How the Lex Fridman Podcast helped a guy boost revenue by 93%, The rise of women's sports, and more

So there's this post over here from Levels. So he got interviewed on the Lex Fridman podcast and this guy runs Nomad List. He has a bunch of different websites, right? You know Nomad List?

No.

No, I— anyway, so he says, yes, the Lex Effect is big. So Lex Fridman has a very big podcast. Elon's on it, Jeff Bezos has been on it, right? Zuck has been on it. So he says after he went on the podcast, signups and revenues on almost all his sites doubled overnight, plus 93%. Probably temporary, but nice to see. So you look at these numbers over here. Look, it's all, it's all green, right? Pretty impressive.

So his numbers just went through the roof.

Yeah, just by being on the Lex Fridman podcast. It was a 3-hour podcast. And he talks about like—

What was the revenue? Um, the difference was 30-something to 50. Uh, $36,000 to $52,000.

And I think this is for one of his sites.

That's pretty good.

And he has like a lot of different websites.

Good for him.

Yeah. So I think that's interesting. I mean, like there is in fact an ROI here, especially if it's a very highly listened podcast. And his episode was just about how to make money online basically. And, um, a lot of his websites are like how Nomad List is about finding a great place to work remotely. Right. Or like he has job boards to hire people. So like it all, it all adds up. Like it connects. So Kieran Flanagan, the, the, I think he's SVP of HubSpot. So he says this. He says, AI will saturate educational content. Marketers will need to invest in personality-driven content. How you do this? I believe many B2B brands will heavily invest in personality-led content over the next 2 to 3 years and work with creators to do it. So I'm not going to read everything here, but 2, 3 main points here. Number 1, hire in-house influencers. Okay. Number 2, launch a creator program. Number 3, do drops with creators. We're kind of talking about this stuff over here, so we might as well continue the conversation.

Dude, I'm with you. And then the other problem is, is not just AI will saturate the educational content, AI is also saturating marketing in the way that everyone is using AI in their marketing, and we don't see it doing crap for conversions anymore while it used to before.

By the way, this is why we're doing this in person, because it's like, this is us, it's raw thinking, and it does well. And then the thing is, I've been using that overlap tool more and more. I'm just like, Dude, my posts are performing way better on X, Threads, and LinkedIn.

It's great. What does the Overlap tool do?

Just go type in joinoverlap.com. It's free. What it does is, let's say we take this podcast episode, it'll find the right moments and chop it up. It's kind of like Opus, right? But it actually finds great moments and they're probably like 3 to 5 minute clips. And so now, because we talk about a lot of different things, a lot of it gets lost in translation, right? And we've been doing it now and yeah, the reach is like 10 to 20x more and I think we can get it even higher. So, that's something that's worth having your team do as well.

Try joinoverlap.com.

Yep. Yep. But I like some of these ideas. So, hire in-house influencers. So, can you find emerging talent with authentic personalities? We talked about the best marketing campaign ever or something. I think that's her Instagram name. And she did a good job of promoting that drink. Remember, she like Gary Vee came in and stomped on the can?

Yeah, where she said, I bet you I can get more followers than my boss just crushing cans.

Yes, it's that gal. Yeah. And so like, how can you hire more people like that with talent? Maybe they're coming out of college and then, you know, maybe they get a starting salary and then if they do better, maybe there's some other incentive tied to it, but they can, they can ramp with you. You know what I mean?

I'm curious to see how much that really boomed their sales out of everything, right? Because their follower count grew really quickly.

I have no idea. Yeah, well, I do believe she like, she's a star. You know what I mean? Yeah. Interesting enough. Can we talk about that podcast, Brad, that you're doing?

When's this going to come out?

Like next week? I don't know. Okay, okay.

We'll wait, we'll wait, we'll wait.

Okay. But launching a creator program too. So, setting up a program to create partnerships with the best creators in your space. Create incentives to share in the upside of their channel exclusively on custom content, ad spots, editorial collaboration, but they own the channel. Have creators— so, it's kind of like a— it's almost like a partnership affiliate model type of deal. Yeah, yeah. And then do drops with creators to include creators in your campaigns when doing feature content drops, give them exclusive data points, imagery, short-form vids. So, you know, I think Semrush and Ahrefs are doing a decent job at some of these. And then speaking of Semrush, they have this program, this employee advocacy program. So I'm going to open this over here.

Oh, and on a side note, congratulations to Brian Dean for selling his second company to Semrush. Do I have that in there or do you have that in there?

I don't know, but I just saw it on X.

the other day, he sold Exploding Topics.

He sold 2 companies to Semrush.

Yeah, good for him. One was Backlinko, the other one was Exploding Topics.

Exploding Topics, yeah. So Olga, the VP of Brand Marketing at Semrush says, we got 9 million additional impressions with employee advocacy this year, and that's only posts about Semrush. Last year we had 2.8 million for the same period, which is freaking strong. Impressions is a weak metric, absolutely, but this is surround sound and it's necessary now. And so it just shows some of these posts over here. So you can see like Victoria, you know, she's like writing something about engagement and then she gets like 1,600 likes and then this one over here has 500 or so. But a lot of their team is posting on— actively posting on LinkedIn. And I haven't seen this work really well for a lot of companies, have you?

No.

Yeah. So great, they got 9 million impressions. The question is, should people be doing this? I think this matters. I think if you're like a publicly traded company and you have some resources, you can give this a shot. Majority of companies, you're probably better off putting your time elsewhere.

Yeah. And speaking of Semrush, I was looking at their stock. Yeah, they've been doing a good job and they're showing profitability and they've been growing nicely. Good for them.

Yeah. What's their stock at now?

It's around $2 billion market cap and $13.8. The last time I was checking them, they were like at $8 or $9. So—

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group To do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. There's 50 German companies right now that are piloting the 4-day workweek. So I have a screenshot over here. So it says, I think it's from Wall Street Journal, I took a screenshot. So meanwhile in Germany, 50 companies are piloting a 4-day workweek for the study by University of Münster. Aiming to determine whether less work and full pay might be appealing to workers. The EU expects the Greek economy to grow by 2.2% this year, while the German economy hasn't grown since 2019. The crisis taught Greeks that success comes from hard work, said Alex Greek last name, a former securities trader from Greek name who now runs Aplo, a popular Greek fast food restaurant with two locations in Berlin. He says, "I employ quite a few Greeks, also Italians and Spaniards. Germans less so. They know the system well, and when you do, you tend to abuse the system." So it says frequent visitors have long taken Germany's hardworking folklore with a pinch of salt. So basically, it's basically you know Greek Greece was kind of in trouble financially right a while back.

It spurred a lot of the Bitcoin boom back in the day.

Now they're growing, right? It's because like the hard work is back right now. Germany in this case they're trying to say hey like four day work week right? We kind of talked about this four day work week thing. I think it's good for people, but I think it's bad for companies and ultimately. You know, companies help drive jobs, they help drive the economy. So, I don't know. We've seen this experiment a couple of times and people, you know, some European companies have said this has been good, but this is kind of showing maybe not so much.

What people also have to remember is what's bad for companies. Like, let's say if they implement a 4-day workweek, of course people are going to be happy because they work less. But if the company starts struggling and people are happy with a 4-day workweek, what happens to people? People start getting fired.

I told you I worked a 4-day workweek at that company, right? And guess who had to pick up the slack?

You did.

I worked 7 days a week after that.

And what happened to the company?

The company grew. I mean, I'm not just saying it was just me. No, the company eventually grew. The company's gone.

Yeah.

Yeah. The company was sold for pennies on the dollar. And they— what eventually happened there was, here's the biggest problem. You go 4-day workweek, you cannot roll that back. Because the moment he rolled that back, everyone got pissed. Everyone got pissed. Right? And so there's certain things where like you open the genie and you can't just put the genie back in the bottle.

No, I wouldn't. I would not do a 4-day workweek. If you look at a lot of European values, depending on the country like France, Italy, a lot of them just take a ton of time off each and every single year.

Yeah.

And if that works for your company, great, do it. I think in the United States, you have a ton of innovation. The reason you have a ton of innovation is people work a lot of hours, whether we like it or not. And if you look at China, You're getting a lot of innovative companies. A lot of people in China don't know about 5-day work weeks. To them, a normal work week is 6 days and you only get 1 day off.

996, 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week. And you look at the kids, the kids are insane now. I told you, right?

Yeah. But when I look at productivity, if you can be productive, if you love what you're doing and you can put in the hours, You're more likely to succeed. If you're not willing to, you're just going to breed mediocrity.

And we get it. That's a big caveat, right? It's hard to find something that you like to do, but you have to keep finding it. Otherwise, you're going to be miserable for the rest of your life. And I do believe it's possible for everyone to find what they like. And by the way, when I say insane, I just mean in China, the kids at age 5 or 6, they know about AI, they know about STEM, and they're pushing. And it's— you're never done with classes. Even when summertime comes, you're going to go to more classes. And then you're— oh, you're done with school? Oh, you're going to go to after-school tutor. It never ends.

Yeah, dude, I totally agree with you.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And Now back to the episode. There's another one here on the rise of women's sports, which has unlocked unexpected marketing opportunities. So did you see this one on Wall Street Journal?

No. Is it because of that WNBA player?

WNBA? Yeah, some of it's about Caitlin Clark. But what's interesting is that there's a lot more reach happening for WNBA and women's sports now in general, because people are interested, right? And finally, like, it took a WNBA like a long time to get the reach. I'm glad that WNBA is getting the reach now. So it says here, makeup brands, haircare startups, and fertility clinics historically haven't been associated with sports. Now they're taking over game As the draw of the elite women's players, teams, and leagues attracts new new kinds of sponsors. So there's new kinds of sponsors now, and what was maybe like a ten grand or twenty grand sponsor now it's costing a lot more because there's a lot more reach now, right? And so you know again these are fertility clinics usually they're not sponsoring much, right? But the fact that they're sponsoring sports now that that's kind of cool. And I will say this: women's elite sports will generate around 1.3 billion in revenue globally in 2024, up from 981 million in 2023 and 690. By way of comparison, the NBA team sponsorship revenue alone was estimated to be worth about $1.5 billion for 2023. So it's still a ways off, but you know, it's on its way.

Yeah, that's great. I watch a lot of women's sports. I technically don't watch that much in sports, period, but things like tennis, I watch men's tennis and women's tennis.

Tennis is awesome.

Yeah, seeing like the Williams sisters when they were playing, like It was amazing to watch.

Dude, Caitlin Clark's team— so she's, um, the star for the New York, uh, New York Liberty. Actually, no, I don't, I don't think she played for Liberty. I think she played for somebody, I don't know. But anyway, the New York Liberty at least, because I— they're actually a top team, I believe. I think they, they, they did this wrong here, but the Liberty this season had 47 sponsors, up from 31 last season and 17 in 2022. So it's good growth rate. I mean, that's almost 3x.

Is she the number 1 ranked WNBA player?

Not Clark's Obviously Rookie of the Year, um, but she's not number 1 ranked. But like, she'll— I think she'll be up there. She's a rookie. Yeah.

Yeah, I knew she was a rookie. I just didn't know if she was like the best.

No, no. I mean, she didn't get to play on Team USA. That's a whole nother thing though.

Oh, that sucks. Why didn't they let her play on Team USA?

They didn't let, um, the person she competed with at LSU, um, both of them didn't make it. But what's interesting is, um, they Played the WNBA. Sorry, there's Caitlin Clark and then the other gal. They played the Olympic team in a tune-up and they beat the Olympic team before they went to, um, before they went to Paris. Yeah.

They should just put them on the team.

Yeah, but there's a whole like uproar about it. But yeah.

You see the Steph Curry social media change?

No.

He removed, uh, Golden State from his social media and then— or Warriors from it, and then he put the Olympics up.

Yeah.

And then the rumor is, is now he's going to the Lakers.

Oh, that'd be awesome. When'd you see that?

Was it today?

Yesterday? Something like that.

Yeah.

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