Google's Cash Bet, Jensen's Open-Weights Letter & What Social Is Actually Worth

So, Neil, I think Google is doing something right now that is shocking to me because this is the first time that they're using up their free cash flow to win the AI race. So Google is going negative on their free cash flow, right? And so, by the way, they make a lot of money. It's not like they're starving for money. I want to show this little chart over here and then we can react to it. Anthony Pompliano here tweets this. So Google is willing to risk the entire company to win the AI race. And then Google reports first quarter of negative cash flow. So this is free cash flow, right? This is reported by Bloomberg and you can see it for the first time, it's gone down. They started in 2004 and then they've continued to move up. Neil is— but so anyway, I think it's interesting because my first reaction to this is, are they betting on the right thing? Now let's think about everything that Google has, right? Google has search, which is their money-making machine. Google also has— they have their TPUs, okay? Google also has YouTube as well. Google also has Google Cloud, uh, and then Google also owns what else? They, they're— they have Android, so Android ecosystem. Um, they have Chrome as well. And so they just have all the distribution in the world. They have Waymo as well. Um, by the way, there's— you think about some of the investments that they've made from Google Ventures, like they do pretty well there as well. And so all this data center investments, buildouts that they're doing right now, is it truly a risk at the end of the day to win this AI race? In my opinion, I don't think it's much of a risk because of how well they've done over the years. Like you can say they're a big conglomerate now, but I think I was listening to the All-In podcast. Did you listen to the recent one where Chamath was just talking about what the return on their investments has been in the last, I don't know, let's call it 10, 20 years or so? Do you know?

I think he was talking about the Google stock in which the average returns if you're a shareholder is roughly 30% a year, not necessarily their revenue growth or their EBITDA growth. But what most people tend to forget is Google's not investing only for the sake of investing. They have a $514 billion backlog for its Google Cloud division, to give everyone a quick perspective on the numbers and why they're spending all this money. They want to actually take that backlog and realize the revenue from it.

Yep. So I think, and they, and I think they will, right? You look at all the demand. By the way, you look at Microsoft yesterday, they reported earnings, right? Their stock has gone up quite a bit. You look at how Azure, which is their cloud provider, like how much it's gone up. I think it was like 100% year-on-year growth or something like that. So all that to say is they already have proven business models. And in fact, most people are going to be coming to them and they're not risking everything. You look at how shaky things might be right now with like an Anthropic or OpenAI with these open models, right? And so I think their business models are going to work, but I think they're getting a lot of pressure in other areas versus Google has already established themselves. Like they have plenty of business models that are already working for them.

Dude, totally. And people tend to forget businesses operate to maximize revenue growth and profitability. Their whole purpose is to keep making more money. People just don't invest for the sake of investing, especially this amount of money, without really realizing how much more money they can end up making. It's done intentionally, and they're looking at how much more growth potential they can get if they do some of these investments.

Yep. So one thing I want to talk about, so I was reading this tweet from Naval, and I think this stuff all kind of ties in together. So you look at what Naval is tweeting over here. So he says, when software was expensive, so thin, horizontal, best-of-breed software stacks extracted rents across every business. So what does that mean exactly? So we're talking about thin and horizontal. So horizontal means it can cover like a bunch of people, right? And Well, what he's saying now is that now that software is cheap, keep in mind before you needed a bunch of software engineers, you still do, but today anybody can vibe code something up, right? And that's kind of how he's saying that software is cheap now. So now that software is cheap, value moves to vertically integrated businesses that deliver opinionated end-to-end experiences, right? So what does that mean exactly? That means instead of trying to be everything to everyone, okay, you actually now are, let's say Neil and I are both in marketing. So marketing would be one vertical, okay? So vertically integrated would be, and then let's say Neil has data from his companies that he works with. I have data on the stuff that I do. So Neil's going to have his opinion on how something should be built. I'm going to have my opinion as well. But now that software is more democratized, this is where the value is occurring now. And that's why I think everyone needs to build a revenue brain, right? So I've talked about single brain, But a revenue brain is more vertical, meaning that it covers sales, it covers marketing. That revenue brain can be something that integrates with your cold outbound system. So it's handling cold outbound for you, but maybe it's also integrated with your AEO SEO software suite too. So it's creating content. It's also looking at the customer calls that you're having. So it's taking all the connectors that you have and it's figuring out, oh, where should we make retargeting ads from an account-based marketing standpoint? Where should we figure out where we should attack more on the cold outbound or just outreach standpoint? So. If you have a revenue brain that's going, we've talked about having your website be like its own revenue agent. That is an example of a vertically integrated experience that you can deliver. Because what I'm seeing right now is when you look at companies out there like Victor, they're doing really well. They're like, that's like a little, like a brain that lives inside your Slack. There's plenty of other competitors out there that's much more horizontal and that self-serve. The way I look at it, I don't think agencies are going anywhere. I think agencies are going to evolve. I think for us, I know for us, it's more so, hey, we're on the revenue side because that's what we understand and we have our opinions there. And I had a conversation with Google this week, Neil, a couple people from the Google Ads team, and they're like, oh man, they're like, we think traditional agencies are dead. I'm like, oh, it's interesting that you say that, right? Because I've talked to a handful of these traditional agencies, people that are trying to jump ship. They're like, yeah, that model doesn't work anymore. We're more interested in what you're doing on the agent side right now because we think what you're doing is going to— that's going to affect how agency work is going to be done in the future. So that was the conversation that I was having. And I think all this stuff kind of ties in together. So I think whether you need a finance brain or a revenue brain or a company brain, whatever brain you need, you need some— you need these vertically integrated brains. And there's going to be plenty of companies offering this stuff. You know, Neil and I probably more on the marketing brain, revenue brain side of things.

Not only are we seeing people build it themselves, we're seeing a lot of companies trying to offer solutions for it. But I think you're going to start seeing a lot of this stuff just productized by some of the major SaaS players. in different verticals. So like the NetSuites of the world, my guess is over time they'll offer like a financial brain. You know, a lot of the marketing software solutions will do that on the marketing side, so forth, so on. And I believe that, you know, people can end up building it in-house, and I think a lot of people will, but majority of companies will just pay for a solution that already exists and they can just plug and play with everything else that's They're already doing. And I believe most of the software solutions that they're already paying for will start offering some of this stuff for free. It'll just be value added to keep retaining you.

Yep. And that's why I think right now, like the way we think about the Single Brain stuff, we're doing a lot of these, these free pilots. We're not even charging in, in, in, in many situations, right? Because it very much is a situation where like, how do you just get more logos in the door? Um, and how do you— because it is, it is a retention and an expansion game for, for a lot of these, these companies. Um, and, you know, what I communicated a week or two ago was, um, right now, like, when we talk to the— one of these investors, they're like, oh, we talked to our portfolio company, like, everyone's building this right now. And therefore, like, you know, we, um, they, they think that because everyone's building right now, it's not going to be a hot thing. I think, in fact, if everyone's building it right now and they have the engineering resources, it means that more people are going to need this because you're going to need people that are managing the— who's going to manage it, who's going to optimize it, who's going to upgrade it. So anyway, I think to Neil's point too, yeah, like a lot of these companies are just going to offer this as well, or they're probably going to gobble up companies that are doing it too. All right.

So what's the next topic that you want to move on to?

Yeah. So Neil, have you been using ChatGPT voice at all?

You know, I've never used the voice feature inside ChatGPT, not once.

Okay, have you seen— remember the— do you remember watching Iron Man?

Uh-huh. Jarvis.

Jarvis. Okay, this is basically getting very close to a Jarvis. And so what I do in the morning now, I take out my phone, I'm like, hey, give me the daily command center, right? It's like, okay, here's what's happening right now on the recruiting side, here's what's happening on sales side. Um, here it's also evaluating all of the, the forms I have on my site to make sure nothing's broken. I just want to make sure everything's working right. Um, and it's like, here's a recommended action for these things over here. Do you Do you approve or disapprove? And I'm like, approve, disapprove. I'm like, what about this thing that we're working on yesterday? Where's that at right now? Where's this at? Oh, by the way, not only is this operating in ChatGPT, it's connected to all my other harnesses because my ChatGPT can use my computer, right? So yesterday I was setting up Buzz, which Jack Dorsey released. You know what I did to set that up? I was just talking to him. I was just talking to my ChatGPT voice. I'm like, hey, I need you to set up Buzz for me. I need you to invite these people over here. I need you to make sure that all the permissioning is set up correctly. And so now, by the way, it's hooked in. You can hook it in with, you know, you can have it source for you on the recruiting side. You can have it send partnership emails. You can have it do whatever you want, right? But ChatGPT Voice has been great because ChatGPT has a browser, and plus you can control the other apps that you have. And so my Hermes harness is available because my Hermes is much more powerful from like a connector standpoint. So all that to say, is that, um, you know, you hear about these people right now going on these like 4-hour hikes and they're just talking to these things. Now, Neil, now when I'm on a commute to go see my dad on, on the weekends, guess what? I'm just gonna be talking. No more need to listen to podcasts. I'm just gonna be talking to this thing for an hour and asking it to do things for me.

Yeah, dude, and I think voice is gonna get better and better. Um, what I'm really waiting for is Apple to have a better Siri and it just being all integrated within, you know, your hardware that you have. And I believe they were supposed to partner with ChatGPT. It did not work out because ChatGPT or OpenAI is supposedly building hardware with Jony Ive because they ended up buying his company. And I think Apple claims that they stole some intellectual property or something like that.

Definitely did.

And then OpenAI is claiming that Apple never ended up integrating. Uh, I believe Apple's moving over to Google, but I'm waiting for their tech to get better and it just be integrated within, you know, the current systems and workflows.

Yeah, but Neil, why do you even need that when you already have— you're paying for ChatGPT, you're paying for the $200 a month version. Uh, and so your home computer, right? So the main thing is I have it set up on my home computer over here to desktop, right? So it's like your command center. It's already hooked in with everything else. It already has all the contacts, plus you can control like your phone too. And so You already have all the context in the world. Why don't you just do this right now?

Honestly, I don't trust ChatGPT. I've deleted a lot of my backlog and history and it still pulls from it when I ask questions.

Oh wow. They don't fully delete your data?

I fully deleted my data as an experiment and then people are like, give it a few days, give it a week. I'm telling you, it's still pulling stuff from the past.

Not everything.

So if I uploaded files and I was careful, I never uploaded files that I shouldn't have uploaded. But some of those files— yeah, you can get it from the pantry, buddy. So some of those files, they don't actually have the file to reference, but they reference it in chats in the past. And the data that it referenced in the chats, that stuff is still there when I ask it questions. It's still pulling from it. But if I had to ask something new and I had to pull from the original file again, it's not doing that. But it's pulling from past chats where we analyze data and I just don't like it. So I hate to say it, I don't trust it. I still use it, just being honest, but I won't use it for anything sensitive. I just—

So here's a question for you. Which companies would you trust with your data? Apple?

I trust Apple. I trust Apple probably more than most. I also trust Google and Microsoft. Um, sure. Sit here and eat it, buddy. Um, the, the reason I trust Google And Microsoft is, they're so big, you know, everyone's like, oh, they're using their data to figure out what search results to show. That kind of stuff, I don't mind.

If I— You're so OCD. Just let William eat whatever he wants.

Uh-huh. Well, I look to see, and my wife, he ate a little piece of chocolate, but the chocolate doesn't taste good. I'll just tell you that. So you can assume what's in it. Like, her brownies are made of sweet potato and dates and chocolate powder. And vegetables, like her pancakes.

That's a scam. That's scam chocolate.

And I'm like, yeah, this stuff. She won't do dark chocolate because of caffeine, but still, like, it's— I've tried it and I'm like, what the heck is this?

Yeah.

So even like, before we get back to it, last night my wife was gone. She had a family emergency. So I'm taking care of the kids by myself. And they're just like, mom's not here, we want a popsicle. So I gave them one of their popsicles. And there was 3 in there, so I had one because the kids were like, eat one with me. It's like no added sugar, it's made of pure fruit, it tastes so nasty. And the kids were like, this is delicious, because they don't know what the real stuff tastes like, you know, like the stuff we ate as kids.

Scam. Scam.

I took one bite and I threw it away. They're like, it's delicious, you don't like it?

I'm like, no, you don't know what delicious is. But see, that's good marketing. That's good marketing. That's the, the stuff that, uh, that your wife has consumed, uh, is, is, is healthy, right? But it's, it's all stuff that she's probably seeing on Instagram or YouTube.

So yeah, but going back to Google and Microsoft, if I delete my data from Google and Microsoft, I'm not talking about search results or whatever, but I believe Google would genuinely delete my data and not reference it in the past for questions that I asked. And ChatGPT can say whatever. I swear I'm asking questions and it's pulling from the past on stuff that I already deleted.

I would tell you, okay, let me tell you who I trust first and then what you would do if you're a little patient with this. This is more for the audience. So I trust Amazon. I trust Microsoft, I trust Google, I trust Apple, right? I trust Nvidia as well. Like, you know, never had any issues there, right? But those are kind of the main companies that I trust. Now, what I'll say is this, I don't necessarily trust Anthropic either. So I don't trust Anthropic or OpenAI. And so I wouldn't go like with super sensitive stuff ultimately. Here's what I would say. If you want to run this, because Hermeus Voice just came out yesterday, which is open source, by the way. So Hermes, you can run it on your own box, you can run it on your own systems. And so you can talk to it, you can activate it just saying, hey Hermes, kind of like, hey Siri, right? So that, Neil, you can actually set up. And because my Hermes harness is very powerful, I could just run it through that. And you can run it through OpenWeights, like open source models, right? So you can definitely do that. Now, if you're impatient right now, you want the ChatGPT voice experience, like that, it's unparalleled for the moment. I would say that Claude just came out with their own voice as well. Just keep in mind that they have their own incentives ultimately. And one more thing I'll say is that I believe that OpenAI and Anthropic, they're probably just going to build more and more applications and attack more of the profitable niches that they see their customers— like legal, they're getting into legal, they're getting into life sciences, they're getting into— I think they're going to get into more and more stuff because they have these frontier models, right? And I think there's also good reason to not trust both companies because of how both of the, let's just say the executives, how they operate, And I believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. So that being said, I still take advantage of it.

Yeah. So right now you're using voice on ChatGPT. Are you asking it anything sensitive relating to data that it shouldn't have, or you're worried that it could end up using in the future?

No, I don't do very sensitive stuff like financial analysis and that type of stuff using Using these.

So yeah, well, when we do financial analysis, we do it in a controlled environment. We do not upload it to ChatGPT. We never have for stuff like that. I've used it for like personal stuff, like just asking like, hey, analyze my blood test results, right? If that went out into the public, I know people are like, oh, health information and HIPAA and stuff. Honestly, if my blood test information went out into the public, I really wouldn't care.

Right.

But the fact that I can still ask it questions related to that pisses me off and it still shows it. It just, to me, it just makes me not want to trust them. If you're asking questions related to your business and getting stuff done, you're saying with ChatGPT Voice, because none of it's really sensitive, you're okay with just pushing it out there.

Yeah. And I'll give you some examples. Okay. So some things I use ChatGPT Voice for right now are Oh, hey, look at the latest Marketing School YouTube channel. I want you to create trial reels for it. I want you to edit the videos, put an overlay, and then create 6 trial reels and then publish them, right? And that can do it, right? So, because it has like the, the, the Metricool API, um, that's one thing I ask it to do because then it just controls my Hermes. My Hermes has all the connectors. Another thing I ask it to do is I, yesterday I didn't want to set up Jack Dorsey's new Buzz, right? Which is like their Slack for agents. Um, I didn't want to set it, just set up all the stuff for me. It set up all the harnesses and it invited the right people and it put together all the channels. That was very nice for me, right? The other thing too, as I was just testing this out, because on our talent side, we're trying to recruit more people right now, but I was just testing out like a couple of these recruiting flows. What it did was it logged into my— it logged into LinkedIn, it logged into our applicant tracking system, it logged into our Juicebox, which is our like recruiting agents, and it figured out a way for it to reach out to these people in a tasteful way and figure out how to combine all the things, right? And so, That to me is helpful because now I can hand that off to other people on my team and then they will work like that. And that to me is a very high leverage thing because in my opinion, the more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you spend on management.

The more time— you're saying the more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you spend on management?

Yeah. If you spend more time on recruiting great people, great people don't need to be managed as much. Yeah.

I thought you meant the more time you spend like just recruiting, like as an entrepreneur should spend all their time recruiting. Oh no, you just mean if you recruit the right people, you don't have to deal with management.

Now that being said, I will— my opinion is the entrepreneur should be one of the best recruiters in the company. I should spend a lot, like a significant chunk there, because Neil, if you look at your return on investment on the time you spent bringing in some of these people, it's some of the best time that you use. Yes or no?

Yeah, I actually spend my time on 2 things, uh, as an organization. I don't actually spend too much time on recruiting anymore, being quite frank. When we were much smaller, I did spend the time on recruiting and building up the team. Now my team spends the time recruiting other great people, but if you have great people, they don't want to manage them. So they'll work to find really good people and they deal with the headaches of recruiting because it is a long process. It's not simple. I don't care if you use AI, you still have to build the relationships with the people and talk to them to figure out who's the right fit or not. I'm not saying AI can't help you speed up some of the process, but it just takes quite a bit of time. Yeah. The second thing is, uh, I spend a lot of time hitting up companies to buy and building the relationships there. I spend an arm and— like, I would say that is probably on a daily basis at this point, 60% of my time, it's maybe 70%, is just reaching out to businesses myself and trying to see which ones I want to buy.

And how are you thinking about them now? Because some people have the angle where it's like, okay, I'll just buy these logos and then get rid of the people. Or are you thinking about, hey, I'm going to buy these logos, but also maybe I'm internationalizing because the clients that we want, they require us to be in these areas?

Yeah. So the way I look at it is We've done enough deals where I did one deal where the founders did not stay. Actually, I did 2 deals where the founders did not stay. One of them was a software company called Answer the Public. So we already knew the founders weren't staying and we felt they were doing things wrong and we didn't want the founders to stay. So I didn't mind that one. We did another deal in Asia Pacific called Search Guru. Where the founders were checked out. They didn't want to stay. They had a guaranteed earnout. I wouldn't ever structure a deal like that anymore. But the upside was very capped and I didn't understand how relationship-heavy Asia Pacific was. So for a service-based business, whether the founders are checked out or not, I'll never buy a business again where A, the founders are checked out. And B, they don't want to continue. That's 2 different things. You could be checked out and wanting to continue, but if you're checked out, that means you're not putting enough effort into there. So why would I want a business where you're not willing to spend your own time, especially if I'm compensating you? And if you don't want to work there, it just creates more risk on me. So I'm looking for businesses where the founders want to stay in the game for at least 3 years. And I'm ideally looking for founders who are like, Yeah, it would be great if we can work out a deal where we continue longer than that because it shows they really care and they believe in the future. And my fear is when you buy businesses and people aren't in it long enough, there's knowledge transfer, client relationships, and the list goes on and on of stuff that may not be able to be ported over, which just creates risk. So I try to find companies and I build relationships with the right people. And then go from there. And the way I look at M&A is what are the regions? So if you look at ad agencies specifically, and I'll ask you this question, do you know where most of the global RFPs come from? Like what countries?

I would imagine—

Let's go top 5. Let's rank them.

Top 5, US for sure.

Uh-huh. Is number 1. Uh-huh. What's number 2?

You probably have, I would say—

I'll give you somewhere in Europe that's English speaking. What's number 2?

UK?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Number 3, close to your homeland.

Uh, Japan?

Your homeland.

That's close to my homeland.

I'm saying your homeland because you were born in Taiwan, right?

I'm not—

Oh, you were born here, but your parents are from Taiwan.

Taiwanese Cantonese. So China.

China is number 3. Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And then number 4 and 5 is kind of like a split.

Middle Eastern.

Uh, number 4 and 5 is a split usually between France and Germany. Uh-huh. Number 6 is usually some other areas in APAC.

Yeah. And so where were you going with this?

Uh, so I'm trying to infill in the regions where we get the RFPs. So then that way I don't have to travel as much to those regions.

That's a lie.

You'll still travel. I'm not saying I won't travel. I would still travel, but I wouldn't need to travel as much because When we look at the ROI of us, me traveling, what we found is building relationships has helped building the pipe for the long haul. It would just be more effective if I traveled less, bought the companies, and then paid to speak at the biggest events within those regions.

I guess let me ask you this question. So you had said before doing this podcast, you're reaching out to at least what, 10 people per day for sales, and then maybe like how many people are for M&A per day?

I've slowed down on the sales side, so I'm probably reaching out to 3, 4 people max a day for sales. M&A, maybe 15, 16 a day.

Yep. And so my point in asking this question is like, this stuff changes, right? Because what I'm doing right now is probably I reach out to 15, 20 people a day that I know, because it like, my thing has all my, uh, it knows my connections, right? Um, for single brain, these single brain, uh, pilots. Because right now we're just trying to figure out like, how do we just have more of these customer conversations? And inevitably, like most of them lead to they want to engage with us, right? And then from there we do customer development and then it's like, okay, how do we scale it? But then in a year or 2, that might change where it's like, oh damn, this stuff is working really well. Now the scaffolding is working really well. Maybe it shifts over to something more strategic calls, or maybe it shifts more into executive recruiting, or maybe it shifts over into M&A, right? So this stuff ebbs and flows. It's not to say that Sales, you should always focus on sales every day. It's what is the highest leverage thing that you can do every single day that if you did that one thing, the day will be good.

And that's the way to think about it. Yeah. And I think that should change every single day or every single week for most entrepreneurs. And I think a lot of them don't keep adjusting. It's like, just because something's working and you're focusing on it doesn't mean it's the thing that you should continually focus on over the next 30 days or 60 days or even a year.

Yep. By the way, so I want to talk about why open weights matter for marketing. So open weights are basically these open source models, right? So you can use like a GLM 5.2 or a KIMI K3 as of this recording, these are strong open weights. And so when you use these, when you think about the cost savings, you're talking about 25 to even 100x savings on these open weights, right? So a lot of people are talking about, oh, like, why should I pay the frontier models like Anthropic and OpenAI if we can get these open weights? And so This matters for marketing because if you think about when you're generating a ton of creative volume, okay, you think about you're generating maybe AEO, SEO pages, you think you're generating all these, all the strategy, right? Like, how do you think about mixing this up from a token optimization standpoint? So my stance on this is that 5% of your, the strongest strategic thoughts that you have should go to the frontier models, right? That's where the most expensive stuff is. 15% goes to maybe you're paying subscriptions, for example, and then maybe 80% goes to these open waits, right? And there's plenty of things that you can use right now, like OpenRouter, to kind of handle this. But everything is downstream because marketing costs a lot of money. Like you think about all, again, all the things, all the emails you need to send, all the sequences that you need to do, maybe like all the stuff that you need to do, right? And so again, keep in mind, you're talking about a 25 to 100x savings But that's not to say that you should use your open weights for everything because sometimes you do need the more powerful weights.

Well, and we work with quite a few organizations. I wouldn't say it's the majority, but it's a decent enough number because they're publicly traded. Some of them have a lot of restrictions on what they're allowed to use when it comes to open source and what they're not allowed to use. Some companies are restricted on using technology, let's say from China and places like that that we work with. And what I always tell people in marketing is there's a big problem in which I see a lot of marketers using AI and specifically frontier models for really basic stuff. If you want to end up using the frontier models, use them for stuff that's more complex and what they're really needed for. You can use some of the older models which are much cheaper, or you can just use your subscriptions to get a lot of the basic stuff done and you don't need to pay the latest model released by Claude for something basic like keyword research. Like it's crazy on how much more expensive that's going to be versus paying an older model that can do just as good of a job.

Yeah, so let me show you the meme here that I like looking at. So the meme here is, let's see, it's this one over here. So Neil, do you see my screen? Right.

A saxophone? Oh no, it's a flamethrower.

It's a blowtorch. So this guy is using a blowtorch to light his big cigar, right? And so when you use frontier models to just do like a simple search, you are wasting tokens, right? So that's what Neil's ultimately talking about. So I think this meme goes a long way to explain that. Yeah.

And almost every single company we work with, especially the larger ones, they're very cost sensitive now to how much they're spending on AI because Most of them have not seen the revenue growth compared to the costs that they're spending.

You know what's interesting? So, Neil, I had a— I was on a chat last Monday, and so I'm in these like AI executive groups. And again, these are people that operate at, uh, you know, we're talking about 9-figure, 10-figure companies. And some of these people are like the AI transformation people, for example. So the topic of the conversation was, what's the ROI of AI and how are people managing it, right? Um, nobody really had good answers is what I'll say. It's like, You shouldn't manage token usage or measuring people on token usage is stupid, which I do agree, primarily on token usage is stupid. But nobody has a clear model right now. And then one of the people even said, why are we even trying to measure this? Because this is akin to the internet, which I think is wrong because this is not— the internet, by the way, costs you like— it's a flat cost that you're paying. But when you're paying API usage costs, it's not the same cost. You do have to measure it in some way. But also, when someone else like, oh, you know, measuring on time, estimated time saved is also not a smart thing because it's estimated time saved, right? So how do you measure it ultimately at the end of the day? I think it's still a conversation that we're having. But again, on a call with like 10, 12 people that think about this stuff all day, nobody had a good answer.

Isn't that interesting? It is. And even people who are really smart and sophisticated, I don't think there's an exact solution because I honestly don't think most companies have figured out how to use AI to create more revenue other than the AI companies or some really tech-forward companies. I believe the majority of organizations who have used AI and see financial ROI have seen it from cost savings, not necessarily revenue growth, and that's the harder one to tackle in which, yes, we all want cost savings, but what we really want is more revenue growth. Revenue fixes everything. Cost savings is definitely a plus, but how do you get more revenue from using AI? And there's some obvious ways like, hey, how about rank on ChatGPT? But when it comes to actually token costs and using it for work, what we're finding is companies are using it to get more done, but their customers are expecting more. So it's not like they can do the same amount as before or less and still make the same amount of revenue. And that's the conundrum. It's in theory, you should be able to get more growth, but because everyone's doing it, the customer's expecting more.

So what I would say is this, I find that measuring revenue per employee is a healthy way to look at it as of today. So one of the people on the call, their revenue per employee last year was $600,000. Today it's $1.2 million. And so I'm like, okay, There's some efficiencies there, right? And they're not necessarily looking to cut. I will say one more thing. The narratives that a lot of the CEOs that they worked for previously, all the CEOs were like, how do we cut more people? How do we cut more people? How do we cut more people? And they're all saying now that that doesn't work anymore and that they've like backtracked on that. And so I find that interesting. Like, by the way, you didn't see the founders in the room reacting to that much, right? But the people that were working at companies were like, yeah, you know, we had to backtrack on that. So I'm just reporting on kind of what happened in there. But I think revenue per employee is one thing. I will say one more thing too. With these single brain implementations that we've been doing right now, where we set up these agents, these managed agents, we've noticed that a lot of these calls, Neil, it's more like tech support now. So we've realized that a lot of these companies, even though we set these agents up in Slack, these marketing agents, they need a lot of support. And at a certain point, it's just like, whoa, like, why don't we just charge them on outcomes, right? Because it's like, you just want these outcomes. And then like, your team's not going to learn how to use this stuff, even though they live inside of Slack. And so what I kind of landed on, you know, talking to my CTO yesterday was like, you know, at the end of the day, with this AI stuff right now, maybe the edge is being on the cutting edge, right? And that is very much something that is It's an advantage because I remember reading a tweet. It's like, oh, um, if you're on Twitter right now and you're into AI, maybe you're 6 months behind Frontier Labs. Now the rest of the world is probably like way behind you, right? And so I— that's why I think that if you're in services right now, um, I don't care what service you're in, if you have the AI augmentation piece, if you're in services, there's gonna be more demand for your stuff because to Neil's point, the expectations keep getting higher and higher. So that actually means more people need to be hired.

I don't know if I said this on a previous podcast, but we're not really seeing too many customers saying, hey, we expect more because of AI now, do a lot more for less. Mm-hmm. We're seeing customers now focus on how do we grow more in this competitive market? What do we need to do to win? I'm not saying that doesn't mean they want more for less or whatnot, but the way they're describing their problems now is very different in which they're more focused on we need growth. What do we need to do to grow? Because if you're publicly traded or even if you're privately owned, You can increase your profitability, but if you can't grow your top line, people don't like that business as well. And you can measure things like revenue per employee and even profit per employee, but those metrics, depending on the company type you are, only take you so far. The reason I say that is a lot of the people listening to this Marketing School Podcast are global audiences. There's in many situations where you may decide to fire people in certain countries and hire 2 people in some other countries to get a little bit more done, but they may be a fourth of the price each. So your revenue per employee may decrease, but your overall— and your revenue or your profitability per employee may decrease, but your overall profitability may increase and your overall revenue may start growing because you're able to get more done due to the fact that you have total greater headcount, but you're paying them less per person.

So I think with any metric, you need to have a pairing metric. What I mean by that is you can say revenue per employee, that's one, but every metric by itself can be gamed, right? So if you do revenue per employee plus, to Neil's point, your growth rate, that's a good mix, right? And so I would just encourage you to look at that. And I think the key takeaway here is that nobody's quite figured it out yet. We're all kind of figuring it out as we go. So don't feel like you're that behind. So yeah, I think that's my take on it. Anything else you want to add to this?

No, and I think you nailed it with the very last point. You guys don't have to solve all these problems right away. These are— we're still really early into this whole AI revolution. You know, if it's a baseball analogy, I think we're only in the first or second inning, and I think we have a long way to go, and time will tell what happens. And I think for people to try to solve all their problems right now, especially when it comes to marketing and how you implement this technology, I wouldn't worry too much because it's changing so fast and there's going to be a lot of solutions that affect you for your whole corporation and not just marketing. So just be flexible, don't be tied to any one solution and just be patient.

Let me talk about something with OpenWaites because Jensen Huang, my Taiwanese brother, signed up for X. This is his first post. So before I call out the post at all, I just want to show you this. His first post got 64 million views. Okay, so you want to talk about all this personal brand stuff, and sure, Neil and I, we create content, um, you know, whether we like it or not is, is, is, is one thing. But I do enjoy hanging out with her. Like, it forces us to hang out. Like, that's a cool thing, right? But here's the thing. Does Jensen have to create content? No, not necessarily, right? He just— I'm oversimplifying it, but he creates a product that people want. Um, and then when he talks people pay attention, right? And it just so happens that it's one of the biggest revolutions right now, and he's at the forefront of it. So of course, he's going to get more views. But he put out an open letter on open weights. So he's just saying, look, man, open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation diffusion, and enable sovereignty. Because everyone's talking about AI sovereignty right now. You don't want to be just tied to one model. I just think this is great because he put this out there. He put this letter out there, but then immediately it got co-signed by Satya Nadella, It got co-signed by all these people. Even Sam Altman co-signed on it. The only company that didn't co-sign on it is who? Anthropic, right? Which I think is hilarious. So it's like a nice marketing play because he's here to support everyone. Like the OpenAI ecosystem helps NVIDIA, but he also wants to get everyone on side as well. And it also shows who's not on side.

Yeah. And for them, it benefits because he's selling the chips, right? So he's making money no matter what models you want to end up running.

He's good with whatever. So he needs both ecosystems, but I agree, like you shouldn't just have like a duopoly that control all the power. So, like, by the way, if you talked to Neil and I a year ago, I don't know about you, I don't want to speak for you, Neil, but you talked to me a year ago, like you asked, would I ever use open source models or whatever? I wouldn't even know what you're talking about, right? Not that I don't know what you're talking about, more so like, I wouldn't want to put the time into it. But now that it's such a big thing as it ties into our businesses, it doesn't make sense for me to not understand it. And so I would encourage you all to play with open source technologies, right? Like Buzz that just came out from Jack Dorsey, like that's open source. Hermes is open source. OpenCLAW is open source, right? Using these models like GLM 5.2 or KIMI K3, like these are all very powerful things. And then you combine them with what else you're using. And then the cool thing is I actually believe, Neil, that your company or my company, we're going to need to build our own language models, okay? So we might fork like a KIMI K3 that's close to frontier model, right? We might take our opinion, the data that we have on helping our clients grow their revenues, and we might make our own models, right? I think that's very much going to be a thing, just like other companies, like Cursor has done that. They forked a version of KIMI and they made their Composer, and they have a lot of data on people engineering and coding, and they made their own, right? So I think that's going to become more of a thing.

My opinion from a year ago, I still hold the same on it, in which I believe Microsoft and Google are eventually just going to undercut the market and give away a lot for free and let companies do a ton for free. And you're just going to be on their ecosystem and it's powered by all the other revenue that they make. And eventually they'll charge you some here and there. And yes, you can use different open source models or whatnot, but the Google versions and the Microsoft versions will be so cheap or affordable or free in some cases You won't care and you won't end up experimenting with a lot of this stuff. That's what I still believe is going to happen in the future. I just think it's a question of time because unlike a lot of these other AI companies, Google and Microsoft just make so much from their core business, they can just keep undercutting everyone on pricing.

So when I talked to the Google Ads team, so we had this conversation, they're like, so what do we need to do to get you guys to use Google more or whatever? I'm like, dude, everyone likes to use Google, but you guys need an MCP that's available to the public first and foremost so we can run these things, right? They're like, oh, okay. They're like, you know, we've been offering Gemini for free to these people. We're offering more tokens so they can use Gemini more. But a lot of these companies just laugh at us, right? And I was like, the reason they laugh at you right now, just right now, is because your models aren't good enough, right? And I said, look, people might be using Nano Banana, which is our image gen model, but ChatGPT Images 2 is really good, right? So I'm just saying, it's just a matter of you got to Neil's point. It's a matter of time. I believe you guys will catch up. But if you bundle poo-poo, like, I don't care if you bundle anything, it's just poo-poo, right? So not saying Gemini is complete poo-poo right now, but it's poo-poo compared to the frontier models. And so I think they'll get there. But it's just interesting that they're just— they are trying to do that. They're trying to bundle and they're trying to undercut, but they can't quite do it yet because the product is not quite good enough.

So, but on some of these things, I would have to say, Okay, William, go potty then. Use the bathroom in the theater.

No, William, don't potty. Potty on the ground.

So use the bathroom in the theater. So with some of these models, I have to say, like when you're having it do analysis, like I was having it review a cost seg model, it's for real estate and bonus depreciation. It's like some accounting thing.

Of course you were, Neil.

Of course. Gemini was the most accurate LLM out there for analysis by far.

Now, whether I think Gemini sucks or not is one thing, but I used it to plan a lot of my travel and like that was a last-minute trip to Italy last week and it did a really good job. I'll just say that.

Yeah. And when you do a cost seg, you pay a professional to also do it. So I, I had Gemini do it. I had Claude do it. I had ChatGPT, right? And I'm telling you, Gemini produced the best results.

And how off were the other ones by a factor of like what?

Okay, so let's just take a dollar amount. Let's say it was $100, right? Yeah. Gemini was off by $3, so 3%. Okay. ChatGPT and Claude, one of them, I don't know which one was what. One of them was off by 30-something percent. The other one was off by 50-something percent.

And we're not talking about $100 here, guys. We're talking about a lot of money.

So millions of dollars. With millions of dollars and something being off, it's like, no, this is not good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think, look, I think every model has— um, I will still, I will still say for today, Gemini is not quite there yet, and they've kind of delayed their new flagship model. I do think they're going to catch up. They're going to be fine. They have all the infrastructure in the world. Um, and to Neil's point, I do think they're going to undercut. But yeah, so I do want to call out something else. So if you look at Anthropic, okay, so a couple of like last year actually when we were speaking at the HubSpot conference, I called out how important MCPs were. MCPs are what? So MCPs are model context protocols, right? And, you know, it's basically like an enhanced version of an API. It was very expensive back then. It was very janky, right? And so it's like at a certain point I was like, okay, maybe we don't need to use MCPs anymore.

We need to use—

just use the APIs for that. Application Programming Interface. Let me tell you where I'm going with this. Anthropic just launched a new version of their MCPs, and I didn't understand all the technical jargon. So I'm going to explain why Anthropic's new MCPs matter for you, especially if you're in marketing, because I actually had a table made for me, Neil, and this is pretty cool. So I had a conversation with my friend Grok. Okay, so Grok, I was just like, hey, like, simplify this for me. I have ClickFlow, okay, and I have Carrot. And if we use the MCP, what are the practical implications there? Like, what do all these capabilities allow us to do? So keep in mind, new MCP came out, there's a lot more capabilities now. I actually think every software needs an MCP now, and they need to upgrade to this new version. Okay, so first and foremost, a new capability with Anthropic's MCPs is mid-process human approval clarification. Okay, so now, if within ClickFlow, which is where we have a content creator, So agent might start rewriting a declining page. So let's say the traffic's coming down, it can pause and ask, hey, do you prefer a more technical tone or more benefit-focused, right? And then it can continue and save the draft. Or Carrot, which is where we make LinkedIn account-based marketing ads, agent might generate personalized LinkedIn ads for 20 accounts, pause, and it asks, hey, approved is created for Company X, or regenerate with stronger social proof.

That's one.

Okay. I'm not going to go that entire list here, but You can have it run bulk jobs, which it couldn't before. Like, these things would just break. It would just break with like very fragile, right? Uh, reliable high-volume use case. Um, you can have team members, multiple agents running this. So you can use this inside of like Buzz, for example. Um, interactive previews. That's cool, right? So you can preview the live before and after page, um, and you— or you can like preview side-by-side ad creatives, right? So for Ubersuggest or Answer the Public, which is Neil's tools, or these tools that I have over here, you can just do a lot more here. Oh, It's cleaner for enterprise or team authentication. So easier SSO managed authentication. So my point of calling this out is that as a marketer, it's important for you to understand the enhanced capabilities of your software or whatever it is that you're building. And then these MCPs, by the way, other agents are going to find these capabilities and they're going to use them. And if they use them more and more, maybe there's going to be more, you know, maybe whatever tool that you have is going to become more popular. But I think As a marketer, it's helpful for you whenever someone tweets, oh, Anthropic just released this new thing. I just hit the Grok button. What does this mean for my businesses over here? What are the practical implications? Can you make a table here? And then I understand it and then I can disseminate this to my team. So don't get caught up just because you're quote unquote not technical.

Yeah. On a side note, you and I haven't talked about this in a while. We've been doing social media content for many, many years and A little, quite a little tangent from talking about AI, but we've been doing social media content for years, and I know every year we typically talk about what we're going to do with our social content. If I'm not mistaken, when I look at the end of 2025, we're now middle of a little bit past the middle of 2026. When I look at 2025, we both talked about ramping up content, focusing on quality, more personal-based content and less AI.

Yeah.

Right. And we're really focused on improving long-form, short-form, and just the overall quality, not necessarily chasing views, but chasing the right type of audience. How has your social media marketing gone for your own company, your own brand in 2026? And what adjustments have you had to make throughout the year?

Yeah, so that's a good question. The way my social works now, I'm actually just looking at the stats. So X, I'll go through the stats first. So X, usually we're averaging like 3 million views a month right now. And then Instagram, about 400K or so views. And then YouTube's about 235K. LinkedIn is 133K. And so if you add those up, let's just call it like 4 or 5 million a month, something like that. This doesn't include maybe some of these other channels. So that being said, that's what we're getting right now. Now, what's done better for me? is me focusing on how I'm using AI as it relates to marketing or me running my business. So I'm more so sharing how I'm doing it right now versus trying to do a bunch of these like podcast interviews with like, you know, finance, dating, or whatever. That's been better for me because when the new year started, when I saw the step change in AI, I just wanted to share what I was doing. And that's working out well for me because that's generating, you know, more leads for us and they're qualified leads and it's a thing that's in demand right now. Like, how do, how do people handle marketing, um, but also include AI? So that's been a boon for me because I happen to be interested, uh, and, and if because I'm interested, it's an easier time for me to create this content. So that's been me. Um, and one more thing I do, Neil, almost every week I basically do like a webinar, um, and I just share kind of how I'm building things. And the thing I do, I've noticed this, Neil, when I do the webinar, I'm a lot more excited. Like, like kind of how I am now, right? I'm a lot more engaging versus like, yeah, you know, here's what you should do for this, uh, the 5 things you should do for SEO, right? So, um, which I see you still doing, right? So, but like, but like, all joking aside, um, that's been good because we take the webinar and we tighten it and we have a hook in the beginning and we tighten that webinar into like a YouTube video and the engagement's a lot higher. And so we're going to do a lot more of that. So, uh, that's been me. How about you?

And wait to go back, a few more follow-up questions. What do you think your revenue growth, or what has your revenue growth been from a trailing 12 perspective over the previous trailing 12? Or if you look at Q1 over Q1 of last year?

I would say we're on track for about—

Percentage-wise?

30% or so.

So 30% revenue growth. I'm assuming bottom line is not 30% growth because you're reinvesting a lot.

Correct.

How much of that do you think is coming from your content, like on social?

When I asked the sales team, they're like, They think it's like 60, 70%.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So it's a pretty high percentage for you.

Yeah, but it's low for you. I know.

Yeah, it's low for me. So we've actually ramped up content more than what we thought we would've ramped up this year. We're going to ramp it up even more in the next, call it 2, 3 weeks. So we're going to go even more crazy when it comes to creating content. We found it to be decent for branding. We found the speaking to be better for branding. The reason we're ramping up content is it helps to stay top of mind. We don't see it working as well for revenue generation. I can't attribute what portion of our revenue comes from social. I haven't asked my sales team in a while, so I would be taking a guess here, but if I had a guess, Maybe 3%, 2%, 5% if I'm really lucky, but I think it's more closer to the 2%, 3% than it is on the 5%. The second thing that I would say is the reason we do it is it helps us get in the door more so for the type of clients we want. And I don't mean this in a positive or negative way. I think Eric and I are going after different company types and different contract sizes. And for that reason, I think social is more effective for mid-market and SMB. I think social isn't as effective for enterprise. And when I say enterprise, I'm not talking about just the logo. I'm also talking about the contract size. You can work with a really big company. Like, I don't know, Dior. A Dior and get a contract for $5,000. Even if you're working for LVMH, I don't know if Dior is owned by them, but let's just assume it is. Even if you're working with LVMH, who owns Louis Vuitton and a lot of the big brands out there, a $5,000 contract, just because they're an enterprise brand doesn't mean that contract's really enterprise contract, right? And I found that social isn't as effective for closing an enterprise deal, but it's very effective to get in the door. So you can attribute a portion of the sales to social, and that's why I give it in the single-digit percentile, because a lot of our revenue at this point is just coming from referrals or being in business long enough or other clients referring more clients. But I would still say social's effective, SEO's effective. Because when I look at all of those marketing channels that we're leveraging, I would probably say that it accounts for less than 30% of the revenue.

Yeah.

So when I say these percentages, it's also in a place where it's really skewed because a lot of our contracts are coming from referrals and RFPs and things of that nature where I'm guessing, I don't know Eric's revenue split, but I'm guessing 70+% of your revenue comes from marketing efforts and not referrals or RFPs, correct?

Yep.

So in that case, social would have a bigger impact. So same with the other marketing channels as well.

Yeah. And I would also say one more thing. Like the way we look at it right now is because we're doing more AI implementation as it relates to marketing and business, it obviously it's a newer thing, right? So people want to know like when you're doing the thought leadership stuff on like an X, for example, when you're writing long-form content, There's like a, there's a gap in that market. Like, for whatever reason, there's a lot of AI content creators, but there aren't many people that are operators talking about this stuff, right? So I've like, that's the gap that I'm in right now. And this stuff is going to expand over time. Like, it's a lot of this is very much land and expand right now. But I think it's a good fit for my demeanor and how I work in general. And there's still people that want services, but we're kind of, we're rapidly changing how we do things overall. And so I think it's It's just different. And I was trying to pull up something that shows like, um, like all the single brain leads are like 100% come from content, obviously. Um, but it's interesting how like some of you'll see from like newsletter, some are like direct, some will come from like X, some will come from, from YouTube or whatever. Um, it's kind of all over the place. Neil, do you know how many views you're getting per month across socials? Is it like 20 million, 30 million?

What do you think it is?

Like blended.

I have no idea.

So if I just look at YouTube, because that's the easiest one, I just—

let me just go to YouTube Studio.

I think yours is like 400 or 500K on YouTube, no?

Uh, I have no idea. I haven't checked in a while, dude, just being honest. Uh, let's see. Uh, dude, it's just easier to go to Social Blade.

Yeah, that's what I— so you should, you should just sign up for— by the way, shout out to Metricool. Metricool is awesome because you can combine all your socials, and the cool thing is you can use the API And I have a skill now, a trial reel skill, um, that basically will like pump out a bunch of trial reels and it'll schedule all the trial reels. And that's cool because the trial reels allow to show you like which hooks and overlays work well. And then I have the AI actually edit and put the hook in the beginning. Um, so these are all the things I mess around with. Go ahead, Neil.

So YouTube is 500,000. I don't know the others off the top of my head. Um, but let's call it— I don't think it's anywhere near 20 million what Eric's saying. I think I actually may be getting less views than you, and I'm pretty certain on that because there's no way I'm getting 3 million on X. And Eric's doing really well on the views because he nailed it. He's focusing on that vertical that, or that segment that's underserved right now, which is operators and business owners talking about how they're using AI to maximize their growth. And that segment is doing really well. I've avoided most of the AI content. I think Eric has seen that by, if you just look at my channels, I tend to focus on the boring, non-sexy content that generates us majority of our revenue right now. And we have a little bit different playbooks, and I'm not saying one is right or one is wrong or one's better than the other. My playbook is a little bit different, or the way I think about business is different than Eric. Eric is right now focusing to try to be the leader in a specific sector. And then he'll try to go and dominate that, let's say with a single brain type of company. My model is I keep doing what is making me my money. I keep trying to grow organically, and then I'll use the profits from whatever ends up working. So let's say there's 50 companies that are trying to do what Eric's doing. If that model ends up proving out to work really well within the next 12 to 2 years, 12 months to 2 years, I will go and I'll just buy one of them. So what I do is I focus on what's making us the majority of our revenue and profit, and I keep doubling down on that. The moment something gets traction, I don't shift my content focus to that. Instead, I shift my dollars to it and I just go and buy a competitor who's doing really well. And every year we go and try to buy multiple players in our space who are dominating a certain sector that we don't dominate that's done really well. And that creates a synergistic growth because I'm combining their revenue with mine, their profit with mine, but I'm selling my clients on their services and their clients on my services and products, which then creates more revenue and more EBITDA by combining the entities. So it's a very boring, ugly playbook, but I found that to work really well with me. And Eric knows this, my personality type is to never be the first to jump on anything. I just find out what's working and when it is really working and I'm 100% certain, I just push a ton of money towards it. And I found that to be easier than it is to build everything from scratch at this point for me.

So I'm actually doing something right now. I'm looking at Neil's webinar page because I know that Neil puts out— his topics are actually proven topics that convert, right? So I have it open up in 2 harnesses right now. One's Codex, one's Hermes. I was like, hey, look at how Neil formats his webinar topics. These convert well. How should we adopt these for our webinar topics? And then so it calls out yours and it's like, Neil's best performing format is urgent problem or contrarian insight plus specific business outcome plus proof mechanism outcome or proof of mechanism. So anyway, all that to say is if you guys are doing webinars right now, webinars convert both well for Neil's company, which is services, and my company as well. Now what Neil's saying too is, Keep in mind, a lot of you listening right now, most of you are like, well, how do I do that? Right? The thing is, you need to think about like where you are in your business lifecycle. And many of you are maybe not able to do it, or maybe you can go get some SBA financing and you can go buy some stuff. But you need to get to significant scale first before you can do this. And so you just, again, you need to think about the highest leverage thing that you can do right now. It just so happens to me that, right, at least right now, to Neil's point, There aren't many companies doing this. And so because I'm on top of this stuff, I might as well just go and do it. And it's been working out well for us. And so I think Neil can certainly buy and there's going to be businesses that are available to buy. I also think that this stuff is just moving so quickly right now and we've never seen anything move this quickly. But I don't think anything's wrong or right. I think it's just like, what strategy is right for you ultimately? But yeah.

Yeah, exactly right. And This strategy that I end up using plays really well to my strengths. And even when I was younger, I always looked for deals to buy. Like I bought Ubersuggest for $120,000 back in the day. You know, I've always been someone who likes buying. I bought Hello Bar back in the day. I ended up buying— I bought the assets from Kissmetrics when they were struggling and I merged them into Neil Patel. But I've always been someone who likes Acquiring and it's just my personality type.

Neil, check this out. So this is after analyzing your— so look at how Neil formats his webinar. And so how I adapt this for Single Grain. So topics I prioritize, and you can steal these too if you want. Anybody can steal these too, by the way. Getting excited isn't enough. How to turn AI visibility into pipeline. Like, oh, that's pretty good, right? Your AI tools aren't a problem. Your marketing memory is. Oh, that's pretty good too because we sell memory to write with our single brain gateway. The AI search traffic drop is here. How to grow pipeline when clicks— this is good. Neil, this is pretty good, isn't it?

Yeah, it is pretty good.

Yeah. So all that to say is I would also encourage this, as you guys listen to this, when this goes on YouTube, our Marketing School YouTube, take that video, go to youtubetotranscript.com, dump that in there, or you don't even need to do that anymore. You can just take the link, And say, hey, what are all the spikes that Neil and Eric are talking about? How can we apply this to our business and run it through whatever harness that you have? And you're going to be able to do better with your topics. Because again, why do I need to reinvent the wheel when I know that Neil painstakingly, when he, to his point, when he knows something works already, he's going to double or triple it. I already, like, it picks apart the patterns, right? And I'm like, oh, this is, Neil is indirectly or directly helping me make more money and generate more leads.

But by caveat, and I'm going to end up telling you this because I know what Eric did here and I think that's really smart. My client profile is also very different than Eric's client profile. So you just have to be careful because if he replicates it, which I don't mind, his pipeline conversion to a deal close is not going to be the same as mine because we choose topics that helps us get global contracts. Eric can't do global contracts because he doesn't have enough people in enough countries that some of these clients would like. So we had to adjust the topics that would work for that ideal customer profile that he's targeting.

By the way, that's true. I would also say one more thing. This is why on my ChatGPT, it doesn't have all of my— it doesn't have all my memory and my harnesses. Now, when I'm running it on Hermes, it's a different type of answer, right? So this one, it's more talking about pipeline and revenue, which still applies to my audiences.

Yeah.

But when I look at Hermes, for example, it hasn't— like, we audited 100 websites for AI search visibility. Here's what gets cited, SEO or EO, where should you invest your next, you know, X amount of dollars, how to build an AI marketing engine without adding more headcount. Like, these need to be massaged more, but your mileage may vary. So I just wanted to add that.

Yeah, or like we have topics that we do like on web analytics or tracking a whole funnel. I don't know if Eric has a data and analytics division.

Nope.

Right? So like the leads and the contracts wouldn't convert as well because he— and we're doing some of these topics specifically to generate revenue in some of these buckets.

So Neil, because we landed on this topic, we should talk about content versus paid ads. So more so organic content versus paid ads, because I was listening to a debate with these— one guy's really big on paid media, the other one's really big on organic content. And I'm just listening to these guys argue on this podcast and I'm just like, this is so stupid. Like, it's one guy's like, oh yeah, you know, with organic, you can't do X, Y, and Z on paid media. Like, you can scale to the moon and it's exponential. And then, you know, there's key man risk if you're doing organic. Like, while that all might be true, I think the answer at the end of the day, content versus paid ads, I think the answer is both.

Totally. We run paid ads, we do content. I think you should do everything that you can end up doing that's profitable. And this debate in marketing that's been going on for years, oh, this is better than this. Marketing is about what's better. Marketing is about what can I do that produces an ROI? And you do everything that produces an ROI and then you consider cutting the stuff that doesn't. The reason I say you consider cutting the stuff that doesn't, I put a chart out on this a while ago, or maybe it's not live yet. It was on—

Yeah.

X. I got the data from Nielsen and actually the chart goes out on it, I actually think tomorrow. Let's actually see. Yeah, it's scheduled for tomorrow. So I have a chart from Nielsen and it talks about how 1% increase in brand awareness reduces short-term CAC by roughly 1%.

Yeah.

So it's even. So a lot of things like branding and brand awareness that gets your brand out there. You're just like, man, we're investing all this money. We're trying to build a solid brand within our space, kind of like Nike, right? That's at least what we're trying to do. And it's expensive and it doesn't produce an immediate ROI, but in the long run, we do believe it'll reduce our CAC. It's just some of these things will show a negative ROI and you can use a lot of different tools or people or AI to help analyze some of these things and be like, oh no, you may need to cut this. It's differences of opinions and you need to figure out what works for you. Like you look at Airbnb, you go fly on any airplane, a lot of times on the TV monitors, you'll see commercials for Airbnb before the plane takes off. Or back in the day before Zappos got sold to Amazon, the shoe e-commerce site, in the TSA section, when you're going through the airport, you would have to take off your shoes. There was no TSA Pre back then. And there would be a tray and the tray had imprints of where you put your shoes and it would say Zappos. I thought that was very clever marketing and branding. It's not going to produce a direct ROI, but it gets their brand out there. And some of those things, you got to determine if your company wants to invest in them, even if it's too hard to showcase the ROI on it, at least in the first few years.

What do you think you're spending, rough range right now on paid media per month?

I don't know, for our own business?

Yeah.

Not much, maybe $3, $4, $5 million a year.

Yeah. So it's, it, and then when you think about the content, your content budget, what does it look like?

Content includes email and things like that, or, and website content, or are you just talking about social content or all?

All.

Maybe another $150,000 a month. So call it $1.8 million. So call it between everything, we spend maybe $5 to $7-ish million USD a year.

So I'm only asking Neil because it's about 28% of his overall marketing spend for his company, right? Just looking at organic and Paid. So you have 5 of the 7 goes to paid and then 2 of the 7, 28.5% goes to organic content, right? So it very much isn't like an or situation. I would say for us, we're not spending nearly enough as we should on paid and paid, like it works, right? Like both of them work. Why would you not do it more? And you guys are still running paid for your webinars too, right? I don't know.

And I know we have a 3rd marketing bucket that we didn't talk about, which is in-person. Let's call it another $1.5 to $2 million. So let's say we spend somewhere between $7 and $9-ish million. I'm rounding per year on marketing efforts. Yep. Great.

So that's, and by the way, like it's, we're not going to talk about percentages here because then you get back into your revenue, but we'll just leave it as usually the percentage should be a lot higher. So with your marketing.

Well, we don't spend as much because What we found is we actually used to invest more into marketing than we do now, but when you're moving upstream and your goal is to get, let's call it more global 1,000 contracts, a lot of marketing doesn't get you those contracts. What we found gets us those contracts faster is just buying companies in regions that we're not doing as well in, or we're not as big in, or we're not in at all. that have those contracts and then just landing and expanding and then taking their brand, doing a ton of press and marketing, how we acquired them, and then convert their name over into our name. And that ends up getting us what we're looking for. And it's just much quicker than spending all the dollars on marketing. And Eric nailed it earlier. I'm not saying that's the best approach or the worst approach. I've been an entrepreneur at this point for 25, 26 years. So I'm able to do a lot of this kind of stuff where I wasn't financially able to do this stuff like 10, 15 years ago as much. And it's just easier for me to do this kind of stuff than it is to build it from scratch and spend the money. Because the issue that we face, and you guys all know this, when you're doing marketing, not only does it cost money, but it takes a long time. And we found, and it, for us at our scale, It does help us grow, but it takes us longer to get growth than it does to just go and buy it. So we found it to be easier to just buy the growth combined with doing organic marketing.

Yep.

All right.

So that actually, we're talking about ROI, right? So Neil, I wanted to call this, I saw this this morning when I was at the gym, but I wanted to show you this because let's talk about the ROI of podcasting because you and I, we've been doing this podcast, it's got to be close to 10 years now. Which is kind of insane to say because it's gone by so quickly. But these are the highest paid podcasters here, okay? So this is from Forbes. So Joe Rogan, $82 million, right? And then you have TBPN, which is bought out by OpenAI. So apparently it's, I guess it's $70 million. And then Diary of a CEO, I didn't know it was $45 million a year. Ashley Flowers, Crime Junkie, $42 million. That's crazy. Like, just these numbers are crazy. Smartless, $37 million. Here's some other ones that you probably have seen. So Andrew Huberman, $18 million a year, and you have Scott Galloway, $19 million, Tucker Carlson, $20 million or so, right? So I think this is really interesting, but—

Didn't Andrew Huberman get in trouble for something? I don't know, Epstein or something like that? He didn't.

No, that was Peter Attia.

That was the other one.

Yeah. So what's interesting to me is like, these are very much all personalities. I will say Scott Galloway is definitely an entrepreneur. Andrew Huberman's partnered with a lot of people. I'm trying to look at who else here would be considered an entrepreneur, Neil. Um, who do you see?

They're all entrepreneurs at this point.

Yeah, well, I guess so. They're probably invested in a lot of things. But, um, the reason— what I'm really saying is like, who here is a business operator, right? Um, you could argue that these 2 probably are business operators, and Steven's been a business operator as well. But also, you know, you can— this is really healthy revenue, like I'll say that. Um, but, you know, how many people can we say that have podcasts that have led to Um, you know, large, large organizations that they've been able to build.

Yeah. And you look at this, the number 1 podcast rated here, and this is probably just looking at English. There could be some other languages that people may be dominating, like in Chinese or Mandarin, or Mandarin, but in China specifically, um, that could be making more. I don't know. Uh, but you nailed it. I look at market cap, and when I look at ad agencies, it's like I can't even count on 2 hands. It won't even fit for all the ad agencies I know doing 9 figures plus in revenue. There's so many of them, you can't even count them. And there's so many of them that I never even heard their names before. It's just such a massive market. And what I found is it's easier to just go and go into a big market and be a small fish than it is to go into a smaller market and try to be one of the bigger fishes.

Yep. And I think at least for— I'm speaking for you again, correct me if I'm wrong here, but like, I enjoy the operating piece more than the content creation piece. As much as I enjoy and love doing this podcast, it's good. It's been fun. And surely it's definitely helped. I just want to call that the way we're doing it right now is very much to generate more brand awareness ultimately, and it's to help our businesses primarily. So we're operators first, content creators second.

Yeah, same with me. Look, I don't mind creating content. I think it's fun, especially this podcast, because Eric and I have been friends for such a long time. Some of the content that I create, I don't always enjoy, just being transparent, because sometimes you have to create stuff that you don't want to create. But it's just like being an entrepreneur. You're going to always have to do stuff that you don't like. It's the nature of the game. My kid's watching TV. I don't know if you heard the yelling.

I heard that.

But yeah, I spend more time on M&A and I enjoy it because it's like, oh, I found this company. Oh, they're doing $12 million in revenue and they really want to sell and I can get a deal that works out for them and me. And I'm like, cool. It moves the needle much more. It's just like to organically generate $12 million in revenue takes a lot longer. And it's like, wait, how many of these can I buy a year? And then I found that it just works better for me, but you just got to figure out what you want to end up doing. And I look at a lot of these things as they're all intertwined. It's just like, wait, I can buy a company that's doing really well but is doing a crappy job marketing themselves, and I can just put more fuel on the fire and do better on their marketing.

It's all different games, and there's different levels to the games. Um, and so the, the challenge is if you're all in as a content creator— and then there's no knock, but I'm just saying the challenge with being a content creator. So like, if William wants to be a content creator, for example, he wants to be an influencer, you got to go deeper and deeper. And people start telling you all these things to do, like when daddy has to tell you what do, William, and you have to listen to him, right? That's not fun, right? So like, but when you're an operator, you kind of get to march to the beat of your own drum. And so I think it's, there's no perfect solution, right? There's only trade-offs at the end of the day. And I prefer to deal with the trade-offs that we have to deal with right now. So there's no right or wrong, it's just what your preference is. So Neil, the final thing I think we can touch upon here before we go, I talked about earlier about recruiting versus management. So we just did content versus paid ads. And so I kind of said, hey, look, if you don't want to deal with as many people headaches, you should spend more time on recruiting. When I say you, I really mean your organization. So if you're starting out, maybe it's you in the beginning, but I've just found that recruiting, especially when you're smaller, it is one of the highest leverage activities because, Neil, let's just look at you for a second. When you brought in the CEO, how much did it just change the trajectory of your organization?

It changed a lot. And I was having a conversation with him yesterday because we were going over some deals and he was telling me, because I'm the one who starts a lot of the M&A conversations and I pass it to a team. We have a team that does M&A as well. And he messaged me because he's a CEO and he's very direct with me. He's like, hey, I know you're looking at some deals that you may end up liking. The team has some hesitations on some of the deals that you may end up liking. And I was like, I'm like, look, dude, you know, I try not to interfere. He's like, yeah. He's like, you let me run the show. And he's like, it's been a great relationship. And he's like, yeah. So I'm like, here's the thing. I'm just here to find deals and I'll tell you which ones financially I'm okay with. You guys can decide which ones you want to do, or you guys can bring more to the table. I'll never tell you which ones to buy, but I have the right to veto if I don't want to spend my own money on something. He's like, totally agree. But I'm like, I'm never going to have you do something that you don't want because you're going to have to end up running it anyways. He's like, cool. He's like, I figured. And I'm like, yeah, we're on the same page. He's like, yeah. He's like, the team was just telling me. I'm like, yeah. I'm like, no need to worry. He's like, I figured. But he's like, I just want to have a conversation with you on it. But that example there, on a day-to-day basis, like Eric knows I had a family emergency come up, so I had to watch my kids. by myself for, I don't know how long. It could be a few days, it could be a week or two until things get sorted here. And all of a sudden I'm able to drop everything and my team deals with anything and nothing skips a beat. I was on a Disney cruise for— one minute, William. I was on a Disney cruise for roughly a week and I barely did any work and nothing skipped a beat. Right. And like what Eric pointed out, recruiting, spending the right time getting the right people is priceless.

Yep. And by the way, I'll just say this. When you found the right person, there's no need to wait a month or whatever. Usually you'll see in the first week or two if they're that damn good. That's what I found.

Yeah. And I'll try to get them right away, but sometimes getting the right people, what I found, especially if they're higher up, uh, it takes a while because sometimes in their contracts they have really long notice periods where sometimes some of them even have to give like 6 months to 9-month notice periods. It's ridiculously long.

But my point, Neil, is when you know someone's really good, they deliver something in the first week or two, right? Remember you had to fire that one guy, the mustache guy, and you fired him within the first week or two?

Yeah, I feel bad that I had to do that, but yes.

Yeah, you—

I didn't mean to laugh about that, but it didn't work right away. Exactly too.

Like, it's, it's once you got the feeling, that feeling's almost never wrong. In fact, that feeling has never been wrong for me, Neil. Has it been wrong for you?

No.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's food for thought for you all. Like, I know we're talking about marketing here, but the more time you spend time on recruiting amazing marketing or salespeople, or really anybody, the less time you have to manage. Because the best people, they don't want to be managed, right? They want to— they want to— like, to Neil's point, Neil's CEO, you let me do my own thing. That's the key, right? People don't want— like, the greatest people don't want to be told what to do if you want to work with the greatest people. So That is it for today, and we will see you tomorrow.