This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "The Surprising Marketing Tactic We Would Invest $10M Into Right Now" (uploaded Aug 4, 2021). The excerpt is a short conversational episode between Eric Siu and Neil Patel (hosts of Marketing School) in which they recommend investing in product-led growth and giving products/services away for free to capture market share and attention. They discuss examples (HubSpot, Ubersuggest), buying attention via newsletters and podcasts, applying the approach beyond SaaS to physical products, and emphasize delayed gratification and long-term monetization. The clip ends with a promo for marketingschool.io/live and asks listeners to rate, review, and subscribe.
Chapters
Today we're going to talk about the surprising marketing tactic we would invest $10 million into right now. You go first.
All right, so the big thing that Eric and I— and I already know we're going to have the same answer, so I'll just give it for both of us— is free. Not freemium, but free. What could you give away for free and build a massive base? So example of this, if I was building an SEO tool, how can I make it as free as possible and just gobble up a lot of the market, or email tool, or if I was like e-commerce, how can I give away a free tongue cleaner or a brush? Did— because the more of the market you can have, even if it doesn't generate a lot of revenue in the short run, hence we said $10 million investment, what you can end up doing is you can build a big base of solid users or customers, and then you can upsell them into other products or services in the future. And the goal by leveraging this tactic, which is why Eric and I love it, is you can end up gobbling up market share. And even though you make a lot less money in the short run and you lose a ton of cash, we believe it's much more cost-effective than advertising. And B, we believe in the long game in which if you control a massive audience, big buyer pool, eventually you'll monetize and make a ton of money from it.
Yeah, there's— and we've talked about product-led growth over the years and really recommend reading Open View Ventures. So we Mainly product-led growth is tied to SaaS. And an example of this would be HubSpot, where they converted into giving away their free product. And they're getting even more attention and they're actually using their money to even buy more attention. But product-led growth is really at the core of their strategy. But this whole product-led growth thing, you can think about how to apply it to e-commerce as well. And at the end of the day, if you're playing the long game, it just doesn't matter. You're going to win long-term because most people just don't think like that. And so if you're investing the $10 million, You can go invest it into, let's use Ubersuggest as an example. Let's say it had a solid customer base already. It had attention there, had a good amount of links already. And so that might be an element of it, or I might take the $10 million or so and maybe go out there. And what HubSpot did with buying The Hustle, they were buying the attention. They were also buying revenue, right? So they had the email list, they're buying the podcast as well. And so that was, yeah, they probably spent more than $10 million there, but at the end of the day, they are buying a lot of free. Newsletter is free. The podcast is free and then they're going to figure out how to monetize it afterwards. So the whole thing here that we're trying to— the message that we're trying to deliver is delayed gratification wins at the end of the day. And most people, especially in the marketing world, especially in the internet marketing world, they can't wait. They can't wait. I got to monetize. I got to get the money. I got to get the money. Yeah.
And the delayed gratification is really worth it. It's just most people aren't willing to wait.
You want anything else?
I think that's it. You got our viewpoint on it. I would try to figure out how to end up doing it within your industry. Product-led growth doesn't always have to mean software. There's many ways to grow, just like we mentioned, give away a free toothbrush or tongue cleaner. But you just got to figure out what will work within your space. And that's what I would do, because remember, ad costs are continually rising. Product-led growth, and it could be for physical products, services, software, that is a much more efficient and effective way to grow.
Yeah. The more attention you can own long-term where you're not relying on these channels, who knows? Like the more I see, oh, so-and-so's, these bills are being put out there to break up big tech or whatever. And by the way, big tech's going to take care of themselves. It's not like They're just doing whatever they're incentivized to do. So it's not saying they're bad or anything, but at the end of the day, they're going to take care of their shareholders. You have to take care of yourself. That is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/live. That's L-I-V-E to check out our virtual and our live event. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It really helps us grow and we'll see you tomorrow.
