How to Grow on LinkedIn, Build a Personal Brand, and Thrive in the Age of AI

All right guys, we're coming to you virtual today and Neil didn't bring his microphone, so he's going to sound crappy. So it's okay guys, it's temporary. It won't happen. We're not recording live. Usually we have a microphone, but at least Neil has a nice background. So why don't we get started today, Neil? Why don't— here, I'll tell you what, you pick the first one.

The easiest way to grow your LinkedIn following as entrepreneur. But the real question is, should you do it?

Okay. All right. That's a good one. You start it off.

So I don't know if you follow Lars Lofregen on LinkedIn, ex-employee of mine, went out on his own. I've worked with him past being employed. Great guy, really smart marketer. Did a lot of affiliate stuff in between following like the old PG, you know, Patrick Gavin model, setting up those sites like online education, getting tons of traffic.

Oh, the education guy?

TextLinkAds. TextLinkAds.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then he ended up creating some auction. I think TextLinkAds was like an auction-based site to buy links. And then from there he created like online education database and had like onlinecolleges.org or whatever the domain names were, ranked them, did lead gen, and then sold it to— what's the company that owns Bankrate? I forgot. Red Ventures. I don't know what it was, but the number was public. I think it was like $600 million or something like that. So good for him. But Lars was doing a similar thing. And then his business partner Corey used to work for Patrick Gavin. But going through, you know, his LinkedIn, I think a lot of people have seen that Ahrefs post if you're in the SEO space where he was complaining about like $7,000 a month for data from LLMs and it went viral on LinkedIn. Tim Soulo ended up commenting on the cost of data and what Ahrefs And you're talking about the brand radar thing that Ahrefs is charging for, and it's very expensive. Yeah. So he put a comment on that or a thread on that on LinkedIn, or more so a post, went viral. And one that was done really recently that did extremely well was Google posted on their blog how SEO traffic hasn't gone down. And Lars was like, I just read this, I was catching up. And he's just like, and I'm paraphrasing here and I'm putting words in his mouth, but it's pretty much like Whoever wrote the blog post, let's say their name was Mary, I'm making it up. And he was like, you know, Mary, I don't know where like the F you're getting your data from. Like, you know, I have access to tons of Google Analytics and SEO sites and everyone's going down. Like, what the heck are you talking about? You know, you're smoking some crack. Maybe your employees don't want to tell you the real truth. And like posts like that have done really well. And the reason I bring up Lars as an example, Is he talked about his LinkedIn growth in one of his posts, and he's had some massive growth, and he took 6 months off, and he still had massive growth, and his reach is expanding. But if you look at the type of post I'm talking about, he's just not just speaking the truth, but just being direct and really upfront, and most people probably would never dare to, right? Like, honestly, would you—

Yeah.

create a LinkedIn post calling out Google like that?

Well, I actually have a thought on this, so I'll answer your question, maybe finish your thought, and then I'll kind of tell you where I'm steering this.

Yeah, so when you think about the type of content he's posting that's doing really well, he's taking things that people are thinking, but just saying them, and most people aren't willing to say what they believe is true, what they believe. And even though the majority believe that's true, Yeah. Just most people don't have the guts to say it, including me, by the way. Right? Like, I'm not gonna create a post on social media calling out Google or Facebook or any of the other platforms. Why?

Because— It hurts you a lot more.

Yeah. We generate business from this. Or I'm not gonna post on LinkedIn using a cuss word, um, while he can. And I'm not a saint. I've cussed many times in my life. I'm assuming you have as well. I've at least heard you do.

What do you mean you're assuming? You know.

Yeah, but I would never do that online. Or at least now in my, uh, now being 40 plus, but even in the last quite a few years, I wouldn't put that stuff online. And I'm not saying Lars is wrong. He's saying what people believe, but I wouldn't do it because it can hurt my business. And he's just speaking the truth. As a solo entrepreneur though, which he is, and he probably has a small team or a few contractors that he works with. It's not going to negatively impact him as much as me dealing with enterprises. And I'm not saying I'm right, or I'm not saying Lars is right. I love his viewpoint and I love reading his content. So I'm liking it. It's just more so, I don't have the guts to say—

It's not for you.

It's for me to consume. It's not for me to state those kinds of things online.

So I'll tell you what, I was watching— I was— so when I sit on my couch, I watch YouTube. And so I was actually watching— there was a Steven Bartlett from Diary of a CEO. So he had Daniel Priestley, Codie Sanchez, and Alex Hormozi on there at the same time, right? There was 4 of them. And I wanted to understand what they're doing on the content side that might've been unique or different, right? So, I kind of skipped around and then it got to the content side and then Codie mentioned something about her and her husband. So, Codie Sanchez, mutual acquaintance of ours, I'd even say friend. And so, she said that if someone doesn't go out and say things that are controversial or kind of go out on a limb that says something that they really think, she kind of looks at them and be like, that person's too safe or they're playing it too safe, right? I'm paraphrasing here, but basically, like, she's kind of on guard with that person, right? Because they're not being authentic, right? Now, at the same time, I understand where you're coming from too, because you're trying to protect your business and you can't say all the things that you want to say, right? Because you have so many different constituents, right? Now, here's what I would say. I message— remember Gaetano?

Yeah, he used to work for Yaniv as well.

And you.

Yeah.

So I texted him, I was like, you know what, I think I'm going to become the Triple H of LinkedIn. So remember in wrestling and WWE in the '90s, Triple H was like a heel. He was a really bad guy, right? Everyone hated him. I hated Triple H. You love Stone Cold, you love The Rock, but you hate Triple H, right? And so I posted something last week that I knew would piss a lot of people off, right? So I don't know if you saw it. It was basically like, you don't deserve to be CEO or CMO unless you have 100,000 followers. I knew It would piss people off. And then someone wrote in there, dumbest comment on the internet. All these people attacking me. And then one guy posted, this guy was an enterprise lead for Carrot, right? And I just didn't give a crap. I just like kept fanning the flames. And then, and he posted something. I was like, yeah, and that's why you're not CMO. He's like, well, you're not either, blah, blah, blah. So I just tried to get, just tried to piss people off more and more. And I got a lot more reach than I usually would get, right? And then I remember a few months ago, 6 months ago, I said, Harsh reality, everyone's going back to the office, right? So, when you make a statement like it's not most people are going back to the office, it's everyone's going back to the office, you're going to fan the flames. And so, it's no different than what the Clueless people are doing. It's very controversial marketing, right? So, my take on it right now, when I told Guy Tano, I was like, maybe I should become the Triple H of marketing and just try to piss people off and rage bait more and more. I'm not really going to do that, but I kind of enjoyed it when I became the heel or the villain.

So, but it works. Your reach just skyrockets.

Yeah. And you know what's interesting is this is a quick thing and this is a quick detour and we can come back to what you're saying. But I actually don't know if you'd agree or disagree with this, but I was talking to our mutual friend Yaniv about it and they do really well, right, as a company. I was like, you know, maybe 5, 10 years ago, you don't necessarily need to understand at least one of the social channels to have a CMO role. I believe now the world that we're going into, if you're going to be a CMO, you have to at least know how to play the game on one of these channels. Yes, you know, you have to know how to manage a P&L, you You have to know how to hire people. You have to know how to fire people. You have to know how to do all these things, right? But I do think you actually need to understand one channel really well. For you and me, it started with SEO. But I think now that the game's moving into organic, the reason why I said 100,000 followers isn't because of the followers. I just really mean that you should at least understand one channel, if not multiple. So when I talked to Yaniv on the phone about it, he was like, at least multiple. So my take is at least one. His is multiple. What is yours?

Mine's multiple. I don't think one is— and before you even mentioned you need, I was like, I agree you need one, but it can't just be one. It has to be multiple. Because if you look at Facebook, Facebook grew through the email invite flow, right? Dropbox through social media, tweet and we'll give you more space for free.

It's broken.

But back in the day, companies were able to grow into gigantic organizations through one channel. If you look at today, all these channels are saturated and any good channel quickly becomes saturated. So you have no choice but to take the omnichannel approach. That doesn't mean you need to be great at every single channel because there's too many channels. Not everyone's going to be applicable, but you need to understand a lot of them, most of the major channels. That's one. And you need to understand how marketing platforms in general work. So like, for example, if you're going after AI, just generally speaking, how these AI platforms work or how organic social works, because if a new platform comes around or you want to learn a new pla— another platform that's existing like a Snapchat or Pinterest, a lot of the principles and the frameworks are similar, right?

Yeah.

Like when we create video-based content, it doesn't matter if it's Instagram or TikTok or YouTube, the better the retention, the more views you get. It doesn't matter how many followers, but the fundamental concept and strategy of how to create video that people are intrigued with and want to keep watching It's the same. And if you don't understand not just the basics, but the platforms, and you're not good at, you know, a handful of them, I just don't think you're going to do well in today's world. And I would say the most important thing as a CMO is, you know, most people look at it as like player-coach, you need to be able to get your hands dirty. I do think that is very important. But I would say the most important thing if you want to scale fast is You need a CMO who not only understands strategy, but knows the people to hire, assuming you're trying to grow into a large corporation, that just can execute amazingly on every channel that you want to go after. Like, this person, you're just doing Google Ads. This person, only Facebook Ads. This person, managing only affiliates. This person, organic for Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok and nothing else, right? This person, AI SEO. This other person, traditional SEO. You, Just email, right? And when you start piecemealing it like that, and you have world-class people who are in charge and don't need to be micromanaged, that's typically when you see the best results.

Yeah. And what I think we're both trying to say, what we're both trying to say here is, if you're a dynamic marketer, you have taste in these different areas, if you're pretty good at each channel. If you don't have taste, and you're an old-school marketer, you haven't learned these new things, how are you going to know the patterns to detect? Because everything in work is really just pattern recognition, especially in hiring. And so, I stand by what I say and maybe I'll triple H myself more. We'll come back to a post I actually threw up on Threads and there's so many people here calling me an idiot. Only idiots repeat this nonsense. These people are drinking Kool-Aid. These people sound insufferable. It sounds like a delusional crowd. And I responded, I was like, yeah, some companies doing 9 to 10 figures in here, so I suppose these people must all be idiots. So, I think I'm just going to fan the flames more and milk the reach out of it.

But yeah, the one thing I agree with you, and I know when you said 100,000, you're not actually saying they had to have exactly 100,000 followers, but I get the point. You're saying they need to have followers and understand how to grow. The one thing that's important as a CMO, if you have followers and you have an audience, it makes it that much easier to recruit amazing people and your network is probably bigger.

Mm-hmm.

CMOs that don't have that are not going to grow as fast for organization. Like, I'll be very frank here. Both you and I, I know we can execute on marketing, but let's go with the hypothetical that we could not. I guarantee we both have amazing people that we know, whether it's independent contractors or just people that we can hire for Facebook ads, Meta ads, organic on pretty much all major platforms. Maybe not the Snaps, you know, and Pinterest as well as, actually we probably both have on both of those, but we definitely have people on the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the YouTubes, all the major channels, Email for sure, conversion optimization. And these things are super important because if you and I can't do crap as marketers, just hypothetically here, I'm not saying we can't, at least we have a Rolodex to be like, go run. We know you guys will just perform and produce.

Yeah. And by the way, this goes into why one of— some of you should figure out multiple channels here and build that network because even though Neil says that 10% of his revenue is driven from brand, that's attributable revenue. Also, I'm like, man, all the amazing people he recruited, like huge, massive. So, and then we realized, by the way, Neil and I both started as marketers, but in order to do the things that we want to do for the long term, I'll tell you what, Neil, like the majority of my time right now is spent on recruiting. So yeah.

I don't spend as much time on recruiting. I never actually really did. I know Matt can.

You're at a different stage though, too. Yours is marketing strategy. What else right now?

A lot of software and AI.

Product?

Yeah, a lot of product. I actually spend most of my time on product, more product and engineering than anything else. I'm not actually coding, but if I had to sum it up, it would just be summed up as product. I probably spend like 70% of my time on product right now.

I think what's worth calling out here before we move on to the next topic is you're working, you and I are trying to focus on the highest leverage things. Highest leverage for me right now is recruiting. For you, it actually, I mean, because you have a lot of distribution already in product, You're affecting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people with product, right? And you're going to drive more leads that way. And so you have to constantly be asking yourself when you wake up in the morning, when you look at yourself in the mirror, what is the absolute highest leverage thing? The number one thing I could be working on every single day that will grow the company the most. And that's something that we both try to focus on.

I agree with you. And I do think recruiting is really important. It's just, we have a whole recruiting team that deals with it.

Plus, I don't think you like to deal with it either.

No, but I do interview the people when it gets close to the end, at least for like the main roles. And it actually really depends what you consider a main role. Like we hired a head of Germany years ago and I never interviewed him. Same with the head of Italy or Spain or most of the countries.

Man, that's scary.

At this point, I got a CEO that knows a lot of people in the industry and he's just plucking people that he's already worked with in the past.

Yeah, there's a, he has trust established with these people if he's already worked with them. So it's a lot less risky versus you interviewing someone off the street that you, nobody knows. So.

Dude, our head of LATAM, his name is Javi. So Mike and I, funny enough, interviewed him at your event.

Miami. I remember. Yeah.

Okay. Uh, Javi's worked out really well for us. Yeah. Pitched a lot of companies really well, networked like, dude, he's done partnerships like with, um, other publicly traded like ad agencies. I'm like, oh, how'd we get this client? He's like, oh, I knew someone at Ogilvy. They kicked over the account to us for SEO. And I was like, Ogilvy's owned by a large holding company. They must have an SEO division. And he's like, yeah, they do. But he's just like, because of my relationships, I was able to get them to kick it to us instead of, you know, one of their sister agencies. I was like, all right, we'll take it. I'm not going to complain here. And when I interviewed Javi, not only did he say he could bring revenue, it was a big client. He's just like, You know, he's like, I think I can close you Sony. And this is before we were— before he was hired, and it ended up coming true. It took a few months.

You made that a big deal. I remember that was like, hey, we better get Sony. I remember that.

Yeah. And then he brought it. It took, I think, 2 or 3 months. But what was interesting about Javi, what really made us hire him was, I would probably say 50% the Sony thing, because I was like, dude, if this guy's full of it, I'm going to fire him. I know that sounds bad. But he was the one who says, I'll bring an account. I'm like, what's the certainty? He's like, 100%. I was like, okay. He's like, I have strong relationships in that organization. I know what they're looking for.

Never tell me 100%.

Yeah, because I'll expect it. But the other 50%, which was huge, is Mike G, our CEO, knew Javi not directly, but indirectly, because one of his team members that he worked with in the past that he truly respected and knew was amazing, Work directly with Javi. And that guy's like, Javi's a rock star. You can never go wrong with him. You should bet on him. And, you know, a lot of our hires come from just our executives who we trust and we don't micromanage. And when I say don't micromanage, like, I don't know what a lot of my executives do on a daily basis, but they're good and they just produce results and you just let them go do their thing. When those people that are known to be producers vouch for someone and saying you should go hire them, I don't really care to interview them. Like, at that point, I'm just like, How do you know they're good? Oh, I've worked with them for 6 years in the past and they did all of this stuff. All right. Sounds good. Like those are the people that have worked out almost 100% for us.

Yep. That's good. I think also when you're talking to people too, not, I'm just talking to the crowd. It's, you have to think about what values are important to you and then hire for those. Obviously what's important for especially working with you is, is your, they have to have a bias to action, not to be able to figure things out on their own. Right. And they have to be driven. Ideally, if they're working with you, they know how to run a P&L in some way, shape, or form, or if they know how to impact numbers, right? So I think those things are all important. Okay.

Well, the leaders we make, we make sure they know how to run a P&L. And some of them we know going into it, they may not be the best, but we have a massive accounting team. So like Javi, for example, he knew how to run a P&L, but he of course could use improvement in that area. But his strong suit or his strong skillset was sales and massive network. So what we'll do is things like a P&L, you can put internal people to help fix that for someone. It's hard to fix the gap of you have strong relationships with clients and you can bring in revenue. Like that is not that fixable or trainable. It's much easier to be like, you don't have great P&L experience or you have some, like Kavi actually wasn't bad at P&L, wasn't just, he wasn't the best though. We coached him and he got great. And if he couldn't, we wouldn't care because he's amazing at revenue generation and managing our team. We'll just go have the accounting team help him with it and walk him through it every time.

Yeah, that's— I think relationships, that type of stuff, sales will be one of the last things to fully get replaced by AI. So it's hard.

Hands down. All right.

So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. 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. All the views in the world don't matter if you don't, you know, you, if you don't have this, right? So for example, let's say Neil was like a bikini, like OnlyFans girl, okay? Let's say he had all the views in the world, millions and millions, 11 million followers on Instagram, and then he had millions and millions of views on each video. The problem with that is it only converts in one way, if Neil decides to start an OnlyFans, right? But it doesn't really convert into revenue. Like, Neil can't influence me with that bikini account on buying enterprise software, for example. Now, for example, if somebody else decides to talk about, let's use the Clue.ly guys, they want to talk about their consumer product, right? And they're just showing it in action all the time. And each video is getting like 3 million, 4 million views or so.

Yeah.

They're actually driving more sales, more adoption that way. All the views don't matter if you don't have the influence to get people to purchase a product. And so you have to think about the value of an audience based on that influence.

Yeah, I was talking to a dude a few months ago, male model, you know, jacked, good-looking, and has, I don't know how many millions of followers, but on each platform he has millions of followers, all right? And he does like these high-end campaigns and stuff like that with like fashion and whatever else, like, you know, car companies and stuff. And he was asking me, you know, I have way more followers than you, Neil. Why can't I make more money than you? And I said, followers don't equate necessarily to directly to the amount of income you make. I'm like, we'll walk down the street. More people will know you than they know me by far. But the problem is, is people know you for what? And I asked him and he's like, for looking good and taking pictures. I was like, cool. So where's the money value on it? And he said, well, the money value is, is I can make their products look good because if a good-looking person wears a specific watch, maybe other people will want to buy that watch. I said, okay. And how many good-looking people are there out there? And he's like, A lot, right? And I was like, I'm like, you probably know better than me because, you know, I hate to say it, Eric's a handsome gentleman, but most my friends are not male models. And I'm assuming you would agree with this, Eric. You're not a male model.

I'm just an average guy. Just an average guy just trying to make money online, just like you, Neil. Eric's above average.

All right. He's not average, but he's definitely above average. But this guy, you know, I don't know what the rating scale of a 10 would be, but let's call it a 9 or 10 or whatever, right? Because he has millions of followers. I'm just basing it off of that. And he was just like, well, Neil, you know, you have a lot less followers. There's a lot of marketers though. And I said, yeah, there's a lot of marketers, but A, how many of them can actually produce results within the budgets companies have and within the time constraints? And B, how many independently owned ad agencies are there that have a global reach in 28+ countries that can help companies with their global campaigns and things like AI, you know, ranking on ChatGPT or getting mentioned there and App Store stuff and traditional SEO and CTV and all the services. And he's like, I don't know, I don't know your space. And I'm like, the list starts going lower and lower because one, companies don't offer all services and B, most companies don't offer it in a lot of regions unless you're typically a publicly traded organization or a massively large holding company. And he's like, oh, okay. So I was like, so my market's just bigger, right? There's a lot more being spent on things like Google Ads and taking a portion of it than how much people pay for someone to be in a photograph, in a picture with a watch or a car. And I think people forget 2 things. How big is your market? And how many competitors do you have?

Yeah. Well, I think what's also important too is the value that you're adding, right? So if an enterprise is paying you, let's say a dollar, they're expecting a multiple on that in terms of return, right? So 3x or 5x or 10x or even higher than that. Now he might argue, oh, he puts his beautiful face on something and it helps it convert, but no, he can be replaced by any other beautiful person on the street.

AI.

Yes, yes, exactly, dude. And some of these AI models, I'm sorry to say, like, they are beautiful. They are gorgeous. So like, sometimes it takes me a little bit to figure out that it's AI and I'm like, damn, but that's pretty good, right? And pretty soon we won't be able to tell anymore. So the thing is, it's one, you guys are harder to find, right? The business that we do is harder to find. 2, the value we add is why we get paid.

Dude, I was, you know, my wife was showing me this Instagram video in bed yesterday because she was just scrolling before we were going to bed. And it was a video on, you know, someone saying like, draw me an Eminem eating spaghetti. Okay, so she's watching it at the same time because I have my iPad out. I go to ChatGPT and I say, draw me an Eminem eating spaghetti.

Yeah.

Mine took a little bit longer than the Instagram video. Keep in mind Instagram, you know, speeding up, but whatever. By the time the person was done, even if it was faster, and let's say they did it in a minute, ChatGPT took me multiple minutes. When I showed her, mine was like 10 times better. And, you know, I don't know what I paid. I don't know if I needed a paid account for that. I have a paid ChatGPT account, but I don't know if you even need a paid ChatGPT account.

You can do it for free, but you get very limited. But yeah, that's how it works. By the way, you want to know a crazy stat? I found this on Instagram today. So this is just random because we're talking about good-looking models, right? So here's a crazy stat. Only 1 in 25,000 men over 35 have a visible 6-pack. That's just 40 out of 1 million. In a city like Austin, Texas, that means only 40 men with abs.

Isn't that crazy? So, is your goal to get a 6-pack now?

No.

You could already have one.

No. By the way, by the way, our videographer Noah, very handsome man, he has a 6-pack. So, he's clearly 1 in 25,000 men. It's actually even rarer to be over 35 years old with a 6-pack versus to be a millionaire. I don't know if you know that.

Yeah, because most millionaires are created by them just owning their homes for a long time.

That's also true. That's also true.

But even then, I'm not saying, you know, because people are like, would you rather have a 6-pack or be a millionaire? I'd rather be a millionaire than have a 6-pack.

The millionaire definition, so like, what is it? That's just your assets minus liabilities. Most people above 35 are like, if you're living in the United States and if you're listening to this right now, you're probably going to get there, I would hope.

Yes.

So yeah, by the way, so do you want to know about this one website that the US government paid $620 million for?

No, I want to know, but I have no clue what it is because one website, I'm curious how one website costs $620 million and it's probably something silly.

Okay, so recreation.gov was a pay-for-performance deal. So they signed with, I think, this, this web dev shop And basically they said, okay, you can do— we're going to do pay for performance. So we're going to take a small fee of every transaction for these park passes, right? These campsites or these event lottery tickets. Like if you don't want to get to Yosemite, sometimes there has to be a lottery to get in, right? So initially this agency projected that they would make $87 million for the first 5 years and then $182 million for 10 years. They funded 14 websites and 24/7 call centers. And they actually ended up making $620 million. And so they got a good pay-for-performance deal done. So, um, are we saying everyone should do pay-for-performance? Not necessarily, but we've talked about Spiralize in terms of how they structure their deals. If you can figure out how to structure it well with good upside for you guys and good upside for the client, then it's, it's, it's still a really good deal.

I hate to say this. I'm guessing you'd be on the same page as me, but if I was running that department in the government, I'd be like, screw your contract. We're not going to do pay-per-performance anymore. You're getting a flat fee. And that's how it works with large corporations. If we crush it for them, they're not going to pay us more. If we don't do well for them, you get fired pretty quickly and they're like, this is it, screw you. And if you make them 10 times the money, they're like, cool, do it again or else you're not going to get a renewal.

I think the key is to negotiate these deals early when it's like, it's very clear that— it's very unclear that you're going to win or not, right? Because when you think about Formula 1, the Formula 1 TV Initially, this, I think this is back in the '70s or the '80s or so, but there's this one guy that offered all the Formula 1 teams, hey, buy in $100 grand and then you guys can have the TV rights too, right? Nobody wanted to buy in. So he got all the TV rights and I think he got a huge profit share as well. And that's how he became really rich with Formula 1. I don't have all the details, but again, if you can figure out how to get to somebody, this is why we talk about how small businesses, probably mid-market makes more sense where you reach out to them and say, hey, I'll do pay for performance. They'll do it because they're not sure if they're going to win completely yet, and they're not at the scale of enterprise where they have— they can't take the risk on it. So.

Yeah, but I've always had the issue with performance-based deals. I don't know how many times you've tried it or not. I've had the issue where a lot of people agree upon it upfront, and it doesn't matter how ironclad your contracts are, legal just costs money and large corporations know it. Most of the time I can get it through and the times I have gotten it through, if you start performing really well, no one wants to keep doing the deal. They hate it.

I agree with that. Eventually they'll be like, we just can't do the deal anymore. I remember I had a friend in EO, he would help companies get into like Costco or Target, these other distributors back when people didn't really know how to get in. And he would take a 5% cut and then eventually, no, sorry, 10% cut. Eventually got whittled down to 5%. And then every year they would call him to whittle it down more and more and more.

Yeah, it's tough. And then with— and the business knows that, hey, if Costco's carrying my product and they're doing really well, yeah, you may have the relationship and I don't, but at the end of the day, Costco's not going to want to lose, you know, $100 million in revenue or $200 million because it all adds up. So yeah, I don't want to pay you anymore.

Yeah, the leverage has been flipped. Like maybe let's say I was selling it to you, I might've had leverage initially to get the deal done, but like that goes down over time. So Yeah.

Yeah. How's it worked out for you when you tried doing performance-based deals?

You know what's funny? I was talking to, I forgot who I was talking to yesterday, but in 2017, I got these SaaS companies, like remember Mixmax, the email company? So, yeah, yeah. So I knew I could, I knew what was up and coming. So I got 6 of these performance deals signed. Okay. Now here's the thing. The team didn't know how to perform on it. I thought I can just delegate it and let them figure it out. Right. So I knew what exactly Okay, we should do the landing pages for them. We should run Google Ads over here to make it all work. We just didn't do it, right? And so it's easy. It was easy for me to close the deals because I had the relationships because I was doing the podcast and it was just focused on SaaS founders at the time. And so I got the deals done, but we just couldn't execute at the time. But I will say we're trying to do that now again. We're going to probably focus that more on mid-market if we're going to guinea pig it.

So I think it's a beautiful model. What's the one that does it? Starts with a C, is it Cloverfield or something like that that does it?

Centerfield.

Centerfield, my bad.

Yeah, Centerfield. So, okay, you want to know the story how they started? Because one of my friends worked there back when they were like a $2 million a year agency. He went to work there. And so this is funny because we're at a networking event and one of the guys he met ended up hiring him. Okay. And Him and the other guy were like ad buyers. They were both in the affiliate space. And so Centerfield went from this affiliate agency, or sorry, this marketing agency, standard marketing agency. They were saying, okay, we're just going to focus on telecom companies. And then what we're going to do is we're going to drive them leads on a CPA basis, right? To get paid per lead. What eventually happened was they got so profitable. I think they're doing 10 figures in revenue. I could be wrong. But now they will handle the entire funnel. They will handle not just the paid ads, the landing pages, but they'll actually have the call— they buy call centers too to have the entire customer gift wrapped for them at the end. And that's how they get the deal done.

It's like a Red Ventures.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to me it's affiliate.

Yeah, it's affiliate.

Yeah. But I think it's like a classier version of affiliate marketing. So. Yeah.

On a side note, you have something on the list on how SEO is back. Why don't you, uh, Read into it.

Yeah. So SEO is back. This is a tweet from Aleyda Solis. So Aleyda is amazing SEO and Dejan SEO said GPT-5 just made SEO irreplaceable. So a couple bullet points here. OpenAI just made an executive decision to focus on raw intelligence and leave the rest to search engines. Now, number 2, without grounding. So grounding is grounding it on maybe pulling the data from Bing or pulling the data from Google. So without grounding, This model is virtually useless. It's designed to be the brain on top of tools and information it's provided with. Number 3, and 4 bullet points here. This means SEO has never been more relevant than now. And the last point here is OpenAI appears to be designing models that think and reason well, but don't attempt to internally store all world knowledge. Instead leveraging retrieval augmented methods such as tools, search plugins, large context to pull in fresh information as needed. And this approach is motivated by efficiency, cost, and performance considerations. As evidenced by recent statements, research, and product releases, because they're burning so much money on these tokens. They have to figure out efficient ways to do this. So that's why I said SEO is back.

And people want cheaper prices for, you know, the APIs over time, and they have reduced their pricing quite a bit. I know they've lost a lot of money, but I think they lose money on purpose. They could charge more for all their products, but they choose not to, to try to gobble up more market share.

Yeah, totally. And I actually have some slides. So you and I are speaking at HubSpot's event actually in a couple of weeks now. I'm going to work on our slides tomorrow a little bit, but check this out. So I have this. Okay, you're going to like this. Let me share this. You guys are getting a sneak peek to my talk. You're getting a sneak peek as well. Do you see this?

I do now.

Okay, so if you're just listening to this, the slide basically shows that the cost of intelligence is dropping.

So I actually shared this at a talk I did earlier this year.

But a couple months ago, you would pay for, let's say, like an input API price for like DeepSeek, right? Which is a Chinese model. You pay $0.55 over here. And for ChatGPT's O1 model, which is the best in class at the time, you were paying $15 for that. Okay. And then you can see on the very right, output API price is $60 from O1. Now today, look at what it's dropped to. So DeepSeek, maybe still $0.55 for this one, but look, Instead of $15 for O1, it's dropped to $2. Instead of $60 over here on the right side, it's dropped to $8.

Uh, well, O1 is $15 here, right? It's $2 for O3.

This needs to be adjusted over here. This O1 preview, ignore the orange. We're actually taking that out. Um, cause no one really talks about O1 preview, but—

But right here, no, no, go to the next slide. It's O3 that's cheaper, right? You see in the cash, it's $2 versus $15.

Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're right. I didn't see this O3 pop in. So I actually need to make some adjustments to this slide, but point is, it's It's getting cheaper. So the fact that it's O3 on the right side here, this is— O3 was one of their best models at the time. And by the way, now it's like, it's just ChatGPT-5. So—

Yeah, but O1, you put $15 over time. Did it stay $15 or did it decrease?

I'm pretty sure it decreased. So that's where I need to fix the slide. But main point is this has dropped by a lot.

Yeah. So the pricing is all going downwards like we're talking about.

Yeah, exactly. We're just saying this is very deflationary and we're— we all— I think we all know, like you and I both know that Okay, energy is going to be really important. GPUs are going to be really important, and we need the price to continue to drop down because we're just paying for intelligence ultimately.

Yes. All right. Yeah, I agree with that. You know, it's— you're just paying for intelligence at the end of the day.

You want to know the difference between a $22 billion startup versus a $3.5 billion startup? Sure. Is it growth rate? No. Okay. So 2 credit card companies, different stories over the last 5 years. Which credit company— credit card companies would these be if you're to guess?

I'm going to go one was Brex. I could be wrong, but I'm going to go with Brex.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right.

I don't know what the other one is. Brex is probably the $20-something billion one if I had to guess.

No. Okay. So, so this Ramp came out of nowhere.

Oh, Ramp.

Oh yeah.

Ramp's the one that raised money. My bad. I was confused.

They both raised a lot of money, but Brex started earlier. And Brex had the lead. Brex was like all over the place. Like, dude, when crypto was going crazy, there's always like a Brex representative at all these crypto dinners when I was in Miami. But Ramp, from what I've seen, they've just executed better. And they have— and from what I've seen, their engineering, their product is just better. And so if you're looking at this over here, $3.4 billion company Brex over here, and then you have Ramp, $22 billion. And so it says over here in this tweet from Teddy, the valuation gap between Ramp and Brex is a sobering reminder that execution is all that matters and the job is never finished. And I met the founders of Ramp, super nice people, very humble. I'm not saying the Brex people aren't, but I think the Brex people, they were very sales-focused and they're at like every single party, whereas Ramp, they're just always shipping new features. I think this year they shipped like hundreds of new stuff. But wanted to call it out because a lot of my friends do use Ramp. I don't think you and I use it, but worth calling out.

Dude, remember that house I was going to buy on Beverly Drive?

Beverly and Long? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Was it the Brex people?

The Brex founders were renting it because I was like asking the realtor, I'm like, who the heck spends $180 grand a month on rent? Like at that point you should just buy a house, right? And they're like, oh, this company called Brex. And there was something like that. They were paying like $180 or something ridiculous every single month. And I'm like, That's a few million bucks a year. Like, just go buy a house. It may not be as big or nice, but who cares?

You're just throwing money away. We don't know the founders of Brex, but like, I do think how you do anything is how you do everything. And so if you're going to do that as a founder, you know, if I'm an investor, I'm on the board, I might have a problem with it. And by the way, you look at the Ramp people over here. This is a guy, I think he's on the product team, Ramp Economics Lab, right? He's just writing about their analysis on their data. They're always sharing interesting data that gets retweeted on on X. I don't— I didn't— I've never seen this from Brex, right? And so for me, I'm just like, they show you credit card spending across different industries and to show that maybe there's like a recession coming or whatever. I just think it's stuff that people who are interested in the markets are interested in reading on. So kudos to Ramp on the execution. I hope they keep going.

Yeah. And either way, both the companies are going to do really well. I think it was Ramp that announced things like if you're using them as a corporate card, They'll automatically have like AI analyze people's travel and expense reports and make sure that they're following in line so they're not trying to like hurt the company. There's one of them that's using AI for like corporate cards for people expensing or, you know, doing meals or whatever it may be while they're traveling. But I thought those features were pretty useful. I've never used this. Technically a lie. At one company that I was working with for a while, they gave me like a Brex card or a RAM card, but it was more so just for the credit card number and it was virtual. But for my own companies, and at that time I never really used it, it was just more so I had it. But for my own companies, I've never really used anything outside of Amex. We do have Visa cards because some places don't take Amex, but I've just found that if you're trying to scale your business, it's easier to just go with like American Express because you can just get the the line limits and it's just easier to scale up faster.

I like Amex because of their superior customer service and it's just, it's been convenient, right? But I can see a world where Ramp starts to out-execute and I can see a world where you and I are on Ramp in the next, I don't know, 5, 10 years or so. We'll see what happens. I'm actually asking Grok right now, why did Ramp do better than Brex? We'll see what it says, but you can pick the next one.

The next one I want to talk about is personal branding. And people talk about building a media company, a media company, you know, a company that it doesn't matter what you're selling, but Eric and I have talked about everything's turning into a media company where you need a following, you need an audience, whether it's personal or corporate. But what's interesting is we're seeing a lot more people trying to build up their personal brands or even corporate brands. But what's worked for you and I and what's worked, what works today, I would say is very different and you can't build a media company the same way that you could in the past. And again, to clarify, when I say media company, we're not talking about building your own version of CNN or Huffington Post or TechCrunch or anything like that. We're talking about you have your product or service that you're selling, but you need to build up an audience. That would be the media type company-ish thing that we're talking about to Build a community that evangelizes your product or service, the brand, pushes out there and helps you get more sales.

Yep. So I, my take on it is it's harder than it's ever been, but it's more essential than it's ever been. And the game is changing very quickly too. So if we were to start today, like just doing SEO, we'd be in trouble. But, you know, the, I look at marketing as there's always the meta, the most optimized way to play marketing right now. And then there's also each channel, there's an optimized way to play for short form, for example, and things like that. And And you for what you've done with long form. So I think when people say you need to build a media company, I look at it as they're just saying you need to build distribution in some way, shape, or form because one of the only forms of moats right now is distribution. And so that's why we continue to do what we do. I wouldn't say, Neil, you necessarily enjoy creating content, nor would I say I enjoy creating content. I mean, I would say that when we hang out and we get lunch and all that, it's fun. It's like more of a reason for us to hang out.

Yes.

But that's about it.

So, dude, I, you know, I don't enjoy creating content and you're being kind about it. But my favorite part about our podcast recently has nothing to do with the recording, even though Eric and I genuinely do enjoy helping other people. It's just we have busy schedules. So it starts becoming tough to always sit down every single week and share content. Like today is my anniversary, right? Wedding anniversary. I'm sitting here creating content. Thank you. But the part that I've been enjoying about our podcast recordings of recent is we've been doing lunch after.

Yeah. And we do lunch with Noah, who's our amazing videographer. And it's fun. Like it's, you realize the joy I get from doing this is the relational wealth that you build from it long-term. So there's different types of wealth. You got relational wealth, you got monetary wealth, you got physical health, Right? And you've got your mental health. There's all these different things. And I think actually Sahil Bloom wrote a book about this, but I think it's worth thinking about these and it's not always about money, money, money, or reach, reach, reach. So there's always secondary and tertiary benefits to these things. But going back to the original topic here, what's your take on it in terms of building a media company?

I think it's more essential than ever, but I think it doesn't get you to a really large corporation. And I'll give you a great example of this. If you look at Hailey Bieber, I believe is her name, her makeup company, I forgot what it was called, but it was bought by e.l.f. Beauty.

All right.

And they got to hundreds of millions in revenue.

e.l.f.

bought it for premium. It was mainly stock. And I bet you the company will blow up now. Hailey Bieber has a big community. Her dad is one of the Baldwin brothers. I don't know which Baldwin brother. And then her husband is Justin Bieber.

Mm-hmm.

The Baldwin brothers, like Alec Baldwin. I don't know the other ones. They're, they're great actors.

Alec Baldwin from, uh—

Yeah, I don't know all the names.

ABC, Always Be Closing. That's how I remember.

Okay.

Glengarry Glen Ross.

Yeah. Um, but it's one of the Baldwin brothers and the reason, um, she'll build a bigger company now isn't because of her social audience. If you look at majority of the people who buy cosmetics, The transactions happen offline.

What e.l.f.

has that she didn't have is they have the relationships to get into every store and the distribution and the lines of credit to do it because it's very expensive. I think e.l.f. just financed like $600-ish billion in debt. Don't quote me on the amount, but it was something large like that. I'm pretty sure it was around $600 billion in debt for all their Sephora inventory and things like that. Let's see, e.l.f. Beauty. I'm going to look it up. Debt. Million financing Sephora. Let's see. Oh yeah, debt financing of $600 million. So that way they can go in and expand faster offline. But that's where the majority of the sales are. So you can create a media company. Like a Kardashian, Hailey Bieber, and these are extreme cases, and I'm not trying to say it in a negative way. I mean extreme cases in which they have so many followers, 99.999999% of people will never reach what they have. And even then, it's hard to get more than hundreds of millions of dollars of followers just doing it online. They, they, it's a great way to jumpstart the business, but then you need all the systems, the processes, and the fundamentals that the old school large corporations have figured out for many, many years. And that is distribution and partnerships and all these other things that don't seem sexy but drive a ton of revenue. And it doesn't matter if you're talking about Kylie Jenner, she's done amazing, or Kim Kardashian. But when you compare them to like the L'Oréals of the world, they're so tiny. And I'm not saying it in a bad way. They've built bigger businesses than you and I have built. It's just more so the L'Oréals of the world, whether you think they're sexy or not compared to the Kim Kardashians and the Hailey Beavers, They figured out the part that generates a lot of money, which is the old school traditional stuff, which is people going into Walmart and buying.

I think one part where people have gotten confused, like, so I was actually watching something recently where people like, you know, obviously MrBeast created Feastables, right? And then he partnered with Logan Paul on Lunchly. So I actually pulled up, I used Grok to pull up Prime's, which is Logan Paul's drink, right? So 2023 full year, Sales figures, 1.2 billion. Okay, so that's what Bloomberg estimated. Who knows that's real or not? 2024 full year, down 112 million pounds in 2023. This is UK only, so that's a 71% year-on-year decline. Profits dropped 92% to just 312,000 pounds. Okay, now if we look at the trailing 12 months 2025, it's reported journalist Darren Rovell Reported 90% decline, but 42% is a verified figure. So it's going down a lot. So all that to say is creating the— making this media company, driving distribution is certainly important. I don't think it's an or thing. You have to have a good operator on your team to figure out what to do. Otherwise, it's all going to fall apart, right? And then what ends up happening is then your brand ends up getting tarnished for it, and you don't want that to happen.

Yeah, and ideally use your brand, your following, whether it's corporate or personal, to kickstart things and get the engine going. But don't forget about all the systems and the processes and boring stuff that's made a lot of these large publicly traded companies large. You need both. If you don't have both, it's really hard to succeed in today's world. Now, you don't necessarily need the media part or the personal brand. I still think you can do it the old school way. It just costs more now than it did before.

Yeah.

The personal brand side, right? Trying to create that media company or corporate brand side, it helps kickstart things.

Dude, speaking of which, did you see that PayPal is offering $236,000 to manage their CEO's brand?

No, that's it?

Yeah. So, okay, so there's a head of CEO content. It's not even SEO content, head of CEO content based in San Jose and $137,000 to $236,000 full-time job. And So I just, I think this is interesting. I think some people, a lot of people are poo-pooing on it, but I think this is necessary because at least PayPal realizes this is important.

It is hugely important. I can't name companies, but we get paid by quite a few publicly traded companies to manage the CEO's online presence. And PayPal, you know, their stock hasn't been doing well as of recent, but it's still a $66 billion company. They're still growing. And in 2024, they did $31.8 billion in revenue with a net income of $4.15 million, EBITDA of $6.17 billion. So they're still massively large. And people tend to also forget Elon was one of the co-founders.

Yeah. Along with Sacks worked there. Reid Hoffman worked there. Thiel was a co-founder.

Yeah. It's the PayPal Mafia. Yeah.

Yeah.

Affirm, right? And then I forgot what he did before. I think the Yelp guys also came from there.

Maybe.

Yeah. You 2 founders came from there.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they had a lot of smart people come through there.

Um, no, but what it shows is, forget the smart people come through there, it shows that Thiel and Musk were amazing at recruiting and spotting talent. That's what it shows more than anything else.

So I, I don't know if I told you this, but, um, so my, my, my CTO Sean went to, uh, the SpaceX Starbase, right? And he just said it was incredibly motivating to be there because everyone was focused on the mission. Everyone was working, helping each other. They were just walking and someone drove by them and said, hey, do you need a ride? Like a golf cart, right? But everyone's working around the clock because when you have a mission that's so insane, you can't help but to want to work harder for the mission and to work harder for Elon because it's like they're trying to make humanity multi-planetary. That's a crazy mission, right? Or when you're trying to reduce carbon emissions of space, or with Tesla, you're trying to make robotics, you're trying to make more self-driving cars. Every single mission is so big that you're naturally going to bring in the best of the best people, and the people that can't take it are going to quit, right? And so you and I don't have missions like that necessarily, but we started working on our mission a little more and we started to mold it a little bit. But I think if you can look at SpaceX, whether you love or hate Elon, you can agree that the mission is very noble and it inspires people to keep working there. Because what was PayPal's mission? You remember?

I don't know, maybe power every online transaction. I'm taking a guess here.

So to democratize financial services, making them accessible, convenient, and secure for everyone regardless of background or economic standing. I'm sure that might have changed in the beginning, but at least that sounded interesting back in the day because nobody solved payments back when we first started using PayPal. There's so many scams going on.

Yeah, people would send checks. I remember I would get money orders to buy stuff on eBay and mail them out. It was a pain.

I remember this is when you sold CDs.

Yeah, yeah, didn't go well at that, but yeah.

Yeah, that's when I sold, uh, I sold gear on eBay. I sold weapons and, and, um, assuming did not go well either. No, it actually went well for me. It worked out for me.

Oh, you're not talking about like weapons like guns?

No, no, not real weapons, like in-game weapons and armor.

Thank you for that.

That's not a weapon dealer. I thought you had like— you're selling tactical. I'm like, this did not go well. You're gonna get You want to know what I want to call out? So earlier in this session, I talked about how people responded to my, you know, if you can't lead marketing, if you don't have at least 100,000 followers. So guess how people responded on X versus LinkedIn?

LinkedIn people must have hated on you. I didn't see it on either, by the way. X, you probably got some haters, but you probably got more people that are like, cool, this makes sense.

Exactly. The question is, are people on LinkedIn dumber than people on X? Okay, so that post, again, if you don't have at least 100,000 followers, you don't deserve to lead marketing. On X, almost every single person agreed. Okay, every single person agreed. And actually, I get my news from X, right? Behind the scenes, when I'm talking to, let's say, you, or I'm talking to other CMOs, some CMOs, their company's doing, you know, hundreds of millions in revenue, right? They agreed with it as well. In fact, they said, no, you need to have even more. You need to be good at multiple channels. And even you said that yourself, right?

Yeah.

Now I go on LinkedIn, everybody hates me. Every single person hates me, right? And so the question is, is LinkedIn dumber? That's a good question. You answer it first and then I'll go.

I don't think it's dumber. I think a lot of the people on LinkedIn know it, but what's happening is, is most of the people on LinkedIn are there trying to climb the corporate ladder and they're going to go against anything that is not favorable to the employee. So you've probably posted about— actually, you did. You talked about this, about people have to go into the office and that's going to be the new norm again. I bet you everyone on LinkedIn hated it. I don't know what percentage, but it has to be 90+% had to hate on it because there are people who had to— don't want to go into the office. Same with people who don't want to have a massive following because it's hard for them. X, you have employees on there. You have entrepreneurs similar to LinkedIn, but X is a platform where you don't really get chewed out for speaking your mind as much, right? LinkedIn, you get chewed out for speaking your mind, you know, and X has also designed it where if someone likes your content and you're just saying what you want, others don't know that they liked it. Yeah.

And by the way, so I don't necessarily look at it as dumber. I just look at it as different experience levels and different incentives too, right? So the people To your point, people commenting, when I put that post up on like harsh truth, most people are, or all people are going to go back to the office. That one got, I think, 500,000 or 600,000 views on it. And everyone in there was like, no, this is rage bait, whatever. But when you look at all the people that responded, what did they do? They actually work at companies, right? So, of course, they're not going to say it's okay, right?

Yes.

And then they start fighting. And same thing, like when you talked about the people climbing the corporate ladder, they don't want to have to do more work, right? And I get it. That makes sense. Like maybe they're in a season where it's like, I don't want to have to learn this new stuff. I've already worked so hard and I get it. Now, on the other side, when you look at X, to your point, you have a lot of people who are entrepreneurs, right? And, or entrepreneurial. And so they are actually okay with having to deal with whatever change is going to happen because X is moving so quickly. I would, I tend to think that whoever's posting on X usually is someone that's trying to take responsibility for themselves. And they're willing to try the new things, right? Not saying that LinkedIn people aren't, but X people are, I would say, more— how would you put it— more sovereign individuals, if that makes sense.

So I posted something on both X and LinkedIn in the last, call it 7 to 10 days. I forget the timeline, but somewhere around there. And it was on what companies are expecting or how they're adjusting because of AI. And when we started talking to a lot of companies, we found that the biggest thing is they're expecting you to finish your work faster.

Mm-hmm.

Like, so they're reducing deadlines. So, if you had 2 months to do something, because of AI, they're hoping that you can get it done in a month. I'm just making up, you know, the time difference, but it could have been a month, month and a half, but they're just, they're creating shorter timelines, that's for certain. The other thing that we're seeing is they expect people to get more done with less. So less of a team, less money, they're still expecting you to get more done. And the list goes on and on. I posted it on X. I think it got like 40,000 views.

That's a good one.

And I read all the comments. And then I posted it on LinkedIn. I don't know how many views it got. I don't think as many. But if I look at my direct messages, because I can see the messages, I have so much hate of people being like, why would you post junk like this? This is useless information. And you look at it.

Useless.

They all work at corporations.

Yeah.

And they don't want anything out there that makes their life harder. And I bet you it's the same thing. Like if someone posted stats or data on X and LinkedIn about going into an office and hypothetically, let's say it makes you more efficient, it probably could. There's probably cases where it doesn't, but I don't have data on this, at least off the top of my head, but I can research it. And let's say I created a chart showing and citing my sources on how it makes you— I'm making up the number, You know, 31% more efficient even though you have work commute, you know, output increases, et cetera. If I post it on X, you know, people probably love it. If I post it on LinkedIn, some people would love it, and even on X, some people would hate it. But on LinkedIn, I know people would be furious with it. And the reason being, they're like, this chart is garbage. You know, I've become way more efficient because I don't have to hour commute each way to work, and I'm saving so much time and all this kind of stuff. Like, people just argue for what's in their Self-interest.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's fine. It's rightfully so. So you just have to understand what audience you're hanging out with. And ironically, so on Threads, and we can jump around here, but on Threads, Threads happens to be a little more, I would say, like a different crowd than X. Let's just put it that way. Okay.

They like motivation for sure. Anything that's upbeat and cheery, like, yay, people love that.

It's funny. I wrote something on X about Elon or on LinkedIn as well. It did okay. But when I wrote about Elon on, I put the same post on Threads, I got, It got ripped apart, right? So like, how could you, how could you actually believe, you know, that Elon is, is, you know, helpful to society or something like that, right? Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency, Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Karat. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI, go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Yesterday I went to this founders lunch and there are around 40 people there. And so here are some of the things that I overheard. One is, number one, one doctor said this. He said 60% of doctors will not be needed anymore in the next few years. Okay. A doctor said this, actual doctor. Okay. Number 2, the terminal value of SaaS companies will become zero. This is from a well-known, let's say, like a startup incubator guy. Number 3, I actually saw a friend in front of me, he vibe coded a game from scratch with zero technical skills. And first I thought it was going to be a piece of crap, but it was actually good. You've definitely not played this game before, but those of you that have played Hearthstone, the Warcraft game, or like Magic: The Gathering on your phone, it looks really good, right? And here's the crazy part. The person who was running the lunch, Nancy Liu, she asked the group, she's like, hey, what percent of the group here uses Cursor? Okay, bear in mind, most of these people are non-technical. 70% of the hands went up, right? So I was just saying the rate of change is insane right now. And then everyone in here on Threads is calling me an idiot, right? So all that to say is if people just want to hear what they want to hear, and you just have to understand the audience that you're talking Dude, did I tell you I started giving my kids games?

I know this is a random tangent. I started giving them games like trivia, puzzle games, like where you have to solve puzzles. 1's 4, 1's 6. Eric knows this. But, you know, some of them are pretty challenging. My kids are good with puzzles and, you know, critical thinking and thinking outside the box. Some of these games are like strategy, right? What pieces can you put in? And you don't know what's going to come next, but there's only X amount of shapes, so you have to have enough room. But either way, my son and daughter— I've been doing this for like a week and a half. I had to delete the games from my computer and my iPad and my iPhone. My son, 2 days ago, all right, was just like, I need more! And this is at bedtime and is getting mad at me.

Yeah.

He started hitting me, and I don't hit my kids, but I was like, how would you feel if Daddy did this to you? And he just got mad and he just started hitting me and kicking me. And we don't really give him TV. And I'm like, ah, this is why we don't give our children devices.

Yeah.

And, you know, I took this from an Elon Musk video I saw. He's like, we need to make education more like games. Kids love games and they're addicted to it. Why can't education be like that? And I played games as a kid and I know you did too. And we both turned out fine. Like, I don't think necessarily giving kids TV or games is going to screw them over in their future. I don't necessarily believe that. I do think there's some bad television And you don't want to give them too much. You want them to live a good life and read and all those other kinds of things. But I don't realize what games do to little kids when they get addicted to them.

Well, I actually became like that. So as a teenager, I think, but my reasoning was you were taking— my mom was taking me away from work and my dad was taking me away for work, right? Because I grinded really hard in those games and I would play like a long time and the team I would play with was like a really elite team, right? And so I felt like I had a job to do and they needed me for a certain time and I needed— I wanted to be there, right? I didn't understand that. I felt like it was a job to me, and I felt like I was being— I felt like I was needed, right? Um, no, it's definitely a different story for your son. I don't think it's the same situation here.

No, it's not. There's no team.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is the crazy part, my son never hits me or anything like that. He'll talk back to me for sure, but he's, he's very peaceful. The first time I experienced it, I deleted him right away, right? And I wasn't like pissed off at him. I was just like, wow, Games are really addicting. I've never really gotten into games. Even when I was younger, I didn't play them that much. I was addicted to television more than games.

You still are.

I still am. Like, I need television. I need my CNBC in the background. I don't know why, it just helps me get along with my day.

CNBC is a good thing to have.

Yeah.

Okay, so the— by the way, because we just talked about that, that, that lunch, The founders' lunch. I can give you some of the core takeaways from that lunch. So there were some people that sold their businesses for 10 figures actually. So 10-figure valuation, some had sold for 9 figures, some were actually doing 9 figures. Some people are like curing Alzheimer's, right? So it's a pretty good group. And I would just say that one of the things there is learned is one, what I just mentioned. So the doctors think that they're going to be replaced in the next couple years. And what's interesting is one of my clients was there and he was sitting right next to me. And then he was like, dude, all the stuff you talk about on your YouTube, why don't you just do it for your clients? He just kept bugging me the whole time. Why don't you just keep doing it for your clients? Right? And he's like, dude, I know my friend that does it for his clients, like all the AI stuff that I talk about. Right? But to your point, it kind of validates the point where people expect you to move faster, especially the people that know the AI stuff. And the crazy thing is when you have 70% of the group saying they're using Cursor and they're not even technical people, it is the stuff that I've been talking about. Right? Like, I do I think if you have the time to learn Cursor, MCPs, and Claude Code, you're going to move a lot faster. And I think the— let me ask you about this. Do you think, do you agree with the statement that terminal value of SaaS is going to zero?

No, I could be wrong. I also don't agree doctors won't be as needed in 3 years. I'm not saying And here's just my viewpoint on it. I like my information from a good doctor. I think junk doctors are going to be gone. I already don't use junk doctors. I pay premium for really good doctors.

Well, but that's— you said 60% are no longer going to— so those are the junk doctors, no?

Sure, yes. But I pay for— I pay an arm and a leg outside of insurance for amazing medical care. And not only will they come to your home and things like that and help you out, but like You know, like, I have a bump on my head, can't, you know, can't sleep well. Dude, I got appointments right away, like same day, you know, MRI scans, all this checking for cancer. Not weeks, but like straight up within 24 hours. And they're like, cool, you're good.

Yeah.

We can't figure out why your brain is, or why your head is inflamed and your brain is Was it bruised or something like that? I forgot what the terminology they used, but they're just like, it all worked its way out. But yes, I think the cream of the crop will stick around. I do think for SaaS companies, a lot of the traditional SaaS companies are going to get hurt. I don't see valuations go down to zero, at least anytime soon. You know, maybe 10 years from now it's a different story. But here's the kicker. We all talk about AI, dude. We work with so many companies that aren't even on the cloud yet that are like worth tens of billions of dollars, and they still pay for, you know, these SaaS solutions that have to be installed on servers of theirs that aren't on the cloud, and they pay an arm and a leg for them. And these companies have very low churn because they're working with old archaic corporations that are in random industries that You would think, oh, they're just going to get disrupted, but they control some of the supply chain or some of the natural resources, and it's like, it's hard to displace them.

Dude, speaking of which, when you mentioned hard to displace, I mean, AOL just discontinued— it's going to be discontinued on September 30th after more than 30 years, right? So actually, so the company itself was called Quantum Computer Services in 1985. I wasn't even born yet. You were just born. So for nearly 40 years, there's been AOL's dial-up service. And like you and I haven't been using dial-up probably since, I don't know, the early 2000s. I've always moved over to DSL, you know, cable modem and all that stuff. So it takes a long time for these things to die is our point.

Yes. And it goes back down to the cigar butt mentality, right? You know, will SaaS go down in valuation? I think we've already seen SaaS start going down in valuation. I think a lot of people start looking at SaaS these days. There's so many SaaS companies that aren't growing as much and that are valued at like 7, 10 times revenue. And people are like, what's the difference between this and a furniture company that's making profit and growing at the same pace? You know, if you don't have a SaaS company with net negative churn, and it's not growing at a rapid pace, your valuations already suck.

Yep. By the way, speaking of valuations and churn, you have one over here on how the agency industry is really doing.

Yeah. So what's interesting is, you know this, we've leveraged bank debt in the past. And you've leveraged bank debt in But we have a lot of relationships with a lot of the large and mid-market banks in the United States. And the reason we have the relationships is you shop around debt. So when you have debt or you're using debt to grow, some people will give you more money, some people will give you less money, some people will give you cheaper interest rates or more favorable terms or less restricted capital. Because with capital or debt comes restrictions of what you can or can't do. And a lot of the providers we've talked to, mainly focus on the marketing agency sector. So when you're talking to banks like JP Morgan or Bank of America or whoever it may be, or KeyBank or, you know, Zions or CIBC or whatever, they all have divisions and there's debt people within there that specialize in a certain category like ad agencies or media companies or manufacturing, you name it. So they see industry trends. And one thing that we've seen is because Google and Meta have seen increases in ad revenue. No joke, almost every bank we've talked to in the last 60-ish days, they've told us like, oh yeah, you guys are doing decent in this economy, not as great as we want, but they're just like, we've talked to a lot of companies and some that are even larger than yours and been around a lot longer. People are just getting beat, like they're just getting hurt really bad. And they're just like, you know, your numbers are better from what we're typically seeing. And it doesn't mean we're doing amazing. They're just giving analysis. You know, we're not doing as good as what we did when COVID first came around. And, you know, we're getting double-digit— I mean, double-digit, we're getting 100-plus percent growth a year at our peak or around 100%. And they were just breaking down, you know, ad agencies are still getting crushed right Right? It doesn't matter what Google's posting on their earnings or Facebook is. They're seeing real data from small and medium businesses. We classify medium businesses as less than a billion in revenue. I know some people don't, but medium typically is what we classify as $100+ million to a billion in revenue. And they're saying that, you know, whether it's SMB, doesn't matter what size, they're typically getting crushed in the marketing landscape and they have been for around 3 years. And it doesn't matter if Snap or Google or Facebook or whoever are posting amazing earnings. That's just not what they're seeing in the private sector.

You know what's interesting? My only contribution to this is we've been doing some reference checks for some executive hires. And what we do for the executive ones is we do this thing called extreme reference checking. So I don't ask for just one reference. We ask for 6 references. So we say, Neil, wow, I want 2 managers, I want 2 peers, and I want 2 direct reports. I also want Who can we absolutely not talk to so we don't put your job in jeopardy, right? And so I actually, because this is like a really important executive that we close to me, I actually made the reference calls myself. So I was talking to some of these people and a lot of them don't have jobs right now. I'm like, oh yeah, you worked in so-and-so at this company owned by, let's say like one of the large holding companies. And I'm like, oh, you're fun employed right now. He's like, yeah, I'm just, I'm not learning the new stuff right now. I guess I probably should. I was like, yeah, you probably should.

But the thing is— Wait, wait, to clarify, and sorry to cut you off, is this the reference check? Like the people that you're talking to for the reference check have no job? Or are you talking about the person you're interviewing doesn't have a job?

No, no, no, not the person I'm interviewing. The people, I think there's 2 or 3 of the 6 don't have jobs right now. And they used to work at large holding companies with VP titles and they used to get paid really well. What I was saying was, yeah, a lot of these people don't have jobs and they're looking for other jobs right now. And it seems like a tough job market. Like, it seems like the other agencies they worked at, even after they work with the candidate, like a lot of them didn't work out. So it's a tough market right now, I think, for agencies. And I think, you know, you and I are, you know, somehow doing okay and knock on wood.

Yeah. And we've also pivoted a lot on our business model, our service offerings, right? I think if you had to pick, what's the biggest bet you made in the last 3 years during this downturn?

My biggest bet is just getting more involved with my business.

Okay. What's your second biggest bet? Carrot?

Carrot's there. Carrot and the tech-enabled— Carrot is really pushing this tech-enabled services vision forward. So yours is more around the LLM stuff. Ours is more tech-enabled services around B2B. So it's focusing on being that B2B growth partner that people can't outgrow.

And I would say in the last 3 years, our— the biggest bet that we've done is internationalization or globalization. So like just being in 28+ countries, which has cost us an arm and a leg, but That screwed up our financials and profit because it's just so expensive to expand. But yeah, so I would say that would probably be the biggest bet we made.

Yeah. So I guess for us, we'll see. By the way, when we make these bets, they typically take 3 years to pan out. And that's what Jeff Bezos used to say, like, whatever you see now, we were working on 3 years ago, whatever we're working now, you're not going to see for 3 And so hopefully these bets pay out and you'll hear from us in 3 years. So by the way, do you remember the cold email experiment that I'm running? So I can report back on some of the results that we're getting so far. So on every 250 cold emails that we send, this is outbound emails, we get a response. So it's actually pretty good. We're looking at ramping that up now. And the subject line that works well for us is, it's very simple. It's just company name and then brackets, not brackets, but the little arrows pointing outwards and then single grain intro. That one has the highest open rate. And basically the offer is a gift card. It's a $100 gift card to get on a call with us.

How's it working?

And it actually is booking It's actually booking calls. So yeah, I know you're looking at it, but 250 emails, every 250 emails leads to a response.

What's your cost to close? Do you have that, like the data? So you're spending how many hundred dollars?

Too early right now. Too early right now. We're just getting on the calls now. So I'll let you know in a month or so, but at least there's, you guys are getting the progress as we go.

How much have you spent in total on it?

Not much. $5,000 for the month. And so initially the test is we test like 11 different sequences and then we narrow it down to 4. And then from there we'll narrow it down to probably 1 and just go all in on it. So it's like 1,500 emails sent per sequence, and then we narrow it down to 4 and then we pick 1 and then we send 100,000 emails. So I'll let you know how it goes.

So in essence, you got 50 phone calls for $5,000, something like that. And then I'm guessing you'll have some closes within 30 to 60 days is your guess. And then you'll have data if it's profitable or not based on the LTV.

What's the interesting thing too is, and happy to share the info with you after too, but a lot of people you'll find when you cold email them, because I don't know if you guys are, I think you guys are doing cold, right?

Depends which country, but yes, US, we don't do as much Yeah.

I mean, this is always a good reminder. I think you and I have both known this, but it's always good to see like you catch people at the right time. Oftentimes you see them and say, oh, the timing is so good right now. The timing is good right now. The timing is good. And so you just need to surface at the right time. Yeah. Okay. So you have one here on how marketing is about to get a lot more expensive. Perfect way to end this. Yeah.

I think marketing's going to get more expensive because companies are getting From what we've seen over the past 30 to 45 days, they're getting used to this environment, whatever you want to call it, whether it's rates or whether it's tariffs or from a global perspective, uncertainty. And it's just like you got to do something. You can't be in this position forever because you guys still got to figure out ways to grow even though you— whether you like it or not.

Yeah, dude, this is a good way to end. I'll end it with another subject that dovetails with this. So the stock market is ripping right now. Okay. Right. We would say it's doing pretty good. Mainly because the jobs are slipping.

Mainly because of AI.

Yeah. The jobs are slipping. Right. And so let me show you this meme over here. Those of you that can't see this, we will explain the meme that you see on the screen. So it was Jason Calacanis that tweeted this, but check this out. So you know how like when you work at a company, in an office, there's always employees of the month. So you can see, you know, this is Ethel, Matt. You can see these are human beings.

Right?

And then August, it's all robots. Autotron, Autotron, Autotron, Autotron. And so to your point, I was actually asking Grok earlier. So there's this little Grok button you can hit. So Jason Calacanis said, fairly obvious what's going on here. I'm like, is it really AI? And then I was asking to justify. I was like, what do you think it is? Is it, you know, is M2 money supply part of the equation? Which is like a small part of the equation, but the big piece is actually AI because when you look TechCrunch here, TechCrunch, look, they're citing how many tech layoffs are happening. January 2025, 2,400 employees laid off. February, 16,000. March, 8,800. April, 24,000. May, 10,000. 1,600. 16,000. When you think about COVID when there's that layoffs.fyi thing, that was people being cut all over the place because of COVID But this is becoming really consistent now.

But do you think this is because of AI or job or poor company performance or a mixture of both?

I think it's both.

Yeah, we've seen AI disrupt a little bit. It depends which sector, but what the main reason we've seen companies cut is because of poor company performance.

Yeah, I think it's— we're not in a great economy right now. I think it's company performance. And then I think companies are more willing to cut because they know they're going to gain AI efficiencies too. And I think we're going to start to really see it pick up because again, like just using that dinner as— or that lunch as a forward signal. Again, if all of them are thinking like that and 70% are using Cursor, trust me, it's top of mind for, I think, almost every single entrepreneur. And I'll leave you guys with this. Naval Ravikant said this. He said that there are no entrepreneurs that are afraid of AI taking their job, right? And part of the reason there is because, well, entrepreneurs are really scared, right? They're very paranoid and they're going to be— if they hear something's going to take their job, they're going to be the first ones to understand it. So our recommendation to you, or at least my recommendation, is try to learn as much as you can, try to explore as much as you can. And that is it for today, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.