How AI is actually affecting the labor market

So I want to talk about how AI is actually affecting the labor market. So here's how AI is actually affecting the labor market. So I'm going to pull up these stats for you to take a look at over here. But if you look at this, okay, this is people on Reddit over here. Okay. So it says graphic designer here. I haven't been fully replaced yet, but the landscape has completely changed. Clients now expect me to use AI as a copilot, generate initial concepts, mood boards, and even rough copy in minutes, not hours. The job is becoming less about executing the first idea and more about curating, refining, and adding the crucial human touch. It feels like I lost my job and more like my job description was rewritten overnight. The pressure to constantly adapt is a real challenge. Here's another one. I was a literary editor for one of the largest sci-fi presses in the world. My boss, the executive editor, retired and the company reassessed their practices. So after 15 years working for the greater good of sci-fi, I got outsourced to a goddamn robot. Let's do one more. Okay. Was making 3D models for 20 years, but since AI became a thing, most people just skip the 3D stage altogether and just generate the final model or image, final image or video instead. AI is still trash at 3D modeling, but it's great at generating the final product, making the models themselves unnecessary. Working retail now. So you want to talk about how AI is affecting the labor market? I mean, this seems like it's just the beginning. And like one more, the chatbot gets to carry the whole— this entire support team got laid off. I'll say one more thing. I got on a call with a couple of mutual friends today, okay? So like we do these calls every, you know, 3, 4 months or so. And one person said, I have never been more profitable than ever. For better or worse, I have never been more profitable than ever. We created this support bot over here. We did this.

What kind of company was that?

You've already guessed. I know that you've guessed already.

I have not.

You're correct. It's a software company. It's a software company.

I was going to say communications.

No, no.

See?

But communications is working on it too. Communication is the same thing, but nobody's going to say this out in public, right? But if you see people on the front line saying this, and we say behind the scenes people are saying this.

They have a software company that plugs into a bigger platform? Uh-huh.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, but like it's, it's, so I think it's helpful for us to talk about how things are changing. And my thing is like, I was listening to a podcast recently and I shared it with my team on how a creative strategist now is somebody that understands how to play all these things. Like when I, we're interviewing creative strategists, we just made the offer and they're joining next week, but literally he's got Figma, 6 different designs up. He understands VO3, he understands 3.1, he understands Nano Banana, he understands that he has to 10x or 100x himself. And then on this call today, we're just like, dude, all of us, yourself included, like you weren't on the call, but like it just, we keep saying AI, guys, we gotta adapt, we gotta adapt. But there's still people, like very small percentage people, even though they've had tenure at one friend's company for a long time, it's just like, dude, it like, we can't keep you forever if you don't adapt. You can't just be scared this whole time. And so what do you think?

When I look at those examples, and there's probably many more, And there's probably more that are going to contradict my viewpoint. I look at a lot of those jobs as not high-level jobs. I look at a lot of those jobs as you're helping with the ideation, you're helping with one area like editing. I haven't seen AI affect too many people in roles like strategy or executive positions. I've seen it affect a lot of the Lower and some mid-level positions. And I look at the workforce as changing from a pyramid where you have a CEO at the top, some management underneath, some mid-level managers, and then a ton of people at the bottom. I look at the pyramid changing more into a diamond shape.

Like an inverse pyramid.

No, not an inverse pyramid.

Diamonds like this, inverse pyramid.

Yeah, at the bottom. Inverse at the bottom. Starting as the same as a pyramid.

Which is you invert the pyramid.

Yeah. But then Flip the pyramid upside down and at the bottom, it's going backwards. So you have a point at the top, a point at the bottom, and you have a fat middle.

Oh, I got it. I got it. I got it. Right?

So think of like this.

It's 2 pyramids stacked on each other.

2 pyramids stacked on each other, but the bases are connected. So the tips are at the very top and at the very bottom. And I look at it as the total workforce amount is going to be lower compared to the traditional pyramid. You're still going to have your executive at the top. You're going to have a lot of amazing mid-level people in the middle.

I'd say executive leadership at the top. Yes.

And you're still going to have that mid-level, which could be both strategy, but they can also help with execution and they're smart in the middle. But you're going to have a lot of people at the bottom who are just doing grunt work that are gone and out of a job. That's how I see the new workforce.

The way I see it is if you're going to come into workforce today, and there's a lot of pressure coming, like if you're coming out of college right now, You've got to be both strategic and you've got to be both tactical. So I don't think we can live in a world where you and I aren't like flying high sometimes where we're very high level, but sometimes we're flying our plane very low, which means you and I are getting into the work. Like you and I have always kind of got into the work, right? But the other piece is you gotta fly fast too. And so it's fast, high, and low, and that's how you're gonna win. Because even with this creative strategist role, it's like they gotta be really good at strategy, but they also have to be good at implementing. And someone like you and me, if you and I were both in the workforce today, Yeah. working as a marketing manager, we would be a lot more powerful because of our knowledge with marketing. We would know how to dial up content up and down. We would know how to dial up different, you know, creative concepts up and down because we can do a lot more with what we have. So even if we know a little bit as a T-shaped marketer across the board, we can do a lot more now. And that's kind of what you're saying. We're going to be required to do a lot more. And then the other thing too is, you remember back in the day, we both weren't alive actually. No.

History.

Back in the day when there were lanterns, you had to have lantern lighters at night. Those people were out of a job. When the printing press came out, all the scribes, okay, out of a job. Okay, industrialization, okay, robots doing the job. We actually have a lot of robots working today. So, a lot of the work that humans actually don't want to— does anybody wake up in the morning saying, I want to do customer support? No. Does anybody wake up doing any of these jobs? To your point, it's not like it's It's the jobs that no humans want to do and people might complain for right now, but in the long term, people get to do better jobs that they actually enjoy doing.

Yeah, but you nailed it right there. And that's the hard part. People will get to do better jobs, but those people will want to have change and they have to embrace it. And most of them don't want change and aren't embracing it. Those are the 2 things that are really required because if you want to talk about the printing press or whatever it may be, People had to adapt. And what I'm seeing right now is a lot of people are like, dude, this is unfair. And they're complaining instead of being proactive and being like, let me learn this new technology. And a lot of these people aren't talking about all the new opportunities AI is creating.

Yeah.

They're just looking at it as it's sucking out the jobs.

Yeah.

Yes, but there's been reports like by McKinsey.

Mm-hmm.

And McKinsey ended up stating that there's going to be job losses in marketing, But because of AI, there's going to be more new roles that are created that require AI capabilities. And net-net, if you take away the losses plus the addition of new jobs, there's actually more total jobs in marketing than there were before if you include all the new roles with AI. And people should just be adapting. But you and I see this all day long in corporate America, a lot of people aren't adapting.

Yeah. And I actually think we're actually going to be doing more work. I think you're actually going to need more engineers. I'm going to need more engineers. And so it's— I don't see this as the world is constraining. It's actually expanding. That's how I see it. And then one more thing here on kind of how AI is benefiting society.

Wait, let's go back.

Yeah, go ahead.

You're saying you're needing more engineers. I agree with that statement because we've actually been hiring more engineers at this point as well. Why would you say that you need more engineers in this new role?

Because there's always newer stuff to be built and you have to build faster.

Yes.

It never stops.

It never stops. You have to not only build faster, you need to ship faster, like actually get stuff out. People want stuff shipped on a weekly basis and it's becoming ridiculous.

Yep. By the way, so you talk about shipping at a fast basis right now. So I don't know if you saw this, but the Gemma model helped discover a new potential cancer therapy. So Gemma is from Google. And so You can see these models are— okay, there's another one here. This is, I think this is also from Google, bringing AI to the next generation of fusion energy. So we're going to have more efficient energy. We're going to be able to solve cancer, I think, hopefully in the next decade or so, 15, 20 years, because cancer sucks, right? So people like to say AI is in a bubble. I don't think that works here when AI is actually starting to cure cancer and solving nuclear fusion. Fusion, fusion, sorry, nuclear fusion.

There's this girl on Instagram that I follow. She's a VC. What's her name?

Asian?

She's Asian. Uh, she's really good at just breaking down VC and—

I think I know who you're talking about.

What's this? It's something talks.

Conviction. Sarah Guo?

No, not Sarah Guo. It's like—

Something what?

Her username is like something talks. Zoe Talks?

Zoe Talks. I don't know who that is.

I think I'm spelling it right. Z-A-U-E-Y. Zoe Talks. She's a VC. Am I spelling it right?

I don't know who this is, but yeah.

She's a VC, I believe, in New York.

Okay.

And she breaks down interesting concepts like, you know, the AI bubble.

Yeah, it's a really nice phone.

Yeah, you should have got the iPhone Air. I should have got that phone. Yeah, it has a lot of bugs though. I think it's more so the software, not the hardware.

I'll wait for the next one.

Yeah. When she was talking about the AI bubble and she did it in an illustration of like OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, like all the major players, including Meta. Dude, the, what people are tripping out on is all the money going around in circles. Oh yeah.

The round tripping.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And that's what people are tripping out about. And I get what they mean. I'm not saying there is a bubble or there isn't a bubble, but if one of those players starts feeling the pinch, everyone starts feeling the pinch.

More so Nvidia than anybody.

Yes. Um, or if OpenAI starts feeling the pinch, it hurts everyone. And when you look at the round-tripping that's happening with money, there's a few articles that I read. People have different reasonings and theories on this, but as long as the money going around in circles, these companies are all growing and it's actually causing more growth outside of the money that they're just circulating between each other.

Yeah.

They're saying it's quote unquote not a bubble. But then you also hear people like Altman and a few others go on air and say like, yes, a lot of AI is overvalued and it is a bubble. And my whole take on it is, I don't know if this round tripping or not is going to cause a bubble or not. I think what's really going to cause a bubble in AI is not OpenAI, not NVIDIA.

Not the big ones. Not the big ones.

They're making money hand over fist and they're providing a ton of value.

A lot of small ones will go out of business.

Yes. It's the ones that are like, I do $50 million in revenue. I just raised money at a $10 billion valuation.

Or all these SEO products that have raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I just don't understand where that's going.

Look at BrightEdge. Yeah. Right? It's a good enterprise product.

Jim, great guy. Yeah.

Yeah. Great product. And I would say it's one of the better tools out there, especially if you're a larger organization. I'm pretty sure they've tried to sell multiple times over the years. They've gotten offers. It's not easy and it's not easy to continually get growth. These SaaS companies, I think BrightEdge is good, but even if you're a good company, it doesn't mean that you're valued at $1 billion, $2 billion, $5 billion. And I'm not saying BrightEdge is claiming that, But a lot of players in the SaaS world have gotten hurt really bad from this. And yes, the big players like Anthropic and OpenAI, they're here to stay.

Yep.

They're going to be valued a lot of money over time. Maybe they're valued over too high right now, but they'll grow into the valuations over time.

That's a problem right now too, that the valuations are very high and then the VCs need to keep investing. They need to keep putting shots on goal, right? And so, but it doesn't align with all these other founders who think their company is worth that much, right? So you actually mentioned McKinsey, and I kind of want to pull this stat up here for you. So McKinsey claims that 70% of their 45,000 employees use its AI. Do you think that's likely? So the consultancy built an internal AI chatbot called Lily, trained on 100 years of the consultancy's work and 100,000 documents and interviews. It claims 70% of the firm's 45,000 employees regularly use this tool. And so UCited at Firm rolled out in 2023. Those who use it, those who turn to it about, those who use it turn to it about 17 times a week, and it aggregates key points, identifies 5 to 7 relevant internal content pieces, and points users to appropriate experts within the firm. Users can opt to have queries answered by the firm's internal knowledge repository or external sources. So this just kind of more reinforcement here. You're seeing, people are like, oh, what? There's no ROI, it's a bubble, right? I think the reality is, one, the valuations aren't crazy, 'cause you remember Cisco's valuation, the forward P/E multiple? I think it went up to like 30, 40, or 50, and then it jumped up to like 200-something. When you look at Nvidia's PE, what is it right now? The PE ratio, like 27?

Nvidia's current PE or forward-looking PE?

Forward-looking PE, sorry.

Nvidia forward—

Yeah, Neil's chatting with people right now.

Yeah, you know, this last article here says forward-looking is 29.94.

So it's not crazy is my point.

No, it's not crazy.

And you and I are seeing the usage in our companies too, right? It doesn't feel like, Again, like you and I weren't in business in 1999, but you know what I mean?

Yeah, but if you want to look at the hype in AI and marketing, specifically marketing, because I would say we both have a better understanding of that.

Yeah.

AI is definitely here to stay. ChatGPT has grown to a billion searches a day faster than Google has, but you can't just compare how many years it took Google because the internet was very different back then. Just like Threads got to 100 million users quicker than anyone else, but look at where Threads is now. No one really cares for it.

Dude, I get good reach on Threads. Compared to my Twitter.

Me too, because they want to push it due to the fact that no one really uses it. But when you look at marketing and AI specifically, it's here to stay. It provides a lot of value. I would say the biggest value it provides marketers like Eric and I is actually not the tools. It's more so OpenAI gave us ChatGPT, which is a new channel to push out our products, our messaging, and our services and get traffic and conversions from. Would you agree?

I agree.

That's actually the biggest change over anything else. It's also given us technology. The technology makes our people more efficient, but the technology hasn't had as big of an impact on our organization compared to the traffic that we can generate from ChatGPT and the conversions. Do you agree with that statement?

I agree with that. Yeah.

And in marketing, would you also agree that a lot of people overstated the power of AI and how it's going to replace a lot of marketers?

Yes.

By far, right?

Yes.

And would you agree Your mid-level, high-level executive positions or mid-level managers, you haven't figured out how to replace them with AI yet.

No, not yet.

Bottom level, some people doing grunt work, you have.

Yes.

And that's why we both believe that the pyramid is now 2 pyramids stacked on each other with the bases connected and the points at the top and at the bottom.

Just call it a diamond.

Just call it a diamond.

Yeah, yeah, a diamond. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but when I said diamond to you—

It was a funnel. That was a funnel. Yeah, I had it wrong in my head. Now I can see a diamond.

Yeah, it's a straight up diamond.

It's like an Ethereum diamond, dude. Okay, so you look, you like stats. This will be the last one on AI real quick. So Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs has stated that companies on average are experiencing a 25 to 30% productivity improvement after adopting AI successfully deployed. So whatever that means, right? But here's what's interesting. So Autodesk, about 60% success rate productivity gains when successfully employed.

deployed.

UC San Diego, my college, look at that, 55% or so, right? And then you have like Adobe, Deloitte. Adobe is like pretty high, like 50% or so. So the productivity gains were— look, it's here to stay. I just wanted to give more stats with all this stuff because I think a lot of people are doomers and against this. But guess what? All the people that like to complain, I was watching a video. I'm not going to try to go too much into politics, but I had a friend, we had a mutual friend send me a video the other day and it was somebody complaining about what does EBT stand for again? Is it the food stamp program?

I think so, yes.

Okay, so this person basically said like, look, I get that it's important, but like it says I need to work 20 hours a week and it's like, I'm not going to work. I'm not going to work for anybody. Like I'm a boss, I don't work, right? And the problem with that is the companies that are working hard, the people that are pushing hard, they're getting productivity gains, whereas the people that don't want to push, that's what's going to happen. Like you're better off pushing and having more agency for yourself. That's my point.

Yeah, but also when I look at these productivity gains, We're just getting done more with the same amount of people. Most organizations that I've talked to, at least with marketing departments, they're not looking to fire tons of people. They're just looking to get more output out of their existing people and do more because it's a competitive landscape. So they got to figure out how to get more done to try to beat people.

Did you watch the interview with Andrej Karpathy?

No.

Okay, so Andrej Karpathy, you know, he's a big AI guy, like legend, right? He's worked for Tesla before. He actually helped with the self-driving stuff. He, so he did an interview with Dwarkesh Patel. Okay. I don't know. Dwarkesh Patel. It's your brother from another mother. I don't know who that is. So he's got a popular tech podcast. So Mark Zuckerberg's been on there and all that. So whenever you listen, like sometimes he's got some big interviews. And so the point is Andrej, who's a legend in AI, has said that AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, which is where an AI can do everything autonomously. How many years do you think that is out? Like 5 years, 2 years, 8 years, 20 years?

I think 10+ years.

Exactly. He said 10+ years out, right? So he's like, we're not quite there yet. The other thing he said too, that's what you just kind of mentioned, is that AI is creating mountains and mountains of slop, right? So everyone thinks that you can just use it to create a bunch of like thousands of articles and not have a human in the loop, and you can't do that, right? You need AI plus human. It can't just be AI on its own, at least for right now.

Dude, I got this. Check this out. You'll love this one. I don't know if I ever showed it to you. How much time are marketers spending on AI sloth?

Oh, I didn't see this one.

Yeah, look at this. This is great.

What's 51 stand for?

This is marketing organization. So people whose team size, not corporate team size, marketing team size is 51 plus, they're spending 76 minutes on average per person per day on AI sloth. Team sizes 21 to 50 average, they're spending 81 minutes per day per employee. When your marketing team size is 11 to 20, they're spending 56 minutes on average a day with slop. And team sizes of 1 to 10 in marketing, 33 minutes a day on slop.

You know, people should be taxed on if they're just creating slop without— they should be paying more per token. That's what should happen. Is it just a bunch of junk that's being— the internet was always a bunch of trash and now there's even more trash on the internet.

So much more. What's funny is, you know, every time I go and give a speech, I always ask the question, how many of you guys are generating more revenue through AI?

Not much, right?

Not much, but now I'm getting a lot more people raising hands.

Which is fast because we did that at HubSpot.

Yeah, but do you want to know what they're saying right now?

What?

When they raise their hands, I say, how? They're like, oh, ChatGPT drives us sales and traffic. I say, okay, if you exclude that, how about from the technology that you're using within your organization? Still not really getting any hands. And they're saying, a lot of them are now admitting it's actually causing us to have more work with our team because it creates a lot of inefficiency.

It gets confusing too.

Bad stuff. And they spend their time not just— this is just AI slop, right? AI junk that they have to go and fix. But what we're finding now when we talk to organizations and they don't categorize this as AI slop is their team has shiny object syndrome where they're using AI to do this cool stuff and this cool stuff, like go create a really cool video and they're like, oh, we never needed it. We just want to test it out and do these cool things. And they're spending so much time on stuff that has nothing to do with their KPIs.

Extra unneeded work. That ultimately is actually counterproductive.

Yes. And what they're finding is, is those people are struggling to get their normal tasks done that they needed to because they're using AI, but they're using AI for the wrong stuff instead of using it for stuff that impacts the KPIs.

That's actually a good lesson. I think if you're a leader of a company listening to this right now, you actually have to like, sure, you need to champion AI, but you can't say test every tool because that's going to be counterproductive to your business.

Very counterproductive. Yeah.

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Mm-hmm.

So when you do CRO on your website right now, Like, are you using like Figma to like take a snapshot of a page and then comment on what you want changed? Like, how do you do it right now?

The whole process or just the design?

Just the beginning. It's like, I want this changed. And are you proto— how are you prototyping it right now?

So, uh, my buddy Gajan from Spiralize takes a snapshot of any website on the internet that's running an A/B test. So if I want to run an A/B test, the first thing I do is I go to him and I'm like, yo dude, I need data. What's the winning versions for anything in my industry? And he'll feed it to me. And then I take that and then I'll take the current version and then I'll go and I'll leave edits based on what's won on previous tests. And when I say he takes snapshots, let's say there's 100 B2B SaaS companies and I have a SaaS product. I'm making this up even though I do have a SaaS product and there's 100 in my space.

Mm-hmm.

He'll go and take a snapshot of every single one that's running a testing script, Optimizely, VWO, Crazy Egg, you get the point. And then they pinpoint which version became default after the test was over. So they'll do that for many different websites so they can see what tends to be the winning variation versus the variations.

He should have that as a product.

Yeah, he should. He'd probably make more money selling that as a product. And then we will then take the data on what's winning. And then use that data to then go and adjust what we're doing on our website.

Yeah. But the key thing, so you just mentioned after you have that data, so after, okay, you've got it, like how are you communicating these changes? How are you prototyping these changes to send to your team?

Figma.

Okay.

It's all comments. Great.

Get this. So you, okay. Remember, like if you want to prototype something, you might've had to use Figma. You might've had to like wireframe stuff using Balsamiq in the past, right? So now. There's an app, like I know we've mentioned Dotto uses a bunch of AI tools, but, but, but here's another one. Here's, here's actually an amazing app that helps you prototype because you, with a lot of AI prototyping stuff, it like will give you like an AI, like version, AI looking like computerized version of like a landing page, right? If you wanted to maintain consistency for your site, so if I went to mpdigital.com right now and I did a snapshot, I can literally type in natural language. I want these changes made right now. Plus I can like loop in screenshots from other tests that you've seen and literally it'll make the changes to that page. You can send it to your developer. That takes you like 2 to 3 minutes to do and you get the changes up a lot faster and it's exactly what you want versus before Figma comments, comments, comments, this and that, back and forth, this and that. Don't need to do that anymore.

So we don't do the comments back and forth on Figma. Oh, it's just, it's just me saying my comments do this. My comments do this. And I would probably still use the same process that we use right now instead of the tool. Because for me, I know you're saying 2, 3 minutes. I get it was an exaggeration, but it's quick. It's faster for me to just be like, here's the screenshots, implement these in these areas, and that's it. And then my team though should use that software that you're just mentioning to whip out the version and showcase it to me.

Yeah.

Because I think for me, I'm not trying to sound arrogant, it's a bad use of my time to do all of that versus just saying, just go make these quick changes.

I'm not exaggerating, 2 to 3 minutes. I've not, I'll show it to you later. Like maybe your team should use it, but I'm saying like, I get it. Like, yes, your time is very valuable. You should be focused on higher leverage, but conversion rate is a very high leverage thing, right?

Yeah, I know this is a high leverage thing.

I'm not exaggerating, 2 to 3 minutes and that's it. Like for me, like Getting Things Done, that book, right? It's like if it takes 2 minutes, you just do it yourself. And so not do it yourself.

Yeah, I agree with that. What's this software called?

alloy.app, A-L-L-O-Y dot A-P-P.

Okay, I'm going to check it out. And I'll let you know what happens after I test it. Here's my big fear, and this is why I haven't used a lot of AI apps for these kind of tasks. I put it in and I tell it to make a mockup with my design guidelines, and I'm assuming I can upload the design style guidelines and the color scheme and all that.

Dude, you just freaking, I was about to use the F word, but like, this is how much I love it. You literally take a screenshot of whatever page it is, it'll capture it, and then you just say whatever you want to change, and then you can, if you like to pull the spiralized examples, like 1 or 2 examples, just upload it and then just say, They ask me any clarifying questions and then boom, like it's done. And I was like, the first time that happened, I was like, whoa. Like, 'cause Jason Lemkin mentioned it on X, right? He's like, this is the best thing. I'm like, this can't be that good, right? I use it. I was like, it's pretty good. Yeah.

I'm going to end up testing it, but here's my fear going back to it is I'm afraid that I spend the 2, 3 minutes and it doesn't get it the way I want and I can't send it to a developer and I'm going to have to keep spending 2, 3 minutes, 5, 10 times. And that's why it's just easier for me to just leave some text-based comments.

I changed my homepage, right? So you can see my homepage here. I added this average ROI thing and then these like 3 checkmarks over here and I changed this quote over here and I asked the video to be changed and we changed the logos down here, right? That like—

Yeah, let me check it out.

That it maintained the style of the brand. It didn't like add a bunch of like random things that I needed to, you know, rekindle, spec out.

So for, for these kind of changes, I get it, but I don't use Figma for these kind of changes. I would just pick up the phone and tell them. Yeah.

You're talking about something significant. Yeah.

Like doing a whole new redesign based on a new flow.

That's different. I'm talking about minor things like this.

Yeah. Yeah. Minor things.

No, no, actually no. You can do this for prototype with products too.

So like, I don't have an example of our old homepage, but if I show you my new homepage, I want to make sure I'm not blocking your camera.

No, you're right here.

No, I know I'm talking about your camera.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. I ended up doing, we figured out logos on the left, which logos we wanted, checkboxes, what happens after they put the checkboxes. We wanted the awards right underneath after that. We wanted to change the next section to creative.

Yeah.

We then wanted to reduce— introduce a map with all our locations.

Yep.

And then we wanted to introduce a case study section, which we're redoing right now.

Yep.

Then we wanted to introduce a job section, but most the page, the layout has changed. Where it was more so a redesign where—

Oh, you have an RFP button now. That's great.

Yeah, we have an RFP button.

Yeah.

And I can tell you what happened with the RFP button, but the point I was getting with this redesign, I was able to get my team, we were able to get alignment in less than 10 minutes on everything that wanted to be changed. I don't think we could have brainstormed and figured that all out in an app in less than 10 minutes.

No, if you got that done in 10 minutes, that's still more efficient.

But not the design, by the way. That's me getting my site done.

Yeah. I don't know how long it's going to take. If your site is only 10 minutes, I would just stick with that. But prototyping like apps and things like that, like, you know, prototyping apps.

Yes. If it's like brand new, I actually do love using AI. And the reason being is I'm now speaking with a visual and then it helps our product team go out there and figure out how to build on something.

So, okay, if you wanted to build on Ubersuggest, for example, you would just take a screenshot of like the design of like the different Ubersuggest screens.

We already do that with AI right now. And then we send it. I don't know, Kyle on my end does it.

Yeah. So this, this would plug into that because like whatever changes you want to make to screens and all that, this is, this is where you'd be using it. But if you have something for it, then it's fine.

I wonder if he texted me the screenshot.

Yeah.

Uh, let's see. I can show you it. Uh, no, my text messages delete after 30 days. Yeah. But, um, he would text me changes. He's like, what do you think of this? And he'll do it in AI. And then if it's good, we'll then send it to the team and explain through that visual what we want done and they'll go and tweak it. It's never looking exactly the same. They polish it up more, but that was useful. Going back to the RFP button, you want to know how that's working out?

Yeah, yeah.

So the thesis behind the RFPs is we're an enterprise shop. We do SMB work as well. We do mid-market as well. So we do all ends of the spectrum, but we've been going more and more upstream and even more and more upstream for SMBs. So instead of working with an individual business, We would work with an individual business with 300 locations or 500 locations. So you're getting the money in quantity. So even though each individual business isn't much—

It adds up.

Adds up because the franchise may say, hey, we're only giving you $5,000 a month for the business. Well, it's just like, wait, you have 200 locations. That adds up to a pretty penny on a monthly basis. So those kind of deals, and they don't always pay $5,000, but even if it was $2,000, you know, with 200 locations, whatever, it adds up pretty fast.

Yep.

And what we found is we're like, you know what? Most RFPs, when they decide to include you in an RFP, they're not going to go to your website and click an RFP button. They've already decided at that point that they want to include you in an RFP. All right? We still wanted the RFP button so that way when people browse our website, they know we have, We accept RFPs.

Yeah.

So they're more likely to include us. I don't have any data on that yet. Yeah.

'Cause you just launched it.

Uh, it's been live for like maybe a month and a half.

Yeah. But NP Digital, the website, your web, that website doesn't get as much, nearly as much traffic as your main website. Your, your personal brand.

It does more revenue than the Neil Patel website.

Well, I'm sure it does, but like I'm talking about web traffic to NP Digital.

Yeah. I, I don't know how much, uh, It doesn't. My guess is from Google Search Console, my guess is just from search alone, NP Digital, what is 30,923? That was last 3 months. So from search, we're getting, call it, if I look at the last 28 days, 8,680 clicks from search.

Wait, 800 what? 800,000?

No, sorry. 8.68, so 8,600—

To npdigital.com.

To NP Digital from—

Yeah, but it's very qualified traffic.

Very qualified.

Yeah.

You want to guess what our number 1 query is?

Neil Patel?

No. NP space digital. You want to guess what our number 2 query is?

NP Digital, not spaced?

Yeah. You want to guess what our number 3 query is?

NP Digital marketing? No.

Neil Patel Digital.

Okay.

Those are the top 3. NP Digital without a space—

Wait, what percent? What percent? Like how much traffic is that?

I wish they gave the percentage. I don't know. That's average click-through rate. Okay. So NP Digital makes up 3,032 with space. Without a space is another 525. So the brand name, that's just the direct variation of that is 3,500 of the 8,608. The Neil Patel Digital, only 141 clicks a month. So, and that is not, that's the 3rd most popular keyword.

How are you logging in so quickly to your Search Console?

I'm already logged into Google.

Oh, here.

So you just go to—

I'm going to look at Single Grain. So the, while we talk about that, I think we should, while I pull this up, we should talk about how to make more money with podcasting. So this is interesting. I was, this guy I know, Sean, he has a company called ridge.com and he has a podcast called The 9 Operators, which is 9-figure e-commerce operators, right? There's a handful of them, like 4 operators on that podcast, which is interesting because there's a SaaS operators one that came out. But in my mind, this is like an agency operators one. But anyway, Sean tweets this like 2 days ago. He's like, yeah, you know, we make 7 figures a year. They have like a 3 or 4 podcasts, but I don't think they get like a ton of downloads and like a good amount, right? I think you have very smart people listening to us. It's a good podcast. And I was like, man, like, how is that happening? Because That ain't what we're getting, right? So then I spoke to a podcast, let's say a podcast advertiser, he manages a couple brands. And I was like, okay, how much should we be making basically? He's like, yeah, you guys should be making way more. And I think for us, we want to have a situation. So the way the 9 operators do it is they just have like a couple of prerecorded mid-rolls and pre-rolls and that's it, right? You and I are down to do that.

Yes.

But if you asked me to do like, I have to do separate recordings for this and that. I have to make a show and this, like, we need to focus on operating our business, right? And so all that to say is that, you know, we have a podcast partner right now and I think it's fine, but, you know, we want to see what we can do to amp it up when it comes to driving more revenue. And I think the way to make more money from podcast advertising, sometimes you just go direct to some of these companies.

I agree. Someone hit us up direct the other day on— I added you on the WhatsApp thread.

Yeah.

And it was really simple. They're like, okay, this amount.

It's 2 actually. There's someone else. There's another one. I didn't loop you in on this one, but like, oh yeah, okay, well we'll do this. And it's a similar deal structure to the one you mentioned.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't, I don't like doing these one-offs because here's the thing, and we can move on from this, but like there are sponsors, like people do ask me, it's like, how do you get LinkedIn? How do you get Shopify? We do get LinkedIn, we do get Shopify, and they do keep renewing, but somehow, somehow We're very poor.

Yeah. Where's the check?

Yeah. So I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. And we're not saying they don't pay. We're not insinuating that.

No, no, no. We're, we're, we're saying that—

We're saying they do pay and we're not saying Eric or I are stealing the money.

No, but we would like to get paid more.

Yes. Yeah. Uh, so what's the traffic on Single Grain?

Okay. So we're looking at last 28 days, right?

Yeah. Mine for some reason ends on October 19th, even though today's the 24th.

Last 28 days. Okay, so my traffic is only 16,400 now for organic.

Wait, wait, wait, but when was your last update date? Was it October 19th?

10 hours ago.

Yeah, no, no, but look at the chart. Mine says October 19th.

Mine says, this is 28 days, right?

Yeah.

Last update is October 19th, correct?

Yeah, that means they need to update on their end.

Okay, so we are looking at what? We're looking at queries and click-through rate, right?

Yeah, so you're at how many thousands of visitors? 16,000?

16,000 last 28 days. Okay, so Single Grain's number 1 with 1,200, 47% click-through rate.

Okay. Single Grain with no space or a space?

With space. Yeah.

Okay.

And then after that it's like, you know, 2, 3, 4 are like these AI tools that we built, but 5 is Single Grain, no space. That's 142 clicks, 72% click-through rate.

Yeah.

Got it. Yeah. So that's what we look like. You said yours is what, like 3,000?

When I, I just combine both. So when I combine Single Grain, I mean NP Digital, NP Digital, no space, Neil Patel Digital, because I assume they're all the same company name.

Yep.

We're at roughly 3,600 and change.

Cool. So mine's at 1,300 and with the high click-through rate, I have to assume that they did intend to click a digital marketing agency page.

So. My click-through rate should be higher. NP Digital is 61.8%. It's 70.9% for No Space, 12.7% for Neil Patel Digital.

Yeah. Okay.

I, because I'm assuming, because my name is there.

If I add these other ones, 15, 1.5, 1.6, but your, your, your brand name gets a lot of traffic.

What's your click-through rate at single grain?

The highest one?

Uh-huh.

47%. Second one is 72%.

72 is no space, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I figured.

Same with mine. My no space is 70%. My other one is 61.8%. The reason Eric's click-through rate is lower is because single grain could mean multiple things.

Yeah. Well, here's the thing. For, but it does say clearly when you click, before you click it, it's a digital marketing agency. So I think they actually do understand what they're clicking because Single Grain is actually malt whiskey. People search for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I do think they're clicking the right thing.

And also, uh, you have quite a few people advertising on your name. I don't know if you saw that.

No.

Yeah.

But that's, that's normal. Oh, you guys don't allow it?

We run ads on our own name.

Yeah. We, we, when we looked at it a while back, it was expensive. So we had already basically—

No, it becomes really cheap for your own brand name. Try running it.

After you come in? Yeah.

After you come in, it goes down.

Oh, I didn't know that.

We usually say, because your click-through rate's really high.

Yeah.

They're looking for you in the first place. So it tends to be pretty affordable.

Speaking of SEO, um, so Matt Diggity tweeted this. It says your SEO strategy is missing 41% of potential customers. So basically 41% of Gen Z. uses this marketing channel first. Which one do you think it is?

41% use this marketing channel?

41% of Gen Z, they use this marketing channel first.

TikTok.

Yeah. So it is scrolling Reddit, ChatGPT, and trusting TikTok recommendations. So this is Sprout Social's Q2 2025 survey. So only 32% still use Google. 41% of Gen Z now uses social platforms first. And so that's the shift that's happening, whether it's like looking at, you know, Reddit or YouTube, checking reviews on Amazon, ChatGPT for alternatives. So Google, 32%, still big. But, you know, as marketers, we have to adapt because here's the thing, like, you know, when you and I, like, let's say we're speaking at SEO conferences, SEOs like to stay just in one area. You've got to branch out at this point.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, dude, you should. Seriously, if I would go back, You should go run ads on your own brand name.

Let me see yours here. You can pick the next topic.

I'm just going to look at this. I don't see ads right now for mine.

Yeah.

I don't know what software we use, but when we see other ads and it turns on, and when there are no other ads, it turns off.

So we're not burning money. Oh, what are you using for that?

I don't know, but just text me and I'll find out for next time.

Yeah, yeah. I'm going to text you and text you right now.

It saves us quite a bit of money. It saves our clients a lot of money too.

I would like that.

Because you don't want to bid on your own name when there's no one else bidding.

Yeah, exactly.

You only want to bid when there's someone else bidding. Uh-huh.

Okay, there we go.

I'll find out from the team.

Cool.

But we've been using that for years. It saved us a— it saved a lot of our clients money too.

Yep. Oh, this is interesting. So Neil, when I search your thing, number 3 is, uh, you got some Reddit posts up here.

For NP Digital?

Uh-huh.

NP Digital. I haven't seen. Dude.

Yeah. Let's get a community manager on that.

Okay. Yeah. It says something tells me I don't want to work here. Eric's too nice to say it.

That's not for me to say.

Yeah, they recently landed an interview. But that was nice of him for not saying, but I didn't mind just saying it. But yeah, I did.

By the way, I mean, what you would do there is very simple. You would jump in yourself and respond and—

Oh, but Reddit's going to hate me if I respond.

Why? It's an authentic response.

I'm telling you, I've responded on Reddit before. They hate me.

Well, if it's the same SEO community, then yeah, probably.

Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, so I'm going to, I'm going to pick the next one. So you can pick.

Here's an interesting fact, all right? They're telling me they don't want to end up working here. They've been doing pay-per-click, yada, yada, yada. I actually have this recent stat. Do you know what our churn rate is on pay-per-click clients?

Per year?

Yeah. I actually got this stat last week.

10%?

Nope, 7%.

It was close.

It was close, but 7% is really good churn.

Yeah.

That means we do good work with Your clients. With pay-per-click.

Yeah.

So I know some people aren't, may not be happy when they interview with us because they don't get a job or whatnot, but that means the average client on pay-per-click lasts 14.28 years. We haven't been in business that long, but it's around 7%.

Yeah, but that's, by the way, this reinforces again, when I talk to people more and more, all the AI stuff we're talking about, it means you have to make it harder and harder to join your company. And the way we set expectations, by the way, we interviewed a couple people for YouTube Stripes. So what are you paying for AI right now? Oh yeah, I just don't, I borrow other people's stuff. Not good enough. Okay. What's the most impressive thing that you've done? Yesterday we talked to somebody. This is the final stage of an SEO interview. What's the most impressive thing you've done with SEO? Well, with CRO, I did this. Wait, what? Right? So yeah. Anyway, all that to say is that high standards aren't for everyone, and it's important for you if you're a leader of the company to set the standards and repel people where it doesn't make sense. Okay. You can pick the next one.

All right, let's pick. Let's see. ChatGPT continues to lose Gemini traffic share.

Oh, this one's good. You've seen this graph for sure. Okay, so check this out. So if you look at this graph, okay, you can see this right over here. So you can see 12 months ago, the big blue one was OpenAI. That's ChatGPT.

Okay.

And then Gemini is red. Okay. Now, if you go to today, Gemini, the red one has gotten way bigger. Okay. And then you can see these other ones here. You got Hugging Face, DeepSeek, Perplexity, all these, right? And I'll just give you the numbers 12 months ago, okay? So ChatGPT had 87.1% share 12 months ago. Gemini was 6.4%. Today, Gemini is now 12.9%. ChatGPT is 74.1%.

Wow.

Yep. And this data is from SimilarWeb.

Most people would not agree with me on this, but I think Gemini will be one of the most popular AI platforms.

I mean, why wouldn't most people agree with it? It seems obvious to me.

Yeah, most people say ChatGPT is going to take it all. I just don't believe in that.

I think ChatGPT will be a player. I think when you look— so we should justify this, right? I think Gemini, because they own YouTube, because they own Android, because they have Chrome, because they have these TPUs, okay, because they also have Waymo, they have all these things, okay? They have some of the best image models. They have some of the best video models out there. They've gotten serious about how they play the game now. NotebookLM, fantastic.

Yeah. I think Google's, in my opinion, releasing better technology than OpenAI. And the most, if I had to take the last 3 to 6 months, I would say Google's doing a better job.

When I make short-form scripts, and we can talk about this, we should talk about YouTube for a second too. So I told you I've been piloting this short-form agency and they've been doing a good job. I'm like, I can see this compounding pretty significantly in the next 2, 3 months. And they write these amazing scripts. And what I do with their scripts is I take the scripts, and I make a Gemini Gem. I don't pick ChatGPT like a custom GPT. The reason I pick Gemini Gem is because it can pull from YouTube. It knows what I'm like and it knows it can take from like my speaking style, my thumbnail style, and then it can, it can take the scripts that they put together and make short form. And I've actually created a couple of good short form scripts using theirs. So I'm going to keep getting scripts. I'm going to keep working with them. But these— I picked Gemini Gem because it's hooked in with YouTube. That's why.

But from a marketing standpoint, do you use OpenAI or Google products more?

For what?

For any marketing-related tasks other than searching.

In general right now, I still use ChatGPT more.

Okay.

Because it has a lot of memory and like today, like I'll ask questions like, hey, like what's the highest leverage move here? I have these decisions to make with these 2 products over here. And then it knows because we've worked together a lot. Yeah, and then every day you get a daily pulse from ChatGPT. So, oh, but you remember that retention graph? Did you see that retention graph from earlier this week?

Uh-uh.

Oh dude, okay, so you will like this. Today's a great episode for Neil 'cause he likes data. Okay, this chart over here, I don't, it took, I had to stare at this for a little bit to understand. Maybe it'll take you a little bit to get it too. Maybe you'll get it, you'll probably get it faster than me. Do you understand what's happening here?

This is, what is it?

Customer retention graph? Customer retention ChatGPT. So you can see this is over the time period, number of months over time, right?

Which is actually kind of crazy 'cause that means over time people are using it More and more.

And it's probably because of the memory. These are people who have churned, right? And they're coming back. And so the retention's going up because of memory and things like that. Yeah. This is an example. So someone said this in an investor—

Yeah, but it's not only— the interesting part here is it's not that they're just churning, they're coming back and they're not coming back at the same pace. They're coming back and starting to use it more than they did before.

Yeah.

Before they churn. And it's because of the memory.

I remember an investor tweeted, he responded to this and it's like, the only other graph I've seen like this was Uber back in the day, right? And, you know, Uber's a great company. I think ChatGPT is probably going to be more significantly larger, but the guy that tweeted this says, huge, this chart is so insane that it looks fake. Huge businesses, plural, will be built on top of this chart. Again, it looks like a happy face.

Yeah. Yeah.

So that just, I mean, okay, product lesson here is how do you get people to, how do you constantly think about how you can add more value and lock people in? That's what ChatGPT is doing.

But when we look at the use case for ChatGPT and even Google's AI products and Microsoft's, you know, it doesn't matter if you want to pick Copilot or Perplexity or any of these brands out there, the biggest use case is not actually to become more efficient at work. It's people using it as a new version of search, getting their questions answered. A question answered could be, what should I do with my products? Like you're talking about.

Mm-hmm.

It's just a more advanced version of search and it's where search was supposed to go. Google was just slower to adapt. Example for me recently—

But now they've caught up.

Yeah, they've caught up. Example for me, although what I don't like about Google is you don't see AI mode on an iPad. I hate that. Have you noticed that?

I don't use— besides for this podcast, I don't really use this iPad unless I'm like flying and watching movies. Okay.

I use the iPad more than I use my laptop. And when I say Like AI mode, whether it's AI mode or ChatGPT. Like the other day I was researching an accounting question and it was a really—

Of course you were.

Complex question. It was, I wouldn't say it's a complex question, but it was a complex answer I was looking for because I got hit up by someone who's a competitor. They want to sell. It's not worth my team to spend the time and energy on that company. Because it doesn't make enough revenue and it doesn't make enough profit, but they raised a lot of money. So then they're a C corp, I'm an S corp. So in business there's something called NOLs. Are you familiar with NOLs? Net operating losses. So typically—

Oh, you want to carry them forward?

I want to carry them forward. So I was just like, and I know they changed the laws on NOLs. So I was like, wait, let's say hypothetically they raised, you know, $30, $40 million, and I can pick up the business for $1 million. I don't care for the revenue. The revenue was small. When I say small, like $2, $3 million or something like that. And when I say the profit, it was negligible, like maybe like $500,000 a year in profit. So I'm like, dude, buy this company for this. This is a pain in the butt. And I was like, will the NOLs carry forward? So then I started doing research About the law changes. And they were just like, well, it's now based on how much you bought the business for and you can get 8% of what you bought the business for each year. So if you bought the business for, I think they were saying 8%, maybe it could have been a smaller percent, but it's something small. Like if I bought it for $100 grand, it would be more than that, of course, but using easy percentages, like $8,000 a year that I can write off for my profits.

I'm like, this isn't how it works. Not worth it. Yeah.

Right. But before you could, before you could just take the whole, you know, enchilada or not the whole thing, but a lot of it. So if someone had $50 million in venture capital and they lost it all, you had to keep in mind if a company's making profit, the profit goes against it. But let's say they have $50 million remaining. You could over time capture $50 million. The laws on this changed a while ago.

Yeah.

So then I was like, how about if I merge the companies? And they're just like, well, if you merge the companies, are you going to be the majority owner? Because if the other person retains majority ownership, the NOL laws are different than if you retain, me being the person trying to buy it, retains majority. I'm like, well, this won't work because I would own all of it. I don't want to give them any percentage and keep those owners still around. And then I started asking questions on like, what happens if I kept it a C corp and that company miraculously grew in revenue? I'm not trying to do anything shady, but let's say we promoted it, Would I get— and it started generating a lot of revenue, would I actually be able to save $50 million in losses? And they were just like, no, because you bought it for a lot less.

Yeah.

Long story short, I probably spent 15, 20 minutes when I was in my daughter's car line.

Yeah.

Waiting to pick her up for school.

Yeah.

Because I wait there for like more than 30 minutes.

Yeah.

I started and I put the car in park. So I'm just asking ChatGPT all these questions. To get my answer.

But that saves you so much time and headache.

It saves me so much time and headache. That's where I found these new search tools really useful, or AI platforms, is I can do like really hardcore deep research to get my answers.

But you know what's important too that you're mentioning? It makes you a better strategist, but you have to have that level of thinking already. That experience matters a lot.

Dude, you're totally right. Because I've asked it a lot of accounting questions. Like even, I have one corporation That used to make a lot of money and I've merged it in with other corporations. It was an S. The way we did the assets, the company that was an S, it ended up turning into a C and I don't own any of the assets anymore, but the C is, think of it like an empty shell.

Uh-huh.

So it doesn't generate any revenue, but I still keep the company around because I like it. And you know, after the 5-year limit, I can convert it back into S and I'll, I'll, you know, I'll do whatever I did with that corporation. So with that company, you know, I may have to end up refunding someone, and which is fine. And I already predicted this and I was like, okay, if it's a C corporation now, you know, if I can end up, if I refund, it actually has negative income, but the income generated when I was an S, so in theory, I should be able to claim that off my personal taxes. And they were like, yes, you can, as long as you have enough income within the year to offset it. And I don't know what I'm going to generate each year because sometimes we reinvest a lot, we buy more businesses, et cetera. And I was like, what happens if I don't? And they're just like, you'll end up— it goes away because it's too late to go redo your taxes because it's been more than 3 years. So I was just like, so whatever you save in that year, is what you save, the remainder balance that you refunded, you don't get a tax break on it. And I was like, I'm like, you're asking me if I do a credit. What happens if I turn it into NOL? Because I should be able to. And they're like, actually, you are correct. You got the, you know, they're like, this is something that, you know, that AI did not think about. And I was like, what about turning into NOL?

Yeah.

And it's like, yes, you can turn it into NOL, use it as a debit instead of a credit, and you can wipe off all the gains on your personal. And I was like, cool, sounds good. And I was like, if I should do this, because when I had that money and I paid taxable income, I'm not trying to do anything shady here. I lived in a state where there was no state income tax. Now I live in a state where there's a state income. And I was like, because it's an NOL, in theory, I should be able to save on state income tax, even though I didn't pay state income tax on the original amount. And they're like, that is correct. You will get a rebate on state income tax as well. So I was like, oh, cool.

Yeah.

But the AI did not think through all the different scenarios. And I had to feed it data on, or I had to give it ideas on how it could work for what I was looking for.

Let me tell you why this is important. So again, this is new work that couldn't be created before because Neil's old behavior is he might, you know, call a handful of different people all the time. He used to call people all the time, right? Now he will pester the AI instead, and once it's nailed down, then he will make the call to double-check with a professional.

Yeah, you're so right, because normally I would have called 3 to 5 accountants, maybe 2 of them would have Picked up and I would've spitballed with them to try to figure this out. And then once we would've had a plan, I would've verified it with another accountant to make sure it's legal and it passes. I'm not doing anything shady. Now I pester the AI for anything I want.

Yep.

And then I verify it with a human who's an expert. And I'll tell you this, in most scenarios, I'm using AI for really high leverage stuff. Like I'm talking about millions of dollars in taxes here, right? I consider this high leverage. This is stuff I'm figuring out in less than 30 minutes, so it's very valuable. I could have figured it out by talking through quite a few people, but it's easier now for me to go through AI and then verify it with human. But if you yourself as an individual aren't decently knowledgeable in the subject, and ideally more than decently knowledgeable, like I think I know taxes and accounting pretty well, even though that's not my specialty.

You definitely do.

The AI doesn't produce what you're actually looking for. It is not that useful. You need the person who's prompting to have the expertise themselves, or it's not that useful. And this is for any subject from what we really see. Like if you're in marketing, if the person behind there is more talented, they're going to have much more success using AI. And the second thing is you should verify it by an expert. And Eric nailed this and he knows me really well. And why would you say that I'm going to ask an expert to verify this?

Well, because you need to make sure it's— because that's not an expert, first and foremost. You need to make sure you're legally okay. And you probably will ask what— you'll probably ask 2 or 3, actually.

Correct.

Yeah.

Because you don't want to go wrong. And Eric's spot on. I've had a lot of times where I've asked experts after doing my research and OpenAI is wrong or ChatGPT is wrong with what they gave me.

How often is it wrong though?

For this complex stuff?

20, 30% of the time?

More.

40%?

Yeah, it's right more than half the time, but probably 40% of the cases.

But it still moves you a little further than you would before. Because the thing is, once you call all these people, you exhaust them a little bit. When you do it in ChatGPT, even if you get a little closer, like a mile or 2 further, it's still worth it.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because even when I talk to accountants on some of my cockamamie ideas, Sometimes they have to do research too.

Yeah. Yeah. See, this is where the AI is good. It's infatigable.

Yeah. Because when I say my cockamamie ideas, I'm not trying to do anything illegal. I just have random ideas and it's either, it's pretty black and white. Either it'll work or it won't.

Either it will make money or it won't. Exactly. That's how your mind works.

And the problem with a lot of the stuff that I want to research A lot of them are about different laws and rules and cultures in different countries because it's not all accounting.

Oh, you have to do it in a bunch of spaces.

I have it do it for different countries and then I go like, let's say if I was talking about accounting, I would go do the research in ChatGPT for multiple countries and then I'd bring on our international tax team as well as our domestic tax team because our US entity owns all the international. And then I'm making sure everyone's on the same page based on the research. But it's really tough to do that with one individual because one individual doesn't know every single country's tax laws.

Dude, you need to take all the transcripts of you working with this thing and make like sub-agents for each region and then have it work with your accounts in each region. And it's just working on that the whole time.

That would be more efficient than what I'm doing.

That's what— but you will do that eventually. That's where we're going, guys. So By the way, I think the takeaway for this one, and we can move on, is we use it for the highest leverage things. So for me, I'll workshop with it like, okay, what's the best comp package I can have for this executive over here? Or sometimes I'll even like, because I work with it so much, like, hey, I'm like, hey, we'll workshop something. And it's like, okay, here's the new mission statement for the company. Here's what we should be focusing on over here. And then I'll often ask it to ask it like, hey, of all the things we worked on this year, how high leverage is this? Okay, what do I need to reprioritize? And it helps me with that because for me, I have the entrepreneurial ADD. I like to work on a lot of different things, but this keeps me focused actually, and that makes it so worth it. Yes.

And where I love using AI in marketing from a global standpoint is, do you remember like the ads of like Coke and Pepsi? Like it'll be like a can, like dressed as a Pepsi can in a Halloween—

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or a FedEx truck that's kind of disguised as a UPS truck and they're making fun of the competitor.

Not all heroes wear capes or whatever that was.

Yeah, that was the Pepsi one.

Yeah.

We were running a campaign in Japan and someone wanted to run a competitive campaign and I knew the company was a really big company. So I started asking, you know, I was going to ask my team in Japan, but I was like, dude, my team is sleeping right now. I don't want to wait for them to get up because Japan is a time zone versus me and PST. I started asking ChatGPT, you know, like, how will this work, this ad work in Japan? Because they wanted to do a Japanese version of it.

Yeah.

And this was a global company, but I was talking with people based out of the US. They're like, yeah, we should just push it because global marketing was run here and they would just tell people what they want done and people adjust things to local markets. And I'm like, I don't know if it'll work. So I was spitballing with ChatGPT for probably like 20 to 30 minutes to try to figure out how to make this work. And I know in Japan, people are very loyal to brands. They don't just switch.

Yep.

And what I ended up finding out by doing ChatGPT, and I had a hunch, but I'm not certain because I'm not Japanese. They ended up saying there's a good chance you're going to offend people and they wouldn't like it. So then we decided, we did confirm with people in Japan, but ChatGPT gave us a quick answer and I was able to call the company back on Pacific Standard Time. I'm like, I don't think it's going to work. My gut inclination is people are loyal to brands and they won't like it. And I'm like, this is what ChatGPT is saying. I was like, I think we shouldn't spend too much time on this. Until we get feedback from the regional people.

Yep.

We, I shot off an email.

Yep.

And I didn't shot off an email with the points that ChatGPT was breaking down.

Yep.

But I just wanted to see what the regional people thought. And I'm like, just be blunt. If you love it, let us know. If you think it won't work, tell us why in just one sentence. Because I didn't want people wasting too much time.

Yep.

And no joke, our team and their team told us back in one sentence why it wouldn't. And they both said it's going to offend people. Yeah.

Okay, before we move on here, like, by the way, I also like using ChatGPT to settle arguments too. And the majority of the time I'm right, thank God.

Yeah.

But it's so good because then I'll just like, sometimes I'll be walking with my dad on the weekend, I'll just open up audio mode, right? And then whatever crazy stuff he might say, I just like do it. And then like, even then with an AI, he won't change his mind, right? Which is insane to me. But I'll even do it with like, you know, other situations too. We'll leave it at that. But like, people do change when you take your emotions out of it and it's just a robot talking. They have to, they usually have to concede. If they don't, maybe there's something off.

But yeah, I would say, and you and I have used that as well when we're dealing with each other, I would say it works really well for black and white type of things.

Yeah.

For stuff that's ambiguous in gray areas, it's tough.

Religion or politics, it's, it's tougher.

Or stuff that there's not a ton of data and it's just giving opinion.

Yeah.

It's tough as well.

Yeah. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil. 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. Did you know that many of the best companies go slow before exploding their revenue? So I'm going to give some examples over here.

Many companies go slow?

Yeah, before exploding their revenue. So when you think about So ChartMogul here. Okay, Lovable spent 18 months building before their breakthrough success. So Lovable, I think, is doing 9 figures a year now. Clay grinded, you know Clay, right? Clay's the clay.com, it's like the sales thing, right?

But what's Clay Grinder?

Sorry, they grinded for a very long time. Yeah, so basically Kyle Pollard tweeted this. So basically only 3.3% of SaaS startups reach $1 million ARR in less than a year. And just 1 in 1,000 reached $10 million in less than a year, right? And so here you have Lovable, it spent 18 months building. Clay grinded for 6 years before seeing revenue traction, meaning that they had to sit it out for a long time. Bolt.News, I mean, they spent 7 years crawling their way to $700K in ARR before their new product exploded, which is, I think now they're doing like close to 9 figures or something like that. But the point is, a lot of these situations, it just takes a long time to grow. And Replit, I think, took over what, like 8, 9, 10 years or whatever, and now they're doing, you know, multiple 9 figures. Um, so many of the best companies, they go slow before exploding their revenue.

Yeah, but people believe everything will happen overnight, and you and I know that's not the scenario. Yeah, they believe it's like AI's growth.

Young kids too.

Yeah, it's not.

Most founders are like 40+ years old, the, the successful, like big companies, right?

Really? I didn't know it was that old. I assumed it was in the early 30s.

It's like 45, 50.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Well, it's 30s because we've seen Mark Zuckerberg and we've seen like these people.

Yeah. Matt Mullenweg and a few of those.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. He was young too, right? When he started Automatic. I think that was his only company he created. I could be wrong, but— Yeah.

Did you know that listicles drive 9 in 10 third-party mentions in AI search?

9 in 10?

Yeah. So the latest—

90%?

So third-party sources drive 85% of brand discovery in AI search. So AirOps did this study. Okay. Listicles drive 9 in 10, so 90% of third-party mentions in AI search. Product pages and homepages drive 26% of first page visibility. 68% of brand mentions are often unique to a single AI model. Okay, you got this over here, right?

Yeah, I knew the 9 in 10.

Yeah, which is high.

But here's the problem with listicles. I actually did a presentation on this 3 days ago. Where were you located? I was here. It was a virtual presentation for a private equity firm. The problem with listicles right now, let's actually use ChatGPT for example. Right now, if I want to be the best camera company, right? The best camera for a YouTube video or whatever. If I create tons of listicles, the best camera for YouTube videos, best camera for Instagram videos, the best camera for a podcast, best camera for a video commercial, and I keep breaking them all down, the problem is, is if I put them on junk sites, ChatGPT cites them most of the time and you start ranking really high.

Yeah.

It's just a ton of spam.

Yep.

And that's how Google was, right? And I'm giving a hypothetical. I'm not saying I'm actually creating that type of content, but if you look at it, it's just a bunch of spam. I believe ChatGPT, not now, but within the next 12 months, will start refining their algorithm, just like how they don't cite Reddit as much because Reddit isn't as high quality. And, you know, if you look at the same example, when Eric Googled NP Digital, It was my company name, LinkedIn name, and then it was someone who wasn't happy after they interviewed with the company. I didn't read it all, but they probably didn't get the job.

Which is not a good result.

It's not a good result.

Yeah.

But forget me and my image. That's not what really people are looking for when they search NP Digital. Would you agree with that? Majority of the time, it's not a good experience.

Yeah. That wasn't— that result should have popped up if someone was searching for like employee reviews.

Yes.

Yeah.

Not for trying to work with the company.

Yeah.

This person was trying to get a job at the company.

Oh.

And they weren't happy. They can say they weren't happy or whatnot. Maybe there's some stuff we can improve, but they still did interview with the company and it didn't work out.

Mm-hmm.

But the point I'm getting at here is algorithms shift and adjust. Their algorithm on ChatGPT, I believe, will start looking at industry publications and won't look at Joe the plumber talking about the best marketing tools and go off of what Joe the plumber is saying. So I think everyone just creating a ton of spammy guest blog posts and just publishing them all over the web with listicles of here are the top 3 ad agencies and all this, I don't think that's going to be effective.

Yeah. So this is interesting because the old days of SEO, going back to what Neil said, we did an episode on this actually last week, right? It's like Lycos, Excite back in the day, you just did the hidden text spam at the very bottom, right? Or hidden in the back of the page. Marketers tend to ruin everything. And so when a new channel comes out, if there's a way to game it, they're going to game it. The other thing is, if you're OpenAI or you're Google, you have to clean things up from a spam perspective, otherwise that deteriorates your product quality. And so they're incentivized to fight against spammers, right? And so I'm saying like those of you that are doing this right now, it might be working right now, but for sure long-term, it's not going to work out that way. Neil and I have been playing, we've been playing this game for quite a while and we've seen the different movies here. History rhymes.

But when I was doing that presentation, there was other people on my panel. So we each talked for 10 minutes, but we talked with slides for 10 minutes and then we did Q&A.

Yeah.

One of the people, I won't mention the private equity firm or the software, is one of the most well-known softwares for tracking AI visibility. They showed an example of a company that's doing really well in their space and they're talking about their product and how they release on their own blog, that company, like literally they release on their own blog a ranking list of the best products in their space and they of course mention themselves number one and they showcase how once they did that, they started getting included more in ChatGPT for everything.

As if it's a revelation.

Yes. But that to me is no good. Like if you did that on Google, Google would be like, this is junk. We should end up breaking the site. And eventually ChatGPT will adjust their algorithm for the same thing you want.

Did you get to disagree on that panel?

I did not get to disagree on that panel.

That would've been great.

It was more so we each had 10 minutes of talk time and then people asked us questions. And whoever it was relevant for, we would answer that question.

See, this is the cool thing about panels. At the end of it, it should have been like, hey, did anybody say something you disagree with? And then it would have, it would have been more exciting. But the reality is we do disagree with that because the fact that they're saying that means they don't, they actually don't understand the SEO game, like how this has moved.

They don't, but they have a good software for AI visibility and they're well known for that, but their background isn't in SEO. So they, I'm not saying They're bad. It's just they don't have the experience that you and I do for doing this for 20+ years and knowing how algorithms adjust.

Yep. By the way, so look, I don't know. I mean, other, like, I think our takeaway for this one, honestly, guys, is, is if you focus on doing the black hat things in a white hat way, that always works better. So we're not saying the black hat stuff doesn't work. It works, right? But if you do it in white hat, like back in the day, remember last week I talked about link wheels, which is where you have a bunch of spammy links. that point towards these Web2 properties that then link to your site. How about you just have a bunch of good relationships that you build over time from high-quality websites, high-quality publications that link to yours? That's a better signal that lasts for the long term. And that's kind of what you're talking about too. You want to, you want to have high-quality publications. And even Eric Schmidt, like this doesn't change. Eric Schmidt said this, the internet is what? It's a cesspool of poo poo, right? And the brands will rise to the top.

Yes.

It's because the brands spend more time building their brand, building quality.

Dude, look at Reddit. Reddit cited a lot less on ChatGPT. They're getting less traffic from Google and ChatGPT, I believe, because their stock started taking a tank. Was it just ChatGPT or was it also Google? I think it was both.

I don't know.

But either, I know for sure it was at least ChatGPT because we have a graph on that. The problem with Reddit is marketers started spamming the crap out of Reddit because like, oh, ChatGPT, you want to end up pulling from this? No problem, we'll just spam the crap. And Tim Soulo from Ahrefs had a funny LinkedIn thread because I think Reddit made some announcements like, hey, marketers have been putting messages, self-promoting, spamming. And I think Tim Soulo said something that was cheeky. To me, it was funny. I loved it. And he's just like, actually, it's just getting started, which is spot on, right? Because if there's one signal that's working—

Yeah.

Eric and I are not in this phase of our careers, so we don't believe in spamming. It's just too short-sighted. 20-plus years ago, we tried the spamming approaches. We just know it's not long-term. Marketers will just spam the crap out of something because you can make not just some money, you can make millions and millions of dollars in profit. It may only last 2, 3 years, but hey, your cost was very little to nothing.

And that's the lesson. Human nature never changes. That's why you want to study history, right? You want to study human nature because if there's an easy way to make money, people are going to go hard on that, right?

Yes.

And like, I don't know if you've seen those memes where it's like the easy way out, that line is like super, the line is very long, but it's like the hard way the long-term wait, there's only like one person there.

Yes.

That's how this is, right? And so look, it's— I would encourage you all, if you're just getting started in this in your career, spam away, because then you'll realize you get the repercussions from it and then you get punched in the face a couple of times and then you stop doing it because that's how we learn over time.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay. So this will be maybe second last one here. So Jason Lemkin tweeted this. So he said, one of the best CEOs I know said to me the other day, I wish We'd never allowed work from home. So basically the takeaway here, the CEO, I never, I wish I never allowed work from home. Okay. And he's just saying, Jason Lemkin, he has a fund, right? And he's like, what I can tell you in my ecosystem is the fastest moving and the fastest growing startups I invested in are either 100% returned to office with some exceptions, but as a baseline. So with some exceptions, right? But as a baseline or 100% distributed. Okay, so now the ones that are 100% return to office often are more flexible than pre-2020. Few are as 100% as pre-2020, but they are 5 days a week in the office as a base with the hiring trade-offs that come with that. They generally won't hire anyone that can't come into office and that hire— that limits the hiring pool substantially. I've also invested in some winners that are 100% remote, but they really, really work at it. It's all they do and it has trade-offs, especially in go-to-market and sales teams. But the ones that are some of the best efforts mix of maybe come into the office a bit, a few times a week. What was he trying to say here? But the ones that are some of the best efforts mix of maybe coming to the office a bit, a few times a week, they just don't have the same urgency. Okay, whatever he's trying to say, he's just saying the people that mix it together, they don't have the same sense of urgency. So all this to say, I think the key takeaway here is that You have to either be 100% committed to remote or 100% in office, because then you have the urgency.

100% to remote or office.

But you really have to work at it for both of them.

Yes. I don't think remote's easy either to do it right. We've been, we've had office with some people remote, but we used to mainly have office and we put them everywhere. Now we're remote, but we still have some offices. And remote has made it too hard to go back into office because we started hiring people all around the world, wherever we can find the best clients combined with where our clients are. And for us, it's actually worked to our advantage because we can see and interact with our clients more. But that was a choice, but you do got to work at it. It's not as simple as just making the choice and be like, oh, this is going to work.

I think it also comes from the top too, because your style is more of a remote style. Yes, it is. Like whatever people say, like the energy does come from the founder. So however the founder likes to work, that's probably how it's going to be.

But also, even though we're remote, we push really hard on a lot of client interaction. So for example, this is Friday when Eric and I are recording this. Monday, I'm driving to San Diego and back to pitch someone for 1 hour. And then I'll come back.

You're driving yourself?

Yeah, I'm driving myself.

Dude, it's such a tiring drive.

Yeah.

I get tired doing that. You should take the train.

I'm pitching our buddy Jeff. You know Jeff?

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. Oh, so that's worth it. That's like a little hangout too.

It's a little hangout, but I still would've went whether I knew Jeff or not. I've known him for over 10 years, but still, like, that's my philosophy is I will go and I'll make the effort to, and just like, dude, just send me the contract. We're good. No joke. I was just on the phone with him. He's like, what do I need a pitch for?

Just send me the contract.

I was like, no, dude, you need to know what you're getting and it has to make sense. And he's just like, just send me the contract. He's just like, you're one of the— because I'm a shareholder in the company, in his company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like, of course you're going to do what's best. And he told me what his budget was earlier this week. And I told him, I'm like, hey, we're going to come in under budget because I don't think it makes sense to spend all of that. We should spend the money in other areas outside of us. And he's like, cool, whatever you want, just send me a contract.

But the in-person goes a long way too.

Goes a long way.

Because when you do that, like every, you're building a, you're deepening, like Jeff and Neil have known each other for a very long time, but still just that one touchpoint goes a long way. It shows that you care and he'll remember you a lot more too. And there's a lot more things you can do. You're going to have a lot more flexibility too.

Yeah. And then when I go to his main office, because our pitch is at, I think, 11:30. There's a few team members coming. I'm like, dude, I'm going to have to drive back. I'm like, you still have Everbowl in your office? He's like, yeah. He's like, you just make sure. I'm like, cool, we'll eat some acai while we pitch you. And he's like, all right, sounds good. That's good.

That's good. By the way, okay, so this can be the last one here. So, you and I were talking about this, but I kind of tweeted this the other day, but this is how the economy is actually affecting marketing right now. So I feel that general economic sentiment is crappy right now. And so the railroad data is off, right? The restaurant data, Restaurants Performance Index, that's like, you know, kind of going up and down a little bit. So that's how much people are going into restaurants, right? Railroad data is how much traffic's, you know, how many transactions are going to the carts, right? But, you know, we've seen Google, Meta, and LinkedIn reps, they have reported, at least on our side, I don't know about you, but increased CPLs, cost per leads, and decreased volume. With our client data, I think you're seeing similar stuff here too. We're seeing similar, similar kind of decreases. And then agency businesses, I've talked about with you, other people as well, a lot of agencies, I'm seeing anywhere from like 30 to 80% decrease in month over month leads. So—

But what's happening with their revenue?

I haven't asked about their revenue. I don't think many people are increasing their prices. So I have to suspect that it's going down for most of them.

Yeah, because I told you, I think I showcased on my, on the last episode or one of our episodes, our lead going down and I was breaking it down for you. But if I look at our October numbers, October's not done for us. Yeah. Last week, I know for a fact October's our second biggest month for new revenue close in history of our company.

So you guys are increasing pricing. We're increasing our pricing too. And that's something I've been—

No, we're not increasing our pricing.

You haven't? That's what you told me at lunch last week.

No, we're not increasing our pricing.

Your average price has gone up. No?

No, we're not increasing our pricing. We're going upstream.

So it's more work. Oh, got it.

Got it.

Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

So we're not charging more for the same work. Yeah. It's just Because we're closing bigger accounts and bigger accounts require more work. So the dollar ticket is much bigger, but it's this, we don't charge hourly, but if you looked at it from an hourly perspective, we haven't increased our hourly.

Yeah, that makes sense. So for us, we actually are increasing our pricing just based on the sheer volume of stuff that we're doing on average, right? You guys, I mean, it's kind of a similar result at the end of the day. If you're going upstream, the prices are probably going to be higher. You're probably going to make more.

They are, they are going up, but our business, not just recently for the last 3 years, I would say we've been going upstream and I don't think we're really upstream the way I want. I would say within 2 more years, I think we'll be in a place where I'm happy, but knowing my personality, I'll never be happy.

You'll never be happy.

Yeah, I'll want something bigger.

But that's a feature. I think that's a feature. If you're happy, that means you've become complacent and then you stop.

Yeah, because right now we'll get included in, like we just lost one pitch. We got eliminated in the first round. We usually make it pretty Yeah. It was a pitch that was $7 to $9 million in agency fees. We got eliminated and most of our other players got eliminated. It looks like they're going to go with a holding company and they're looking to just use the holding company because it looks like that's who's just remaining. Holding company being someone who's listening with like 100,000 employees or something like that. We don't have that. But I believe, call it 2 years from now, that'll be much more of a standard for us and we'll have a lot more of those. And you're probably right, then I'm going to want the $50 million average pitches or $20 million pitches. And we don't really get included in $20 to $50 million pitches. I'm not talking about spend, I'm talking about in our fees.

Mm-hmm.

It's very rare a customer comes to us saying, here's an RFP for $25 million a year in services.

Yeah.

What's typical is they'll pitch us and be here, they'll give us an RFP and be like, You pitch 'em and be like, we have a budget of X million dollars. And then you have to work to land and expand 'em and get 'em to pay 5, 10 million over time. But out of the gate, they're not handing you a contract for 10 million bucks a year.

Yeah. And I think this will be the final thing. I mean, it's not to say that Neil's money hungry or anything. It's more so how do you just play the game at a higher level? Because, you know, waking up to play business kind of feels like, at least for me, it feels like you're playing a video game and that's why you continue to enjoy it, right? You play the friends game, the family game, and then you play your business video game. But I heard this, I heard Ben Horowitz from a16z, he was talking to the Databricks CEO today. So Databricks, I think they're valued at, I'm looking at this—

$100 billion or something.

$120 billion, right? Last valuation. And what's interesting to me was that they got an offer that was 6 times their value, which is maybe a couple years ago. And then he told his executive team, the Databricks CEO, and then the executive team's like, oh my God, we're gonna make so much money, right? We should sell, we should sell, we should sell. We're gonna sell, right? We're gonna sell, right? And then The CEO went to Ben and was like, should I sell? Like, we got this offer. And then Ben was like, look, man, like, if you sell, more power to you, right? Like, the 6x on this, it's gonna be good for, you know, me to return to my LPs, right? We're gonna make money off of this. But it would really be a shame for you to have such a good CEO and such a good idea. And to think back when you look at it, you sold the company, it's like, man, I really had a good vehicle. And, you know, I sold out. I never got to realize what it could have been.

Yes.

And that's the same thing with Mark Zuckerberg as well. And we're not saying we're Mark Zuckerberg or Databricks necessarily, but that's the fun of continuing to play. And I think a lot of people think the goal is to sell out, but then what are you going to do after that?

Dude, what is it called? Jay Kron is back at Kajabi.

What?

Yeah.

Why?

Running it, co-CEO.

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

And the point I'm getting at with that is it's the same thing. After you sell, what do you do?

You want to get back in the game.

Yeah. You get bored at home after you cash your check.

By the way, unless you hate If you hate what you're doing, then absolutely sell it, right? Unless you're like burnt out, whatever. But if you like what you're doing already and you're continuing to learn, you're continuing to compound, like how can you fail over a 10, 20, 30 period? You can't.

Yes, but you and I like continually going because it's fun.

Yeah.

And we always want to challenge ourselves and be better.

Yeah. Maybe secretly we like pain too, but you know, it is what it is.

When we're during the painful moments, there's no exit opportunities really.

Yeah.

Or exit opportunities that we would take. During the good moments, we're like, this is great. Why would we sell? So we want to keep pushing forward.

In the bad moments, okay, this will be the last thing, but bad moments, like Neil would call me and say, hey, I think you should just bankrupt, man. And I was like, that's the logical thing to do. But like, I'm just going to keep going.

And Eric literally said on the phone to me, that is a logical thing to do. And he's like, but I'm not going to do that.

Yeah. And look, we're going to keep going. So anyway—

And look, it worked out for you.

Yeah, it worked out. Anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.