Eric Siu discusses whether entrepreneurs should sell courses directly or use them as upsells and tripwires instead. The conversation covers YouTube growth tactics, including how the Cultural Tutor gained 200k subscribers from one video, plus platform updates on livestreaming and AI clipping tools.
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So today we're going to start off by talking about why we should have kept selling courses. If you look at Eric and I, we've tried a lot of different products. You've tried courses a few times. You've— we've tried masterminds together. We've been in masterminds together as well.
Honestly, the masterminds, if it kept going, it probably would've been fine. Yeah.
And the reason I really regret The model of stop selling courses, because I don't think courses are a good business. It's a really low TAM business, in my opinion. I think you're better off being the software that helps course creators versus being the one who's selling the course.
Or community, like school, whatever. Yeah.
Or Kajabi or whatever it may be. Right. But I think it's an amazing tripwire. And in our core business, if we sold courses, If you sold a course on YouTube marketing or B2B marketing, you wouldn't make a killing from it. Maybe you make extra 20, 30, 50 grand a month. How many of those customers paying 50 bucks, 100 bucks for the course would eventually become a customer?
A small percentage, but still a small percentage adds up. Yeah. And you should explain tripwire to everyone too.
Yeah. So Ryan Deiss back in the day used to talk about a concept like a tripwire. If you get someone to buy something for, you know, $10, $7, that's a very irresistible offer. It's much easier to then get them to go buy something more expensive.
Because at that point you've acquired a customer because they put in a little money and you have the credit card information too.
Yes. And I believe that we should have just ran with that model and continually had a tripwire. A course is an easy thing. And upsold people into services.
What's to say you can't come back to it?
I can, I just don't want to put in the effort to create courses.
Neil one time made me, I had to go to Burbank to help him record a course for some other thing. It took the entire day.
Half a day, half a day.
Oh yeah, we had to get dressed up for that too.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, yeah, but that wasn't a lot of effort and it was a good return on time. Like it is a lot of work too. I just—
It's a lot of work.
But what's to say you can't repackage a lot of the stuff that you've already done with webinars and things like that and sell it as just like bundle it together and just package it better?
Yeah, that's true. You know, I haven't talked to my co-founder about this, but if I had to do it all over again, I probably would've taken 2 different approaches. One approach would've been do something that's really cheap so then that way you can get more customers. We kind of do that with, we have an annual event that we do. It's usually called like the Future of Digital Marketing or Future of Digital Marketing and AI. And that does well for us. And then it gets more people to know our brand. But I would've done something more evergreen, like a course for the consumer side. And then I would've done a second group, let's say a mastermind just for agencies looking to grow.
Yeah.
And then it would've gave me a bigger pipe to acquire more agencies.
You know, I think what I would do instead nowadays, we were actually talking, so I was telling you pre-recording, I was at an entrepreneur poker game yesterday and there's a handful of people that have very big YouTube channels, some bestsellers, some people have like, you know, cool companies that they've sold in the past and all that. But we were just talking about some of the biggest people in the info game, right? I'm not going to name any names, but we're just saying that, you know, some of them are like the best workshop company in the world or like the best course company in the world, right? I think the problem is you start to get lumped into that and they see you as just a course person, right? But I think when you look at OpenAI or all these other companies where they're giving their courses, their AI courses away for free, or Anthropic, what's to say we can't give these things away for free and then, you know, have an ascension model in there? 'Cause you just want them on your email list anyway, right? And so I think there's, on one end it's like, okay, Tripwire, they've put in some money, they've committed some money, right?
Yeah, it's easier to upsell people once they spend some money.
But the problem is, The moment that happens again, oh, for whatever reason, right? Because there's more grifting in courses than there isn't, you're kind of seen as that, right? And so you have to have thick skin there to probably just not care as much about what people think about you. And Elon actually mentioned this, he actually thinks that caring what people think about you is actually a weakness, right? And he's like, I got rid of that early in my career. And so take that for what it is. I think if you're going to do courses, just that probably will help you a little bit.
Yeah, but you could also do it in a different way that doesn't make you seem as much as a grifter. And even if you're not promising the world, I'm not saying anyone is going to, but even if you're not promising the world, some people, as Eric mentioned, will just assume you're a grifter or you're a course creator. So it gives you a bad rep. You could give away your course for free. They pay for shipping and then you mail it to them. And then you can also give them a digital version, but they pay for the, like the actual physical papers. And you may not make any profit from it, but that's okay. The whole purpose here is just to get them to spend money on something so that way you can upsell them.
On one end though, maybe it's easier. I'll take the other side now. Maybe it is good to be a course creator. You know why? Because when you get the hate around it, more people talk about you anyway, right?
That's true.
So, you know, it is what it is because the people that really like you, they know you do a good job. Like it doesn't matter.
Yeah. So the next topic I wanted to go to, you have it in the sheet, new YouTube channel gains 200,000 subscribers and 2 million views from a single video. Yeah. Because you and I have seen so many videos go viral, But it's very rare that you actually get a subscriber from a video that goes viral.
Yeah. Okay, this is great. We can stick on YouTube for a little bit because I have some more stuff on YouTube. So this is the Cultural Tutor. So this guy on Twitter, just so you see what he looks like, it's literally like one of these like, you know, stoic, you know, like, you know.
Like the Greek gods.
Greek gods, yeah, type of thing. So his name's the Cultural Tutor. So he said this, 2 weeks ago, I released a short film on a new channel. 2 weeks later, it has hit 2 million views, 190,000 likes, 13,000 comments, and the channel has already Nearly 200,000 subs. Why? 2 reasons, both simple. Number one, the internet is sloppier than ever and everybody knows it, right? We're talking about AI slop and things like that. We've seen, you know, AI content creation is up 53% versus others. You tweeted that as well. Number 2, the message of the film. People around the world are tired of modern architecture and modern design, right? So he has basically his packaging here. This is good packaging. Look, it says the packaging for the title is How Did the World Get So Ugly, right? And then basically it just talks about the modern world. And you can see here the number of comments and the number of subscribers, right? Now it's like 200,000. And so those of you that can't see this, it's an interesting idea that covers a very wide TAM. And I would say, yeah, like when you walk around now, like when you walk around LA, the architecture's not that great. But when you walk around in like Paris or London or whatever, you look at the architecture, it's beautiful, right? It's like, what happened here? It's like we're supposed to be the richest country in the world and it's garbage, right?
Dude, yesterday I was in downtown Los Angeles.
Oh, great.
I was having coffee with one of my friends, who was in town for an event. And we're looking literally in downtown LA at 3 skyscrapers. Imagine each skyscraper is at least $100 million. Like, I don't know how tall it was.
Probably cheaper now.
Uh, to build.
I'm saying to build. Yeah. Right.
When you're talking about the land and everything, 3 skyscrapers all next to each other and they're tall. I'm not talking about like 10 stories or 20 stories.
Like graffiti tower there.
Yeah. The graffiti tower. That's right. And they all had graffiti on it.
Yeah.
Yeah. I was like, What the heck is this? There goes $300 million.
Yeah.
How the heck do you have buildings that are like half completed, have graffiti all over them, and the United States, especially in a city like Los Angeles, that's so rich?
Yep. Look, I think going back to this video, it goes back to, uh, so people are interested in craftsmanship, right? And so there's slop now that's being published all the time. It's like, okay, you have the coolest you know, Veo 3.1 or whatever, the best image generators, the best video generators, and people are going to get lazier and lazier with content. And so this guy was very intentional about the content he did here. And he didn't just focus on politics or rage bait or clickbait, but it was because that stuff is— people are getting tired of it. Like people, I think people are getting more sensitized or desensitized to all this rage bait that they see in the TikToks, right? So his whole thing is just talking about how modern life is somehow chaotic and boring at the same time. And he wants to go with a different angle, but he's like, it doesn't have to be this way. So he had a different angle. So my point of saying this is that if you want 200,000 subs from one video, you spend a lot more time on the craftsmanship, you tell a different story and you have really good packaging and that's how you're going to win. Interestingly enough, Neil, I talked to someone from, that's Gujarati like you. I don't know how to pronounce it, but 23-year-old, he might help me with YouTube strategy.
Okay.
And he's like, you know, me and Neil, we're the same, 23 years old, right? We're the same. We're really good at money. We look at the finances and we're very detailed with them. I was like, yes, that you are. And so he's like, he's going to, he might help us with the Marketing School channel.
No, cool.
It's a good deal. I'm like, hey, tell me, his name's Param. I'm like, hey Param, why does our Marketing School channel suck so much? And he's like, well, to be honest with you, you guys have really good content. I'm like, well, thank you. I know we do. But like, but he's like, you and Neil don't have time to focus on the packaging. I'm like, bingo. I'm like, I don't want to think about the ideas. I don't want to think about the packaging. He's like, I got you on the packaging. I got you on the thumbnails. And he's like, 'cause he helped the channel in India grow from like 0 to 7 million subs or something.
Wow.
I was like, hey.
Must be consumer-based.
Yeah, you're right. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. YouTube's just changing so much. So did you see the YouTube CEO just announced that, uh, he, he announced that 30% of viewers watch live on, on YouTube and they're going to bet harder on live streaming. And the other thing is thumbnails now, when you upload them, they're way higher quality, but they're going to try— like you basically go live every week with the webinars. I'm like, live stream—
Every other week, but yeah.
Every other week, yeah. But I'm like, we should be doing more of it, whether it's a webinar or whether it's like, you know, us having like friends come on and just shooting the shit. Honestly, that would be fun. And I do that. Like last Friday I was shooting the shit with a few, like there's 8 of us, right? And it's like, dude, the conversations we have are so fun and interesting. Some stuff's confidential, obviously, but people are getting tired of the same stuff over and over. And when people are zigging, you gotta zag.
That's how I see it.
Yeah.
You should just do it with your YPO group.
I'll tell you what, I'll tell you something at lunch after. I can't tell you right now. But one more thing on the YouTube thing too. So yesterday I was talking to one popular author and YouTuber at the poker game, okay? ended up using the same YouTube firm you were using that was costing like $20 to $25 a month, right?
Right.
And then he's like, interestingly enough, like all these other creators, they get off of that creator group, but they end up going back to them, right? And he's like, dude, they're just too expensive for what they were. And he's— him even having so many subs and so many views, he's like, we constantly need to shuffle through YouTube, like YouTube strategists because like, I'm like, so him being so smart, bestselling author and everything, I'm like, do you come up with your own ideas? He's like, F no, right? I don't come up with my own ideas. Like, I just have the team do it. So if they suck at it, I just fire them, right? And interesting enough, one more thing. This is kind of behind the scenes.
And he has 7 million subs.
This is like another guy with like 4 or 5 million or so.
Still a lot.
Yeah. And he said one of these popular creators that we know, that everybody knows listening to this, he has insane turnover. Actually, every big creator has insane turnover with their YouTube team.
Yeah, I believe MrBeast has high turnover.
MrBeast and some other people too that, that we can talk about at lunch. But point is, people don't want to pay a lot for this, right? People also don't want to think about strategy, but people also want a good price. So the short-form team that I'm using right now that I'm still testing, I see the videos starting to compound and I'll intro you at some point, but it's a really good price, right? And I'm like, this is just the— what does an entrepreneur want at the end of the day? They want you to just take things off their plate or just anyway, take it off their plate.
Yes.
Handle the strategy and come with a good price.
Yes.
Yeah.
We all want a good price, especially from stuff that's hard to make a direct ROI on, uh, for like branding purposes. It's like, you know, it's worth it. You know, you should spend some money, but when you have to start spending 10, 20, 30, 40 grand just on YouTube videos, this is like, yeah, do I really want to? Especially for people like you and I that can do it cheap if we just put the time in ourselves.
Dude, we're still cheap on everything. I still, as, as, as much you know, scale as you've built over time, we still try to go cheap as possible in the very beginning, right? It's just in our blood. Okay, let me read this part on the YouTube CEO thing just to go a little more deeper and then we can, you can pick the next topic. So Matt Diggity tweeted this. So YouTube CEO Neil Mohan, Mohan, right?
I don't know.
Okay, you're good.
Mohan.
Okay. Neil Mohan just dropped major platform updates that completely change how smart marketers should approach video SEO in 2025. So the biggest game changer with YouTube, let's call it in 2026, is multi-format streaming and AI-powered like clipping. So YouTube will now let creators broadcast in both horizontal and vertical formats simultaneously. This means that your single livestream can reach desktop viewers and mobile scrollers at the same time. It's good for the webinars, right?
Yeah.
You're now competing for visibility across 2 different search behaviors with one piece of content. According to YouTube's own stats, 30% of daily viewers now watch daily live content. That's a massive audience most businesses are ignoring. So I think we need to triple down on live, if I'm being honest, maybe weekly. We used to do livestreaming for this too.
Oh yeah, we did.
I'm like, I was like, I was like, no, maybe we can bring it back, but your Wi-Fi might be poo poo here, right? So after 16 years of running SEO strategies, I can tell you that platforms which let you repurpose content efficiently always win. YouTube's new AI clipping tool automatically turns live streams into ready-made Shorts. That's one live session becoming dozens of searchable content pieces. Start testing live content now. So what's the takeaway for you and me? Maybe we go live here. I don't know. Well, if your Wi-Fi poo poo, maybe you're coming to my place now. Because I have Wi-Fi across my whole building.
Really?
It's my Wi-Fi across my whole building, yeah.
Oh, cool.
Yeah, but that means Neil has to drive his van over. But I'm just like, why are we not doing this more? 'Cause it's like, you know what I've heard too? I've talked to my YouTube team about this, or my brand team. You and I, anybody, we're way different on live. Like, we're like this, okay? When I'm doing like a video, I'm stiff. I'm like reading off a teleprompter. I don't wanna be there, okay? Like you try to talk, I don't wanna record these YouTube videos. But if I'm here—
Oh, it's fun.
At least I get to eat lunch afterwards, right? We get to talk about interesting things. And this is my real personality.
Noah always has great stories for us.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Noah has great stories. And like Maya from my team said, she's like, she's like, you're way different when you're doing a webinar because it's way more fun and I'm way more relaxed. Right?
Because it's not scripted.
It's not. And then when we're talking at the conference, sure, it's a little more like, at least for me, you're still, there's a little nerves because you're still talking in front of a lot of people. I always believe there's going to be a little nerves, but it's still a lot more me than like YouTube, just recording a YouTube long form. Yeah.
Next one I want to talk about is Lily Rae has something in here, the lie of AI SEO, parentheses, GEO.
Okay, so she— this has been happening quite a bit. So let me set the tone for this. So you saw yesterday Amplitude came out with a free GEO tracking thing, right? And then someone tweeted like, there's very little amplitude and like pointed out to their stock price. It's like gone straight down and flat. It's like there's no amplitude, right? And then someone Someone tweeted, retweeted that and said, lack of focus kills, right? Because they're an analytics company. I kind of disagree with that. But there's a lot of like SEOs talking about, oh, you know, it seems like this geo tracking space is just, there's unlimited TAM for it, right? There's all these VCs are putting money into it. It's like, I guess this is the new panacea, right? Geo tracking, which is that part I agree with. I think it's kind of funny. So Lily Rae tweeted this. I'm going to read it. Basically, Lily Rae is a popular SEO, I'll call her SEO practitioner influencer. And she said, I've recently seen so many questionable, misleading geo case studies these posts and ads. As usual, this post is meant to share some truths that can hopefully help people from falling for these scams. Okay, so I'm pulling up on LinkedIn right now, but here, okay, here's what it says. So, as an SEO team with mid-sized to enterprise clients, it would be easy to position ourselves as AEO/Geo experts by taking credit for the visibility that many clients have enjoyed in LLM responses since the day LLMs became available to the public. There's a reason we don't. The truth is, many brands automatically earned brand mentions and citations in LLMs by, wait for it, being among the best and most frequently cited brands in the space. That quote unquote knowledge was already reflected in their training data. So without reading the whole thing here, so she says, look, you know, to be clear, I absolutely do believe that you can do the work to drive additional visibility and citations in AI search. That's why we do offer their AEO service at their agency. And she stands behind the work. But I think it's important for those in our industry and the new GEO folks who just got here to be transparent about And honest that many brands mentioned in AI search appear as such simply because it's a reflection of the often 1+ year old training data used to train the LLMs that generate their names, not because of GEO magic. So basically, I think she's just saying that a lot of these people that say they can do it are claiming credit for things that they didn't do.
Yeah, because if you look at a lot of products and services, they're already mentioned in GEO or ChatGPT or Perplexity or whatever. And I have seen Marketers take credit for it. The proper way to do it is you track a lot of different types of prompts or variations. You end up seeing how often the company's mentioned, and then you look at the sentiment and you want to see it grow from there. So if you can influence it and grow it, it's great. It's just like SEO traffic. What's your baseline? How much can you grow over time?
Yep. Look, I think like anything in marketing in the early days, if you're just a little bit ahead of the curve, like you're going to try to claim that you can do it because everybody wants to make money, right? And so whether it's GEO, AEO, whatever we want to call it, search everywhere optimization, I do, I see the sentiment of where she's coming from. You got to be honest, right? I think, you know, ultimately you got to be honest practitioner. But I do think a lot of this stuff, like when you see this much money going, like tens of millions of dollars going into these AEO trackers, GEO trackers, something's off. And this is no different. We've talked about this, guys. This is no different than the Yellow Pages earlier in the day. You can say you're a Yellow Pages expert and then you became like a, you know, GeoCities expert or something like that. And then you became like a Google expert and now you're an AEO expert.
You know how Amplitude's doing it, right?
How?
They already scraped a lot of the web. So when you put in a query, they're not analyzing in real time. They'll send you a link and the analyzing progress bar will take a long time. But if you put in your email, you'll literally get a report pretty quickly.
Yeah. So—
And then for the sites that they have no data on, we've seen that we are not getting emails.
I, the reason I like Amplitude's move, whether it's a good product or not, they're, so they're an analytics product, right? And they're supposed to be, you know, working with more Enterprises, right? Mid-market to enterprise. Now for them, it makes sense for them to— this is why we talk about giving things away for free. This makes sense for them to splinter off, give it away for free. They know there's a lot of people in the space already, but they can collect all the information and then just look for anybody that puts in their email and then enrich them to see who's product qualified and look at what they're using and then say, oh, you should be using this analytics product over here and this one over here.
No, I think this is a great move.
We'll do a reverse trial. We'll give you some, like a little bit of usage of these things every bit a month or so. And then hopefully they start to you know, expand within the account. So I don't think it's a bad move. People can poo-poo on their stock price or whatever. But, you know, this is tried and true time and time again.
Just generally speaking, if you think about the stock market, the stock market hasn't been favorable to marketing SaaS companies. And I'm not saying Amplitude's pure marketing or anything like that. It's just, it hasn't been favorable to analytics marketing type products. They just haven't done well. Majority of them haven't done well in the public markets.
Someone tweeted something this morning and it showed, it literally showed, it was talking about all these GEO things, right? These analytics things. But when you're like a system of record company, like a HubSpot or a Salesforce, your valuations tend to be higher. When you're just kind of like a little feature, yeah, feature, your valuations tend to be a lot lower. Yeah. So.
