a round of applause because he does put in the effort.

Thank you. Thank you. No one's giving me applause.

Thank you. I probably put in 5 minutes of effort with topics.

Well, here's the thing. So you are right. Like back in the day when we first started this, because this, remember guys, just to shed some light here, we started this podcast because Neil and I were walking to Creation Juice on 3rd Street in Hollywood, West Hollywood. And Neil's like, yeah, let's start a podcast. Let's call it Business School, B-School. I was like, well, there's already a course on that. So we started the podcast, but then I had all the know-how. We didn't have as many resources we have today. And so it was easier for me to get going. That part's done right now. All these ideas. So Neil and I, we have an idea sheet. A lot of my stuff comes from X. It's just stuff that I read in passing. So it's honestly not additional work for me. I just dump it in there.

Got it.

Yeah. So I don't go through like, oh man, I really need to think about the ideas. I just dump in whatever I think is interesting. That's all. But like also I think it's different for you too, because the way you do the podcast from the interviews that you were doing, you did like 4 where you interviewed CMOs, correct?

Max 4, but yes.

Yeah. I just don't think you're wired that way. I think the way you learn is different. The way you learn is by calling people quickly. And then like, but the way I learn is like having conversations and like I'll research them and all that.

Right.

It's just different styles of learning. Yeah.

The hard part about me too, that I found, Eric knows this really well about me. It's hard to change my mind unless someone has stats and data. And I'm really stuck in my ways until like, if it's a gut feeling, I'm stuck in my ways. But if anyone can show me how I'm wrong with data, I will switch instantly.

Yep.

I'm a really big data guy. I'm less of a gut. Of course, when I start things out, I usually go with gut feeling because I've just been doing this for such a long time. But I look at podcasting, it doesn't generate a lot of revenue. I enjoy doing this. So for me, it's fun. Eric also enjoys doing this. And then after we record our podcast, we tend to go to lunch every single week as well, which is more fun. And we discuss marketing or work or whatever it may be. So it's pure enjoyment. And it actually, for me, is like an escape out of my normal day or work.

Yep.

But when I look at the data on how we generate revenue, at least from a marketing standpoint, I tend to focus all my energy on that and 110% on it because That's what works. And it's hard for me mentally to shift my efforts on anything that the data can't show me is driving a lot of revenue.

And by the way, I think there's trade-offs to everything, right? There's not— that's not like a good or bad thing. I think what we're saying, we're just experience sharing here. I will say that this podcast, in addition to being able to hang out with Noah, Neil, and all that and eat really good food after, this does in fact sharpen me. I don't know if it sharpens you, but it sharpens me because like it forces me to think about these things. And sometimes you might— we might debate it and then sometimes I might think about it a different way, right? And I remember, Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley for their podcast. Brad was actually saying it this week and he was just saying like, this podcast, the last 2 years we've been doing it has forced me to sharpen how I think about things. And that to me is a big benefit because whatever you and I say to our team, things actually get done. And so like naturally it just starts to sit in my head rent-free and then—

Yeah.

We hang out with each other and like you are the 5 people you hang out with most. So I'm— we're already 20% of each other. So like naturally some of this stuff is going to go over into our organization.

Yes.

Yeah. And hopefully make us more money too.

No, dude, I totally agree.

By the way, you have this one over here on the right way to speak at conferences. You, so you just spoke in Sydney this, this week and in Dallas. Dallas. Okay. I spoke in, I drove down to San Diego to support Tim Soulo's event. So let's talk about this, the right way to speak at conferences.

When I look at most people who speak at conferences, they just speak and they walk away. And when they speak, they focus on their message that they want to get across. The first thing you need to think about is when you're speaking is yes, you may have a message, but how can your message help the people in the audience resonate with them? And more importantly, how can they take action on them or change the way they're doing marketing or business or whatever you're speaking on, right? Coaching or health, it doesn't matter. It needs to impact them in some way. Not that, oh, this was just an amazing speech, I can relate to it, but like, this is what I'm going to do now. Like you want to empower them where they actually want to make change. That's the first thing. The second thing is people just walk away and they don't think about how the attendees, whether it's a free event or paid event, they may have spent money, but they're spending their time and they could be doing something else, but they chose to watch you speak. As a speaker, you should have appreciation of that and you should go above and beyond to help them out when they come up to you after and they want their questions answered. So, like if someone emails me after, I will try, assuming I actually see it. If I see it, I will respond and I will answer their questions. Sometimes I do miss it because I don't know where they're emailing or it goes into spam, or maybe I just miss it because I get so many emails. But I do try to genuinely respond to everyone and I do try to answer people's questions right then and there. So I remember one of the events I was at, I'm not going to name names, but one of the events I was at, they tried to escort me and they said, oh, we'll try to push, get you to your room. And people started asking me questions and they're like, Neil has to go. He only has a few quick seconds and he has to go. And I'm like, no, it's okay. I'll answer their questions. Don't get me wrong. I could have just been in my room, watched some Netflix, or more likely I would've done work than watching Netflix.

No, more likely you would've done both at the same time.

That's true. Yeah, 'cause I always have, I usually have CNBC on the background while I'm working. The problem with Netflix is, is I have to watch a show like 10 times.

Love Is Blind. Great show.

Is it good?

Great show.

See, those kind of shows you have to actually pay attention to. So it's going to be hard for me to watch that.

Oh, we can debate that at lunch.

Okay. So, or you probably don't need to pay attention to it, but if you want to really get all the drama that's happening, you have to pay attention. So it's just like, I believe that you should go to everyone or you should be available for majority of the people. It's hard with everyone depending on the event size and answer their questions. It's the right thing to do. You know, I don't care who you are. You could be worth billions of dollars. If someone's taking their time to listen to you, you should try to help them out.

Yeah. So here's the funny thing. So for the Ahrefs event, because it's San Diego, right? And it was raining on Tuesday. I was like, okay, I'm going to speak and then I'm going to peel out and go, right? But I was like, no, but I still left 90 minutes afterwards just to stop and speak to people, right? Because that's actually where the alpha is, the people that you talk to afterwards, you're actually building a relationship and you never know where these people are going to end up later, right? Some of these people that came out, it's like, Oh, I was watching your stuff, our stuff in the very beginning since they're like 19 years old or whatever. And like, look at where they are in their career, right? And so I think for me, like one of the biggest dopamine hits I get from it is seeing people grow and I enjoy helping people. I think you enjoy helping people too. And so the right way isn't to just, you know, appear and then disappear and act like you have— you're too important for the crowd because you're there to deliver value, right? And that's part of the value delivering piece. So this is funny because we have a mutual friend that likes to go into events and then he speaks and then he just leaves immediately. And we had someone else speak about We have a mutual friend? Yeah, I'll tell you who it is at lunch. Where do they live? They live in Beverly Hills.

In Beverly Hills?

Yeah, don't worry, I'll tell you after.

I can't think of who they are.

Don't worry, I'll tell you after.

I know him though.

Oh, you know him very well.

Yeah. Really?

Thank you.

Yeah, tell me after.

I'll tell you after, yeah.

I'm like blanking on a name. I know most entrepreneurs who live here in Beverly Hills.

Don't worry, I'll tell you after.

Are they in marketing and SEO?

Yeah.

Okay, I know who you're talking about. There's not a ton of us here in Beverly Hills, but we, I don't, I don't, I don't know if they actually live in proper Beverly Hills. I could be wrong.

I'll tell you after. But anyway, my point is it's like we've been speaking for quite a while. You've traveled, we said we're going to speak less this year. You just ramped it back up again.

This economy's bad. I don't have a choice.

Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, that's that. You highlighted another one here.

I think you— Wait, wait, before we switch topics, you were at an SEO event. Who are the rock stars who are well known in SEO these days? Because I haven't been to SEO event in, I can't even remember the last time I went to one.

I think, so in my mind, I think Kevin Indig is still great. So Kevin Indig, remember he worked at Shopify for a little bit. I think to me he's like an SEO influencer.

Tim is?

Tim Soulo, definitely. And then I'm trying to think who else stands out. Aleyda Solis stands out to me. Eli Schwartz stands out to me, even though he doesn't speak at a lot of these things. I think that guy that runs Graphite, that SEO agency, He kind of stands out to me too. I think his name's Ethan. I like the data that he shares.

Cool. I should check him out. I haven't seen his stuff.

Yeah.

Sam, who creates the Ahrefs videos, he's probably well known.

So I hung out with him. You want to know what's funny? So he's around our age, right? And he does the YouTube channel. I don't know if I should be saying this. We were just talking about how much we hate making YouTube videos.

We all do, dude. But we have to do it. It's like part of like life.

Yeah, it's part of search everywhere. Like if you want to get found, like this is what you got to do now.

Yeah. So yeah. And YouTube drives, I think Tim once said, uh, 10+ percent of their revenue or somewhere around there.

YouTube's huge for them. They, they crush it with YouTube. Yeah. Like they, this is the difference between our YouTube channels versus theirs, right? I think yours is pretty good. I think mine's is like poo poo right now, but I look at theirs. They spend a lot of time on the, the idea, the ideation, which is what MrBeast does. And then on the packaging, I think most people in the SEO world, they spend too much. Oh yeah, I'm going to make a YouTube strategy for you. Let's focus on the tagging. Let's do keyword research. You're just thinking about like an SEO. You got to think about it natively.

So we spend a lot of time thinking about the packaging, the editing, all that. And we have for a while. We's not you, right? The what?

We's not you, right?

I'm saying we as in NP Digital for my own channel.

Oh, got it. Yeah. So for your channel, but okay, go on.

We spend a ton of time thinking about ideation, packaging, what will resonate. The problem is, and this is why I would say Ahrefs gets more success from their channel than I do from mine, It's, they focus on selling software from their channel. You agree with this, right? But if you look at it, they're not blatantly just shilling their software, even though it's good software. They're more so trying to educate first.

Mm-hmm.

Because of their price point, YouTube works really well for someone like them. Because we're focusing on enterprise and ideally trying to get multimillion-dollar contracts, YouTube is great for being top of mind, but it is not as big of a revenue driver as some, someone may think. So if you look at our channel, we track what topics from blogs, from content that actually create leads and eventually revenue. We also look at the type of stuff that our enterprise clients are paying us for and their big pain points. We try to create content around that. A lot of that stuff doesn't generate the most amount of views. If I talk about what is going to happen in SEO in 2026, that'll get 5, 10 times more views than some of my pieces of content that are really specific on, let's say, like ChatGPT. ChatGPT marketing has been beaten to death. I'm assuming you agree with this statement, right?

Mm-hmm.

It doesn't generate as many views, but we'll get questions from our potential customers or our enterprise customers, the ones we work with, they're asking us questions on like, how is ChatGPT going to be sustainable and what are they going to do?

Right?

Like they're asking these questions because like, oh, we saw a report that they're losing money. Or, you know, they're talking about, oh, YouTube's changing. What does that mean for me? So we'll talk about YouTube changes. But when you think about like, and I had a video on that and only got 73,000 views, which is good. But the YouTube update that changes everything. And yes, it's on YouTube, so it's doing better there, but that type of content isn't going to be applicable as much to someone searching on YouTube being like, what's a YouTube SEO strategy or a hack, or how can I get more traffic or sales, right? And you know, like I had another video that did only 21,000 views, ads are going to take over AI search. And I end up breaking down ChatGPT, Google Perplexity. Most people don't care about that stuff, but our customers are talking to us more about ads in these platforms, and not all of them have ads, than actually the organic side. Because if you look at most of these enterprise companies, they spend majority of the money on paid ads. So we tend to create content that appeals to enterprises, and it's really hard to generate a direct ROI from YouTube and social channels. Because of the long sales cycle and how it's so multi-touch.

So what I'm hearing is you are looking at maybe the blog content or whatever content that converts well on your website maybe, and then you're taking that and then that serves as maybe a baseline ideation thing for your YouTube channel.

2 things. So we look at what blog content they read to become a lead, and then we look at which of those leads actually converts into Customers. Then we look at which of those customers are spending the most amount of money with us. Okay? Then we try to correlate back to, we don't look at just like one customer, we look at multiple data points from not just which ones are leads, but which ones are leads with how much of a budget.

Mm-hmm.

Because that gives you an indicator of how much they're willing to spend, what's enterprise and what's non-enterprise. What content are they reading before they submit an RFP to us? Right? So we're looking at those indicators to see the type of content that's generating the most amount of revenue per contract. The second thing we look at is when we're talking to those ideal customers, we, you know, do you use Gong still?

Yeah.

Okay. So Gong records your sales conversations, assuming you're disclosing, you're allowed to, all that kind of stuff. You're not breaking any privacy rules, right? Ideally, you should be listening more than you're talking on the entry or opening calls. And Gong will tell you if your salespeople are Talking too much versus listening. And Eric hit upon this a little bit earlier on, or maybe it was before we started recording. If you don't listen to people and you don't understand what issues they have, you're not going to know how to pitch and you're not going to know the rest of the sales process is going to be screwed up. Your first call should be a lot of listening. So we try to listen to the main pain points that customers have. And again, we do this for ideal customers. And based on those 2 variables, That is how we go and figure out what type of content to go and create on these social platforms. And a lot of them won't get views. Like for example, I put out data on how long does it take to meet someone at a conference before they close into a customer? A lot of our enterprise customers have been curious about this because they've been spending more on in-person events from a marketing standpoint. And they wanted data on this. So it took us months to do this, but we gathered enough companies that had data and then we were able to do a study on it. But the point I'm getting at is like, it got very terrible views. We didn't care that it didn't get 100,000, 500,000 views. It's for our ideal customer versus creating content on, here's a ChatGPT hack. That'll get you mentioned in 24 hours. Like, that's cool. I bet you a lot of SMBs would love to watch that. And there's actually some hacks that we can go over. But dude, when we talk to enterprise companies, they don't care about any of those hacks. They're just like, here's a channel, it drives X percent of revenue. Here's all my other channels. People are saying this one, ChatGPT or Perplexity or AI LLMs, it's, they're going to be huge. How do we get more market share?

Mm-hmm.

You tell them about a hack, no one gives a crap about it.

It won't process for them.

Yeah, it won't process. They're just like, okay, we do $1 billion a year. This one channel drives $10 million. The rest drive $990 million. How do we go from $10 million to driving additional $90 million a year? So instead of $1 billion a year in revenue, we do $1.090 billion, right? That's the kind of stuff they want to know about. And they know they're not going to get there with hacks.

And how is this team structured that helps you? It's definitely not you finding all this. So who's doing— you have a data analyst, you have a visualization person. How is this structured?

So we have a data and analytics team at NP Digital. It's automatically set up and it gets spit out into not Excel, it's a Google Sheet. So everything's in Salesforce, it's popped in there, but we actually use Google Sheets to look at and it changes every single week. I look at it more so on a monthly basis, but it changes every single week where it breaks down the type of content that's been creating the most amount of closes and updates on a weekly basis and it's cohorted out. Because the last thing you want to do is use data from 2023 and be like, wow, this drove a lot back then.

Mm-hmm.

Well, no, what's driving revenue today? So that automatically tells our team what content is appealing and it ends up showing you revenue being closed and average marketing budget based on the content type for the leads that are coming in. So that gives us ideas. And then Nick Rochon from our enterprise team, because he deals with all the sales reps, you know, and he talks to everyone on a global basis, he'll end up telling me, because I talk to him multiple times a week, the hot topics.

Mm-hmm.

So I take both those two, I send them to internal team, Salo. Technically, I don't send them to anyone. Salo just gets it. And then Salo starts parsing out, here are the main topics that people want us to discuss about. And on a monthly basis, there'll be around 10 topics. Then 4 of them get chosen and the content gets scripted out. Then I go into a studio And then I just go and record.

Yep.

And then the team goes and edits. I watch the video once after it's edited. I'll leave my comments in, I think it's frame.io is what we use. I'm pretty sure it's Frame. It's an Adobe product. And then it gets published. I don't check to see if they actually make the edits. I already know they're going to make the edits. So that's how the video side is done. For the data side, it's a combination of Solo and Kayo. Kyle works on, manages the software products, Answer the Public, Ubersuggest, all the data feeds that we're getting in and collecting from third parties that we pay for.

Yep.

Saulo deals with the studies, the surveys, the vendors, the contractors that we're paying to help us out on that. So between both of those two, we end up getting the data, it gets pushed out from— Kyle gets it usually from engineers, Saulo gets it from the vendors we're paying to help us execute on it. And then Believe it or not, once we have the data, Salo himself goes and does the graphs.

This is what happens when you have a lot of competent people that you're— that it's, it's like, it just, it flows. Everything clicks.

Uh-huh. And then Salo and I, like, we'll have the data and he'll send it to us. And sometimes we don't use it because the research didn't come up with anything that's cool or interesting. It's just like, this is Crappy data. I'm not talking about the quality of the data, just like crappy data.

It's not interesting.

It's not interesting.

Yeah.

So then some of those pieces get thrown away. And when I say some of those pieces, it used to be a lot at the beginning. I would probably say close to like 60%. We've gotten much better at picking topics that are interesting because we actually asked our data team, A, what are clients talking to you about when it comes to data and analytics? But B, what data do we have that is interesting? And I would say at this point, it's less than 20% that gets thrown away, but I know it's more than 15%.

So that's a lot better than before.

Yeah. And our goal is to get it down to under 10%. I don't ever think it'll be at 0% because if it's at 0%, you're not pushing the envelope and trying enough new things.

Yep. Dude, speaking of which, you and I kind of texted earlier this week or maybe last week or so. And I've been looking at other agencies. Some are, you know, some are, you know, PE-backed platforms and all that. And they're saying that leads are slowing down. Have you seen anything in your— just talking to other people?

I have. And I asked my team and I think I pinged Solo or Kyle. I can ask Solo right now. He should get back to me pretty quick. For what timeframe do you want to know?

We're just talking Q3, Q4. So apparently these agencies are experiencing like a Q4 slowdown in leads.

And I think I mentioned you on this, Q4 is our busiest time of the year.

Yeah. Which is strange to me that I'm hearing this in other areas. So.

But for you, has it been slowing down?

For us? Yeah, I would say it's slowed down a little bit too. Whereas like last month it was really strong. So yeah.

I know from a new contract standpoint, August was a hot month for us and September was a really hot month for us.

Yeah. August and September were good for us.

And you're saying October, you're seeing a slowdown?

Yeah.

Uh, let's see. Solo notifications are silent. Let's see if I can FaceTime audio him right now. Let's see if he answers.

While Neil pulls this up, this is, this is real time. When you need something, this is what I do in Slack. I just hit the huddle button, just like Neil's just hitting the FaceTime button when he needs something. That's what you got to do. That's how you move things along. Because guys, every single week is 2% of the year. And when people try to delay, yeah, let me ask Kaya. Yeah. See, and by the way, this is another thing. When you don't get what you need in an organization, you go to someone that, and not say, Salo's amazing, by the way, but sometimes you have multiple people you can go to. You want to create redundancies. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karat, it allows 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.

The penalty for average has never been so severe. So what do you mean by this? Sure.

Okay. So let me, let me tell you what I mean.

So This has been—

so Wall Street Journal tweeted this out, not tweeted this out, they wrote this. It says, why AI will widen the gap between superstars and everybody else. Workplace tensions and resentment will rise if top performers benefit more than everyone else from artificial intelligence tools. But there are things companies can do to level the playing field. So this person, Signal, tweeted, the penalty for being average has never been so severe, but the payout for being extraordinary has never been higher. And When you look at some of the things that you're talking about right now, okay, how do you reduce that rate from 60% error rate to maybe like 10, 15% or so? You're probably leveraging some technology to help you with that, right?

Yes.

I look at the speed in which we can, you know, the fact that with ClickFlow, our internal SEO tool initially was saving our team 20 hours individually per month, right? Now it's saving 55 hours per month per individual. And then now if we're going to add in these other workflows, it's going to save an additional 30 to 40 hours a month. And so that means our people, that means gross margins are going to go up. And that means that people that know how to leverage these tools or these products, even our internal product, they're becoming way more efficient. But there's also people on the team that aren't using this stuff, right? So that's why the penalty for being average has never been so severe, but the payout for being extraordinary has never been higher because we as business owners would be stupid not to reward these people if they're becoming 10x or 100x of themselves.

Yeah. Do you want me to— I agree with you on this. Do you want me to get you the lead breakdown?

Do it.

Do you want me to go back to 6/25? 6/25 is what, June? June.

That's coming up.

June was 8,345. July was 7,549. These are just MQLs. 8 is August. So August is 8,018. September is 8,802. Okay. October is three thousand seven hundred and three. The month isn't over yet, but it says pacing for forecasts because it predicts how much we'll get this month. It says six five five one.

Okay, so it's down.

It's down.

Yeah. So eight eight hundred minus sixty six hundred. Is that what it is?

Eight eight zero two. Uh huh. It says L eight W average. What's L eight W? L eight W. L eight W averages seven thousand six hundred. Let me find out what L eight W is.

That's down 25, 30%.

So let's see, what is L8W average? What does that mean? Yeah, I don't know what L8W average is because he says our L8W average is, oh, last 8 weeks. I don't know why it keeps saying 7,600. That must be broken because it's been saying 7,600 since June. So I would ignore that one, but yeah, it's down.

Yeah. So I guess we're seeing this trend. And by the way, speaking of agency trends, so we've been interviewing more people from— dude, by the way, Juicebox, juicebox.ai, guys, I'm not getting paid to say this. When you have these agents recruiting for you, looking for the very specific criteria that we look for. So been talking to a lot of these holding company people that have been working at these companies. So like Dentsu would be an example. So I spoke to this guy at Dentsu. Dentsu's about 75,000 employees, right? Something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah. So he believes that, so I was speaking to him and then he believes that they're doomed. I was like, why do you think you guys are doomed? And he's like, well, we're just, we say we're doing this AI stuff, but we're just like a big tanker. We're not moving quickly enough and it's taking us a long time. And sure, we have all these like internal tools and all that, but it's kind of like a joke, right? And he's like, you know, to be frank, like I'm speaking to you right now, but I'm also like WPP and Publicis, which are other big holding companies, have tried to poach me, but he sees the same outcome there. And he's like, it's also not a good signal when like a densu is trying to sell because that doesn't show like a lot of confidence, right? And so I thought that was interesting. And then later today, I'm grabbing dinner with a guy who's a candidate and he actually works at WPP right now. I was like, why are you leaving? And he showed me all the stuff that the, you know, their, their, you know, stuff that he just talked about, the stuff that they're working on. And he's like, yeah, it's the same deal. I don't feel like I'm growing and it's like it's moving too slowly right now. And so the question The question is, are these 75,000-person agencies doomed? I don't think they're going to die immediately. I think there's going to be a little bit of pain, but I think that's the reality, right? And it's always been like this, like startups, like smaller companies are going to move faster. They're more nimble. And like these companies too, they have to protect— it's more about wealth preservation for them instead of trying to produce, like trying to move very quickly and break things all the time. So I thought that was interesting. I mean, we've been having more and more of these conversations, but what's your take?

I don't know if they're going to break. There's not too many options for global help.

Yeah. I don't think they're going to break, but I think it's becoming challenging, more challenging.

I think it's been challenging because the economy's gone, but okay, let me ask you this. You've been using AI. I've been using AI. Have we really seen AI grow agencies like crazy and change our business? Like honestly, I'm not talking about your workflows. I'm talking about from a new business standpoint and client retention standpoint. I haven't really seen it change agencies yet and marketing yet. I'm not saying that we're not using this technology to do better, cooler stuff, save time, but what I'm getting at is when I go to events, whether it's HubSpot or South by Southwest that I was just at, and no matter what country I'm in, and when I ask people have they seen an increase in revenue from the usage of AI in marketing, very few people ever raise their hand.

Yeah, I don't think we're seeing— so here, this actually, this will align with what you're saying right now and then I'll kind of address it. So McKinsey dropped a stat that should terrify every CEO. They just reported that 80% of companies now use AI, but only 1% are doing it well, meaning that only 21% redesign core workflows for GenAI. Just 28% have their CEO personally leading governance. And the last thing here is those who did. So those CEOs who are personally leading governance, and I would count your— you're not a CEO, but like I would count yourself as you're a founder pushing it.

Yeah.

Those who did are already reporting higher EBIT from GenAI. AI. And so my take on it is like, there's pockets of this, right? But like, you see, I do see reports of like, oh, this smaller agency is getting 80, 85% gross margins from most of the AI work that they're doing. That those numbers maybe need to come down a little bit. But, you know, I think for us, like you look at your engineers, my engineers, like, yeah, if they're even 3 times faster, 5 times faster doing that amount of work, I mean, that flows into our gross margins. So—

On a side note, they gave me US lead data. Do you want US lead data? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not MQLs. So before I give you MQLs, this is just leads. So the numbers are going to be higher, but keep in mind, majority are not qualified. So I only have data going back to 7/1/2025 because that's the screenshot he showed me. So 7/1 is July. It's 20,670. August is 17,944. September is 18,111. And October is 8,088. Again, the month's not over. It looks like from my calculations, it's pacing for around 14,700.

Mm-hmm.

He claims it's pacing for at least 15,000 because they look at weekdays versus weekends and when the month started. But he actually thinks it's going to be closer to around 16,000 this month for leads, not MQLs. Keep in mind, MQLs go through more of a tougher criteria.

Yep. Look, so I think all these things kind of go together, like the penalty for being average has never been so severe. So yes, start to learn this stuff. And then also the majority of companies are not using AI well. And I think the majority of companies are failing to report on the benefits of it. But you saw the thing I shared on my Instagram stories yesterday about like, The new cancer breakthroughs from Google, right? Like, I actually think cancer is not going to be— it's going to be a non-issue, probably could be 10, 15, 20 years out, like knock on wood.

I hope sooner than 10, but yes.

Yeah, but you see where this is like, I think the— you and I can see the long-term benefits of— I think we're starting to see the revenue benefits from it. But if you were to ask for this maybe like 2 years ago, I think we'd be hard pressed. I think we're seeing a little more now for sure.

I'm curious what the AI companies are going to do with this because From what I've seen with all this cancer research stuff, they're working with the pharmaceutical companies and they're helping 'em do all the research. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't know.

And then from my understanding, a lot of them are paying for this technology. They're in labs or doing experiments. But, um, it would be cool if someone other than a pharmaceutical company, uh, release it when there is a cure, hopefully sooner than later. released it so then that way they don't charge like $100,000 for the drug.

Yeah. You, you're talking about, because at the end of the day, the pharmaceutical companies, they have their incentives, right? The reason they're able to charge so much and all that. And like, you know, I think, I think we will see different studies. I think some of them are working with them, some of them aren't. And, you know, maybe, maybe they're gonna wanna release this data where, I don't know, it benefits the rest of humanity and it's not just the pharmaceutical companies. I don't know. But here's one thing.

I hope so.

Let me come back to one that, that I was looking for this in my studies. This is the beauty of me reading X, right? So, Ethan Mullik tweeted this. So one of the first randomized controlled tests, so it's a controlled trial testing whether GenAI boosts revenue, not just productivity. So this is a controlled study on whether AI drives revenue, okay? It says it does. A large mature e-commerce platform using older GenAI models, GenAI tools found most of them, from customer service to marketing tools led to large significant revenue boost. So this is one of those like these large abstracts, right? When people do these studies, like you can see who did it. Yeah. What I'll call out here is across the 4 GenAI applications with positive effects, the implied annual incremental value is approximately $5 per consumer, an economically meaningful impact given the retailer scale and the early stage of GenAI adoption. So when you look at this over here, Neil, you can see these are the 4 different business workflows here. So one's a chatbot and it shows the incremental value per customer. So $0.274, that's like $0.27 or so. That's the upper bound, right? Lower, let's just call it like $0.25 incremental.

Yeah.

Search query refinement adds about like 6 pennies or so, and then product description adds about 1 penny, and then marketing push messages at like 0.0004, right? So there's like a time multiplier, all these things, but when you add it up, it's about total linear additivity is about $5 per consumer.

That's not bad.

I mean, I don't know what platform this is, but if it says large significant retailer, I'm like, who could that be? Right. So I don't know who it is, but that's, that's, this is like, we're going to need to see more studies like this. I guarantee you guys would do like really well if you just do a bunch of studies like these.

Yeah. Those studies that you're showing on your screen, some of you guys can see, some of you can't. Those are just really expensive and time-consuming to do. What we do is we focus on stuff that gets included in presentations.

Dude. So this one's from Cornell University. Like, how do you pay these universities to do these studies and then attribute it to you?

You could.

You go do it first. Let me know how it goes.

I don't want to spend the money.

I know.

I'd rather just do stuff that people share internally.

Yeah.

Because that just keeps us top of mind when they're doing RFPs. Like we were talking about how you're saying for you and me, based on the lead count we've both been showing, it's been tougher periods, right?

Yeah.

This is probably going to be our highest month in new sales closed.

Yeah.

Now again, a lot of the deals are older, But for us, you get an RFP and it comes in and I'm just making up a number. Like we're pitching an RFP right now. It would be $7 to $10 million in fees that we would just collect.

Yep.

You close a deal like that, it doesn't matter how many leads you get from a website or not. Like you close it, you having a good month.

Dude, can I, can I tell you something too? I, I was actually listening to calls from like 8 years ago when I was on sales calls, right? And so you want to know the difference between a $10,000 a month contract versus a $100,000 a month contract?

$100,000 a month?

Yeah, $100,000 a month.

What's the difference?

Okay, so literally I'm listening to this call, okay? All I had done on these discovery calls, so 7, 8 years ago I was on these discovery calls, literally I would just say, hey Neil, tell me what your goals are exactly, okay? So what metrics do we need to hit exactly to be successful, right? And you see where I'm going with this. And then I'll be like, okay Neil, what's the value of meeting that metric? Oh, okay, $10 million. Well Neil, let's just say hypothetically we can guarantee that we can hit the $10 million 100%. Is it fair for you to pay us $1 million? Why yes, Eric, if you can guarantee it, right? Nobody, like what idiot is going to say no to that, right? I'm going through, I'm like, I'm listening to this segment of the call and literally we priced it on value. We said, okay, we, if we think 50% success rate for us, we're going to take that 50%, multiply it by that 10%, right? Which is $1 million.

Yeah.

Then that, the high end of the contract is going to be $500K, then $250K, then like $125K, okay? Instead of just saying, we're just going to charge you $3,000 a month, which is what SMB people are used to selling. So long story short, I listened to that segment. We had priced this thing on value, okay? And basically one of the deals was the guy was like, oh yeah, no, we don't do the smaller ones. We're going to do the $100,000, okay? But like that, it was just reframing a little bit, asking a little more, asking about the value. And you can't do that for everyone, by the way, just keep that in mind. But the more you can frame around value-based pricing, the more successful you're going to be. I've literally I, I've like, we've done this, like we have like a couple calls recorded where I just did this and we just, for whatever reason, we stopped doing it. And you can't do this for enterprise deals, by the way, as much as you like.

Yeah, no, no, I was like, this won't work for us.

Yeah. But you can do this for, we're talking like smaller or mid-market or so, especially if it's founder-driven. They're just like, no, no, no. Especially when there's ego sometimes too, if they raised a lot of money. Oh yeah, yeah, no, we're just gonna go for the big one.

Yeah. Uh, Gajan from Spiralize.

Uh-huh.

Uh, they're based out of Atlanta. They do this.

Great company.

Really well. Uh, their agency does a lot of performance-based stuff. But you're right, this kind of stuff works for SMBs. We don't do it. We've thought about doing it years and years ago. It just doesn't work. Like you go to a company that makes $10 billion a year in profit, forget revenue.

They have their forecasts.

Yeah, they have their forecasts. Their CFO's like, oh, this is what we're telling the market. Like they're not going to do anything that can screw up their stock price.

Yeah. So it's just, I think our thing here is like, it depends.

It depends. But I think you should start implementing this at Single Grain again.

I'm just like, dude, like there's so much game tape and like my blood boils as I listen to that thing. I'm just like, dude, it's really not that hard. I think it's, you know what it is? I would just say for those of you that are listening to this that have the ability to implement this, I think it's for your job is to kind of go there and disarm your sales team and say, hey, look, it's okay. Like I know you're used to selling it this way, but I'm telling you, you just frame it first. Hey, would you like to make more money? Would you like to make 10 times more money? Right? Maybe just frame it that way.

Yeah.

And then like you can have a coaching conversation because And oftentimes if you're the founder listening to this too, maybe they're a little scared to listen to you. So just disarm them and just say you're here to help them. And that's how you make it easier.

Dude, one thing that people get wrong with sales and marketing, and I hear this all the time, because a lot of people ask me, how do I go upstream? Even when I was in Singapore, not the most recent trip, but the one before, I did an interview with Tim from Ahrefs and he was talking about how to go more upstream.

Guess who set that up?

Yeah, you said that.

That's right.

So I appreciate it, by the way. And when I was with Tim, he was asking me questions like how to go more upstream.

I actually listened to that one. Yeah, it was a long interview.

It was a long interview. And I get that question a lot. And people believe that enterprise contracts are for a lot of money and they're sticky and they don't churn as much and you can make really great money. And a lot of those things are true, but what they forget is most enterprise contracts, even if they're RFP, sometimes they do, but majority of the time they don't start out at $2 million, $5 million, $10 million, $100 million. They start out really tiny where they test you out with something that's $100,000, $200,000, maybe even smaller, sometimes a little bit larger. And if you do well, you keep getting more contracts, more divisions, more regions, because these enterprise brands typically have a lot of different product divisions because they bought a lot of companies and they're in a lot of different countries. So you can grow your contract by expanding by regions or by division and selling multiple products for them or services. And then it adds up to multiple millions of dollars over time, but it's just a long game and people just believe that, oh, I'm going to end up getting these enterprise contracts and it's going to be great. It's just like, no, you're going to close a contract and you're not going to get what you want in the first 12 months.

And you might not even be profitable. You're going to take it on the chin, but you're playing the long game. It's, it's, and by the way, when you're in, you're in.

Like, dude, we just had one enterprise company that we work with in one region introduce us to another region. And they said, okay, now that we introduce you to another region, we want a discount. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, we haven't even closed the other region. And they're like, yeah, yeah, but we want a discount. And there's a certain point, and I was telling them like, we already have terrible margins with this, with your business. And I just shared the results with them. Like I literally was very transparent. I'm like, here you go, here's all the profitability on your account.

Mm-hmm.

I'm like, if I do what you're asking me for, I will lose money. It doesn't even make sense for me to keep you on as a customer, but it's not that easy to deal with depending on the region because each region, their procurement departments have different cultures. And some regions, their goal is to just continually squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. And there's a point where you have to say no. Some companies are great though. Like we had one company ask us to go above and beyond, be there for a lot of meetings, Do things that were out of scope, help us on other regions that we didn't even have a contract for. And if we didn't do those things, they would get upset and they would rate us very poorly when we were doing the reviews. So we sat down with this gentleman, older gentleman, I think he's in his 60s or something like that. Nice guy. And I'm like, look, I know you're not happy because we're not doing these things. Here's our contract. Here's what you're asking us for. Here's our profitability on your account. We're losing money. And I know you're not happy. We're discussing on how we move forward. We're open to just ending the agreement or we can readjust the agreement. And they're like, oh, I didn't realize you were losing more money. And this gentleman was really kind. And they're like, look, it's in our company culture to just keep grinding our vendors. And I'm like, I get it. You should do whatever's best for you, but I don't want to lose $300,000, $400,000 on an account a year. That's a lot of money to lose. And they're just like, okay, no problem. We'll fix this. We'll stay within bounds. And, you know, if we want extra work, we'll add additional scope. And I was like, cool. But sometimes you just have to speak up and let people know.

By the way, when I said once you're in, you're in, what I really mean by that is once you're in with the enterprise company, procurement sometimes takes a very long time and you might be taking on a chin for a year or two, But once you're in and you're doing a decent job, they're going to try to expand you because it's easier because they don't want to go through procurement again.

No, they don't. But they usually have to for expansion. It still goes through procurement, but it's easier because you're in your system. You're already a vendor. They can just easily add you. And for certain things, they don't have to go to RFP again because they have different rules depending on the company. If they onboard new vendors, you know, sometimes they would be like, okay, you want to do this? You want to try to find new vendors? All right, let's issue an RFP. They don't want to waste 6 months to a year of their time. They're just like, let me just onboard someone quickly and just get it done.

It's interesting for us because a lot of the agency deals we have are, I would say, probably more mid-market, but on the Carrot side, we're going through procurement quite a bit. Like it constantly gets thrown in front of us, but you can pick the next one.

I look at, before we pick the next one, I look at your Single Grain and Carrot business as 2 different types of businesses because it's different customers.

Yeah, I look at it as the same because Single Grain's ultimate mission, and my team will listen to this, but the ultimate mission is focusing on B2B. And so it's the marketing partner that focuses on B2B customers.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

Is SEO jobs dead?

Yeah. So are SEO jobs dead? Are SEO jobs dead? So this is interesting because at the Ahrefs conference, you remember Ryan Law who wrote, he used to be at Animals and now he works for Ahrefs, a great copywriter, writes great blog posts. So his talk was actually on, I didn't get to see his talk, but we talked for a little bit the day before. But there is a general fear, like I could sense it in the audience too, on like, what's going to happen with my career? And my talk actually became more inspirational, right? And I was like, guys, like we as SEOs have taken it on the chin. Panda update, Penguin update, Donkey update, right? Like all these updates, right?

Yeah.

And so SEO jobs, like we've had to adapt the most. And so in my mind, it's like, I don't think SEO jobs are— I think if you just focus on traditional SEO and you don't adapt at all, Like, yeah, it's probably just like how paid media jobs are as they, as we know it are probably dead, right? But my whole communication was like, look at all the things that are happening right now. We're talking about search everywhere optimization. ChatGPT just came out with apps, you know, ChatKit, like all these different things, right? So in my mind, we've talked about this, like I'm excited about it. And then people came up to me afterwards like, oh man, that was really inspirational, man. Like I didn't intend it to be that way, but I kind of sensed the fear in the audience like, oh, where do I go with our career? Because that was one of the things that Tim brought up like the day before, like he put it on Twitter. It's like, yeah, like where do we go with all our SEO skills? And I'm like, well, you've learned to adapt and take it on the chin. So like, just keep doing that.

Yeah, you don't really have to do anything. I agree. I don't really see them going anywhere. I think they're still going to be valuable as long as you adapt and they have adapted over time. So they should be fine. On a side note, I got asked an interesting question the other day. I'm curious what your take is on it. At South by or? South by, yeah. What do you wish you would've done differently with your own marketing if you could start over this year? So imagine it's January 2025. We already know what's happened for 9-ish months of the year, right? Because we're in October now, but 9 months are done. What would you have done differently?

If I can pick one thing only?

You can pick 3 things.

Okay. So this is not exactly marketing, but I wish we would just 20x our outbound. Like outbound's performing for us.

And you want to break down your outbound process because it's the gift cards, right?

Yeah, so it's gift cards. So the way what we do is we send $100, we offer $100 gift cards.

Sorry to interrupt and you can start again. This is marketing. That is a form of marketing.

I consider that sales, but, but that you can call that marketing too. Marketing, our job is to bring people to the point of sale. So I guess you can argue it's marketing too, but semantics. So one of the things that we do is to if I were to restart my marketing is we would 20x what we're doing on the outbound email side. And basically our TAM, our total addressable market is, let's say this one's a B2B market, right? So there's 100,000 people, 100,000, you know, emails that we would send initially, but maybe we're trying to hit our TAM, our entire TAM, you know, maybe we're sending like 4 emails a month. So maybe that's 400,000 emails. My whole thing is it's been generating good meetings for us. And some of these are actually closing. And these are enterprises that have raised a good chunk of money too. And so I'm just like, well, why don't we just do 20x of it if it's already doing really well? And maybe the TAM can't go 20x, but we should be doubling, tripling down on whatever's working. And that shouldn't come down to— I mean, once we see it working, like someone should just be like, oh, let's just do that more.

Can you, can you break down what your process is so anyone listening can replicate?

So we actually use an outside agency for this, but I'll break down their process because they actually reveal it too. So they basically will create 60, call it 60 to 100 inboxes. And this is interesting. So they use female names and specifically they use like female Latin names, right? So it might be like—

You mean email addresses? They create 60 email addresses? Yeah.

And they're all females.

Like at a random Gmail or at your corporate email?

Corporate email. But it might be like singlegrainmail.com or singlegraine-mail.com or like, you know, gosinglegrain.com. So it's It doesn't affect our, our, our main domain, right? Um, 'cause you don't want to tank your main domain.

Oh, you're talking about it would be like lindsay@go.singlegrain.com.

Yeah.

So they're using a subdomain.

No, it's just lindsay@single— it's just different inboxes. These are brand new inboxes that they have to warm up.

I'm confused when you're saying it doesn't tank your Single Grain name, 'cause you said like go.singlegrain.

Not go dot, I just meant goesinglegrain.com as in one word.

Oh, they're not using singlegrain.com.

No. No.

They're using a different domain name that is a version of your own domain name.

Yeah, 'cause if you get flagged for spam, like across the board, like you want to protect the main domain, right? Which arguably, like, you know, I think the Single Grain was already flagged in the beginning, right? But point is they have, they create like 60 new inboxes and they have like, you know, brand new names and they'll be like, oh, you know, Leandra or something like that, right? And then they will warm these inboxes up, right? So they'll use something like SmartLead or whatever, like send a couple emails or whatever. And then each inbox can only send maybe 20 emails a day. Ideally you can send up to 50, but they try to limit it because they don't want to get, you know, ticked by any spam filters, right? Then once it's warmed up, they'll try 14 different sequences and I'll work with them on the sequences. And like, I'm just adjusting the copy for them. Like one offer might be get a free Karat demo, the other one might be free gift card, other one might be like free AirPods or something like that, right? And then we'll test for like a week or two, you know, 15,000 emails per sequence. Then we select 4 and then one ends up winning and then we just go to town on that one. But in my mind right now, I'm like, why haven't we pushed on that 20 times more? Because it's already working.

So is it mainly the gift card one that's working for you right now?

The gift card one is working.

And how much of a gift card do you give away?

$100.

Amazon?

Amazon.

Okay. Yeah. Uh, what's your cost to get someone on the phone?

Our cost to get someone on the phone. That's something we, it's too early to say right now. Yeah.

What's your cost for a deal closed?

For, we, by the way, we haven't closed anything yet. So it's like these, like 2 are about to sign. Got it.

So you think it's going to work. So you, you wish you would've doubled down on it earlier.

Yes.

And 2 are about to sign. How much have you spent so far on this?

Let's say we spent $10,000.

On the gift cards?

No, $10,000. And then on the gift cards, maybe let's put another $2,000. So $12,000 total for 2 that look like they're about to close.

So $6,000. And what size contracts do you think the 2 will be?

One's going to be, let's call it to start, maybe $144,000 for the year. So $12,000 a month.

Okay. And the other one?

The other ones call it like 10, so $120,000 to start.

Okay. So $144,000 and then you said the other one's $1—

Call it $260,000.

$264,000. $264,000.

Yeah.

So then your cost on $264,000 is $12,000. That's really good. Why not just go all day?

Yeah.

All day. And then do you change the commissions to your sales team based on those kinds of leads?

So not right now, but it's going to become a conversation. I think like you're going to have to— Because that cost is higher, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I was just curious on that. What are the 2 other things that you wish you would've done differently in your marketing?

Well, let's go back and forth. You go, and then that gives me time to think. So you go. Okay.

So one thing that I wish we would've done on our marketing is adjusted our messaging. If we look at the marketing that's really resonated, we've shifted to search everywhere optimization, and we've talked about this a lot longer than beginning of the year, But it took us a long time to update our website. The moment we shifted how we're pushing stuff out from a messaging perspective globally, not just locally or not just regionally like the United States, the moment we started pushing this out globally, we started seeing a different type of customer reach out to us and we started seeing more people who are interested in Helping us be an agency of, or submit RFP for things related to like AI SEO or GEO and things like that. And the reason I say I wish we would've done it earlier, a lot of the companies we deal with already have agencies of record. So I'll give you a random example. We don't work with this company, but if you're Procter Gamble, you have an agency of record. So if you want to do something in the SEO space or the paid advertising space, you need to first go to your agency of record based on how your contract's set up. It's not as easy for them to just hit up NP Digital or Single Grain and just be like, I want to pay you guys for this because they have an agency of record. With this AI stuff, most people are not covered under their agency of record contract. It allows us— to talk to these large organizations that already have a preexisting agency and nothing's really blocking us to get in. We get in, we do well, then land and expand. I wish we made the messaging change earlier on. And if I had to give a takeaway for everyone listening, marketers think about how can I get more traffic? How can I boost your conversions? You should also think about what is trending that everyone's talking about? Is there a trend that you can ride that you think that trend will last for a while and it can impact your business in a positive way and make your marketing easier? That is in essence what we did with this.

Yep. Number 2 for me. So we're doing 3, right? So Neil already does a lot of webinars. What works well for us is sure, we do webinars internally, but we don't have the same list size that you have. And so doing partner webinars has worked out really well for us. We should, that's another thing I should be like, why aren't we doing 10x or 20x of that? These types of collaborations and people are down to do it. Like there's almost no times are people like, they're like, oh no, we're not down to do it. They're like very receptive because they're missing out on content or they're missing content. So I would say I wish we did that more. Like there's 2 things I wish we would've doubled down on, tripled down on, quadrupled down on.

Yeah. The second thing for me is if I go back in the time at the beginning of the year and this has happened on a monthly basis, I would consider us a medium-sized business, small or medium, whatever you want to define. I would say most people look at us as a medium-sized business. I define large as a billion plus in revenue. We're not there yet. If you look at most medium-sized businesses, they typically operate with P&Ls and you have forecasts and projections and budgets, and you typically don't want to go outside that. And even if marketing's profitable, People typically start with budgets. You can adjust your budgets, but you start off and then you expand over time. Some marketing, like content marketing, is a very expensive long-term endeavor that usually doesn't pay off in the short run. Assuming you agree with that statement. I wish we did more influencer deals at the beginning of the year.

To drive leads for you guys?

No. So I'll give you a great example of this. I'll release a video in the next 30 to 60 days, a deal that I did with Intuit. Okay. And it'll say sponsored and you get some money for it. Whether you're a corporation or individual brand, there's a lot of people that would pay you for email blasts or they would pay you for, you know, social posts or, you know, A joint webinar to your customers, some sort of deal where you're doing like a partnership and you're getting paid for it and you're promoting them more than they're promoting you and maybe you're just promoting them. The reason I would've done this earlier on, because let's say, you know, you recuperate extra few hundred grand from that. That's money that drops to your bottom line.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

And then you could, I could have taken that and done more content marketing with that money.

Yeah.

And instead of saying, hey guys, you know, we're spending X amount on content marketing.

Yeah.

I'm going to get pushback from my executive team even though it's my company. If we spend too much, Neil, we're going to screw up our numbers. Like we got to have a balance here. And they're right. They're being responsible with my money. But at the same time, if I could have done influencer deals, and the reason I give the examples of like an email blast, any company can do it because even if you're a small company doing a million in revenue or half a million, you have customers. Someone would pay you to do an email blast to your customers.

Yep.

And if you take that money and then invest it into marketing for your own business, I actually find that it causes quicker growth and I wish we would've done that earlier. And instead, you know this, I would ignore almost every single person that emails me for influencer deal. I started responding in the last 30 days. Now I'm not going to take a lot. I'm going to only take enough For, call it, you know, uh, I don't know, enough to like double up my video output per month.

Yeah.

And then have the cost covered.

So Neil has OnlyFans now.

It really is a version of OnlyFans for myself.

Yeah.

I know that sounds bad, but like it really is.

I had one too. I'm OnlyFans myself this year too. Yeah. You know, for like Adobe and Snap and like TikTok hit me up too. I was like, oh, Snap did this. Can you do this too?

I bet you I know who hit you up at TikTok.

It was a random person. It was like a—

I know, because I got the same random person.

Okay, that's funny. Share it with me afterwards. But no, that's actually interesting because—

Here, I'm going to give you their first name.

Look it up.

This will be entertaining.

Okay.

Okay. Nah, let's see. Dude, I have so many emails.

Does it start with a D?

Does the company start with an A?

I don't know. I'll look for it after. I couldn't find it right here. But going back to what we're talking about here, So that was the second thing from your side, right? Is that the second thing?

Yeah.

Okay. The third thing from my side, this is marketing. This is like basic marketing. So we've definitely innovated quite a bit this year with all the different things that we have going on, like within Karat or even ClickFlow too, like the time that it saves. And I just, I'm like, oh, sometimes I get ahead of myself. I'm like, dude, where's all the collateral for this shit? Like there's no like sales collateral. There's no like, you know, how this data is performing over here, whatever. And it's just, it's such an obvious thing that sometimes we forget as marketers, sometimes the basic stuff. And so this one to me is not like a 10x thing, but this one to me is like, you're going to increase your conversion rate by a lot if you're able to tell a good story that aligns with what the customer is looking for. And sometimes that requires you to slow down, talk to your data analysts, maybe talk to your designers as well, get somebody together to tell a good story. So that's the third thing. What's the third thing from your side?

I just responded to the TikTok people because they wouldn't pay me the money I wanted. And they're like, would you just do it for one platform? And I said no. And they're like, you know what? That's another like month of cost.

Let me tell you one more thing on the influencer thing. So YAP Media, who helps us with the ads for this podcast, so this is interesting because this directly affects us. So they're like, okay, they have this whole deck, right? And then my former chief of staff, so she's still running this stuff, right? And so she's like, look, here's what they're proposing. They'll pay like, let's say, you know, I'm not going to give any numbers right now, but if we do a series or whatever, We will make 2 DreamHosts, okay, if we do a series, like 3 episodes or whatever. I'm like, I think Neil and I would be down for that, okay? Let's just— but the series matters, like what depends on what we make. They will also pay us, you know, like a 6th of a DreamHost if we do, you know, if we do like, you know, one little ad read over here. I was like, look, we're willing to do these things, but right now the payout, this is for YAP Media, the payout, the juice isn't worth the squeeze right now.

Yeah, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

It barely covers like our cost of life. Like fund this thing. So we're like broke with this right now. Yeah.

No, we spend more on a monthly basis than what we generate.

We do. Yeah.

And I look at it as it's like when it comes to like influencer deals or any of this, you and I don't like the idea of just taking whatever money people are throwing at us if we don't like the brand.

Yeah, we can't do that.

Because we've turned down so many brands. It would've been, we would've actually made a lot more money if we just took everyone. And the second thing is, is we don't want to continually just do stuff all the time. Because it gets irritating for us. It gets irritating for the audience, but doing every once in a while is worth it because it covers a lot. We just have to make sure, as you mentioned, the juice is worth the squeeze. Even like the TikTok stuff, they didn't offer enough where I was like, yeah, I don't want to end up doing this. And then they emailed back like, would you just put it on only your LinkedIn for this amount? And it was a good amount. And now I just said, actually, I will accept it if you guys are still open. I don't know why I said no.

Well, this is also very interesting too. And then we can go to your third thing. But if you're going to an influencer, it's like, or if you're being pitched on these, they have to feel good to do. Otherwise it feels like work. It feels like work. And good brands.

If you don't like the brand, then it's just painful. And I'm like, well, I don't want to shill this brand because I don't like it. So I think that's really important.

Okay. What's the third thing from you?

The third thing that I wish we did more of is right now when I travel to a city for marketing, I end up going and I end up going to different cities and we'll do in-person meetings with companies. We'll do even our own events for companies. And we've done that for a long time, but very rarely have I actually done podcast interviews with people when I travel. I did the Ahrefs one that you set up a long time ago. I had an opportunity to do one in Australia. You know the person.

Yeah.

I couldn't make the schedule work out. They offered a car service and everything. They're like, we get over 100,000 views. I'm like, dude, I can't make the timing work out. And to some extent I want the views, but I got to optimize for revenue before—

Yeah. They're going to be back here in November anyway.

So yeah. Yeah. So what I ended up doing is, or what I wish I ended up doing was my team, I started having Marina on my end. hit up popular podcasts for all the cities that I'm traveling to where I have availability on my schedule and set up interviews because it's a great way to get exposure within region and hopefully it helps my business grow faster. But it didn't hit me until the Australia guy, and I forgot his name. He's a nice guy.

Dane Walker.

Dane Walker. Because I was like, wait, we should be doing this everywhere. And it'll help us grow within region because Dane's like, oh, if you make time, I can help introduce you to customers. I have a great Rolodex. Who are you looking to meet? And it wasn't that. I'm like, dude, I don't have the schedule. And he's like, is it because I'm a competitor? I'm like, no, dude. I'm like, honestly, I do a podcast with Eric and we're both competitors and I still do it with him on a monthly basis. And I'm like, it has nothing to do with any of that. I'm like, I can't make the schedule fit.

Yeah. By the way, the competitor thing's not even a big thing because there's so much business for everyone. Like once you get into this world or any world, there's so much business for everyone, right? And maybe in our younger years, maybe we just want to like kill every competitor, but like, you know, there's still competition for sure, but it's like, it's, there's so much business for everyone. So, but by the way, we do this weekly, not monthly.

Yes.

Yeah. Go, what are you going to say?

Do you have a, what's your third?

I did give my third already.

Oh, so I gave mine last.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm going to give you a bonus one.

Yeah.

You and I speak at events. Some events pay us, some don't, but I would say the majority of us Majority of the events pay. Sometimes we do it for free because they're friends or the audience is really big. One thing I wish I would've done earlier this year, if I can go back, I would've paid to speak.

Interesting.

Because the events that would've charged me money, they have so many of my ideal customers just sitting there in a room. And it's just like, some of them want $15,000, $20,000, even though I believe I would help draw some attendees, maybe not a lot, but I think I would draw at least some. At least all the conferences that pay me to speak tell me that I help out.

I think you draw a lot.

Yeah, at least that's when I was in Dallas, they're like, you helped out a lot. A lot of people wanted to see you and we're really happy you came here. Because I had to fly from Sydney to Dallas. That was a long one.

Was that a straight shot?

Straight shot, 16 hours.

Wow.

Qantas?

Qantas. Wow.

I should have done American Airlines though, because Qantas doesn't have internet whenever I'm going over the pond. And then American has a base there. And I didn't realize this, but I'm a Concierge Key.

Oh, that's really high.

I didn't know that. I don't travel American that often, but I fly so much, my not so often, you know, adds up. And plus I pay for first-class tickets on every flight. So then the—

Oh, they love you. Yeah. You're not even using points.

Yeah. I don't ever use my points. It just sits there because almost all my travel's paid for.

Right.

So, and even when it's not paid for, like if I'm going to New York for a meeting, I usually do American from here to JFK.

Dude, let me buy your points.

It's lay flat. But going back at it, I wish I paid to speak at events. I think it would've generated us a lot more enterprise business 2 to 3 years from now. And because I'll start next year doing it, I'm going to have to wait another 2 to 3 years after to see the results from it.

I think the next 5 minutes we have, the 6 minutes before we wrap up, We can talk about where we've changed our mind because a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, Neil and I were like, yeah, we're going to spend less time traveling and all that. You know, we're going to not do these influencer deals, da da da. But, you know, new information comes and things change.

Well, I've traveled less than last year. Yeah, that for certain I know because Marina tracks my hours.

Yeah.

And I'm not at 30% yet, but the goal was to be— actually, the goal was to be like 50% less. And I'm in the high 20% less than last year.

Yeah. But you're going to make it significantly less, but then you started ramping it. You're like, I'm going to do it again.

Because I thought the economy was going to boom this year and rip and it didn't. So I had no choice but to get back on the road and do whatever it takes.

Yeah. And by the way, so like going back to it, so Neil, I would say you've actually changed your mind a little bit on this. So remember I had Gary Vee on my other podcast, Leveling Up, and his whole thing is I want all the views in the world. I want all like, you know, 8 billion people watching me, right? So you going on these wider TAM podcasts now, that is actually getting views.

No, no, I usually don't go on wider TAM podcasts.

Well, you said if you're going to reach out to, if Marina is going to reach out to people and places you go to, like what kind of podcasts are you going to get on?

Related to marketing and like ideally ones who have executive crowd.

How many of those are there?

There's actually quite a bit. They just don't have the views. So they're not going to get like 100,000 views. Because if you look at Dane—

Oh, so you'll do niche ones.

We'll do niche ones. Because if you look at Dane, Dane has Because his podcast—

That's an agency podcast.

Yeah, it's related to marketing. So that's ideal fit. A great example of this is someone's like, hey, the next time you're in New York, I have a hospitality podcast and it's for executives who listen to hospitality type stuff. I would be down for it because I would talk about marketing related to hospitality. I don't know how many views they get. Let's say it's 1,000, 10,000 views a month or 5,000.

But it's the right people.

It's the right people.

Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. Like we're not, we're not, we're completely okay changing our mind once we get new data or once we think about things a little differently. Yeah.

Totally agree.

Yeah. And like, we're not to say that we're right on everything. We're certainly wrong quite a bit. So.

And by the way, even though I traveled less than last year, I would've traveled more than last year if I was able to, because I didn't want to travel as much this year because I wanted to be with my family more. And, but business, the economy took a lot of turns because a lot of things that we couldn't control. I'm not trying to get political. I'm not saying a president's right or Yeah. I'm just saying tariffs had a drastic impact on our industry. Would you agree with this?

Yep. Right.

So things like that, I couldn't have predicted last year when I was planning this year. And then when I told Marina, I'm willing to ramp up and do whatever it takes to try to get the business to grow faster, she's just like, a lot of the events were determined for us 6+ months out. So by the time I told her, it was already too late to ramp up travel as much as I wanted.

Yeah, here, let's cover the last thing here. So you have this topic here, why raising too much money causes founders to burn it on silly things. So I assume you are referring to a picture that I sent you the other day.

Yeah, we won't mention the brand name, but Eric was at an event and I texted our mutual friend and then he's like, I'm the one who sent it to Eric. And when I texted him, I'm like, by the way, I got it from Eric. And then he's just like, I'm like, I'm the one who sent it to Eric. So I was just cracking up and you, him, and I were laughing. And I was messing with him. I'm like, this is what happens when companies raise too much money because they start burning it on silly marketing things. And—

Let me describe what happened first.

Okay.

So this was at the Ahrefs conference and then this company, they hired a truck and these, like a driving billboard basically. And on the billboard it said, you know, try our tool, right? Use code Ahrefs for 80% off. But the ironic thing was the word Ahrefs was bigger than all the other words on that ad, and it actually drove more signups for Ahrefs.

Really?

Yeah, because people saw the word. So they, they, everyone started the next day. I was talking to someone, Patrick on their team, and Patrick's like, dude, we got a lot more signups and people are looking for an 80% discount. I was like, maybe you guys should offer some form of 80% discount just to capitalize on it.

Oh yeah, that's smart.

Yeah, but continue on. So this company, I think they've raised, let's just say tens of millions of dollars.

More than tens of millions. It's quite a bit higher. It's not 100, but it's high up. But either way, even in the Bay Area, you see all these people having all these billboards on the freeway to the city. And I'm like, dude, most of these billboards don't convert the way that people want and they're paying an arm and a leg and they just don't brand it.

And it all says the same shit. AI, AI, AI, AI.

Yes. And I'm like, dude, this is just a waste of money. Marketing dollars could be spent more efficiently. And I look up some of these companies and I was like, Ethan, have you ever heard of this company? He's my brother-in-law. I've created some companies with him in the past. And he's like, no. He's like, they must be decently big if they're spending money on these billboards. I look it up, raised over half a billion dollars. I'm like, wow, some of these companies are just raised a ton of money. I'm like, no wonder they're running these useless ads.

Yep.

And it's just like, you're not going to get an ROI from A lot of stuff. It's not that billboard ads are a bad idea. It's the messaging that they're putting in on the billboard ads and it's the offer are really terrible. And they're just doing these things because they have money to blow and they should be spending it in performance areas first. Because that'll convert a lot higher. And I get billboard ads and offline are versions of performance, but they're just blowing money.

I also don't think that's the right person or the right company to target. Like, you know what I mean? Like you don't see other Ahrefs competitors doing that type of stuff. And so—

Yes.

Yeah.

And even with the Bay Area billboards and them talking about AI, I'm like, dude, when I look at your offer, like I looked at the companies spending over, who raised over half a billion, I'm like, your ideal companies are outside the Bay, not in the Bay. You're trying to help old school companies adapt with AI. The companies in the Bay are very AI forward. You got to go push all these big enterprises that aren't headquartered there and convince them to, leverage this technology and they want to and they don't know how, instead of targeting these startups and corporations in the Bay who think they already know everything and can do it all themselves.

So the last thing I'll say is this. I've been interviewing more people because we're going on, like, we're just pushing, been pushing for more headcount right now. And when I talk to people, like a lot of these people, I'm just, I become so disappointed because it's like, to what you say, you just need to think a little more to go the extra mile to understand, oh, maybe my customer base isn't here, or maybe I shouldn't have my billboard say the competitor's name bigger than like all the other words, right? And so when I talk to people, Well, like I can tell like the person that said the 75,000-person agency is doomed, I'm like in my mind, okay, this guy invests $0 in AI per month and then he's kind of expecting the next company he goes to to save him. And I'm just like, people are trapped in this like prison and all you need to do to break out of this prison is just to think a little further out and then you'll perform much better than all these other companies.

Yes, but before you leave, I'll give you the Dentsu example, 'cause a lot of people think these big ad agencies don't try to adapt. Years and years ago, before ChatGPT was even out, we hired a guy from Dentsu. His only job was to automate and leverage technology to replace humans. These organizations have spent a ton of money, not a million, not tens of millions, much more on this stuff well before ChatGPT. The issue that they end up running into is, I'll give you a prime example. Imagine you had 50,000 employees and you told your employees internally, Hey, I got this new person named Lindsay. I'm making up a name.

Lindsay again.

Okay. Lindsay here is to help automate things with AI. So then that way we can just do things with less humans. How many of those 50,000 people would want to help Lindsay replace their job?

Very small.

Exactly. That's the issue with it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you can't— it comes down to the story, right?

No, I know, but it was worded really differently because I was talking to him because we hired him and he's a salesperson. Like, it doesn't matter how we positioned it. This is one of the largest holding companies. He's just like, people all saw the writing on the wall where if they helped me automate their job, they would get fired. So no, everyone pushed back and just wouldn't give me the time of day or they would run me around in circles.

This will be a good next episode. So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.