Stop Shipping Everything: Why supermemory Killed Its Viral Product

Yeah, and for anyone listening, if you're getting pitched by people who are telling you how to succeed and their version of telling you how to succeed is them creating content on how to succeed, they usually haven't done anything in the past and they usually haven't made any significant money. So you can listen to them if you want. This is why, and I know it's controversial, I don't care for coaches. I just think most coaches are a waste. On the flip side, if someone is truly really successful and they have a lot of money, I've seen almost in all cases those people willing to give advice for free. If they don't want to give the advice for free, they won't give it even if you pay them. So it's either they give it for free or they're not going to give it at all. I haven't seen really too many successful people being like, I will charge you for advice and this is what I do for a living.

I would say there's 2 types of coaches in my mind, Neil. So you have the coaches that coached like Steve Jobs, that coached like, you know, the founders of like Intuit or like, you know, like these tech coaches, like Bill Campbell was his name, I think, right? So that's like a coach that everyone knows in Silicon Valley, right? And that's someone that has kind of been there, done that, and is coaching those founders up. Then you have coaches that are selling things, right? Which you see quite a bit on like Instagram, for example, right? They put you through a funnel and all that. And actually, funny enough, I had talked to someone that yesterday worked for someone that we know in the coaching space, right? Very successful YouTube video, we'll just call it that, right? Back in the day, okay? Has even done business with people that I know very closely and has not paid those people, right? So anyway, all that to say is like, that is an example of a coach, but that's like the coaching used for almost like just to try to extract maximum value from a monetary standpoint. What Neil's talking about is you do have these Silicon Valley type coaches like a Bill Campbell, who didn't actually really collect money. He was just out there paying it forward, right? So I think there's 2 types of coaches. And I think some people can— anything can be weaponized for maybe trying to extract too much money.

Yeah.

And I'm just a believer that the people who are good at what they do, do what they do. They don't go coach on it. You could get people who you want to pay for something very specific. And maybe it'll help you out. Majority of the coaches that I'm talking about online that I just despise are the ones who are just going to teach you how to get rich.

Yes.

Or versions of that, like, I'm going to teach you how to become popular and grow, blow up your personal brand, or I'm going to teach you how to do marketing and get a million views on Instagram. I'm like, but that doesn't equate to revenue. It's just, they're pushing hocus pocus because they don't know how to drive real revenue.

So let me talk about, so we talked about these 2 coaches, right? You have the legendary Silicon Valley coach, Bill Campbell, who actually there's a book I read called The Trill Billion Dollar Coach. That's a good one, right? Because he formed all these— helped form all these companies. So he actually coached, he mentored. So he used to be the CEO of Intuit, and he used to coach football at Columbia University, right? So he actually ended up mentoring Steve Jobs from Apple, right? He mentored Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both of the co-founders from Google, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Twitter, now X, co-founder Jack Dorsey, right? Matt Moschieri, this is the one that I talked about. This is also a great book as well, but The Great CEO Within, that's a great— he's known as a coach, but he coached the CEOs of Reddit, so Steve Huffman, Coinbase, OpenAI, and Flexport. And he, to my knowledge, he does actually charge for coaching. So these are the coaches that I think are worth their while. And so when Neil and I had talked about this a couple years ago, the coach that I had actually had founded companies before and was a VC before and had worked with Some of these legendary VCs. And so to me, he was a founder and investor. That to me was worth it. But I have never really gone through kind of these other, you know, what Neil's talking about. And I, we have seen more scams than not.

Dude, so I get pitched, I'm going to cover the person's name so you can't see it.

Okay.

I get pitched a lot. The message says, hey Neil, hope all is well. Love the content. I had a crazy idea if you'd be down to hear it, stay safe. And I respect this dude for his hustle. And I said, what's the idea?

Okay. So I wanted to reach out, one, because I love your content. I find it very valuable. And 2, I feel like you're leaving a lot of money on the table. To give you an example, I'm CEO of takecultivation.com. And last year alone, with one single content creator, we were able to cash out over $1.1 million. Now look, with the industry that you're in, the type of value you're giving to your audience, and the type of, you know, content you're making, there's no reason you can't be doing that, if not more. Would you be open to hopping on a quick 10-minute call later today or first thing tomorrow, just to see if I can even help? If not, at least give you the blueprint to scale what's there and fix that bio. Stay safe. I'll talk to you soon. Awesome. I'm going to reach out.

So he sent that, he said, and then he responded with, you there, brother? Because I didn't respond back. And my response—

What'd you say? We aren't that kind of biz. We wouldn't care for that extra mil in revenue. Oh, he didn't. Did he even see it?

I don't know. He didn't respond back to it.

He didn't see it. He didn't see it.

No, but none of my other messages show read from him, so I'm guessing he did see it.

I don't know. I don't know.

But none of the other messages say delivered or read or anything.

Let me tell you what's wrong with the message that he sent to you. So I don't know who that guy is, right? So, um, let me just say this. So this guy reaches out to Neil and he's like, hey, you know, hey brother, you know, first of all, like, I don't know if you say hey brother, but like when you talk like that, hey brother, and you're like, you're wearing like a tank top, like you gotta, if you're trying to do a business deal, at least look a little bit presentable, at least wear a t-shirt or something like that. Right. The second thing is this. Hey, brother, you're leaving so much money on the table. So that kind of makes me feel like an idiot, right? The third thing is like, I'm going to help you make an extra million dollars. So basically you did no research on me, right? So you did no research on me. You don't know how big my business is. You don't even know what I do. And you're just sending these out and you're trying to be personal, but people can see right through that, right? And so when you act like that, how you do anything is how you do everything. So if you're like that already, that's how it's going to be working with you.

Dude, you nailed it. If someone doesn't put in the time and the research before they talk to you, imagine what's going to happen once you hire that person. You're screwed. People typically try the hardest to get your money. Once they have your money, it's usually much worse.

Yeah.

And dude, you experienced this. You recently hired someone for, I think it was content ideas, and they were so irrelevant. You gave them feedback, on why they did things wrong and it's not even relevant for your business. And what did they come back to you with? Sure, but that's not included in our scope. We can fix it.

We just want more money. Yep. Which doesn't make any sense to me. Like, you're clearly early in your career and you're trying to learn and then you're like, you're only looking at the monetary gain, which is not a good thing too. Like, sure, Neil and I talk about revenue and all that, but there's a time to learn and there's also a time to earn.

Yes. But dude, you nailed it. I think that's a very valuable lesson for anyone who's listening. If someone doesn't put in the effort before they get your check, what happens after you give them the check? It's usually much worse, not better.

So one final thing on the coaches piece, and then we have a few other things that we can cover here. But Neil, I actually did some research here with, you know, Gemini, right? So the most famous Silicon Valley coaches did not charge their core founder clients for money. Instead, they structured their compensation through equity donations or provided completely free of charge. So Bill Campbell, the most legendary one that I was talking about, So, he never accepted a single dollar for his executive coaching. When coaching founders like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, he routinely refused salaries or fees. If a company insists on paying him, he would demand they donate the entire amount to his charitable foundation or local community causes. He believed that accepting a paycheck would create a conflict of interest, stating that he wanted his advice to remain entirely objective. But he was already massively wealthy. Wow.

wealthy, right?

Yeah.

Now, Matt Mochary is the next one, right? So he built his reputation on coaching the top tech CEOs entirely for free. Inspired by the idea from OpenAI's Sam Altman, Mochary decided he only wanted to spend time doing things he would naturally do for free. By offering world-class guidance to elite tech founders like Naval Ravikant and Brian Armstrong at no cost, he built unparalleled trust and insider access, but he now charges people. So he does selective coaching now, but he has an agency now that does the coaching. It's $10,000 to $12,000. $12,500 per month for regular executive team-wide coaching. So he made it into a business eventually.

He made it into a business, but he has a proven track record, right? So when someone has a proven track record, has done well, that's a little bit different. And he's not promising you that he's going to get rich. I'm not saying, and nor is Eric saying, that all coaches are bad. It's the coaches that are trying to charge you money to make you rich are really bad, or a version of that, like make you popular, right? Or anything ancillary that can lead to making money online.

Yeah, I'll say one more thing, because this actually does tie in with marketing, right?

This—

because this is what actually gives marketing a bad rap. The people in the— I would say the majority of people in the coaching space, I think there are some good players in the coaching space, but the majority, right? It's a lot of short-termism. It's a lot of, hey, get rich quick, I'm going to help you make money fast. But what ends up happening is anything that comes quick ends up going away quickly, and it ends up leaving a poor taste in most people's mouths, which is why That industry is more despised than other industries. So I'll just leave it at that. I want to come to this next topic over here and get your feedback. So my conclusion now with everything around AI is that— 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 organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer the Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Unshipping is actually more important than shipping today. So let me explain. So when you ship, you can build anything. You can build any product, you can build any CRM today, you can build any voice thing, you can build any SEO tool, you can do whatever you want, right? The world is your oyster. The problem with that is that when you start to ship everything, kind of similar to trying to create content for everything, You become known for nothing. And so, this company over here known as Super Memory, they started doing this one thing. So, let me share my screen with you real quick. So, this guy— how do you pronounce his name, Neil? This is your people.

Dhruvaya Shah.

Dhruvaya Shah. Okay, thank you for that. So, they launched this company brain because a lot of people are talking about these company brains, right? It's like, hey, this company brain can reach attachments, read attachments. It can read Slack deep links and all this stuff. Basically put the entire company on this, right? Like, people loved it, da da da. And then they realized that after putting in all these resources, it was taking it away from their core business, which is pushing the frontier of memory and continual learning for agents, right? It was taking away from their core business. And so even though you see companies like, you know, Coinbase shipping more than ever right now, you see Robinhood shipping more products than ever right now, right? Um, you see Google shipping more products than ever. When you're a startup You can't actually do that even though you can ship anything because you have very limited resources. We've talked about the concept of bullets versus barrels versus ammunition, right? So ammunition, you might have a lot of ammunition, but you only have so many barrels that you can fire initiatives through. When you're a startup, you have less barrels than a large company. And so you have to be even more focused than before and you have to focus on unshipping things and shutting things down quicker because we're in a world now where you can ship anything.

Dude, that's true. And we're also seeing people just ship too much stuff that just makes products harder to use. That company that had the valuation of $10-ish billion that Eric was talking about, the reason I think they're doing well and they're getting a lot of hype is because it's just over SMS and they just kept it simple.

Yeah.

It's, you want to build more, but you want to build more without people, A, having to see it, and B, having to interact with it. In essence, how can you just help people solve their problem and do more on your end versus just showcasing everything to a user and just giving them tons of interfaces that just make their life harder.

Yep. And this resonated with me because recently we had consolidated a few of our products and our initiatives just to focus in even more. And so this is interesting because he said this, like, hey, we have many, many developers, startups, and enterprises who already use our memory engine in production. So they're using their core product, right? And so what ended up happening was that, you know, this company brain thing that they were building ended up having a conflict of interest with larger companies that they work with, like Cognition or Notion, which are hot startups right now, right? And so you don't want to have conflict of interest with these clients, and because eventually they're going to stop paying you. So he said this: shipping is important, but unshipping is even more important for us. We want to make sure that everything we do, we're doing— we're the best at doing. Using some other company brain products and agent harnesses made me realize that putting 100% of your time in something can lead to great results. And since we are not able to do that, our product was average, not out of the ordinary. So if you want to be extraordinary, you have to do extraordinary things. Which means unshipping.

Yeah, dude, it's, it's, I think it's spot on. But that's the kind of content, by the way, that I think performs extremely well on X, will do really well on LinkedIn, will do terrible on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. I don't know, hit or miss. But that content would do very well on X and LinkedIn.

The best mid-market and enterprise type leads for me this year came from X, right? And it wasn't even AI content. It's content that I wrote myself, right? And the AI content, sure, it performs, it gets a lot of views, but when it's my content written by myself with a point of view on it, that's what gets people interested, right? And so speaking of X, Neil, I have one more for you to react to over here. Your brother-in-law, Hiten Shah, shared this.

Okay.

So brand as software. So this guy, Oh, I was gonna say Kimchi. This guy's Paul, so his profile says Kimchi in it, so I thought his name was Kimchi. But, um, so he leads brand at Ramp. So Ramp's a pretty hot company right now, 284,000 views on this one. So he writes a very long article over here, and it talks about this, this concept known as brand as software. So look, it's a very long article, Neil, a very long article.

Oh wow.

But so let me just do this, Neil. Let me just make it easy for us. Let's just hit the Grok button over here. And just see what it says. Okay, so it says, I call the opportunity brand as software. Software that carries a company's point of view, values, and constraints into the work itself. Highly skilled designers spend their time reproducing decisions already made while the brand dies by a thousand paper cuts. An agent can carry audience, product truths, voice, and visual system into the work so the guideline finally answers back. Pair artists who invent the language with builders who turn those decisions into living infrastructure treated like a product, And taste remains human and reputation becomes software. The system carries a score so that people can make music, not noise. What this guy is really saying, this guy Paul Yoon, what he's saying is like, look, the way we used to work with designers, you and I as marketers, Neil, the way we used to work with designers on the branding stuff is we would almost do all the marketing work first and then say, hey designers, go ahead and step in, come for cleanup work, right? Um, which is not what a designer wants to do. This is why, at least from my experience working in startups, Neil, Designers always hated working on the marketing stuff because it's always just like a throw it over the fence type of thing and they're like an afterthought, right? But the idea here is that this allows that type of work to be codified into software. So you might have a design.md file or multiple files that make your brand consistency there. So whenever Neil wants to crank out a landing page or I want to crank out a new ad, it's just brand consistent. And then the brand people and the designers, they can focus more on the new stuff, right?

Mm-hmm.

the stuff that's more strategic, and they can continue to upgrade the brand guidelines. And so they don't need to worry about any last-minute stuff. And so we're all becoming more enabled, and that's what I believe brand as software is going to be. In fact, I think most stuff is going to become as software.

Yeah, I like it. I agree with it.

I mean, how are you guys working like this right now?

I don't think most people are working like this right now, but they should be.

That is true. I mean, the way we work on this right now is we use what I was just mentioning, design.md files, and then you can have workflows and things like that. But I think you need a lead designer that's super AI-pilled because someone like me or someone like Anil, we might know a little bit about this stuff, but at the end of the day, you need someone that's super on top of it, which just gave me an idea. I'm just going to go to my designers afterwards and say, hey, what are we doing about this? And I'm just going to send them this article.

So not just that, if they're not AI-pilled, I already know what Eric's going to do on that one. If they don't know the right answers, it's like, oh, you don't know all the stuff that you should be Well, dude, I'll tell you something, Neil.

So we had a creative leave recently to another company, right? And he just came back. I'm like, when I talked to him, I was like, why are you considering leaving this other company? He's like, not AI-pilled enough, not fast enough, right? It doesn't give him the energy. And so when he's back, I'm like, hey, if you're going to come back, I actually want you to make a difference on these things. And so I'm going to send you stuff and I want you to move a lot faster. I want you to speak up. But I think it says a lot. Like, Neil, I'm sure you've had boomerang employees. We do as well. But when you have boomerang employees, it actually reinforces that The vision that you're driving is the one that's true to you because people want to come back to your vision, right? So a lot of times, like if you're starting out, you're listening to this right now, maybe you're 1, 2, 3 years into your business. It's about staying the course and it's not an easy thing to do. But I'm going to throw one more at you. You can react to this one. ChatGPT agent ads are coming. What are you going to do about it? What do you think about it?

So ChatGPT agent ads. We'll test it out just like every other channel and see what ends up working. We don't look at it as much of a difference to marketing to humans and agents, whether it's ads or organic. You're still marketing through platforms that are controlled by algorithms and bots and machines, and you just got to persuade people. The persuasion may be through more logic versus using emotion, but you got to persuade people to check you out.

Yep. I'll give you one more because we have a couple, a couple of minutes here. So Neil, I saw this yesterday. This one's more for entertainment. So this is another article from Ramp. So the cool thing about their company, by the way, is look, you have an engineer from Ramp, Sandra Likes Frogs. The other one was the brand person. They're all publishing content that's getting— and I think they're all amplifying the content because you have a bunch of engineers. So they're doing engineers, designers, other people at Ramp. And so I think they're all amplifying each other. And there's this product called Triordinal, which allows you to do more employee-generated content like EGC. And I think that's what they're doing right now. They're all kind of amplifying each other. And the cool thing is at the end of their post too, they all have like a— there's like a little recruiting link at the end of it so they can just continue to get more people, right? It's more awareness to get more people. So the cool thing here is that Sandra from Ramp here said, you know, we gave an AI agent a Ramp card and told it to make money. Okay, so as far as they're concerned, this is the first example of an agent where you tell it to make money and it actually made money for you. Okay, so here's what they did. They gave Devin a ramp card. So I'm assuming this is Devin from, uh, Cognition, right? Or maybe they just named it Devin. So they gave this AI maybe, uh, a ramp card, which is a, you know, temporary credit card, um, and a phone and email. They named it Bug Basher, okay? And they told it to sell, uh, New York pest inspection referrals, okay? So the tool is called Bug Basher. So Devin is in fact from Cognition. That's the, the AI coding tool, okay? So they gave Devin a ramp card, phone, email. And then they told it to sell NYC pest inspection and referrals. Okay, so 4 weeks and many phone calls later, I think over 10,000 phone calls, Neil, it made $75. All right, so the first publicly documented AI B2B sale from a cold start. Every 20 minutes, a heartbeat checked the inbox, Stripe, and calls, and then revised prompts and its shared brain from transcripts. It added a Spanish or Chinese ask, leaked its system prompt on 197 calls, and found our systems in Git when Slack installed. Our exterminator paid $75— one exterminator paid $75 via Stripe. Agents hill climb well but still struggle with long-term planning and go make money. So that's the lesson from this. But it seems like it's one of the first documented cases of an agent just making money.

That's really cool. I think we're going to see more of that. And then we're also going to see a lot of cases of agents causing you to lose a lot of money.

Yeah. I mean, we've seen that already where someone, I think last week, It overspent on their card by $5,000.

On your card?

No, on their card. Someone shared it on X and they said they only shared it for one transaction because it's tied to like a Link account, right? Which is from Stripe. And then it overspent by $5,000.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. So I think that's going to happen a lot more than a lot more of this because people aren't that smart, including myself.

So. Cool.

All right, so anyway guys, that is it for today. We hope you enjoyed it and we'll catch you tomorrow.