Ryan Trahan’s Bike Boom, AI’s Winners & Losers, and the SEO Comeback | Ep. 3023

Ryan Trahan, do you know who that is?

I don't.

Okay, so Ryan Trahan is a YouTuber and he's been getting a ton of views. He basically was doing a fundraiser where he would travel to every single state. And at the end of this, I think he raised a couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe even over a million. I could be wrong there. But this bike company got really smart. So this bike company reached out to him and said, hey, we're going to give you like $10,000 or $50,000 or something like that, right? And then that bike company showed up in one of his videos the next day. They wanted to give him an electric bike. They said, every day that you ride this bike and it's in your videos, we're going to give you an extra 10 grand. So I think that maybe they gave 50 grand initially and then it was like 10 grand each time, right? And they knew he had 50 more videos to make and he kept riding that bike. It's like an electric bike. And what happened was these videos were getting some of them 50 million views or whatever.

Wow.

A lot of views, right? And so I think what happened to this company was that they exploded their revenue. And I don't have exact numbers here, but if you are smart and you know if someone's going to do this trip and you know you can, you can smartly insert yourself in and then almost incentivize this influencer, you're getting a ton of ad impressions for your product all the time. And people start to associate, oh, like, I need an electric bike. Okay, I'm gonna go with that one. I'm gonna go with that one. So that's what they did. And I think you have to be, you have to be lucky in this case, right? You have to be opportunistic to get your product in there at the right time, and then be smart about how you incentivize this influencer. Because this influencer is trying to raise money. Okay, we'll give you 10 grand each time in every video. Who else is doing that? Not enough people are doing that.

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

Yeah.

And I think they would have done very well.

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

So you saw their stock today, right?

Sweetgreen, they just tanked.

Did they? 26%.

Why did they tank?

Earnings.

Oh, wow. That must be—

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

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

Revenue per—

the first thing you think about is revenue. Okay, so it's Restaurant Performance Index. So Restaurant Performance Index. So one of our— I don't know if you've ever met I think you probably met George Gammon, but he actually watches this. He's great with macroeconomics, right? He has a YouTube channel. So I was watching one of his videos yesterday and he talks about like, sure, you look at inflation data, you look at job reports data, but all of that can be manipulated pretty easily by the government, right?

Yeah.

But when you look at Restaurant Performance Index, you can see when there's weakness, like every time it drops below a certain amount, a recession happens. Right. And because that shows like how weak the consumer is, if they're not going out to eat that much, then Sweetgreen dropping and I go to Sweetgreen like I just had it yesterday. that means the consumer is backing off a little bit. And so it's actually -0.1 right now or something like that. So it's worth looking at that. And Warren Buffett likes looking at the railroad data, right? Like if you have more or less railroads kind of, you know, transferring stuff, that's also weakness in the economy. So I don't know how that looks right now, but it's worth taking a look at because who knows how we're doing right now.

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

Your spend, your, your, what do you call it, disposable spending?

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

Oh, marketing.

Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

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

Marketing.

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

But hey, Meta and Google continue to do good.

Yeah.

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

I've never seen this guy.

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

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

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

But no, there was— you saw the red paperclip, right?

No. No.

Red Paperclip.

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

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

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

Yeah.

So largely, you should just focus on one channel that works well, and the other ones you're okay maybe letting it slide a little bit.

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

Oh, that's like The 3rd or 4th time you've changed it in the last—

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

That's a good headline.

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

That's good. Who came up with that?

Colin from my team. It was already on our website.

Copywriter?

No. No, he's a marketer.

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

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

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

Dude, no.

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

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

Then it makes you look bad.

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

That was just the reality.

Yeah. So then I called Gajon and I was like, dude, I want to redo the homepage. I'm looking for someone cheap who can do it because I don't want to do it myself. And I just, I really just did not want to do it. And Gajon's like, dude, you already know what you want, right? And I'm like, yeah, I already know what I want. And I break down to him like, this is exactly what I want. And I give him 6 numbers and I put them in order on how I want to change it. And I already had a lot of the copy written. I myself am not a designer, but I didn't want to pull my designers from my Ubersuggest project. We're releasing all the AI stuff to go help with this. And Kishan's like, dude, why don't I just do it for you? I'll just do it for free. I have a ton of staff. I was like, thanks, dude. Sounds good. So then he turned my idea into vision. He also added his own flair. And what was unique about him is he scrapes the internet for every single A/B test.

Hmm.

No joke. Literally every single A/B test. So if you have A/B testing code on your website, he's looking at what tests you're running. And which one ended up becoming the default. Hmm.

So he knows what wins and what doesn't.

What does.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

It doesn't mean someone's going to add us to RFP because of it.

Yeah.

It's more so when people visit the website, they'll know that we deal with RFPs and maybe in the future we'll include it in more.

Yeah.

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

No, but I tried to buy his company first. Oh, you did?

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

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

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

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

They just focus on CRO. That's it.

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

But he gets paid on outcomes too. It's base fee and outcome. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create personalized ads Towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side.

No, it depends. A lot of it is just outcome.

Outcome-based.

Yeah.

So when you, by the way, there's no, I'm saying no base fee.

There's pure outcome. Yeah.

I forgot, he kind of explained it to me and I don't want to reveal his pricing structure to everyone, but like when you charge on performance, you do well. You're like a center field, right?

Yeah.

So it makes one—

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

It's too risky for them.

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

Yeah. Procurement likes simplicity. Uh-huh.

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

Yeah. Technically you can do this with their smaller SMB division. But it just, the numbers don't map out there. I think you have to have the mid part work out.

He has mid-market.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

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

Yes, but like, because I was talking about his pricing model.

I think he takes 25% of the lift or 30%. I don't know what it is actually.

No, it's not a set fee like that. It's dependent on the size of the company. The volume and the margins. Because let's say if you're selling protein powder, your margins aren't as good as let's say if you're selling software.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So by the way, that's another thing. When you get on a sales call and you don't just talk about your solution, you start talking about what their business challenges are and how their business works, it becomes a totally different conversation and you can price differently according to that because now they respect you more because you're talking about their business versus just trying to sell them on like your software or your service. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I have this one over here. I actually think so. I've been nerding out on this. I've been showing you, I think. But I think the future marketing is going to look like online poker. So remember, I talked about this the other day. We were on a podcast together with HubSpot again, and the guy like showed in and out like the last time we did a podcast with HubSpot. But that's, that's a side note.

No, no knock on HubSpot.

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

Yeah.

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

No.

And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's just done. Like, oh, this is done over here. Okay, here's the results. Okay, boom. Okay, you should do this over here based on these results. Okay, boom. And I'm just like running all these things. And it's like that the guy, this online poker player, he used to play StarCraft, Elky. He had like 48 tables open. He's like looking at it, right? That is a picture of him doing that. So I think that's what's going to happen.

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

Yeah.

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

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

Yes.

That's the highest leverage thing we can do is to find— to find the high leverage problems. That's how you do it, right? And so I, I've been posting about this and I've had— I've probably introduced like Eight different people to my tutor, so he's good too. Oh, your AI? Yeah, yeah. Like, why do you need a tutor for? Dude, because because main thing for me is I'm not technical. He helps me set things up, right? No, I get that. And when he when he tries to teach you, I'm like, "Don't teach me." I like just just like whatever whenever I'm blocked, like let's just unblock me, and then I just open up my Zoom, give him remote control, and I go watch TV.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But when you think tutor, I think of school, like in school.

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

So yeah. Cool.

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

I'm curious, what are they saying?

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

And we've started to see that companies accept traditional SEO again. We were in this period for, I would call it 6 months this year where a lot of companies are still doing SEO, but they're just like, I don't know, I want to Let's see what happens with AI. And they're starting to slowly accept that you still have to keep doing traditional SEO because A, it helps with AI SEO. A lot of the factors are the same. But B, a lot of the companies we talk to that are like, I don't know, we think it's going to be drastically impacted by AI and it's not worth doing. And these are large corporations that have, the ones I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of 3 particularly that have market caps over $10 billion. No joke, 2 out of the 3 came back in the last 45-ish days.

Mm-hmm.

Talking about, hey, it makes up too much of our revenue. We still need to focus on it. We can't ignore it and we need to start getting back into it. And how do we make up for lost time? I believe the third one will come back, but we're also seeing this on the SMB side where people before AI SEO was a shiny object and I still believe it is, but now they're willing to Also come back and reinvest in traditional SEO because it's profitable and it drives a lot of revenue if you do it right.

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

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

I don't think it's going to die fully.

Yeah, I think it could shrink. And, you know, case in point was Mercedes. You saw all their ads that they did with the G-Wagon Electric.

Yeah.

And remember how you introduced me to one of your friends to get a G-Wagon electric?

Yeah.

Because he owns a Mercedes dealership.

Yeah. Does he?

Yeah, he owns a Mercedes dealership.

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

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

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

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

It's nothing. It's tanking.

Yeah. And their marketing was— you saw the 360-degree videos where they literally had a Mercedes G-Wagon electric.

Yeah.

And it can make a 360-degree So if you put it in a circle, it can stay in that circle and all 4 wheels just move and it just keeps— does donuts, but it's stationary.

Yeah.

Like, think of like, um, a can and just twirling it in your hands. It's stationary. That's what the G-Wagon Electric can do, at least in those videos. Yeah. Even with all that marketing hype and it making it look really cool, and a lot of people want to get one, it's not doing well.

Mm-hmm.

Why? They forgot one thing when they were doing their cool marketing. Do you want to guess what it was?

I couldn't tell you.

A lot of people buy G-Wagon because they like the way it sounds. The rumbling, the roaring.

Yeah.

A lot of people buy it for that. You don't get that with electric.

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

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

That's what they say? Yeah.

They're saying a lot of people buy the gas because they want the noise. Yeah. I just don't know.

I would say with my car. So when I had the Tesla before, electric, obviously, I liked that it was quiet, right? But then my Porsche now, it has a noise. It's— there is a noise, right?

They manufacture them.

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

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

Interesting.

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

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

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

Yeah.

And Mercedes still claims that they do fine with the G-Wagon electric, but they bundle it in all together. And if you look at Mercedes electric vehicles, the secondhand market for 'em, they depreciate way faster. They're not worth it. People don't want 'em as much. And the reason being is the new sentiment for most car drivers is they prefer, well, Range Rover has is the hybrid in which you can drive on electric for up to 50 miles and the rest is gas. People love that model where it's hybrid.

I hate going to the gas station.

You do?

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

So if you're just doing city driving like you do, you never have to fill up. But then if you're going to San Diego, you can fill up and you don't have to charge.

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

It depends on the work that you're doing. So in that case, like you should, But let's see, yeah, they're going to the client's office to help them work in person, right? So it goes back to in person again.

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

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

Who doesn't love money?

I love money too. And so, but money doesn't make you a good person or a bad person. It just amplifies your nature. Do you agree or disagree with that? I agree. Okay. Now, if money amplifies your nature, AI amplifies your mind positively or negatively. So if you're super anti-AI, it will make you like, it'll make you from one person to like you're a 10th of a person. If you're super into it, it's going to make you a 10x person or 100x person, right? I look at this as you look at electricity coming out, you look at flight coming out, computers, internet, all these things, and you hear the smartest people in the world. I think Bill Gates has said this, right? That AI is the number, like it supersedes all the rest of these inventions.

Yeah.

And so in my mind, like I would say the vast majority of the people at my company are really into using AI and enhancing themselves. But you do have some people resist, oh yeah, you know, it's not going to do this, it's not going to do that. But I'm just like, dude, like, this is going to be akin to not using the internet when you're working. This is going to be akin to not bringing your laptop. This is going to be akin to not using power tools when you're, when you're building a house. So you either choose to amplify your mind or somebody that's enhanced with this is going to, going to replace you. Yep.

So every time you bring up Microsoft, all I always think about is how Bill Gates would have been the first trillionaire if he He just had to Steve Ballmer it.

He just had to hold on to it.

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

I listened to a 3-hour interview with Steve Ballmer on this Acquired podcast because I wanted to hear this story, right? So when he became CEO of Microsoft, so obviously Bill Gates founded Microsoft.

It was his baby.

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

So that means they're probably not good friends anymore.

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

They should bring him back to the board of Microsoft.

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

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

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

How often do you use Zoom compared to Teams?

Honestly, I use Zoom a lot.

You use Zoom a lot?

A lot. Yeah.

With clients too?

Yeah, but I'm going to churn off of Zoom. Sorry, guys. So every— I saw this thread on X. Everyone's like, yeah, F Zoom. Like Google Meet is so much better. I was like, huh? So I can save a couple, like, you know, a couple grand a year. I'm probably going to churn off of Zoom.

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

I believe it.

And it's enterprise client. We use Teams, but all of our clients use Teams. If you are working in the enterprise world, everyone's on Microsoft.

Zoom could be great. It could be better.

It could be worse. Yeah, just dude, the majority of the world runs on Microsoft products.

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

It's a multibillion-dollar company. Yeah.

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