Neil Patel and Eric Siu's Biggest Business Wins and Mistakes of 2026

So I figured, I mean, because we're doing such an organic episode, we can talk about either some of our marketing highlights from this year, because this year, guys, by the way, we're in Q4 now, right?

Oh yeah, we're in Q4 now.

The year has gone by really quickly again. So what are the highlights and lowlights from a marketing standpoint? Or we can also do the highlights and lowlights from a business standpoint too.

You want to start off with the business and then go with the marketing later, or you want to do marketing first?

Yeah, I'll go business highlights and lowlights. Well, let's start there first. So for me personally, One of the biggest business highlights this year has been pushing, and you know I'm going to say this, but hiring more AI-native people, and which immediately factors in with people who are adaptable and curious. I thought that one of the lowlights this year was actually starting the year thinking I could train people, right? Where it was like, oh yeah, I'm going to do all these hackathons, we're going to do all these group trainings, we're going to do all these things. The smart people kept building smart things. Yeah. The maybe not so AI-native people kept building dumb things, right? And at a certain point, like, my CTO was just like, dude, stop thinking you can train them, right? Like, he said that at the very beginning, to his credit. But as soon as I realized that, like, things just started to move a lot faster. And every day I can tell that people are having a lot more fun at work, and it does actually feel like a video game now. And by the way, I can tell during interviews now, the people that feel like work's a video game versus the ones that don't. It's just easier when it feels like a game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we're doing highlights first or—

Highlights and lowlights, right? Up to you. Yeah. Okay.

So I would do, my first highlight is even though the economy has been really bad, I know that doesn't represent the S&P 500, but if you remove all the AI, you know, companies or ancillary companies, most businesses are not doing well. And this year our churn is one of the lowest it has been in a very long time. So that was a huge win for us. Another, business highlight is we've gotten a lot more of our international divisions in order. I would say by next year, we'll have no international regions losing money, which is a huge—

That's a first, right?

It's a first. We thought this year was going to be that year. It did not work out that way, but we're so close. I do believe it'll happen pretty quickly next year. I don't think it'll take till the end of next year, but I would say it would happen Worst case, maybe middle of next year. And at this point, there's not that many regions that are losing money, so the losses aren't that bad. Another business highlight is I had legal drama over the last few years. Silly stuff like companies pay you, they go bankrupt, they try to claw back the money. People then try to badmouth you online and saying something it actually really isn't when they sued, maybe call it 74 more companies to try to reclaim money as well. And if you're a big enough company, I'm not saying we're large, but we're large enough at scale if you look at our headcount and our revenue. When you get sued for stuff, they throw the kitchen sink at everything. They'll make whatever claims, even if they can't prove it, because— and then your job is to get them knocked out because the more things that they can throw in there, whether they're real or false, the more doors they have to try to reclaim the money. Mm-hmm. And then your job is to shut those doors, which then makes it harder for them to reclaim the money. And that's how you get to settlement because they know that they're bleeding you for legal fees. They know that they're making money because a lot of the lawyers on these bankruptcy cases make thousands and thousands of dollars an hour, literally $2,000 to $2,500 an hour. Like the FTX case, did you know the lawyers have billed, I think it's getting close to around $700 million in legal fees to deal with the bankruptcy?

The lawyers always win.

The lawyers are always winning on this, right? So I'm not saying what they're doing with us or not, but A lawyer, if you're making that much money, you get paid no matter what. Why would you be incentivized to close things up fast when you get paid first? You would just drag it out.

Show me an incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Correct.

And with these bankruptcy cases, we had a really good law firm representing us. They were like, we'll try settling as early as possible. We're having discussions, but he's like, people don't want them. And we've dealt with these types of cases, not just once this year, but multiple times. There was a few, there was a big, A decent-sized pharmacy company that, you know, we have a mutual friend who has a pharmacy, who had a pharmacy company. We had to deal with bankruptcy there in which they shut down and they wanted money back. But when you try to ask for settlement early on, they're just like, no, no, we want all the money, just keep going. And the reason being is they need to bill some hours. If they don't bill some hours, they don't make any money from you. Yeah. So that was a huge business relief. And if I had to say business cons, The economy didn't recover the way I thought globally. I think tariffs and— War. War has hurt us. I'm not trying to be political here. I'm not trying to say some president or a nation should or should not have done this. People can decide their own opinions, but I'm just saying from a business aspect, those 2 things did not help marketing, right? With tariffs, companies are like, well, if our customers have to pay 10, 20% more, it's going to be harder for us to sell cars or whatever. They cut marketing budgets first. That really hurt us last year and that trickled into this year. The other thing that hurt us is war, inflation, things are just more expensive. Like if we work with a company that is a logistics company, like we have a logistics client, everything costs more if they're paying more for fuel prices, right? Like shipping, et cetera. That means that e-commerce companies, Yeah. have a harder time selling and offering free shipping because it's more expensive for them to ship now. Like all these things impact businesses at different— it all trickles up and whatever happens to the end consumer eventually hits the businesses and it impacts their bottom line, which then impacts us and everyone else in the food chain, right? So I would say those 2 things really hurt us and that hurt us Globally, because we do a lot of business in Europe and in Asia, and with things like uncertainty, it causes a lot of companies to just pull back on budgets.

Yep. That being said, we're still very optimistic about 2027. So we'll see. I

am. Yeah, I'm not as optimistic. I'm not saying that 2027 won't be a better year.

I think it's going to be better. That's why I say I'm very optimistic about it being better.

I think I'm hoping that war and all this kind of stuff is over by 2027, which will help. But, um, I'm not optimistic that normal non-AI businesses will flourish like they used to. I think it'll take time before normal businesses are growing at a nice clip. I think we just got to figure out a lot of things, not just in the United States, but globally. There's just a lot of problems. And we're seeing, at least with a lot of the companies we work with, because some of them are just massive and deal with everyday consumers, they're seeing people try to do payment terms on basic essentials like toilet paper and groceries.

Oh, that's the worst. That's basically credit card debt.

Yeah, but it's a really bad sign if you're doing that because you can't add it to credit card or you can't get credit card. Like there's something wrong if people have to get payment plans for groceries. And I'm not saying the individual's good at saving or bad at saving, or they're doing something right or wrong. But when you hear more and more of those stories, when you work with some of these large corporations, they're sharing this data. It's kind of, for me, it feels like doom and gloom and kind of sad. It's not about how I'm living my life or how Eric's living his life. It just sucks to hear about people struggling. And I don't see that getting better for the very bottom unless governments across the world are just like, hey, if you make under $100 grand, just don't pay taxes.

Yeah. Again, I'm optimistic about next year being better. I'm not— we're still going to have a lot of problems. I think to Neil's point that this K-shaped economy is going to get worse, I think. And I'm concerned about not just the wealth gap, but the cognitive wealth gap. Right. And so that's for politics. But let me just talk about one other thing from a business highlights and lowlights standpoint. Then we'll move over to marketing and highlights and lowlights, and then we're going to eat at Javier's. But so our change has been this year is that us as a marketing services software company is that we are makers and managers of bots, right? So we make these bots, we manage them, we optimize them, we upgrade them, we maintain them, right? So, and a big bot that we made this year that has helped a lot with our recruiting, because recruiting is just, it's an evaluation game, right? You're evaluating if people have like the promotions and the tenure initially, then if they respond, you send them the questions, right? And then if they pass that, then people get shortlisted. Now what's been amazing to me is we talk to these recruiters right now, right? Almost none of them are AI native. No problem, because we just have these running the whole time and it's just shortlisting people every day and it's shortlisting to the point where it's like, oh, okay, it asks them 6 questions, they answer it well, then they'll make it over to my team and they'll get over to me quickly, right? And so that has allowed us to move a lot faster on the recruiting side. And the funny thing is when we show recruiters the workflow, they're like, oh, this is exactly what I wanted to do at my company. And then when they get to me, I'm like, so why haven't you done it right now, right? What's stopping you from doing it? Oh, you know, they're just, you know, they don't let me do it. Then I'm like, why do they need to let you do it? You can just build it, right? But it's just amazing to me that it's It's not allowed. So talent to me is downstream of everything. And Vinod Khosla, who now owns Seattle Seahawks, has said—

Yeah, good for him.

Has said that, you know, your people are the company, your people make up the company, right? And I've seen both sides of this before. You've seen it too. You have an amazing executive team, right? But I've seen it where when I let up on the talent, things fall apart. But when I don't let up, and the good thing is these workflows allow me to never let up on talent. It allows me to continue to tweak it more and more.

Yeah.

So yeah, that's been good for us.

That's cool.

Yeah.

So now let's talk about marketing highlights and—

Lowlights.

And lowlights. I can

go first if you want.

Yeah, go first. Okay.

So what's— we can just go back and forth here. So what's been nice is the YouTube channel, because I started to add those skills now, it's actually driving leads. I think I told you a couple of weeks ago, someone reached out and then someone left a comment, right? And then for one weird reason, I was looking at the comment, I'm like, There's a weird aura around this comment. And I just looked at the name, right? And it's like, oh, this person's like a VP of AI who's been at this company for 11 years. They just raised a $100 million round, right? And then not only that, my team, the sales team is like, hey, there's a lot of people that are actually seeing your AI content now. So my CTO and I hopped on a call this week for SingleBrain. And there's our sales guy was on the call too. And I was like, hey, just tell me, like, where did you find us? It says you came through like a webinar email. He said, oh, I just watch your YouTube videos. Right. And so I'm like, the YouTube videos work now because the YouTube is more fun now because the skills are taking care of it and YouTube's actually driving. We're talking mid-market to enterprise-level pipeline. And that, that to me is a highlight more so not just for the YouTube thing, but because I am unencumbered to do whatever the F I want and I will not be held back anymore.

Yeah.

Same for you, right?

Yes. Yeah, it has helped a lot. I would say marketing highlights for me is I've really streamlined content production where it takes the least amount of my time for filming, which was a huge aspect. And they come to my house, which makes it easier.

Yeah. Because your house finished and you have so many different scenes you can shoot, right?

Yeah. So that helps. I would say another huge highlight from marketing aspect is we've won a lot of awards this year. Like we won Performance Marketing Agency of the Year. by Ad Age. That was hard to win. Uh, went to award ceremony. I was the first one to probably bounce from the—

For sure. You probably left. Like, when'd you leave?

I left after we got it. We had to go on stage. I was like, all right, I'm out. Peace.

That's great. I love it.

Because it was like going for a few hours. I'm like, yeah.

Because then you have to schmooze and network and all that. No, I don't think you mind.

No, I don't mind that. Um, It was really interesting going to an advertising event. A good amount of the people were not from the advertising industry. A lot of them were just random people there that just got tickets. And I think some of them were just trying to meet other people to date or marry. It was in New York. There was a lot of single women.

Oh.

I know this because I got hit up by a lot of single women like, oh, we should change numbers. I don't wear, I don't wear a wedding ring. I don't like jewelry, but I am married. And I would tell them, I'm like, oh, I'm married. I'm good. And I was like, I'm flattered. I said it in a much nicer way than that. But I forgot how many single people New York has.

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And then what else was a big marketing highlight? We're getting more and more enterprise leads, so that's been great for us. We're getting more global pitches than we've ever had before. That's been a huge win. A downfall, I think most people have this problem, they're seeing less traffic. That has been definitely a downfall. We're getting more social views in general. I took a screenshot of one of my Instagram views for 30 days. I don't know if I sent it to you or I saw it. You did.

A couple million. 5.5, 6?

It was something like that. Because remember we were talking about it and I was like, yeah, I don't get that many views. I got maybe like a million views.

And you're like, oh no, you have 5.5 million.

Yeah. And then I saw it the other day. I think it was, it was, where is it? Professional dashboard. Let's see. Yeah. Views 12.7 in the last 30 days. I'm like, I get a lot more views than I actually realize in 30-day period. And I produce pretty specific content. Just didn't realize that. I get views. I don't pay attention to my social media, but Eric knew something was wrong because Eric's like, you get millions of views. I'm like, no, I think I get maybe like 500,000. He's like, no, you get millions. And then I actually checked. So that was a win, but not really a win. I just didn't actually know how many views that I get. The other huge win that I would say on the marketing side was my team is speaking at more events. So I'm not speaking on as many. And I would say The last downfall, but it was a personal win, is my summer was extremely slow this year for speaking, but that allowed me to do a lot of family stuff. And I can't remember the last time I was home for like 2 months straight with no travel.

Mm-hmm.

It was really refreshing. I was like, wow, I kind of dig this life. I don't think it's going to be permanent, but I've been really pushing my team because the economy's bad. I'm like, we should acquire in all the regions. that were the weakest, where I had to travel to more so I can cut back on the travel.

That's good.

So not slow it down where it's zero, but make it somewhere more manageable because I really enjoy things. And I learned this one from Eric because he keeps sending me a quote that came from Eckhart Tolle.

I don't keep sending it to you. I send it to you once a year to remind you.

Yes, he reminds me of it though, but he reminds me more than once a year, but he sends it to me, let's call it once a year. And dude, someone was asking me a question earlier today on my team. They're like, do you want to buy a company for X dollars? And it would be a really big acquisition. They're like, but you would have to put in Y more dollars and we can create a bigger company and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, if I told him, I was very direct. I was like, if we can get a good deal, I love deals. Eric knows this. I will put in the Y dollars.

Yeah.

I'm like, if we can't get in a good deal and we're paying normal market rate, Why the heck do I want this company when I can find other ones that are at better deals? And they're just like, but you could create a bigger company. And I was just like, you know, and I admitted to them on the phone, I'm like, I'm not that person who's like an Elon Musk where I'm built to just keep going after a mission. I'm like, I'm pretty content in life. My life's not that bad. I don't have any stress. The money is not going to change anything really. I'm like, yeah, whatever makes the best returns with the least amount of stress is what I for, not what makes the best returns and causes the most amount of headaches. You know, like someone the other day pitched me a company that we can turn around and we can make a killing from, but it would be a headache. And I'm like, I don't want a headache. They're like, but you would miss out on making all this money. I'm like, I'd rather pay more for a deal that has no headache than one that is going to create a headache for me because my life is chill.

It's that Eskimo story from Alaska, right? They asked the fishermen, oh dude, the private equity guy comes in. Oh yeah, we can catch way more fish. And then he's like, well then what will I do with all this money? It's like, well, I would just go back and fish, but he's already doing it right now. So you're already doing it right now, right? And so a couple of things on my side. So outbound has been working for us, right? Oh, that's awesome. So outbound's been great for us. Like it's, I think this week already it's booked like 5 good calls. And that's significant because these are more enterprise companies, right? And people want, we talked about this earlier in this podcast, but people want more help now. I think part of it is because some of these people consume the content. So they're like, hey, we know you're helping with marketing. And that's led to another thing that's kind of related to marketing. We're just creating a bunch of wedges now. So Neil might have Ubersuggest, he might have AnswerThePublic, right? These are just different wedges to find us, right? So Single Grain, people know us for marketing there, right? Single Brain, oh, AI implementation. But then it's like, people are coming to us for Carrot now. It's like,

oh, Eric said 2 different companies, Single Grain, his marketing one, and the second one's Single Brain.

With a B, yeah.

Yes.

And so my whole thing is like, we were talking about ChatGPT plugins earlier. It's like, dude, at this point now, because you can just build these wedges so quickly, you just build as many wedges in. So they might come for one thing, but to Neil's point earlier, The problem set is expanding. They want you to solve a problem. And so, you get people and they're like, oh, you can do that? Oh, you can do that? Okay, we want that. So, people want more now, right? I think the expectation is getting higher. That's another thing and that's been good for us. I will also say that Gary Vee liked to talk about, you know, it's all about having 15-minute meetings, right? I'll tell you in a remote environment, it's all about having— when you have a problem, it's all about having 15-minute standups and you just keep hammering away at the issue until the problem is solved and you just inject a bunch of intensity and then you just disband the standup. And that's been good for us.

You also did release like a website with a ton of skills or—

Oh yeah, Skills Dojo. Yeah, how'd that go? That went well, but you need— what I learned from that experience is you need— what I'm learning from our 4 deployed engineers and our 4 deployed marketers, what we're calling them, is that the engineers don't have the distribution know-how or the skill. So you need to pair them with the marketers because the marketers actually understand funnel drop-off rates and they understand distribution, they understand churn a lot more. The engineers are so used to building, so we're trying to train the engineers up, but they'll never get to the level of a marketer. And also we're trying to train the marketers up in terms of being builders, but they'll also never be at the level of engineer too. But I do believe that being like deep in one area and T-shaped is helpful. So that's how that's gone. So it's a good thing, but we need like a marketer that's on it.

So yeah.

Yeah,

that's the hard part. It's like we all have tons of ideas. AI makes it easier for these ideas to come out, but unless you have people really focus on these projects,

they rarely ever

produce the results that you expect. But another approach or philosophy that I know people have taken, and I've taken this too in the past, is because AI makes it easier to crank out products, it's okay if you don't have someone to focus on it. You can just do 10, 20, 50, 100 of these ideas and just crank them out. And the ones that get, that naturally have legs and are gaining traction, double down on those and just ignore the rest. Yep. It just makes it cheaper to figure out It just makes testing cheaper and to figure out what actually gets traction and by spending the least amount of time. But the issue that you're seeing, and Eric talked about this at the very beginning of the podcast, is all these things cost money. It takes someone's time to release these experiments. If you're using AI, you're still spending money because AI has token costs, although token costs are getting relatively cheaper. Yep. And I think you're going to start seeing better economics because a lot of these players want to go public, although none of them have really said when they're going to go public. I think there's maybe some issues or security concerns or whatever it may be.

But actually, in a few weeks, Neil, I think Gavin Baker reported this, but it was like it used to be 80% of tokens were Frontier, and now it's actually flipped to 80% of token spend is actually more of the open-source ones, or open— what's called the open weights, not necessarily open source. But what Neil's saying is like Back in the day, you couldn't really throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. Today, you can kind of do that more. But the focus elements actually, I'll say a lowlight is because I talk about AI within my company, people, you sometimes you have some slop cannons coming out, right? Where they're just like, yeah, Eric's talking like do do do do do everything, right? And I'm like, no no no, like it's got to tie in with like a business result. Forget traffic for a second. How are you driving pipeline and how are you driving revenue, right? And it's just because I sat in on a meeting the other day and. Literally 4 other people that had 5 different ideas each. And then the leader of that meeting was like, no, no, guys, we're going to focus on one thing, one funnel, one offer, and that's it for this one thing, not 20 different things, right? So that part's important. But you brought up a good point because one of our creatives said, I didn't know Higgsfield launches— their requirement with an organization is you launch one new feature a week. So that's 50 new features a year, right? And you see a lot of these companies doing it. But I think they are doing the throw spaghetti against the wall because then you can just look at the engagement metrics and you have a large user base, you have distribution, so you just bet harder on it.

And you cut the ones that suck.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So, but you do need to have like a good technical person for that. So yeah, that's tough.

You do. I've learned over the last few years, I prefer creating service-based businesses over tech-based businesses. I perform way better in services than tech. It's not that, and I spent the majority of my career in software over services. Although I did spend a good chunk in services as well.

But I think you partnered with your brother-in-law was a good partnership too, because he was very tech-oriented.

He's very tech-oriented. My tech chops are nowhere near what it takes to thrive and succeed in today's world. And I was telling my brother-in-law this and he's just like, dude, He's like, this happens every generation. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, when you started, you were like, dot-com boom, like this is great. And he's like, there was a lot of entrepreneurs who were like, man, I don't know how people adapt to this dot-com world. I prefer my old school way. Life was great.

Yep.

And he's like, you adapted really well to the dot-com boom. He's like, you have the capital now to adapt to this whole new AI world and you can just buy companies. But he's like, He's like, you personally are struggling to keep up with all the changes. He's like, it's so fast and there's so many. So he's like, how do you do it? And he's— I'm like, I just hire people. I try not to keep up with it. Like, I'm like, I just don't have the time. I'm like, I got a family now and kids and I know these are just excuses, but I'd rather choose some of those things versus working 70, 80-hour weeks constantly and trying to keep up with everything. It's just like, it's just too much.

And it actually makes more sense for you to think from a capital allocator standpoint now because you've already put in the work and then like there's different seasons of life Now, what we were just mentioning earlier, if you're an Elon Musk, of course you want to continue to grind yourself. And by the way, we really respect Elon, but I would never want to live his life because the level of problems that he's working on is so tough that it— and it's on 4 or 5 different things and you're flying all the time. I wouldn't want to do it.

Same with Target. Like he talks about like going to grocery, he's like, I can't. He's like, there's too many threats on my life after Charlie Kirk and stuff. He's like, it's just too risky. I love going to Whole Foods or Bristol Farms or whatever it may be and doing grocery shopping with my kids. We think it's fun and it's a treat. Like so much so, I stopped doing a lot of Uber Eats because we find it fun to just hop in the car and be like, hey, you want ice cream? It's, yes, I can get Jenny's ice cream and get it Uber Eats to me and delivered, but the kids have a better experience when I park the car, we walk into the store, like that experience, the environment, the smell of the ice cream cones that they're making, it just makes them happier. And I was like, oh, I like living a normal life.

Yeah. Yeah, your priorities change over time in your life.

Yes.

But by the way, like if I'm in Neil's shoes right now, okay, like you've been in business like 14 years longer, right? It's like you've been through the grind already, you've worked extra hard already, right? It's like, okay, well now I have this machine and if I just focus on capital allocation, I can continue to optimize my machine and continue to live the life that I want to live instead of having to travel all the time and all that. So things change.

Yeah, and my co-founder was talking to me today. And it really hit him. He was just like, hypothetically, if the business went to zero tomorrow, what would you do? And I was like, I'll just stay home and play stocks. And he's like, that's it? He's like, would you start another? I was just like, no, I'm over it. I don't want to start another business. I'm not into the grind. Yeah. And he's just like, you really do like the chill life. And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, Could I go and create something else? I'm not saying I'll be successful or not, but I think because I have enough capital, I can figure out how to buy my way into some sort of success. Maybe not as big of a success, but some sort. But I'm like, I'm just at a point in life where I'm just like, man, I just keep reinvesting my money and just chill. And yeah, I'd rather have that life.

Yeah. And I'm sure you've run the numbers 10,000 times already.

Yeah. As long as I control my expenses and I don't get crazy, I'm like, I don't need a ton of money. I'm like, life is chill.

Yeah. So anyway, guys, that's it for today and we will see you tomorrow.