Instinct's Founder Proves You DON'T Need a Personal Brand.

All right, so Neil, you know, we should, uh, we should talk about the, the craziness that's happening with Instinct right now. So Instinct is an agent and it's growing at 10% a day. And it's interesting because a kid— I'm saying kid right now, the founder is a 23-year-old, okay? So I think they, they've raised, uh, I, I think a billion dollars or so, and they're valued at $10 billion. Is that what it is?

It was a billion at 10.

Yeah. And I mean, it's interesting to hear him talk because I listened to him on Invest Like the Best, which is a great podcast where you can listen to some of the best investors in the world. And it's interesting because it's the first interview that he's really done. And I think one of the things that relate this to from a marketing angle is that you don't really need to build a personal brand as a founder. All you need to do is to just do. Like, if you just build something amazing that people use, whether you're Mark Zuckerberg or you're Elon Musk or you're Steve Jobs or you're like Lisa Su from AMD, right? You know, she runs AMD. You just, you don't need a personal brand or even Fei-Fei Li who just sold her company for $8.2 billion to AMD, right? So all these people who talk about building a personal brand, this and this, they teach you how to do it and they sell you how to do it. Neil and I both as marketers, even though we have quote unquote personal brands, we're playing the game because we sell marketing services.

Did you see the Lisa Su clip at Formula One?

No, what did she say?

So she had a badge on, she's backstage, someone's coming up like, hey, who are you? What do you do? And like they're trying to find out, you know, all the people. My name's Lisa Su. What do you do? I'm the CEO of AMD. You know, like we sponsor that car.

And how they react to that?

I'm like paraphrasing, but pretty much AMD is a sponsor. I don't know which car AMD sponsors. Official team sponsor F1. Which car is it? Uh, is official team sponsor Mercedes-AMG Formula 1. So yeah. Yeah. Um, so, uh, they didn't really know how to react, you know, it was like more so like, hey, what are you doing here? But, um, I agree with you, but I do think it wasn't this way a few years ago. So not, not even a few years ago, like 2 or 3, I would say 5 plus. If you go back 5, 6 years ago, I honestly saw companies looking too similar and you saw the rise of personal brands. And I'm not saying 5 or 6 years ago is when it started. I was saying it was working maybe 5 or 6 years ago because you would see like Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics, Rihanna, Fenty, right? People were leveraging personal brands to create companies. And I did a smaller version of it. I did Neil Patel, NP Digital. And at first it wasn't called NP Digital, it was called Neil Digital. And then it transformed into NP Digital because we found that calling a company after my name, like directly my name, not last name, like my full name, it actually hurt us when we started going upstream because people were just like, oh, you have key man risk. And what I mean it hurt us, it hurt us when you talk to potential investors, it hurts you when you talk to bankers, like they all worry that there's more key man risk and even potential clients like, What would happen if Neil's not here? We don't get those questions as much. We still get them a few times a year.

Yeah, well, let me play devil's advocate on that because once they ask what NP means, it's like, oh, it's Neil Patel. Well, does Neil Patel still work there? He still does. So how does that play?

It does, but most people don't ask what NP stands for. Some people do know it is my name, but some people just don't know and they don't care. They just look at it as 2 random letters. Most people don't know that HP stands for Hewlett-Packard. A lot of us tech people do, but a lot of random people like, oh, that's HP or IBM, right? They don't know what IBM actually stands for, but we all see IBM as a company. Again, I know a lot of people listening to this do know the acronyms and what they do stand for, but the rest of the world, like the average population, many of them do not know what these brands stand for. And the reason I was saying 5, 6 years ago is there wasn't too much differentiation in the marketplace. I think AI's changed that. People are executing faster. They're creating more new innovative companies than we've ever seen before. And it's going back to people not caring as much for the personal brand. They're caring about the product, the service, the results. And you're also seeing in today's market that I've never seen this before. I've been an entrepreneur for 25, 26 years. People will switch on a dime. It used to be that people were super loyal to Nike and they loved them. And then it became, oh, I'm going to try On shoes. Oh, I'm going to try Adidas. I'm going to try Reebok. You see, you used to see a lot of people loyal to Lululemon. Now they'll go to Alo and then Vuori and not care as much between switching between brands.

That's true. I wear all those.

Yeah, but we're seeing it. How much loyal are you to a brand now than when you're compared to a kid? Like when you're a kid, I bet you love Nike.

Yep.

I don't think you have the same loyalty to a brand right now that you did when you were a kid. And I think it's a lot because we as consumers expect more. We aren't as accepting of not being satisfied and we'll just switch on a dime. And it's never been easier to switch. And because of all these things and how you have to create better products and services and how it really means a lot more like from a quality perspective, I think personal brands don't matter as much because a business has to stand on its own.

Well, you know what, I actually bring up a good point. I actually think there's been a democratization of being able to create these things because, okay, you think about when we're born, when we're born, there's no internet, right? There's no like, oh, like everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. There's no social media right now because information is flowing a lot faster. You're seeing a lot more of these brands pop up faster, which is all, by the way, you see these personal brands and like a MrBeast, for example, he's quickly spinning up or like a Logan Paul, they're spinning up like their drinks and all that. Like, I don't know how those are doing right now, but my point is, even with AI too, like, this actually moves over to like a video that I shared with my team this morning, that it's never been easier to just make in general, right? Which means that the expectations for quality gets higher and the people will just default to quality. And especially when you have agents searching for everything, it's going to be quality, right? Did I send you that DHH video from Rails World, I think? You know, the co-founder of Basecamp.

Yeah. I don't know if he was the co-founder. I think he's the unofficial co-founder. I think he joined later on, but I think he was one of the co-creators of Ruby on Rails.

But he's, I mean, he's a, talk about personal brand. He, him and Jason Fried. Yeah. Jason Fried were kind of brands back in the day, you know, from a developer standpoint right now. Here's what's interesting. So he, and I told my team, guys, this is required watching. It's like a 1-hour video. And it's basically him talking about the thumbnail says, look at all the things that I'm not doing, right? And what he talks about there is like, okay, you know, before AI, he's like, AI really started to happen last December. Remember what I keep bringing up, Opus 4.5, right? Last December. To him, it was like November, but to me, last week of December, that's when everything started to change. He's like, the expectations, like we could just build anything now. And look at all the things we're doing. We were just pressing enter all the time and we're not even coding anymore. We're not even writing code. We're not even reviewing code anymore. And look at how much more we're shipping and look how good the design quality is this and that. So that actually goes back to the point that people are shipping more, more and more. Like, entrepreneurship is more accessible to, to more people today. So I think that's just going to force more competition and quality goes up as well. Um, so I think it's a, it's a worthy watch for everyone.

Yeah, I haven't seen it. I'm gonna definitely check it out. That brings me to a point when you're talking about how much more people are doing without actually doing themselves. a16z had a chart I have not I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard about it. Quite a few people were talking about it on television. I was flying back today, so I couldn't pull it up. The Wi-Fi sucked, but CNBC livestream worked out really well about token usage, and it's just showing how usage of AI is just through the roof, and a lot of the usage is not actually humans. It's AI using AI at this point.

Yeah, let me try to find that. So, I mean, do you want to speak more to it as I try to find it?

That's all they said on CNBC, but I believe it. And it was an interview with a Milan company. I forgot the name of it. It was like Doyne, Doyne.

Doyne?

Yeah, D-O-Y-N-E or something like that. I'm messing up the name. You know, they're supposedly raised money at a $2 billion valuation and they were just talking about differentiation and today's world, which funny enough brings us back to personal branding. But yeah, I think usage is just crazy. And going back to the personal branding point, I don't think it's much of a differentiation. Nike stock tanked when they did not renew their partnership with Mbappé, you know, the soccer player or football player. You know, it doesn't drive as much revenue as one may think. They have so many personal brands and their stock and companies are struggling.

Do you see the screen here? So agents are a 14x increase over humans. So you can see on February 6th, 2026, when the year started, agentic tokens surpassed human ones, right? This is interesting because what you see on the chart over here, so this is in the blue. So you can see as of today, as of August 7th, this is probably even higher now. So you have 7-day average token usage on OpenRouter. This is only OpenRouter, right? So 7.5 trillion versus humans are 1 trillion and then mix is like 1 trillion as well. But then when you go back to the last week of December, I'm citing like December 18th, maybe December 26th over here. You can see that agent— agentic usage was still under humans, significantly under, like it was still half of humans, right? And so when I say things really started to take off, look, that's end of January over here and things really started to rip, right? And that's when I think AI really started to happen and become a lot more useful and it got better and better rapidly and now it's getting crazier and crazier every day, right? But going back to the point, I think The video with DHH talking about you can do anything now, and that you really— the point that he's making is that look at all the things I'm not doing. Look at all the non-robot things that I'm not doing, or sorry, the robot things that I'm not doing, right? So he's not doing robot things anymore, and his team gets to work on— they get to spin up like a Windows app very quickly and all this other stuff, right? And obviously they have guidelines for it. And so no matter what I do, Neil, right? And no matter what you do, probably same thing as well. Is the people that want to embrace this stuff are flying with it right now. The people that aren't, they just aren't, right? But we also have to keep in mind too that human inertia is a very real thing. Because if I say that this exploded last December, guys, we're still not even a year. It still hasn't been a year yet. And look how much the world has changed.

Yeah, I think you're going to not only see this climb, but I think you're going to see some ups and downs in between because people are spending a lot of money and they're just like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Our revenue is not growing and our costs are just increasing, so we need to start adjusting how much we're spending. And we're seeing this across the board with most major companies that we work for, that we work with. Their finance team is pushing back. This is just in marketing, right? So it must be organization-wide, but they're pushing back on marketing saying, hey, you guys are spending so much on these AI tools. We're not seeing tons of growth from this, but we're seeing rapid increase in cost and it's affecting potential earnings.

Neil, so I'm going to show you a memo from Hormozi in a moment talking about internal AI usage, but, and then I want to give our reaction to how we're thinking about this internally. But so we pay for an Ahrefs subscription, right? And there's a limit on API tokens that they give. So I was actually going to try to test something and then it's like, you're out of AI tokens, right? API tokens. I'm like, what? And then I looked at it, it was like, it was someone else on my team that had maxed out all the tokens. And I'm like, how did you do that? Right? He's like, I was just testing it. And I think the issue was he just let it run. And I'm like, dude. And so, so I think, and by the way, this guy's a great guy. I love him. But what my point is, is a lot of people, they want more and more usage. They want more and more tools. But when we aren't holding people accountable to like, hey, what's the actual ROI? Not, I estimated I saved this time. No, no, no, no. F that, right? It's more so what, how much more traffic did you drive? Yeah. How much more conversions did you drive? How much more usage did you drive if you're a product organization, right? If you're talking about a product, but no, no estimated this, estimated that, right? I'm literally spending money. I don't need your estimation, right? I need to know what the ROI is, and I'm the number one proponent of AI, don't get me wrong, but come on, there has to be some guardrails around this stuff.

There has to be, and all these things cost a lot of money, and I think that's where people make huge mistakes in which they just use and they don't think about the consequence of Oh, I just spent a lot of money from the company. Maybe not new money, but we had existing contracts and I just used up everything. So the company, if they want to use these features or these capabilities, they have to spend more money.

By the way, one of our mutual friends, he's like, oh, he messaged me the other day. He's like, I'm spending $14,000 a day on tokens, right? So that's about $5.1 million a year. And so like, you know, this stuff's got to— I'm not saying don't spend on tokens. I'm saying you just got to be smart about how you use it. And I do think it's a good barometer when you look at someone's token usage. How they're using it is important. And I think that should be— that goes into the performance review, in my opinion. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or 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.

Yeah. And you're also seeing something that's happening in marketing right now, at least in B2B, Companies are releasing too many features and you may be thinking, Neil, how could you have too many features? We're entering in a world where it's so easy to release these and yes, you can have product marketers or people who just focus on releasing features and marketing them and making the experience delightful, but the issue is now as consumers, what we're seeing from a marketing perspective, they're getting overwhelmed like, oh look, my tool does 1,000 things. Well, 1,000 things is a lot. I only need you to do 5 things really well, and this is just getting too complicated. So sometimes pushing out more faster than your competition can actually hurt you because your product becomes too complex.

This is funny, Neil. We're talking right now, I'm looking at X and I'm looking at Neil Patel is hosting Summit Day 3. There's 910 people there. How are you hosting a summit when we're doing this podcast right now?

You can

do both. It's Neil's AI double.

No, not AI double. It goes all day.

Okay, well, I'm assuming other people are speaking. That's what it is. Yeah, yeah, cool. So let's look at this memo real quick. I actually haven't— hadn't read this yet, but I just saw this the other day. I scrolled by and I just Googled this right now. Um, so Hormozi here says, internal AI usage cap memo. In response to requests for increased AI budgets, they aren't coming, and here's why. We currently offer 16x token spend per employee compared to average of tech-forward companies based on ramp spend data from 70,000 businesses. I say this to reestablish. I actually want to look up that number. I say this to establish, for those of you who request increases, it's unlikely that you'll get it. Unlimited budgets create unlimited waste, a luxury we do not have. Okay, that part I agree with. So budget and use your tokens only on projects that have a clear revenue-producing or cost savings. Uh, that— yeah, okay. Otherwise, it's likely to be fired under shit that doesn't matter and not worth spending money on. To help you, we will be offering trainings on how to figure out what's worth worth working on. Biggest myth number 1, how to use fewer tokens to get same output. Think of this as AI hygiene. How to use the time AI saves you to be more effective. I think those are good trainings. AI is a tool that creates leverage. It helps you get more out of what you put in. That said, company revenue is flat relative terms compared to AI usage increases. This suggests that people are largely using on projects that don't matter or using on things that don't matter than spending the time, the saved time working on things that don't matter. Okay, so this discrepancy Hints at a skill deficiency in the team, one which I hope we will train up just as we train up on AI usage. Okay, uh, right. Hey, but what did we say earlier? P.S., the more clearly you can articulate how what you do generates a return, the more likely tokens will be in your future. And the way to maximize a return is to show how little you can use and how much you can get from it.

Yeah, I also think you're gonna see companies reducing the cost for a lot of this stuff. They already are. Right. It's getting more and more competitive and you're going to have the bigger players willing to lose money to gain the accounts over some of the new up-and-comers just because the big incumbents have just tons of cash that they can burn.

Yeah. Here's what I'll say about this one. I think you've heard me, my stance on this. There's all the trainings you can do in the world, but it's not going to change a mindset thing. And I think what he's addressing here is a mindset thing. I honestly think that's what he's addressing. Now, that being said, I do think it is worth To train people on what is worth working on, right? And then also, what do slop grenades look like? I actually put up a policy on, you know, our writing policy and slop grenades, and how to get, you know, how to use fewer tokens, like using Jev, right? Using an open router, for example, having Jev as an in-between, and, you know, how to think about it helping you be more effective, and how you also, how do you communicate the ROI from this, right? So let's just look at this. I actually asked Grok over here, so I was curious. So he said they offer 16x token spend per employee compared to the average of tech-forward companies based on what Ramp said. Okay, so reports a median AI spend of about $11.95 per month, roughly $12 across recent months. Okay, so he's saying they offer $200 per month. That doesn't seem right to me. But anyway, if that's what it is, I guess it is around $200 a month, well above the median. I actually think you have to go harder than that. And I think what has to happen is You— not, not you, Neil, but I think those of you listening to this right now, it's more so first you figure out how to hire the people that are very AI native, right? And then if they can, they know how to do this well, they know how to use this well, and they know how to prove the ROI, then you give them significantly more than $200 a month. That's what I think.

I think a lot of companies need to go back, especially in marketing, to hiring based off of past results. If you know someone really did well In your sector or your space for a competitor on a specific channel or area that you're struggling in. Those are the people to start recruiting. Have them focus. If they use AI to do even a better job, great. But people need to start going back to the basics because in marketing right now, I'm seeing a lot of AI fatigue. And I use Eric as a good barometer of this. A year ago, everything AI, AI this, AI that, push, push, push. I only want employees that are AI-pilled. To now, hey, there's too much slop. People shouldn't just be spending. A lot of these campaigns aren't working. People are just getting frustrated with the expense and not getting the output that's producing the results that they're looking for.

Yeah, I think on my end, it's more so, it's the revelation that, you know, the fortunate thing is we don't have a ton of headcount, right? So we can move quickly with decisions. I would say from a personnel standpoint, Ultimately making sure that the people that we have on are the AI-native people that can move quickly because they enjoy working with each other. And then also helping the people that maybe don't want to work like that, helping them find the other things where they'll be happy, right? It's just the way we see it, the way I see it more than anything, is that it's the amount that you can do now as a person if you work like this is a lot more. So my take on it is actually you need to hire the people that have the experience, one, but they, in my mind, for my organization at least, they have to be They have to be AI native or else it's just not going to work because they just cannot keep up with the other people. There's other people are like this, they're like this, and they might have a lot of experience, but if they can't keep up, might as well just find someone else that has experience and can keep up. Well, anyway, guys, that's it for today. We hope you enjoyed it and we will catch you tomorrow.