The Two Things We're Doing For The Rest Of 2026

If you had to pick 2 things you're going to do for the remainder of 2026, what are they going to be? And then the second question I have for you is, are you ever going to fix how your company is just founded by you and bring in someone else?

So are we— is your question tied to marketing or business?

Both.

Okay, let's talk about marketing first. What I'm going to do for the 2 things for the rest of 2026.

And then do the business side. And then the third one, which was about the founding partner or co-founder, that is more business side. But I'm curious on all 3.

I think so. I'll start with marketing first. So we're, and I'm sure you guys are doing this too, but it's not even just about marketable moments. It's really about how can you ship stuff and stay top of mind, right? And you look at what Nikita Beer, the former product lead that actually left pretty quickly, but he launched a lot very quickly. Neil's going to fall asleep. He's about to yawn. So anyway, Nikita Beer was like, look, it's not about just like one one big launch video or whatever. It's like constantly shipping all the time so you're top of mind, right? And there's so much stuff we're shipping around like the single brain gateway we have, the ambient agent. There's all these things that we have where the engineers now, we're like, they're all learning how to do marketable moments. And so we want to get— we want to push that very hard. But to answer your question directly, it's also the agent-led growth piece, right? How do you set up the MD files? How do you make it easy for agents to purchase and setting up APIs and MCPs? I think, you know, it's that agent-led growth piece. We want to solidify that foundation and marketable moments ties in with that. So that's maybe 2 things. And the 3rd thing is, I'm paying a lot more attention now to how we're doing organic social. So we just had a new contractor start on organic social. First post he puts out, like 500 comments on LinkedIn, and then it's like he's just responding to people and stuff.

I'm like, this is pretty good, right?

So I'm going to hit on that more. But how this relates to also the business as well is I have now all these workflows sourcing for all the people, and I stole your 2 promotions at 2 different companies and average tenure 3 years. It's just sourcing everything every single day. And it's also sending them sending them very specific questions too, which we can talk about later. So that's the 3 things on the marketing side. And related to that, on the business side is the recruiting piece, right? We have these workflows reaching out to people, hey Neil, saw that you're working on this and that. You know, we're building these revenue company brains at Single Grain. Would you be interested? We're looking for AI, very AI-forward people, right? So recruiting's a big one. Second thing is related to that, there's some executives that we're bringing in. To answer your question directly, would I be open to a strategic investor? Like, yeah, I would be. And we do have a new executive that's coming in that's going to free up a lot of my time. We'll see where I can focus more on product marketing and recruiting.

So before I ask you a question about the single brain side—

Well, then you have to answer the question too.

No, before I ask you a question.

Okay, but then you have to answer the question after. Go ahead.

Okay, dude, this is how many people actually use agents in the marketing world.

Yeah. I'm curious how it looks in a year.

Yeah, so—

So Neil, you should read to the—

Sure, so how popular are agents in the marketing world? OpenAI says users are using agents when it comes to their platform 1.1% of the time only, which is really tiny. We interviewed companies, 100 companies. The total employee count in marketing was 1,416. Numbers are rounded for clarity here, not the one for companies using agents because that's a straight number out of 100, but only 17 of those companies were using agents in marketing. And when you dive in a little bit deeper, majority of the companies aren't actually using agents. And when you actually look at how many employees, it's only 3 point— roughly 3.5% of employees are using agents in marketing.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know about the other departments. It's hard for us to survey that due to the fact that we don't have access to a lot of engineers or product people. Is that a dog or is it— It's a dog, it's a dog. That's a dog barking. But yeah, I was like, it's very tiny. Everyone talks about agents and how they're using them, but I don't think actually most people use them in this full way.

Well, let's test this real quick. So Noah, how would you define what an agent is? And I'll repeat it in here. A program that's going to run things for you and manage all of your AI. Okay. What do you define an agent as?

I look at an agent as something that is, software that's going out there and doing things for you and actually executing and getting it done and reporting back what it did.

Yeah, so Noah and Neil said the same thing, and I actually agree with you guys. To me, an agent is just code. Like, you define something that you want, the agent thinks in the middle, and then you get an output, right? And so I just don't think that— I don't think most people— like, agent is such a weird— like, I even hate using the word agent, right? Like, it sounds so like, oh, look at me, I'm using agent. Look at me, I have a 6-pack, right? Like, you don't even need to say that. It's just like, I'm just having this do it for me, right? I just don't think most people know, but I would suspect that that number goes up a lot once people are just like, okay, that's what I use. But in my mind, I'm just like, I'm just using AI, right?

So spot on. I think what will happen is in the future, the number will go up. People will be using Gemini or ChatGPT and it'll do stuff for them, but they'll look at it as like, oh, just Gemini did it. They won't call it an agent. They'll just be like, hey, help me get it done.

It's not like I've logged onto the internet and used TCP/IP protocol today. You know what I mean? And so like all the flows that I have working, like, are those agents? Yeah, they But it feels so icky for me to say agent. I don't know why.

But I think a lot of the flows and everything will change drastically in the future.

Probably. But you know what? I was reading, I don't know if you saw this, but I'm reading this other NVIDIA book, right? And one of the senior engineers who's still there today, I think he's been there for 20+ years, he's like, dude, if you think about it, people are like, oh, AI's going to destroy the world. Like, no, AI's not going to destroy the world. You know why? Because AI's not going to think in human terms, like zero-sum where we're trying to kill each other all the time, right? AI's going to be thinking about, oh, we need data centers? Oh, okay, let's put them underground because there's a lot of space underground so we don't have to disrupt the humans. But humans are Territorial, right? Like if I'm competing with you, you're competing with me, I'm competing with you. Like we're a little, like we wanna compete with each other, right? AI's like, no. Like he's like, dude, AI moves at the speed of light. AI doesn't have to be on this planet. It can be in space, it could just be moving around. And so it's gonna think way beyond this. And so the way we're even talking about it right now, you look back on this in maybe 2 or 3 years, it's like, look at these dumb humans talking about like us, right? Like they're gonna think way beyond how we think right now.

Yeah.

But yeah, what's your answer to the 3 and 3?

3 and 3. So 3 things that I'm focusing on in marketing till the end of the year, and then 3 things that are business for the year. Marketing, one, I am trying to get a list of conferences that I should speak at that have our ideal customer profile. We're trying to move more and more upstream to larger companies, even on the SMB side, because you could be an SMB, but you could be part of a franchise and there could be 300 of your locations. So we would consider that SMB, but it really is starting to become enterprise because it could be multimillion-dollar accounts. And I believe you're going to get a lot of those relationships from conferences. The second thing that I'm working on heavily towards now in the end of the year is GEO and getting ranking specifically through one simple, obvious tactic. So I am typing in all the queries that we ideally want to rank for or be mentioned globally on these LLMs and I'm looking at the sources they're citing and I'm trying to convince the people that are citing my competitors to also mention me within their articles because I found that that's the quickest way to get AI to cite you.

You know how everyone's like, you need to create listicles, you need to do this.

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If you just look at the articles that they're all pulling your competitors from, because they list out and you get included in those same exact articles, it's the fastest way to get mentioned on Gemini, ChatGPT, any LLM by far. So I'm manually myself emailing the people and building relationships and trying to get included in every single one.

And my team's helping me out because I don't speak all the languages and my team also—

This is where you would set up a GrokBot for this. This is for just for fun. Yeah.

So those are the 2 things of marketing. If I had to pick a 3rd thing from marketing right now—

By the way, that's digital PR.

Yeah. The 3rd thing is ramping up content even more. So 2:00 PM today, I'm starting to film 30-minute to hour long-form videos that I'll publish, but I want to see, this will be my first one that I've done in a long time. I want to see if I can do 2 of those per week. So I'm already producing a lot of content, right? I do 2 shorts a day, a chart a day. Sometimes we miss a chart, but let's call it 3 pieces of content. I also produce a long-form video, 1 a week. That's usually around 10, 15 minutes. I'm now trying to produce 2 longer-form articles per, or longer-form video content pieces per week. That would be 30+ minutes. And this does not include text-based. And then of course we do the podcast and stuff like that.

My guess, if you stopped doing the long forms, is because you get bored because they're so long. The long 45 minutes to 60 minutes, unless I'm doing a webinar where you can kind of just be yourself, it's really hard to do those.

It is. It's more screen sharing than it is, than of me talking and going line for line.

But you know what I've learned? And this is, and I want to come back to your answers, but like, When I do a webinar for 60 minutes and I'm just sharing screen and I'm kind of just like talking, it's actually very enjoyable, right? It's not enjoyable when you have a script, for me at least, in front of you and you're like very stiff and you're like, yeah, you know, we're going to do the 10 things on this and that. And then it's like, you just have to like, it's a slog. Like remember that one time we went to record that course for you for that one company? And that took the entire day. And then like that was painful.

Yeah. Dude, the way I do my recording these days is I record in my house for an hour and then the crew that's helping record, I will go and either eat lunch with them in my house, so like Uber Eats something or whatever's in the fridge, or depending on the time of the recording, I will just go into the theater room and we'll watch a TV show for 30 minutes to an hour. So you just get a mental break and then go back to recording.

Yeah, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Neil and I, we're a little older now. We're in our 40s now. So we need, we need mental breaks. We need to take naps sometimes too, you know? So yeah, but continue. Did you, you covered the 3 marketing and the 3 business already?

No, I covered the 3 marketing. Business is find more companies to buy in Europe this year. I already found the one in Latin America that I want to buy, so I'm not really focusing on Latin America anymore.

You got the German one too?

It's not done yet. I look at it as once they sign an LOI and then once we really know, German one's too early, but Yeah, so I want to focus on Europe and that'll set us up for a much better next year. I want to start infilling services. When I say services, like what do we lack? Because one way to grow is you just buy in regions.

Mm-hmm.

The other way to grow is you add in the services that you're not offering. So we offer, for example, marketplaces and TikTok shop marketing. We've been doing that for a while. We're not known for that. There's other companies out there that are better than we are at it, just being very blunt, because that's all they specialize in. So either go and recruit those people from those organizations and bring them over, or if I can't do that, just go buy a competitor who just does that. So I think what, that's 2. And then the 3rd thing that I'm trying to do on the business end is This sounds really cheesy. I need to push my team, especially my executive team, to create a much better work-life balance. When you try to recruit amazing people, they die for the company and they'll do whatever and continually work. But just like how I'm getting older, my team's getting older. And it's just like someone the other day is joining our call when one of their immediate family members passed.

I'm like, well, what are you doing?

Like, this is not acceptable. Like, dude, I can't say that. I have to be there, but I'm like, hey dude, we're going to reschedule this call. I can't say directly on the call, like, what are you doing? But it's just like, no, I don't want you on the phone. Go be with your family.

So anyway, that's it for today. And we'll catch you later.