How I'm Adding Millions To My Business Using AI
Eric Siu shares how he's using AI to add millions to his business. He walks through specific applications that generated measurable revenue increases, showing concrete examples of where AI made the biggest impact on his bottom line.
Chapters
This AI strategy is making me millions of dollars and 99% of other business owners aren't doing it. I'm going to show you how we do it. I'm going to show you a couple other tricks if you stay till the end. So let's get into it. Okay, so first things first, we need to understand that the cost of intelligence is dropping. So with the launch of DeepSeek, and this is just the very beginning, DeepSeek from China actually decreased the cost of AI. And what we're talking about is What used to cost $15 to run the O1 model, which was at the time the best version of ChatGPT, it now costs 93% less. And basically people are saying by the end of this year, we're going to see the cost decrease by another 5 times. The cost of intelligence is continuing to drop. And you can see by this graph over here, you can see the output AI, the API price over here, input API price. You can see everything. You can see, you know, O1 is in the yellow. And then DeepSeek is in the blue over here at $0.55 versus $15. And the cost is just going to continue to get cheaper and cheaper. So you can buy intelligence now, and that's the world that we're going into. So I'm going to talk about a paradigm shift if you stay a little later into how you should be thinking about this, because a lot of people, including people at my company, I don't believe are thinking about this the right way. So stay till the— stay till a little bit longer and we'll get there. So the game has changed, right? And so when you think about it, 20 years ago, you needed to have 500 people plus to build $100 million business or even more than that. Today you can build a billion-dollar business with just 10 people. We're going to see a lot more of that. So one example is when you look at Instagram, for example, they had 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars and they had 30 million users at the time. And then the company behind Minecraft, they had 37 employees when they were acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion and they had profits of over $100 million. WhatsApp had 55 employees. They were bought by Facebook for $19 billion. And you look at BuiltWith, for example, they just have one employee and it generates $14 million a year. I think the BuiltWith example, the last one I gave you, I think we're going to see a lot more of that where you might just have one employee where it's doing over $100 million a year. And that's the world that we're going into. And even if you're not a business owner, let's say you're working for someone, it's imperative for you to understand this. And this is how you're going to get richer and wealthier yourself if you understand this. Because the one thing I tell my friends and I tell my employees as well is I say, look, 2 things are going to happen. One, the AI-enhanced people, the ones that embrace AI, they're going to get paid a lot more money. And number 2, the people that don't embrace AI, they will be replaced by number one. And so we're going to see a lot smaller teams, but bigger businesses over time, because what you actually need when you need to get work done, you need a lot of intelligence, right? So if you can buy that intelligence now, if that work can be done for you, and I'll maybe get to that in a little second, But what happens is you can clone yourself thousands of times and this version of yourself works 24/7 and is infinitely patient and knows all your weaknesses, knows all your strengths, and knows all the strengths and weaknesses of your business as well. And so it's not only just thinking about, oh, hey, I can just go hire these AI agents and they can do tasks for me. It's not just that, it's going beyond that now because If we think about 5, 10 years down the line, it's not just these average employees right now that are agents as we see them today. They're going to get a lot stronger than that. So more on that in a bit. So when we think about the old version of marketing versus the new version of marketing, so you look at this graph over here. Again, the world is shifting so quickly. This is HubSpot's traffic. So they lost about 80% of their SEO traffic and they're a publicly traded company and they're worth billions and billions of dollars. And so not only is the world changing from a business standpoint, but obviously it's going to change from, change from a marketing standpoint because of AI. And so you look at this, this is the new era of SEO. You see this graph over here, it's just going down and to the right. That's not a good thing. SEO as we know it is dead. And here's the thing, 15 years ago, SEO was organic social because there was no organic social at the time. SEO was in fact organic social that it had the most organic reach. Now today, as of this recording, organic social is TikTok, it's YouTube, it's LinkedIn, it's X, and whatever else might come out in the future. And so if SEO as we know it is dead, that means we have to change when it comes from a marketing standpoint. And this is how it's going to affect your business as well. So when you think about SEO, SEO is now search everywhere optimization. And when you look at this, you look at this graph over here, why is all this traffic moving up into the right? This is all search traffic, but it's all community-led traffic. And so this is HubSpot's community, it's Zapier's community, it's Shopify's community. These are all businesses, right? Some of them are publicly traded companies. Zapier, I believe, is probably doing close to a billion in revenue or so, if not more than that. But my point of showing you all this is that you can't just expect yourself to coast when it comes to growing your business and just listen to some of the AI headlines and just, oh, you know, how are you doing with AI? Oh, I'm just testing out ChatGPT. I'm just testing out ChatGPT. That isn't enough. You have to be studying the headlines every single day. You have to understand where the world is going. You have, ideally, my news source is looking at X. It's looking at what people like Dwarkesh Patel, what he says. And he made a really good point. He's like, look, the companies of the future are going to be what I mentioned earlier. Let's say you could have like Satya Nadella, who's the CEO of Microsoft. What if you can Make 1,000 copies of him. How valuable is that going to be? You're going to, as a publicly traded company and a shareholder of that company, you want as many Satya Nadellas as possible. That is now possible. Not only that, if you're Satya Nadella, you can only be— he's the CEO of Microsoft— you can only be in one spot at a time right now as a regular human being. But if you make copies of yourself, you can also merge them all. All these AIs will be at all places at once. They're all seeing the same thing and they're all taking the knowledge and then Then they're able to figure out how to merge all the information they're getting and make the best decisions there. So you can make copies of yourself, you can merge yourself. There's just so many different things that you're going to be able to do in the next 5, 10 years or so. When my employees say, oh, the ChatGPT operators, oh, they're so dumb right now, they're not that smart right now, they're completely missing the point because this is the absolute worst version of it that you're going to see. And so the right way to think about it is to think about, okay, yeah, This is the worst it's ever going to be. I should embrace this stuff. I should take a look at it. And maybe I'm not trying to do everything at once, but I'm just dabbling here and there. I'm dabbling here and there. And I'm understanding that the world is very— the future is very foggy. And you have to be very careful about— imagine that you're taking a step. Each step in this, when you're in a swamp and it's very foggy, is a stepping stone, right? And you have to make sure that you're on firm footing before you make the next step. But the only thing you could do right now is to keep taking the next step and keep taking the next step. Because if you don't do that, that's when you get left behind. You just— if you're just going to stay on one step and everyone is at least, you know, they're exploring a little bit here, they're exploring a little bit there, and they're maybe taking one step over here, oh, realizing it's bad, maybe backing up a little bit and going somewhere else. They're still learning the whole time, right? Whereas if you're staying stagnant, you're not going to learn. And that's how you're going to lose millions and millions of dollars. Because again, I believe we're going to move into a world of More small team, big businesses, right? One employee, $100 million in revenue, maybe even a billion in revenue at some point. Going back to this slide over here, we talked about search everywhere optimization. So search everywhere optimization is, it's no longer S, it's no longer search engine optimization. It's not just about Google anymore. So that means you're optimizing for YouTube, you're optimizing for Pinterest, you're optimizing for the Apple App Store, the Android App Store, you're optimizing for the LLMs, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT. You're optimizing for Amazon. Marketing 101 has always been wherever your audience is hanging out, that's where you should be advertising, right? And because 15 years ago, yes, it very much was about Google because there weren't all these other channels. Now there are, and attention is so fragmented, you have to think about optimizing for these other platforms. So that's what search everywhere optimization is, and my podcast co-hosts like talking about it all the time on the podcast Marketing School. Here is The new media game. When you look at the slide over here, you might say, okay, I can tell that's an AI. That is an AI. But this person, Cody Schneider, tweets, here's how I'm getting $1.69 leads for my friend's local coffee shop using AI avatar UGC ads made in ElevenLabs and HeyGen targeting 1-mile radius around their address with a call to action for a buy one, get one offer. AI avatars are going to drive more customers and emails. And I've seen this, I've played around with this a little bit this year myself. And some of these AI avatars where it's my avatar, it's my voice using HeyGen and ElevenLabs, it's actually getting more reach than my regular Reels. And because one, it's more scripted. And what I do simply is I just have ChatGPT tasks, give me the headlines for the day and give me 3 scripts for these headlines that are less than 60 seconds each. And then I can use HeyGen for my avatar, I can use ElevenLabs for my voice. And then I can use, I believe it's Capwing for the B-roll. I find that Capwing is better for the B-roll out of all the other B-rolls I've used so far. And then you can just post it to TikTok, you can post it to YouTube Shorts, you can post it to Instagram Reels. Then you can see it, you can watch it go from there. And by the way, if you have someone just running this every day, it might take maybe an hour max to do this for 3 of them. So if that's the case, why don't you just do like 6 of them a day? Or why don't you make multiple channels? Why don't you make it in multiple languages too? Why don't you just attack as much as you can? Maybe you're doing 4 or 5 based on a news cycle every day and you're making Spanish versions, you're making Chinese versions, you're making German versions, you're making Portuguese versions. Why wouldn't you try to attack on all fronts? And when you, especially when you're posting Instagram Reels, you can leverage ManyChat. So if someone leaves a comment, you can automatically DM them and get them added to your email list. not only grow your reach quite a bit, but you can also grow your email list as well. And I think that's really interesting. So I think this is something that you should attack. I don't think we're doing the best job of this. In fact, what I'll do after this is I'll send this video to my team, right? It's part of why I do this too. Leverage. That's what it is. And so this is where the new medium game is going. And I think this will maybe work for the next year or 2. And then this, this strategy will probably become played out. But the fact that you're watching this right now, you have an advantage over other people. If you're an agency owner looking to break high 7 figures, 8 figures, or even 9 figures, the Agency Owners Association is for you. It's ran by my partner Neil Patel and myself, and we've been there, done that from an agency standpoint. And if you want to learn more about it, if you want to grow faster, get more clients, take yourself out of the day-to-day, just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. Now, the other thing I want to talk about, if you want to make millions and millions of dollars, and if you stay towards the end again, I'm going to have some, some extra special hacks for you. Okay. So here's the thing, back in the day, maybe even 3, 4 years ago, if me as a non-technical founder wanted to prototype something, it would take me hours, maybe days or so to get it done 'cause I'm just so busy. Or if I wanted someone to do it for me, I wanted a designer to do it for me, we might have to get on a call, I might have to wait a couple days, they have other priorities. It's just the time to value now is a lot faster. And so what happens is if you use something like V0, so that's the letter V, the number 0, v0, it can make you a prototype of a— it's really good for design. You can make a landing page, you can copy different homepages out there. You can maybe even post a picture, a screenshot of a page that you really like and ask it to make a similar version. It's good for that. Cursor is good for code editing. Actually, all my developers use it and they're a lot faster. They use it for coding. I like Replit when it comes to using a code editor because I'm not technical. And so I, for example, here I asked it to make an interactive home design studio for one of our clients. And it did that and it took about 5 minutes to get there and it's maybe 60, 70% of the way there. And I'm not saying I know, I, as a founder and you, if you're watching as a founder or a non-technical person, you necessarily need to know how to deploy. You don't. Instead, you should focus on maybe just learning the first bit of this and getting a prototype that you can share with your team. So for example, here, if you look at the prototype, this is a home design studio and this is like skeleton version. It's just an outline of what the studio might look like. And you can see there's different call to actions and things like that. And then I could keep working with Replit here, and then Replit will give me different— it'll ask me different questions. Hey, should I build this next? Should I build this next? And then I could keep working with it, right? And it'll keep, you know, sometimes it'll find bugs and it'll back up a second, it'll fix itself. And so I'm not saying this is— you're ready to launch something that's production ready. I am saying this will get you 67% of the way there, and you're going to cut down a lot of the weeks it took to get the prototype ready and all this communication done. Because the speed at which you get these prototypes out and the speed at which people look at it and understand what you're trying to do, there's just a lot more noise that's eliminated from a communication standpoint. So the stack here is you can use Replit, you can use v0, you can use Cursor. They're all great products that you can take a look at. So if we take a look at the future, so earlier what I talked about was, okay, ChatGPT Operators is great. You can use the agents, maybe you can go book a flight. You know, we've used it for different things, right? We use it for recruiting, for example. We wanted to recruit, let's say, SEOs. And then so we actually have it going into our LinkedIn recruiter and then adding people that fit our criteria. We want people that have been promoted at least 2 times and they add them into the profile, right? And you can just leave it running. And so now you've bought back time from your recruiters on your team, for example. So how much money is that going to save you? And if you find the right people, okay, that's definitely going to make you a lot more money. And the other thing we do with like an operator, ChatGPT operator, is I have it actually go into my Google Analytics and I have it find the top performing pages on my site that are high converting. And I have it come up with other strategies on what else I should be optimizing to drive more traffic and conversions for my agency, Single Grain. And I do that. And so just think about all the possibilities. And think about all the things that you just, the repetitive things that you haven't been able to do over the years that you've had to just throw to the side. Now you can do all those things. And what does that mean for you? If you are a high-leverage CEO, going back to the example I used earlier, you're Satya Nadella, for example, you don't have a lot of time. Guess what? You've bought infinite hours now with all the copies of you that are merged together that know what to do. And so AI agents are actually a thing. in 2025 and beyond. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it this year, but I just, guys, this is just the very beginning right now. So all those naysayers out there, oh my God, it's not good enough right now. Of course it's not good enough right now. That's not the right way to look at it. If you really want to make millions more for your business, then you have to be willing to embrace this technology. That's the only way that you're going to succeed, right? Everyone is forced to be an adopter of this stuff. Okay, so here's the other cool thing. If you think about all the documentation you've done as a company, all the screen recordings you've done as a company, so let's say you use Loom or you use Notion, you record all your stuff, you use Coda to record all your stuff, all that stuff that's littered throughout your organization, which is likely collecting dust, by the way, that stuff is all invaluable now. So your virtual employees have arrived because here's the thing, you can take that Loom, you can take all that documentation, you can have an operator read all the documentation, You can have it watch the Loom videos and understand what you're trying to do. And then what you do is just give it your logins afterwards and it just does the work over and over and over. And sometimes you might have to come in and then help course correct it a little bit. But for the most part, you know, just me testing it a little bit, it's very exciting for where it's at right now. And if you want to be able to make millions and millions more, think about this. Even with all these operators, we had a copywriter that is, he's moving on from us end of March or so. And he's amazing. And I just asked him, I was like, hey, what do you think's happening with the newsletters that you write for us? Can't AI just do all that? He's like, yeah. He's like, AI can do all that. And so, okay, that saves us his cost per month and call that a couple thousand dollars or so. Okay, that saves us the cost per month. Oh, and then what else goes on here? Oh, now not only can we write one newsletter, we can write multiple newsletters. Now, Not only can we make a bunch of content using my avatars and in using different scripts out there, we can use it for different languages too. And so you think about if your business wants to internationalize, you can now do that. And the thing with this guy over here, his name's Mike. He's very strategic and he's always ahead of the curve. And so that's going to free up his time to think more strategically, but the actual act of writing itself, that cost is just going to continue to come down. And I think about all the content that I create, whether it goes to my podcast, my YouTube channels, whatever it is exactly. There's just a lot there that's hard for one human to ingest on their own. And I think that's going to be a great thing. And so the cost of content is just going to continue to come down. And I've told someone on my team who was— he's used to being a blog manager. I was like, look, man, like, if that's all you're going to do, be a blog manager in the next couple years, like, you are in trouble. And I think he'll get it. I don't think he quite gets it right now. I think he's more scared than anything, but I think he'll eventually get it. And so, you know, sometimes you have to give tough love to your team too, to get them to realize that what they're doing might work for right now, but they're gonna have to quickly adapt if they still wanna be relevant in, I guess, the working world in the near future. Now that we know that the cost of intelligence is continuing to drop, so earlier I mentioned that an O1 input might cost $15, whereas if you use DeepSeek R1, which is a Chinese version, the open source version, that might cost you 55 cents. And if that's going to decrease by 5 times, wow, okay, fantastic. We're talking around 10 cents or so. And so the cost of intelligence is going to continue to drop, meaning that organizations are going to have to buy more GPUs and they're going to have to buy more compute because now we're no longer capped on intelligence when it comes to a business and intelligence and actually doing the work. That is what matters at the end of the day. And so that actually means you as a company, you have to think about becoming a tech-enabled business if you aren't already. And I actually look at most companies as tech businesses because they're using some form of technology, whether they like it or not. And so for us, for example, we built an ABM software called Carrot. And what it does over here is it basically allows you to run scalable personalized LinkedIn ads. And this is something that we knew was a gap in the market. Well, this would've taken us a lot longer to build, but to get the working prototype of this working probably took us a couple weeks, whereas it would've taken a couple months in the past. And so earlier I mentioned prototyping and splintering. You can do that and then have your developers close the last mile or so, right? And then what happens is you start to build something that's more fully fledged like this, and then we actually have people using it. And so when I say building leverage with Carrot, which is what the product is called, What I mean is, let's say you're an agency, for example, you can build a lot more of these products and services. They can be calculators, for example, or widgets. Those can drive a lot of links and those can drive a lot of awareness from an LLM standpoint. And that's going to bring traffic and conversions to your website if it's relevant to your customers, right? You don't want to build a lot of relevant— irrelevant things, obviously. So for us, we do a lot of B2B work with companies and this actually drives leads for my agency. And the interesting thing is we're just going to continue to build stuff like this, either give it away for free or give away crippled versions of it. And we look at this as even if you're building a SaaS company, you're going to need services at the end of the day. I actually went services first and then now we're layering on more SaaS. And still, if you have a really good solution, people are still going to need people at the end of the day to help them with this stuff, right? And that's where the creativity, the strategic parts come in. And that does still fit in with the thesis that, okay, if we're gonna look at building smaller teams, big businesses, but we're gonna need more compute, well, if we're gonna build more stuff like this and we can customize a lot of these solutions, we're still gonna need smart people that are working with our customers that are coming up with new ideas that are constantly exploring the frontier. And so this is how we look at it now. It's where stuff that used to cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to get going, it's getting cheaper and cheaper over time, and it's gonna get even cheaper. Right? So this is how we think about it. And the way we look at this is, okay, now we know we have a better offer. If you're an agency, if you just reach out to me, oh, hey, you know, just checking in with you. You just want to see if you need my agency services or whatever. And then there's a lot of schmoozing that goes on too. Well, you don't necessarily need to do a lot of that. I think you should definitely still keep relationship building, but the more products you can build, the better. And you can also, by the way, sometimes if you don't know what to build, you can validate it in public. And so if you look at this over here, you can see I put up a post on LinkedIn just saying, hey, you know, LinkedIn doesn't allow you to do this, comment XYZ if you're interested. Okay, it got 1,300 comments, it got 633 likes on it, and it drove a ton of leads for us. These aren't small leads, we're talking these are mid-market enterprise leads or so, and I think if even, it doesn't matter what business you're in, I think the more solutions you can build for people to bring them in the door, great. And look, if you're an agency, if you're, you know, heavily built on RFPs, I still think this is a good, this is a good leg up that you're going to have because when you have this in your pitches, you're going to have a leg up over the competition. And most agencies tend to move very slowly and they tend to have a lot of bloat because, well, there's a headcount problem, right? And most agencies, because you need to throw people at the problem, oftentimes you start to cut corners when it comes to talent, B and C players, right? I don't think that's going to be acceptable in the new world that we're going into. And whether we like it or not, and I think it's going to be a smaller team, big businesses, and more capital expenditures going towards GPUs and high-performance talent, and high-performing talent, I should say. And I think the B and the C players in your organization, I don't think they're B and C players in their life. I think they can figure out something where they're an A player, and then they'll move themselves into that accordingly. And I think that's the new world we'll move into. I think it's going to be— A lot more balanced, and I think we're going to see a lot more creativity in the world. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency, and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative, and there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. What else we're doing right now with products too, we look at products as lead magnets, right? So When I think about SEO, because we get a lot of SEO customers, we think about, okay, how can we make life simpler for SEOs? What are the thankless jobs, the jobs to be done as an SEO? And so what you see on the screen over here, this is an example of an agentic workflow that we've built where we'll scan your entire website and we'll find the pages that need internal links, that should have better internal links, or maybe that have a lack of internal links, and we'll make recommendations on what you should change. And then a human in the loop can choose to approve or disapprove them. And then changes will happen. And stuff like this, we prefer to have it either be really low cost or just give away for free. And we know this can be lead magnets because still earlier we talked about SEOs. People are still getting the SEO, but it's more search everywhere optimization now than search engine optimization. And we know this is a good way to get people in the door. And the ironic thing for us, my podcast co-host Neil and I, we both have a group, like it's almost like a mini YPO for agency owners. And in that group, we asked people, what's your number one problem? 99% of people, client acquisition, right? And so if you can do stuff like this, great. And I think whatever you can do, I think, you know, what did you need before to be able to lead magnet? Maybe you had an ebook before and maybe then you would have something that's more of like a complete guide, which would take more resources. And then maybe you might have lead magnets, right? I think those used to be that the barrier to entry to those used to be higher. maybe, you know, 10, 15 years ago. And one of the higher barriers was just building software as a lead magnet. I think that the barrier to entry on all these things is coming down quite a bit. And to be able to set yourself apart, that instantly makes you a more remarkable company. I'm not just talking about agencies, I'm just talking about any company in general. I think e-commerce, you can certainly make tools that help your customers and things like that. All right, so I do want to talk about some real-world wins as well. So this isn't all just theory, this is stuff that we're actually doing. That can make you more money and the stuff that works for us. So you think about this right now for the Single Grain website, we rank for thousands of agency type keywords. So like e-commerce agency, programmatic advertising agency, programmatic ad agency, global SEO agency, for example, these are, these are high intent keywords. And so this is high impact for us. This is us leveraging different forms of search everywhere optimization. And this stuff still works. I do believe that website traffic is going to continue to go down over the years, but As long as people are still, the world's still transitioning right now, why would you not milk this, right? So again, this stuff works. Well, what do we do to get there? AI-assisted content, programmatic SEO, programmatic conversion rate optimization. These are all things that are happening in an AI world. And so this isn't just us saying, okay, ChatGPT, you know, I'm just going to ask you a couple questions. This is leveraging OpenAI's API. This is leveraging different forms of, you know, Maybe we're using Surfer for content briefs and things like that. This is doing keyword research faster using these LLMs. There's a lot, there's a combination of things that are happening here. And then we have agentic workflows built internally that will automatically delete content that isn't performing in terms of after 45 days, maybe it's not getting any links, it's not getting any traffic. We just delete that content, right? So all the thankless jobs to be done in your organization. I think one of the to-dos here is to actually note down all those things. And then you can note down which one's highest impact and easiest to do, and then you just kind of go down the list over there and you can decide the things that you need to build. And I do think what ends up needing to happen too is if you don't have someone technical working with you, and I'm saying someone that's really badass, I think you're going to be behind. And there's one thing for us to be the visionary, Operators here, right? So we have CEOs here, we have the founders here, and there's something to be said about just having someone that understands how to put your vision into reality. And I think even in today's day and age, even though the cost of intelligence is coming down, you still need to know someone on your team that can pilot all this. So that's one real-world win. All right, and then here's another real-world win. So we look at our social reach last year, just as a B2B company. And you can see we got 57 million views or so, probably a little more than that. But we look at this, it's like, okay, YouTube's going up 17 million, Instagram 24 million or so, TikTok 11 million, 4.76 million Facebook. And if the music keeps going, we keep dancing right now. And that is how it is for organic social. So you have to think about, okay, where are all the places you can attack? Earlier I mentioned AI avatars, for example. Or you can use different things to repurpose the content that you're putting out. You can use NotebookLM from Google to take your YouTube videos, your podcasts, and then create a caption for short form, or you can create something for LinkedIn and you just have a workflow that works for you. And I think this $57 million, like it's okay as a B2B business. I think we can get to hundreds of millions or so, and that's our goal for this year. So we'll see what happens. And I just want to show you all this because This stuff actually works for us. There's no reason why it shouldn't work for you. And, you know, if you're thinking, oh, I'm an operator in my business, I'm just going to leave this to my marketing team. I think that's a mistake. I think the 2 advantages you're going to have in this AI-driven world really comes down to distribution and data. I'll get to that in a second. And I guess this thing I wanted to call out too, the stuff that we do, building Carrot, building agentic workflows, these are the types of leads that we have coming in. You can see they're coming in from YouTube, for example. So one, on one end is how do we attract these people? Okay, we build an offer that people really need. Okay, it's the product. Second thing is most of my traffic used to come from SEO, but a lot of these leads are coming in from, you look at YouTube, for example, you look at email, you look at podcasts, they're not actually putting in SEO here, even though my background's in SEO. And even though for Single Grain, a lot of our leads come through SEO, you look at this, this is where the world is going. And this is what's interesting is one of these enterprise leads that came in, I said, how did you hear about us? So on the phone call, they said, hey, I said, so how did you hear about us? Well, um, I was watching one of your YouTube videos while I was taking a dump. And I was like, oh, okay, well, that's very descriptive of you. And he's like, yeah, you know, YouTube's the way. And a lot of the mid-market enterprise leads came through YouTube. And I don't know if they're all taking a dump while doing it, but, you know, to each his own. So. We look at this, these are real-world examples. You look at the, these bottom-of-the-funnel keywords, you look at the social results, and I think this will continue to compound. I don't think we did the best job on it last year. We're going to do even better. This is just the very beginning of where things are going with marketing, and this is where search everywhere optimization makes a lot of sense. Okay, so small team, big businesses. This is where the future is going. Efficient companies are the new gold. And I mentioned earlier that data is going to be a multiplier. So you got to think about, okay, if you create products, what data advantage are you going to have? So for, for Carrot, for example, we're going to see what types of campaigns people like running from an account-based marketing campaign, what type of ads tend to convert the best, we're going to have a lot of that data, okay, that data is going to be an advantage, an advantage, because we can anonymize that data, and we can create content around it. Okay, that's good, get more reach for us. We can also think about what other products can we create? How can we make our product or our platform stickier? And we can think about, okay, from a usage standpoint, what tends to make the most sense, right? From a product standpoint. So the data is an advantage. That's one piece of it. And that's going to help guide whatever AI that we want, future AI features that we want to build in, because I think that's going to build a moat around the business. So data is one, and data is a multiplier, for example. If you think about social traffic, so you look at this, this post on social traffic, organic social traffic revenue, what happens when a company stops using social media? You see a decline over time, right? It's not a huge decline, but you do see a decline. Now, why am I showing you this? My point is, if I have a product that has a lot of interesting data about usage behaviors that the market might find interesting, I can make interesting graphs like this and I can share it out there and it's going to get a lot of reach. More than anything, it's going to drive conversions. That's what I would say. And this is another example, AI-only copy versus AI-assisted copy. These are both from my podcast co-host Neil, and this is good. And by the way, if you don't have a product, you can still go out there and survey people and you can study a lot of people, right? You can have a, you can have a, hopefully you have some data people on your content team for that. Now, the earlier thing I mentioned with AI avatars, this is where I kind of wrap the bow and I'm going to show you how this all ties together. So, You look at the future leverage, so data is one, distribution is second, at least for the next couple years or so. I don't know if we're gonna have as good distribution as we have right now in the next 10 years when we all go into glasses, but you look at this, this guy Rowan Chung, and I actually talked to him on Twitter, and he gained 94,000 followers and 8 million views in a week. And what he did over here, look, 2.6 million views, 1.7 million views, 234K views. This is his AI avatar from HeyGen, and then his voice is from ElevenLabs, and he has B-roll over here. The vast majority of these videos is mostly just B-roll kind of moving around. So you don't see his AI avatar being all weird because we're not quite there yet, right? With these AI avatars. But here's how you can get millions of views and thousands of email signups. And I think one of the last bastions of control when it comes to your marketing is your email list. And so you can build your viewership and your email list through AI avatars, or you can hire in-house influencers, which a lot more people are doing now, right? You can buy that talent and they're out there creating content for you. I think maybe you can even do both. I think that would be exciting. So look, he did this in a week and he's got 850,000 people on his email list. And I think that's such a valuable asset, especially if you have a high LTV type of business. It just goes a long way. So you have data, you have distribution. And here's how you can daisy chain all this stuff. So if you want to do what Rowan did, I just asked him, I was talking to him on Twitter. I said, hey, look, so how did you do all this stuff? He's like, to do all this, to do this workflow with AI avatars, so what you have to do is you have to create a script. So for example, with my podcast Marketing School, Neil and I, we record, we have like 5 episodes that drop every week and we obviously don't have the time to do all this, but what we can do is we can have Gemini Or you can use ChatGPT Tasks, for example, either or. I like using Gemini because it can pull— Gemini's connected to YouTube obviously because Google owns it and you can just have it make a script for you. I say, hey, make a 60-second script based on this video over here. Understand that I'm going to post this for short form on YouTube Shorts, IG Reels, TikTok, and I want you to craft a good hook and go ahead and give me the script. Once I have the script, I'll go into HeyGen, I'll select my avatar, and then I'll post the script that I want to use, and I'll select my voice that's connected through ElevenLabs, and then it'll create my avatar with my voice. And then what I need to make sure to do is I will then just go over into Capwing, I believe it's called. So Capwing, or you can use Opus. Capwing or Opus are fine. And then what you can do is you can have it create B-roll for you. And again, you don't want your avatar talking for too long because people can tell it's an AI right now. Again, it'll get better in probably a year or two, but right now the way you compensate is you just have more B-roll and then you have to add the captions and all that type of stuff. Now I did put in over the end over here, ChatGPT Operator, and I like ChatGPT Operator because I ask it to give me the top 10 news on marketing every single day and then pick the top 3 where it thinks I would have the best— it'll write a script for the top 3 pieces of news that have the best chance of going viral and it'll also give me a hook as well. And so that's how you can play this game. And what you do is you daisy chain all these tools and you have these different agents. All these things are going to get stronger over time. And then eventually, when I say ChatGPT operator, sorry, earlier I meant ChatGPT tasks where it will give you like a daily kind of summary of things and a script. But ChatGPT operator is the agent where it can just do all this stuff for you. I can see that happening in the next, you know, next couple months or so. I think it's just going to get a lot better. I think, again, this is the dumbest version of it right now. To start to wrap things up over here, you can start to build your leverage. You look at it this way. This is the meme, right? It's the old way is you have the boss that's telling people what to do. You know, he's a dictator, right? Or she's a dictator. And then you have the leader who will step in front and then do the work with you. They're in the trenches with you. And then you have the introvert just pulls by themselves. But, you know, ultimately introvert with AI, now they can just lead on their own and then they have all this intelligence behind them. And they can, it's also much lighter too, 'cause it's cheaper too. The costs have come down quite a bit, right? And so am I saying, you know, oh, humans are useless? No, I'm saying you're gonna hire the best people, you're gonna pay them more, you're going to pay for more compute as well. And the people that you end up having to move on from, they're gonna realize that their best work they can do somewhere else, or they might end up just creating their own things. I think the vast majority of the world, they're gonna realize that, oh, it was never about retiring. It was always about doing fulfilling creative work. And they can now go do that. And so this is how you build leverage with media, with AI and efficient products today. And Satya Nadella, I'll leave you because I talked about him earlier. He says AI agents will become the primary way we interact with computers in the future. They will be able to understand our needs and preferences and proactively help us with tasks and decision-making. The other thing is this, I'll leave you with this thought. I believe that the majority of web traffic in the future is going to be bots, which means that all the ads that you're making, maybe you're a creative shop. might not be as relevant anymore, right? And then I know humans, like, we don't like to think in, you know, in terms of change, but I think there's still gonna be a lot more room for human creativity. But I just mean the ads for robots in the future, it might just be something that's blockchain verified, right? There's a verifier, you're quickly checking if, you know, this company that's advertising themselves, it looks like they have all the verifications. You can quickly verify that through the blockchain. I think someone's gonna make that and something I'd be interested in investing in. But that's where the world is going. I don't think that's going to happen in the next couple years or so, probably in the next decade, but that's where the future is going. Thank you so much for this. And if you take out your phone and if you scan the QR code, you can actually opt into our email list where we talk about all this stuff. You want more stuff like this? We're just going to keep sharing it with you. And then you can follow me on the Instagrams, the Xs, and you can visit singlegrain.com. That is the agency. And then we have That's where I'll leave it. So that is it for this video. If you want to watch a video on how to rank number 1 for LLMs, so for ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc., you can just go over here, somewhere over here, and we'll see you in that video.
