Synthetic Customer Development: The Next Big Thing?

Eric, did you see ChatGPT has partly replaced Bing?

I do see— you picked the worst one. I was complaining about this topic that you picked. I was like, God, Neil picks the worst topics. But no, it is a big deal. I actually didn't see this, so please explain.

Yeah, so there's this French blogger, alexseo.com. He has a newsletter and he did an analysis with certain queries. When you look at the search results in ChatGPT for some of the ones that he pulled, I don't read French, you can't translate the image as easily as the text, but roughly 30% of the results were from Bing, but on the flip side, 90% were from Google.

You know, this is interesting to me because aside from this, you look at the Microsoft OpenAI partnership, it's getting shakier and shakier, and then you've seen the commentary on X where people have said, Sam Altman's lost so many executives, right? Like before, like the CTO—

Facebook and everyone.

Recently, yeah. But even before, he lost like Mira, he lost all these other people resigned, right? And then there's so many people that have said that Sam Altman, and I can't verify this, but this is just what I've seen on X, saying that, you know, he's not like a moral upstanding guy. Like he has problems with Elon too, whatever. And then I've been reading through about the Microsoft partnership, how they've been trying to negotiate this deal and like get out of like certain splits that they have to deal with from like a revenue sharing standpoint, right? And so this is happening over here. ChatGPT is like, okay, screw you, Microsoft, we're just going to move to Google. So I think it's just going to get more and more complicated. But I don't know, like on one side it's like Sam Altman has created one of the most important technologies of our time. But on the other side, you just start to hear so many of these things and it's like, you know, it's— it gets a little shaky, I think, you know, when you look at it from like a company standpoint.

And I don't see Microsoft being flexible on their deal. They gave too many billions of dollars. The company wouldn't be where it is if Microsoft didn't pour all that cash in early on, which was a big risky bet. Now, yeah, Yeah, you can go look at it being like, ah, it's not that risky. But back then it was. They poured what, supposedly $10+ billion into that thing.

$10 billion, yeah.

And they deserve their revenue cut. And I doubt Satya or anyone on the legal team's gonna be like—

No, it'll make them look bad.

Yeah, they're like, sure, we'll give you— give us less revenue. They're like, screw you.

So I actually listened to an interview yesterday with one of OpenAI's co-founders, Greg Brockman, I think is his name, and with one of the Collison brothers, right? And Greg was like, dude, so many times in OpenAI's early days, they almost died. They didn't know what to do. They were like building like gaming stuff and like they didn't know that it was going to be this chat thing. I think they were trying to figure out how to sell these APIs in the very beginning and somehow they figured it out, right? But without Microsoft's war chest, I don't think they would have figured it out. And now it's like, it kind of seems like from the outside, us looking in, it's like they're kind of biting the hand that used to feed them. And, you know, I don't know. That kind of sucks. And Microsoft shouldn't let up. I don't think they should.

No, they shouldn't. But speaking of doubling down, I think that is with most businesses and startups. Even when we run marketing campaigns, we don't know always what's going to resonate and convert. And, you know, I would love to hear how you guys have pivoted over the years and potentially died. At NP Digital, you know, we started as a consulting company, then had software. We've had some rocky paths in between, but the company grew through a decent economic time. So the scariest moment was probably COVID. Yeah.

Right?

Because we didn't know what was going to happen.

Even the very beginning.

The very beginning of COVID But, you know, we've had a decent tracker, I'm knocking on wood, and we've had some scary moments similar to you and other agencies, you know, where people are like, oh, AI's going to kill marketing agencies. AI's going to kill SEO. Now, you and I didn't believe either of those 2 things, but I have to say, and I know you agree with this, we're also biased because we're in that industry. And we also think the Sam Almonds of the world are biased because they're building the platforms and yes, they want the biggest TAM, so they're going to go with the pitch of we're going to be able to do everything that people do and you don't need to pay these people. But even like I look at right now in my company, you know, internally we were focused quite a bit on Amazon over the past 3 to 6 months and we still do quite a bit of Amazon stuff, but I've really shifted the team's focus to LLMs and I'm like, why not try to be the agency that really helps people with everything LLM related? And double down on that because I think that's a much bigger pie for companies like yours and ours versus, you know, focusing on Amazon where the 3rd largest seller is only doing $800-ish million in revenue, which is a lot, but it just shows it's fragmented with a ton of SMBs.

Yeah. So I don't think we've necessarily changed our opinion because you're the one that came up with search everywhere optimization and, you know, companies call it different things. I, and I just call it what you call it. And so I do think that that naturally falls into— and here's the interesting thing from my side. You've seen so many of these VCs back these like Profound or whatever. I actually talked to another company this week. They're building one of those LLM, you know, surface trackers. You're doing the same thing. You're adjusting Ubersuggest now, right? There's so many of these coming up now, and it seems to just be moving in that direction. And it's— I think in this case, it's more so this is just where the tides are going to, the wave is flowing.

Yes.

So why push against it? And I think it's the ones that usually have a different angle in the beginning. Those are ones that stand out because you have a point of view.

Yeah, but I think as a company, when we're trying to come up with our unique value proposition, right? How do we adjust our copy and our positioning to stand out in a crowded place where everyone looks alike? You know, we differentiate through technology and we're going to end up showing unlike other agencies, we actually have alum-based tracking and our own proprietary technology. But I've also seen you pivot as well. If you look at your history, Single Grain is now what, 10+ years old?

Single Grain started in 2009. I took it over in 2014.

All right, so it's 10+ years old of just your ownership.

Yeah.

More than 10 years old when you look at total.

Yeah.

But when you look at Single Grain, it used to just be a marketing agency that really focused on SEO.

It was just an SEO shop.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then you added in the other service, social, paid management, email conversions, a lot, yada, yada, yada. But if I look at you now, you've had a huge shift into ABM and focusing heavily, whether you say it or not, B2B because of the ABM, right? It's mainly B2B companies that are using it.

I'll give you the angle. I mean, so for us, we're focused, we call it B2B OS with Carrot and everything and Singularity. It's really all encompassing. So on our end, we're just like, let's just focus on B2B because B2B is often so far behind B2C, like 5 years behind. And I think we can do a lot better if we just— our focus is on making B2B, this B2B operating system easier for everyone. That's already a wide enough TAM because B2B is what, $20 trillion a year or something like that?

And it's massive. And it's actually stickier. The B2C has much more ups and downs and higher churn from what we see than B2B.

And so we're just going to keep building technology around it and hiring more people around it because I think the more you focus, the better. Just like if you're going to say, okay, we're going to be the LLM agency, great. If we're going to be B2B OS, great, right? I think you need to have some type of positioning here in a world, to your point, where everyone looks the same and You and I, I think it's— I think the problem with a lot of agency owners is they, they don't adapt quickly enough. And that's why when we talk to people from recruiting right now, a lot of the people that we're pulling over, they're like, the agency is just not adapting. They don't want to do this AI thing. They don't want to skate to where the puck is going. And so it's like kind of like, I don't know, stealing kids from stealing candy from a kid when you're talking to people right now, because all you need to do is paint the vision around AI and where you're doing and instantly like their eyes light up, right?

Yeah.

So I don't know about you guys, but recruiting has gotten a little easier for us because you paint that vision now, so.

I actually think recruiting's gotten easier because there's not that many agencies that are hiring. The whole agency space, according to my CEO, I don't know what article he read, has contracted 4% over the last 12 months.

Oh wow, wow. Have you been paying attention to the holding companies?

I have, I have.

Okay, so how's that going?

Publicis is probably doing the best out of all of them and they made some really good bets back in the day and they've been paying off. Their most recent bets have been around influencer marketing and they've been doubling down. They bought multiple companies in the influencer space, so they're trying to go for reach and just own the whole space. And they're saying that is a big future. The Omnicom-IPG, I believe, merger, it looks like it's getting—

It's going through? Yeah.

No, it looks like it's getting regulatory pushback.

Really? I thought I read a couple weeks ago that it was going through.

It could still be going through, but I read also that they're getting regulatory pushback. It doesn't mean that they won't find ways around it, just like Activision, Microsoft, right? They figured out how to compromise and make the regulators happy. I think Dentsu, they've been struggling. The rumor is that they've been, they're planning on selling. They've been liquidating assets like Mute6 and others that don't fit the story. So my guess is they will. WPP has been struggling. Martin Sorrell's S4 Capital, which bought MediaMonks and a few other companies, they've been struggling as well. I'm not trying to talk Crap, a lot of agencies just have been struggling. These ones are public, so you can just look up their numbers. Yeah, I think just the overall space for the holding companies, what's happening is like if the Omnicom and IPG merger go through, you're going to have a bigger organization that moves slower, run by accountants, cutting more costs.

Yep.

From all the articles I'm reading and the trends we're seeing, I see a shift happening over time to more people pushing towards independence.

Dude, so you just hit the nail on the head. In my opinion, it's bureaucracy that holds a lot of these holding companies back these agency holding companies, it takes too long to get things done. It's slow as molasses. And then when you have people at the top where it becomes more of a math equation, and I'm not saying math's not important, finances are important, financial models are important, but when it becomes all about that, you're actually losing sight from focusing on customers, right? And I'm reading that book right now that I told you about, the—

The billion-dollar one, right?

Yeah, Company of Giants, right? And when you read about like Steve Case of AOL or Scott Cook from Intuit, right? These guys were just like, dude, you just have to, it's all like, one of the quotes is, it's all about the customer, stupid. It's not about this financial model, but the moment things start to really grow, and this was in the Steve Jobs interview in there, when you have people at the top, like, I think it was, God, I remember Steve Jobs hired the Pepsi CEO and then the Pepsi CEO, all they did at that point was they focused on private jets flying to nice islands and things like that. And it was all about making sure they have nice company cars and all that. It was no longer about the customers. And so I think for you, because you're founder-led and you own the lion's share of the company, you get to call the shots and where the— you understand, again, fundamentally your job is to help these companies grow and you have to understand where the puck is going. And that's all it is.

Yeah.

It's focus on the customers, That's all.

I agree with that. But the hard part is, even though we're founder-led, like my co-founder and I were texting back and forth when I was flying back from Hong Kong, and he actually said something to me that was really interesting. He's like, dude, business was so much easier when we were smaller, like $30 million or less in revenue.

Mm-hmm.

Because right now we're trying to implement some AI technology. I've talked to you about this, where AI calls all of our leads and we have some other things in the works, so it's not just as simple as them just calling our leads. There's some other cool things that we're trying to do that I don't want to go into. Talking to my co-founder or texting him back and forth when I was on the flight, we've been trying to do this for like a few months now and we can't do it.

Yep.

Because we're bound by laws and laws are different in EU versus the UK versus here versus Brazil and Mexico and Canada, and the list goes on and on. And there's a lot of privacy and regulatory issues or legal issues because a lot of these software solutions will train on your calls and use that data for other things. And we're not allowed to do that based off of certain countries and laws and how we collect leads. So I can't implement it and test it out. And my co-founder and I were texting, we're like, man, if we were a startup—

Oh, instantly.

People just do it because you don't have much to lose. But at our size, I'm not saying we're massive.

But you also don't have bureaucracy holding you down.

We don't have too much bureaucracy. When him and I get involved, we can just get through it.

But the hard part— When I say bureaucracy, I mean the regulation from like the EU or whatever.

Yes. Yeah. We have bureaucracy that's holding us down, but as a startup, this is going to sound bad, but this is reality. Most startups just ignore bureaucracy and the laws. They're not going to blatantly break the laws like selling drugs, But they're going to ignore it like a ChatGPT scraping a New York Times and learning from it, right? I'm not saying that's what happened or didn't, but I think that's what the case is all about. And you're skirting around laws and no one cares because you don't have much to lose. But when you're larger, you have a crap ton to lose. We don't have anything to lose like ChatGPT, but still it's a lot for us.

You're still a target.

Yeah, we're still a target. And that just, that really does slow us down and it just makes us not grow as fast. And then it's just like, all right, If we were sub-$30 million, a lot smaller, you know, back then, I don't know how many people we had, maybe 200 employees, right? We were like 1/5 employee count, maybe even less than that, maybe like 100 and something employees and 1,000 plus right now to give you guys perspective. It's just like, all right, who's going to really sue us? Just go for it.

They're going to be like, oh, we're small. Let me give you the counterfactual. Elon does a lot that he wants to do. For example, I'm going to start a new party. I'm going to start the American Party, which is like, she— he should be like, I think you and I could both say like, he probably shouldn't do that.

Correct. And Eric and I are not talking about politically what he should or should not do. We're talking about when you look at it from a shareholder perspective, a lot of the stuff he's doing is just causing people to get pissed off. And it's also causing his Tesla shares to go down, not just because of the political side, but people are also boycotting Tesla, which everyone's seen on the internet, and it's hurting their sales.

Yep. Yeah. So look, I think your point around this was that LLMs are now going to drive a lot of agency revenue. And now we're kind of talking about, you have this other piece over here on how relationships matter more than ever. So I feel like all of your topics today are centering around one thread. What is that thread?

Well, let's actually go back to the one that you just mentioned on how LLMs is going to drive agencies quite a bit of revenue. We're starting to see the ChatGPTs, the Perplexities, and other solutions. recommend agencies for LLM optimization. We're starting to get referrals from the actual LLMs. LLMs.

We are too. Yeah.

And I'm like, it's a great channel. And when I say referrals, I'm not talking about someone going to ChatGPT, uh, typing something in. I'm talking about an employee at like a Perplexity or ChatGPT is saying, hey, you should talk to NP Digital. Yeah, we're starting to get business from that.

Yeah, that's awesome.

When, when you look at traditional agencies, most people don't know this, but Google and Facebook drive a lot of revenue. When you look at Mute6, what caused Mute6 to grow was—

Meta.

Yes. Yeah. The people who at Meta who were in charge of managing their top advertisers would recommend Mute6 when those clients or the accounts that they were managing would say, hey, do you know a good shop that I should talk to for managing my paid ads on Meta?

Yeah. And Google and Meta drive a lot of revenue to agencies if you get on their good graces. How did you get people working at ChatGPT and Perplexity to refer? Because it's like, usually that's not a normal thing because like, at least with Meta and Google, you have that relationship. But how is that happening with ChatGPT and Perplexity?

We're building relationships with them.

Oh, okay. You're reaching out, building relationships, events, things like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And Continue. Let's go to the next piece on relationships matter more than ever because this is actually related. You're building these relationships.

Yeah, because in a world of AI, you can get recommendations from a platform like ChatGPT, and that's great. And I think for small things, inexpensive things, new toothbrush, a camera, a television, I do believe people are going to use ChatGPT because it could be more analytical. But when it comes to like big expensive items, like someone signing up for Single Grain or NP Digital, our contracts are not cheap, right? I don't know what your pricing is, but I'm guessing your pricing is 6 figures plus for majority of your contracts. Because it's such a big decision, they're not going to just do research on ChatGPT and say, ChatGPT told me so I'm going to sign up. You'll get a small percentage, but I genuinely believe— Just like most service-based businesses, the majority of your revenue is still going to come from referrals and relationships. I don't know how it is right now on Single Grain, but I'm guessing because you've been around for more than 10 years, a large chunk of your revenue comes from referrals and relationships of just knowing other YPOers, EOers, and then referring business to you. Would you agree with that statement?

Yeah, I would. And, you know, actually I was just telling Noah here, my past 2 days sleep has been bad because, you know, I was at a— I hosted like an AI founders dinner around here. And then yesterday was AI potluck. It was an AI like founders potluck. Right? And this is, it's no different than joining a peer group like an EOYP or Hampton or something like that, or even us hanging out or like, you know, us having mutual friends where we hang out like once a year. And so it's in a world that's really driven by AI, people are going to long for more human connection and who actually controls the power at the end of the day, it's actually the relationships.

Yeah.

It's sure, you can be number one listed and that is important, but nothing beats relationships more because Everything is people to people and people like doing business with people, not necessarily a ranking. So ranking is usually like when you're not sure what to look for, but when you have like a word of mouth thing, oh, Neil, who do you go to for a dentist? Oh dude, I go to this dentist over here and you get to watch TV and you wear these glasses over here. Like you're selling it to me, telling a story, right? And then my friend's like, oh, you got to go to this eye doctor over here. Like they'll do this and that. Like sold, done. I don't need to think anymore.

Yep.

Because I trust the person.

When, with your agency, with your revenue, you do a lot more than a million bucks, but let's just use million dollars as a hypothetical. If you looked at a million dollars, what percentage of the revenue would you say comes from referrals and relationships?

I'd say right now it's probably like 30 to 35%.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

That's good.

What is yours?

70-ish percent. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's for enterprise, for SMB, it's probably 20-ish percent referrals, 80%, um, inbound and other forms of marketing. But from enterprise, which is majority of our revenue, you're looking at 70-plus percent.

And that makes sense because people move around. Yeah, right. And so that's most of the 70% is coming from people moving around that you did a good job for.

Yes.

Yeah. And the thing is, by the way, we'll call this out too, as an agency and even a software company, you're not going to do the best job 100% of the time.

No.

Maybe like, what do you think the percentage of time you're doing a good job?

It depends what you consider a good job. Like if you're talking about producing positive ROI—

Positive MPS, CSAT or something.

Yeah. It's majority of the time by far.

80%.

Yeah. 80+ percent, I would say. But there's going to be like 5, 10% of the time where things just don't align and you can't always control it. A great example of this is if you're doing marketing for Nike, okay, I'm giving you a real hypothetical here. We'll see what happens in the next few months. The US just passed a deal with Vietnam where it costs 20% more. I believe they implemented a 20% tariff. I don't know what it was before, but let's just go with it costs roughly 20% more now.

Yeah.

That means Nike, who produces a lot of products in Vietnam, they have to— they don't have to, but I'm guessing over time, because they usually say the business owners pass that cost over to the consumer because everyone has to end up paying it. It's going to hurt the people who are doing marketing. So if you're doing marketing for Nike and you're producing an amazing ROI, but just hypothetically imagine they increase their prices 20%, you're not going to perform as well and it could be a loss. And that was a campaign that didn't go well. But is that your fault? Is it external factors? The reality is it doesn't matter. It didn't work whether it was your fault or because of external factors or because of the company paying you. They had a shift in people and they never got anything implemented. You're never going to have 100% success rate, but when you fail, it doesn't matter if you were in the right or wrong, it still hurts you. And when you do good work and people are happy, it doesn't matter if you're in the right or wrong. You do some campaigns are messed up, but overall you made them a lot of money. You'll keep getting referrals.

What matters is ultimately, if we were to simplify this, is that you're learning and then you're just improving and then you're just being consistent for a long time. And that's really what helped all of this works. Here's the problem with most marketing agencies. They don't understand what is happening with the world of AI. With my agency Single Grain, we think about agentic workflows. We think about creating agents for the future. When we think about SEO, we think about creating different products such as internal linking products or content consolidation products. And on the other side of things, we think about building products such as Care. We just think about making marketing easier overall. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of marketing and at the same time leverage the power of AI. Go to singlegrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. I think I want to talk about a little bit what people actually want for marketing services now. So you mentioned LLMs, that's a big piece.

But let's go back one thing. I agree with you, but I think the reason you have good relationships than I do is because personality. It's not that our personalities are different or the same, it's people can jive and get along with us. We're normal, they like being around us, we like being around them. If you're in a service-based business and you have relationships, but people don't like your personality, it doesn't matter how much good work you do, you're screwed.

Really? Any business? Almost any business.

Almost any, but not like Charmin. Who cares about toilet paper? You're buying the toilet paper from Ralphs or Bristol Farms or wherever. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, to just look, I think, you know, if there's anything going back to the funeral, right? My mom's funeral. relational wealth that matters at the end of the day. When you think about relational wealth with your family or your friends or like people that you work with and like Noah, for example, Noah, I've known you for what, 8 years or something like that? Like that's an example of relational wealth, right?

Yeah.

Like it's all the things that you have at the end of the day, it just doesn't matter. And this is more of a philosophical thing, but it does apply directly to business too. So let's talk about— I want to move over now and talk more around kind of how things are changing in marketing in general, because There's a couple of things we can touch upon here. So marketers are using Cursor now, what people actually want from marketing services. And then also the fact that IBM just cut 8,000 people against one thing. AI.

Yeah.

So maybe, maybe we can start on that one first. So 8,000 people versus one chatbot. So who does it better? Obviously the chatbot did it better because IBM cut 8,000 people. Yeah. So, so I'm just looking at this one over here and IBM laid off 8,000 HR employees. Not for budget, not for performance. They got replaced by a chatbot. That bot is called Ask HR and it runs on IBM's own AI engine, WatsonxOrchestrate. Okay. 94% of HR work automated. Pay, vacation paperwork, even terminations. $3.5 billion in productivity gains, 40% drop in HR costs. IBM built a system that made these types of layoffs possible. Now they're selling it to everyone else. Packaged, no-code, enterprise ready. But you're going to start to take a look at this afterwards.

I don't have that many people in HR, but yeah.

IBM calls it innovation. Let's call it what it is, y'all. One of the first at-scale white-collar replacement experiments, and it worked.

Yeah.

I think I was just texting with a mutual friend this morning, and I'm like, so how many of these AI automation people do you have now? A couple of weeks ago it was 2, now it's 6. It's growing pretty quickly. I'm like, so what's the job? Automate everything they can and then replace where we can and build these flows where we can. And then they're like, we're on a mission right now to replace our internal Gong. I'm like, that doesn't seem really difficult to build. It's going to take a little time. But he's like, yo, it's going really well right now. Wait, why do they want to replace It's expensive.

Yeah, but Freshworks, is it Freshworks as a company? They have a Gong alternative that's really cheap.

How much is it?

It's like a fraction of the money. It's not like half the cost, it's a lot less.

Yeah, I think they want to see if they can build workflows to just replace it. Sometimes it makes sense to just pay for the cheaper one instead of trying to build it, but like, you know, they have their own philosophies and there's no right or wrong answer for that. I think we're going to see a lot more of this. And look, we saw it happen with customer service. Now this is HR. We've kind of seen it happen in sales a little bit. I think what's up next, maybe creative, maybe marketing.

Yes. But looking at Gong, I just checked this out. This is a March 5th, 2025 article. Gong has passed $300 million in annual revenue. I did not know that.

They're a good size. They're still growing.

They're still growing.

Yeah. All right, so this one is interesting. What do you think the only moat that's left in business is now?

I think the only moat in business, and there's only one in my opinion, and I could be wrong, or let me rephrase, for most businesses, because there could be some moats. Like for example, you saw the Pentagon invested in a rare minerals earth company for $400 million or $400 billion or no, $400 million or something like that. There's some moats like there's only so many natural resources and I own them. Like you can't—

That's called a cornered resource.

Yeah. But if I look at like moats for most businesses, the real moat that I see is a brand. I think there's not really much of a moat other than that because if you and I go try to create shoes that are better than Nike or Air Jordans, let's actually use Jordan as a brand. Jordan has a strong following. It's not about you and I creating a more comfortable shoe or a better looking shoe. We don't have that Jordan cachet, at least when it comes to athleisure wear, footwear, because we're not Michael Jordan. That to me is a true moat that is just too hard to get around, even with AI or technology and even time.

So I think we're saying similar things here. I believe that the only moat in business now is actually your distribution. So if you look at Google 10 years ago and you know this a little bit, 10 years ago, 2 pages scraped 1 visitor. 6 months ago, 6 pages scraped 1 visitor. Today it's 18 pages scraped 1 visitor. And then Anthropic 6 months ago was 6,000 pages scraped per one visitor. Today it's 60,000 pages scraped per visitor, right? So the Cloudflare CEO said that if the business model of web has been search fundamentally for the last 35 years, you get value by subscriptions, ad, or fame. All 3 of these things are going away and they're going away fast. And so this guy, Only CFO, not OnlyFans, but like Only CFO. So he's like, look, as a finance leader at a software company and a small-scale influencer in the finance accounting space, I have been seeing the problem firsthand. Everyone is fighting for eyeballs. Competition is greater than ever.

AI is commoditizing software.

Traditional content strategies are breaking. I think we can agree with that. AI is radically changing the methods of getting attention. Yes, which we can talk about in a second, like what we're seeing people actually want. Customer acquisition costs are rising. So there are a lot of companies wasting absurd amounts of money, making money, marketing money in 2025, running old playbooks. The joke used to be half of the marketing budget is wasted, but I don't know which half. Today, for many companies, it's like 80% of the marketing budget is being wasted. And so yesterday when I was at this AI potluck, one, one person who manages a bunch of influencers and like, here, I'm like, so how does it work? How do you decide how much to pay? He's like, oh yeah, we just throw $50 grand here. Meta will give us money. We'll throw $100 here. I'm like, so how do you measure? Oh, we don't, right? But he's like, she's like, that's how the game is played now. And no wonder it's like, you know, Adobe or Snap will come to us and try to throw money at us. And then they like, they don't know how to measure it, right? But I do think to your point, brand is the moat. Distribution is the moat in this world that we're in now. And then I just think like, you look at what people are looking for now, they want LOMO, They want, they want YouTube, they want Reddit, they want stuff that isn't the stuff that people were looking for, like at a much more aggressive pace a couple of years ago. It's shifting quickly.

It's shifting really fast. I also think there's going to be a day of reckoning in the AI marketing space where companies are going to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're spending all this money on this technology that's going to make us more efficient, but we didn't see our revenue go up or profitability go up. What the heck are you burning all this money on? It doesn't mean that the technology is bad. I think there's a big issue with how marketers are using the technology, and many of them are just spinning their wheels and doing a lot more work with AI. But this work is irrelevant, has nothing to do with their bottom line. They think it looks cool, but at the end of the day, your CFO, your CEO, none of them care unless you can move the needle.

Yep, 100%. And you're seeing the same thing, right? People are looking for LLMo, YouTube, Reddit. Like, what else are you seeing an increase in?

We're seeing it in everything LLM related.

Yeah.

And we're just seeing crazy inefficiencies and people burning money and not having good KPIs in mind before they burn the money.

Here's a question. Are you charging more for LLMO?

No.

Around the same. But you're not, you're not charging for rankings. Or you never charge for rankings.

We never charge for rankings. But when you're looking at LLM optimization, we look at it as A lot of the fundamentals are similar to SEO, but there's some other different stuff as well. So we charge for what the work is, and it really varies company to company because some companies have like, they're in 20 different countries and all these different languages and they have like 50 different divisions. So it depends how many you're helping, how hard it is, and it's the same thing just like SEO.

Dude, I got a good one for you here. So, you know, Jason Cohen from WP Engine?

Yeah.

So, okay. WP Engine, they used to do 49 million.

SmarterBear or whatever it's called, right? Yeah.

So he tweeted this. So his basically premise is that no successful SaaS company has a strong social account. And I think it's actually more no successful B2B SaaS company has a strong social account. Do we have any counterpoints to that? Because if you think about it, who actually is—

Wait, repeat the line again.

No successful B2B SaaS company has a strong social account. Like Salesforce, HubSpot. Oh, HubSpot actually does. HubSpot with their YouTube.

Is it strong? Ahrefs with it has a good YouTube.

HubSpot is pretty good. Ahrefs is pretty good.

Yeah, but even then it's not strong like the consumer ones.

Yeah.

You agree with that, right?

I agree with that, yeah.

Like if I look at like HubSpot's Instagram, that's a great example of it. They have 621,000 followers.

What's like the average view?

I'm looking at the reels. Nah, dude, like 10,000 reel views, 16,000, 11,000, 20,000, 17, 14, 26. It's not bad, but, and, and this is not, I'm not trying to hate on HubSpot. We have the same problem for our B2B company or even ourselves.

Yeah. There's just not a lot of viewers in our space.

No.

Yeah. So I, I think here's the thing. You can't, it's hard to say strong social account because strong compared to what?

Yes.

If you are trying to hit your TAM, I, I think they're, they're hitting a good amount. Because they're just like, if you say strong social account compared to consumer, it's not fair because there's way more eyeballs for consumer. Let me, let me give you an example here. So, you know that company Clue.ly, right? We're talking about them a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. The one place that the company that helps you cheat on your math and everything.

Yeah. So like they do controversial marketing, right? But they also do— have you seen this one? So there's this, this gal over here, right? She's talking and then basically this view, like 1 million views over here, 2.1 million views over here, right? Let me show you the video itself. So this video, let me, let me go back to it, is basically here, check this out.

Prime Neymar or Prime Hazard on your team? What's Prime Neymar or Prime Hazard? Is this soccer players?

Yeah. She has no idea who these players are. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, but then everyone in the comments on like YouTube or TikTok is like, what is she using?

Clue.ly, Clue.ly, Clue.ly.

But 4 million views on that video. And so all these content creators that they're hiring, like it's working really well for them because they know how to drive.

I think Cluey is blowing up from this because everyone's just looking at it like, oh, it helps you cheat on everything else.

Yeah. Controversial marketing. I think it works to an extent. You just can't— I don't think you can do it forever. But this viral 4 million view formula, that's what they do to get massive signups. And I think they're growing like a weed right now because you can cheat on everything in so many different things.

Yes, but what I think's going to end up happening is they're going to be like Jasper. Remember when Jasper came out? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And they were just like, create content easily, click some buttons. What happened with Jasper in the long run? Massive churn.

Well, they didn't really have like a moat. And I do think that the moat that Clue.ly has is actually they're pretty good with distribution, which is why they're hiring these people. I don't think they have a product moat. I don't think they're stronger right now, right now from a product standpoint versus like other companies, but they can always hire for that, right? I think the distribution piece they have, Pretty good right now because it is a consumer SaaS product.

Yes, but with, with Cluely, you're going to end up getting a lot of users and they're going to end up joining, but you start cheating on certain things. Okay, why do you actually need to cheat on a lot of this stuff like Neymar versus Hazard? Like just reality-wise, why do you need to cheat?

Well, I'll give you an example. So I do, I would like to cheat on if I'm talking to, let's say I'm interviewing you for a job, right? And then I have a heads-up display over here that tells me all these things about you. Oh, you went to Michigan. Oh, you went over here. Here's an interesting fact. Or like, maybe some other things I found about your work. Like that heads-up display would be very interesting to me.

Yeah.

It would be useful to me.

It would be useful, but I don't think it's useful enough to spend money on every single month. Like I don't think it's that useful.

I do, I think the one thing that's worth copying from Cluey though is if you watch his interviews like this controversial marketing. So this guy Sully tweeted this, he said, Cluey has cheated on everything. Soham, that guy Soham, the Indian dude that had like a bunch of different jobs at YC, Lie and deceive, right? And now we have founders fabricating lies and chasing attention by any means necessary. Is this what startups have become? Just whoever can become the most controversial. Now, this is not necessarily new. You look at the news cycle, even if you look at ESPN or CNN or whatever, everyone looks for controversy. And I think it can work. But again, I think you can flame out your audience over the long term.

So yeah. Time will end up telling. And you know, Clue.ly has— there's a product, what's the product name that competes with Clue.ly and they just released it for free?

Oh, they posted it. So they're like, oh, we just took their code and we open sourced it or something like that.

It was something like that. They just made it all free.

Yeah. You know, okay, let me give you a cool thing. This was at this AI founders dinner that I hosted the other night. So have you heard of synthetic customer development?

No.

So to build like billion-dollar software companies, you have to be doing a lot of customer development. You have to be talking to customers. Like the CEO of Intuit again, You know, the CEO of AOL, they're like, talk, it's about the customer, stupid. And synthetic customer development. So instead of having me, I have to book a call with you, Neil, or book a call with Noah. What you can do is you can take all of your call recordings, like your Gong transcript, for example. So I had a friend, he basically took 70,000 of his transcripts and he made a custom GPT from it, right?

Okay.

And from then, all his people are just talking to that custom GPT, especially like the last 90 days or 2, you're just looking at sales calls. What are people looking for? What are customers struggling with?

Okay.

And so now you have synthetic data that's being created and you can train off of that instead of always having to wait to have these customer development calls, because those calls are important. But this is a good example of people using synthetic data to drive business outcomes. And I think it's really smart.

I think it's smart too. I think we're going to see a lot of people doing things to help them grow faster, generate more revenue, become more efficient. What I'm really waiting for is there was a rumor that Meta may end up buying— what's that eyeglass company? Ray-Ban? Ray-Ban?

Meta? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Ray-Ban, right? They have the partnership with them.

Yeah, because they have all those glasses.

And if you look at most of the eyeglass solutions, like, did you ever try the Vision Pro?

No, you did.

I did. But did you ever even go to the Apple Store and try putting it on or anything?

No, never.

It's really cool and amazing. It gives you a headache and it's just too heavy. It's not practical. Meta's version, I'm not saying it's as good, I doubt it is as good because it's too small, so how much can you fit in it? The concept is really good. And if everyone starts wearing a version of that or contact lens, how much new inventory do we now have for advertising?

A lot. Yeah. Yeah.

And everything that we don't have—

multiple ones too.

Yeah.

Yeah. Not that that matters. You can only have like one human using it at a time. Yeah.

Even in like the iPhone, we have a phone, Apple doesn't really showcase much ads within our phones.

No, but Meta will.

Yeah. And I, if Apple, this is just my take on it, I bet you more people would have iPhones if Apple made it for free and then they made the money by showing ads, but they don't.

That's, you know, it's just business models and philosophies. Meta is an advertising company, so they'll drive more. Yeah. You know, Apple's about this privacy and simplicity thing and design.

Yeah, that's true.

Did you see this Matt Diggity post where he's just, he wrote that a Google engineer just revealed in court how their ranking algorithm actually works. Now, Google.

Yeah, but on the other side, like, they've had that for a while, but also who cares?

Because like, because it's all changing quickly. Have they had this for a while? I didn't know that.

Remember the Google leaked document with 1,000-something documents or 2,000 or 4,000, whatever the number was that broke down their algorithm?

We don't have to talk about, but there's this ABC framework. Do you know what this is?

Uh-uh.

So I'm reading this for the first time. So, um, a Google engineer just revealed in court how their ranking algorithm actually works. So it's, and it's way simpler than most how SEO experts see it. They use what's called the ABC framework. So number 1, A, anchors, so backlinks pointing to your page. B, body, how well your content matches to what people search for. C, clicks, how long people stay before going back to Google. Google calls this topicality, which is just their way of saying how relevant is this page compared to what someone searched for. Okay, so this is just, I mean, I think of my YouTube channel at the same time, your YouTube channel.

Yeah.

It's just how topical authority or how relevant is this content compared to what the user searched for and how long are people staying for? And the click-through rate and all that. It's kind of the same thing.

It goes back to basic fundamentals. They're looking at usage more than anything else.

Yep. So no, no new news here, um, despite what this Google engineer revealed. But do you want to pick the next one?

All right, next one. Let's see, I'm trying to load up here.

I'll give you one before you load it. So the—

Too many damn open tabs.

One thing I saw recently Is that in your company, right? And I don't know how often you— how often do you appear at your company? Like to do like an all-hands meeting or something like that?

Do you appear at all?

Oh no, you don't.

You know, I learned about the all-hand meetings the same time, like, oh, who's showing up? Whole company. I was like, oh, okay.

So how often does it happen? Once a month?

The all-hand meetings or how often I show up?

Both.

I don't know how often they do them. And I don't know when I last showed up.

Okay, let me speak to my experience because we're a smaller company, right? And I'm actually in it right now operating. So I'm very much in the trenches, right? So what I've noticed, and I don't know if you'll be able to relate to this at all, I don't think you will be able to, but I've noticed that you've got to tell the stories and you've got to drive the narrative or else others will start to create their own, right? So let's say, you know, Recently we might have moved on from a couple of people, right? And so I was talking to someone, it's like they start to create this narrative in their head. Oh, like maybe the company's not doing well, right? It's like, no, like I actually listed out like, no, it's this one, this performance over here, this happened over here. Oh, actually, no, we're still working with this person over here, right? And you got to— if you don't keep— if someone's not constantly communicating, it doesn't have to be you, Neil. Something's like people are going to start to create stories in their head, right? Or like I heard this story a while back. It's like, oh, it seems like You know, all Eric cares about is like the bottom line or something like that.

Really?

Or like, all Eric cares, like, it doesn't seem like Eric cares or something like that, right?

And it's like, but wait, wait, where are they getting this from?

They start to create narratives in their head, right? Until you break the narrative and you start to tell more stories and say how things are actually going and what the vision is, and you have to keep reinforcing it, it like, you can't carry the company forward. There needs to be someone leading and shouting from the top. And in your case, it's not you, but you still have someone that's That's constantly driving the cadence. You know what I mean?

Yes, we do. But why would you think that people within your organization get this narrative? Like, where do you think it's coming from?

Well, this, in this specific case, this person was frustrated. And once I talked to this person, like, you basically like talk them off a ledge, right? But in this person, they weren't. I think it's like, once, sometimes when you're frustrated, it's easier to lash out. And it's like, the moment you start to ask, like, well, what evidence do you have that Eric doesn't care? Because like, Eric's in it every day. Or like, Do you have, do you have evidence that Eric put millions of dollars back into this company over the last couple of years to save the thing? Like, it hasn't really, you know what I mean? And so like, it's, it's—

Oh, they don't care. They're going to do whatever they want to do and they're going to think that, yeah, you know, what's best for them at that moment is what they—

And it's hard to change that narrative, right? But if you're constantly driving it and you're trying to keep everyone aligned, then that's why it's important for you. Like, someone needs to do it and you agree, right? Even though it's not you, someone's doing it.

Someone's doing it.

Yeah.

I think it's very important because it aligns everyone.

It is marketing.

It is marketing.

Yeah.

And it does get rid of misconceptions. And if you don't do it, then it's going to start to bubble up. And then what happens is people internally, they start talking and then it gets worse and worse and worse.

And then the story evolves. It's like telephone. It becomes crazier and crazier until you like show them how things are actually going and you tell them. So it's in this case, it's good to be transparent. And this is why people talk about being the chief reminder officer or repeating your core values. Or repeating your mission over and over and over, because it's really easy to let it slide. Yeah, but go ahead.

So this is okay. So you have how many people within your organization?

Rough headcount?

50-ish.

Okay.

So if you have 50-ish people and certain people think that you, you yourself only care about ROI, if you don't participate in some of these, I wouldn't call them all hands. What ends up happening? Do they just keep spreading it? Does it get worse and worse for you?

I'll tell you, when everything was destruction 4 or 5 years ago, Noah was part of this. Everything was destructing. We did the 2 acquisitions, right? What started happening was like, it's— we had that one saboteur that was spreading this, oh, leadership hates you all. Eric doesn't believe in you. Eric actually hates you. And so it starts to spread, right? And then what ends up happening is you start to talk to people during your exit interview. One guy's like, man, I just want us to win. He resigns the next day, right? And so it starts to create this, this domino effect, this, this snowball effect. And if the snowball becomes too big, you can't push it down anymore, right? So I learned at that moment that I have to be involved in some way, shape, or form, right? Even if I'm in the back trying to drive things and say, hey, this is what the story is, this is what the vision is. That's, that's what you have to do. Otherwise, again, it starts to become its own monster. And then not only that, you're no longer focused on your customers. You're not even focused on your business anymore. You're focused on this crisis control thing.

Do you want to hear the craziest thing someone said about me the other day?

What?

So I don't know where they ended up reading this from, and they started telling some of our team members internally. The new narrative was Neil is killing people in India.

What? Yeah.

I'm like, I don't want anyone to die, but I'm like, where the heck are they getting this crap from? Like, I don't even go to India. How am I killing people? And someone came up to one of our colleagues Or my coworkers at a conference and they said, Neil's been killing people in India, like actually killing people. And then they knew that I'm not actually killing people in India. And then I was like, okay, it sucks that people are saying this, but like, oh, what can I do if someone doesn't have common sense?

Yeah.

You know, like I can't solve this.

This is how these narratives, like that you gotta just do what you can to control it. You can't force them to believe something, but at least you can get your point out. And I think it's important to get that point out.

Very important to get your point out. And I did address it with some of our internal people because even though they believe that I'm not killing people, right, which is a really far-stretched narrative, talk about me doing something in business or marketing, you can even try to say I'm doing unethical stuff. That could be potentially more believable, but like actually committing murder, like actually killing people in a country I barely ever go to.

Yeah.

And they weren't saying like I'm paying people. They're like I'm actually like killing people yourself with your bare hands. I'm like okay, you know I don't know how to solve it, but I was like look, I appreciate you guys believing that I'm not killing. I'm like I can share my travel schedule with you guys. I can show you when I'm in India. I can share my passport stamps. And the reason I just said that is because it's like I just want to nip it in the butt.

Yeah, you know it's not nip it in the butt. It's the bud. I googled this before.

Bud is bud.

That's not the butt. I used to think it was the butt. It's not the butt.

It's not butt.

No, Google it. Yeah, B-U-D. Nip it in the bud, right, Noah?

I believe you.

Nip it in the bud.

Is it bud, Noah?

B-U-D.

Uh, Alex says nip it in the butt.

Dude, I hope you don't say those on calls.

No.

Yeah, but I mean, that's like the stories. You tell stories or else others will create their own. Um, so that—

And you don't want their narrative. And what I've also found in the corporate world You can tell your story and you can show facts. And even when you do that, some people may not believe you. Like when it's just like black and white. And I'll give you an example of this. I know someone, they had a business issue with someone in their organization and something happened with money or whatnot. And People didn't like him or her. They liked the other person, and the other person was screwing over the team and wasn't going to pay him any more money. So then the person I know was making sure their team was getting paid, even if they had to put money out of pocket, and people still hated them because the other person who screwed him over was saying bad things. And I'm like, So people are hating on you when you are giving your team money and they're believing the guy who screwed them over. And I was like, no matter what you tell people, there's always going to be some people who don't believe the narrative, even if it's true and you show them data, they're just brainwashed.

Yeah. And the final thing on this, and we can move on, I think it's as long as you know that you're consistent with your behaviors and your habits every day, that's the best that you can ask for. And then you, again, you can't force someone they change their mind. And so all you can do is try to be the best person that you can be because people make up narratives. Like, for example, yeah, Eric doesn't care about— oh yeah, all Eric cares about is like his ego and like, you know, creating content online and, you know, his personal brand or whatever.

I've never once seen that.

I could never care less, right? I just— we're doing it to drive more leads, right? And then like, it's— that's what I mean. Like, as long as you know that you're doing your best, that's all.

Yeah. And I've also seen you create content that gets tons of views and you're like, I'm going to test this out. I'm like, Eric, why are you doing this?

It gets tons of views.

Month or two later, hey Eric, why'd you stop doing it? Gets tons of views, no revenue. Who cares for reviews if it does— who cares for views if it doesn't convert? Well, if you really cared for ego and your brand, you'd go back to creating the content.

Oh, I'd go all in on that all the time.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'd be a full-time creator. You'd be on top of it.

Yeah.

Exactly. Might even have an OnlyFans.

Dude, someone yesterday told me that they're going to get into OF. Okay. And I was like, like online finance? And then I was like, what's OF? And they're like, they're like, oh, OnlyFans. And I was like, oh, I thought you meant something with finance. 'Cause I couldn't put two and two together. And the way they told me they were gonna get into OnlyFans is they want to be an agency that helps people market, um, their OnlyFans account. And I don't know much about it, but remember you and I were in Germany?

It's part of that German guy.

Yeah. And when we were in Germany, I was like, I think I met a kid.

Yeah.

Who did this and he made a killing. Although when he made the OnlyFans people too much money, they got lazy and stopped working, which then reduced his income. But one quick thing before we switch topics, the problem with the narratives and stories and what people believe, I think social media creates a big problem today. And a prime example of this is you look at Middle East. So I saw this clip on Instagram that someone sent me, and I'm not trying to get political. I'm not saying I'm for Israel, for Gaza, or any of that. I'll keep my opinions to myself. But there was this lady who did an interview on Instagram and she was interviewing people, or at least I saw it on Instagram, who were in the LGBTQ+ group.

Yeah.

And she was talking to them about Israel and they were hating on Israel. They were all about free Palestine. Israel's a terrible place in the Middle East. I'm not saying that's I believe or anything. I'm just telling you what happened in the video. And she was like, uh, are you in the LGBTQ+? And they're like, yes, I am. You know, and they didn't all specify, uh, their preference. Doesn't matter. Um, it's, you know, whatever they personally prefer is what they personally prefer. And she shows 'em a clip of someone getting tortured. She's like, what do you see here? Oh, someone getting tortured. And they're like, they're in the Middle East. Do you know why they're getting tortured? And then she shows a picture of them pretty much being killed or—

Mm-hmm.

Getting actually really killed, which was sad. And they're like, oh, crazy. Like, what happened? They found out that the person was gay, so they killed them, which is terrible, right? Like, no one should ever be killed.

Yeah.

Uh, especially for that. It's just like, dude, what does that have to do— what, how does that harm you? It doesn't harm you. Let them be with their lives.

Yeah.

Right? And then they're like, do you know where this happened? And then they tell them, you know, in the Middle East and where. And they're like, do you know where the only place where you can be LGBTQ Plus in the Middle East and be supported. Israel, Israel, they have one of the largest parades.

Yeah.

And then a lot of the people in that video were like, oh, I had to do my research still and double check. And I was like, oh my God.

Which I think is a fair statement though. Sure, they should verify.

Yeah, they should verify, but they didn't want to change their tune. Yeah. And they're just like, so, well, if this is true, what would you think?

Yeah.

Yeah. But even then they didn't want to admit that they were wrong and they wanted to stick with their stance. It's a what?

It's a narrative violation.

Yes. And I was just like, so someone's showing you facts and you can just Google right then and there. And some of them were actually open and they changed their mind.

Yeah.

But a lot of people were just stuck in their ways and weren't open to the concept of change. I'm not saying they had to change right there, but just being open to it.

Dude, you know what's funny? So this morning I was getting my blood drawn, right? And I had like a, like a Russian nurse helping me. She's like, you know, the problem with America today is we're too liberal here, right? She's like, she's like, the good thing about Putin is that he sets the tone. And like, he's just— she was making the same point around the— it's really easy to brainwash people, especially people that are early 20s or teens or so. Right. And they start to follow— like, that's why social media, this stuff blows up and it's really easy to just change someone's mind and then almost like corrupt it a little bit because people don't— they just look at whatever TikTok they see and then they're like, oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. I can get with that. And then all of a sudden, you know, you have a growing population of people who seem to be brainwashed. But anyway, this is not a political show.

No, but if you go to places like Germany and places in Europe, posting misinformation or something that's defaming against another individual could cause—

Did you see the British guy that got arrested this week?

No.

He had a sign that said— and by the way, we're not saying we support or not support, but he's like, he basically, I think he was calling out saying that that if you're trans, like, basically you are mentally ill. So he wrote that, right? But in America, that's freedom of speech, right? Yes. And so again, we're not saying we agree or disagree, right? Um, but he— there's a video of him getting arrested and he's like, I haven't done anything. Like, I just had a sign that said that, right? I'm not inciting violence or anything. It wasn't saying like, oh, let's go destroy them or anything. He was just saying that, right? And so that's what's happening. That's what you're saying, right?

Yes. But in, in Germany and places like that, you're seeing certain countries have laws where if you say things that can be hurtful, you can get in trouble. Or example of like the mental illness one that you said, you can get in trouble for it. But the way I think things need to be just adjusted from a marketing standpoint, at least a bit from a business perspective, if people are just putting out misinformation, and when I mean misinformation, like 2 2 is 8, right? We all know 2 2 is 4. Like when something is like factually, but on purpose you're saying it's intentional, there should be a way for things to just get scrubbed.

Yeah.

Because I think there's just way too much misinformation on the internet that is screwing up marketing for so many companies. Like, we see this as an example of social media. We're seeing a huge trend of companies starting to pay us money to do their social media marketing for stuff that would be considered boring and ugly. And these are publicly traded companies. They're not in the sexiest verticals. They're doing this for stuff that helps with earning calls, investor relations, CEO reputation of them talking about things like, you know, being green or saving the earth or be more energy efficient because they're worried about false narratives that people put online about a corporation that could just be off.

I think, look, if there's any takeaway from this and then we can move, finally move on after this, is the storytellers are often the ones that can really drive change in the world, right? You look at Martin Luther King, for example, good storyteller, right? You can even say that the, this, the Zohan, whoever the New York like candidate, right? Yeah, really good at inspiring people. And like he is telling a story and he's rallying people, right? And again, we're not saying right or wrong on any side, but the better you are at storytelling, like go read this book called Storyworthy, great book, the more you're going to be able to get the things that you want done, whether it's— and hopefully it's good stuff.

Yeah.

Yes.

And the more extreme your story is, the more likely it is to resonate with a portion of the audience.

Yeah. And the more you talk to a broader audience, for example, eat the rich, right? Like that's a story, that's a story that seems to resonate very quickly with like the broader audience and the wealth gap is increasing. That's easy to get behind. Right. And then all of a sudden, then you get revolution, right? Yes. And I hope that doesn't happen, but yeah.

All right.

So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil. 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. The phrase here from the Four Seasons founder is, if you want to become rich, like, excellence is the capacity to take pain, right? How much pain can you take? And when you look at people in your organization, the people that are maybe— or not even your organization, people around you— it's not that that you're smarter than them or anything. Most of the time we're like pretty much the same level of intelligence, right?

Yeah.

I think that is, that's the case with most people. But then they complain, they blame the rich. It's like, oh, why can't I be rich or whatever? But you look, we've talked about this before, like the amount of times we keep getting kicked in the nuts throughout the years that we've been in business. Sometimes you get kicked multiple times per day, right?

Yes.

In the nuts. It is your capacity to take pain. 'Cause never once in my, I don't know, 15, 16 years of knowing you have you completely lost your mind when things got difficult. gold, right? And it's the same with me. Like, you just keep going and most people just give up too early. And there's the book that I constantly remember, it's called Think and Grow Rich. And Think and Grow Rich, it's basically like, you think of this meme where there's like 2 people mining for gold. One guy quits right before the gold's right there. The other one just goes a little further and gets there, right? And that's what it is to get to the next level, next level, next level. You just have to take more and more and more pain. It's not that anybody's smarter than you. It's for the most part, it's not because they're richer than you or whatever. It's just that they had more capacity to take pain.

But do you know why? And I'm not saying this is how it always is, but I've seen a pattern. Do you know why you and I are good at taking the pain and just going after it?

Why?

Because we grew up with very little to nothing and we've had pain for the majority of our lives. So that's all we can remember is struggles.

Yeah, it's good. But pain builds resilience. And I don't— I think I was joking at that, that the AI potluck yesterday where it's mostly like, you know, Indians and, and like, you know, Chinese people or Korean people, like it's, it's like It's kind of built into our culture, right?

But it's because we also grew up with nothing and we suffered and we struggled when we came here.

Yeah. Okay.

But now let's, let's go back. All right. Our parents struggled much more than us. You agree with this, right? For sure. Much more pain.

Yeah.

Your mom, when she was selling homes and barely had anything, when she had a commission check and someone needed a washer and dryer, could barely afford it, she would give part of her commission check when she needed the money.

She was making good money.

At that time she was making good money.

She was making good money. Yeah.

But before, when she was helping people out—

When she was starting out, yeah, like she absolutely would sacrifice for the future.

Yes.

And while taking care of me.

No, but also help out her customers as well when things were hard.

Totally.

Right?

Yeah.

I get in the, in the last part of her life she had money, but she spent the majority struggling.

Yeah.

Okay. They struggled more than us. Would you agree they know how to take pain better than we do?

Yeah.

All right.

Would you agree that their grandparents—

Yes.

Our grandparents.

Yes. Would you agree that people like my kids, Eric doesn't have kids yet, will not be as good at taking pain?

That depends on you and your wife.

Okay, sure. But would you agree that their life is more of a bubble?

Yes. And by the way, remember I told you we had like a dinner a couple months, I don't think you were at this dinner, but the one worry about this, it was like an entrepreneur dinner. The one concern everyone had was their kids will not be resilient. And I think that's a concern you probably have too.

Very much so concerned. But when you're talking about pain, a great example of this is my kids don't know pain yet. They're young, 4 and 6. They're growing. But my son the other day, I live in a neighborhood where some people have a lot, lot, lot more money than I do, right? Like I'm not sitting in a $100 million home. I literally have people in my neighborhood with Yeah. $100+ million house.

Neil's just, you know, a fraction of that.

Correct. So then I drive a Honda Odyssey. That's my daily commuter.

How many cars do you have?

Uh, I got rid of a lot of them.

You liar.

No, no, I just got rid of them.

Yeah.

Uh, the Range goes to my dad this weekend.

I didn't even know you had a Range.

Yeah, I have a new Range. It's all blacked out. It's in the front in valet.

Oh, that's the car there. I was like, which—

I've had that for like almost a year and a half.

Which ass is in the handicap spot? It's you.

No, no, the valet puts it in the handicap spot.

Yeah, I was going to park in the handicap spot. You could have. No, then they told me to stop parking there. It's for you.

No, I don't. We don't park. They valet our car. So wherever they put it.

Anyway, continue. Continue.

Okay. But I got rid of— we're getting rid of more cars. The one I drive, and Eric knows I'm not the best driver, I tend to drive a Honda Odyssey because I'm very comfortable driving the Honda Odyssey. I could drive a nicer car. Yes, Eric's point is we have nicer cars in our house. So for me to get a Range Rover, you can imagine some of the other cars we have that I'm not giving away. I won't get into that. But my son tells me the other day, Daddy, you need to work harder.

Hmm.

He's like, I need a Bugatti.

Wait, how old is he?

4.

Dude, that is insane. I didn't even know what a Bugatti was at 4.

I don't think they were that popular back then. 'Cause remember the, they came out, I don't know, like 10 years ago and they made the world's fastest car, whatever time break. But either way, we knew what Ferraris were when we were kids and stuff. He straight up says, work harder so we could buy, 'cause he asked me for a Bugatti, you know, before his birthday. He turned 4 last month and I didn't get him a Bugatti. And I told him, I would love to buy you a Bugatti. It's too expensive for daddy. Daddy can't afford a Bugatti.

Yeah.

Okay. So then it's, it's an easier conversation to have, you know, just saying like, look, you need to save up money. I can't afford it. And then he ended up telling me I need to go travel more and work harder to buy him a Bugatti.

You're like, okay.

I said, okay. But what, That's an example of not understanding. Like, I worry about that future generation not understanding pain like you and I understand pain.

Can I give you a framework? I actually was listening. So it's interesting because I don't have kids, right? But on X and even on YouTube, I have like a parenting bookmark. So it's like for future me, right? But this one I got, I think you actually like this. So whenever your kids want something, they have to pay for 50% of it, right? In the future, maybe like right now, like maybe—

No, no, we make them pay 100% of it.

How do they pay? How did they get the money for it?

No, they do chores.

They have— great, right? So like they have to, um, basically like in their teens or whatever, they're gonna have to work for it. Like whatever you want to buy, if you— oh, you want the Bugatti? Okay, you're gonna have to pay for it. Get up to 50%. How much is Bugatti? A couple hundred grand?

No, like $2-3 million.

Really?

I'm guessing.

I don't know. So he'd have to figure out how to get the $1.5 million and that—

I'm not gonna give him $1.5 million. You can pay for the whole thing.

Okay, great. So yeah, but you get where I'm going from, right? It's like, that's like forced resilience. Like, hey, Me covering 50% is still phenomenal, but you got to figure out how to get the first 50%.

No, no, we do the same thing right now, but we do it for 100%. Yeah. So if they want a toy and they don't have enough money, you're not getting the toy unless it's a birthday or Christmas.

How much do I make if I'm your son every hour doing chores?

Uh, they earn around $10. I don't know the hourly, but I know weekly they're earning around $10.

Oh, okay, great, dude. So you have a nice framework.

Yeah, we have a nice framework.

Yeah.

So like if we go into Target, Target usually, at least the one we go to, has a Starbucks inside. I don't know if that's common with all of them. Yeah.

Yeah.

If he wants a cake pop because he likes them, he has to use his own cash because we're not buying him a cake pop.

Dude, that's awesome.

And if he wants a toy and he used his money on a cake pop and has no more money, we'll tell him, well, this is all the money you have. You don't get it.

Yeah.

The other thing we're starting to do, my son is actually better at math than my daughter. He's 4. He does 3rd grade level math at this point.

3rd grade is how old?

7, 8? 8, I think.

Wow.

Um, he loves math. He doesn't look at homework as homework. He thinks it's fun and playing. So he just wants to do it like at least an hour or 2 a day of just learning math and reading and stuff, but he's actually stronger on math. He prefers that as a subject. But, you know, I'm starting to introduce this new concept that I'm trying to teach him because he has saved up around $400-ish. Some of that came from like Christmas gifts, people giving cash or birthday gifts.

Wow.

And I'm trying to teach him the concept now because he's understanding money better is if you save a portion of it every month and you don't spend it, Dad will give you interest. Mom and Dad will give you interest. So you're saving it and investing it.

Yeah.

And I'll make up something that they're investing in.

Yeah.

Or, you know, say like you're investing it in Dad's company.

Yeah.

And then they'll get interest on it. Maybe I'll give them like 5% a month. I know that's not realistic, but a large enough amount where they're just like, wow, I can make money saving. Because if I give them like a quarter, they're going to be like, whoop-de-doo. But if I make it large enough, not too big where they can buy tons of stuff, but if I'm like, wow, you made an extra $10 by saving in that spending, it'll teach them to save and then invest as well.

So let me, let me break this into like a takeaway for everyone here, because what it comes down to is, is, okay, we grew up where it was tougher for us and we had to learn the resilience. You've built a system for resilience for your kids, right?

I'm trying to.

Yeah.

And by the way, I got a lot of it from you. You're the one who talked about this like a year ago. I don't think you recall.

I don't recall. Yeah, I forget things quickly. That's why I try to get it out. But I think if you're listening to this, you're like, well, why can't I be rich? It's just a matter of how do you build that system where you tolerate pain and you understand the pain actually helps you get to the next level. And I don't know why I want to share this story right now, but my CEO told me that there's this show on Netflix called American Factory, and it's where these Chinese— this Chinese business bought this American factory, right? And then one time, they brought all the Chinese people over and the Chinese HR was talking to the Chinese teams like, guys, make sure when you talk to the Americans that you compliment them a lot. They love compliments, right? And all the Chinese people started laughing. My point is, in like Chinese culture, for example, you actually like, you, you kind of disregard the compliments and you look for the criticism more because that is a level of pain, right? So if somehow you can engineer some level of pain and resilience into your world, going to work, waking up early is painful in the morning. Going to the gym is painful in the morning.

Yes.

Eating healthy is painful. You start to build those, then they carry over into business and you're like, where else can I find the pain? And then you're going to get stronger and you just realize that's part of life. And if you can't take the pain, what's going to happen is you end up drinking all the time. You end up eating a bunch of food, you get fat and you start doing all these drugs and all that. And no wonder you're depressed all the time. So the solution is you take the short-term pain or else you feel the long-term pain.

That's right. And by the way, Eric is as American as you can get. When he was giving the Chinese and American example, he's not trying to say—

Yeah, guys, I'm pro-America, guys.

Pro-America. He's not trying to say it's better in one place or another. Yeah, he's actually very pro-American.

It just is. It's not better or worse.

It just is.

Yeah. All right, go for it. Okay, so now you want to talk about the cursor price increase.

The moat. Okay. And by the way, before we get into that, the example I was giving with Cursor, I do think it's great. It does like 80, 90% there. And yes, you may need help on the 10%, but it still saves you a ton of money and time.

Yeah. Okay. So we'll talk about the high pricing and then we'll talk about how marketers are actually using Cursor now. I think you'll like it.

Yeah.

So Gary Tan, president of Y Combinator, tweeted this. So basically Cursor went up from $20 a month to $200 a month. I think since then they've, they've maybe rolled it back and say, hey, we'll refund you. I think they're still going to stay at the $200 per month. But this guy Simon Wilson tweeted this. I think this highlights a few interesting trends with this price increase. Firstly, the era of VC-subsidized tokens may be coming to an end, especially for products like Cursor, which are way past demonstrating product-market fit. Tokens are, you know, OpenAI, like when you're—

Yeah.

Tokens, right? Secondly, the $200 a month plan for 20x the usage of $20 per month plan is an emerging pattern. Anthropic offers the same exact deal for Claude Code with the same 10x price for 20x usage multiplier. Professional software engineers may be able to justify one $200 a month subscription, but I expect most will be unable to justify 2. The pricing here becomes a significant form of lock-in. Once you've picked your $200 a month coding assistant, you are less likely to evaluate the alternatives.

Yep. I think the 10x price increase is going to get them more lashback, but I bet you that'll make them way more revenue and profit.

Yeah. Which is, by the way, this is the same PE playbook for SaaS companies for a long time. And I love that it's a 10-20x, 10x, 10x.

Vista Equity has been doing it for ages. They buy a company, they figure out where the value is, and they jack up the price in those areas and they make more money with the same product.

Yeah. There's also like switching costs too, right? Once you start to, like for ChatGPT, for example, because it has memory, I'm less likely to use the other ones now. And then the O3 Pro and the Deep Research and MCP connectors, I actually use it a lot more now. So let me— okay, let me talk to you about how marketers are using Cursor now. So imagine you can go into Cursor, which allows you to, you know, code complete and things like that, but you can work inside of Cursor to have it say, hey, hook in with the MCP for Apify and scan all my competitors' Facebook ads over here, or scan their landing pages and make a new one for me over here. Oh, I want to invoice Neil. Okay, you know, invoice Neil. Boom. It's like you're working inside of the terminal and you're just commanding it to do a bunch of things for you. And I've been doing something this week where I'm not necessarily using Cursor+ Claude code yet with its MCPs, but I am using the OpenAI's, the ChatGPT MCPs, meaning I'm hooking in with Google Drive and I'm hooking in with my HubSpot. I'm like, hey, how did— because our one-on-one documents are all in our Google Drive, right? Hey, how did all these people perform in the last 90 days or so? You score them, right? Oh, HubSpot. wait, which leads should we be re-engaging with? How have these companies done? Like, who— look at my Google Drive, who are all the proposals we pitched in the last 3 years or so, and which companies have actually grown? And then it shows me a column because it does deep research on the net. And then it shows how employee size, how it's grown over time, who should we be repitching, why.

Yeah.

And then I'm like, you can do all that within there. And like, you imagine all the more you can do within Cursor. And you're seeing way more people now saying, marketers saying, I'm using Cursor, Plus I'm using Claude Code and I'm just operating in there all day.

So I had a presentation about this with around like 13, 14 people on my team in marketing.

You presented?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

And the example I gave with Cursor, it's like a modern computer within a computer. You're using your computer to log in and you can do things with Cursor. It's just like it's a virtual human in there that's helping you with everything that you need to get done. Even if you don't have the skills, it can help you out. And then what I did is I started having them ask me certain things that they would do on a regular basis.

Tell you or ask you?

Tell me. Or they can say, hey, can I, you know, they would just tell me what they're doing and then we would go over together on how they can actually do it with Cursor because we have someone on our team who just specializes on Cursor and helps other people onboard and use it for their daily work to become more efficient. And we're teaching them how to just become more efficient and get way more done.

Are you using Cursor yourself?

Not really.

Personally, because the thing is, it does— you have to like spend time setting it up and all that. Like, I'm just too lazy. And then tomorrow I'm like, okay, fine, I'm just gonna do it. But like, you have to set up like a— like, you remember using MS-DOS back in the day? It's like using MS-DOS, right? And you have to like cd this and that. Like, you have to learn a couple commands and all that. But if I'm gonna become way more efficient with it, like, why wouldn't I do it? So I think we're going to see a lot more people, not even just marketers, using IDEs like Cursor to get their jobs done faster.

Yeah, like I did a 4-hour crash course of Cursor with Kyle on my team. So he sat down with me, we were screen sharing, and he taught me how to use it and leverage it to make things more efficient. And then at the end of 4 hours, it was great. I really ended up learning a lot about Cursor. I should be using it more and more. But the majority of the stuff I do on a daily basis has no need for a cursor or ChatGPT or any of them because a lot of my stuff isn't research or actually doing busywork. A lot of my day is like selling to customers, building relationships, speaking, doing meetings. But if I had to pick like one thing, most of my stuff that I do on a daily basis is actually just pushing. When I say pushing, like calling someone and be like, did we get this done? Why not? What do you need to get it done faster? Or like, what are you working on? Remove these 3 things. I only want you to focus on this one thing. You had 4, just focus on this one thing. When is it going to get done? That is the majority of my day.

Do you check in with them to see if they got it done?

How many times a day do I check in with them?

Yeah. So by the way, Neil's not just— That's the real question. So you can't— pushing, just pushing is not enough. You actually have to check back in with them. You agree with that, right?

Oh yeah, dude. I drive people crazy so much. Like, I check in with people so often that some people will tell me, hey, just as a heads up, Neil, when you respond back to me, I'm traveling in Europe right now, so I won't be able to get back to you when you respond back. Because they know I'm going to bug them within an hour being like, is it done yet?

Yeah.

Dude, I have a guy on vacation right now. He's amazing. I love him to death. He hasn't taken a vacation in 4 years. So, he's at home right now. But he's still focusing on a lot of our AI stuff because he's finding it so fascinating that he loves it. So he, we called him during his vacation and—

Who's we?

Me and my co-founder, and we didn't know he was on vacation until we called him. And he's like, dude, I love it. So I'm still working on some of it. I'm like, okay, we still want you to have your vacation. And during it, we still talking for like 30 minutes. So like, so when's it going to go live? And he's just like, I don't know yet. I'm missing X, Y, and Z. I'm like, don't worry about it. You'll get that today. He's like, you sure? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then Mike and I just go call other people right there. Like, I need it in the next hour.

Yeah.

So we ended up getting it within like 2 or 3 hours. We didn't get it right away, but close enough.

Yeah.

Get it to him. And then he's like, I'm going to take my vacation, but tomorrow I'll have timelines for everything. So then Mike pings him. We both are actual pushers. And it was funny. Dude, what was the message? I gotta actually— oh, let me— I gotta reread this. Um, it was where— that's a little— my— where's Mike? Uh, here's the image. I'm getting close to it. Uh, uh, let's see. Uh, no, either way, I can't do— we have so many text threads, it's just so hard to go through all of them, but Mike starts with something like, oh, he says his name. And then because the guy's on vacation, it's ETA day, smiley face. And then he has a smiley face.

Wait, Mike said that?

Yeah.

It's ETA day.

So we're like, and then I'm messaging him too. So once we got the ETA and then I'm like, cool, that's for Ubersuggest, but what's the ETA for ATP or Answer the Public? Right. And I know he doesn't have everything for it. But you still got to ask. And then they'll end up telling you why they don't have an ETA. And it's like, cool, I will go and fix that stuff. And then I'll tell all the other people and be like, next day, tell me the ETA at the latest for the other part.

This is underrated and I don't want to miss the details here. So one, absolutely you need to have pushers, right? But you also have very exceptional memory. So you, you have like a, like a project management tool in your brain. So I think you do actually remember when people say things or you're like at least close to it. So you'll know when to follow up. My problem is I have bad short-term memory, right? And so I had to make an Asana board called Delegated by Eric board. I'll just assign all these things. But even that gets annoying, right? So I hope there's a— I just gave myself an idea. There's going to be AI listening to me the whole time and it's going to be the remember pusher and it's going to keep pushing because guys, this might seem like it's annoying and it's micromanagement or whatever, but if you don't push, you're not going to get the important things done because people just don't care as much as you do. It's just the reality.

Dude, and I straight up said, and the launch of V1 of ATP, the new version with AI, end of July too? You know, that's when we started getting into ETA about that.

Yeah.

But when he told us the ETA was end of August, the first thing I did was I called our project, uh, product manager, not project manager, but product manager. And I, I told her straight up, I was just like, you know, the feature that they're launching, I don't want to derail things or any move anything around. That feature is not going to be that used. The most used feature in Ubersuggest is the keyword research. Why not add it to there first? And They're like, I don't have the designs for that, so I can't get an ETA. And I was like, will the ETA of that affect the ETA of the other thing? Because if so, I can reshift. It's really in phase. And then the first thing I ended up saying was, hey, why don't we do both and take the people who are working on maintaining the old product, which won't be in existence forever, shift them over and do them both simultaneously so I can have one of them done sometime in the next few weeks if possible.

Yeah.

But you just gotta push and you gotta follow up and you can't forget.

Yeah.

And you gotta follow up multiple times a day, 7 days a week. And I know that drives people crazy, but it works.

It's true. It's true. And look, Neil's not trying to be a bad guy or anything. It's just, this is what's required to build something great. And let me ask you this, does Mike have a good memory? Does he remember to keep pushing? I don't think he pushes as— you, you're, you're, you put, you push pretty frequently.

No, he pushes a lot too.

We both push. So he remembers.

We both remember.

Yeah.

I don't know how he remembers. I don't make notes of it.

I think it's just in your head, right?

For me, everything's in my head. He is much more organized and he'll like write things down and have all his notes and stuff. I just store it in my head and I just know to follow up with people and I know like, you know, when it's going to be due, when they're going to say, and I'll know to even follow up a few weeks ahead to make sure that they're on track. And if they're saying they're not on track, why? And what do I need to cut to make sure they're on track? It's just all compromises and pushing. And if you don't have people who can handle that pressure, if that's your personality like mine, then you're working with the wrong people. And when I interview people, I make sure they're okay with that before I hire them so that way they know what to expect. Do you?

Okay. So we call this anti-sell, right? So we tell them what they're going to get into. So how do you tell them that about your level of pushing?

Oh, I'll give them examples right then and there. So I'll say, okay, we want to release LLM features of tracking how many times you're recommended on different Keywords or prompts on ChatGPT, Gemini, you know Meta. The list goes on and on. I'm like, how would you go about building it? So asking all the questions, making sure they're on the same page or thinking about. So like oh, I'd build it all at once. Like okay, that's overwhelming. It's going to take too long to get something out. I would have been like you're looking for logic. Like oh, I would first do research on Google Trends to see which is the most popular platform and has the highest usage. I think it's ChatGPT because that's what everyone talked about. But I would verify based on that. I'll roll that out first, then I'll roll out the second, then I'll roll out third. I want them to even think about. Oh, and then I'd research which startup programs these have, and then I would get the credits from— Yeah, so you can— So that way we would save money. So I'm expecting people to start going down that track. Sometimes I guide them like with the credits or stuff, because some of that stuff's not the biggest thing, but I want people to be money conscious in my organization. And then, you know, assuming everything's running, I'm like, how do you deal with pressure? And a lot, most times people will be like, okay, I'm great. I'm like, how do you deal with being a player and coach if it's a manager role? Because I'll tell them, I'm like, I expect all my managers to get their hands dirty. It doesn't matter if you're a CMO or product manager, you need to get your hands dirty and actually do the work. And then I'll go into examples. I'm like, how would you react or how would you feel if I messaged you 3 times a day asking about this deadline?

God.

Okay. And then I would say, if I message you about the deadline and you don't respond, what do you think that's going to make me feel like? Okay. And then on the flip side, I would They're like, what happens if I message you at 6 at night or 7 at night and you're 4 hours ahead in time zone? So for you it's at 10 at night. How would that make you feel? Would that irritate you? I'm like, you can just be transparent because I'm just telling you my personality. The last thing we want to do—

These are execs mostly.

Mid-level and execs. Well, people—

Superstar. Yeah, people you're going to work with.

People I'm going to work with. That's a better qualification than their job title because they could be a person just writing emails. When I work with someone, this is what I expect from people. And if they can't do it 7 days a week, And I'll even go with like, I'm like, there's an emergency. This is what happened. It's Christmas. You're with your family. You have kids. They want your time. I understand that. What would you do in this scenario? And I just want to hear what they have to say.

Yeah.

And I know it sounds crazy. I'm looking forward, and I know people are going to hate me for this. I'm looking forward to the people who would be like, I would tell you I'm with my family. I would find out how urgent it is and how much money we're losing. I would respond. If we're losing a ton, I would drop and spend like 10, 20 minutes or 30 minutes fixing it. Or trying to stop the bleeding at least. And then I'll get back with my family. Or they're like, if it's not that much of an emergency and it's only costing us $100 or $1,000 a day, I would ask you, are you okay with this loss or do you want me to fix it right now? And I would tell them, yeah, I'm okay with a $1,000 loss. Okay.

This is the last question and then we can, we can go eat our lunch because I really need to pee too. When you set the expectation, because this for sure will freak some people out, what percent churn at that point do you think after you set the expectation?

From the interview?

15, 20%.

Okay.

Churn. So yeah.

The rest stay. But keep in mind, we have my co-founder, HR, other people on my team who have interviewed those people in advance before I've got to them. So they've already weeded out a lot of stuff.

You're the final one.

Uh-huh. And they've already set the expectations on how demanding I am.

Yeah.

And they show them examples of emails, text messages.

Yeah.

So they— and Slack messages.

Oh, they're like priming them through that whole thing.

Uh-huh. They'll even show like call logs of how many times I'm FaceTiming, audioing them.

Yeah.

And when they don't answer, I just keep going. Yeah, you do. So they know what to expect working with me. And I know that's— I'm not, you know, let me just say this. I'm not an easy person to work with. This is why I'm not the CEO of my organization. And I focus on the areas I believe I can have the highest lift. And I work with the people that can help me get there. And in advance, we know if those people will have the personality to be adaptable to work with me and will be okay mentally to work with There's 2 things here.

One, you're setting expectations up front, which is super important, right? And the second one I forgot, so we're going to end the episode here. See you guys later. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.