How AI Can Predict Sales With 90% Accuracy

All right, Neil, let me tell you this, okay? Let me tell you how Claude Code will replace your marketing team. I'm going to give you some examples here because I've been on this Claude Code train. One of our mutual friends, he messaged me every day now. He's like, I wish I could just replace everyone. He's like, these 400 people gone, all these people going to be fired soon, right? And I'm just like, I ran this because we just relaunched ClickFlow today. Remember the SEO product that we had?

Mm-hmm.

So I wanted a go-to-market plan for ClickFlow, but you know how much a go-to-market plan would typically cost if you have someone that's writing your email funnels, like onboarding emails, abandoned emails, you know, churn save and all these emails, right? The landing page copy, all these things. You're probably paying a go-to-market person who's good, maybe $20,000 to $30,000 for this, right?

Yeah.

So at minimum. So I basically had it interview me. I said, here's what I'm trying to do. Here's what the goals for this thing are. And it asked me like 10 questions and I used Claude Code to spit this out and it put it in these neat folders, okay? And I read through the onboarding emails, abandoned cart, all these things. It basically was 95% there. It doesn't even look like AI copy. Even the sales emails, the presale emails were good. I'm like, oh my God. So the prompt I put out to X was like, if I can create this go-to-market plan quickly, like what happens to not all marketers, what happens to most marketers, right? And I just threw this out there 'cause it's like, you still need people to do this stuff, right? But you need very high agency people to manage these things. And I was like, that is just one example where I'm just like, you know, the coders have already seen the light, right? They've already seen that. Jensen said this, Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, he was like, you know, if people are still coding, he was like, I would prefer my engineers don't code so they can work on higher leverage things, right? And so my question is, you know, What happens to most marketers?

So before I answer that question, I'm going to give you the code example, and this is a little bit tangent, but then I'll answer the marketing one. I was talking to Hiten yesterday and we were talking about, you know, all these apps, right? Like Claude and all this kind of stuff that helps engineers and people just be more efficient. And he was telling me something interesting. He's chosen historically as an entrepreneur to mainly only hire senior-level engineers. He doesn't like dealing with junior level or mid-level as much, so he prefers senior level.

Why? You should explain why.

And the reason being is he finds it much more efficient use of his time. They can just figure things out on their own. You need less of them. And now with AI, he's just like, they're so much more efficient. You don't need big teams. It's not about just hiring tons of engineers, it's about hiring the best ones and then giving them these tools and letting them go. And the reason I bring up this tangent, I think marketing is going to be somewhere, Similar. So I'll give you an example between me and my co-founder, Mike Kamo. He understands marketing, that's not his specialty, but would you—

He's a pretty good marketer.

But would you agree he's really good at sales?

He's an excellent salesperson.

And persuasion and figuring out what to say to convince people?

Yes, yes.

So sometimes when I'm writing out emails for partnerships and stuff like that, I will send it to Mike, because all cold emails still to this day, I don't know if I told you, I probably send at least one cold email a day. It's on my like to-do. Every day I try to send out minimum one cold email or I don't feel asleep. Really? I didn't know that.

Uh-huh.

But most of it's for partnerships or Or maybe sometimes a deal? Uh, no, no, this is for revenue generation.

Okay.

So it could be partnering with a company that could drive revenue, or it could be pitching a company and trying to get them as a customer.

Yeah, got it.

Those are usually the main 2. So I send some of my emails to Mike when they're really important and I know the person probably has a high likelihood of responding and it's a big company, like let's call it, you know, 20, 30, 50, 100, multiple hundred billion, even trillion. And I know the person who's in charge, I know they're probably going to respond. I'll have them review it and fine-tune it. He loves taking everything and running it through AI, ChatGPT, Grok, you name it, he tries them all. How many times do you think I use his email copy when he modifies mine through AI? Through AI?

I don't— you're a really picky person. Maybe 50% of the time.

Close, but in a different way.

Okay.

I never really use any of his copy, but AI sometimes words things in a different way or adds another point.

Yeah.

And then I may take that.

You'll build on it.

I'll build on it.

Yeah. So you're really using it to help form or give you ideas, like you're pulling ideas from it and you're building on those.

Yes. The problem with AI that I see right now in marketing and Junior-level marketers and entry-level marketers and maybe some mid-level marketers, what they don't understand on certain things like copywriting, and that's an easy one to use because everyone uses AI for text-based copy, or a lot of people do. It makes crap too wordy. It adds in too many dashes and fluff. It tries to sell you sometimes too hard instead of just being very direct and showing that I'm coming from a place of authority or confidence, or people should just want my product and here's why. I found that it does a terrible job in copywriting. A lot of junior people send me stuff and mid-level, and they don't know. I'm not talking about people in my company because they've learned their lesson by now. I'm talking about from external people, and I can tell it's written by AI, and they don't know that I know, and it's just so obvious for me. And I'm like, dude, this is just crap. I do think it'll replace the junior-level people really much more easily. I don't see AI replacing the high level, like people like you and me, and I don't see it replacing the good mid-level people. I think it just adds to it. Like, you know, I think what we should talk about next is you've used AI for a year, 2 years heavily. I would say a year really heavily, like super heavily, maybe a year.

I would say I've been pretty big on it. Yeah, let's just go a year heavily, but pretty heavily already the last 2, 3 years.

Okay, so I want to ask you something and I want you to really describe it. Go and describe your day in detail, not the cold plunges. I get the screenshots from you sometimes in the morning, or it's a sauna.

I don't send screenshots to you.

It's a sauna. That's weird.

Guys, I posted Instagram stories.

Oh yeah, that's what I see. But it's a sauna and you'll put like a time on there, like 5:00 AM or 5:05 or whatever.

Yeah, I like that stuff.

Okay. Which I actually think is really good for you. At least the articles you sent me show it is. Talk about how your life used to be on a daily basis. Okay. Like really daily basis as a marketer, not running your company, but what you would do in marketing. And now break down what your life is on a daily basis now from a marketing aspect a year later, not the in-between, but that way we can see the drastic difference.

Yeah. Okay. So this is, this is good because a year ago we had the fires going on. So that's a nice starting off point.

Minus the fires. Eric is not saying—

I'm not saying the fires were good. I'm just saying, I just remember that. So, and thank you for that. One thing before I answer, Neil, so just to kind of close the loop on how Claude Code can replace your marketing team, what we're really saying is high agency people will never be replaced. And what it really comes down to when you say good, my definition of good ultimately comes down to someone who has a bias to action. Because if you think of all the good people you work with, like, you know, in the past you would say execute, actually quick executor, fast executor, right? Everything comes down to bias to action. Mike, strong bias to action, right? Anybody you worked with that you worked with for a while, I would say has had that strong bias to action, correct?

Yes.

That's what we really mean by good. And so anybody that has strong bias to action, you're not going to get replaced. You're going to be fine. Why are you smiling?

No, it just gives me— I'm actually thinking of a scenario of someone. When you're talking about replacing, I'm actually thinking of someone right now.

Okay. All right. Well, anyway.

Okay.

So let me ask you a question. So a year ago, let me think about this. So when I was using AI a year ago, There was no Claude code. I was mainly using it to— because ChatGPT had recently introduced memory. And so I was going through like a relationship thing. Okay, so I was constantly using it as my therapist at the time because it had memory, right? I was using it for advice. I was using it for basic use.

Sorry, can we slow back and go back? Because I missed like half of it. Yeah, I didn't understand what you were saying. Okay, you were saying there was no Claude code a year ago, and then you started using it for what?

Okay, let me back up. So a year ago when I was using AI, let's just call it 2025 Eric, okay? I was using AI mainly to use ChatGPT for therapy, okay? I was using it to track my diet. I was using it for calorie counts, things like that. Very, I would say rudimentary stuff. I might use it for copy and things like that. I might, and as the year went by, I started to use it for helping me scan legal documents and things like just to give me the key takeaways and things like that, right? From a marketing angle, yes, it helped me with copy. But to your point, the copy was very— there's a lot of em dashes. You can just see the very first sentence, it reads like an AI, you know, piece of content. It wasn't until— and I'll be very honest, it wasn't until actually 4 or 5 weeks ago, Neil, during the holiday break, when Claude Code actually unlocked everything, right? Maybe I can hold off a little bit, but it was at that point where I was like, oh my God, I can build anything now. And that has what changed my workflow completely. I would say in the last 4 or 5 weeks ago. Now I get anxiety if I don't get to use Claude Code at least for a little bit, for at least 2, 3 hours a day. One hour, like you think you're going to use it for 30 minutes and it ends up being like 3 to 4 hours.

So let's go back and let's make this a little bit actionable.

Yeah.

Okay. You do more than marketing, but you do marketing yourself and you have employees who are marketers. What do you expect? What are you expecting from an employee right now? Let's say someone doing SEO. Let's, let's just use that example because that's where we both started using SEO. What would you expect them to use AI on a daily basis for specifically?

Yeah, I'm going to answer this and then I'm going to give you, because now I'm thinking about specific use cases for me in the last year. So I'll come back to that, but this one I'll answer. So our SEO team right now, they're expected to use ClickFlow, which is our internal SEO tool. So I was actually sitting in an SEO meeting this week because I wanted to ask them about product feedback. I'm like, okay guys, You guys are using this how much percent of the time, right? They're like, oh, like 80, 90% of the time. I'm like, okay, how much time are you saving with this, this ClickFlow thing? Copywriters, 90 hours a month, okay, per person. And then, so they're using a combination of ClickFlow to help with content, with internal linking and things like that. And we're also, they're also using Mannis, which is a general agent to help with keyword research. Mannis just, you know, did a partnership with SimilarWeb.

Didn't they get bought out by Facebook?

They did, but then, you know, China is trying to stop that, right? It was like, well, you didn't, quite, you know, divest properly. So we don't know, we're gonna have to invest— investigate this. So all that to say, it's really those 2 things right now. So any keyword research strategy stuff, hey, what's happening with these competitors, that kind of happens with Manus. Obviously, they still need to talk to clients and things like that too. And then I would say the other piece around content mainly comes from ClickFlow, internal linking, and, you know, updating, deleting, consolidating.

Yeah.

Yeah. But that was very recent, maybe the last couple months or so. Now, now that I remember some of the things I did last year, do you want me to answer some of those?

Yes. Okay.

So in 2025, I was— and Neil pays for all these things too, I think, even though we're both cheap. So—

Sadly, I do. I see the bills. It makes me cry every month.

So we both pay— I'm speaking for you. We both pay $200 a month for ChatGPT, the pro version, just because you can—

there's—

do you pay $200 a month?

I don't know how much I pay. I just know it goes on the corporation and I just know it's expensive.

Yeah. So $200 a month. is the individual plan. Okay. We both— so I pay— I was already paying, I think, $100 a month for Claude for Max.

Okay.

And I was paying Perplexity $20 a month because the deep research is really good. So I use Perplexity for deep research, finding things quickly. I use Gemini for image generation and video and then for studying YouTube videos too. Right. This was 2025, Eric. And then ChatGPT, it's more like general questions or let's say if I'm— I use Granola. So if I'm arguing with you about something, I might just turn Granola on and I will just see who's right. It pisses people off. It pisses— in relationships, it really pisses people off. So I don't try to do that that much.

I'm not going to try that one. I'm married.

Yeah, yeah, you don't do that one. That'll get you in trouble no matter what.

I'm going to lose either way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like I've just given up on that in relationships. But what I do, by the way, like I used Granola yesterday, like I was having a debate with someone and like it called out where I was wrong and where they were wrong. And we talked about it today and we both apologized for where we were wrong, right? So it's good for solving problems.

That's great.

Yeah. So, 'cause you have like a, you know, an arbiter in there that doesn't really care about you or the other person. It's just listening.

So all that to say, That was last year, okay?

Now, and there's other tools too, but we'll just leave it at that. In the last 4 weeks or so, I use Claude Code and all these MCPs where it connects with like the tools like HubSpot, Ahrefs, Gong, and I built like a deal reviver that will surface, you know, deals that we lost maybe 12 months ago or so. It'll show the deal size and it'll show why we lost the deal, and it has an email crafted that looks like it's a very good email. You would open it, right? It's like, hey, you know, Neil, we connected 12 months ago. I just saw the announcement on this funding round. Congrats. Does it make sense for us to reconnect? Eric. That's not bad, right? It's not 100%, but it's not bad. And so the team now can click in Slack, they can select what they want, and they can just hit send email, and it'll send the email out, and then it'll record it to HubSpot. But that's an MVP, that's a prototype that I built. Just like sometimes I'll be in line at Sweetgreen, I'll just be building, right? Or I'll be on my couch, I just open my phone, it's building, right? And then sometimes I can't stand watching TV anymore. And I'll just go to my computer room until it's about time to go to bed. Like the other day, I was gonna watch TV, it was 6 PM, then it's holy shit, it's 9:30. And I was just on Claude Code the whole time building stuff in parallel. So my point now is, the way I use it is to solve problems in my organization, which I couldn't do before. It's extremely high leverage. And I was asking it, I was like, hey, The work that we did today, how much work did I do as one person? What is it equivalent to? It's like, you did the work of 5 engineers today, right? I was like, okay, break down the math for me. It's like, well, X, Y, and Z, but also I think I broke down the math to you last time. How long did it take for you to get a prototype done before, like a working prototype where you can mess around with for software?

For me, are you talking about using AI or having my team do it?

Just having your team build it in the past, like a year ago.

Working prototype being designed that you can click around or one that actually functions? Because, you know, in the design apps, I forgot what the one we use.

InVision or—

Not InVision.

Balsamiq?

Not Balsamiq. Is it InVision?

The wireframe stuff? That's what you're talking about?

No, it's actually a design you can click around.

You're talking Figma.

Figma.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So usually I'll see stuff in less than a week.

Okay. So that's for a pro— like a Figma?

For a Figma.

Okay. How about a click around? You can do stuff.

Click around and do stuff where you actually see different results. Like if you put in a URL. Usually 30 to 60 days, sadly.

Okay, so let's just say 30 days, okay? Now get this, I'm being— okay, let's say I can get these prototypes out in 20% of the day, okay? We can be conservative here, but if 20% of a day on 30 days, 30 days divided by 0.2 is 150, okay? So you can say I'm either 150 times faster, or you can argue that I'm infinitely faster now because I don't have coding abilities, right? But you and I do have strategic abilities, and we see the entire battlefield with our companies. To me, that working prototype, the deal reviver, the ability to spot client expansion, client churn opportunities and see what exactly they said and why we should be pitching this or whatever, and then sending that to the team and seeing if they take action on it. I've built all that, all of that, right? And that's why I'm so excited for you because once I inject you with this drug or you inject yourself with this drug, there's no turning back. You're going to be messaging me. We're just going to be doing this all the time because our mutual friend, we're just doing that every day. And he's like, I feel like a loser right now. I can't believe I'm in these meetings. I'm like, I can't believe I'm in these meetings too.

Yeah.

It's just so fun right now.

You know, for the sake of me, and you've known me for a long time, I don't know how many years, but it's well over 10, 15 plus?

15, 16 years. Yeah.

Okay. I can't get the life of me to spend more than 30 minutes a day using these tools. I agree they make me more efficient as a marketer, but I find my highest use of time Just doing deals more than anything else. So these tools are great and I have my team using them all day long. Engineers, marketers, product people, even customer success.

Right.

Because we can input all the satisfied people, all the unsatisfied people, learn from it, have AI help with the responses and train our people. There's a lot that you can end up doing with these products. But I still find my highest use or best leverage for my time is just focusing on closing deals.

I don't disagree with you, but I'm willing to bet you, I'm willing to bet you a really nice meal in 12 months or so, you're going to be using this because, and this is, and let me come back to your response too, because I do, I will say Neil typically is, I'm more on the optimistic side, sometimes too optimistic. Sometimes Neil's on the pessimistic side, sometimes too pessimistic. It's a good balance, right? But what I would say is, Let's say I agree with you. Your highest leverage thing is doing deals, right? Whether it's, you know, whether it's an M&A transaction or like a deal, like a business transaction, like a sales transaction or a partnership. I do agree with that. This type, like, let's say that's true. What are all the things that bother you with that process right now that would be able to help you gain even more leverage there? That's how I look at it. How can I gain leverage on all these things? And that's how my friends look at it. I'm like, what are you building right now? Because arguably he should, he shouldn't be doing what he's doing right now. But I'm like, so what are you building? He's like, everything's around product right now. And It is, it's going to save him a lot on headcount, but he's like, dude, this is supercharging everything we're going to build.

So my team, Caio helped build a lot of the automation to scrape, get lists, send first cold emails for M&A. So we've already built a lot of this stuff and we're using AI for a lot of the grunt work that we hated hiring people for, or, you know, that I would just manually go on LinkedIn and go look for companies. And a lot of that's done. The main way I use AI to make deals happen is I go and do research. And when I say research is I'll ask ChatGPT questions or, you know, AI mode questions or Gemini, whatever you want to end up calling any of these products. And what I found is there are often many cases. So for example, sometimes I'm doing deals where you're structuring them and it involves tax consequences. And I was talking to ChatGPT a few days ago about a potential deal, and it was just like, oh, it's not going to be tax favorable for you because with the Trump tax bill, bonus depreciation in 2026 is only 40%. And I'm like, what the heck are they talking about? It's been known for a long time that he renewed the bill and it's now 100% for bonus depreciation.

Mm-hmm.

Right? And it carried back all the way towards, I think, January 20th or something like that, or whenever he got signed into office. But I was like, what the heck is ChatGPT talking about? What I find is these tools produce a lot of inaccurate information. Luckily for me, I'm using them for research on topics that I'm already familiar with, but there's nuances on laws and taxation for states versus federal, and every state is different. But I'm able to catch some of this stuff. But other than that, like, that's the main thing I want fixed, and I hope that they'll be able to fix this stuff within a matter of a few years. I find that Google, tends to actually be more accurate than ChatGPT, believe it or not.

I believe it. You know, did you watch the— remember I sent you that Elon interview, the 3-hour one he did? Did you watch the whole thing?

No. Okay.

So he does say something in there where he's like, and I think he brings up a really good point here with the company, especially the larger you are, the more inertia there's going to be, right? The less willingness to change there's going to be. So he's like, look, the AI adoption stuff, there's going to be a situation right now where the companies that are really on top of it versus the inertia of companies that are not, they're going to be able to run circles around the ones that And he's like, naturally, there's gonna be inertia. But his whole stance, like, if you haven't listened to that one, is basically, most working will be optional in the future, which he said quite a bit, right? There's gonna be a lot of robots, things like that. I think my take on this Claude code thing is this is probably the first time, like, the way we were using it previously, it's like, okay, use it for strategy, tax strategy and all that. You want to hallucinate less talking to it back and forth. Now it's just like, oh my God, I can— any product that you build, it's not— you and I are human beings, we're flawed, right? But a product is going to continue to improve over time. You can keep compounding on it over time. And if you can have multiple fires in the iron, irons in the fire, where you can compound them for the highest leverage things that you want to do, the more people that do this, my God, like, this is the first time— it's funny, he's making fun of me, right? He's like, you know, you call out all these trends and then I have to give it to you. This is like, This is like when you called out Bitcoin, right? It's like you're on top of it. He's like, most of the time, a lot of stuff you say are stupid trends, but this is like, you're right on it.

Wait, who's saying that to you?

Our mutual telecoms friend. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's generally a skeptical person too.

No, I'm with you. I'm 110% sold on AI.

I just need to get you to use it.

No, so much so that I push all my executives really hard to implement and Every week I have a call with them on how much more did we implement and what were the results? Every single week they get the question. And what I like doing is I like calling them all separately to just see what sounds like—

See if it's consistent. Yeah. And then what different— Well, that's good. I recommend if, if most people can do that, that would be great. But the other thing, Neil, if you actually do this for a little bit, I guarantee you're going to grow much faster. Guaranteed. Guaranteed.

And you're probably right. I just find if I spend the majority of my day doing deals, I make the most amount of money from that.

It's okay.

You're going to touch this at some point and you'll be like, Eric, you were right.

Swear on my life, you're going to grow a lot faster. Swear on my life. Swear on Noah's life too.

Okay. So, so, so here's the question. I'm pitching a 9-figure deal right now. Uh-huh. 9-figure in revenue for me, right?

9-figure revenue for your company. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Long shot. I'm talking to the right person who can make the decision. Yep. All right. It's hard for me to get that kind of leverage using AI.

I think in that case, the human part is good.

You're good. You get what I mean, right? Like I'm trying to focus on, I'm spending most of my time right now on minimum mid-7-figure deals all the way up to 9 and only have one 9-figure deal that I'm working on. I'm trying to get another one in the works, but I'm spending my time on mid-7 all the way up to, you know, well into the 8 figures. Like it's hard for me to use AI and create those kind of efficiencies. I close a handful of them a year or 6 or 7.

It's a great year.

It's a great year. And that's just new business that I'm bringing, not anyone else on my team.

What part of your day pisses you off right now, or what part of your day do you feel like you're wasting your time?

The biggest time, the biggest thing that pisses me off is picking my kids up in school and waiting in the, and picking, waiting in the car line. So it's, so it's the driving that irritates me. I used to have a driver. I'm trying to be more down to earth and do everything myself. Uh, I'm really thinking about getting that Tesla Model Y. They're so expensive. It's like $60 grand or $50 grand. No, they're not.

You can lease it now.

Yeah, but it's $500 a month.

Oh my God.

Or $1,000 a month or something.

What are your other cars?

Let's not talk about it.

Exactly. I'll mention the Honda Odyssey. Exactly. Exactly. So then, uh, you know, if you had the Model Y, it would just drive you to CarLife.

That's what I'm thinking. So then I'm like, I won't be as pissed off. And then I'm just, some things I'm really stuck in my ways, as you know.

This proves it right here. For $500 to solve the problem that pisses you off, you won't do it.

Yeah, 'cause it's just out of principle.

Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Uh, it's, it's to teach my kids really that daddy lives a normal life or can live a normal life. You should work hard. Like it's—

The world they're gonna live in, they, driving will be illegal.

That's true. But like, they hate my car so much, or they hate the Honda.

Okay.

Okay. Like I'm trying to teach 'em that.

Is it embarrassing when they're, they're To other kids? Like, do they feel embarrassed because other kids have crazier cars?

No, but my, my son especially is like, this is so slow. I can't believe it. Or he'd be like, I got to drive with daddy. He's such a slow driver. I want to teach him life doesn't— everything doesn't have to be glamorous. I'm not willing to cut back on my home.

Yeah. Right.

Like, I like living in comfort. I'm not willing to cut back on like having someone clean my home every day and stuff like that. But like, I'm trying to cut back in areas that matter to my kids, like a car. Like my son's addicted to cars. I don't really care about cars, but the reason I was thinking about the Tesla Model Y, so I go to the car line early because I don't want to be on the back because then it takes me even longer to pick up the kids. So I leave earlier so that I'm sitting in the car line and the Tesla has a screen. I'm like, oh, I could just watch a movie on there while the car's parked for a while. And I'm addicted to trying to be the first car in line. And I've mapped out every single day.

It's like a competition though.

It's a competition. And I figured out I need to leave roughly an hour and 20 minutes before pickup to be the first car in line. So it'll give me around, call it like 56-ish minutes. And then I think it can be the first car in line. I'm not willing to sit there for 56 minutes.

So how long do you wait in car line or to pick? How long does that process last every day?

I figured out the position I'm in. If I leave 45 to 50 minutes earlier, Okay. I'm in the first batch of the car line where when they open up the gate where cars can drive in, I'm in that group where my kid can get in.

So give or take, this takes you 90 minutes to 2 hours every day, right?

Uh, more because I have to go there, come back.

3 hours.

Uh, easily. You spend 3 hours plus.

Hear me out. This is why I'm asking all this stuff. Hear me out. Okay. Imagine you're sitting there instead of wasting your time watching a movie, you just take out Claude Code. It understands all of your goals and you say, okay, map out this strategy for me over here. Map out this. You, you, I have it running on my phone. ask it to map out all these things. Here's the thing, those emails that were written, it did not— that's why I was so impressed. It does not look like the typical AI slop that you see, and you know, this stuff's going to get better. And so all of the stuff that I want to do, you can say, hey, here's all the deals I'm working on right now. What else can I do to get more leverage from this deal? What else can I do? Right? And you can just keep going with it back and forth, but it's mapped on everything because it's tied into my GitHub, right? And so look, I know how to use GitHub right now. I never thought I would use GitHub, but I have my GitHub repo. It's tied to my Claude MD file, which has all my personal goals, all my business goals, how we're trending right now, everything. And everything I build maps up to that. It even tells me when I'm being stupid sometimes. It's like, hey Eric, I think you're building too much right now. I think you should just focus on building this thing and compounding it. Stop building this, right? Yeah. Well, I— 3 hours a day.

I agree with you. But during that time, a lot of them spending driving, even with the Tesla, you can't take your eye off the road. I've seen videos. I know Tesla's a great car, but they do recommend that you still look at the road and hold the steering wheel because there's just some things that it can't do, although it has better reactions than I do. And when I'm in the car line, technically right now I don't watch movies. The whole concept of Model Y is maybe I could watch movies. I spend all my time in the car lines on the phone trying to do deals or catch up with team members.

Just so everyone knows, dude, that Neil talking on the phone is extremely high leverage because he's a human being and humans want to interact with humans. And these are, it's, it's, it's, these are very hard relationships to come by.

Yeah. Like when I'm talking on the phone, some of the conversations I'm having are executives Like executives who are C-level at companies that are worth over $100 billion. So it's just like, this is a very effective use of time to try to close deals.

How about, okay, so let me just, let me put myself in your shoes for a second. So you're on the phone, maybe sometimes there's some downtime, right? And maybe I want to improve Ubersuggest or maybe there's something else I want to do. Because here's the thing with ClickFlow, even though my engineers are working on that, there's a lot of stuff I'm building right now that are directly tied in. And then my CTO is like, oh, we can easily merge this into ClickFlow. So I'm just going to keep building, building, building, building, building whenever I have downtime. Because like when I'm at home, home. Now instead of watching anime for 3 hours, I'm just on Cloud Code, you know, because the difference is I don't have kids.

Yeah, so mine is either I'm spending time with kids or I'm on the phone. Yeah. And if I had to guess on my talk time, I probably spend 6, 7 hours a day just talking on the phone and trying to do deals.

Yeah, which is a good skill that Neil has.

And I even talk on the weekends when I have free time and my kids allow in between.

Yeah.

So it's like, but, you know, going back to ClickFunnels, Ubersuggest, if we use Ubersuggest, 'cause that's mine, I know ClickFunnels is yours.

Yeah.

I've thought about, oh, I can spend more time on Ubersuggest, I can spend more time on Answer the Public.

Yeah.

But then—

That's not high enough leverage for you.

Yeah, I started creating a spreadsheet. I'm like, I can just close one massive deal. It's—

And by the way, this is important for everyone to know too. Like, okay, what's the value from this? I think it's important when you're working with these things, whether it's Claude Code or regular ChatGPT or just working on your own, it's what is every day, what is the highest leverage thing I can do today?

Yes.

Today.

And by the way, 5, 6 years ago, I would spend my free time on Ubersuggest or AnswerThePublic and be in the trenches dealing with product every single day. Now I've shifted over the years because I'm optimizing for what is going to produce the best returns.

Yep. And by the way, I mean, Neil's going for 10 figures in revenue. So, you know, there's a different game at every level. That's why you have to ask yourself every day because the leverage score changes for—

on a daily basis. Correct. Yeah.

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

Sure. Okay, go for it.

So if you look at Grokopedia, which is their version of Wikipedia, okay, so in November, traffic was 35,000 a day. Okay, now it's 3.5 million visitors a day. Okay, so yeah, every day, that's a 10,000% increase in just 2 months. And so at this pace, Grokopedia is about to take over Wikipedia and become the biggest, you know, pedia in the world, right? So Elon's just like, the superior product will win in the end. This is his stance on SEO because you look at X, a lot of organic traffic, Wikipedia or Grokopedia. I mean, it's their version and look, look how fast it's growing. A lot of people are saying it is far superior than Wikipedia.

So SEO is important, but no matter if it's SEO or paid advertising or social media marketing, I do agree the best product wins at the end of the day, assuming you have competent people in your organization that at least understand marketing. You need, you could have a great product like Grokypedia, but if you don't have competent people and half the time all the pages are noindex, the other half they're indexed and you keep changing URLs and messing things up, it can screw up your traffic. You really do need competent people, but having competent people with a shit product, even if they're amazing at what they do, it doesn't fix the business. You need both.

You know, I was talking to some friends the other day that are very big. They were very big on the SEO content game. Okay, let's just say one guy was doing, I'm going to make some numbers up. Let's say he's $30 million a year in affiliate revenue. Okay, so just count that almost all as profit. $30 million a year, Neil. And that revenue has now dipped to let's just call it $3 million a year. So on that call, I was talking to these guys and the whole stance now is the SEO content game is dead. What do you think about that?

I don't think the SEO content game is dead. We still generate a lot of revenue from it.

Go. I knew you're gonna answer like that. So you go first and I'll go.

So the reason I say the SEO content game isn't dead is we find it to just produce a lot of revenue as long as you talk about new stuff and stuff that's for your ICP. Where we see the SEO content game dead, as most people would call it, is what are the nutrition facts about a banana? Let's say if you're a health website, content like that produces no value and it doesn't drive that much revenue in the first place. It doesn't really drive conversions. It doesn't drive revenue. What's the bite force of an animal? What's the weather today? Going over math equations if you're an education site. What is SEO? Like the definition of it. Stuff like that, really basic content, there is no value. And if that's what you're creating, the SEO game in those eyes are dead. If you're creating valuable information for your ICP, it is not dead. And I'll give you an example of this, working with a global company, They end up talking about their struggles with multilingual and different products and where they should place a blog and breaking down when you have multiple websites, multiple products, multiple languages, the different scenarios, what's better, what's worse. AI will start pulling from that and citing you. A lot of the companies will start looking at that and be like, maybe we can just hire that company to solve it. We've gotten a lot of business from that specific example.

Yeah, I want to come back to this in a second, but as you were talking, I was like, you know, if I were Neil, I would totally make a tax bot. that, you know, does exactly what you want from a bidding, like does your bidding. Okay, Neil thinks Neil's is very, very, he's very strategic when it comes to that. We'll just leave it at that. And then, but I'll come back to that, is the SEO content game dead piece. So I actually did a webinar with Clearscope CEO Bernard yesterday, and I kind of brought this up to him too. So I look at, you look at these LLMs, okay, you look at Gemini, you look at ChatGPT, where they're grounding all their data from. It's still Google. Google is still, you know, 43%, you know, search traffic, 42%, 43%. And these LLMs, it's 1%. Okay, ChatGPT is like 0.20% and declining right now. And so I think, you know what, I think the game, the content game isn't dead because all these LLMs ground on that traffic. And the other thing too is the game might have changed a little bit. So maybe we're producing more bottom of the funnel content, or if you're going to produce more top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, you have to provide a lot of value, which is actually going to bring me to my next point on how to grow fast on X. You have to have have a unique point of view, you have to, maybe you're doing data storytelling, right? So Neil actually does a pretty good job with data storytelling on his X where he has different graphs and things like that, charts. People find that very shareable, right? And sometimes you get good PR, maybe you even appear on like podcasts and things like that or shows. So I think content and game, it's just the, sorry, the content game, there's always organic traffic or organic content game and you just have to figure out what works and where your audience is actually hanging out. That's marketing 101. Now I do think that being said, Neil, I do think website traffic is going to continue to decline because the, the contract now with these publishers versus Google, for example, they're just not getting paid as much anymore. So what is the incentive to keep producing these articles? And so I think a lot of people are trying to adjust and adopt other channels as well.

Yeah. And going back with marketing is it's like at the end of the day, you just got to take an omnichannel approach with whatever you're doing. If you take an omnichannel approach, you should be fine. Don't ever be reliant on one channel. Create amazing products, create good content. And you should be fine. A lot of this does come down to the basics. People talk about all the technology and all the changes, but they don't do the fundamentals right.

By the way, so Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X, so he actually tweeted something and he deleted it, but this is how to grow fast on X. And this actually ties in with, this ties in with content in general. So let me read this out to you. So, Nikita says, CT, crypto Twitter, is dying from suicide, not from the algorithm. CT, again, crypto Twitter, ends up wasting all their reach on replying good morning. So GM, right? So crypto Twitter would be GM, we all gonna make it, all these things, right? Hundreds of times. And when they finally post real content like a project announcement, it only gets shown to 3 people.

Wait, let's go back. What's CT?

Crypto Twitter. Okay, crypto Twitter. I don't know what that is. 3, 4 years ago, everyone was like, they're all these acronyms. So if you say GM, like good morning, everyone responds GM, GM, GM, GM, GM, right? Or it's like, you know, crypto's going down. It's okay, guys, we all going to make it, right? So everyone's using these acronyms. But his point is crypto Twitter kills itself because they are wasting their reach. So the point is the average Twitter user only views 20 to 30 posts per day. Okay, so crypto Twitter ends up wasting all their reach on replying good morning hundreds of times when— and when they finally want to post real content like a project announcement, it only gets shown to 3 people. So the point is, Don't try to post in volume. Try to post something with a point of view, something that's high quality, and then do it only a couple of times. Don't just try to spam Twitter because people are like, oh, we can spam Twitter. You actually can't.

That's his point. Yeah.

Same thing with LinkedIn.

That makes sense. I figured it's just like most social networks. If you go on Instagram and you post 20 times a day, your reach gets really compressed. And then in the future, when you want to post, the algorithms also are like, hey, your followers don't like engaging with you. We shouldn't show your new stuff, even if it's good. That often. So you got to start rebuilding your trust with these platforms and your followers.

You know, at least with this podcast, our best content is when we have a story and we're just being ourselves. And so I realized yesterday, I was, I was telling you this pre-show, but I was, uh, you're speaking at the summit today. I was speaking at the summit yesterday and I was like, you know what? I'm going to go in with no deck, no preparation, nothing. Okay. I called it something else, but anyway, that's not the point. So the point is I'm going to go in and I just came in with a ton of energy and then I did some screen shares going back and forth and everyone in the chat's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone's going crazy, right? And then because Granola was recording that, I took that transcript. I also took a transcript of us just riffing on this, right? Like 120 minutes or so, or yeah, 120 minutes or 80 minutes, 80 minutes. And then I compared it to me talking at a conference like the HubSpot conference. Okay. And I was like, okay, which one? You are the best speaker in the world. Evaluate me. It's like by far when I'm just no slides, no preparation, It's way better, right? And it's like, but the problem is the content that you present is technical, so you still need to have some slides, but do it differently because when it watched me speak at the HubSpot one, this is— I'm using Gemini here, by the way, because Gemini can see the YouTube, right? It's like, yeah, you're getting it. I can tell that you're getting held back by the slides. And so I'm not saying this style is for everyone. I'm just saying you have to understand what style works for you. And then once your style comes out, that's going to become higher quality content, at least for videos.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think people should just be themselves and not try to prepare too much. You know, when I go and speak, a lot of people have asked me over the years, hey, you've done a decent job speaking. We like hearing you. What's your secret? And I'm like, I'm not really speaking at the audience. I'm just having a conversation. Like, what do you mean? I'm like, I just go up and I just talk. I don't prepare. You know, I'll look at my slides when I'm on stage, Sometimes I do look at them like 5, 10 minutes before I go on stage. My team makes them for me. I tell them what to put in the slides or how I want the outline. So that makes it easier to not have to look at them. And I just have a conversation with people and just talk. And when you're just being yourself and you're not putting pressure, it tends to work out pretty well.

You know what's funny, Neil? I was reading one of the comments with us talking, and then one of the comments was like, Neil's like chamomile tea. And then Eric's like, he took 3 shots of espresso before he started.

Dude, like 4 or 5 people sent that to me.

Oh, you saw that too?

Yeah.

Yeah, I thought, I don't think I sent it to you, but I've realized something because I'm so excited about these things because even at the HubSpot talk, I was going really fast, but I'm like, no, this is me when I'm excited about it. And some people be like, usually for most channels I have to speed it up, but when I land on your channel, Eric, I feel like I have to slow it down and I love it, right? And then one guy posted yesterday, he's like, I like this guy and I don't even need to speed up the video. So I'm not saying that's for everybody. Like Neil has a very calm, collected, it's slower pacing, which is good. But I realized over the years, I'm like, wait, this is just me and it's not going to be for everyone. But you look, when you listen to Marc Andreessen, I heard Marc Andreessen talk today from Andreessen Horowitz. I'm like, oh my God, it's on 1.5x and he's like on 3x. And I'm like, but that's him. He's not going to change. And I'm like, that works for me.

Wait, it's on 1.5x?

I had it on 1.5x and it sounded like 3x because he talks so fast. And I can't understand him.

Oh, so you went back to normal.

I had to go back to normal. So my point is, you have, again, you're not going to develop your style immediately, especially if you're starting out right now. It might take you a couple of years, but once you find something that works for you and it feels good, double down on it.

Yes. And when Eric talks, sometimes I'll tell him to slow it down because it's, if he talks too fast, I think people will miss the point he's trying to make and it's valuable and I want people to hear, but majority of the time I never tell him to slow down. Why? Because when he's talking fast, it usually means he's passionate and he loves what he's talking about right then and there. It comes off differently than if I told you to slow down. And that's why I only tell you to slow down if I'm starting to miss things, because that means people may be missing things.

And to be fair, when Neil does that, it's to help the audience, right? More than anything, it's to help the audience. And that's helpful. So that's why I don't get offended by it.

Correct. And when Eric wants to talk fast and he's passionate and people are going to get it no matter what, I let him go because the passion he has, it just comes off better in my opinion when you're just yourself. And I don't think, you know, like back in the day people like, oh yeah, you know, Zuck, he's media trained.

Yeah.

Oh, look at him now. If you look at Zuck today, I don't think this is the media trained Zuck. Would you agree with that? No, this is just a chain and just being himself.

Yeah, he wants to do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, go do it. You can break your— I think he tore his ACL.

Cool.

Yeah, but he's being him.

Yes. And people relate more in today's world, especially with that, than these robotic trained people. And the reason I say that is in this AI world, it's really screwing people up. For example, I'm posting something tomorrow. This episode doesn't get posted tomorrow. Check this out.

Okay.

All right? So I got this chart. Do people know when they're viewing AI-generated social media content? We did this with 100 people. We showed them AI content and non-AI content.

Okay.

So the first batch, only human-generated content. How many times or what percentage of times do you think people thought it was AI-generated?

Zero?

24%. So they thought when they— we showed them human-generated content, this was only human-generated content, 24% of the time they thought it was AI-generated.

That's interesting.

Okay, then we showed them AI-generated content. We didn't tell them it was AI, right? We're just showing them content and we're classifying it When we showed them AI-generated content, what percentage of the time do you think they thought it was AI?

24%.

36%.

Okay.

So majority of the time, 64% for AI-generated, 76% for non-AI-generated. Majority of the time, humans believe content is human-created, whether there's AI in there. And if you actually think about it, a percentage of the time, roughly 25% of the time, they think content is AI-generated.

Dude, we're not going to be able to tell anymore. Yeah, it's getting harder and harder.

Did you see that?

Have you seen that monk? There's a monk in a temple and he's always spewing wisdom and then it eventually goes to like a course. He's like, you know, it's not about money, blah, blah, blah. It's like an AI-generated monk, right? And then there's like a link to go buy his course.

I did not see that, but I saw one video of a guy sitting on a chair and he's just talking and moving his head and it constantly changes from a woman to a kid to adult to a guru. Like, he changes to all these different characters and spewing different stuff just to show you the power of AI. It's crazy.

There's some on Twitter now, you can see there's like guys that are moving around, but the avatar is a woman and you actually can't tell anymore. And so I think what's going to happen is you're going to see a lot of virtual OnlyFans and it's just guys behind the scenes playing it. So that's what we're going to see. Yeah. By the way, okay, but I do think you just kind of mentioned this and you have this highlighted. So I was talking to my team about this. So we mentioned, okay, brand's a differentiator. Live events are like in-person is a differentiator. Having taste is a differentiator, but it's like, okay, well, if people can code, we can build all these things. What is the ultimate differentiator when it comes to building things? It's design. And I'm like, holy crap, we need to get really good designers because they have taste and they already, they can build whatever they want now too. But you and I both know, like, I wouldn't say, you know, I have the best design taste. I don't think we've had the historically, we've had the best designers for your company or mine.

No.

But I do think we're going to be looking for some of the best designers in the next year or 2. That's what I think.

I have some designers that I'm really happy with on the product end. I always really struggle with website design because what my executives want versus what I want are 2 different things. And then I let them go and do amok with the website and then they look at conversions and we're optimizing. Then I go and change stuff and then Salo goes and changes stuff. And what we found is for enterprise-based leads and business, like trying to close like 7, 8-figure accounts, a lot of the design does not matter one bit.

Yep. Yep. I mean, oftentimes they just want to get to the point, so.

Yeah. And what I've learned through this, I'm like, well, if revenue is growing and my team can constantly hit numbers, do I really want to have the fight with my management team on what design looks better versus worse when we A/B test this? And something may look more pretty, but it doesn't really impact revenue. It's just like, all right, I'm not going to have this battle. Go do whatever you want.

But you, I would say, so I agree with that piece. I would also say that the best designers are typically very, very opinionated and they push back a lot. And we did this with the, so we just launched a ClickFlow site today, right? If you look at the landing page, and we were talking, oh, we're like, oh, we don't have a new logo. I was like, okay, that's what my CEO, I was like, hey, just put the original logo we had on the site and see, and it's going to piss off design. It pissed off the designer. He redesigned it and he ended like it, Problem solved.

The new design's good.

Yeah, it's pretty good. And it's better than a single green website.

So.

Yeah.

The only problem you're going to have is your CTAs. A lot of them blend in because of the coloring.

Yeah. Don't worry. We'll change it. Yeah.

But other than that, the design is great.

But see that logo used to be, it said ClickFunnels orange before and it pissed him off so much. And then that, that the, the, the, the lines, the funnel lines on it, like that wasn't there before.

My problem with design is I tend to optimize for conversions more than anything else.

Yeah. So like, so you'll be at odds with designers all the time.

I'm at odds with designers and I tend to control what gets shown for, let's call it half the homepage or majority of the homepage. And then I just don't care. So like I'll optimize for the areas that I know that are driving conversions and then they can do whatever they want with the rest.

That's what happens when you're very focused. So we'll leave it at that. So you had the death of rollups. highlighted, or did you want to go with the distribution channels? Actually, no, hold on.

I didn't highlight any of them. My mouse was just moving.

Well, let's, I want to continue. So we were talking about design, but Shopify, you saw Shopify, Google, Walmart, all these people have partnered on basically agentic commerce with UCP.

Yes.

You want to talk about that?

Let's go for it. What's this tweet?

Okay.

So— This is a tweet by, oh, this is Tobi from Shopify.

Go for it.

I'll let you read it. Go for it.

Okay. So Tobi, CEO of Shopify, by the way, Hey, before we go into the Shopify one, Toby tweeted this recently. He said that in the past 3 weeks, this is a week ago, in the past 3 weeks, he's shipped more code than he has in the past 10 years using Cloud Code. Yeah. So that's high leverage for him.

Dude, I haven't heard too many people talk about Cursor. Everyone's been talking about Cloud Code.

I use Cursor within Cloud Code. Sorry, I use Cloud Code within Cursor all day. And that's what Yaniv does as well. So yeah, I do. And you have a lot more options. So you're just using I'm using on one, on the far end, I use it as a data analyst with all my MCPs. I'm just asking, querying my data questions. On one end, I'm using it to build stuff and I have multiple tabs to build things. Think of it as a browser.

Can't Cloud Code do a lot of the stuff that Crusher does?

But in Cloud Code, you know, MS-DOS, right? Like a terminal. Yeah. You're, you're, you're using terminal. You have one window open, but I have that. And then I have the output, the .md files, which I can basically edit if I want, like the email copy and then save it in there. It's not that easy to do inside of terminal. So it's actually better to have it live within like an ID, like a cursor.

So they'll eventually fix that and then you won't need cursor.

Yes, exactly.

It's just a question of when.

Yes. And they didn't talk about that on the 20VC. It was Harry Stebbings, Jason Lemkin, and another guy. They're talking about like what happens. And I think their whole stance on it is like everyone's going to have— they're going to be able to survive. We'll see what happens. I'm just glad I'm not in that business. It's tough. Okay, so back to this UCP thing. So guys, MCP is Model Context Protocol. It's like APIs where you can talk to your products. You can have the LLMs talk to your products, like have ChatGPT talk to your HubSpot, for example, and ask it questions. UCP is Universal Commerce Protocol, which they developed, they co-developed with Google. So Google and Shopify partnership, it will make— UCP will make it faster for agents and retailers to integrate. It's open by default, so platforms and agents can use UCP to start transacting with any merchant. Any merchant, yeah. Major retailers are already using it. Finally, agents can handle everything from discovery to fulfillment and support things like discounts, subscriptions, and loyalty programs. We've accounted for all types of commerce. So imagine this, if you're using AI mode and you're searching for best luggage, you're going to be able to buy it directly from within AI mode. That's one example.

I think this is going to be huge. We're going to see this as, you know, more and more adoption comes, and I think it's going to end up happening really soon, and it's going to affect the way that people are shopping, but not fully affect it because I think people are also going to shop the way that they're used to right now. I think it's going to be a combination of both. What I'm really waiting for when it comes to shopping is you're able to put in a specific requirement into Amazon because we are trained to just go buy on Amazon. You agree with this, right? For like most products, you still buy on Amazon.

Just one click and one click add to order.

Yes. The problem with Amazon And let's go with the example of a jacket because we're both wearing sweaters or jackets, whatever you want to call it. Let's say we're going to, um, or this is a perfect example. I got my son ready for school this morning. The weather during this morning was in the 50 degrees. It gets into the high 70s in the afternoon.

80 today.

Yeah. So it becomes a little tricky on how you want to dress the child. You don't want them to be cold in the morning. You don't wanna be hot later on. And this happens a lot in Los Angeles.

Mm-hmm.

I wish I could just go on Amazon and type in, looking for kid pants or need kids' pants, needs to keep you warm when it's cold, but the same pant needs to keep you cool when it's hot, needs to adapt in temperature. What's the best pants for kids? Plays in dirt, gets dirty, goes on slides. And then it just says, here are the best pants for this scenario. I'm waiting for that to happen. I think that's more useful than all this agentic commerce stuff that people are showcasing right now with the technology, because we buy right now by doing research and typing instead of just saying, hey, go scour not just the web, but all of Amazon, all the reviews, and tell me what is the best product for my I wonder, as you say this, I actually want to pull up a graph to see how fast, how quickly it took for people to adopt to mobile, like smartphones, right?

When the iPhone came out, let's just say 2010. And by what is it like 2015, 2017, maybe the whole world changed. Do you think it's maybe 7 years of mass adoption? Does that sound about right?

Sure, that sounds about right. But, but it's for me, it's not just even like these devices. If you go on ChatGPT, Or, you know, you're in AI mode and it tells you the product to buy and shows you, would you buy right then and there? Would you go to Amazon? Honestly?

No, right now I would still have our default behavior, but I'm just wondering, the reason I asked that, posed that question is how long does it take for human behavior to change en masse? And you can see iPhone actually launched in 2007. It exploded into mainstream 2012 to 2013. So let's call it 6 years or so. Over 80% Uh, penetration by 2016. So let's just call it 9 years or so. So my point is, is validating what you're saying. It's human behavior takes a while to change.

It does take time to change. Now, would I be open to purchasing in AI mode, or would I be willing to purchase through ChatGPT? I would, but I want the luxury that Amazon has to offer. And with a lot of Shopify stores there, you don't get that luxury. I order from Amazon, dude, Sometimes the same day I'm getting the product, right? I order from Shopify, I'll get a product in a week.

I think Amazon's going to copy this. That's it.

I agree. And then I'll be down to do it within Amazon. That's what I'm getting at. Because the concept of AI mode, you're asking the specific questions that I would be asking, like on my son's pants. But I want to do that in Amazon because we're ingrained to go to Amazon because of their fulfillment network. Their logistics is better than anyone else and you get products right away. I don't want to wait a week or two. So I want Amazon to implement this. That will change shopping drastically more than I think most people think.

I bet you they're doing it already because all this Cloud Code stuff, because every, like, by the way, the Cloud, this Cloud for Cowork thing, there's like, oh, it's built 100% on Cloud Code. And then the Cloud, the creator of Cloud Code is like, yeah, all my code's written by Cloud Code. Right. So there's no way they're not doing this because if our engineers are, you know, 5, 10, 15 times faster, they already have a bunch of people working on it. On it, guaranteed.

Yes.

If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T. And we'll see you on the other side. So, okay, that one's interesting. And maybe that will bring us over into this, the distribution channels that work in 2026. So this entire list over here, Neil, do you have it pulled up?

No, I do not.

Actually, I have a better idea, Neil. So I use Claude Code for this one, okay? I had it look through all of our Marketing School recordings, over 3,000 episodes, okay? So it gave us 2 ideas here. You can pick here, okay? I'm going to give you 2 options. Okay. 10 counterintuitive marketing truths after 3,000 Marketing School episodes.

That's number 1.

Okay. Number 2, 10 timeless marketing themes from 3,000 Marketing School episodes. You want A or B?

Either one. Okay.

Let's go with A. So basically this scanned all of our episodes that we've done.

Okay.

Bear in mind, we started doing this, what, 7 years ago, maybe coming up on 8 years now. I have no idea.

Has it been that long?

Yes, it's been long. And this is before you were married. This is before you had kids. This is when you lived in Vegas. This is when I came back from EDC to go record at your place. I came back at 7 AM in the morning from a music festival.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It has to be at least 8 years.

It's 8 years.

8 plus, because Emma is almost 7. Yeah. I was married before that.

Yeah.

Right. Engaged before that.

So maybe 9 years?

It may be 9.

Oh my God.

We may be going on closer to 10.

Yeah, because I'm about to turn 40 this year.

So. Episode, I'm trying to actually Google when our first episode was. Does it show? Wow, episode 1, July 21st, 2016.

Wow.

It's almost 10 years.

Oh my God. Okay, so we have, this is, guys, Claude Code helped us with these 2 episodes over here, guys. So number, the 10 counterintuitive truths. So you can see it on the screen over here. I'm going to start with number 1, okay? Free products are better marketing than ads. And I'm actually going to let you take this one because you've done this quite a bit with the products that you've you've given away in the past.

Yeah, I agree with this. And when you look at free products, as advertising continually gets more expensive over time, just look at Facebook and Google's earnings. But what changes is when you give away something for free, eventually, because ad costs are so high, it's cheaper to build this stuff and give it away for free, especially now with AI, than it is to pay for the ads. And you got to figure out what can you give away for free, but sell them on the backend that's more expensive to make up for your costs of the free offering.

And that's exactly what we're doing with ClickFlow. We're going to— we have a— there's a free trial version, but we're going to have stuff in the backend. There's going to be buttons to upsell. And then also we're going to look for product qualified leads, people that are good fit ICP for product, but also for managed services in the backend. But to Neil's point, I'm looking at a lot of these prototypes that I'm building right now within Cloud Code. I'm like, oh, I should just give this away for free. These are nice lead magnets that you can make now. And that's why, Neil, I don't know if I mentioned this on this podcast, but we're mandating in my company When the first year, when the new year started, I'm like, okay, everyone's got to learn Clog code within the next 6 months. Everyone's got to be proficient. We're going to help them get there. It is a requirement. We're doing these office hours now. We're doing these hackathons, all these things. And I still don't think like it's enough, but we're going to have to, we're going to have to get it there. So anyway, all that to say, that's number one. Number 2, Neil, is boring marketing makes the most money.

Yes. Channels like SEO that are really ugly.

Email, direct mail.

Pay-per-click, conversion optimization. They tend to make companies way more money than being like, let's try to go viral on Instagram or Facebook, or let's do this cool creative TV ad. If TV ads were so effective, I'm not saying they're not effective, they actually do generate profitability if you know how to do it right. But if they were so much better than the boring Google pay-per-clicks, Google wouldn't be the most profitable company in the world. They're worth more than all the TV companies that I know of. If you combine them, they're worth roughly $4 trillion. It's from something that's boring.

Yep. Now, number 3, high agency beats intelligence in the AI era. And what that means by high agency is someone who has that bias to action, someone who's willing to move quickly on things, because the faster, the more rotations you have, the more shots on goal you're going to have. You're going to make mistakes, but you're going to learn from those mistakes versus someone who's really smart, but it's slow to get things done. You want someone who's quick, and if you have that, Those people are going to get the most done and those people are going to be the most successful.

Yes.

Number 4, micro-influencers outperform celebrity endorsements. I'll give it to you.

Yeah. So we found that the celebrity influencers just charge way too much. Micro-influencers are way more effective because not only their rates lower, they try harder. They tend to care more. Their audiences are more tailored around your product versus where the big celebrity ones and macro ones have followings for a lot of different things, not just one. And that makes it harder to monetize. So go for the micro and nano influencers.

See, look, these topics are great. See, AI did a good job here.

Uh-huh. Keep going.

Yeah. Let's keep going. So deleting content improves SEO. So this is definitely counterintuitive because you would think that the more content you create, the more shots on goal you'd have to be able to rank, but you're actually making it harder for algorithms and even these answer engines to scan your website. And so the more you optimize your website, the more crawlable you make it, the more it's easier to find your good stuff because it's ultimately the quality that rises to the top.

Yep.

Next one?

Next one.

Human plus AI hybrid beats pure AI content.

Yeah, when you look at AI content, a lot of it's regurgitated. When you look at humans, we can talk about new stuff because we're not just scraping the web. If you combine humans with AI, you're going to be better off than if you just leverage humans or if you just leverage AI. We're not saying AI is better, we're not saying humans are better. We think the world is both HAI. Humans combined with AI.

This topic is a perfect— this topic that we're doing right now is a perfect example of this. This is AI-assisted. We didn't come up with this topic. It actually did a good job of scanning our, let's just call it our wisdom over the last 10 years or so. So you want to keep a human in the loop. I call it HIL, human in the loop. So you can have whatever acronyms you want. The riches are not always in the niches. And I remember Neil did an episode. We've talked about this a few times, but Neil was very adamant about this. Like, the riches are not in the niches. I remember. Yeah.

If you look at the biggest companies in the world, they go after massive TAMs. TAM stands for total addressable market. They don't sell things like a course for best man speeches. You can start in a niche and then expand into a larger and larger market, but the niche needs to be something that is much larger. If there isn't a large market, like if you're like, I'm going to do best man speeches and then go into bridesmaid speeches, you're still in 2 niches that are terrible and you're not going to make a ton of money. You can go from wedding speeches to then into I'm going to do birthday speeches, funeral speeches. Again, these are all niches. It's not a big enough TAM. If you go after like, I'm creating CRM for just the travel industry, and then I'm going to do CRM for the car industry, and then just the general CRM market, that could be a very big market. Just look at Salesforce.

You can start vertical and then go horizontal.

Yes.

Yeah. Services outperform pure SaaS long-term. So Neil and I both come from SaaS and I used to poo-poo on services, A lot of SaaS companies you've seen, they actually end up adding services because a lot of these, they're big customers, they need the services, they need the handholding, right? And so what we found over time, both of us, is that maybe you might have SaaS in the front end, but in the back end, that's where you actually make your money and have a lot bigger deals that way. So Neil, I'll let you build on this one because you were purely SaaS first and then you layered on— actually, no, you were services first, then SaaS, and then back to services.

Eric is not talking about valuation, to be very clear here. When he says, when we're talking about services, it's easier to generate revenue and more revenue through services than SaaS. SaaS companies are valued much higher than service businesses because service businesses are valued on profitability. SaaS businesses are valued on revenue, which makes it easier to increase your net worth. The point that we're getting at here is You shouldn't just do SaaS or services because one is more uglier or prettier than the other. You should pick whatever you're passionate about. And if that happens to be a service, that's okay. There's a lot of money in it. Just look at companies like Accenture. It's not a dead space. AI hasn't replaced services. Yes, it'll impact services, but the really good people will still be sought after and hired by corporations for services.

Yeah. So this one's interesting, Neil. So specialization beats being well-rounded.

Neither Eric or I are jack of all trades. We don't try to be. We've been talking a lot about AI, Claude to Code. You don't see me trying to do everything. Yes, I've used some of these products. I'm not the best user for every single product. I spend most of my time doing deals. I understand marketing extremely well. I focus on where I'm the best at, and then I hire people around me who can fill in the gaps. That's how you win. You don't win trying to be great at everything because you're never going to be great at everything. There's not enough time in the day.

And that's not to say you shouldn't specialize in the— actually, we are saying you should specialize in the beginning because both of us, when we started in our career, I would say more around SEO. And sure, we did branch out. We started learning other stuff like how to do deals, how to close things, how to, you know, tax strategies.

Paid ads, conversion optimization, email marketing, right? The list goes on and on.

In the beginning of your career, maybe you start more T-shaped, which is where you go deep in one area, and then you might learn these other things. You definitely should learn these other things, but we're not saying you should try to do everything. Because what we'll say is, from a business standpoint, what we've learned is a lot of entrepreneurs we meet in our 20s, they come up to us and they're like, oh, I have 10 different businesses right now. That is an example of trying to do too many things at once. And we've learned that after you get punched in the face, you know, sometimes kicked, you know, a couple of times, then you learn that specialization. That's what worked for the biggest companies in the world. Yeah.

Yep.

Yep. Last one but not least, in-person events beat algorithm optimization.

Deals are meant to be done in person. And if you want to start closing big deals, we're not talking about a $1,000 deal or $500 or even $10,000. You want to close really big deals, they're done in person, whether people like 'em or not. I don't know too many people that are signing, you know, $10 million deals or $5 million deals without meeting people.

Everything comes down to relationships. And the older we get, the more we realize that whether it's friendships or recording this podcast or doing deals. Everything is relationships. Like for example, I was talking to a guy and he just partnered with one of the most popular football players in the world for, you know, his, one of the brands, right? But that came from him knowing someone and that came from him knowing how to do things, right? To be successful as an entrepreneur. And so I think that the more— I used to just think that I can just do business in my boxers at home. That's not how you do it. You have to get to the in-person stuff.

All right.

See, look at that. Claude Code did that.

Mm-hmm. All right, now let's do, and I'm curious on this one, the death of rollups. This is a tweet from Mark Cuban.

Yep.

So there was a guy named Andy Kessler who pretty much links to a Wall Street Journal article, WSJ, Go Around and Strangle Things. That's the title. I'm not a fan of rollups. Amazon didn't roll up Local Bookstores. Tesla didn't buy Chrysler. Facebook didn't buy Yellow Pages or local newspapers. The famous Facebook model Move fast and break things is cute, but a better Silicon Valley mantra is, or a better Silicon Valley mantra would be, go around and strangle things. And I totally agree with this, right? It doesn't mean you can't roll up companies. And the reason I say you can't roll up, you can still roll up companies. If you're going to roll up the same companies over and over again, I think that playbook's been dead for a while. But I'll give an example for the agency world. Let's say my ad agency, NP Digital, starts off and we're doing SEO, and then we add in paid advertising, and then we add in social media marketing, and we're getting client inquiries for App Store marketing. Let's say on Apple, the Apple App Store, for the Google Play Store, and companies are looking for that. So we, this is a real example, acquired Yodle, which was a UK shop sometime last year in 2025 because they specialize in, they're one of the big players in App Store marketing where they help companies do better in App Store rankings and even manage the App Store ads. Now, even though my company did this, we didn't have all the case studies and the pedigree that Yodle did. And I believe Yodle was Yodle Mobile, Founded date, I think they were founded in 2007, so not 20 years old, but close enough, 19. It's hard to go and create that from scratch. It takes time. It's easier in many cases to buy, roll that in, and go buy other ancillary services or features or whatever it may be that you don't have, because you can sell all your customers on their stuff and they can sell your customers on your stuff. Where I don't think roll-ups make sense is you just go and you go buy, you know, like if you're Amazon, let me go buy all the local bookstores. When that model is broken and you think there's a way to disrupt it, you shouldn't waste your time buying it. Or Tesla believing electric cars are the future, why would they go buy a Ford when, if they believe electric cars are the future and at that time Ford only believes in gas cars? Yeah.

So it sounds like you're saying it depends, right? And I'm saying it depends.

Yes, because if someone offers a feature that you don't and you can cross-sell your customers to theirs and theirs to yours, that's creative. That isn't 1 1 2, that's 1 1 potentially equals 3.

Let's just look at Google, okay? Google bought DeepMind. Oh my God, best investment, right? They bought Android, okay? What else did they buy?

YouTube.

Yeah, YouTube.

Facebook. Facebook, they say in here Facebook didn't buy Yellow Pages or local newspapers. Yes, because that was dying, but they did buy Instagram and WhatsApp.

Yeah.

M&A is not dead. You just gotta buy stuff you don't do that you think is also the future.

It should be accretive. Like when I think about some of the ones I did last couple years ago, they weren't exactly accretive. They were actually damaging to my company.

Correct.

Yeah, yeah. So I think it's the— this guy, whoever wrote this, Andy Kessler, right? This is on the opinion page for Wall Street Journal. So this is one person's opinion and like most things, it depends.

Yes. And Mark Cuban may agree with it, but that's Mark Cuban's opinion. I have nothing against him or for him. I don't follow much of him. I, I think he sold the basketball team, right?

He, he sold a minority. No, he's a minority owner, owner now, but he can make decisions. And I think he wanted to do that to get involved with the casinos.

Well, I, I think what he's doing with cost-plus drugs is awesome.

Yeah.

Just making drugs more affordable because I think they just cost a lot of money.

Well, you know, I mean, I think Ozempic is, is dropping from like $1,000 now to like $159 for Americans. Americans because we're trying to— I forgot what it's called, but the, the fair— all the other countries get like a lower price. But what was happening was these pharma companies were charging the US more because the US could pay more. And now, you know, this administration is bringing that down. So I don't know how that's going to affect cost drugs, but maybe they're— maybe not. So I don't know.

Well, hopefully it reduces our health insurance costs because I think you and I both pay an arm and a leg for corporate health insurance.

That's the one thing that's gone up because we talked about the gross margin thing that just didn't make any sense. You can't cap gross margins like that because they're going to find another way to game it. Yeah.

What Eric's talking about was a law, I think it was during the Obamacare. Yeah, and it was, they couldn't make more than 15%, was it?

Yep.

And then if you limit a company and say you can only make a certain percentage, call it 15%, another way they can make more money is keeping that 15%, but just grow your revenue by double. So if you charge people more, keep your cost basis at the same percentage, you make more money.

You know what's funny? I was looking to troll on Threads. I didn't do it this week, but I saw this recently. So this is, guys, this is not being political, but we are talking about politics for this one. So I guess I am. So Gavin Newsom, right? He's known for being, right, Democrat?

Yeah. Okay.

Now remember the wealth tax bill in California. So those that don't know, there's a wealth tax bill that's being floated right now. It's like, we'll take 5% of your assets, right?

Kind of, but yes.

Around the same thing.

There's some nuances.

Yeah, a lot of nuances.

Like if you have a lot of voting power, like the Google founders, then they can take, call it, I think the number was like, $50 billion from them. So what ends up being like 25% net worth, but then they had to sell more, pay taxes and then pay that. So maybe it costs them like 40% of their net worth.

Yeah. The point of me bringing this up is like I logged into Threads to see where I could troll, but then someone had already trolled. So it's interesting to me and I don't even know why I'm bringing this up right now, but I just thought it was funny. So usually what happens is everyone on Threads is like, oh my God, Gavin Newsom is the next United States president. Okay, he's our guy. He's our guy. He's our guy. Right? And then the moment the Wall Street Journal is like, Gavin Newsom does not support the billionaire tax because mathematically it doesn't make sense. Right. And there's actually people leaving now. And because the problem with this is that if you roll something like this out, then when's the next one coming and the next one coming and the next one coming? It starts to go down a slippery slope. Right.

And what they're saying on this is, is it can move from billionaires within this proposal.

Yeah.

Like they can just naturally start taxing people.

Go to 100, go to 50 and just keep like it's a slippery slope. Right. And I agree with that part. Politics or not, throwing that aside. But the funny thing that I saw was someone posted the Wall Street Journal headline. It's like, he's not our president anymore. And then all the comments are like, yeah, screw him. You know, he's not our guy. I'm just like, dude, guys, you can change, you change on a whim like that. Come on. Like, right? So I'm not, I'm not on the left or the right here. I'm just saying that's kind of funny to me.

But it is also very logical too. And people don't realize this income tax started with just like the 1% or the really wealthy. And then it moved down to everyone. That's what happens with all taxes.

Dude, speaking of the wealthy, I'm going to show you one chart over here. This is the guys, this is the only chart you need to see if you want to become wealthy. Okay. So this is the chart from Lenny, from Lenny's podcast shared this revenue chart from a recent investor update. Just don't die. You can see 2022, nothing. 2023, nothing. And it just goes 2024, nothing, right? And then boom, 2025 skyrockets.

So it's from nothing to something in 1 year.

Over 2 years or so. But the point, and we said this on this podcast, the only thing you need to do to become wildly successful is one, you stay curious and you stay consistent and you stay focused.

On a decent enough TAM. Yeah.

A lot of caveats, but if you're curious and you're focused, you should eventually figure out that part. That's what I think. And so I think that's interesting because a lot of people are like, you know, there's all these books you can read, whatever. You don't need all that stuff. You just need to look at this chart and just understand this stuff takes time and just don't die. That's all.

So yeah.

We get one more.

Yeah. Let's see.

I got a fun one. Why you should build for women and not men. How about that one?

Go for it. Wait, what's the topic again?

Here, I'll start it off. So here's why you should build Build for women and not men. Okay, so check this out. When you look, this guy tweeted this over here, Ernesto Lopez. Okay, so he says women are overspenders. Source, sister and fiancée. He's kind of just talking about his own life. So there's this app over here. If you build an app, the male version makes $5,000 a month. The women version makes $400,000 a month. Okay, this is basically all you need to do here. So let me show you this. It's like a It's like a fitness goal thing or like a sizing thing, this app over here. So you see this?

Yeah.

It's a workout planner, 30-day fitness, one's for men, one's for women. You can see how much money is being made. This one's $5,000 a month. This one's $400,000 a month. Okay. And he's like, just make the same app, just make it pink.

I think it does vary per industry.

Yeah.

If you want to sell like—

But consumer, 80% of consumer spend comes from who?

Women. And usually they lead up the household.

Yes.

So they pick a lot of the expenditures, but if it's certain things like a car, like a sports sports car, men tend to be more purchasers of sports cars than women. Same with like motorbikes, right? It doesn't mean that women don't buy motorbikes, it's just majority of them tend to be men. I think for certain industries, designing for men can make you more money and certain ones designing for women can make you more money. But yeah, like if you're Procter Gamble, if you notice them, almost all their ads, majority of them other than like the Gillettes of the world, pitch to women. And when you even look at razors, there's, I think it's the men's version's called Gillette. The women's version is called Venus. Is that correct?

I actually have the Gillette women's version.

There's a women's version?

There's a, yeah, there's a women's version.

What's a, what's a, you know, a lot of females, what's a woman's version called? Is it Venus?

No, but I, I have the Gillette razors for women. Do you know why I use it? I went to Reddit. It's like, it's better. It's actually a better shave. And, uh, there's all these people talking about it.

But they're all very similar. Yet they just repackage it and say it's normal.

They just made the— it's a white, it's white instead of like orange or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah. By the way, it's actually 85%, according to Google, 85% of all consumer purchases in the US are driven by— look at it this way. What Noah wears, Noah looks great, Neil looks great, okay, I look okay, but we don't really care about what we wear, okay? Not as much.

Yeah, we're just wearing yoga clothes.

Yeah.

I don't really give a fuck.

This is like yoga. I stopped buying clothes. This is yoga as well. This is, yeah, whatever. And I'm wearing my gym shoes right now. So anyway, all that to say, this is why you should design it for life.

This is a great example. So in my home, we're going over furniture. Okay. So then forget what we spent on it, but it was a lot. Right. And the first thing that comes to my mind is I'm like, I could have bought another home. All right. I'm not saying I could have bought—

You're like, forget the cost, but it would've cost a home.

No, no. I was about to say, I'm not saying a home in my same neighborhood, but I could have bought a home somewhere in the United States. I'll leave it to people's imagination. So I was looking at this and I was like, you got a 6-year-old, got a 4-year-old. How much spaghetti, food, crayons, markers is going to be on this furniture? So I'm having a conversation. I'm like, so we're going to spend all this money on furniture with kids jumping around and you want playdates and birthday parties here? And they're like, well, what's the point if you're like, Not living your life and you're just worried about stains. And you know me, I'm OCD.

You're OCD, yeah.

Yeah, so it's harder for me. And I'm like, totally get it. Why not just go spend like $100 grand on furniture or $200 grand? I don't know what furniture costs, but like, let's say $100, $200 grand.

You're not supposed to give numbers.

Yeah, no, but I'm saying what you could spend, 'cause you can probably buy a lot of nice furniture for $100 grand.

Here, I'll make it simpler for you guys. Instead of going to Restoration Hardware, you can go to like, you know, West Elm.

I'm not saying go to Restoration Hardware.

I know, I know that's what you're saying. I'm trying to make it simple for— Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Restoration Hardware, go to IKEA.

Yeah, that's too low, but you—

No, but there's nothing wrong with IKEA.

There is nothing wrong with IKEA.

I've been there, their furniture is great. I wish they handed out free food like Costco.

Did you actually have IKEA furniture before? I did.

I had.

Yeah, all the time.

Yeah, nothing wrong with it.

I would always buy new beds and rebuild it, right, in college, and it was great. But point is, this is why you should build for women and not men, even though like the stuff that— the only stuff we care about is this, right? The technology that we have, that's it. We're very simple.

My favorite is they showed me my office furniture and it was like all this like elegant stuff and I'm like, Uh, can we replace these chairs? And they're like, with what? I'm like, Herman Miller. Yeah, looks way more comfortable. This stuff isn't practical. And then it's like big bulky chairs. I'm like, when I film, my chair's usually behind me.

You can't see it. You don't want to sink into it.

Yeah, I don't want to sink into it. It's going to look really awkward for filming. And I'm like, yeah, this is no good, dude.

Herman Miller. Okay, I use a Steelcase chair. These are the best office chairs, right? They're expensive, they're the best. Yours probably cost like 5 to 10 times more than those.

My Herman Miller?

No, not the Herman Miller, but I'm saying the chair that you're gonna—

the sinker I have no idea, but I told him to get rid of it and give me a Herman Miller chair.

That's the point, guys. And by the way, guys, leave in the comments too if you actually enjoyed the 10 counterintuitive truths, because Cloud Code will give us a lot more from where that came from. Those used to be hard for us to plan, but when you just stare at it, it's pretty easy to do.

We should do those a lot more often.

Yeah.

Next one we'll do the timeless marketing—

See, he's starting to like Cloud Code now, guys. Starting to like Cloud Code. All right, guys, we'll catch you later. Goodbye.