The Marketing Playbook Just Changed

All right everyone, we're going live today and we're doing this podcast on Neil's birthday. He's very old now. Happy birthday, Neil.

Thank you.

All right, so we're going to jump into things. We got a lot to talk about today. First and foremost, we want to make an announcement. Neil and I will both be speaking at this summit in LA, so if you want to hang out with us, it's invite only, but I don't think it's going to cost you a dime. So it's the Social Commerce Summit. Again, it's the Social Commerce Summit. I think it's socommsummit.com or something like that. So S-O-C-O-M-M-S-U-M-M-I-T. I think we're both speaking on May 14th or something like that. So check it out. There's going to be some cool speakers there, but more than anything, you can come hang out with us if you are in LA.

It's in Manhattan Beach.

All right, so let's jump into it, Neil. So I've been seeing a lot of stuff earlier this week. I posted about TBPN about how their clipping system works, and that post actually did really well.

Yeah.

TVPN, the one that sold to OpenAI for $200 million, the podcast.

Oh yeah, the podcasting company.

Well, yeah, the tech bro, they call it Tech Bros Podcast Network or whatever. It's not really called that. But remember we talked about how this podcast, in 18 months they went from, in 18 months they went up to $5 million and then this year they were on track to do $30 million in advertising revenue, which is a good chunk. And then they sold to OpenAI supposedly. For $200 million. And so I actually had my OpenClaw do some research on how exactly their strategy works. And I literally just cut and pasted that to Twitter, got 150,000 views on it. And so I think it's worth us talking about this and people talking about chief clipping officers. They're talking about the clipping economy, why Andreessen Horowitz is crushing it with social views. I think all these things connect because I just had lunch with a guy who's really strong with social. His name is Ryan. And we're just talking about how this is like the new meta, the new way of playing this game. So let's talk about that. How about that? You want to see the post?

Yeah, I want to see the post. Well, what's the breakdown? I also think one of the reasons that they do well is a lot of it has to do with the topic, right? A lot of the topics that they talk about are ones that it's easier to get views on, just in my personal opinion. And it's also the people that they have on as guests. They're so successful and a lot of people want to hear from them. It makes it even easier to get the views.

Yeah. So here's what I would say. I'm going to share my screen here. So what I have some thoughts around this, especially after having the lunch. Okay, so Neil, look at this. So TBPN is a 7K live viewer podcast that sold to OpenAI for $200 million because their average clip gets 257K views. Everyone's talking about the strategy. So this is from this guy, Eric Siu. on Twitter. Um, and then it says, here's the structure. Uh, number 1, format is engineered for clippability. And we should— I can actually click around here, Neil, so you can see the clips, because I think there's probably some things we can take away for this considering all the time and effort we put into this. I think we're coming up on 10 years on this thing. So they stream, Neil, 3 hours a day, live, 5 days a week. We ain't gonna do that. Okay, so massive raw inventory demand. We have businesses to run. Not that they don't have a business, but that is their business, right? Um, Guest call-ins. So to your point, Neil, they have like Mark Cuban come on. They might have Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber. So they have 6 to 8 per show built in 5 to 10-minute self-contained segments. Every guest segment is a prepackaged clip candidate with a hook, an arc, and a payoff. The hosts read the tweets live on air. You get instant memes, okay? And then the tweet author shares the clip back, distribution loop. So high and low aesthetics. So you have a mahogany desk, cinematic lighting, suits, but the content is group chat casual. So they make the clips feel premium and authentic at the same time. So let's go one at a time. So what do you think about this?

I think that helps, but I think the biggest thing there is actually the guests. Because when any of those people say anything, if you're talking to them for an hour, you're going to get some aha moment that you can just like clip and it'll just skyrocket. And you use Mark Cuban as an example. Do you remember him in the All In podcast and the clip that went viral all over Instagram? You saw that, right? I—

you have to remind me on what it was.

So during the All-In podcast, which is, uh, the besties, right? There's 4 of them. They were doing one of their summits and Mark Cuban was on stage with Tucker Carlson, I believe it was. And they were talking about Ukraine. When you have a lot of these rich people, they tend to be asked about things that are outside of what they're known for. So a lot of times people talk to them about money or politics or war. And someone asked Mark Cuban, they asked Mark Cuban about Ukraine and if the US should fund or help them out. And I think Mark Cuban, I'm paraphrasing here, said, I think so. I'm Ukrainian. I'm talking as he is, or part of his family is from Ukraine on, I don't know which side. And Tucker Carlson said, so you're Ukrainian?

Why don't you put in the money? Yeah.

Have you given any money? And he says, no. And he's like, you're a billionaire. And he's like, well, I'm trying to solve healthcare. And then he's like, solve healthcare in Ukraine. And then he said, it's so hypocritical for you billionaires to tell other people what to do when you're not really willing to cough up your own money. Now, again, I'm paraphrasing and I'm off, but that's roughly the context of what was discussed. And you guys get the point. But that went viral. And it's not hard for those kind of things to go viral, especially with billionaires who are really well known. Again, Eric and I are not here to sit, talk about war and politics, and if Mark Cuban or anyone else should fund or not fund any war or anything like that. But this is just the example we're using here to explain why it's so much easier to go viral on that topic. Now, on the flip side, if you took someone like me or Eric and you put ourselves in Mark Cuban's shoes, it wouldn't go anywhere nearly as viral because we're not multi-billionaires who own a sports team.

So here's what I'll say. So my thoughts on this one. So format is engineered for clippability, not the other way around. So Neil, I'm not going to say you're wrong. I think these 2 things can exist in the same world. So you can have a guest come in and that's why they designed that section for that. But I would also say that when you do 3 hours a day and you do 5 days a week, this massive raw inventory is really important because to me, clipping is like a slot machine. It's, I just look at it as you never know what's going to take off. So for example, you and I talk about Shake Shack discount, 8 million views. You and I talk about Loro Piana discounts, 4 million views on it. Okay, let me show you something else here, Neil. Remember, there's a period of time where I was experimenting with this. Look at this. You see my Shorts channel over here?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. What does it show you on my most popular Shorts?

I can't see.

You can't see? Okay, so Neil's blind. Okay, so I think Neil's on an iPad right now.

I can see Your Rich BFF. No, I'm on my laptop. I can see Your Rich BFF. I can't see the number 2 person. Then number— I mean, I can't— and number 3, number 4 is also Your Rich BFF.

I'll read it to you. So basically, this is my Shorts channel, okay? Or this is my YouTube channel. So the number 1 is Your Rich BFF, and she has— this one has 3.9 million views on it. So the title is How Rich Can You Get on Content Creation? Number 2 over here is This will change your perception around money. Number 3, never stay at a job for more than 2 years, right? And so all these are based on what? Personal finance, based on real estate. This is based on investing over here. It's a wide TAM. And here's the thing, the way I did these podcasts was, Neil, I engineered it for clipping. I made it so the questions I asked were the hook itself. Now, I think that part is good and we don't necessarily do that here. And look at this over here, $135K with Bryan Johnson. And you have all these other people over here. So I think when you create the conditions to make it more where you create more opportunities to get lucky, I think that's what they're doing, right? And I think when you add the guests in that you're creating more opportunities to get lucky and that's why it pays off. Because here's the thing, Neil, if they're only getting like, I think 7,000 live viewers is actually a lot, but when they average 257K views, a lot of that's coming from X. And what they do at the end of these videos, Neil, is they add an ad at the end of it. So that actually is their ad inventory. And I think that's really smart. I'm like, oh, we should do that for ours. Like we should have these clips and then have an ad at the end of it. Yeah.

And you're so right when you used to do that and Eric stopped doing, you know, trying to go viral on social media with clips and it was an experiment for him and he quickly realized it was getting him attention, but it wasn't driving as much revenue as he would like. So then he shifted and again, he didn't assume when he started that it was going to drive tons of revenue. It was just an experiment to see what would happen with his brand and if that would create more business. I do believe you did go to some EO or YPO events and more people said that they were noticing you because of the clip.

You know who came up to me? It was the wives that came and said, I really liked that clip. I was like, oh, okay, thanks.

But you're spot on about the engineering because if you go back to the Mark Cuban, Tucker Carlson example, why would you put them both on a stage unless you're trying to provoke something and trying to get some clips?

Yeah. Quick break. If you're doing AI SEO or content marketing in general, you know what the problem is. The problem is you're spending hours writing yourself, or you're paying agencies lots and lots of money, and you're getting AI slop that sounds just like everyone else. That's why we built ClickFlow. ClickFlow creates production-grade content that actually sounds like you. Plus, it helps you with other areas such as building internal links, creating FAQs, and more. One customer even reported saving 90+ hours a month just by using ClickFlow. You can get a 14-day free trial just by going to clickflow.com. No more AI slop, just production-grade content that drives traffic and conversions. Back to the show. So let me show you something real quick, Neil. I got access to this new tool. Shout out to this tool, Social Proof. So you see this over here?

Yep.

Okay, so this actually shows over the last 3 months or so how TBPN has done. So you can see here, they have this one, this clip over here, those of you that can't see the screen right now, this is Andrew, they're interviewing Andrew Huberman. You know, you know, Andrew Huberman, very popular doctor. So this one got 4.5 million impressions and it looks like it was on X. A lot of their views, Neil, you can see their top channels, look, 97% of their views are coming from X, okay? 1.3% from Shorts. So you would expect that they would do really well on TikTok or Instagram, for example. And so when I was having lunch with Ryan today, just now, he's like, dude, your content— so talking about us, Neil, your content should live more on X and LinkedIn because that's where your audience is. And I was thinking about it. I was like, yeah, My really good leads actually come in from X. It's not like, or like a LinkedIn. It doesn't really come from YouTube if I'm being honest, at least for me personally. I think it's different for you, but I think it's, when you look at a social proof and you look at how they've been growing over time, it's like they hit on the right audience because all the tech bros are actually hanging out on X.

Yeah. Speaking of right audiences, you saw what happened with MrBeast, right? And someone ended up breaking down how his views are going down and he's declining. And then he actually set up a meeting with them and he's like, oh cool, I want to learn more and get some ideas.

Yeah, no, when was this?

I don't know when it was, but I saw it last week.

Dude, but Neil, as a separate thing, I'm not going to read the entire tweet here, but like it shows the entire analysis, like the clip itself, consistent visual grammar, the caption tweet wrapper volume and cadence, the real edge. By the way, again, the other meta game here is this post generated 126K views, right? Like not bad for an OpenClaw generated post.

That's a lot.

Yeah. So do you want to see one of their clips? Let's just show people here.

Okay.

Aggression, and you will be back soon. So anyway, it's going really long. I'm just gonna play the end of it just so you guys can see the ad, but I think my thing's freezing a little bit. Hold on, let me go back.

I don't get why they went viral.

Yeah, I think it's just, dude, it's, it's just sheer volume, Neil. Um, but I don't know why my, my thing has frozen. Um, anyway, you can continue while I try to repair this.

Yeah, look, I think clipping is worth it. I think you have to pick the right platform to clip, and instead of optimizing for views, you need to optimize for views with your right audience. You may not get the leads you want or the sales directly, and that's okay because I still think the branding is worth it. But I think the mistake that most people make with clipping is the content doesn't resonate with their ideal customer. And if it does resonate with their ideal customer, because you could say, hey, everyone's interested in finance. Well, if what you don't sell is, if you're not selling finance, getting views for finance isn't going to help your main business. So it needs to be related to your main business and the content needs to be around that. And then you need to focus on the channels that are relevant where your ideal customers are sitting. It's the same reason why I don't really log onto TikTok or Instagram much. Yes, we collect leads from Instagram and TikTok and, I'm passing them on to my team, but even then, it's not like it's our main core focus because we know that's not going to really change our business.

Yeah. So to Neil's point, I'm back on the TBPN X account over here. So look, they have 400,000 followers and they just did a show about 2 hours ago. So they had Gary Vee. I think this is the CEO of CrowdStrike. Yep. CEO of CrowdStrike. They had Ben Horowitz, not Ben Horowitz, but Ben Horowitz. And then they had Looks like the CEO of ComfyUI. And so they're bringing on people that have reached, to Neil's point, and this is a 2-hour podcast. Look, uh, 5,000 views livestream.

Okay, wait, is it with all of them at the same time?

No, it separates them. So I think they'll bring them on like during this time, they'll just call them in at a certain time and then they join. Um, so I think that's actually really smart. Um, and so when you go with this video over here, I'm just gonna boost it very good.

The chat asked for a fight.

There's no ad on that one. I want to play one with an ad real quick. Okay, look, they— and they take pictures, so they have a production crew where you can see they're sitting in the middle, Gary Vee's in the back, and they're, they're doing this. Like, that's pretty cool. Um, so let's pick one over here. Do you see— okay, this one with Cathie Wood. Here we go. Good impression every day. How about this one?

Let's see.

We'll do a little— this is Marc Benioff, those of you that can't see. And Mark Benioff obviously has a large reach, especially on X. $41 billion public and made— CEO of Salesforce. Let's see what we've got here. I think we've made $1.5 billion on that. I think we've made $1.5 billion on Wiz. So they put an ad at the bottom over here with AppLovin, and then they have all their sponsors at the bottom. But I do see them at the very end of these sometimes say, hey, go check out, you know, go check out Axon over here, go check out AppLovin at the end. And I think that starts to become more interesting for advertisers. That's what I saw, so.

Yep.

Cool. Anyway, all that to say is like this post alone, Neil, people talking about this and revealing the strategy, people are like, oh, you need to hire a chief clipping officer now. I think what you need, maybe it's not a chief clipping officer. I do think you need someone with taste that knows how to find the right moments and make sure that they're published to the right channel. 'Cause I do think the type of stuff we talk about here, if we publish it the right way to X and to an extent LinkedIn, It would do better because again, that's where I see the good leads coming from.

Yeah, but we also have to manufacture the clips. And what I mean by that, it's not just the people to help us clip or using software, it's more so what we're saying. Because when you and I are trying to get views, it's still hard for us to go viral. It's hard for anyone to go viral, but we can add more nuggets intentionally and we do know that it'll help with views.

I do think so. Here's the thing, Neil. I watched some of our videos, some of our podcasts from like maybe like 10 minutes or so from like a week ago. And within that 10 minutes, Neil, no joke, and I tend to think that I have high standards, I found at least 3 clippable moments in that 10 minutes. And so it's a matter of finding the right people because we are talking about timely things. And guess what? A lot of my topics come from what? Twitter.

Yeah.

And then you and I are, we do talk to a lot of amazing people too. And we have a lot of interesting conversations. Now, what could we change differently? We're not going to record 3 hours a day. But what I would do if we actually— if you wanted to make this practical for yourself is maybe you're doing 1 or 2 lives per week. And Neil, basically, he does a webinar every 2 weeks or so. I consider it a live. I consider those like if he's presenting mainly, there's probably clippable moments from that too. So I just think the way you look at it now, it's like the guy that wrote The Clipping Economy, he wrote an X article about this. It's not so much about the main podcast, like this main podcast, It's more about the clips because, Neil, to your point, when people walk up to me at a conference or a dinner, it's, hey, I saw you in this clip. It's not, hey, I listened to your podcast. I saw you in this clip. So that's how things are kind of changing a little bit.

Yeah. And on a side note, you have a topic here, why A16Z is crushing it with social views. So I'm curious what that says because my take on why A16Z does so well is you have 2 billionaires who people want to hear from. And they are, they have become more polarizing over the past few years, especially when they started getting into politics and just being open with their opinions.

So here, this is, uh, so everybody, okay, this guy tweets this, this guy's name's Mitchell. Everyone wants to be a new media company, but few know how to make viral content. Okay. So you can see over here, um, Andreessen, I think these are all Andreessen Horowitz-backed companies.

Okay.

So Uh, we raised $7.5 million to kill AI slap, 4.4 million views. Introducing Meridian, 5.2 million views. My last company, Opendoor, did this. Okay, whatever they're working on now, uh, 1.7 million views. And then this one over here, 3.5 million views. So what, what, um, I was actually looking at before— let me, let me bring up this, this, um, this will be helpful too, and then we can react to this. So Neil, to your point, this is Andreessen Horowitz before buying turpentine. And turpentine, it's branded by this guy named, um, Eric. I forgot what his name is. Um, and look at it now. So the thumbnails are way different than before, and the approach, the different types of topics they're covering. So it's just those of you that can't see on the screen, a year ago, um, some of their videos would get like 2,000 views, um, 3,000 views or so, 3,000 views. Some would go up, you know, 484K. Someone get 93,000 or so, which is pretty good. But when you have like When you have their stature and you're getting 1,000 to 3,000 views, that's not that good, right? Now, A Day's Meal, the new thumbnails, 13K views, 14K views, 161K views, 20K views. So it's a lot better than it was before. And this guy's argument, Guillaume, is that when they bought Turpentine and they actually started hiring new media people, they started to do a lot better.

Yeah, you can see that.

Yeah. So, I mean, you can see, I mean, just, they have like Magic Johnson here, right? And talking about investing. They got Andrew Huberman. So I think they got better guests, they got better packaging, and they just knew how to play the game in a better way versus what they had before. Because you look at this, Implementation Data Impact of Healthcare AI with Julie and Vijay. One, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Julie and Vijay, don't really know who you are. Um, and then it's like, okay, that title is boring. I don't want to spend my valuable attention to click on that. Versus if you show me Magic Johnson and the Peptide Revolution with Andrew Huberman, I'm going to click on this. You show me Alex Karp from Palantir, I'm going to click on it because he's entertaining.

Well, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen are extremely connected with not just influential business people, with a lot of celebrities, and they know them. And like, if you look at the dinners and the parties and all this kind of stuff that they've done over the years, they're able to get the right group of people around the table for almost anything. And of course, if you put the right packaging around it, it's not hard. If you look at them, Companies who are consistently getting the views, I'm not talking about the 11,000 or 13,000 views. I'm talking about when you get like hundreds of thousands, if not millions. A lot of times it's all about who you can end up bringing on.

Yep.

I think that makes a big difference.

I think one of the big value adds they have as a venture firm is the media piece because they just look, they're helping all— they have a playbook that helps and I think they all kind of just promote each other. And by the way, guys, like drop a comment below if you think we are basically the TBEPN for marketing, drop a comment. That would be interesting to me. Okay, so look, you're seeing a couple of things. They're good at clipping, they're good at packaging. The main Meta theme, I think, or the overarching theme is how they play the game. They know how to play the game natively for each platform, which is ironically also called Meta. Not the advertising company, but the optimized way of playing the game for each channel. So anyway, that's the one on that one.

Cool.

And that being said, we will catch you all later. Goodbye. Have a great weekend.