If I Wanted Enterprise Leads From Podcasts I’d Sponsor These

So we talked about enterprise leads for a second and I had this topic here. If we wanted to generate enterprise leads from podcasts, which sponsor, which podcast would you sponsor? I have some answers and I know you don't listen to podcasts, so this would be— From marketing?

Yeah, yeah. None.

So let me tell you which, if I wanted to sponsor a podcast, which ones I'd sponsor and why, and then we can debate this. So, you know, have you ever listened to The Founders Podcast? I send you some episodes sometimes, right? Okay, so Founders Podcast, like you have like Michael Dell listening to it, the Dyson guy, Sam Zell, billionaire, right? Like you have a lot of the— I think people from the Trump family listen to it as well. And so, you know, he has an episode that just came out this week, How Rockefeller Works, recently, How Elon Musk Works, right? And like he has all these like just super in-depth reviews on these biographies and things like that. So all he does is read biographies. And I think that's a very valuable audience. Too bad Invest Like the Best, like they took that over, right? They basically bought him out, I think. You have Acquired, which for, I think for if you want a mid-roll for a quarter, it's like $2 million, right? So they don't necessarily have the most downloads. I think it's like, you know, a million a month or something. It's like $100,000 for an episode. But they have a, that's a very, you have very, it's a very wealthy audience that listens in, right? And then you have Invest Like the Best, which you have some of the best, the smartest, you know, private equity VC people listening to that one.

Yeah.

And so my whole take on this is not necessarily like you're gonna have all the enterprise, like, leaders listening, but you're going to have a lot of the decision makers and the strongest people at organizations listening. And I want the mindshare from these people.

So you're going to advertise on them?

I'm thinking about it.

You should.

I'm thinking about it. And then I'll let you know how it goes.

Yeah. You should. It's already going to fail. I already know it's going to fail. For enterprise, what do you consider enterprise?

Actually, that's a better question before I tell you if you have to go on. Yeah, well, we have different definitions of enterprise. Yeah. So there's, in my mind, there's lower market enterprise, right? So some of our logos that we have for Carrot, for example, are not exactly like The Microsofts of the world or whatever, but they're still publicly traded. They do well, right? And so that's what I would consider enterprise. Like maybe they're doing, maybe they have, you know, a couple thousand employees, they're doing a couple hundred million a year in revenue. That's what we consider enterprise. For you, it's different.

Yeah, we define enterprise of a company that's doing at least a billion in revenue a year minimum, ideally at least a few billion in revenue. And there's a lot of them. People just don't realize because there's a lot of non-publicly traded companies that sell things like flooring and roofing material that you would've never imagined that make billions in revenue. Like seriously, like windows and doors. Like we work with companies that sell parts for gas stations and it's a multi-billion dollar organization just in revenue.

So enterprise for you is revenue and employees. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's that because you have a lot of like, you'll work with like furniture companies or manufacturing and all that, right?

Mainly revenue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

More over employees because some are more efficient. And when I say revenue, I'm not talking about like pass-through revenue. Oh, we manage the ads for the—

Not GMV.

Yeah, like not like eBay being like, well, you know, people listed $1 billion worth of products and we make 10%. So we made $1 billion in revenue because it was $1 billion plus the 10%. So $1.1 billion. We would consider that model as you made $100 million in revenue, not $1 billion. I'm giving the hypothetical. I know eBay makes way more than $1 billion a year. In revenue.

Yep.

But for us, what we found is if I go and I sponsor that podcast episode, some of the ones that you're talking about, the companies of the size that I'm discussing are almost always procurement-driven processes where procurement and internal teams are picking and you're going through a process. We do not see any of those coming from— we haven't tried the podcast advertising, but the audiences that you're describing, They're not the people who are sending out those RFPs for what we consider enterprise.

You know what's funny? Speaking of RFPs, so I think I told you, so Procter Gamble came to us recently and then Hugo Boss came to us recently too. And then you look at the titles of these people, it's like strategic sourcing managers. And I'm like, so we got ahold of these people, it's like, how did you first hear about us? They're Googling and they're searching AI. And then one of them was like, oh yeah, yeah, we looked at, yeah, you appeared on AI Everywhere and you appeared on, you're just a very, you know, You know, well-known health and wellness agency. That's definitely not us, right? But like the fact that it's showing up on a lot of different surfaces, like it's interesting that these sourcing managers are going around, right? But this is an example of how you are able to get some of these. It's not the way, but it is a way.

It is a way. You want to know another amazing way to get some of these?

You're talking about the events?

No, not the events. So when you do award submissions for work—

That actually gets you?

No, the award submissions do not get us. Who's judging the awards though?

The people.

The people who potentially can include you in our team.

So that's why you do the awards.

Has nothing to do with winning the awards.

That's so funny.

Has everything to do with who's judging the awards.

That's so funny. But years and years ago when we did a podcast, you're like, God, the awards are so stupid. Why are we doing the awards? Now you're like, it actually does something.

Yeah, because a lot of those people end up moving around to different companies and they reviewed your work and they liked something and they hit you up.

Yeah.

It's not a high percentage, but you have to keep in mind we don't get a lot of RFPs, but the RFPs we do get, a lot of them are worth a ton of money dollar-wise, and a lot we lose. Like if anyone's like, we win 50% of our RFPs, I'm like, bull. No one's winning 50%.

It's like 15%?

If you're 15%, I don't know if that's good. We're closer to the 30% mark for win rate.

That's good, yeah.

But it's expensive to pitch for these, And what we found is we get a lot of them because we did good work for a company. People move around to another corporation and then they include us in future work. I would say that's the number one way we get RFPs. But the shitty part about that is you need scale for that to work and it's expensive to try to manufacture the scale.

Yeah, I think you mentioned this on this podcast before. You're spending like half a million to a million sometimes, right?

To manufacture.

Not to manufacture, but to go RFP.

Uh, to pitch?

Yeah.

Nah, it never cost us a half a million for one pitch.

Didn't you say a couple hundred thousand?

You can spend over $100,000 on a pitch, but not a half a million dollars on a pitch. Maybe some people are, but we're not pitching big enough RFPs to spend a half a million bucks on one pitch.

Yeah, I don't know where the half million came from, but dude, speaking of, uh, speaking of—

If you aggregate it all per year, we probably spend more than a million dollars pitching RFPs.

Yeah, but it's worth it.

It's worth it. I don't know how many RFPs we get because we're in so many regions at this point, but it's well over 100.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know if it's 200, 300 because I haven't added up each and every single country, but still with it, it is worth it. And what I found with, if you're trying to generate enterprise leads, the thing that people forget in marketing, time helps more than anything else. And being in business 10 years, is one of the biggest metrics. We haven't been in business for 10 years, you have, but that's the— I have 2 more years to get there. That's what I'm really looking forward to.

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 that just care. 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. And did you see which software is selling today for $1.9 billion?

Yeah, SEMrush sold to Adobe.

Yeah, well, in agreement, right? So we'll see what happens. But I saw the number is $1.9 billion. The number is $1.9 billion. Yeah, I'm not saying I don't disagree, but That's what the— that's what Adobe tweeted, right? Which I think is interesting because if I'm Semrush, like, this is a good time to sell.

I think it's a bad deal for them. I'm really— Really?

I'm really— Let's talk about it.

I'm happy for the SEMrush founders. So I've been— I look at stocks quite a bit, at least in our space. And—

No, no, you look at stocks everywhere, every day.

Yeah, I do. One quick note for everyone. If you're looking at stocks and you're using AI, it is off so much. Like, so for example, you know, SOLT, the Solana ETF that's leveraged, so it's 2x.

Uh-huh.

So when it goes up, in theory it goes 2x. When it goes down, it goes in theory down 2x, but there's a decay factor and it resets every night. So when it goes down, you can go down more. So I did an interesting exercise where I had ChatGPT and Grok analyze the last 30 days of SOLT, the price per day. and the percentages up or down and put it in a table comparison with the price of Solana each day and the percentage of it going up or down. And dude, both of them were so off because at the end I asked him, what's the current price of Solana? Grok told me $240. We know Solana right now is trading $130-something, $136, $138, $130, whatever it is.

Oh, you're really looking at it.

Right? I've been watching Solana really heavily over the last, I don't know how long.

What's the word? It's going to rip.

Okay, so then—

This is not financial advice, guys.

No, it's not financial advice, but it's telling me the percentage gain up and down. If it's using the wrong price, the data's irrelevant. It's like a useless exercise. And then I had ChatGPT and it said the current price of Solana is $190-something in its analysis, which is not $190. I'm paying for this stuff like $200 a month.

This is why I want to set a new rule at my company. When you were walking in, this is what I was kind of dictating on my phone. I was like, guys, like you can't just rely on whatever AI site and then share it with your CEO or whatever. You need to actually verify and then rewrite it and edit it in your own terms. Because if you don't do that, like you're wasting my time. And like I can see the way people are doing job descriptions. Like, oh yeah, I ChatGPT'd this job description over here. Like, no dude, you haven't even thought about what outcome you want from this role and what the mission is of the role. And you're just going to throw a ChatGPT thing over to like our HR team. Like, fuck that, dude. What is wrong with you?

Yeah, so when I was looking at it, and then I had them redo it, I'm like, your pricing is wrong.

And they're like, oh, you're right.

The price we used was wrong for both.

But it's always like, you're right. Absolutely. Oh, great catch. Yeah, yeah.

And it pisses me off. And Grok redid it and it was off again the second time. ChatGPT did it. Some of the data points were off because I started just double-checking. And I'm like, man, how can you guys just mess up on this and be a $500 billion company, right? So I'm just getting really irritated. I'm not saying they're not worth a lot of money, but I'm just getting really irritated because I'm now doing everything manual when I'm paying $200 a month for this, right?

Dude, let— finish your thought.

Okay, so going back to SEMrush, so I've been watching their stock for a long time. Did you know earlier this year around February it was a $3 billion market cap company?

I wasn't looking at it.

Okay, do you know what made it tank?

All the AI stuff?

They announced a new CEO.

I didn't know that.

They announce a new CEO, boom, the stock tanks. Literally the stock tanked. It tanked hard. Okay. The public markets hate companies like theirs. Marketing companies tend not to do well. SimilarWeb also doesn't do well. HubSpot, I don't consider a marketing company.

Marketo didn't do that well back then, right?

Marketo got gobbled up by Adobe. HubSpot makes a pitch that we're a CRM company and we're going after Salesforce. Very different play and market than We are a marketing software company. Which marketing software company does well in the public markets? Most have never done well. I can't recall one. SEMrush is going 20% a year. They don't have a ton of debt. They're slightly profitable. They could run that business at way higher margins if they wanted to. And they do call it around $105, $120, between $105, $120 million a quarter. Let's call it $105 or something like that. They do over $400 million a year, less than $400 $450. Selling for $1.9 when they have net negative churn and the customers stay.

Good deal.

It's a good deal for Adobe. That company should be a $3+ billion company when the market turns around. They're just getting clobbered by the public markets because they don't like their story when it is an amazing company, great execution. I think they should have just cut costs, potentially taken it private. I don't know how many shares the founders own, And I would've just kept running it because they've done well adapting and people could say, oh, it's a dead company. A dead company that's growing 20% a year. How dead is it really at their scale?

It's interesting. You look at Ahrefs, so they say that, I think it's like 140 or something like that. And then you look at BrightEdge, 9-figure company as well. And then Semrush, it's like they've all kind of done it in their own different ways. And so there's no right or wrong way.

Out of which, out of those companies, which would be your favorite? I'll tell you mine.

I think I like BrightEdge.

I would go with Ahrefs.

Why do you like Ahrefs?

Bootstrap, no outside investors, I believe owned by one person. I've never met the founder. I know Tim decently well, probably not as well as you, but I love Tim.

Tim's great. Yeah.

Tim's great. I don't know what Tim runs. I know he's in marketing, but my guess is he runs more than marketing, but I love Tim.

I think we need to define it. So are you saying Would you rather own the company or what would you say? Like what, how—

How it's run. So forget the software.

How it's run.

The ownership structure and how it's run because—

Well, those are different.

No, I think it's, to me it goes hand in hand because the ownership structure of Ahrefs is owned by one person in theory. I don't, I can't verify that data, but that's my assumption.

Yeah.

I know they've never taken outside investors based on what I've read online and what Tim's told me. I think you're right.

Yeah.

So they can run the company as a lifestyle business. They can run it as a growth business. They can do whatever they want. They can do projects like a search engine that they did. I forgot what it was called. Was it Hey or something like that?

No, that's Basecamp.

Basecamp was it?

Basecamp had an email thing called Hey.

What was Ahrefs' email?

The fact that we don't remember.

Yeah. Okay. But I'm not trying to hate on them.

No, no, no, not at all.

Some things are going to not work out and some things will. You and I have both done stuff that doesn't work out.

Many times.

But because it's lifestyle, because it's run by one person with no investors and I bet you no debt, he can do whatever he wants. And I think that's a great way to run a business with optionality. And I love that over someone dictating how you should run your own company.

Yeah. So, okay, here, I'm going to give my answer. Maybe it's a little complicated. So I see where you're coming from. I think from a pure freedom aspect, Ahrefs wins hands down at the end of the day, right? Now where I think there's a little bit of a struggle, like he, and he can fix this by the way, I think there's a little lack of focus problem, right? There's the search engine stuff and I've, had some other conversations. It's like, it's very easy to get distracted when you have so much optionality right now. I like the discipline around BrightEdge. So you and I have met Jim, right? Jim's a very disciplined founder. He was out a little bit. He came back into the business. He does have investors. The investors force discipline. He sells only to the enterprise. And I think he has less, in my mind, there's, you have a different set of headaches to deal with, right?

Yeah.

When you're not selling all the SMBs, like you have less customers to deal with, right? You can argue that they're easier to deal with, whatever, but I think I just like that element of around how it's ran, because we're talking about that piece right now. If it were for me personally, I prefer Ahrefs, but if we're talking about how it's run, I like BrightEdge.

The ideal structure, the reason I picked Ahrefs is because there's no investors, and I think his name is Dimitri. Is that the founder's name?

I'll look it up. You keep going.

Let's go with Tim. Let's call Tim the founder. I know he's not the founder, but we love Tim. So let's say Tim's running the show there. I'm giving a high—

Dimitro.

Dimitro. Sorry, Dimitro, for messing up your name.

Yeah.

So let's say Dimitro's running that business, right? As a CEO. What I love about the business is he's in control of his own destiny. He can do whatever he wants. If I had to pick, it would be his ownership structure and freedom and speed of execution combined with BrightEdge's customer base of pure enterprise. That would be the sweetheart combo.

Yes.

Because I hate, The SMB type of business.

Yeah.

Higher churn. They have much more unrealistic expectations. Yeah. And your multiple on trading a business is actually much worse when it's SMB versus enterprise.

Yep. 100%. Anyway guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.