This $100B Company (Basically) Has No Marketing Team…

So, Neil, I think a good starting point on this one. So did you know that Anthropic's growth team is just one person?

Yeah.

So I didn't know that. I just read about it this week. Let me just give the context for everyone here, and then we can go into it. Obviously, I think they have a bigger marketing team than just one person. But you can go through it first, because turns out I changed my password, so I have to log back in. So you can—

Sure. So there was a report on someone putting it on X on how Anthropic's growth team is just one person and look at everything they've done from just one person. They have done a miraculous job, but you have to look at it a few ways. One, a lot of products actually grow through just product just being really good. If you look at some of the best companies, yes, a lot of them eventually end up doing marketing, but good products are much easier to grow naturally than having a crap product and amazing marketers. The second thing that most people don't report out in this is their growth team is one person, but how many other companies are they contracting with externally to help get things done like their Super Bowl ads or the creative solutions, right? For the Super Bowl ads, I think they had, was it 4 commercials?

Yeah.

It was 4 different commercials.

Yeah.

So they have quite a few people that end up working on marketing externally and internally, even though their growth team is one person, I actually believe it is more people working on marketing internally. They're just not marketers. So we work with a Silicon Valley startup. They're not publicly traded. They're valued over $100 billion. There's not that many of them, so you can take a guess. All right. And we help them— Is it an AI company? Not an AI company. Okay. So $100+ billion, privately owned. Eventually they will go public. I'm assuming that based on A, their valuation, B, they raised a crap ton of money over the years.

Are they worth over $500 billion?

They're not worth over $500 billion. And—

There's only one.

Yeah, that's true. There's actually not that many. Probably shouldn't have said the amount, but it doesn't matter, right? Anthropic could be in theory less than $500, but yeah, it's not. And I said no AI. So yeah, that actually eliminates them, ChatGPT.

We'll let people guess.

Yeah, they can end up guessing. So we help them with a lot of different things in marketing from SEO to GEO, and the list goes on and on, and we help them in many countries. Take a guess who we work with on their marketing team.

One of the C-level execs?

No one. We work with engineers.

Okay.

And we have been working with engineers for 3 years. I think this is our 3rd year on our contract with them. We just work with engineers. So the point I'm getting at is, And some of these companies that are startups based out of San Francisco, they do marketing. And a lot of times you're not dealing with marketers, you're dealing with engineering people and product people who are helping or who you're working with marketing. And the same goes with Airbnb, that one I can mention. So years and years ago when I had Kissmetrics, my old startup, we started doing consulting to reduce our burn because we didn't want to raise more money. I think at that time we raised $4 million.

Oh, I didn't know you were doing that.

Yeah. So we added some consulting and consulting that wasn't related to our product so that way we didn't have to keep raising money because we had more inquiries. One of the companies we closed was Airbnb. I got connected with, I believe his name is—

Junie.

Nathan, the CTO and co-founder, right? I believe it was one of the co-founders. I believe his name was Nathan and he was a CTO. So I worked with him, I worked with someone else on engineering, and we were fixing all of their SEO issues, content issues, duplicate page issues. We were trying to figure out how to optimize their conversion rates. So we were working on so many different things, and not once out of working with them for, I think with them maybe 12 months or 24 months, it was something like that. I know it was less than 2 years, but I believe it was more than 1 year. Not once had I ever talked to anyone in marketing.

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We spent years making it, perfecting it with our clients so it doesn't just sound like AI slop. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. If you're serious about AI SEO, you should check it out. Back to the show. Yeah. So here's what I'll say. I mean, so this guy tweeted this out. So basically Anthropic's entire growth team was just one person for 10 months confirmed. This is what we just talked about, right? So single non-technical person running paid search, paid social, app stores, email marketing, SEO for the $380 billion company behind Claude. Here's how one human's doing it. The job of a full marketing team. It starts with a CSV. So here's what I'll say to all of this. Okay. If you look at the revenue chart for Claude from the last 2 years or so, it's like going, going, going, going, and it goes parabolic, right? And that's when Claude Code, like the Opus models, 4.5 comes out, 4.6 comes out. Really, I would say the last year, year and a half or so, Claude really started to take off and they're launching all these products like crazy. To your point, it's the marketing that's— when your marketing is so good and your product is so good and it's consumer and business and you're touching enterprise, of course you're going to grow really quickly, right?

Yes.

And to your point, a lot of this stuff, like he is kind of reinforcing like, okay, Paid social, paid search or whatever. There is a marketing team. And by the way, when you have all the technology you have, you should be able to— you're not looking to automate away humans, but you are looking for a way to automate away processes. And that's why this person can do more. But there's a lot more than this. Like if the product sucked, it doesn't matter if you had the best growth person in the world. It's still— you're polishing a turd. It's still a turd. It's still a golden turd, but it's a turd.

Yeah. What we've seen with Silicon Valley-based companies, A lot of them may not have a big marketing team, but there's other roles that are involved in marketing. So at our agency, NP Digital, we do a ton of app store marketing. So like, let's say if you're Netflix, you have an app, you would want it to rank really highly in the app store, right? Or we've done app work for like Tinder, right? The dating app. Yeah. So what we've found with a lot of Silicon Valley-based companies When we're doing different marketing initiatives, we tend to deal more with technical people and actually no marketers. It is very reverse from working with like Fortune 500 companies.

You know what's funny? So when I used to work at startups, it was the engineers that helped me. So I led marketing, but I worked, I found that I got a lot more leverage working with the engineers because they think about things in systems, right? They don't think about the tasks themselves, which is actually interesting. This brings me to a point. I was listening to the CEO of Sierra, the AI company, company, right? So he was chairman of Salesforce, I think, for a while, or like up the board at Facebook and also OpenAI for a little bit, right?

Yeah.

So Bret Taylor is his name. And he— this quote I really like, he said, look, you know, like talking about replacing humans is like, it kind of sucks, right? It does suck, right? But when you talk about AI replacing workflows and processes, that's what we should be thinking about. And I think a lot of people, that's the resistance right now because they tied their identity into doing the actual task themselves when it was never about that. Right. And I think that's a much easier way to put it than like, you know, like all the stuff that gets views, right? That gets clicks. Like I have all these dot charts that go out like, this replaces this, this replaces this, and it gets people arguing with each other. But at the end of the day, what we really mean, at least what I really mean, I think you mean this too, is you should be looking at replacing processes. It's not so much about all these bloated, you know, you don't want to hire humans, like I said last time, to do robot work.

Yeah. And 2 things. One, you have to be careful in what you read. Like when people are saying like, oh, look at everything we did with just one grilled person. Is it really one growth person or are there a lot of other people dipping their toes in marketing?

He for sure works with a bunch of engineers and he's probably hired a bunch of consultants. But you can see here, this is like a case study from— you can see that this is their branding, right? So like, oh, as the growth marketing team focused on building out performance marketing channels across paid search, social, mobile app stores, email marketing, SEO. As a non-technical team of one, they use Claude code to automate repetitive marketing tasks. Sure, they do that, but there's no way it's just one person.

I agree with you. And the second thing is you were talking, you just mentioned Brett Taylor. Bret Taylor, for people who don't know, sold the company to Google back in the day. It was really amazing what he did. He was supposed to be the CEO of Salesforce, decided to back out, was on the Twitter board, pushed—

During that transition.

Uh-huh, yeah. He pushed Elon to end up, the board forced Elon to end up buying X when he tried backing out for a minute. And then I believe he's also on the board of OpenAI.

I think he was to help with that transition, and I don't know if he's there anymore, 'cause—

I'm pretty sure he's on the board.

He has a conflict of interest now. Because he has the chatbot company.

Sam Altman praises it.

Yeah, I'm sure he does, but that kind of seems like a conflict of interest.

I think he's still on the board. I'm 99% sure.

Maybe he's still chairman. I don't know. He's not that much older than us. Yeah, so Wikipedia says he's still chairman.

Uh-huh, yeah. Did you see, so talking about replacing people, did you see the X comparison of Sam Altman You know, and I hope no one passes away, but Sam Altman passing away versus Elon passing away, what would happen to the companies?

No.

So they were just like, well, if Sam Altman passes away, and again, Eric and I don't want any wish ill will to anyone and we don't want anyone to die, but if Sam Altman passed away, they're just like, it wouldn't be a big deal for OpenAI. Brett Taylor would just take it over. He's already on the board. He's an amazing operator. And some were arguing that it may even operate better with Brett running and being at the helm of OpenAI.

Potentially. Yeah.

Potentially.

But you can't lose Elon.

You can't lose Elon. They're like, well, who's going to replace Elon? They're like, oh, we're going to have a lot of problems. But that just goes to show, and this is a problem I think in organizations, and I've seen people talk about this all day long. I'm not valuable like Elon Musk, but I remember when we were pitching NP Digital to investors a long time ago.

Oh, you tried to raise funding? Oh, I remember this.

Yeah, this is a long time ago. We were, it wasn't really raising funding. We were going to sell a chunk of the company. And when we were doing this, I don't know when this was, but maybe like—

3 years ago?

3, 4 years ago is my guess. Maybe 4 years ago. So when we were talking to potential people, they would all ask the question of what happens when Neil is gone, right?

And there's this— Key man risk.

Key man risk. And then now, again, as I told everyone earlier, I'm no Elon. We don't really talk to investors at all anymore, but we don't really get the question anymore on key man risk.

Which is good. So do you think today, okay, if you were to go away, like the company could continue on as is, it would continue growing all the things, same growth rate next 3 years average?

I think growth would slow down a little bit.

Okay. Yeah. I think you don't have the key man risk. I have key man risk. So in multiple areas, but anyway, I think it's, it's good to call that out, but I do think going back to it again, the whole idea that AI here is here to replace processes, I think it's also hard. Like we're doing our hackathon next week at my company, right? And I'm just seeing the things people want to build. They want to build dashboards or they want to build keyword research tools. I'm like, bro, like you're building things for humans to still use. Like stop thinking like that. Like think outside, like you got to think about things that only robots can do, right? Because I look at the stuff people are talking about on X, like I'm not doing, I'm not running ads myself. You're not either, I'm assuming.

But On X or?

They're just talking about it on X.

Like they're running ads.

Yeah. They're like, I use Claude Code to basically manage all my ads and I'm spinning up like 1,000 different variations or whatever. And like they're showing their process. I'm like, you know, whether it's like working correctly or not, or even if we do like a 10th of that, that's cool, right? Because I don't think you should be like spinning up ads or whatever. And I think if you're an SEO, you got to be learning the different dynamics around AEO, probably learn some Reddit, learn some YouTube as well. You got to be very dynamic. So like even us going through this hackathon process, number 2, it's very important for me right now where I'm like, Hey, I got to take a quick look at what they're working on. I'm not involved in the hackathon until the very end, like the show and tell, but I'm like, you got to like constantly keep things like on track. Otherwise it can just go like really haywire.

Yeah, dude. Speaking of running ads, I got the question the other day and we ended up creating a chart on this. I don't think it's been published, but it ends up breaking down where companies spend their advertising dollars. It shouldn't be live yet, right? So I doubt it's on X. but it will be on X, my guess is next week.

Okay.

So I always get the question from people on, hey, where should we be spending money on marketing? And if you guess, where do most people spend their money on? I already know you're—

Google.

Yeah, you're going to end up saying ads.

Yeah.

So we started looking at it from startups to then midsize companies and then enterprise companies, midsize being 9+ figures, right? And what we found was startups, Spend most of their money on paid search. You nailed it. Google. Okay. Then the next category, if you had to guess, what do you think it is?

Meta?

Close enough. It's organic social media. And then the third category, and we looped them, we bucketed them in together, was content and SEO. Now here's where it gets interesting. With midsize, it's almost the same. Paid search is still number one. They shifted content and SEO from number 3 to number 2. And if you had to guess what number 3 is, it's social media, but it's not organic, it's—

Paid.

Paid.

Yeah.

You nailed it, right? But enterprise is where it really gets interesting because it changes. Paid search is actually not number 1, it's number 2. Paid social is still number 3. But number 1, if you had to guess, where do you think most enterprises spend their money? Big brands, Coca-Cola, Pepsi.

Branding.

Yeah, bingo. Brand advertising.

Yeah.

Speaking of Claude and using these AI tools, yes, it should be helping you with a lot of this stuff, especially processes. But when you're doing a lot of brand advertising campaigns, I think that's when it's really important to have the humans in the loop. And the reason being is, did you see the Coca-Cola fiasco with the AI-generated ads?

No, what happened?

So they ended up creating AI-generated polar bear commercials.

Oh yeah.

And then people were just pissed. They're like, you took the soul out of that. Ads and they didn't like it. And I'm not saying people are right or wrong, but if your goal is branding, because once a company gets so big, I don't care who you are, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or, you know, even in the agency space, you look at like Publicis, you're not getting your customers from paid social or paid search. You're getting it from your brand name.

Yeah.

And we all know this. They've, all these companies that are old and that are large, tend to get majority of their customers from their just brand. And when you're doing branded campaigns, it has to be thought out really carefully because if you screw up a little bit, it can just really tarnish your reputation and your brand.

Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I don't think, again, I actually wrote this out. I've been writing these X articles. I had one that did well this last week. It was like 500,000 views or something. But we can talk about that in a second because I think that's the future of marketing. But I've been talking more about this forward-deployed marketer model similar to Palantir, right? Or similar to Anthropic, like they put forward-deployed engineers in.

Wait, can you explain it? Because I have no idea what you're talking about.

A forward-deployed engineer, Palantir, I've always wondered, I'm like, what the heck do they do, right? They make so much money. And so what they do is they put an engineer, they embed the engineer into your company. So that's a forward-deployed engineer, okay? FDE. And then what happens is they already have their stack Foundry, and that's the base software stack that they have, but they customize it for different government agencies agencies that they work with or whatever client they're working with, right? So Anthropic did this too recently, which is why the government didn't want to turn off of them necessarily. They were negotiating so much because they were so entangled with their 4 deployed engineers and all their software was in all the government systems, right? It was hard to rip it out. So I think we're, at least we're calling it single brain where we're taking things. We're going to have 4 deployed marketers, like really smart marketers that are not just like, maybe you're only good at one channel, you're like, a more well-rounded marketer. Like I would consider us a little more well-rounded in our careers now. And so, and then you have, you're, they're working with the custom agent stack that you built and they're customizing for the clients, right? So I think to your point, going back to the brand thing real quick, I think you're always going to need smart people. Smart people aren't going to, you know, they're not going away. And I think the people that never were good at these jobs anyway, that's okay. They're going to be able to work on something else that they really like and they'll be okay.

So let's go back to the 4 deploy Engineer. Yeah, because I want to make DM here, for deployed marketer. Okay, yeah, because I have something on marketing that could be somewhat related, but maybe I'm misunderstanding the engineering side. So it is a company has their own software solution or technology, and then corporations work with them. So they're putting their own engineers into other companies' offices, they're working as an employee of that organization and help implementing their own solutions. But they're in that physical location, like being in Goldman Sachs's office or whatnot.

It's similar to how holding companies will put their employees into like—

Got it. We do the same thing in which some, some of our clients require us to put our marketers within their offices.

How many hours do they have to be there per month in office? Is it full-time?

Yeah, full-time. We don't have any that are part-time. It's all full-time.

Got it. So they're full-time and then once the engagement ends, they come back to you. So, and do you find that they actually retain longer because you insert people into the company? Do you have a number? Do you have numbers around that?

I don't, but I should look that up.

I'm so curious on that.

Yeah, we've been doing this for years.

I would imagine, like, I've never asked you, like, it's obvious that you've been doing it, but I've just never bothered to think about it, like, nor have you.

Yeah, I never thought about it. I know for a fact we've been doing it for more than 5 years.

The retention's got to be higher. Like, I'm so curious about that.

Yeah, I don't know. And I know we do it in many regions, so I can actually break it down by client size and by region. But interesting model here.

Dude, that post would do well. If you have the data around it, you post it to X or whatever, that would do well. 'Cause nobody talks about how well that does and it's like a new concept, but agencies have been doing it for a very long time.

They've been doing it for a very long time.

Yeah.

But speaking of that, you know, when I travel throughout all the world, people talk about what they do with AI. And one thing that we're seeing consistently is organizations are all paying for these tools. So you can pick Claude or ChatGPT or Copilot. A lot actually pay for Copilot, at least on on the enterprise end, you know, or Google, 'cause it's just thrown in. And when they're paying for these solutions, one, they usually don't pay for one, they pay for multiple, but two, they're all running into the same problem. The problem being, hey, and I'm going to use content as an example, 'cause this is a simple one that a lot of people or marketers use.

Yeah.

Hey, a lot of different people in our organization are using Copilot or Gemini or ChatGPT to help with content, And sometimes the quality is really good and sometimes the quality is really bad. So then they go with a different model. The model being, we want to hire companies like yours, NP Digital, to come and train our people on how to create better content. And I always tell them—

Oh, interesting.

That model's broken. And they said, why? I'm like, you can train people. One, if they're not receptive to the training, because not everyone will be, you're not going to get Amazing quality results because they're, they have a minimum bar that they would like and they want everyone to meet it. And I'm like, that is really hard to do. And let's just be realistic. Most large organizations that are publicly traded, I get Block laid off 40%, I believe, of their staff. Atlassian just laid off 10%.

Yep.

Majority are not going to lay off 20, 30, 40%. I'm assuming you agree with this statement, especially the older traditional companies that are larger.

And I don't, yeah, I don't think it's majority. I think there's a good chunk, but not majority.

Correct.

Yeah.

At least in the next, at least in the rest of 2026, I don't see the majority of large old school corporations just laying off a ton of their staff.

I agree with that.

Yeah. Right?

Yeah.

Maybe times will change in the future.

Yep.

So they're trying to figure out how they can get their team to produce a minimum quality for any of their marketing materials when they're using AI. So I'm talking to him and I'm like, you guys are all thinking about this wrong. You're trying to train your team to all use AI in a specific way. And I just sent you a meme and you were the one who told me it's like 6 years old, but I just got it today. Do you want to read the meme?

Yeah, so here, I'll read it and I'll bleep out the word over here. Okay, so the meme that Neil sent me, it's from MIT Technology Review.

I think it was a joke that was from MIT Technology Review, but the meme is this.

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Turns out you're effing stupid.

Yeah, and the problem that I was telling them is you're expecting everyone to put out a minimum quality of marketing when you're using AI, but people have different abilities. Some people are really talented and smart. Some people are newer and need to learn more. Some people are, whether they're new or great with technology, some people may be in your organization for a while and they're slower to learn technology. So I was like, the solution isn't to train everyone on AI and get a minimum. The solution is to train the AI to deal with different personality and levels so that way it can figure out who they're dealing with. So that way they know what to ask that they're not going to ask, so they can still produce a minimum quality output. So I was like, what organizations need right now is instead of worrying about training 1,000 people in marketing or 100 people in marketing on how to use AI, it's to train the AI on all the edge cases and the people that they're dealing with so that way it knows the minimum quality of output that it needs to produce for each and every single output so that way no matter who's using the AI, it adapts to that person and gets better and better. And I was telling the organizations, I actually think that's more feasible than training, you know, 500 people or 200 people and get them to all create a minimum quality output.

Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you later.

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