Innovative Marketing Tactics and the Role of Luck in Success

So guys, as you can see, I have a bunch of Erewhon jars in front of me. Now here's the genius of Erewhon. What Erewhon is doing here is they could go with plastic jars with their soup. This is turkey chili. And then I buy candied walnuts too and things like that, right? And but, but it's smart because they know in California, at least, if they give you a glass jar, they can incentivize you to say, hey, if you return it to us, we'll give you $3. But returning it means I need to go back into the store. So today, Neil and I, we're going to Go to Air One and Noah as well. We're gonna go to Air One at lunch. I brought ten of these jars with me. Guess what? I'm probably gonna buy a lot more stuff than just lunch, and probably not gonna just return this, right?

So that's turkey chili. Yeah. And does it taste good?

It tastes amazing. Thirty ounces of turkey chili.

Is it healthy?

Yeah. Yeah.

We tend to just get the chicken vegetable soup or chicken noodle soup.

Turkey chili, dude. It's it's not like a bad thing. Yeah. It's like each jar. Chat GPT is like six hundred calories or so, right?

But no one's gonna eat a whole jar. It's too much.

I do.

I did one sitting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hell yeah, dude. A lot of protein. But the candied walnuts are really good. Your kids will like that too.

But my point is, wait, it has candied walnuts inside?

No, no, no. That's another one. So I have another one that says candied walnuts. See, candied walnuts.

Oh, that's not a jar of soup.

No. So one, some are jars of soup, some are different jars. Yeah.

We have those jars only from the soup. I didn't know that they sell the jars with—

The point is, Erewhon's marketing strategy here is smart because they just— it's a retention mechanism. It gets you to come back right there. They, they know that their average order value is a lot hired other people. So what's a way to get people to come back? It's just like how if you work in telecoms, it's the government mandates that you can't just churn and cancel on a dashboard online, right? You actually have to call. So sometimes you take use of— you take advantage of what the mandates are from the government, and that's how you end up making more money. Because again, they could just go with convenience and go with plastic containers, but they chose to go with the glass. And glass is actually very inconvenient. Like I had so many— I have 10 of these actually. I brought 10. So $30. Yeah, $30. I'm gonna get $30 back, so I'm very happy about that. But guess what? I'm probably gonna spend more.

How are you gonna spend more? Lunch is like maybe like $10?

No, lunch is— dude, lunch is never $10, man. Each of my Erewhon orders, okay, each one's like $80, $90 each.

No.

Yeah, but I order a bunch of things. I order it for— I order it for 2 meals and also like snacks. So I order popcorn, I order the, the overnight oats, I order like And then I order breakfast and dinner.

It's like me ordering for my family.

Yeah.

So similar costs.

But I break it out into 3. Yours is in one city.

In one city.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I thought that was interesting cuz we're going to Erewhon today. So I was like, I need to finally bring these cuz my, um, my cleaner started packing more of, more of these and things. So they, they've, they like contain like a whole, like, I don't know, uh, what do you call it? The, the pantry. Yeah. It was covered with these.

So yeah. You have another topic in here and I'm curious on the results on this and I didn't click through to read the results. We say top OnlyFans creators average monthly revenue. What were the average monthly revenues for the top creators?

Wait, so where does it say that?

5830 line.

5830. Okay, great, great.

And I'm going to take a guess. My guess is, is it, is that article for the, like they list out each creator or is it just average?

Hold on, I'm opening it up.

So I want to take a guess on what they make.

So we're looking at, you're looking at the 0 to 0.1%. This is monthly revenue that they're capturing.

I'm gonna go with, you said 0.2%?

0 to 0.1% and then 0.1 to 1%.

I'm gonna go with 0 to 0.1% is making like 50 grand a month.

Okay. And then try for 0.1 to 1%.

10 grand a month? Okay.

So the top OnlyFans creators, what they make, 0.1%, 0 to 0.1% make $146,000 a month.

Okay.

That's great.

That's—

think of it as recurring. That's usually recurring revenue. Yeah, that's a lot of cash. And then 0.1% to 1% makes $34,000 a month. And then 1% to 5% makes a measly $200 a month. So it's the— we're talking about the fat— there's a long tail.

Yeah, but the long tail barely makes anything.

There's a lot of—

yeah. It's the 1% that makes everything for— it's not the 80/20 rule. It's the 1% to 99% rule.

Yeah, it's the Pareto principle, right? So Pareto principle dictates 20% of the effort will get 80% results. In this case, This 1% of effort gets 99% of the results, right? And this is crazy to me because the thing is, dude, $34,000 already per month is a lot of money.

That's a lot of money.

Yeah. $146,000 is like, you're good. Like that's $1.8 million a year basically.

This makes sense on the German marketer that we met, that kid who has an OnlyFans marketing agency when we're doing dinner in, was it Berlin or Frankfurt? No, we were in Frankfurt, I think, right? And he was telling us the biggest issue wasn't doing the marketing and making money. It was that because they make so much money and And we weren't getting into the numbers really, but he was saying because it makes so much money in a few months, the people he's dealing with, at least I'm not trying to generalize here, but the people he was dealing with and he had quite a bit of accounts he was working with, they tend to start getting lazy and they stop producing content. Then when they need more money, they do it again. And because it's so easy for them to make money that they don't do it consistently, they're just more so do it when they need the cash.

They start to become entitled. And remember, it's entitlement is what leads you to a path of what? He needed intervention at the end.

Remember that?

Remember what I told you? I spoke to that interventionist. Yeah, entitlement leads to that eventually. So guys, don't become too entitled.

But when you talk about entitlement, it reminds me of the— is it Jim Simmons who ran— what's that big hedge fund? He passed away. Was it Citadel?

Renaissance?

Renaissance.

Yeah.

Was it Jim Simmons?

Jim Simons.

Jim Simons or something like that. I'm getting his name wrong, but I watched a video with him a long time, and I'm paraphrasing, he was talking about why he doesn't like hiring people from like Harvard and Stanford and all those places. Yeah, he's like, they're too— in his opinion. Yeah, he felt that they were too entitled and because they were too entitled, they don't grind it out and work as hard as the people who did not.

You know what's interesting? So there's always edge cases, right? But we have someone on our team who's from Harvard and she works extremely hard. She cares a lot. She— so it's like you always get edge cases. But then on the other side, I remember when I was working a dead-end job when I came out of college because this is after 2008, I was doing data entry and now that job would be totally screwed. I was only doing data entry. I was getting paid $32,000 a year. Right. And there's a guy— I was 22 years old. There's a guy who was 30 years old, graduated from Harvard, and he was doing the same exact thing I was doing. Right. But to your point, though, Jensen Huang also says that people— he did a speech at Stanford and he's like, you know, the problem is you go to an amazing school like this. And the problem is people that go to great schools like this, you have very high expectations. But people with very high expectations, you have very low resilience. And when you have very low resilience and you have very high expectations, you have a lot of entitlement.

I was talking to Noah about this before you came because I was— yeah, I was walking in and I saw Noah setting up and we were talking about money and making money in business. And I was telling him how, you know, there's someone that I know, Ivy League school, or technically Stanford's not considered Ivy League. I'm pretty sure they're not, right?

No, West Coast.

Yeah, too new of a school compared to Harvard. But they went to Stanford, they put in all this work, and they were complaining how they don't make as much money as someone else that we both know. Not you, but me and the other person. And they're just like, this isn't fair. I graduated from Stanford.

And I don't make—

I got it. And I was telling them like, you put in the work to get into Stanford and you feel that, and this is not all Stanford students, this is just them. And I'm like, you feel now that you put in all that work and got your degree that everything should be easy. I'm like, that's not reality. I'm like, the other person that we're compare— you're comparing yourself to didn't put in as much work into high school. They did not get into Stanford or any decent school. They actually didn't even go to college.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm like, they grinded it out. They hustled, they did whatever it took to succeed, and they're making millions and millions a year in profit. But I'm like, look at how much they work and look at where you go on vacation and look at where they go on vacation. And the response to me was, I haven't seen where they go on vacation. And I'm like, exactly. I'm like, you just got back from Hawaii. And before that you went to Oslo. And I'm like, they don't go on vacation and they're grinding it out. And I'm like, this is why they're doing better than you.

Yeah. How did this person react overall?

They were pissed that they still felt it wasn't fair. Yeah.

Well, life's not fair.

Yes.

Suck it up.

I know people who worked way less than me, didn't put as much energy in there, way more wealthier than I am. And they got lucky with their business. I don't hate on them. I wish I get luck like that too. And I'm like, good for you. And I hope I get luck like that as well.

You know, there's something worth talking about too. So do you believe that luck plays a minimal factor or a major factor in business?

Major factor. I think it's one of the biggest factors that people don't really think about. I was with a meeting with Guy Kawasaki years and years ago.

This is when he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek. Yeah.

And his personal brand helped him become evangelist for Canva, made a boatload of money from his Canva shares. Right.

Has he cashed out from that? I mean, he's probably still—

he's already rich, but he'll, he'll, he'll be great from just his Canva shares as an advisor.

Yeah.

And it was early on. So when I was talking to Guy and this was in his office back in the day where he had Garage Ventures, I don't know if he still does. And he was talking to me about entrepreneurship and he's like, you know, every time investors talk about investing in big TAMs, hard work, resilient entrepreneurs, he's like, these are all great things that you need. But he's like, if I had to pick one thing, if I could pick this one thing, he's like, I would pick luck every time. Because he's like, a lot of the companies that have done really well, it's luck. And I'll give you a great example of this recently. You saw Figma stock pop. No one knew it was going to pop that much.

Yeah.

When you look at it just from a fundamental Growth perspective, revenue, EBITDA perspective, I'm assuming you would agree they would struggle to sell for $30, $40 billion.

Majorly underpriced their IPO. So I agree. No, no, no.

But you agree right now the current valuation, if they went to the market beforehand to sell, they would struggle to sell for what they become valued at, $60 billion, $70 billion?

I don't know how much. I don't remember how much it popped by. A lot. That's all I remember.

Uh, Figma or no, that's not it. Figma stock. Figma Inc. $79. Market cap is $38 billion. Oh yeah, it's actually gone down a lot.

No, I think I saw— I searched Figma stock. I don't think that's the right one.

No, this is the right one.

Are you sure?

Figma Inc. It's gone down a lot because I was, I was saying it was overpriced. Yeah. And because it came out like at $110 or something like that, then it went over $120 is what it looks like. The 52-week high is $142.92 according to Yahoo Finance. That's not double from where it's now, but you're looking at like a $60 billion company. Now Figma is worth $38 billion.

Wow. $122. You're right.

Yeah.

Yeah. No, no.

If you look at the 52-week high, it's $142. It's even higher.

Wow.

Again, don't know how accurate this is. Yeah, but all I'm getting at is some of it is luck. Like people who quickly sold at that price. I don't know if existing shareholders were locked in or what the deal was. I look at that as a lot of luck. It was overpriced. Figma was not worth $120. I don't think based on their revenue— this is not financial advice— they're worth $79 that it's trading at today.

You know, you look at Canva too. I'm looking at Canva. So 2021 valuation was $40 billion and in 2022, obviously, you know, things drops. So it went to $26 billion. And then 2024 secondary shares sold at a valuation of $26 billion. But recent secondary sales, share sales, June 2025, $56 billion valuation, right? And the thing is, I've spoken to Melanie before on my podcast a long time ago. And the story with her with Canva, multibillion-dollar company, but she— it took her a very long time to find the right idea. It also took her a very long time. A lot of investors said no.

Almost all of them did. Yeah.

And but she kept going, right? So there, there's an element. I think it was a Chinese saying that luck is where opportunity meets preparation. But still, you still have to work hard. But when you work hard, that means you're better prepared for when the opportunity hits, right?

Yes.

Some people get more opportunities than others. Like, that's something you can't control, but you can control how hard you work. And some people like to think, oh, it's because I'm so good. No, like luck plays into it. And there's one thing from that Company and Giants book, all these Hewlett-Packard or you have Steve Case, you have AOL, right? They're just like, No, like luck played a major factor. I'm so lucky to be like, even when they achieved all the success, the billions and billions, the hundreds of millions that they got, they're just like, luck is a major factor. And we both agree with it. I think if you're listening to this and you think that it comes down to you at the end, like a big part is you, but it's oftentimes things that are out of your control too.

I was speaking at an event yesterday and someone asked me what was the key to success for NP Digital? And I straight up said luck, not because we're talking about it, but I just coincidentally said luck. And they're like, what do you mean? And I'm like, I worked hard and built up my personal brand for, call it, you know, 15+ years, more than that, 17-ish+ years before I launched NP Digital. I didn't realize a personal brand was going to help me.

You didn't know? Yeah.

I was like, it was luck that I did it early on and I just kept doing it. And then I was like, and then, and you know, some of the story, got Nick Roshan, got lucky there.

He's great.

He's great.

Critical hire. I think Mike is critical too. Mike Kamo.

Yes. My co-founder is really good. But then Nick got us JJ, which, you know, JJ's no longer with us, but JJ got us Mike G, our CEO, Mike Gullickson.

Yeah.

Which a lot of it was luck. If I never had Nick, I would've never got JJ. If I never had JJ, I would've never had Mike Gullickson. And then Mike brought a lot of amazing people and then we brought, we also recruited tons of amazing people globally outside of those 2 as well. But a lot of it was just, Timing and luck.

Yeah, I'll give you an example too, and then we can move on from this. But recently I had a former employee reach out, so he's moved on to do his own thing. He reached out, he's like, hey, how did you find like the CTO that you have? Right? I was like, it was luck. Like, I can't replicate this because it's like, yes, I invested in his last startup. Yes. Like to meet him, I met Steve from Pray.com. Okay. And to meet the CTO, it was I got invited to a dinner from a guy that I met from Miami. And then Steve couldn't make it. Steve was sick. And then so he subbed this guy in. And so the moment this guy subbed I was like, oh, I invested in his company. I'm like, I'm not even going to talk to these other people at this dinner. It was like a very LA dinner, right? You had some influencers there. I didn't give a crap about the other people. I just started talking to him. And then before you knew it, like we just kept testing for 6, 8 months or so. And then we realized we work really well together. And that's how that happened. I was like, you can't replicate that. That was being very lucky. But it's like I had to be at the right place at the right time in so many different situations. Yeah, same for you.

But you have to take the opportunity and seize it and actually go to those meetings and do the things that don't work out. And one of them potentially may hit.

Yeah. Yeah. You just never know. So luck is a major factor. I think Neil and I are extremely fortunate in our lives. So.

Yeah, I have something interesting to share. I have a topic on here.

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 a 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.

We're starting to see some signs of agency businesses pick up, and I'll read this from a text I got from someone on my team. So this is just some stats and data. This is for our SMB division where the sales cycles are, uh, smaller. So weeks 7, 0, 8, and 7/15. So this is weeks of July 8th and July 15th. Close rates inside 2 weeks, rates rose by 40% versus 23% in late June.

Hmm.

So we're continually seeing the close rates from a lead coming in to them willing to sign to continually increase. June increased at 23%. July increased another 40%.

On top of the base number from the previous—

Not from June, but from the base number on whatever it was before June. But June picked up over the previous months.

Yeah.

And then July picked up again over June. They didn't share data from the last 2 weeks of July. Maybe they don't have it yet. Indicates acceleration began before August bookings, suggesting pipeline quality lifted mid-July. We— oh, week 722. I didn't actually read all the text. Oh, there's more here. Week 722, 100% of the wins came in less than 2 weeks. Week 729, same, 100% of the wins came in less than 2 weeks. Hmm. So those are fast turnaround all year, even in small, small numbers. That's what I'm, I'm They're using like text language, like small n, capital N. I'm assuming that's numbers. Yeah, it's a clear step change versus early June.

That's interesting because August is usually— July, August are usually slower and it's picking up.

There are slow months.

The summer months are slowest for enterprise, which is interesting for us because it's been—

it's been—

I would say it's been better than average. And then it does feel like it's picking up even though it's August right now, because right like right now we're still— even though our main sales head is out on on vacation, we still closed. I think we closed like 1 or 2 this week.

How'd that work? You took a sales head from a competitor. We won't name the competitor, but how'd that work out?

Really good.

So they understand sales better. It's working. The pitch is tighter.

Pitch is tighter and things are moving along. And then it's always in my mind, it's always been like, you know, we get this, these leads, this gold, right? And it's like, but how come we're not closing more? And so I would say that it's been, it's been good. And now I'm like, okay, how do we get more?

So The sales rep that you took from a competitor, I know this for a fact, they get a lot of their leads from, I believe it's Clutch. Clutch is the site that ranks agencies. I'm pretty sure it's Clutch.

I think it's, their SEO is really good.

I'm telling you, they get a lot of leads from Clutch as well.

Yeah.

Uh, the last time we talked to a Clutch sales rep, they claimed that they were the largest spender on Clutch.

Wow. That company.

That company.

Wow. I didn't know that.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. Clutch is expensive. Clutch is great. It's expensive though. Yeah. I like the whole, you know, get emails and webinars.

Yeah, I look at it just you do everything and somehow they end up coming in.

Yeah. Do you— you don't pay for Clutch, do you?

I don't know if we pay for Clutch, but I'm going to guess with no because they require too long of a contract and we weren't willing to run it that long. We spend a decent amount on Meta. Meta does well for us.

For collecting emails or webinars?

No, for getting customers.

Oh, really? Straight up? Yeah, you do run ads. That's right. I ran that little, that little cursor thing and it was just straight up retargeting. Or straight up cold?

Yeah, we do cold and we do remarketing, but we spend majority of the money on cold.

That's funny that that actually works, but I—

We don't spend a lot though.

Yeah.

It depends what you consider a lot. We only spend, if I had to guess, I think we're spending around 50 grand a month.

For your size, it's like, it's not a lot, it's not a little, so.

Well, we only spend the money for our SMB division, so it's not a ton of money. It's—

But your SMB is other people's enterprise.

No, not really.

Okay, what are the minimums per month?

I don't know what the minimums are.

Okay, so is it okay for V to say?

Yeah, you would know more than me.

So you told me before it was around, call it 15 a month, right? Which is for smaller agencies, that's like a lot because smaller agencies don't charge a lot.

No, that's not our enterprise. I'm saying we don't do the 15.

No, I talk about for your SMB division, you're charging 15 a month. No. That's what you told me before.

No, I said we skip the 15s. When you were asking me a comparison because you're comparing for a single grain, I'm saying we don't have that.

You consider that middle market. You don't have—

We don't have that. We have some clients. Now you're talking about average, right? We have some clients—

Average for NPXL.

It has to be way lower.

Really?

If I had a guess, yeah, I'm— my guess is going to be around like $5,000.

So I misunderstood then.

But what I'm getting at with SMB is we don't have that middle tier. So we have NPD, that's enterprise. We're like, we'll work with like the DHLs of the world. And then we have the SMB divisions that'll work with smaller budgets.

Yeah.

And what I'm getting at is we're helping mom and pops for like 5 grand a month. All right. I'm averaging it out. My numbers could be off, but I know it can't be that far off.

Yeah.

And we do have customers at our SMB division that are paying 15, 20, 30, 40 grand a month, but that's not the majority. If you look at the average, it has to be closer than Uh, $5,000. When I say I'm guessing, I know I'm probably within a 90%, uh, percentile of my estimate because I've seen the numbers because we get monthly updates, right? I just don't know every single month, but it's pretty steady because we've had our SMB division for a while. Our enterprise though, we have a lot of accounts paying us millions and millions and millions of dollars a year. So there's a big gap in between. So when you were talking about your agency or Power Digital, Yeah. or a lot of the other agencies that focus on that, middle market or like Mute6. There's another Mute6 alternative that I forgot the name. They're based somewhere in SoCal. They do like D2C. I think they sold to private equity, maybe.

Common Thread?

Common Thread is another one.

Yeah.

They have what I would consider more of that middle market where they're selling their ideal customers paying like $15,000, $20,000 a month. We don't have a ton of those. We have lower end. We do have some middle. But if you look at our percentage of revenue, at least in the United States, international, I don't have the numbers off the top of my head and you can't look at it that way because of the currency exchange. Yeah. So their version of like we have clients in LATAM that are paying us $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a month, but that is enterprise in Latin America for like in Mexico because of currency exchange. Right. So but yeah, we don't have that middle market like you or Power Digital has.

That makes sense. I misunderstood it previously. By the way, I want to go back to something, talk about getting, getting lucky.

Right.

So Remember I told you I was doing— I started doing these AI dinners a couple of weeks ago. And so that AI dinner has now led to an AI lunch that I'm going to. And that AI lunch has actually— there's a couple of— there's like 2 or 3 billionaires there, right? And then you have a bunch of— and it's like sponsored by a sovereign fund, that lunch, right? And there's like 10 or 15 people there or whatever. But my point of saying this is if some of you are asking, well, how do you actually get luckier? This is one of those ways you host these things. You don't know what's going to happen. My only— I was thinking about it this morning. I was like, yeah, I have no expectations when I host these. I was like, yes, I do.

I absolutely have an expectation.

My expectation expectation is that I end up creating more luck and that good things will happen in the long term. And that just happened every single time, right? So I think with your hosting lunches or dinners, that's how you create more luck and that's how you become wealthier in the long term. Because, and even this, like, it's not like I want customers or whatever, but even like I got the invite yesterday and then actually the person hosting is like, oh, by the way, you should talk to this person over here, did an intro. It's like, oh, they actually need marketing help, right? You just, by the way, I had no intention, hey guys, come buy my shit. Nope. Didn't do any of that.

So yeah. Yep. No, it's a lot of people just don't put themselves out there. So they feel that they're not lucky. It's that they're just not trying.

Yeah. You're actually an extroverted person. Remember the personality test? I'm actually very introverted, right?

I'm introverted.

No, on the personality test it said you're extroverted.

Or let me rephrase, forget personality. I don't do much stuff that's extroverted where I actually talk to other people or go out.

But when you go somewhere, you're very extroverted. You bring a lot of energy.

Yes, but my problem is I don't go anywhere.

Yeah, well, like, okay, so for example, when we go to lunch or Novikov, you talk to the waiter like you're very engaging, right? Yeah. Whereas like if I'm hosting something, yes, I'm— it's very high. People think I'm extroverted. But compared to you, when we go out and eat, when we order or whatever, like I don't try to talk.

So yeah, but a lot of my conversations are really awkward and my wife tells me you can't ask people these kind of questions. It's like they think I'm trying to rob them or something like that. I'm like, I'm just trying to find out how much you've got. No, it's just more so, it's just like, I'm not trying to be rude, but it's just like, how many people come here through lunch? Which days are busier? How many people for dinner? What do most people order? Because I just wanted to understand how much the place works.

Wait, why can't you ask those questions?

Because they're rude.

Well, how are those rude?

I don't know. That's what I was told. I like asking those questions.

I think there's a fight.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. Anyway.

All right. Uh, we both have a similar topic in here. Google claims search traffic is in declining. I don't know if you saw their press release or blog post.

I saw that. Yeah, you go, go.

But Google just put out a vague statement that search is up, more people are using search. And they said they're not necessarily seeing people see a decline in search traffic. They're seeing some people also get gains. Yeah, they did not give specific numbers. And I bet you they did. They did it on purpose.

I think Google's VP of Search is lying about how Google is actually doing because they said, oh, total organic click volume from search to websites has been relatively stable year on year, and it's sending slightly more quality clicks than a year ago. I don't know about your traffic. I see the alligator, the open jaw. I'm just like, what? Like, definitely we're losing clicks.

I think we've more so lost clicks and it's stabilized, and I don't think we're losing a ton more right now. We've seen some customers get good wins. We've seen some customers, of course, get losses. We've seen the alligator as well, but we've seen a lot of companies make up the losses in traffic Not necessarily getting more traffic, but getting higher conversions from AI traffic. So we're not seeing AI drive anywhere nearly the volume of organic traditional Google search or Bing search, but we're seeing ChatGPT and Perplexity driving a very, very, you know, fraction of a percent in traffic, but the conversions are through the roof and that's making up some of the losses from organic search. And as you and I both know, a lot of the factors are Pretty much the same. There's some nuances, but—

So look, I, I just think they have to protect what they need to protect. Like they always, they always never completely tell the truth for the most part. Like more often than not, even when you had the search liaison, all these people, and it's okay, right? Like you take what they say with a grain of salt and you try to interpret it with your own data. So that's how I look at it.

We have a similar topic here. Ours is a little bit— titles are a little bit different, but go with it. When you're talking about a female model, actually, before you go into that, let's talk about Reddit. Reddit losing traffic from Google, and then we can get into the female model.

Where's that one?

Reddit is starting to lose Google traffic.

Did I have that one? Oh, there we go.

Yeah. Okay.

So this is from Glenn Gabe on X. And so Glenn, by the way, so he's an SEO consultant. And so he said that Reddit CEO said traffic from Google varies from week to week, but overall it was a headwind in Q2. Headwind meaning that it's kind of going against them, right? Tailwind is when you're getting carried by it. So regarding headwind, quote unquote, check out international visibility trending for Reddit. I'm seeing that across Google's not great for them. That can change and jump back up. But I'm seeing a drop across several countries outside the US. I wonder if these AI translations are causing problems now that Google has seen that in place over time. Maybe another reason they are pushing forward with becoming a search engine. Germany, France, and Italy are below. So you can see what's happening is you can see it going up and then it kind of just drops and it's slightly rising again. This one was— this is Reddit daily updates. I don't know what it is. But yeah, you can see it's, it's, it's not doing well.

I think these are quality of the— They were showcasing Reddit so much in their search results on page 1, and the quality of the results were not relevant for a lot of keywords, but they were just pushing it.

Yeah, they had to dial it back at some point. Like, by the way, it's like whenever Google gives in the past, if you're an SEO, you know that they're going to take it away at some point. That's just how it is.

Well, when they're giving that much, they were giving a lot.

Yeah.

The only one that I would say has been pretty steady over the years, they may have seen some ups and downs, is Wikipedia.

Yeah.

But Wikipedia does not monetize.

Yeah.

Because I think it's a little bit of a different story with Wikipedia.

And it doesn't even matter that Reddit has a deal with Google or whatever. They're going to do what they need to do.

So yeah, well, they're paying them for the data, so then, you know, yep, they can do whatever they want. But going into it, I want to talk a little about how adding a female model increased a 67% close rate. Do you want to read it?

Yeah. So this is interesting and I'll share something about our, our email, our outbound right now. So Basically, so this guy Dan says this guy got a 67% close rate on his sales calls by hiring a model to do literally nothing in the background, right? So basically here's how it works. Client joined, immediately joined a call, immediately was engaged and closed in 12 minutes, $8,400 deal, right? So he's like, so basically he's on a sales call and then you have a model in the background or whatever, right? And he's like, what the F? He's like, okay, so he tested it 50 more times. With a model.

Wait, is this B2C or B2B? It must be B2C.

I am not sure. Well, I think—

Or it could be B2B, but it can't be enterprise.

I don't think— oh, 8400.

Definitely not. Yeah. No. Yeah.

So with a model, 67% close rate. Okay. Without model, 24% close rate, which is pretty decent. But the psychological psychology is primal. Men's brains short circuit. If beautiful woman is there, this must be important. If beautiful woman works for him, he must be successful. If I say no, I look poor in front of beautiful women. Status by association is undefeated. So they took further. Demo calls, model in the background. Support calls, model, different model, right? Quarterly revenue, 2 models. Quarterly reviews, paid collections, payment collections, angry model, right? The results: demos, sales up 43%. Support tickets, down 62%. Payment speed, 3.2 times faster. Client retention, up to 8 months average.

Okay.

Wow. Ethical? Who gives an F?

Effective?

The numbers don't lie. Now we run a whole division, baddies for business calls, $500 per call, Book through Q2. Your competition is using models, you're still using PowerPoints. That's what it is.

Is this like a call center business or?

I'm not sure, but I'll tell you what, I have a guy in one of my YPO groups, right? He literally, he brought a, it was an enterprise deal that he was trying to close with Microsoft, I think, right? He brought, I think this was like international, so he hired 2 people locally that were really good looking, young people, okay? A beautiful, good looking woman and an attractive Handsome man, right? And so they wanted to call. And when the Microsoft people would try to talk to the 2 models, they're like, oh, I'm just— I'm new here. They just like smile all the time. They're just like nod all the time, right? He's like, I've been doing this for forever. My close rates go up all the time. And so whenever he goes somewhere, he brings attractive people with him.

Are you going to test it out?

You could test it out.

I'm not going to test it out.

I'm probably not going to test it out. But I think it's funny because I was watching Cody Sanchez talk about this the other day. When a woman wears makeup or dresses really nice, I think the close rate goes up like we're talking double.

Right?

Whereas if you're a male, it goes up like 15-20%. Not a lot, but it still goes up a little bit if you dress up. So like, this is as old as time. Like, I think we all intuitively know this, but no people are willing to admit it. I just think it's hilarious.

Yeah, I think we're also seeing a shift in culture and marketing globally. And what I mean by this is companies are starting to do with their marketing what helps them generate the most business, as long as they feel it aligns with whatever their ethics may be and they don't care. A great example of this is we work with an automotive company and this company sells a specific type of automotive vehicle. I'm not going to get too much in depth because if I tell you the type of vehicle, you'll guess the brand right away. They tried with their marketing a few years ago to be all-inclusive and try to have a product that works for anyone who wants their automotive vehicle or however you want to define it. Car.

Car.

I'm not saying it's a car or not. It could be a bike. It could be an ATV, but you get the point, right? It's a massive company. They're publicly traded. If you see it on the road, you have a stereotype of their ideal customer. All right?

Yep.

So with the marketing, we started shifting back to their ideal customer. And when I'm talking about being inclusive, I'm not trying to say, hey, if you're any of these other groups, you can't buy the car or motorcycle or ATV or whatever it may be. I'm just saying we target the advertising and the marketing, not just to their ideal customer, but the creatives and the marketing copy and the landing pages all speak to their ideal customer profile. And we ignore the rest. And when I say ignore, it means we're not trying to market to the rest, but if they come and they buy the product, great. And by doing that, we saw sales shoot up. a solid double figures. When I say solid double figures, I'm not talking about like, you know, 10%. I'm not talking about 30%, but in between. You're talking about in the teens, but higher up and closer to the 20th percentile.

And when you say all-inclusive, you're talking about like DEI initiatives?

Uh-huh.

Okay, got it. Yeah. You see advertising kind of shifting back now. We were talking about the Sydney Sweeney ad, right? Like that was not acceptable before. Right. And it still gets a lot of backlash in the United States. But it's more— more companies are kind of going— the pendulum is swinging back where it's okay to do these things again. And I don't know if you remember the '90s, but there were really sexual ads, like for Monday Night Football, for example, where T.O., Terrell Owens, there's like a model that walked in front of him and like dropped a towel or whatever. He's like, man, I'm about to play football. It's Monday Night Football, right? And she's like, well, what about this? And then like, and he's like, well, I can wait for this, right? But like, you couldn't do that type of stuff before. Now it's kind of going back in that direction. For better or worse, I don't know, but at least people are comfortable talking, speaking to their audience.

So I was on this podcast called Digital Social Hour.

Oh yeah, Sean Kelly.

Sean Kelly. Yeah. And he has this like WhatsApp group and he has like 1,000 people or whatever the limit is. There's 2 of them because I think he capped out on the limit. And you know, there's, I don't read all the threads in it because I'm on a lot of WhatsApp groups, but someone posted today because I was just checking and it was talking about the greatest jeans contest and it's someone who looks like a model or they could be a model, I don't know. And they're doing this in Uh, Chicago is what it looks like. And they're playing into it and they're just like, it's silly how much hate she's getting. So they're talking about, you know, it's insane. Hey, I'm gonna do this jean contest. People are welcome, models are welcome and whatever it may be.

Yeah.

But people are starting to do, and this is a woman doing it, right? It's not a man doing it. Uh, people are starting to go back to whatever they want and not obsessing about what other people think as much. And if it's quote unquote culturally accepted now.

I think people were getting too censored the last few years and now people are more comfortable just doing what they think makes sense. And I like that. I think sometimes you're going to make mistakes, but more often than not, you understand your audience better than most people if you're running the company.

And when you're doing your marketing, it sounds bad, but the data doesn't lie. The data is showing that if you just focus on what your ideal customer wants, in most cases, you will make more money. Now, Eric and I are not telling you that you should be rude or doing anything negative to, uh, people who may be considered DEI. I don't know what the category is to be considered DEI. What do you mean? Diversity, equity, inclusion.

Yeah.

But I don't know what type of people are included. Like, if you're Caucasian, I'm assuming you're not included in—

Yeah, you're not. Yeah, but that's reverse racism.

Yes, but all I'm getting at is it doesn't matter if you're Caucasian, African-American, or Indian. You and I are not saying, hey, go talk crap on the other people.

That includes everything. There's LGBTQ. Everything is included in DEI.

Yeah, but what we're getting at is focus on your ideal customer.

Yeah.

If they tend to be LGBTQ or if they tend to be African-American or—

And focus on it.

Or Indian or Asian, it doesn't matter. Just focus on it and stop thinking too much about, oh, inclusion or all this and just focus your marketing on what's working, what the data is showing without being unethical.

Look, I think some people won't say this. This is a little more like this might paint me in a good light, but I kind of don't care. But you look at Nike, right? Nike share price hasn't been doing that well. A couple of years ago, Nike was like very much about body positivity and everything, right? And you saw like it wasn't their core audience, right? But now Nike's going back to, oh, okay, we're going to— the golf commercial, you saw the guy, he— I think he won like an Open and then his baby ran up to him afterwards.

Right.

And he's like, like, this should be the focus, right? So it's like, it's just— it's focused on athletes. They used to celebrate athletes, people.

Accomplishments and success and greatness.

Yeah. Then it became something that was not really what they were all about. Right. And so it's just like, like, dude, like, look at the data, talk to your customers, then you'll figure out the right messaging. Don't try to get sucked in. I got sucked into, you know, these initiatives too. And then I pretty quickly realized, I'm like, wait, what am I doing? Right? I don't think he ever got sucked into it.

So no. Yeah. One of my favorite commercials of Nike's was the one with the— is it Lindsey Vonn, the skier? She's a skier, right?

Lindsey Vonn, you said, is a skier, right? And so very competitive Olympic skier. And it looks like she got—

so she's—

you see her competing in the beginning, and then she gets injured. It looks like she has a knee injury, right? And you see her rehabbing, bringing it back, and then you see her competing again. And then at the very end it says, this is what the United States is about. And that is what the United States is about. It's about adversity and it's about fighting. It's about getting knocked down.

It's about getting up.

And greatness. Yeah.

And celebrity is celebrating people who are amazing at what they do.

Yeah.

Not celebrating, you know, being mediocre.

Yeah.

So it was an ad on 2 kids, to look like 2 different kids. And since they were little kids, they were doing everything like running through obstacles, jumping in their house, breaking their coffee table and trying to jump over it, but messing up. And they showed that how they're even going through like school security systems and like going through doors and stuff quicker. And they're willing to not let any obstacle get in their way. And at the end, it was 2 football players that one was trying to run to the end zone.

Mm-hmm.

And then the other one was trying to block 'em.

Mm-hmm.

And they both left nothing on table and tried their all, and they both gave each other like a high five at the end for like putting it all out there and trying their best.

So Landini, both of these guys are Hall of Famers. One's a Hall of Famer safety, one of the greats for the Steelers, played for USC before. And then Tomlinson played for the Chargers, one of the best running backs out there. And so it just shows how, like, how they got to that point. Right. But it was a lot of work, a lot of effort, a lot of adversity. Again, like that, that's what, that's what makes that, that, that is what our country is about. Right. But I think that reflects Nike. So anyway, it does.

And that's why I'm happy with advertising. They're starting to get back to what we should strive for and not celebrating mediocrity.

Mediocrity.

Mediocrity.

Yeah. So speaking of advertising real quick, the question now is, is Snapchat a good moneymaker? And I wanted to share some, some insights with Snapchat. So Snapchat is interesting because they reach 75%, okay, 75% of 13 to 34-year-olds in 25 countries with a combined $5 trillion in buying power. Right. $5 trillion with a T. It's a lot of money. And then there's 432 million daily active users on Snapchat and 34% of them are likely to buy products from a Snap ad. And but the thing is, I think Snap has been kind of this, this stepchild. And the reason I even bring this up right now is Triple Whale did a study, the reporting company. They did a study showing that Snapchat is being slept on. And I think the return on ad spend is somewhere close to 3, which is pretty good. And they're like, they're basically saying, hey, Snapchat, maybe you don't want to sleep on it because Snap ads are still affordable, especially when you compare it to TikTok and Meta, meaning you can get more reach for your dollar while reaching an audience that's highly engaged. I think that's interesting from Triple Check this out.

We released this chart May— no, March 2025. It's all the social networks, the people that bought a product after seeing it. Which social network has the highest ratio of someone buying a product after seeing it?

Is that Snap?

It's Snap.

Yeah, which is interesting because I haven't opened my Snapchat in ages.

Have you? I don't even know if I have a Snapchat.

Have you ever used it before? It was so complex when we were, when we were little young.

Yeah.

But I'm just saying it's like I've actually looked into it. I'm logged into the dashboard to look at it. It's like, it does seem a lot simpler. And I think it's not something to sleep on, especially now that we see your data. And then Triple Whale saying it's a 3 ROAS. It's worth a look, I think, for a lot of people advertising.

Yeah. And number 2 on our data was Pinterest out of all the social networks. So number 1 was Snap, number 2 was Pinterest. And that was data for how likely they are to buy a product after seeing it on those networks. You know, their numbers were through the roof. But when you look at Snap and Pinterest as a whole, the reason marketers don't spend too much time or attention on them is because they don't have the volume that a Meta does or a Google does. And instead of looking at it that way, you should look at it from the perspective of it converts really well. Get whatever you can from those networks and just take the omnichannel approach and leverage each one for its maximum potential. Yep.

Snapchat's great. It's a great company, guys.

You and I both talk about search everywhere optimization, but we're big believers that you shouldn't be on every platform.

Mm-hmm.

And companies in marketing are taking search everywhere optimization to the extreme and being like, we need our content and our ads on every single platform. If Snap's a great fit for your audience and you can make extra $200,000 a month in profit, not revenue, and you're a large corporation, that's extra $2.4 million a year in profit. That's great money. You know, why not don't do it. But people are going to the extreme and being like, oh, you're in B2B. If you're not on Quora, you're missing out. If you're not on Reddit, you're missing out. If you're not on, you know, Instagram and TikTok, you're missing out. Totally get it. There's always a percentage of people in all these networks that are your ideal customer, and you should try to be everywhere, but pick and choose the ones that are going to move the needle the most and then work your way down the list. And you may never get to every single platform just because you can't make the economics work, and that's okay. Search everywhere optimization is about focusing on where your ideal customer is, not on focusing on every single platform because, you know, they're worth $5 billion or $20 billion. You focus on what's going to drive you the most ROI and then you go down from there.

I— guys, just back to marketing 101. You have to understand where your ideal customer is hanging out. When I say ideal, that keyword's very important. Ideal, not just every customer, right? The ideal ones. You look at your lifetime value data. Who do you want to target, right? You look at where they're hanging out first and then you figure out what the messaging is, what actually drives them to take an action. And then you go for those people. And that often means vast majority of the time, you're not trying to hit every single channel you're trying to hit, you're maybe trying to master one first. And then once you start to really milk that, then you can start to diversify into other ones. And then you can start to figure out, okay, let's start to do branding, maybe if you're doing it really well, right? But it's like everything, there's a crawl, walk, run to this. And that's still the fundamentals that the first principles of marketing has always been this.

So what do you want to go into next? The Ryan?

Yeah, so Ryan Trahan, do you know who that is? Alright, 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 global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Okay, so Ryan Trahan is a YouTuber and he's been getting a ton of views. He basically was doing a fundraiser where he would travel to every single state, and at the end of this, I think he raised a couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe even over a million. I could be wrong there. But this bike company got really smart. So this bike company reached out to him and said, hey, we're going to give you like $10,000 or $50,000 or something like that, right? And then that bike company showed up in one of his videos the next day. They wanted to give him an electric bike. They said, every day that you ride this bike and it's in your videos, we're going to give you an extra $10,000. So I think that maybe they gave $50,000 initially and then it was like $10,000 each time, right? And they knew he had 50 more videos to make. And he kept riding that bike as like an electric bike. And what happened was these videos were getting some of them 50 million views or whatever. Wow. lot of views, right? And so I think what happened to this company was that they exploded their revenue. And I don't have exact numbers here. But if you are smart, and you know, if someone's going to do this trip, and you know, you can, you can smartly insert yourself in and then almost incentivize this influencer, you're getting a ton of ad impressions for your product all the time. And people start to associate, oh, like, I need an electric bike. Okay, I'm gonna go with that one. I'm gonna go with that one. So that's what they did. And I think you have to be, you have to be lucky in this case, right? You have to be opportunistic to get your product in there at the right time, and then be smart about how you incentivize this influencer because this influencer is trying to raise money. Okay, we'll give you 10 grand each time in every video. Who else is doing that? Not enough people are doing that.

Yeah, I've seen some of them on Instagram, but companies don't seize the opportunity. I think it would be wise for them. For example, I saw a gentleman who is overweight and he was saying for every 1,000 followers, he'll walk a mile. It was something like that. So his follower count started going up. I started liking his content and I was like, good for you. And he's starting to lose weight. And This is early on in the journey where I've seen it. Fast forward to now, it's probably been 7, 8 months later. He's lost a lot of weight, but a company should have went and sponsored it like a Subway or a healthy food company, or it could be anything, right? That is just all about like health and wellness, maybe a nutrition company.

Yeah.

And I think they would have done very well.

Dude, if Chipotle sponsored Ryan Trahan every day, we're going to feed you Chipotle or even Sweetgreen, right? Hey, you know, you're going to do it. You're going to travel to every single state. You're going to try to make a video. We need you to eat healthy too, to be a beacon of like a role model to Americans, right? All over the world.

So you saw their stock today, right? Sweetgreen, they just tanked.

Did they?

26%.

Why did they tank?

Earnings. Oh, wow.

That must mean—

Green shares dropped 25% after salad chain cuts outlook for the second time in 2 quarters. I wasn't laughing at them. I was trying to hold in a cough. But yeah, it kind of sucks. But the market's hard right now.

Do you know there's— do you know what RPI means?

Revenue per—

The first thing you think about is revenue. Okay, so it's Restaurant Performance Index. Restaurant Performance Index. Okay. So one of our— I don't know if you've ever met George. I think you probably met George Gammon, but he actually watches this. He's great with macroeconomics, right? He has a YouTube channel. So I was watching one of his videos yesterday and he talks about like, sure, you look at inflation data, you look at job reports data, but all of that can be manipulated pretty easily by the government, right? Yeah. But when you look at Restaurant Performance Index, you can see when there's weakness, like every time it drops below a certain amount, a recession happens. Right. And because that shows like how weak the consumer is, if they're not going out to eat that much and Sweetgreen dropping and I go to Sweetgreen like I just had it yesterday, that means the consumer is backing off a little bit. And so it's actually -0.1 right now or something like that. So it's worth looking at that. And Warren Buffett likes looking at the railroad data, right? Like if you have more or less railroads kind of, you know, transferring stuff, that's also weakness in the economy.

Mm-hmm.

So I don't know how that looks right now, but it's worth taking a look at because who knows how we're doing right now?

I have no idea if the economy is getting worse or better. I just know for our company, the last few months we're starting to see signals. And I shared some of that data earlier in the podcast. And I want people to keep one thing in mind. Forget railroads, forget restaurant indexes. When things get bad, what's the first thing that gets Your spend, your, your, what do you call it?

Disposable spending?

No. When, when things get bad for corporations, what's the first thing?

Oh, marketing.

Yes.

Yeah.

And when things start looking better, what's the first thing they add back?

Marketing.

That's right.

Yeah.

Because it's the easiest thing to adjust. If you already have inventory and you're sending stuff on a train that's booked in advance, marketing spend, you can just turn up and down like a knob. Mm-hmm. But they do.

But hey, Meta and Google continue to do good.

Yeah.

So by the way, if you look at his videos over here, look, each one of these is like 2.4 million, 3.2 million, 2.7 million. You can see the bike over here.

I've never seen this guy.

So he did a collab with MrBeast where he traveled the US. He's like, I'm going to try to survive on one penny. And he made it happen. At the very end of it, MrBeast appeared in the video and they gave him like a giant penny or something like that.

But— So how do you survive with the— it's like the guy who traded a red paperclip for a house or something. Like that?

I don't— I, he kept, I think he's, he traded a penny to somebody else and got like a dollar and he kept like compounding it and then, you know, it became something he can survive on. That, I think that's how it worked. Yeah.

But no, there was, you saw the red paperclip, right? No, it was back in the day. No. Red paperclip.

When's back in the day? Or this guy's really young, so.

It's called One Red Paperclip. One Red Paperclip is a website by Canadian blogger Kyle McDonald who traded his way from a single red paperclip to a house in a series of 14 online trades over a course of a year.

Dude, this just— so that's like a wide TAM idea, right? These are wide TAM ideas. So you look at how many days can I double $1? And that one got 18 million views. And I tested 1-star hotels, 15 million views. I visited 50 states in 50 days, 10 million views, right? And then you can see it starts with a lot of views and it kind of tapers off over time. But yeah, it just goes to show you like the idea matters a lot. And I was talking to my brand team about this recently. I was like, guys, like if there's one thing I can impact right now, what do you think it is that's going to impact it? It's like Everyone's giving all these answers. I was like, guys, it's just the idea. And I haven't spent enough time on ideation and I haven't spent enough time on approvals, right? I kind of just let things go. And so I'm like, if we want to do better here, I'm going to spend more time on ideation. I'm going to be a bottleneck. I'm going to, you know, help with approvals. But there's also design approvals as well. There's also the writing of the content. There's actually a lot that goes into the funnel of this stuff. And what we just talked about, sometimes you just have to focus on what works well and then you kind of have to ignore the other stuff. And for example, when you post a LinkedIn, you're not thinking about, oh, how, how does the LinkedIn algorithm work? You're just reposting stuff, right? So largely you should just focus on one channel that works well and the other ones you're okay maybe letting it slide a little bit.

Yes, but Eric's not saying ignore the other channels and not leverage them. He's saying use the other channels, but you may not get as better or as good of results. And that is okay. Depending on your business and the ROI for some of those channels. If a channel is extremely powerful and you can generate a lot of profit from it, you don't want to let those slide. But if some of those Those are secondary channels where you know you're not going to drive as much revenue. It's okay. But speaking of focus, dude, I've been focusing on redoing our site.

Oh, that's like the 3rd or 4th time you've changed it in the last month or two.

Yeah, so I change it to, we make sure customers— it hasn't launched yet. We make sure customers find you everywhere from Google to ChatGPT. And the subtext is, we help you show up everywhere customers are searching, swiping.

That's the headline.

Yeah, and the sub— but the subheadline is better. We help you show up everywhere customers are searching, swiping, scrolling, streaming, Shopee.

That's good. Who came up with that?

Colin from my team.

It was already on our website. Copywriter?

No, no, he's a marketer.

He's a really good marketer. That's really good for both of them.

That headline was Gajan from Spiralize. I think he's the one who came up with the headline. Yeah, it was a variation of mine.

Yeah. See, that's another thing with your relationship with Gajan. Sometimes it's, it's, it's not sometimes, all the time. This is why it's good to network. This is why it's good to make relationships because that thing you just, hey, just get on a call. call. It's okay, you don't have to pay anything for that.

Dude, no.

I think you're going to refer customers to him too.

I'll refer customers because his work is good and he's made me millions of dollars. That's the real reason I refer because if I refer him and he does shit work, then—

Then it makes you look bad.

Yeah, it makes me look bad. But we were planning on redoing our site and I'm like, man, I don't like our site. It has too much messaging, has stuff about our values. I'm like, no one cares about this. No one cares for careers on our homepage. I want to tidy this up and I want to do CRO Oh. Are optimized for conversions and not just how it looks. So I was talking with my team and the way this idea came about is I had this idea and one of Gajan's former employees hit me up like a month or two prior and he was looking for a job and we couldn't come to alignment on salary. This person was based in India and I'm like, I cannot pay someone in India these kind of wages. I'm like, this is more than what I would pay someone for this job in America. They're great at what they do. I just didn't want to pay it. I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That was just the reality.

Yeah.

So then I called Gajan and I was like, dude, I want to redo the homepage. I'm looking for someone cheap who can do it because I don't want to do it myself. And I just, I really just did not want to do it. And Gajan's like, dude, you already know what you want, right? And I'm like, yeah, I already know what I want. And I break down to him like, this is exactly what I want. And I gave him 6 numbers and I put 'em in order on how I want to change it. And I already had a lot of the copy written. I myself am not a designer, but I didn't want to pull my designers from my Ubersuggest project. We're releasing all the AI stuff to go help with this. And Kajon's like, dude, why don't I just do it for you? I'll just do it for free. I have a ton of staff. I was like, thanks dude, sounds good. So then he turned my idea into vision. He also added his own flair. And what was unique about him him is he scrapes the internet for every single A/B test. No joke, literally every single A/B test. So if you have A/B testing code on your website, he's looking at what tests you're running and which one ended up becoming the default.

So he knows what wins and what doesn't.

What does.

Yeah.

So when he took my copy, took my ideas, added in some of his own elements, showcased the homepage, and he's like, here's how many times we've run a similar test, here's how many times it's won, and here's the average conversion lift that you should expect before we even Wow. And I'm like, we're not going to run a test. He's like, you don't want to run an A/B test? He's like, you're a conversion guy, Neil. You wouldn't want to run an A/B test? I'm like, no, I don't like my current website. I'm not optimizing for leads. I'm actually optimizing for RFPs. Because if you look at how many RFPs we get on a monthly basis, it's not enough volume to run an A/B test. And I'm changing things like, you know, one thing Gajon has to do is, you know, right where it says the top right, hire us, the button, he'll add a button that as RFPs. Yeah. It doesn't mean someone's going to add us to RFP because of it. Yeah. It's more so when people visit the website, they'll know that we deal with RFPs and maybe in the future we'll include it in more.

Yeah.

So, but yeah, it just goes down to what you're talking about, like focus and just getting in. And I'm like, I want this done. And I was a little bit lazy because I don't have design skills and I didn't want to use AI to design it for me. So he helped me out. Plus he came up with a lot of good ideas.

Even if you can get a couple more RFPs a year from that, it's worth it.

Right.

And the other thing is, good John doing this, it's one we're talking about on this podcast, hopefully gets, you know, another couple leads or whatever. But the other thing too is you'll remember that, like, especially if you drive a lot more RFPs, there's no way you're not gonna remember that. And the first person that's gonna come to mind is him, right? Because marketing, especially with marketing services, just business in general, it is whoever comes to mind, top of mind first, because 99% of people are never in market to or not in market to buy right now.

Yes.

But it changes, you just have to be top of mind. This is why you run, you just spend the $50 grand a month on these ads, right?

You just got to be top So, but no, the cool part about me doing the homepage is, is I have my own opinions on what's going to convert the best, and my team does. But I love the approach. We scraped the whole internet in B2B, and here are all the tests that won. Here's what's most likely to win for you for a service-based company. I'm like, sounds good, give it to me.

By the way, like that, if you want to stand out, especially in this world now, you have to go the extra mile. And he's going a couple extra miles to do that and to have that data that stands out versus the vast majority of CRO companies. Remember that CRO company you were trying to buy? I'm pretty sure they're not doing something like this.

No, but I tried to buy his company first.

Oh, you did? Yeah, but I'm talking about the one I introduced you.

Yeah, that one didn't work out. Then my other buddy, Sean, introduced me to another CRO company based in Canada. They didn't want to sell either, but zero out of the 3. And then Gajan's company now is too big for me to buy.

Yeah. So they do well and that's all they focus on.

Dude, he's grown like a hockey stick over the last few years.

They just focus on CRO. That's it.

Only CRO. He won't do other service lines and get into other stuff. He's like, this works. I can build a—

But he gets paid on outcomes too. It's base fee and outcome.

Uh, no, it depends. A lot of it is just outcome.

Outcome-based.

Yeah.

So when you, by the way, there's no, I'm saying no base fee. There's pure Yeah, I forgot. He kind of explained it to me and I don't want to reveal his pricing structure to everyone, but like when you charge on performance, you do well. You're like a center field, right?

Yeah. So it makes one— no, and I'll, I'll, I'll be honest, he may hate me for saying this, but I'll be transparent. You can call him and find out yourself. Uh, the 3 models: you charge monthly retainer, which you and I do, um, and he has that model as well. The other model is you can do a smaller fee monthly and then a percentage of the Mm-hmm. And then the third model is, is pure percentage of the lift, and he'll collect a tail for that too. That model is the most lucrative. I love that model. We can't get large companies to sign off on that model.

It's too risky for them.

Uh, too risky. It's not projected out in their numbers. They don't like it. They rather just say, we're paying you a fee and this is it. And if you knocked it outta the park, we're not paying you any extra.

Yeah. Procurement likes simplicity.

Uh-huh. And then they're like, if you fail and you don't produce good results, yeah, we're cutting you off.

Yeah. Technically you can do this with the smaller SMBs. B division, but it just, the numbers don't map out there. I think you have to have the mid part working out.

He has mid-market.

Yeah.

That's what's working out really well. Because I know some of his clients when it's enterprise, they don't do performance-based fees.

Which is fair. He'll take the larger, you know, retainer and that's fine. He's good with that.

Yes. But like, because I was talking about his pricing model, I think he takes 25% of the lift or 30%.

I don't know what it is actually.

No, it's not a set fee like that. It's dependent on the size of the company.

Mm-hmm.

The volume and the margins. Because let's say if you're selling protein powder, your margins aren't as good as let's say if you're selling software.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So by the way, that's another thing. When you get on a sales call and you don't just talk about your solution, you start talking about what their business challenges are and how their business works, it becomes a totally different conversation and you can price differently according to that because now they respect you more because you're talking about their business versus just trying to sell them On like your software or your service.

Yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, I have this one over here. I actually think, so I've been nerding out on this. I've been showing you, I think, but I think the future marketing is going to look like online poker. So remember, I talked about this the other day, we were on a podcast together with HubSpot again, and the guy like showed in and out like the last time we did a podcast with HubSpot. But that's aside.

No knock on HubSpot.

No, no, HubSpot's great. HubSpot's great. Yeah. So basically, I think the future of marketing is going to look like online poker. So I used to play 16 tables at once, right? I had one large screen and then each like section had 4 screens.

Yeah.

So I was playing a lot and I had a heads-up display showing me how aggressive each player was, how loose a player was, right? And how— what their win rate was, all this stuff, right? So I could see it for each player. And so to me, it was like playing a video game. I'm working more and more in a terminal, meaning I use Cursor and I use Claude Code and I use MCPs and I have a WordPress connector, I have a HubSpot connector, I have an Ahrefs connector, a Google Analytics connector, a GSC connector. And I can query whatever I want and I'll get responses very quickly. Okay. What's the LTV of this? Can I make a landing page over here? Can I make a thumbnail that looks like what we have over here? Um, can I quickly get, um, trending keyword data on what we should be targeting based on how my keywords have converted? What's cannibalizing? What should we be updating? What hasn't been updated for a while? I don't need to wait anymore. And so I think what's going to happen eventually is I'm just going to have a lot of these, these sub-agents in Claude Code that you can set up. You just prompt it and it creates a sub-agent for you. this is the worst it'll ever be. And I'm telling you, like, I'm way more efficient now. And I just think not even just the future of marketing, but the future business will be multi-instance because someone like you and me, we're just going to have it open and you don't want to wait.

I don't want to wait.

No. And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's just done. Like, oh, this is done over here. Okay, here's the results. Okay, boom. Okay, you should do this over here based on these results. Okay, boom. And I'm just like running all these things. And it's like that the guy, this online poker player, he plays StarCraft, Elky. He had like 48 tables open. He's like looking at it, right? That is a picture of him doing that.

So I think that's what's I do think that's the future. In my office that my wife is designing, I was thinking about having a multi-monitor setup, like 16-ish or something like that, whatever ends up creating a nice screen. And each one was big enough, but they're all connected and each one having different reports. That is being worked on right now because I'm like, man, with AI, a lot of things are moving faster in my organization.

Yeah.

I'm like, I want to see real-time data, but I want to see you know, data in real time and have tons of different screens all open at once. And I can just be in my office and look like what's working and what's improving every single hour or day and be like, cool, this one needs more work, this one doesn't, this one's doing fine on its own.

Which is what you're doing right now anyway. You're just— we're like hitting whack-a-mole everywhere in the company. That's what you're doing.

Yes.

That's the highest leverage thing we can do is to find the high leverage problems. That's how you do it, right? And so I've been posting about this and I've had— I've probably introduced I've introduced like 8 different people to my tutor. Um, so he, he's good too. Oh, your AI tutor?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, why do you need a tutor for? Dude, because, because main thing for me is I'm not technical. He helps me set things up, right?

No, I get that.

And when he, when he tries to teach you, I'm like, don't teach me. I like, just, just like whatever, whatever I'm blocked, like, let's just unblock me. And then I just open up my Zoom, give him remote control, and I go watch TV.

Yeah. But when you think tutor, I think of school, like kids' school.

Yeah. So when he starts Teach me. I'm like, damn it, don't teach me. Let me figure it out on my own. But it's been good. That's a super high leverage use of my time. Our mutual friend Yaniv uses it. So yeah.

Oh, cool.

Yeah. How about what big companies are saying about AI and SEO?

I'm curious. What are they saying?

Okay, from Glenn Ossoff. Here's what he said about public companies that are talking about AI and SEO right now. So if I can sum up the hours of transcripts I've listened to, oh, he listened to a bunch of transcripts. I could read over the past few weeks, it would be this. Search traffic is down. We see opportunities in getting traffic from AI answer platforms, and we're preparing for that. Traffic from those sources is small but converting better, which is what we've been saying, right? Where we can, we're making deals with platforms to enhance our visibility and that of our customers. We're relevant. We want to reduce our reliance on search by creating better relationships with our audience, growing on social media, and utilizing email and events. But we're by no means giving up on it, which is actually going to lead into your other topic that you have. We've had traffic challenges in the past, and this is no different. We also see AI as an opportunity to improve our processes and operations. And so this is a tough topic to comment on because on one hand, I feel ready and excited for marketing challenges going forward and all the opportunities that will be for those being proactive. So if you look at this over here, this, this chart, you can see Airbnb sentiments. They said that a lot of travel switching from desktop to mobile and from Google search to social media. But you look at the sentiment, most of it's Red, right? Red means bad. Green means positive, right? So only 3 companies in here are green. New York Times, red. Vimeo, red. Wayfair, red. Wix, red. Like all these are heavily dependent on SEO. BigCommerce and Chegg have been hit pretty hard, I guess. But that's how it is. Yeah.

And we've started to see that companies accept traditional SEO again. We were in this period for, I would call it 6 months this year where a lot of companies are still doing SEO, but they're just like, I don't know, No, I want to see what happens with AI. And they're starting to slowly accept that you still have to keep doing traditional SEO because A, it helps with AI SEO. A lot of the factors are the same. But B, a lot of the companies we talk to that are like, I don't know, we think it's going to be drastically impacted by AI and it's not worth doing. And these are large corporations that have, the ones I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of 3 particularly that have market caps over $10 billion. No joke, 2 out of the 3 came back in the last 45-ish days talking about, hey, it makes up too much of our revenue. We still need to focus on it. We can't ignore it and we need to start getting back into it. And how do we make up for lost time? I believe the third one will come back, but we're also seeing this on the SMB side where people before AI SEO was a shiny object and I still believe it is, but now they're willing to also come back and reinvest in traditional SEO because it's profitable. It drives a lot of revenue if you do it right. Yeah.

And we've been saying this, traditional SEO isn't— it's a cigar butt thing. It's not going to die overnight. It's going to slowly decline over time, but it's still very useful right now. And it's good to have our original skills still be useful.

I don't know if it's going to die fully.

I think it's going to die fully.

Yeah, I think it could shrink. And, you know, case in point was Mercedes. You saw all their ads that they did with the G-Wagon Yeah. And remember how you introduced me to one of your friends to get a G-Wagon electric?

Yeah.

Because he owns a Mercedes dealership.

Yeah. Does he?

Yeah, he owns a Mercedes dealership.

I didn't know that. Yeah, that's what you introduced me to. Yeah.

Yeah. And you even asked, should you buy it? Yeah.

Well, because I saw one at the retreat I went to earlier this year. Yeah.

Yeah. What's happening with Mercedes sales with G-Wagon electrics?

It's nothing. It's tanking.

And their marketing was, you saw the 360-degree videos where they literally had a Mercedes G-Wagon electric and it can make it 360 60-degree turn without turning. So if you put it in a circle, it can stay in that circle and all 4 wheels just move and it just does donuts, but it's stationary. Yeah. Like think of like, um, a can and just twirling it in your hands. It's stationary. That's what the G-Wagon Electric can do, at least in those videos.

Yeah.

Even with all that marketing hype and it making it look really cool, and a lot of people want to get one, it's not doing well. Why? They forgot one thing when they were doing their cool marketing. Do you want to guess what it was?

I couldn't tell you.

A lot of people buy G-Wagon because they like the way it sounds. The rumbling, the roaring. Yeah, a lot of people buy it for that. You don't get that with electric.

That's interesting. I, I don't know how true or false that is, but I will say—

No, no, I talked with a lot of people at the Mercedes dealerships, like at Fletcher's.

That's what they say?

Yeah, they're saying, I just don't buy the gas because want the noise.

Yeah, I just don't know. I would say with my car, so when I had the Tesla before, electric obviously, I liked that it was quiet, right? But then my Porsche now, it has a noise.

It's—

there is a noise, right?

They manufacture the noise.

Yeah, but I like it. It's like, oh, this is cool. So maybe they forgot the noise or maybe the noise wasn't good enough.

The G-Wagon electric, according to the guy I was talking to who's high up at that dealership, he's like, that's what's hurting the sales for that car.

Interesting.

So in his opinion, he doesn't get a massive discount.

Thing is, they might not even make it anymore. Who knows?

I know they're making a Baby G now, and I don't think that'll do well. It's not selling well in Europe, but you may be too late for the rebates because they're doing massive rebates before, uh, the government in the US, uh, went away with them for electric. Oh, well, but whatever. You asked, should you switch? And I was like, no, don't switch. Your Porsche is, in my opinion, is better. But that's a problem with marketing. People want to focus on what's new and novel, and sometimes they forget what's important to the customer. And if you have something that's new and novel and And you keep what's important to the customer, you can do well. But if you look at the G-Wagon and you forget what's important to the customer based on the G-Wagon electric sales, you will not do well.

Yeah.

And Mercedes still claims that they do fine with the G-Wagon electric, but they bundle it in all together. And if you look at Mercedes electric vehicles, the secondhand market for 'em, they depreciate way faster. They're not worth it. People don't want 'em as much. And the reason being is the new sentiment for most car drivers is they prefer what Range Rover has.

Yeah.

In which you can drive on electric for up to 50 miles and the rest is gas. People love that model where it's hybrid.

I hate going to the gas station.

You do?

Yeah.

A lot of people prefer having the option of they want electric.

Yeah.

So if you're just doing city driving like you do, you never have to fill up.

Yeah.

But then if you're going to San Diego, you can fill up and you don't have to charge.

When I did Temecula, that trip out, the anxiety of not having enough electricity to come back, like I dropped all the way down to 5%. I got back.

So there's— yeah. So at that point you would prefer a hybrid?

Yeah.

Yeah. But, and most people who want the hybrid don't want it because they don't want to go to the gas station, but they want all their city driving to be gas-free. But if they're doing a long trip to Temecula or San Diego or San Francisco, they don't want to go and just have to wait 15 minutes for a car to be charged.

That's true. And by the way, what we're getting at here is everything goes back to customer development at the end.

Yes.

Like when we talk to our customers now on the Carrot side, It's like I try to say, look, what are the other business challenges? Oh, it comes down to this. Oh yeah, we're trying direct mail right now. We're trying webinars. We're trying— oh, it sounds like you need more leads. That's what the challenge is. Oh, guess what happens? They're now a managed service customer for Carrot, right? So it's like you just— even though I'm introverted, or if you're introverted listening to this, it doesn't matter. You got to talk to your customers. Nobody's above that. Nobody's above that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's all about talking to your customers. That's where the real revenue is.

So there's this one guy, Samuel Stroischin or whatever, but he basically cut his entire team in Europe. And so he built this go-to-market product, they started, they started growing, and then he realized, they started focusing on this, and then he realized one thing. So he offered everyone in his European team to move to the US, but nobody was able to commit. So family, kids, personal stuff, all reasonable arguments. So he basically had to terminate all of them. So he's like, what can we learn from this situation? Number one, distributed teams are disadvantaged in the age of AI. Async is nice, but sync is crucial if the world around you moves so fast. So as an example here, after my mom passed, I didn't go to the office as much. And then my CTO, he went on a— he basically went to Montana for like 4 weeks and then he went to Starbase, SpaceX, to check that out, right?

Oh, cool.

But like, we weren't in communication as much. And then we basically agreed that, you know, his name's Shawn. Shawn and Eric in the office run circles around Shawn and Eric working remotely, right? And it's just what it is. It's a trade-off. And I think this guy saw it too with his company and all the people he had in Europe amazing, but he's just like, they're just not like that 9-hour time difference. They're not going to move as quickly as I am and he needs to see it change. And so this is going to just continue to happen in my opinion, but I just wanted to call it out.

We have people in marketing that are in random cities because that's where our client's headquarters is within that region. And it helps the client move faster because that's where their office is. But we're not setting up an office of our own just for that client in that one region when there's 3 people, they just go into the client's office.

It depends on the work that you're doing. So in that case, Like you should, but that's the—

yeah, they're going to the client's office to help them work in person, right?

So it goes back to in person again.

Yeah, but they're not going every day like a 9 to 5. Yeah. They're more so going in whenever they need and it works for them.

And but that matters. It is the— you're paying for the in-person touchpoints. That's what you're paying for. So my take on this all, by the way, is I look at money, right? You look at money, for example. You like money, right? Money. I love money too.

Who doesn't love money?

I love money too. And so, but Money doesn't make you a good person or a bad person. It just amplifies your nature. Do you agree or disagree with that?

I agree.

Okay. Now, if money amplifies your nature, AI amplifies your mind positively or negatively. So if you're super anti-AI, it will make you like, it'll make you from one person to like you're a 10th of a person. If you're super into it, it's going to make you a 10x person or 100x person, right? I look at this as you look at electricity coming out, you look at flight coming out, computers, internet, all these things, and you hear the smartest people in the world. I think Bill Gates has said this, right? That AI is the number— like it supersedes all the rest of these inventions. And so in my mind, like I would say the vast majority of the people at my company are really into using AI and enhancing themselves. But you do have some people resist, oh yeah, you know, it's not going to do this, it's not going to do that. But I'm just like, dude, like this is going to be akin to not using the internet when you're working. This is going to be akin to not bringing your laptop. This is going to be akin to not using power tools when you're building a house. So you either choose to amplify your mind or somebody that's enhanced with this is going to— it's going to replace you.

Yep. So every time you bring up Microsoft, all I always think about is how Bill Gates would have been the first trillionaire if he—

He just had a Steve Ballmer in. He just had to hold on to it.

That's right. Steve Ballmer is worth more than him by a substantial amount because he didn't sell his Microsoft shares.

I listened to a 3-hour interview with Steve Ballmer on this Acquired podcast because I wanted to hear the story.

Right.

So when he became CEO of Microsoft, so obviously Bill Gates founded Microsoft, it was his baby. Steve Ballmer, very intense guy. They didn't talk for like a year or two because Bill didn't like how Steve was running the company. So they were really close before, but then the wives eventually had to get them back together. Right. Steve was really upset in the beginning. He was almost going to unload all of his Microsoft shares. He's like, it would have been a very different world had I done that. But he's like, I just wanted to, you know, clear myself of it. But, you know, I decided to stick with it, like a last-minute thing. It was like a, like a hunch, decided to stick with it. And that's what that little hunch led to where he is now.

Also, that means they're probably not good friends anymore.

No, they're friends. They talk again and all. The wives got them back together, like after a year or two, the wives are like, what are you guys doing? Right? Like, get back together. So they got back together, started talking again. And just recently, they were on a podcast. It was Satya, Steve, and Bill doing a podcast. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I thought it's—

They should bring him back to the board of Microsoft.

I mean, I used to think he was, he was like responsible for, for tanking Microsoft, but now I look at him like, no, he like did everything he could. They had— this is when they had all the Justice Department and all that stuff on top of them, and they're fighting battles everywhere. And I think he, he did what he could, and Satya has taken it to the next level, and they all had their uses.

So even when Ballmer was running it, financially the company performed exceptionally well. The market wasn't valuing Microsoft To where it is on a multiple basis, but when Satya took over, they saw the vision. They loved it, and they started valuating them to more so what they should have been worth.

Dude, you look at Microsoft today; they got gaming, they got communication, they got cloud, AI, enterprise. They got AI as well.

How often do you use Zoom compared to Teams?

Honestly, I use Zoom a lot.

You use Zoom a lot?

A lot.

Yeah. With clients too?

Yeah. But I'm going to turn off of Zoom. Sorry, guys. So every I saw this thread on X. Everyone's like, yeah, F Zoom. Like Google, Google Meet is so much better.

I was like, huh?

So I can save a couple, like, you know, a couple grand a year. I'm probably going to churn off of Zoom.

Check this out. Did you know almost all of our client calls are on Teams? I believe it.

And it's enterprise.

We use Teams, but all of our clients use Teams. If you are working in the enterprise world, everyone's on Microsoft. Zoom could be great. It could be better. It could be worse. Yeah, just dude, the majority of the world runs on Microsoft.

You know that enterprise lead that you sent for Carrot? And thank you for that. So they're like, yeah, go ahead and send a Teams invite. I was like, yeah, we don't use Teams. So I'm like, but I see it because it's just better to bundle everything and it's cheaper that way. It's more efficient. So distribution guys, good job. Wait, did you ever have a call with him on non-Teams? Yeah. We did it on Zoom. And so he's like, yeah, sorry. He was a little late, right? He's like, sorry, I had to download all these updates and all that. I'm like, oh, okay.

It's a multi-billion dollar company.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that's it for today, guys.

Bye.