In this episode Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how to succeed in highly competitive markets when you have little or no marketing budget. They argue that traditional channels (SEO, paid ads, social) are becoming a "race to the bottom" as cost‑per‑click rises dramatically (often $50‑$100 in sectors like health insurance, auto insurance, credit cards). Instead of trying to out‑spend larger players, they advocate a product‑led, freemium approach: give away a useful tool for free (e.g., payroll software, a tongue‑cleaner, razor handles, Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic, HubSpot WebsiteGrader) and monetize a larger, related market (health insurance, razor blades, premium features). They link this to the blue‑ocean strategy—finding untapped spaces where competitors aren’t offering free solutions—and stress the need to move quickly, leverage new platform features (e.g., LinkedIn influencer ads), and form partnerships or webinars to exchange audiences. Looking ahead, they predict that AI tools like ChatGPT will make it possible to create and give away sophisticated software for free, turning databases/spreadsheets into market‑changing products. They also highlight that attention, not capital, is the scarce resource, citing Andrew Chen’s "law of shitty click‑throughs" and the decline of banner ad effectiveness. The conversation ends with practical advice to be scrappy, use time as an asset, and explore collaborations.
Chapters
So here's how you market in a competitive market with little to no money.
So my philosophy on marketing, especially in competitive markets, is you can't outspend people. There's already enough people with more money than you. And I don't mean that in a bad way. There's a lot more people, there's a lot of people in this world that have a lot more money than me as well, but you can't do the same strategies that they do. See, if everyone's doing SEO and paid and social and all this kind of stuff, they're spending tons of money. Yeah, you may be able to get more followers because your content's a little bit better, but it is hard to out-market them. And I look at marketing as a race to the bottom. And here's why I say it's a race to the bottom. If you look at each year, I get this year could be a funky year, but if you average it out, marketing keeps getting more expensive year over year. And I get there's some bad economies and when there's a bad economy, it may dip, but overall marketing just gets more expensive year over year. It costs more money for the traffic. It's harder. These channels get more competitive. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do them. You should do them as long as you can generate an ROI. What we found is marketing's gotten so expensive in these competitive industries like auto insurance or, you know, healthcare or credit cards, where it's at a point where some of these industries you're spending $50, $60, $70, $80, $100 a click just for a visitor to your site. And what we feel is it's cheaper to give away stuff for free than it is to buy the traffic. Doesn't mean you shouldn't buy the traffic because if you can make it profitable, by all means do that. But if you're bootstrapped, you don't have a ton of money, you're in a competitive industry, how can you find something to just give away something for free and charge for something else that is a much bigger market? And I'll use a health insurance example. Health insurance costs per click are through the roof. But a lot of companies who provide health insurance, you know, they pay their employees through payroll software. What happens if you just give away the payroll software for free? If you look at all payroll softwares, Gusto, Paychex, almost everyone, and when I'm saying almost everyone, it's 99.99999% of payroll solutions out there charge money. There are some free ones, but the free ones are really terrible, janky experiments, and they only do it for like 1 or 2 employees and you got to manually do a lot of stuff on paper. So it takes a lot of your own time. But on the flip side, if you create a payroll software and you just made it free and you generated your income by saying, oh, someone onboarded 500 employees. Well, cool, let me call them up. You have 500 employees, you need health insurance? Let us work out a deal and provide you guys health insurance. Let us provide you all these other ancillary things, 401 plans, et cetera. And I think you can do this in all industries, both B2B and B2C. OraBrush did it in B2C, free tongue cleaner. They sold toothbrushes then and mouthwash and all these cleaners and stuff like that. Gillette had promos running where free razor, because they know that you're going to make the money on the razor blades, not the razor like handle part. We did this with like Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. HubSpot did this with WebsiteGrader, but the strategy works really well. It's cheaper than spending a ton of money on marketing. It's how you penetrate a competitive market.
So I think the future of marketing in the next 5 to 10 years, if you want to make millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, is free. You know why? Because when you look at ChatGPT, the multimodal version where you can just take a picture of a dashboard or a landing page and it'll just code it up for you, like that's happening. We're gonna see a lot of new software or free software just be given away. And a lot of software, if you think about it, at the end of the day, it's just a database, right? It's really just a spreadsheet at the end of the day. And so that will now be possible. And, um, and, you know, Neil's way of going out there, buying the attention. I remember, um, you know, by the way, just for those that don't know, the way Uber just happened was I bought a senior living website the week before, and I got the— I captured the rankings. And the week later, Neil bought Uber shares. Look what I bought. And it's like, there you go, right? Um, and so, and by the way, just to kind of connect the dots here, at the All In Summit, um, a while back, I forgot who said this, but it's like, you know, you sure as hell can have a lot of capital, and that's more of the commodity. But what you can't really just go out there and buy, it's much tougher to buy, is attention. And that is the name of the game with marketing. And another thing that you all should read is Andrew Chen's essay on the law of shitty click-throughs, because that is just like— click-through rates are decreasing, but cost per clicks are going up. And it's harder to buy this real estate now because more and more people are savvy to this. And this is what happens. Like marketing channels tend to get oversaturated and we marketers pollute things. And this is what happens.
Dude, and it's so funny if you look at that article, it's an old article, but it's still a good one and very relevant. The first banner ad was getting tons of clicks, you know, and—
Less than 5 cents per click. Yeah.
But they were getting tons of clicks and the click-through rate was amazing. But now people see banners and they have banner blindness. And that's why I think if you're trying to market in a very competitive niche, You got to figure out a different angle and the angle isn't really marketing. It's considered more product-led growth or some people consider it growth hacking. It doesn't matter what you want to call it. I look at it as all a form of marketing in which you're just figuring out better bait to attract someone.
But also like blue ocean strategy too, right? So blue ocean is where it's not that competitive. Red ocean is where all the piranhas and the sharks are like, everyone's killing each other, right? But if you go into a blue ocean where like one, Right now, as of this recording, you can go buy software, you can go create software, give it away for free. That's a blue ocean, because most people aren't willing to go do that. Another blue ocean might be a new feature that's released on, let's say, LinkedIn, for example, like the influencer ads, or, I mean, LinkedIn organic right now is super strong, so you got to take advantage of what's out there before it becomes saturated. So you have to be, if you want to get in competitive market and market well, when you don't have that much money, Yeah. Then you have to be able to move a lot faster because these giant behemoths typically don't move that quickly.
Yeah, that's right. But that's how I would market if I were you in a competitive industry. You just got to figure out what to give away for free and how to sell them on something that's much bigger. Look for a small TAM, give away something for free, and sell them on a big TAM. TAM stands for total addressable market. Payroll software, example. I think Paychex is a $40+ billion company.
I think I met the CEO on my Italy trip.
Really? Oh, that's cool. And UnitedHealthcare is a— 10x plus bigger businesses, $400-something billion last time I checked the stocks. It could be a little bit off, but either way, give away free payroll software, a lot of people be happy, sell them on something that's much bigger.
Yeah. Funny story. I'll tell you the story afterwards. The last thing I'll end with here is if you do want to market in a competitive market as well, like without much money, it's like, okay, well, who can you collaborate with? Who can you partner up with? Like if you're in B2B, can you do partner webinars with people? Who has the attention? How can you make it a quid pro quo where maybe your email list isn't as big, but maybe you have another asset that's relevant? So it's on you to think about the angles that are available, and it's on you to figure out how to be scrappy. Because again, you don't have the capital necessarily, but you can figure out all the different angles to make this work. Because what you do have is you have an abundance of time to make it all work. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, which you should be, Um, if you're not subscribed, you should. And check out this next video over here, and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye!
