Modern Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Adaptability, and AI

All right guys, we're going to talk about why AI SEO is BS. So the other day I was on a webinar and I was doing this webinar and like, they're like, guys, Eric, please tell me about AI SEO. Like, how do you do it? Blah, blah, blah.

Is it BS?

I was like, 100,000% is BS right now, dude. I just saw a company, Profound. They just raised $20 million today. They raised from Nvidia, Khosla Ventures, all the Nate who's who's these investors, right? And they help you, apparently they help you rank higher on these LLMs, right?

I don't think they help you rank higher. I think they track.

They say that. Yeah, it's a lot of tracking. And like, how did they raise $20 million? I hope there's a great vision and I haven't used it myself yet. I trust that there's a great vision there. But AI SEO as it stands right now, and I'm curious to hear from you, it's like, okay, you hear people citing all these case studies. Yeah, you need to— ChatGPT is 95%, it's refreshed content. Okay, well, that's still traditional SEO. Oh, You need to make sure your H1s are good to go for the AI over— that's still traditional SEO. You need a lot of citations. I keep searching, who's the best marketing podcast? Marketing School. And I was like, I asked it for the first time this week, I was like, justify your ranking for putting Marketing School number 1. It's like, well, they have over close to 3,000 episodes, they have thousands of reviews, okay, we have a ton of citations, and we're constantly refreshing because we're constantly creating new content. But not only that, if you look into the creators, We've been doing it for a very long time too. So there's a lot of trust that's already built with it. But citations is like since the beginning of SEO. And so anything that's AI SEO right now still tracks from traditional SEO. We're not saying it's going to be like that forever, but it is BS right now to say, you know how to maximize and get number 1 guaranteed for LLMs right now. Total BS.

Dude, I agree with that too. And there's a Search Engine Land had an article on this. There's a direct correlation from ranking on page 1 of Google and being mentioned by These AI platforms like ChatGPT and the metrics that you're talking about or the signals you're talking about like brand mentions and backlinks, you know, it's a form of digital PR or it's a form of SEO. Things like schema markup so they can understand the text on the page better and what you're trying to convey. Things like internal linking, you know, all these things are traditional SEO elements. It's just, I look at, AI SEO as it's the same thing as traditional SEO. It's more so people look at AI SEO as different than traditional search. And what they're not grasping is traditional search will eventually no longer exist and it'll switch all into search will just be AI-based.

Mm-hmm.

Now, does that mean there'll be 10 blue links or 0 blue links or just an answer? I think it's going to vary based on the question people are asking. Like if someone says, I'm looking for a red dress and you give details, you're going to see multiple options. But on the flip side, if you're just asking what's 2 2, the answer's 4. You don't need any links for that.

Yep.

Right? At least that's my take on it. And then what people will have to do is optimize for just ranking or being mentioned, whether it's high up on these AI platforms being the first listing, like when we're talking about what's the best marketing podcast, or whether it's just being the the only one that's mentioned. And I do believe that the AI platforms will adjust over time. Like I've been reading some articles and some SEOs are saying, hey, it doesn't matter if you get mentioned by New York Times or Joe the Plumber, if you get mentioned on the AI platform, it's all equivalent. Well, just like traditional SEO, AI platforms will go through the same evolution, which their algorithms will adapt over time and they'll be like, huh, A lot of people can manipulate Joe the Plumber talking about NP Digital or Single Grain or any company out there, but it is harder to get New York Times to mention you, so we're going to put more weight on that.

The other thing, dude, is you think about AI mode, and you actually touched upon this a couple weeks ago. If you look at AI mode, it actually cites the sources, and if you're searching for the best marketing agency, it still pulls from those lists, those listicles, right? So you're still going to reach out to those sites and ask for inclusion, or maybe if it's clutch.co, maybe you have to pay for a sponsorship to get a higher ranking. So a lot of it hasn't changed. Again, we're not saying it's not going to change, it's definitely going to change. But it's overhyped right now. This is where people in SEO give SEO a bad name because they tried to make it this brand new thing to try to get as much, try to get as much attention as possible. But we're just saying, I mean, look, Neil and I, we've been playing the game of SEO for a long time. AI SEO in its current form right now, the way people market it, that part is BS.

Totally agree. And you were speaking about Profound and we're doing something that's interesting, call it within, I don't know, maybe like I'm hoping we can launch it within 2 months. I had this concept because I was like, man, Profound is super expensive. Like, I don't know if you looked at their pricing.

It's $499 for the self-serve, I think. I looked at it this morning.

$499 a month?

Yeah.

No, it can't be.

Yeah, is it?

I thought it was like $100.

It was, they upped it, I think. Now that they've raised from all these people, they have the winds of all these opinions dragging them around. So.

Oh wow. $4.99 a month. So our model that we're going to do is—

Give it away for free?

Yeah.

Yeah. I was thinking about that this morning. I was like, why don't I just give that away for free? I'm like, what's so special about it?

It's expensive to do the calls.

How expensive are we talking?

They do, based on this article that I'm seeing that they raise money, and this is from FinSmes. It supposedly says they do 100 million AI search queries each month, support customers in 18 countries in each language. So let's call it 100 million. I'm guessing it probably costs them, I don't know, $100,000+ a month just in API costs. I'm guessing.

I just messaged a guy, so I'm looking at their Twitter right now. So there's a growth guy that works at Ramp, the credit card company, and so This guy tweeted, we've 4x our AEO test velocity at ramp over the last 2 months and Proven has been a huge part of this. Shoot me a message if you're obsessed with solving the LLM visibility challenge. Literally, I just DM'd him because we're talking about this right now.

Yeah.

And this guy's name is Luke Tubbs. But Profound, look, look who they— again, they've raised from Kleiner Perkins, okay? They've raised from Khosla Ventures, they raised from NVIDIA, they raised from the CEO of Vercel, and then AppLovin CEO, And then you have some podcast people. So I'm just interested. Again, I've never used it, so I can't say much, but I'm interested to see where they take this.

Yeah, it's, I didn't know they're New York based. Yeah, I just can't believe they raised $20 million. I'm curious what valuation.

What do you think it is?

I don't think they lost more than 20%. So—

So call it 80 or 100?

Yeah, I'll go 100.

Yeah.

Maybe their revenue's like at $5 million.

Yeah.

Someone gave 'em 20 times.

Yeah. $5 million is pretty— I can see because everyone's— this is the marketing of this thing. It's like reincarnated LLMs. Everyone wants that right now. So the hype draws people in.

Yeah.

But I'm curious to see what, like, as you get closer to it, you can bring it up.

Well, we pay for a lot of these solutions, including Profound, so we know how it works. It is super expensive.

Do you actually use it yourself?

Do I use it or does our agency?

Have you actually used it?

I've used it, yes.

How is it? I genuinely don't know. So how is it?

It's pretty good. So we use Profound, we use Scrunch. Ahrefs has a version, SEMrush has a version, but I would say the main 2 that we use is Scrunch AI and Profound.

Yeah.

They're pretty good. So Profound is a little bit different where they're just looking at all the queries or all the prompts and they're just telling you how you're mentioned versus the competition and they're just saying good, bad, et cetera. What's interesting about Scrunch that I like with their interface and their graphs and the sentiment, just the way the data is visualized and represented is kind of cool. But all it is is just data vomit and then you got to figure out what to actually do with it.

Dude, they're all contact sales. So Scrunch costs $300 minimum.

I did not know they were that expensive.

Yeah, well they do have an agency program too. I'm just looking at it right now. So the Scrunch and Profound are pretty similar is what you're saying.

Yes, they go after each other.

Huh. Interesting. Well, best of luck to them. And I'm keen to see whatever free solution you have coming out or cheaper solution. Yeah.

Yeah. Because what I do is there's a lot of people who buy this data. Okay. So think of like a lot of marketers and what we would say is, hey, a lot of marketers buy this data. We will go and let's say if someone buys this data and it costs $100,000 a month. I'll say, cool, give me a data dump of it as well, and I'll cover half your cost or one-third of your costs. Just transfer me the data.

Yeah.

So that's eventually where we get to. At the beginning, we'll be paying for the data just like everyone else, so it's expensive. But when a lot of people pay for the data, you can just share costs and it becomes cheaper.

I like that.

Because there's people who will get the data and then sell the data, and then we just go to those people because they're They'll make things much more affordable.

They weren't. It's interesting because I just searched Scrunch versus Profound. Like, if you're in SaaS, typically you should just think about your competitors and make these versus pages as quickly as possible. Neither of them actually did it. So you see Slashdot and SourceForge and TechCrunch as the top 3. So if you're Profound or you're Scrunch, you're listing right now, you should probably just take care of that because it's pretty easy to do. Anyway, so that's what we think about that. But, you know, I came across this thing and you have a similar topic here, but Here's where AI is actually making you stupider. So there is this, this report over here that basically says, I'm just quoting from this report, MIT completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users and the results are terrifying. So yes, ChatGPT makes you 60% faster at completing tasks, but it reduces the quote unquote germane cognitive load needed for actual learning by 32%. So what you're doing is you're trading long-term brain capacity For short-term speed, right? So we're managing to become stupider but more productive. And here there's a caveat with this whole study. So what it does say in there is that if you do have very strong baseline intelligence, so thank God we grew up having to learn things on our own, that means you're going to become a lot stronger. So you need to establish that baseline first. So I don't have kids, but you have kids. So my concern for your kids right now is like if they rely too heavily on this beginning and they haven't established a resilience or a very strong intellectual baseline, They're going to become like this. And I do think that is a massive risk to humanity in general. You do need to establish that baseline. So maybe there is a rule where kids can't use AI until a certain age where they've achieved a certain baseline. How do you feel about it? Because you have kids.

We don't let them use AI. We do— well, it depends what you classify AI. Are you talking about like ChatGPT or someone asking Alexa a question? Because Alexa, I believe, has AI integrated.

Yeah. Well, Alexa is still really stupid. I still— I only ask it about the weather and the time. But yeah.

My kids use Alexa a lot. Probably—

What do you use it for?

20 to 50 times a day.

But they ask like, how, what's the weight of like a blue whale or something? Correct. Yeah. So that's different.

Yeah.

'Cause they're actually trying to learn there, right? I think using it to solve problems though, like I will notice sometimes like when I'm trying to solve like a, come up with legal terms or things like that, I just default to what the answer is, but I'm like, no, no, no, I actually need to think about this a little more. That's what I mean.

So when my kids use Alexa and they ask a question about, let's say a lion or a rhino, And my son doesn't like to answer. He says, your source is off, Alexa.

Your source is off. That's an answer you would give.

And I'm like, where'd you get this from? He's like, mommy says if it's wrong, it's taking it from the wrong place.

That's funny.

And he's just like, mommy says it's called a source. So he's just like, your source is off.

And he's like yelling at it.

He's like, you're wrong.

But you know what's funny? What your son does, that's like baseline what most humans do. We're just wrong. If you get in an argument, there's like, no, there's something wrong with your source. Well, where are you getting your information from? That's a baseline reaction.

Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah. Okay, let me give you one more thing before you go. So brain scans reveal the damage. Neural connections collapse from 79 to just 42. So what that means is that's a 47% reduction in brain connectivity. So if your computer lost half its processing power, you'd call it broken. That's what's happening to ChatGPT users' brains. Go ahead.

I, I, how often do you use ChatGPT?

A lot. A lot. Too much. A lot.

I don't even use it on average once a day.

Dude, I was walking to the gym today. Usually I'm just like walking, like it's like a 10-minute walk and I'm not using it for, but I'm like thinking about strategies. I'm thinking about, okay, how do we grow this person over here? Okay, what's missing over here? Like what do they need to do to fill the gaps if they want to become like, uh, you know, uh, C-level, right? What do we need to do with this person over here? Like literally the whole time I'm just strategizing as I'm walking now.

I probably use ChatGPT maybe 2, 3 times a week max.

Yeah, but you're different. Again, like we've used this analogy, I'm usually like the first couple of waves. You're usually coming in on a plane.

I don't even think it's that. I think we're past the first few waves because we both know it's here to stay. I think for our business, yes, we're using this technology just like you are, but me personally, I don't know what I can use ChatGPT for on a daily basis for improving my work. Like me as an individual, right? I'm not talking about a corporation. Yeah, I genuinely can't figure out like what I'm supposed to be using ChatGPT for on a daily basis.

Let me read you some of my chats from yesterday. Can I read you some of my chats? So before we started, we were talking about eggs, right? And you're worried about cholesterol. So we quickly solved that problem that eggs are good for you and it's good cholesterol, right? Yeah. Another one would be, I have this equation.

Let's go back on this. Let's go prompt by prompt because I want to see what you use it in a day.

Yeah.

And I would tell you what I would have done.

Yeah.

Does that work?

Yeah.

Okay, so let's start with the first prompt.

Yeah. So the first prompt here, are eggs good cholesterol? That was the prompt.

I would have just asked that to Google and I would have got an AI answer.

Yeah.

Okay.

My next one. Okay. Here. This one's a little more complex.

I'm not going to give too many details. Actually, let me go deeper. I actually I probably would've never asked that question and I would've just continued eating eggs. But I don't eat eggs that often 'cause I usually skip breakfast.

But now you might eat eggs more 'cause you know what, you can eat a couple and it's better for you and it's good for you.

Doesn't go with intermittent fasting 'cause I tend to just do lunch and dinner.

Well, see, now you did the next prompt is, 'cause I used to intermittent fast for like 10 years and then you realize, oh, it's actually like you can do it or you can't. It's not necessarily good or bad. You're just really calorically limiting at the end of the day.

I do it for, they say regeneration of cells or something like that. I don't know if that's true or not.

But then they did studies on these and then it's like, oh, okay, well, it's not like, it's like, you know, so, but like now you can do more research on that, right? But let me give you another one. So I have this title here and AI will title this. It says romantic intentions or escape, right? So, you know, there was somebody messaging me. I was like, what's this person's intentions, right? And then it started like, I started like sharing like screenshots with it and things like that. And it started diving in. It's like, well, you know, here are the potential things and here Here are the odds of each one. And then I fed it more information and then I came to my own conclusion, right? And then I was like, oh, okay, no, the best move in this situation is to just be friends. So, but it's like, that was a little strategic thinking that I did with it. You know what I mean? I already had like somewhat of a conclusion, but it gave me a couple helpful insights there. Let me give you one more.

So wait, prompt by prompt, that one, I would've never had to use ChatGPT.

You would've just made your decision.

No, no, I'm married with kids.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Let's see. Let's see.

You're good with this one now?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You wouldn't do that one.

Yeah.

Okay. Now, now this is one where I'm constantly— this is where AI helps and this is where you're gonna think it's kind of stupid, but, and even AI calls me stupid for doing this, right? So, I use this thing called My Body Tutor where I have to fill in what I ate and my workout every single day, but I don't wanna bullet point out my entire workout, my estimated calories for everything. And I don't know a lot of the calories that I eat, so I'll take pictures of my food and say, okay, approximately how many calories is this? And it'll gimme a calorie count. And then so I'll input all that. But then the most annoying thing I have to do every night is I have to break out my workout into bullet point form. So I did the this, that, and, you know, X amount of times this weight, blah, blah. And so it bullet points it all out and I copy it and I put it in, right? So it's a very minor thing, but that's where I use it, right? Otherwise I just wouldn't fill out that thing. And I think I just, I probably end up saving $400 a month paying for that subscription. But that's what I do. It's like my accountability coach.

So on that one, I wouldn't have used ChatGPT because I eat whatever's in the fridge and my wife makes food. Like if she makes brownies for the kids, it's made out of sweet potato. So you can imagine how delicious it tastes.

That's great.

But when you think about the healthy side of it, it actually tastes pretty decent. It's not as good as a normal brownie that you're going to get from a store, but it's much healthier. Same with like the Ninja Creami. When I gave it to Noah, we never used it. It was brand new, right? And the reason being is my wife doesn't want to give our kids ice cream. Dude, even if it's a healthier version, it's still somewhat ice cream.

So good.

But I just eat whatever's in the food, uh, in the fridge tends to be organic.

Yeah.

She cooks every day, lean food. There is no taking pictures or counting. And I'm also underweight in general.

You are? Okay. I'm gonna give you 2 more and then we can move on from here. Okay. So I do this thing called the Norwegian 4x4 every week, right? And so I, I obsess about the health stuff cuz I just wanna live longer. That's really the main reason. And so the Norwegian 4x4 will boost your VO2 max, right? Your VO2 max VO2 max is one of the metrics that is one of the gold standards for increasing your longevity. Do you want to ask something?

Yeah. What is a Norwegian 4x4? Can you explain it?

Yeah. So, in a Norwegian 4x4 workout, I'm on my Peloton bike, right? And then, you're riding, it's 4 sets of 4 minutes, really intense riding, right? Like, you're gassed at the end of it, right? And so, the whole idea here is you're stressing your body out and then, you're increasing your oxygen intake. Does that make sense?

So, 16 minutes of bike riding total.

Yeah.

4 times. What's the break after 4 minutes?

Yeah, so this is where I was doing it wrong. So I was doing a minute in zone 1, which is like easy, right? Like you're just like, yeah, whatever. And then I went straight into the 4 minutes and then I did 2 minutes in zone 1 again to cool down. And then I went back into like zone, zone 4 and 5, and then I went back to, to, to zone 1. And then I was like, I was looking at my, my heart rate monitor. I was like, something seems off. 'Cause I, I, I feel like I have more left in the tank. 'Cause my, what you're trying to do in this workout, and I don't wanna get too nerdy for everyone, but You want as much time in zone 5 as possible, right? So, I was like, okay, well, so I asked the question here. I was like, in a Norwegian 4x4, how many minutes should I be in zone 5 for optimally, right? And so, this is, you can Google this, but total zone 5 time, you should be there 4 to 8 minutes. And, when I was looking at the thing, my heart rate monitor, it was always 2 or 3 minutes. And, I was like, so yesterday for the first time, I was like, okay, something's off over here. So, I started going back and forth with it. I started showing screenshots of my heart rate and all that. It's like, What you should be doing is 3 to 4 minutes warmup in zone 2, right? And then your heart rate gets up and then you do the zone 5 and then you come back to zone 2. So, you keep your heart rate up. I'm like, I'm so stupid. I should have done that, right? And then yesterday, so then I showed my metrics yesterday, I was basically 8 minutes in zone 5. But I was like, this is like my little health coach, right? That's something I did. I'll give you one final one, but do you want to react to that one?

Yeah, I get why you use it, but I don't do that, so I don't have a use. I'm more curious, what are some of the business prompts? Because on the personal side, I just personally wouldn't use any of these because I think our daily lives are a little bit different.

I'll give you a business one. Yeah. So we have a company that does about $30 billion a year. They reached out and they want help with like agentic workflow stuff, right? And so our salesperson dealing with that one told them, rightfully so, that we do a lot of that stuff internally, but to do that for our clients, like this would be a beta test, like this would be a pilot. And so I was workshopping it with this deal with AI and it's like, well, it knows this company and it's like, you should be charging for this pilot at least a couple hundred grand, 'cause like at least, right? And then it's like, then, 'cause it knows my memory from like Carrot and all the other things that we do, then it's like, then you can connect.

Yeah.

Oh, then it found out the person on that call actually stood up their ABM program at that company. So then it's like, of course we'd float Carrot into that one, into that conversation. But it spotted that. And so it's like in that case, it found, it helped with pricing and it helped with packaging too.

Okay. What else do you use it for on a business end?

I have one over here on, okay, let's say there's a leadership gap. Let's say someone on the team wants to become like a director or something like that, right? And then I, you know what I did? I just took the entire one-on-one document because someone brought this to me. I took the Because we have the one-on-ones public, right? In the, in Google Docs, I just dragged it in. I was like, what do you think about this person over here? They want to, they say they want to become a director, right? And then it says, this person does not want to be held accountable to numbers. This person complains and makes excuses all the time. And this person is like this and that. If this person seriously wants to get there, they would do X, Y, and Z, blah, blah, blah. And I just took that document. I sent it back to the manager.

All right. I think the big difference here is on the personal side, I could be wrong on this. I think my life is more rinse and repeat than yours.

Yes.

So I have, yes, less use for ChatGPT. I'm not saying this is good or bad, but a lot of my day revolves around work and children.

Yeah.

Right? And with children, there's routines, you know, you go to their shows, you go to chess. It's like, there's not as much—

You can't ChatGPT your children.

Yeah. And then for the business side, I wouldn't use it for the use cases that you use it for. I'm not saying they're bad, It's just more so my organization headcount-wise and management-wise is pretty built out where I don't really deal with a lot of this stuff. I don't have direct reports, as you know.

Yeah. Which is great. It's a dream.

It's a dream. It is probably one of the best things I've done. I haven't necessarily made as much money as I've wanted to, but the no direct reports is probably one of my Achievements that I'm happy with because I've figured out how to grow the business while still not having direct reports. I think someone who's better at it than me is Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot, but I would say he's the gold standard. I would say—

If there's a book worth writing, that's a book for you to write.

Yes. I would say I'm the bronze standard. He's the gold standard. So I got to work up to silver and then eventually I got to work up to where he is, but I got quite a few years left in me. I'm quite a bit younger. But yeah, just for me, like when we're going back to the ChatGPT conversation, there's— yes, in our organization we use it. It's very valuable. We use actually a lot of AI tools outside of ChatGPT as well. But me personally, on a daily basis, there's just not that many use cases for me.

I'm going to give you one that you might consider. You probably won't, but you might consider. But before we do, we have a mutual friend, so he pays for ChatGPT Teams, right? So the entire team enterprise, I think. So you can see the usage. And so he's constantly questioning like, if your usage is so low, and then you're a low performer, what should I do? Right? And so it's like, you're not willing to adopt AI fluency either. That's a signal that maybe it's not the right fit here. You just saw like, Microsoft's going to be cutting more even though they're doing well right now, their sales team. But okay, so this one's interesting. I do something to psych myself out here. You know, I like to gamify life, right?

Uh-huh.

So what I've been doing recently, I have it rate the— I'm like, how high leverage was my day today, right? And if it scores me like an 8, I get really mad, right? And then I'm like, okay, well, here's what else I'm working on right now. I want to be working on this and that. And then, okay, here's the other list of priorities. And so I kind of, I don't really need this, but it's more so it helps me reprioritize on the highest leverage things. And it's right every single time. Because I'll like list some things I want to work on and it's like, yeah, no, this should be handed off, right? Unfortunately for me, I still have to manage, right?

Yeah, you still have to manage.

And so for me, but it's like, no, constantly like this, this, and this, right? And so, you know, as entrepreneurs, maybe I'll talk about me, like I, we tend to get distracted easily and we want to help everywhere. And this is just how my personality is. I want to help everywhere I can jump in, right? But I shouldn't do that necessarily. And I would say this has helped save me a lot of time and refocus me and trick me into working on the right things.

Yeah, I myself have a pretty good discipline about being laser-focused on one initiative in the corporation and just making sure I'm moving the needle. My version of that is I work on specific projects at a time. So for the last 45 to 60 days, I've been focusing majority of my time on AnswerThePublic. This month, revenue growth will be 12% over the previous month.

Great. Huge.

And I check their revenue stats At least once a day.

Of course you do. Yeah.

Including weekends.

Yeah.

So that's how I know I'm being productive because I look at my changes I have the team implement. If the numbers aren't going up, I'm pissed. Going with the experiment we did with like, one of the things we implemented because we talked about this on podcast was step 2 on Answer the Public was collecting a full lead, right? Step 1 was register. So you use a product, you put in a search query, it gives you more keyword ideas. Step 2 is if you want to keep using it, keep searching or unlock data, you register, you put in your email password or authenticate through Google. Step 2 after that would be name, phone number, marketing budget, URL. We've called a lot of leads. We just, I don't know if the team has implemented it yet, but 2 days ago I gave them, I sent them a text because my team's now on I know there's Slack and all this stuff, but I have this team on my end on a—

WhatsApp?

Thread. No, no, no. Text thread. Everyone just has iPhone.

Yeah.

So it's called NPD Experiments and I just text every single day on what I need to see.

How's it going? How's it going?

No, not, not really. How's it going? More so, did you get this design done? Show it to me.

Yeah.

And they'll, they'll send me like the actual screens, like in the design. Like this is a text message.

Yeah.

So it doesn't matter if I'm on a plane or wherever.

Oh.

They'll actually send me the designs over text.

Yeah.

And I can see it on my iPad because iMessage is connected there.

Yeah.

And they're like launches. I'm like, what will the original look like in the variation? Right? Where's it shown? See what makes—

Dude, there's so much blue here. Sorry.

The lifetime's effective. It's just count down timer. It's real testing. Now there isn't more of that on either option. All right. When a user comes by, if you're telling, but where do they see this? Does it replace the pricing page and they just keep going? And then I get on the phone from people and I'm like, remove it all.

Stop the A/B test. Yeah.

And I'll tell them what changes to make and I'll have them pull out data wherever I want, but that's how I get a lot of my stuff done. And if it moves the needle, great. If it doesn't move the needle, like the step 2, I told the team to remove it. I don't know if it's actually done, but I'll follow up with them tomorrow and be like, did you guys actually remove it? Or, and they usually send me a deck.

Mm-hmm.

So every single week, you guys can't see, Eric can kind of see. Look, founders alignment deck, and it'll have everything, you know, just numbers, charts, timelines, what's being done where.

Founders alignment deck, meaning this deck comes to you guys, your founders, every week, you and Mike, and, uh, it's just to align you on what people, the high leverage thing people are, things people are working on.

Every aspect of the business that we think's going to move it.

Uh, I like that.

And yeah, like everything. Cost optimization, June $34,000, April $17,000, saved, you know, $16,865 per month, roughly 49%. Last 4 months, they break down the cost per month saved. We'll expect 5% savings coming in the upcoming months, but like—

And you get that every week?

Every week.

Wow, I like that.

But this is on top of us just really communicating with the people that I'm working with right then and there to make changes. And either things go up or they don't. And if they don't go up, things are going to change. Like a great example of this. So I've been having discussions with my team. I just got back from New York. I landed Tuesday. All right. So when I landed at 2:30, you know, got to the hotel around 4:00.

You arrived in New York Tuesday?

Uh-huh.

You got back?

I got back yesterday night late. Technically today morning because my flight was delayed like 4.5, 5 hours.

Wow.

Issue with weather. But when I landed in New York, I was able to, I checked in by around 4:30. There was a line, got to hotel room right then and there. I scheduled a call while I was on the plane with my team. Like I think 4:30, technically I scheduled at 4, I pushed it to 4:30 because it was just taking longer because of New York traffic. I had a meeting at 5 o'clock, so they had a 30-minute window and I was like, guys, I want to change Answer the Public. And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, you do a search, okay? And I want to show you actually how we operate our business, okay? So the first step actually even going before that was I had the team design me a Figma of the Answer the Public homepage based on my feedback everywhere.

Yeah.

And I'm like, you know, this is silly how you go to Answer the Public and you have pick, I want data on Google, I want data on Amazon, and majority use Google anyways. When I say majority, like 80+% use Google, then some use YouTube, which would be the next big option. The rest are really small. And I'm like, search is no longer this way. The data feeds that people pull in are from everywhere. You already know the search everywhere concept. So I told them last week to design—

Turn the camera too.

Okay. So I told them to design this. I can't read the headline anymore. Yeah, you can.

See what people are searching on all platforms. I like that.

And then it just has like this wheel.

Yeah.

The team came up with that.

Yeah, I like that.

There's no more picking of the platform. So then I told them today, or not today, on Tuesday when I had my call, I just want the homepage really simple, the overview report of AnswerThePublic. I don't want to showcase all this Google data. Like, okay, what do you want to showcase? I'm like, I want to showcase someone does a search. And then it ends up telling them there's 4 boxes. I don't know what they'll design. All right. I think the report should be broken into 4 sections: AI, traditional search, social media, and shopping.

Yeah.

And it just takes all the platforms and then it tells you keywords for all platforms and you can dive into, you know, let's say the AI one. And assuming we give you, you give us your domain name, it'll tell you Hey, this is where your domain's showing up for all these keywords. Here's the competitors that are showing up. Here's your sentiment. Here's not. Here's your growth over time versus your competition. And you do that for all platforms. Here's some new keywords that you can target for traditional search that you're not targeting. Here's some for shopping, for Amazon, et cetera, marketplaces. Here's some for social media. Here's content ideas, but just make it really simple. It's just an overview and here's the data for all platforms and you choose your own journey.

I feel like all SEO tools are going to go in this direction where like you do, you look at Ahrefs and Semrush, they're showing AI data, right?

Yes, but it's an add-on for roughly $100 plus.

Oh, it's expensive. Like the Ahrefs one's like, okay, if you want to add the AI overviews one, it's an extra $1,000 a year. And then if you want to add like each LLM, it's extra $1,000 a year. So, so I like the— you're coming in cheaper, right?

Free. And then we'll have paid versions.

Yeah. So that's great.

I'm ideally trying to figure out how I can charge like $9 a month.

Yeah. Can you make those economics work? Are you gonna break even on the 9?

I have no idea, but I have money. So let's just see how much I have to burn before I make some of my money back.

But I think that the point here—

I know that's arrogant to say, but it's the reality. No, I mean, it's true.

And so, but I think that the key thing to call out here is, is there's the thing that you remind me of you telling this story is Flexport has this business ops team where they go in and wherever there are things that are on fire or not working as well as they should be, there'll be an elite team that goes in, they spot the issues, they figure out the issues. If they need to fire some people, they'll fire some people, they'll fix the issue, maybe rehire some people, and then they'll move on to the next problem. But when they— when that biz op team comes in, it gets really intense. I'm not saying it's very intense or whatever, but like you are driving a lot of energy there and you're moving things along quickly. Otherwise it's just going to be like, oh yeah, we'll get it done in 2 weeks. Oh, it's going to take like 2 weeks to get this done. But then all you need to do in those situations is just, how come this can't be faster?

Yeah.

And just keep asking it, how come this can't be faster? Yeah.

Yes. And that's what I do over text. And then we have a WhatsApp group for Ubersuggest, including the devs, because not everyone has an iPhone that I deal with. Typically on the executive team, everyone has an iPhone, at least for the software division. And yeah, it's just continually just cranking. But this is how I operate. I'm not saying my way of operating is good or bad.

It works for you.

It works for me. I don't really need to use tons of AI or ChatGPT. And again, I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm just saying this is my reality. I know my team leverages AI quite frequently, especially my co-founder Mike, but this has just worked for me.

Well, I'll tell you where I got lazy. So the team, I was sitting in a marketing meeting on Monday and then, you know, somebody popped the questions like, what's the highest leverage thing we can do right now to drive more leads, right? And then people were giving all these like random answers, right? I was like, hey guys, Why don't we just optimize the form on our site and just do that? Like, because everyone was giving these super elaborate answers, right? And so, and then I was sitting with my CTO, we're having like a smoothie, and then I was like, I feel really lazy right now. So then what I did was I just like, hey, here's our forms, these are 2 screenshots, it's not showing anymore, but these are 2 screenshots of my form right now.

Show the camera.

It converts at 13%, like if you land on the form, it converts at 13%. I think it'd be way better than that, right?

Yeah.

I was like, okay, what do we need to do to double the conversion rate? And it actually gave a bunch of nice moves that we're going to be implementing, like 4 out of 5 of the solutions we're going to be implementing.

What are 4 of the— what are the ones you're going to implement?

Okay, so one is, this one's obvious, but we have 6 form fields, we're going to cut it to 4. Yeah.

Okay.

One is, and then another one would be, and these are a little more minor in my opinion, but adding a trust quote or badge right before the CTA.

Yeah.

Okay. And then changing the CTA to, we have this quote around, because everyone's like, they don't want to add more headcount right now, right? People are talking about reduced headcount. So we always had this quote here where it's like, grow your marketing without adding headcount. So we're going to change it instead of, uh, um, get free consultation or whatever. It's, uh, grow my marketing without adding headcount.

This is for a single guy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why don't you just copy what we did on neilpatel.com/consulting?

That's exactly—

I've already tested the crap out of this.

Yeah. So you know what's funny? One of the screenshots in here is your form.

Yeah, just copy it.

Yeah, yeah. So how does that, what does that convert at?

I don't know, but it's really good. We've tested everything from testimonials before, CTAs that didn't work well.

That's the page though, but you have a form. On your site too. I'm talking about just—

This is a form.

Yeah. So if they click the CTA, that goes to that.

If they click the consultant page, it goes to that. If they click book a call on the bottom, we let them know what they're going to get on the call. So then that way people know what to expect. Put some logos in there.

This is what I clicked. I clicked hire us on your website.

Yeah, that's tested too.

But do you know what this converts at?

No, but it converts well.

Yeah. So in my opinion, I'm like, guys, it's 13%. We can do a lot better. And like, Most people are going to land on that form.

So the issue is probably not conversion rate as much as you think. What we tend to do is we don't optimize for the conversion rate. We optimize for the type of company that hits us up.

Yeah.

Because when we optimize too much for conversion rate, a lot of junk, we got a lot of junk.

Yeah. But this one, so what you just, those of you that can't see this right now. So Neil has this form on NP Digital. It says email, first name, and this was a work email only. You guys filter for that.

Right.

So work email only, which filters a lot of, you know, people. And we actually, I think we have that too. And then first name, last name, and then phone number, website URL, and then monthly marketing budget.

But we change work email to just email.

Yeah. Because you don't want to— but then you'll still verify it.

We verify it on our end, but we tested work email versus email and it didn't make a difference.

Got it. Cool. Well, yeah. Anyway, let's move on to the next one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Funny enough, we're testing this on our homepage.

What is that? My digital marketers believe Google and Meta is where the attention is, but the attention is really everywhere. I like it.

Yeah. But the, the design isn't up to my standards. The team whipped it out in 2 hours.

I don't understand the graph.

The, the graph is the search on all the platforms.

Ah, okay. Okay. Okay.

But it, it's, and it, it's showing, but the graph isn't done right. It's supposed to be squiggly hand-drawn text.

Yeah.

And then it says, SEO is no longer search engine optimization, it's search ever optimization.

I love it.

I think the CTA is let us help you be found everywhere.

I love it.

But it's, the design isn't what I'm looking for, but it's more so I'm like, just throw it up and then we will go and if it shows any signs of doing better, then I will go and then make it nice.

Yeah.

But I'm okay with ugly and just getting a test run.

Yeah, crawl, walk, run.

Yes.

Crawl, walk, run. You know what's interesting? This is one thing I want to talk about. You know, this is a good episode when we're only 2 episodes in or 2 topics in.

Because we're just sharing our life and what we do on a weekly basis.

Which is great. Like, isn't this great? So you don't have to say it's great if it's not great. But you know what's interesting? I went to this creator pickleball event like 2 days ago, right?

Oh, okay.

Yeah. So there's a, like, because VidCon's happening right now. So there's a lot of influencers and people.

A video conference?

Yeah. It's like for YouTube, VidCon.

Oh, okay.

And so it's interesting because there, oh, a guy actually interviewed you before. It's like one of those, you remember you're on the School of Hard Knocks, but then another guy interviewed you in Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills, there's an Asian guy, Nick, I think, Nick Ho. I just remember he showed me a picture of him interviewing you. It's like one of those things like when you're in Beverly Hills and he's like, how much money do you make or whatever? Not the Hard Knocks one, but there's Asian kid. Asian kid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Similar stuff.

Yeah.

He used to live in Beverly Hills.

Yeah. Yeah. And so he, but it's reversed now because I used to live in Pasadena. Like I'm from the Arcadia area. He's from Beverly Hills and he moved to that area and I've like, I've moved over to this area. But anyway, so it's interesting because He's very young, right? He's like him. And then he had a couple other friends, right? Let's just say they're all doing close to 7 figures or more than 7 figures. And they're all like young, early 20s or mid-20s, right? And they're asking me for advice on what to do. And I think this would be helpful for anybody listening to this. Like, even if you're a teenager or in your 20s right now, what is advice we'd give to our 20-something-year-old self? And this is more for entrepreneurs, people trying to become entrepreneurs. What would you say?

It would be different from what I would've gave to myself versus what I would give today.

Okay.

You want both?

Let's do both, yeah.

So I would've told myself, stick with the big TAM. So total addressable market. You have to penetrate one, you don't have to innovate, and stick with it for a very long time. So pretty much have laser focus on something that's really big and give it 10+ years. Because I switched too many times when I was earlier. And you have a really good Charlie Munger quote that you posted on Instagram I think 2, 3 days ago in a story about waiting. The best returns are made by not buying or selling.

It's by just— Money is made in waiting.

In waiting.

Yeah.

And I totally agree with that. If I look at the majority of my success, it's come from the businesses that have just been around for a very long time and just waiting it out, the good economies, the bad economies. And that's what I would've told myself. But if I was dealing with someone who is 20-something years old, because I see still quite a few of these people at conferences, And I actually get way less questions from these people about life and career compared to what I used to. And my answer to them would be rely a lot less on AI, not from an aspect that AI is not here to stay. I think it's amazing technology, but I think a lot of these young entrepreneurs are getting too reliant on AI in which they're asking it for every little piece of business advice or coaching advice. And they look at it as gospel. And whether you're getting that, it's crawling the web. It doesn't— who do you know where it's really pulling from? And sure, some of the sources are cited, but it's not like you're getting advice from Sam Altman specifically or Marc Andreessen.

And even if you did, they still don't have enough context on your life.

No, exactly. And I think it's really important not just getting advice, but you have to look at who you're getting the advice from. I know someone who has a ton of pharmacies, you and I both know, and at one point Their business was doing like, I don't know, like $400 or $500 million a year. Yeah, $400 or $500 million a year in revenue.

Mm-hmm.

They're crushing it. Sadly, the company went bankrupt. They invested too heavily in technology instead of just realizing it's a traditional pharmacy business and there's nothing wrong with it. They try to go the quote unquote technology route. But if I wanted pharmacy-related stuff, I would definitely go to him and ask him for advice because he's been through it. He's seen what works, see what doesn't, and more importantly, he's failed. He's built a lot of revenue, but he failed and he can tell you what to avoid. But I wouldn't go and ask him about running my software company.

Mm-hmm.

It doesn't matter that he built something that does $500 million a year and he built most of it without venture dollars, which is impressive. I think he got to over $100 million without venture capital. I would not ask him how to build my software company. I think the advice is going to be not useless, but close enough to Not being great.

Yeah. I'll tell you what I told these 3 guys. It's funny because it's like 3 Asian entrepreneurs, like, sorry. And they're like asking me a lot of questions, right? And it's like, one, I'm like, the fact, the reason I'm doing this right now is to pay it forward. And I always feel like it's your job once you start to accumulate at least some level of success to pay it forward to the next generation, right? I think we've both always been like that.

Yeah.

But what I, I did say something that's similar. I said, look, you're going to focus, you got to focus on one thing in your, your, your early 20s, your mid-20s, you're going to try a bunch of different things. That's okay. But once you find the one thing, you got to lock in on it and really go deep. My mistake is I tried too many different things and I tried to do 7 different things at once. And that's actually not success at the end of the day. That's the first thing I said. The second thing I said is, I remember when I was 23, I called up an entrepreneur. I said, what's the biggest impact, like decision that you made? And he's like, joining Entrepreneurs Organization. And it's not necessarily Entrepreneurs Organization, but it's surrounding yourself with like-minded people, right? You do that, I do that. EO is kind of my foray into that and then joining different groups and then forming my own groups too. you know, us doing events together or like speaking at events, you start to find your tribe. And then once you find your group of like 8 to 10 people who you love, you hang out with these people maybe at least once a year, you guys go on a trip and then grow old with these people because it's really like as we get older, you realize that it is just friends and family that ultimately matter long term.

Yeah.

So I said that and like stay humble too at the very end of it. Like I said, look, you have a bunch of creators here and things like that, right? The reason why some of them are really they can be a little more arrogant or maybe even insecure is because they're not secure with who they are yet, right? But you and I know a lot of business people have achieved the pinnacle and they're still very humble, as in like very like, aw shucks, like, you know, type of people, right? And I said, stay humble like forever and find, you know, find a peer group and focus for a very long time. And the final thing I said, this is a Winston Churchill quote, is If you're going through hell, keep going because that's literally just what life is.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's— these young entrepreneurs are going in a very different world. You were talking, I think, I don't know, like 4 or 5 months ago, maybe 6 months ago, how one day there's going to be a solo founder unicorn. You saw the one that Wix bought for $80 million?

I put it here. $80 million acquisition, 1 employee. But go ahead.

No, 8 employees.

8 employees?

Yeah, it was 8 employees.

I just saw their employee count jump a lot in the last couple months or so. But even under 10 is still amazing.

It's still amazing. But it goes back to what you're saying. That's still a far cry from $1 billion, but it's headed in the right direction. You very rarely see any company getting bought for $80 million with 8 employees. They typically have 100 employees, 200 employees, or some headcount that is actually large, but it's very rare to see 80 employees— I mean, 8 employees.

Yeah. And by the way, their ARR, I think, is $10 million or so. And then they're a competitor to like Replit or like Lovable, like these vibe coding tools. And I think maybe at their stage, and this is no knock on them, maybe they're like, hey, maybe it's too competitive here and we should cash out and then move on to the next thing. I don't know what their psychology is, but what you said, I do want to harp on one thing and then we can move on. You mentioned that founders using AI. So in your early 20s, You really don't know what you don't know. You have to establish that baseline level of intelligence. Otherwise you're just going to try to rely on AI for everything. And that means you're outsourcing what makes you unique, which is critical thinking. Yep.

6-month-old bootstrap vibe coding startup sold for $80 million and $25 million of the $80 was retention bonus. And they grew to 255,000 users, hitting 10,000 users within the first 3 weeks, according to his post on LinkedIn, generating $189,000 in profit in May, even after covering high LLM token costs, which he also documented publicly. It's good for him.

Dude, you know, I want to call something out here. I don't know if you're seeing this, but so Levels.io, basically there's been more people talking about on X. So we went from influencers not being considered a job to it being the only job. And then Levels was like, yes, modern founders will be half influencer, half founder. I think this isn't completely new. Look at Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, but I want to take it one level higher. every company will become half media, half the original business. And so you see now OpenAI just started a podcast. You see Sam Altman being interviewed by his company. Stripe just started a podcast. They interviewed the CFO of Meta, and I think they had some other interesting people on the podcast. And so we're going to see a lot more of this. And this kind of coincides with this whole me going to this creator pickleball event because everyone's trying to establish distribution. But I'm like, I was talking to one of the guys there. I was like, look, Establish a distribution, but don't get trapped in trying to interview these people and grow a big reach on podcasts because that's not going to drive revenue for you. I literally did that. Like, I've been podcasting for like 14, 15 years, right? And so you're— I was like, look, you can keep doing the creator thing, but that's— that on its own is not enough of a moat. Like, a lot of creators think that's enough of a moat. And like, but you actually have to learn how to become an operator in some way, shape, or form. Maybe learn pieces of it. Maybe you don't have to learn people management, but you're going to have to learn the ins and outs. And also, So whenever you do a deal with someone, they don't just run circles around you and you get— end up getting screwed on the terms.

Dude, I'm with you on that. Yeah. I also believe that in the next like few years you're going to start seeing more people like the Sam Altmans and the Stripe founders and people like that creating podcasts. Yeah, it's just such an untapped opportunity. We've been doing this for how long now?

I think we're coming up on 9 years.

9 years. Yeah, that's a long time.

And it's really fast. It's gone by really fast.

It has.

Yeah. You didn't even have NP Digital before this. You weren't even married before this. You didn't even have kids before this.

Dude, we were recording in my Vegas condo with no air conditioning.

Yeah, no air conditioning. Yeah, he had to turn off his AC when it was like 115 degrees outside. So it got hot really quickly and we had this cheap mic. Guys, we started cheap with this thing. We had a Yeti mic, which is not a bad mic, but it's cheap. It's like $100 or so. And we're like very close to each other in like really hot temperatures.

Yeah.

So yeah.

And now if you want to start really cheap, the microphones on your iPhone and some of these devices are also good enough to start with.

So you don't have to spend money.

Yeah, get a DJI Mic 2 and then hook it in.

That's a great micro— we use that to record in Miami and we do use a DJI Osmo. We had a second one and we did the DJI mic too. And that was good enough for us. But yeah.

All right. So what do you want to talk about next?

Well, I do have— I do. Okay. I've, because of my mom's passing, I basically tried disappearing from my company, quote unquote, for 2, 2 and a half weeks or so. And so I'm happy to share some lessons because the You always learn quite a bit whenever you disappear or you try to disappear. So basically I stopped appearing for a couple of key meetings, right? But what I learned is that you see who steps up and who can actually handle things on their own. And so, you know, in some cases like the internal marketing meeting where I was driving a lot of the energy, I was like, oh, I don't need to drive the energy as much, but they still do need me for like some critical things. Okay, fine. That's a new learning, right? But then I sat in like one of our leadership meetings and I was like, Okay, this meeting definitely needs me, right? Because it started, we kind of started to sweep key metrics under the rug and like, oh, we can defer it. I'm like, no, no, no, what are we deferring, right? And so I think what you realize is you'll see where things start to really need you and where you need to apply a ton of pressure similar to how you do it. And it's good. This is why the saying is like, if you want to see how good your team is, go on a vacation. And it's like, there's some areas where we're really good, there's some areas where we really need work. And so highly recommend Trying to disappear. I was still working the whole time, but I just wasn't appearing to some of these meetings.

So you were working, you weren't at some of the key meetings, some people stepped up, some of course did not. That's natural. Now you're back into the swing. I would say things are— your life is, um, you, you've adapted to, you know, what's reality, which is your mom's no longer around. Um, and you were pretty resilient yourself I know when it happened, you're like, I got to move on. Work is work. The world doesn't stop and you didn't stop. Do you still go to some of those key meetings now or have your team, the people who stepped up, are they continually stepping up and showing that they can do things without you to make your life easier? It's both.

So, it's funny because someone from my team earlier said this week, I said, I was like, I was already going to stop appearing all the time because Now we're in a season that doesn't scale, right? And so this was the main test. And then she was like, we don't need you in all of these meetings because I'm always trumpeting a message, right? If I— but sometimes the message gets lost if I keep saying the same thing over and over and all the time. And so where I've landed is I will appear where I need to appear and I can release some of the iron fist that I had from the last couple because I needed to take control of the company to bring the company back the last couple of years, right? But now the team's a lot more competent, so now I can back off and back off more. So I know where to step in on and I know where I can step out, and that's extremely valuable.

Yep. Yeah, that's great. I also think that'll make your organization much more efficient because you can now spend your time on other things that are important that aren't getting the focus and the attention.

Yeah. Which is, I mean, the beauty of what Neil has and the beauty of what Dharmesh has is You get to do that 24/7 basically.

Yes, but he's done a much better job than me. His company's also much larger, and I'm not saying—

Company's been around longer too.

How long has it been around?

10?

No, more than 10 years. 20 years?

Maybe a little longer. HubSpot, maybe 1999?

HubSpot started in— Oh wow, almost 20 years. Founded 2006.

Oh.

So 19 years. June 2006. Yeah. So 19 years.

There you go. And your company's been around what, 7, 8?

This will be our 8th year at the end.

Wow.

Okay.

There you go.

So we've got quite a more years to go to try to catch up.

Yeah. All right. You pick one. I have a lot of stuff in here, but you pick one.

Let's see, dude, we're seeing a lot of sales from AI traffic. It's converting higher than traditional SEO. Someone on the Ahrefs blog also posted about this. We have some data that I think I'm going to end up sharing this week on the social web. But for Ahrefs, I believe he said it was around like 0.5% of their traffic comes from AI platforms, but 12% of their signups come from these platforms.

Wow, that's a lot.

That's a lot. And we're seeing similar data, not as high as 12%, and that was just for Ahrefs. But when we look at numbers in aggregate, We're still seeing some decent numbers driving good signups. I think I have the chart from AJ. Yeah, here you go. Look at this chart. That's percentage of overall sales, traditional search, like traditional SEO, like, you know, Google versus AI mode, ChatGPT, et cetera.

Wow. So B2B, okay.

Look at the sales, they're pretty similar, but look at the traffic difference.

Yeah. That's crazy. And it's only going to get bigger. Because I don't know if you saw that there's— Ahrefs actually shared a graph today showing that most of the bot traffic from the web right now, 30% is Google. But you can see OpenAI ChatGPT has moved to 10%. And it's going to continue to rise. And so what, you know, what we were— and I'm sure you've heard the same thing is we are getting leads and then A lot of them are saying that they're coming from very long, complicated queries, like very long-tail queries used inside of ChatGPT.

So yes, so I'm going to break this chart down a little bit more because you guys saw it on screen.

Do you show it over here?

Yeah. So the data's from 50 B2B companies and 43 B2C companies. They all generate at least $10 million in annual sales. All right, so they're not the largest businesses, but they're not the smallest businesses. We want to take a baseline of someone who actually does SEO and Paid advertising, et cetera, right? Omnichannel. So for B2C, traditional search is making up roughly 27% of the traffic, and this is organic, by the way, but 21.25% revenue. And when you look at AI traffic from AI search, 0.49% of the traffic, 11.4% Hmm. And when you look at B2B, 19% for organic SEO, traditional, 19% of the traffic, 11.6% of sales. For AI search, 9— no, sorry, 0.38% of the traffic, but 9.7% of the sales. It's lower on both ends for the AI search for B2B and B2C, But percentage-wise, it barely drives any traffic versus the amount of sales it drives. But I think the caveat here that no one's really talking about is you're getting way more impressions than what you're actually tracking. Because when you do a traditional search, you're going to a website to do your research.

Yeah.

On these AI platforms, you're doing your research in platform.

It's very layered.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you're learning about a company without clicking over to a website.

Yeah.

So visitor count isn't tracked the same way it was tracked in a traditional search. So you're actually getting tons more impressions. You're just not seeing the revenue yet. I mean, or you're not seeing the visitor count yet, but when they go over to your website, they've already made their decision.

Do you know, remember you bought the same thing? So I shared this to social, this thing I do to kind of warm up my eyes. Yeah. The eye mask thing, right? I, it probably took me 15 to 20 minutes of querying ChatGPT to find that product and then determine that's the right product. And then I bought that product. In addition, I bought some other like eye drop stuff, right? But that was all from within ChatGPT. And to your point, like, how do you even count attribution? Because I'm going to go to Google after to search for these things. So Google is going to take the attribution. Yes.

Or Amazon.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, I did go to Amazon. I went to Amazon for maybe both.

Yeah. So then the person who sold it would be like, oh, someone just found us on Amazon. But in reality, you did your research on LLM.

Yeah. So I think what we really then need to monitor, I think, is really LLM usage over time and LLM bot traffic because it's That's where the rubber meets the road because attribution is just totally screwed.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, you have one here on should you build or should you buy, which we've talked about, but it's whenever you bring this up, there's probably a new angle you have.

No, no, it was, I was at an event yesterday and people are talking about like how they're building all these things and they're building their business in multiple regions. And I was just like, the German market, because people are talking about Germany because it was a lot of Amazon sellers there. I'm like, the German market is very different culturally than the US market. It is a very tough market to build a company from scratch when you're already established in the US and they're trying to build something big. We did it organically in Germany. It was really expensive. It didn't work out the way we wanted. A lot of our competitors have had issues in Germany as well. So we just went down the Buy route.

Yeah.

We never, we haven't made our announcement yet, but we'll eventually make the announcement in, I don't know, like 3 months or something like that. But we went down the buy route.

Yeah.

And I think people don't put into the equation of you can build or buy, but when you build, there are costs. And whether you're starting up in a new region or a new division, sometimes it's cheaper to buy something that is barely making any money or has just got started and it's off the ground and they've been doing it for a few years and they're getting traction. So you're buying it for much cheaper. We didn't go for either of those routes. We went with a company that was more than 10 years old, so they had traction, enterprise brands, you get the point. So it costs more money, but time is money and And a lot of times it is just hard to build. Like you can build in one market really well. I did really well with Ubersuggest when I technically bought it. Yeah, I actually haven't built much.

That was 2017, right?

Yeah, something like that.

You're actually right.

I didn't buy that. Yeah. So I didn't build from scratch. I've actually done the more buy route for—

Recently?

Yeah. Last like 5, 10 years.

I would say in your 20s, you tried to build a lot more.

In my 20s, it was pure building. I would say—

Courses from scratch, Crazy Egg.

Everything, majority.

Kiss Insights, Kiss Metrics.

Yeah.

It was all build.

It was all build. Hello Bar with Bob, but that didn't work out.

Yeah.

But it was almost all build in my 20s.

Yeah.

In my 30s, I started buying, but I really started buying to call it mid-30s.

But you still built NP Digital from scratch. Yeah. Like initially.

Yes, technically I built it from scratch.

Yeah. How was it technical? Like—

The model of NP Digital was really different because instead of building a company from scratch, we were just collecting leads.

Yeah, I know. I copied you for that.

Yeah, and we were sending the leads to other agencies and they already had it. We were just getting quote unquote affiliate fee. And yes, eventually we did build it in-house, but the reason And I wouldn't consider that a normal build like I did in my 20s because from day one I just plopped down millions of dollars.

Yeah.

So you're right, I did build, but I built with capital I made from all the previous years.

Yeah, but still, like, you're still, you just have more resources. You're an investor. You're still a resource and you're still very much in it.

Yeah, I'm still in it.

Yeah. Yeah. So I would just say, look, the way I see this is like, it's not should or should you not, in my opinion. I think it's just It just is. And also, many things in life are just, it's, there's no solutions, only trade-offs. So there's a trade-off, right? I think if you're looking to do it, like you're expanding globally, probably a better idea to, especially because your logos, those big RFPs require you to have a presence in these countries.

They do.

It makes a lot more sense. Like that seems like one of the obvious things to do, you know? Yeah.

Like I was talking to one of the largest social networks in the UK when I was there a few weeks ago. And they're like, we'd love to work with you in Germany. Do you have a presence there? And I'm like, yes, we do. And they're like, cool. I'm like, they control all the European budgets. And they're like, that person's like, I'm probably going to take over a lot of the US budgets as well. And you're talking about one of the larger social networks, not a $1 or $2 billion company or even a $10 billion company. They're substantially large and much actually larger than even $10 or $20 or $30 billion.

Mm-hmm.

And yeah, you know, we bought our way. I also think it depends on the phase you are in as an entrepreneur. I'm in a phase where I spend so much more time with family and kids, and I didn't have that in my 20s where I choose to buy because I don't want to go through the grind like I used to. Yeah.

You know what's interesting? So I don't know if we talked about this last week, but I think we did when I was hanging out with our mutual friends that flew in to hang out, right? Because of the passing, but we're all like, yeah, we just don't have it in us to work like we did in our teens or our early 20s anymore. And I'm like, don't get me wrong, I still love working, but I don't want to work at that level anymore.

No, I'm over it. Like, I will grind and I'll still put in the hours, but am I really grinding? Not really when I compare to my 20s. Like, I look at myself as lazy now compared to my 20s.

But also like, we've built up some type of leverage that allows us to If you build up leverage, that means you can hire people or you can invest capital to do things that you normally would've done when you had more time in your 20s. Yeah. So it just changes over time. Yeah.

And for me in my 20s, I didn't have as much money, so I couldn't have just spent the money to not put in the time. I had no choice. Yeah.

Yeah. By the way, so a couple more things from, from our side, I think we've talked a lot about, a lot, a lot about in person. I talked about going to that creator pickleball event. You just came back from New York. You were at an event a couple weeks ago. We, we always speak at things together. We have HubSpot coming up in like, 2 months, 3 months or whatever. So, I think it's good for us to revisit why in-person yields incredible results and how to do it, right? And so, you've hosted events, we host webinars that count as events as well. And so, I think even— so, Eric, he also has a company called Karat. It's funny. He's Asian Eric that has a company called Karat. It's K-A-R-A-T.

The one with Pew Pew?

No, no, no. That's Eric Hung, but he's also Asian Eric. Single child too. Yeah, they're all only child, but anyway, including me. But anyway, so he has a company called Carrot Financial, which is like business credit cards for creators, right? So he hosted this creator pickleball event. I think like 200 people showed up. And you know that guy, Steven He, the emotional damage, that guy, right? You know who I'm talking about?

Is he the realtor?

No, no, no, never mind.

Where he like buys houses and flips them?

No, no, no, no. But there's a lot of creators there and they all have a lot of followers, blah, blah, blah, right? That's a good example of how you get everyone together and they all share it to social and it's good for him because he wants more creators using his credit card, right? So that's the type of event that works for him. But then the events like you and I might do, it might be a dinner with 10, 20 people or something like that, keep it intimate. Or the things you do where you invite a bunch of people that fit your ICP and you do like a luncheon. And then you also teach something at the same time and you have like what, 70, 80 people, 100 people show up?

For a luncheon?

Yeah.

Low end, maybe like 20, high end maybe like 50 to 100.

Yeah. My point of saying this too is like, or if I wanted to, if I'm going to be in San Francisco and it's like, why don't I just have half the dinner people be Carrot customers and the other half be prospects, right? You can do this. You've done it for NP Digital too.

Yeah.

That works like a charm. Steak dinners always work. Events work, webinars work. I just did a webinar with Adam Robinson from RB2B like 2 days ago, right? I think he probably had 400 or 500 people show up and I'm like, that's a great partner webinar. Nathan Latka does the Founder Path webinars where he has like, he's like, he's standing like on a stage, he's got all those monitors behind him and stuff and he's like bringing people in and super high energy. These are all super high converting things and at the end of the day, the thing my mom wrote in that keepsake is like, what's the thing that you're most proud of? It's like my friends and my family, right? Like people all want community. That's what it is.

They really do. It fulfills you in different ways, right? Like working and accomplishing goals is fulfillment, but also having friends around and family around is another form of gratification and fulfillment.

Otherwise, what are you doing it for? Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, it's funny because I had, I was getting smoothies with a friend yesterday. You know this guy, and he was just talking about he, where he doesn't get value from YPO. And I'm like, you know what the problem is for you? You need to hang out with more heavy hitters. Because he's like, this guy's— it's pretty funny. He's like, yeah, everyone I met in YPO is like a joker, right? I'm like, he's like, yeah, there's a lot of people that like they're in it, but they don't qualify. And then like, I end up helping them more than they help me. But I'm like, one, you're very jaded. But two—

Wait, which chapter?

I'll tell you after. I'll tell you after you met him. But I was like, you know, it reminds me of another friend who I think he needs to hang out with heavy hitters too. Otherwise, he's not going to get the value from it. And he's like, you know what? I just don't wanna share my feelings, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, reminds me of another friend who doesn't like to share his feelings, right?

What ethnicity is he?

A beach nearby.

A beach?

Yeah, you can't name him. You can't.

I know him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know him. But my point is, it's interesting because on the other side, a friend from a week ago, we were walking, right? And then this is a guy that was very closed off before too. He joined YPO. I was like, so what have you gotten from YPO? And this is no knock on YPO, I'm just talking about a group, right? He's like, you know what? But hanging out with my forum where it's like they're all heavy hitters, he's like, it's taught me to open up. I'm like, oh, oh, okay, wow. What value did you get from opening up? He's like, it helps me make better decisions at the end of the day for my business. And it teaches me that you don't have to be so uptight, right? But my point of saying all this is that if you're going to join groups or like peer groups and things like that, this is community. You also have to make sure that people are the types of people you want to hang out with and they're at a level that you want to be at. Otherwise, it's going to be a waste of your time. Yes. And so I don't think it's wrong for him or for you know, someone else we know to filter aggressively. Yeah, because you should, otherwise you're wasting your time.

And I think it's more important when you have a family because you have less time, right? When you have kids and you're married, you just have a lot less time. So then it's like you filter harder and harder. Like if you look at me, I don't really do any networking anymore.

No, no, nor have you really needed that. That's the other benefit of building an audience. The network kind of comes to you. You know what's kind of cool at that event? There's like a good amount of people that were like, oh, are you like Eric from Leveling Up or whatever, right? And it's cool. You know why it's cool? This is why you should focus on creating business content if you're listening to this. They wanted to talk about business. I don't want to talk about this creator diss. I don't want to talk about VidCon. I don't want to talk about all this shit. Like, you want to talk about business stuff or me to share my business experience? Happy to do that, right? And that's why it's better to go niche.

I agree with that. And you not only went niche, but you went niche in a massive TAM.

Yeah.

Right? He went niche with his content in which he gives business advice and specifically the niche isn't business advice because it's a massive TAM, it's business advice for startups. I would say, would you agree with that? More leveling up this startup, $0 to call it $10 million or $100 million.

Yeah, yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

So it's not like if you work at Microsoft, how to scale.

No, no. Now it's become much more AI. Like what is just what I'm doing with AI now.

So that's cool.

AI and business because there's not a lot of that AI business content.

So yeah. Yeah, there really isn't.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's another— and I mean, do you still do your podcast where you talk to CMOs?

I just cut it off.

Why? You don't like doing it.

Yeah, you nailed it. We've gotten some leads from it and potential business from it.

Yeah.

Our sales cycle for really large publicly traded corporations, which is the main type of people we interviewed, is a very long cycle. You have to go through procurement. They typically already have existing agency relationships. It's just for me, I want to do less. And when I do work, I want to work more on the business. I don't like working on things like networking, brand building, or any of that. I don't enjoy creating content. I enjoy just like I showed earlier in this podcast, being in the NPD Experiments chat, talking about what needs to get done to grow revenue and then logging in and being like, cool, Oh, revenue has grown 12% this year, this month over last month. And that is what satisfies me. And then I go to sleep knowing that I did something. If I don't see growth, I, I'm just pissed off for the whole day because I feel like it's not been productive. It doesn't matter what I do. If it's not impacting the bottom line, I just feel I'm not productive.

You know, it's kind of similar to you. I actually don't look forward to creating YouTube content. This is a little different because we at least get to talk and I get some ideas from you sometimes. And it's like our chance to catch up, right? And so it's a little different. And then it's like, now we finally have some larger sponsors that are circling where it's like, okay, I would consider this, right? If Snap wants to pay us an arm and a leg, okay, yeah, you're welcome to sponsor this podcast. Even though we said, don't sponsor our podcast a week ago. But my point is, I think, well, I lost my train of thought, but it's okay. We can, what were we just talking about?

We're talking about how we don't want to just do stuff anymore.

Oh yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

Yeah.

I think if it starts to feel like a job, I don't want to do it anymore. And so that podcast for you started to feel like a job. Plus you realized that the amount of time it takes to prep for a guest is a huge pain in the butt.

Well, I did not prep, so it was never as good because I wasn't willing to do it.

Exactly. Because you didn't want to do it. You never felt the vibe, right? And so I do feel like, yes, I don't look forward to making long-form YouTube videos because it does feel a little bit like work, but When I'm in it, when I'm actually doing it, I do enjoy it. I will say that. It's kind of weird.

My hard part about doing a podcast and interviewing other people on marketing, a lot of it was done for lead generation. A lot of it was also done to learn, but with some of the candidates, I was directing them on the answers they should give.

During the podcast? Yeah.

Like I was guiding them to the right answer, the correct answer.

Oh, so you started asking them questions?

I started asking them questions about their business. And I even got some notes from some people being like, oh, can we do a retake? I think I could have done this better or whatnot. No, no, no, no, no, no, retake. I don't want to do that. Yeah, but I was guiding them because I was doing research on their company.

Yeah.

And I knew how the company grew because like you can research a lot on company, some certain companies' histories, especially if they're like 40, 50, 100 years old, you can really get down and there's a lot of citations on the internet of what they've done to change and how they pivot and the revenue impact, especially when they're publicly traded.

Mm-hmm.

So like, I'm asking some of these people some questions and like, they don't know the answers. And I'm like, I'm trying to give them the answers so they can say it.

Yeah.

But I'm like almost spoon-feeding it. And I'm like, you've been at this company how long and you don't even know your own history and why they pivoted to this model and the revenue impact? And like, they talked about it in their earnings calls, you know, X years ago. I'm I'm like, like, the answer's right there.

Yep. Look, and this is, it's funny 'cause I, at that pickleball event, I went to eat with my CTO and then I was like, you know, I'm gonna go back to that pickleball thing. I'm gonna go talk to one of the guys that is a great creator 'cause his whole thing is like, I wanna interview other creators. And that was his objective of going to the thing. So I went back to him, I'm like, look, I'm only sharing this with you 'cause he's moving to SF now. I was like, look, I fell into the trap of interviewing all these people and sure, I'd get hundreds of thousands of views or so, but it wasn't like what it was 5, 7 years ago where whenever I created around marketing, that would actually drive leads. What I'm creating now actually drives leads again and drives business. But what is going to end up happening is you start to fall too much into this creator world where you start to take sponsorships and then they start to guide you on the content they want to see you create and you're no longer yourself anymore, right? And so again, it has to be fun for you and ideally it's relevant to your business. So that's what it is. But yeah.

Yeah, and I agree with that. I found for me, it's like I enjoy doing the simple things in life. So for example, every either Saturday or Sunday, depends on the week. This week will be Sunday. Like I take my kids riding a bike.

That's great.

And then I, I don't ride a bike. They ride bikes.

Yeah.

'Cause I had to help 'em cross the street. Although it's not a really a street, it's more of a residential street.

Yeah.

But it's still cars come to making sure they don't fall or picking 'em up. They actually fall almost every single time.

Yeah.

It's okay though. But I enjoy that. Like I'll do that for an hour every, you know, Weekend, or if they're—

And that's the highlight.

Yeah, it's a highlight for me. It's fun. I would— and then, uh, last week when I did it, did that, then I took them to Pinkberry.

Oh yeah.

And they were ecstatic.

The yogurt?

Yeah, the yogurt.

Oh, nice.

And then instead of— I used to give, you know, what we used to do to save money was get one and then we split it in half.

Yeah.

And then it would always create an argument. I was like, you know what, I'm just willing to pay the extra $5 and I'll just get them 2. Yeah, one each. And I just tell the person And fill it up halfway. Yeah, because it's like they just argue and I'm like, I don't want to deal with this and ruin my weekend over them getting upset that one has more than the other or they didn't get the flavor they want. I'm like, all right, dude.

By the way, have you gone to Awan? A-W-A-N. Type it into your Google Maps. You can take them there. It's— it was recommended to me. A-W-A-N. Yeah, it's, uh, it's nearby.

But ice cream shop in West Hollywood.

Yeah, yeah, look at it. See, that looks pretty good, huh? Yeah, let me know how it is. So a chef friend—

That looks good. Have you ever been Kith?

What's Kith?

You haven't been to Kith? What's Kith?

Kith.

K-I-T-H. The shoe store?

No, why? Why would I go to a shoe store?

You like kicks.

I don't.

You always have like shoes.

No, I just buy whatever people tell me to buy. I'm like, I'm similar to you. That's true.

The other dude gave you the shoes.

Yeah, he gave me these shoes and I never wore them.

Yeah, from that event because they hurt. But Kith is a shoe store that has overpriced shoes. You know, I don't think you and I really spend a lot on shoes.

Yeah.

But they have an ice cream store inside the shoe store. And I think it's genius marketing because a lot of people come there for the ice cream and they make cereal-based ice cream.

This is at the Century City Mall? Where is this?

No, uh, right in Rodeo. So, you know, on Rodeo Drive, like, there's these steps that you can go up.

Oh, okay.

Right by like Tiffany's and all, like, there's these steps that you can walk up. There's this shoe store called Kit. Inside there, there's ice cream and they can make you any ice cream and then integrate like candy into it, cereal into And it's super popular. Yeah, I love going there for ice cream.

So it's free ice cream?

No, it costs money. Oh, and it's expensive.

It's a good way to drive people in and also get people coming back if the product's really good. It's like you have a great product within a great product store.

Yes, so that causes a lot of repeat people to come there, and I see them all the time. They just eat ice cream, be like, I'll buy a shoe. And none of these people had the intention of buying a shoe, but they're just— while they're eating their ice cream, they're looking around for shoes.

But okay, this is interesting because remember when I did that Global Marketing Summit thing in Miami, it was at the St. Regis Belle Harbor and they had that ice cream thing. So what is the upside of doing that?

I would go back there again just because of the free ice cream.

Yeah, it's like, oh, they have the ice cream, it's good, it's free, because they didn't have that before.

The hotel's not that bad.

The hotel's great.

It's great, but it's not like the most—

It's not like best of the best.

No.

It's not the Four Seasons Surfside, which is next to it.

Yes.

It's incredible.

But the free ice cream makes it worth it. I would go back.

Yeah. Okay. And the fact that we're talking about it right now is also helpful too.

Dude, I went back 3 times.

Yeah, that's because your birthday, you didn't tell anybody.

Yeah, that was my birthday treat was a free ice cream.

Yeah. Okay. Here's the final thing before we end. So I'm of the mindset now, the world that we're in, like you're seeing new stuff happen all the time, right? I'm of the mindset that you need to be having an epiphany every single week. Otherwise, I think you're falling behind. Let me show you what I mean by this. So this is done by Perplexity Labs. I asked it to storyboard for one of our clients, right? Just for fun. And I said, make me an 8-minute ad creative and give me like, you know, 8 different slides, right? And look, it's like storyboarding.

This is Perplexity, right?

Yeah. And it sketched it out. You see this? And normally you would have to wait days or weeks to get this done. And then I asked it to prompt it and I started dumping it into VO3 and it started cranking out the videos. But when I, the first time I did this, I was like, oh, right. Like, that's like an epiphany moment. Like, you need to be having those like once a week and then I think you're in a good spot. I think you're on track.

You saw the gorilla ad that was made from it, right?

The gorilla ad? No.

The gorilla ad for the dentist?

No.

It went viral. It was a gorilla jumping out of plane, doing crazy stuff, lost his teeth. I'm like, oh, this is—

And Perplexity made this?

Yeah.

Wow. But isn't that crazy? It's like, and then I dumped this into ChatGPT.

From my understanding, that's what I was told. It was made from Perplexity.

Didn't you just launch an AI ad recently that went like an NFL ad or something like that? And it did really well. But anyway, point aside, I ran this through O3. I was like, okay, so how much like would a storyboard like this cost? How many times, how much time would it typically take? If you're going through a freelancer, maybe 3 to 5 days to get this done. Maybe you're paying a couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand dollars. And then you start going to agency, it's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars. But it's just one of those things, right? Where I'm sure you're seeing something each week where you're like, oh, that's cool. I think if you're not seeing that, again, I think you're behind. And like, my final thing I'll say here is like, I trumpet this AI thing from the top through the org to try to establish urgency. But even if you try to run from an organization that's trying to push you on this stuff, there is no escape. It will chase you wherever you decide to go. And you might as well just embrace it because what's the other option?

There really isn't. And I think the people who are just fighting it, they're just going to be screwed. So I don't understand this.

I don't know about you guys. I don't want to be laid off. So, you know, that's what it is. Anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.