GitHub’s Trust Problem Just Got Worse

Neil, have you heard of the fake GitHub economy?

No.

Okay, so check this out. So basically on GitHub, you can buy stars. So we've shared GitHub repos before, like my GitHub repo now, the marketing skills one has like 2,200 stars.

Wait, GitHub lets you buy the stars?

No, it's a fake, it's a fake star economy. So you basically hire spammers to spam your GitHub repo for stars.

Oh, that makes more sense. I thought you were saying GitHub selling it. I'm like, why would GitHub sell that? That would just screw up GitHub.

That would totally screw their business, like the integrity of their business.

So this is like people Selling, uh, fake Yelp reviews and Google reviews.

Exactly, exactly. It's no different. Like, everyone wants it. Or fake Amazon reviews back in the day, right? So for $85 to $285 in budget stars, a startup can manufacture the 2,850-star seed median. For $990 to $4,500, it can reach Series A territory. Against typical seed rounds of $1 to $10 million, the ROI ranges from 3,500x to 117,000x. So at least 7 open source tools on GitHub, fake GitHub history, commit bot committers, exist specifically to fabricate GitHub contribution graphs. Prebuilt GitHub profiles with 5-year commit histories and Arctic cold vault contributor badges sell for approximately $5,000 on Telegram. Isn't it funny how this works? Remember, Neil, I told you about— I had, remember I had that Marriott hotel program and I was able to get like, it would allow you to stay at like really nice hotels for very cheap. So there's always these underground economies of these things. I'm not part of that thing anymore, so that's why I'm open to talk about it.

So dude, it's just all these shortcuts don't end up working. I remember when people used to buy Amazon reviews back in the day, I'm like, but if you have a crap product, you're going to get sales by buying the reviews and the stars. They do. They've gotten better at catching people, but you end up shooting up in the systems, especially If you're also, you know, you're getting purchases, you're cheating the system is what these people are doing. But when they have a crappy product or service, or more so product on Amazon, eventually you start getting into crappy reviews. And for every 1-star review, you need so many 5-star reviews to make it up. I'm like, the model doesn't work. It's just better to spend the time creating something that's amazing.

Dude, this is so funny. So, okay, well, I'm looking at the screen right now. So here's the marketplace. If you want to buy premium stars, so aged accounts, it's basically like 80 cents to 90 cents. So gradual natural delivery, years-old profiles with repos and contributions. This is no different than back in the day when people used to sell links on these forums. Mid-range, 20 cents to 50 cents, 1 to 2 weeks, some activity history. And then if you want to buy disposable accounts, 3 cents to 10 cents, new empty profiles. And so they basically do a comparison here, Neil.

Yeah.

Where if you look at it organic, like LangChain, a lot of people know LangChain. So the median account age for people posting is like 3,000 days. And then the number of zero public repos, 6%. So when you compare it to all these other ones over here, like manipulated blockchain repos, this one over here, free domain, it has 28% zero public repos and then 81% are zero followers. So you can tell which—

Yeah.

what is spam or not. But for GitHub, like, you know, they have other stuff to manage. And by the way, GitHub's owned by Microsoft, right? So I don't know how much time they have to allocate to this.

You know, Microsoft looked at buying Cursor, right? They decided not to.

You know who got Cursor? Yeah, SpaceX.

But SpaceX, I'm assuming the reason the deal was structured that way is they're waiting for themselves to go public and then do the transaction because they'll have more liquidity.

I actually, um, so the, the The bull case for doing this deal is because Cursor, who was doing, I think, $6 billion a year or something like that, right? $6 billion a year.

I don't know. The last numbers I saw, I think, were $4 or $5 billion, but they're growing so fast on a monthly basis that it's too hard to keep up.

So the problem for Cursor is at the $6 billion because they're limited on compute, for example. But xAI has a ton of compute, but they don't have revenue. So you combine the 2 together and then xAI or SpaceX, if they're valued at Uh, what is it, $2 trillion or something like that? Um, I, they can justify doing a, because this $60 billion is still a drop in the bucket based on their market cap. Yeah.

And then Google just put in $40 billion into Anthropic today. Did they? Uh-huh.

Dude, this is crazy. Yeah. Everyone wants to buy Anthropic right now.

You know, it's the number one most valued private company in the world right now. Or sorry, not valued. I, that I don't know. But it's the number one most wanted private stock right now, as in companies are trying to buy more, or investors are trying to buy Anthropic shares more than any other company. Number 2 is SpaceX. Um, I believe there's a girl named Zoe Talks who's a VC on Instagram. She breaks down the list. Uh, I don't think OpenAI was even in the top 5.

You know the thing though, OpenAI, they have a lot more compute. And so now, like, they're back in the game now, you know, 2.0. Like, every week something changes, right? It's like, oh, I don't use ChatGPT anymore. Now it's like, 5.5 is out, they have this out, they have the agents out, and then they have a lot more compute. Like, you just don't know. The good thing is, Neil and I, we're not part of these companies, so we can be promiscuous and jump around whenever we want.

And I heard the CFO of OpenAI talk today, and she was breaking down how roughly their split is 50/50 now from enterprise versus, uh, uh, just general consumers.

I think both companies will be fine. Are you gonna— let me ask you this, Neil. Are you gonna buy the IPOs for any of these?

No.

You know what I will buy? I'll wait for them to drop when there's a correction, when there's a big correction.

So, because Eric, and this is not financial advice, and people who got in early probably made a killing.

Definitely.

It's more so like they're so expensive that the ROI for Eric and I to put in our money is not going to be that high. It's just easier for us to play the game with our own companies. But what's funny enough is on TV, the guy who's been being brought up a lot is Sam Bankman-Fried.

Remember that? I was going to just say that.

Because he invested in Cursor. They're like, his Cursor shares would've been now worth $3 billion. He invested in Anthropic really early on and they were breaking out on TV. He didn't have the funds at the time and he should have never stole from customers. But on CNBC, they were talking about like, he actually may be one of the best VCs of our time when it comes to picking companies before they're actually hot.

You know what they say, Neil, pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered and he got too greedy. If you just played your main business and then continued to do what you're doing without having to go too far, everything would've been fine.

Well, he shouldn't have been using other people's money without their permission.

That's what I'm saying. Hogs get slaughtered.

He did it.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Okay. So anyway, and the sad thing is I think he came in at what, like 2— what was it? You looked at this, right? The valuation.

His Claude shares would've been— I mean, uh, uh, Cursor shares would've been worth $3 billion. That's what CNBC reported. Crazy.

All you needed to do—

Like, he made a killing. Now, knowing him, because in Eric's analogy, he, he's describing me as a hog, even though the guy was a vegetarian. Um, but I get the, the, uh, what is it called?

Uh, hogs can be vegetarian analogy.

Yeah, the analogy. There you go. I was blanking on it. Uh, 'cause I think that's a Warren Buffett phrase, right?

Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger, one of them.

Yeah, it was one or the other. But yeah, he would've probably doubled down and continually given him more money per funding round. Dude, even Robinhood, he ended up buying, I believe it was around 9% when their stock was at all-time lows. That thing went up almost 10x, right? That would've been another, I think he bought like around $900 million worth. That would've turned to $9 billion. The real problem is, One, he stole money and should have never done that. Two, the people who ran the liquidation, the lawyers or whoever, liquidated all of this stuff at the wrong time. Like, they undersold it. Even when it came to Solana, they were selling it for what, $15 or something like that?

Dude, Solana at that point, during that period, remember Solana dropped down to $1, I think, something like that, or $9.

No, I think the cheapest was, yeah, like around $9, $10. But when they sold it, it wasn't anywhere near there. It was climbing up to like $80 or $100 or $200.

Like, But you know, it's not their job. It's okay. Their job's to liquidate. So, um, Neil, one thing that we should talk about too, I don't know if you guys are doing this. I, I think it's smart. I just, you know, I don't have the time for it. Someone on our— hopefully someone can take this and do this for us. Um, but the rise of employee-generated content, have you seen this?

No, I'm curious on that one. Are you talking about employee-generated like social content or—

Yeah. So let's just look at this for, for, for fun. So Clay, okay, so we know the company Clay, right? They do, um, you know, let's just Let's just say like data for sales or for outreach, for example. So let's see what we have going on with Clay. Let me share my screen with you all. So employee-generated content is basically when you have your team creating content, everyone's promoting each other, which this is to me, this has been done in the past, but more and more people are doing it now. I think to build a pod, like build company pods where people are just posting. And so let's just look at this. So Clay has posts, okay, over here. I don't know if they show employees. These are all Clay, but a lot of Clay employees will, okay, look, so I think this, does this guy work at Clay? I don't know, I have no idea. But yeah, like growth at Clay over here. So Gabrielle's like, okay, this is happening over here. Okay, this one gets 116 likes. Okay, Varun posted this, co-founder, 433 likes on it. So they're just, they have employees posting, they're cross-posting each other, and that's a flywheel that works for them. And then I ended up finding this company over here. I'm going to talk to them on next week, I think, Virio employee engagement, employee content.

Here, let's look at this over here.

Okay, so I— disclaimer, guys, I'm going to talk to them. This was shared with me by Ryan at lunch. So this is content that drives pipeline, a done-for-you service for vertical SaaS companies to turn LinkedIn into their number one channel. So basically, they make your entire team content engineers. Agentic deep research, human taste. I'll let you know how it goes, but I've seen some companies do this really well. EGC is the new UGC. Make every employee generate pipeline in their sleep. So again, we'll see how this goes, Neil. I'll be the guinea pig for this one and we'll come back to this later.

Yes, please report. By the way, remember you were doing that marketing experiment months ago and we followed up on it maybe a month ago where you're giving away, it was either AirPods or gift cards or something like that. Uh, to set up calls with people, with B2B companies?

Yeah. What we did on that one, uh, I don't remember the numbers, but we were generating good meetings. So good. But we, the, it didn't make sense for us to continue to pay the agency. So we're paying them $5,000 a month, but they also wanted 10% of revenue for the first 12 months on every single customer we closed.

Wow.

That doesn't make sense. Right. And so we, the moment we closed one, we're like, okay guys, we're out. And so basically what we did, Neil, is we took all the Sequences that were working well for them. We took all those and then now we have our own running on Instantly. And the thing is this, I'll tell you one thing, Neil. They tried charging one of our mutual friends $10,000 for the setup and they said the infrastructure costs $10,000 a month. Guys, the infrastructure using my Open Claw to set it up, $600 a month. Instantly, it'll set it all up for you. It'll buy all the email domains for you, all these things, $600 a month, not $10,000 a month. You can send cold email all you want. Just make sure the offer is really good. Make sure the copy is good. And then you can have the agent recursively test it over time. Um, and that's not to say cold email is, is, is great because a lot of people are spamming it now. But if you still have a really good offer today, you should still be able to stand out.

Yes.

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So, all right, let's do this. Let's do some classics.

Okay, so you pick, you pick one of the classics.

7 marketing channels we'd bet on if we were starting over today.

My God. Okay, I'll start first. Um, I, if we were starting over from today, knowing what we know, knowing that there's a very strong reach with clipping right now, I would do that. If we're starting over, I would take this podcast, I would go straight on what we were talking about earlier, the clipping economy. How do we make sure we have someone who's really good with strategy, clipping the right content at the right time, TBPN style, 1-minute clips, we're posting it to X, we're posting it to LinkedIn, and then we have an ad at the very end of it. It could offer Neil's services or his products. Same for mine, we just rotate it over and over. And then we, because I do enjoy doing this, because this podcast forces us to stay sharp, I'll continue to do this. So it's kind of a 2-in-1.

We'll call it number 1. Eric's number 1 will be, the channel would be podcasting, but make sure you're also using clipping with your podcasts. Number 2, the channel that keeps producing and is getting uglier and uglier is email. And I don't know why companies don't focus that much on collecting emails. One of the most powerful channels that you can end up leveraging. And the reason being is it's in your control. You can show up in people's inbox. You're not relying on algorithms. It just keeps producing revenue. Now to collect the emails, you can do SEO. You can end up collecting emails through ads, like running Facebook ads or pushing it on your social profiles, but you should collect emails. Yep.

So number 3, I would go AEO. And when I say AEO, Neil, I don't know about you, but we're— the number one thing we get asked for quite a bit right now is Reddit, believe it or not. So a lot of big companies reaching out to us for Reddit, and that— the reason they want that is because they want to do better with AEO. They want their reputation to look better as well. So they're looking for reputation management. They want community management as well. And so I kind of lump them together. And when I say AEO, by the way, that does also include SEO because AEO is grounded on, you know, Google and It is grounded on Reddit, it's grounded on YouTube as well, so we can talk about those later. But because, you know, when you look at like an AEO result, the number one result gets a lot more click-through versus a, like an organic SEO result.

And one stat to keep in mind, we looked at the highest converting channels. So whether you want to call it AEO, GEO, SEO, or whatever you want, but let's specifically talk about the LLM marketing side. Like, GEO, which is what Eric's also talking about. It converts more than 2.5-ish times than the next channel. The next highest converting channel for marketers is typically SMS. Underneath that is email, and then it gets into paid advertising. So, okay, and number 4 from my end, going live on social platforms. I don't want to pick a specific social platform to go live because you should go live on all of them. I think there's a lot of platforms that can do that, whether it's Riverside or StreamYard or Restream. I don't know all the names of all these platforms. I don't know which one we use on a regular basis, but we keep switching over time. What I do know is going live, we do this with our webinars all the time, it produces really good revenue.

Yeah, I mean, we're live right now. Does it produce a lot of revenue? Don't know about that, but I'll tell you what, we're live right now. So next one, number 5.

Or let me rephrase, when we do webinars, it produces a lot of revenue and ours is We pick specific topics, we promote it through the social channels, we promote it through email blasts, and then we go live at a scheduled time. So it's not when Eric and I are going live here on our podcast, it's just randomly going live. It's not scheduled or anything like that or pushed out or promoted.

All right, number 5, yeah?

Yeah, number 5.

Number 5. I think Neil's computer's about to die. He's like chopping out. Okay, so number 5. So number 5 is X. The reason I love X right now is because of the articles. When I write articles and when I write a post, I can spin up 100,000 views, 300,000 views, and it actually drives good leads. The other thing I'll say, Neil, when I wrote a post about that, that TBPN post, their main producer liked it and followed me. You know what I did? I immediately DM'd him. I said, hey, are you available for work right now? Because I want to do that for the stuff that we're doing right now. And so it's very opportunistic. So I think X increases your— people like to say it increases your surface level of luck. I do think it actually does that. The more you publish, the luckier you get. And I do tend to think that the smartest people, especially with AI psychosis, are hanging out on X right now.

Number 6, right? Number 6 would be the second highest converting marketing channel out there. I briefly discussed it, SMS. I don't know why people don't collect phone numbers. It doesn't matter if you're B2B or B2C, it works well. We collect phone numbers. Again, it works well. And you shouldn't just call people, you should also follow up through text messaging. Just make sure you have the right permissions to do so.

Great. Number 7, so you can double dip here a little bit. So with LinkedIn, the cool thing is X has articles, LinkedIn also has articles too. So whatever article you put on X, just throw it on LinkedIn too, whatever. So I use LinkedIn as just a repurposing platform now because I don't have— once you kind of lose the luster of the reach, like whatever you publish takes off, and then once you lose that superpower, it's really hard to get that back, at least from what I've seen. And I also don't want to spend the time being the reply guy and just reply to a bunch of people. So I just use that to Repurpose articles. We use it to repurpose our YouTube videos. We use it to also clip this type of stuff too. Not as much though, but I do find LinkedIn's pretty good for driving business once you have the reach. It's just that we already have enough stuff going on right now, so I'm good with it just kind of, you know, keeping the lights on. But here's what I'll say. The people that do really well on LinkedIn, if I were to start from scratch today, okay, if I were to start from scratch, I would go hard on X and LinkedIn especially. Yep. All right.

So what's the next topic that we want to talk about? This will be the last one. What was that?

This will be the last one.

The last one. SEO is dead again, or SEO is dead again. Why are we doubling down anyways? All right.

This is not bad, right? So, okay. Since the beginning of me learning SEO, so I think I started learning SEO in maybe 2011, 2000, maybe 2010 or so. Neil's a little earlier than I was. So people have said always SEO is dead. I remember Gary Vee did a video, SEO is dying, right? And they're like, oh, it's so dead. And then Bill Gurley, SEO is dead, right? All these people, SEO is dead. And so here's the thing, they might say, okay, sure, Google search is declining or whatever. No, it's not. It's actually going up. Their profits are going up as well. And so the search engines are healthier than ever, right? Gemini, for example, Is one of the best models out there. Sure, your website traffic might be declining, but remember this, the LLMs, AEO, GEO, whatever you want to say, they are still grounded on the search engine. So really good SEO still directly affects how you convert or how you show up in the LLMs, and that's why it's still very important.

Yeah, SEO's not dead. GEO is not dead. You know, AEO, whatever you want to call any of these, is not dead. And they have changed though. It's what is dead is optimizing for clicks, but from a revenue perspective, we're still seeing a lot of growth from SEO and GEO and channels like that. It's just people still focus on the old metrics like, oh, my clicks are down. Well, if your clicks are down, but your revenue's up from those channels, you should be really good in which you should be happy and then you just move on. Yep.

All right, guys. So that is it. Let us know if you want Neil and Eric to be the Marketing Bros Podcast Network. Let us know in the comments. And that being said, we will catch you all later. Goodbye. Have a great weekend.