We FIRED Our YouTube Team. AI Took Views From 300 to 8,000 (Full Episode)

So let's talk about how our social media viewers have started to grow because we've started to let go of people, AKA have to unfortunately fire some people. So the story here is Neil and I, we have this YouTube channel together. Most people don't know that we have this YouTube together. In fact, most people don't even know that we have a podcast together, right? And so we have Marketing School and our Marketing School YouTube channel has been in the funks for a very long time. You look at these long-form views, these videos that we're doing. So Neil and I, we're in person right now. Right? We're recording this and Noah's here, you know, making things awesome. We're going to have lunch afterwards. It's great right now. What is the issue? Well, our long-form videos on YouTube were only getting like 100 views, 300 views or whatever. And I looked at it this morning. I was like, one of the videos is taking off. It's like 6,000 views, right? 7,000, 8,000 views. So do you want to know what happened? What happened? So because I took over my YouTube channel, Leveling Up with Eric Siu, remember I showed you a couple of weeks ago, like 500,000 views are now getting like 20,000, 25,000 views, right? On average.

500 video views, not 500,000.

Yeah, sorry. 500 video views on average per video, right? Now it's like, you know, go up to like 15, 20, 25,000 views, right? That was just me making skills with my ChatGPT. I said, hey, I want a thumbnail skill. And then I want an editing skill. I want a posting skill. I just want you to do it all. So that was 3, 4 people's jobs, right? Taken over. And I was showing the people on the team and these people were, some of these people were offshore, right? I was like, look, just use these skills, take it. I'm not gatekeeping anything. Here's the repo for it. Just go and do it, right? And they're just staring into the screen, right? Now, unfortunately, we had to move on from those people, right? Now, at the same time, one person who is handling our Marketing School channel, he has actually started to step up. And so because the skills have now given me the ability to do whatever I want, The ones that are embracing this stuff, they're taking these skills and they're applying it to our marketing school channel. I said, hey man, if you want to make it work, you got to use these skills. Otherwise it's not going to work. I don't think it's going to work out for you either. I'm just being very honest with you, right? Because there's no reason why I should just be able to on my whim record whatever and just say, hey, go do it. And it just does it all. It publishes everything, it schedules everything, it handles all the editing, right? So he has started to do it. And what we have started to change with this YouTube channel, Neil, is he's like, hey, you know what we should do? He's like, you know, for these 1-hour 20-minute podcasts that we do, 80 minutes, right? He's like, I think we should cover the first trend first. And then I think we should improve the thumbnails. And I think we should level up the 30-second retention. I'm like, there we go, right? We were doing this keep the light shit on for like the last 2, 3 years or so where we were just posting, posting, posting. I'm like, guys, you don't get better by doing that, right? So my point of saying this all is that the skills are enabling us to be more direct, be more upfront. If people want to embrace it, they will embrace it. If people don't don't want to, it won't work out for them. So that is how we have started to grow our social following on our small YouTube channel by having to let people go.

Yeah, I also believe, and I'm pretty sure you're on the same page, if the people were exceptional, they probably would've outperformed the AI or they would've used AI and the results would've been even better. Eric said, yeah. And, but yeah, there's just a lot of people don't perform and it's like, Sometimes you're not hiring average people, you're hiring below average people, and AI optimizes for average, in my opinion, for a lot of stuff. And average in many cases is better than the people you have. And that's a huge lesson because if you feel your people are below average, the chances are AI will do a better job than them, especially in marketing where there's a lot of data, a lot of examples that they can just pull from, regurgitate and copy similar principles and strategies and roll it out. If you want exceptional, it's hard for AI to replicate, but it is very easy for it to replicate average. And I think this is a big thing for a lot of SMBs because most SMBs aren't doing their marketing in an average way. I would say they're actually doing it in a below subpar way. And this is an easy solution if you don't have a budget.

Yeah, to Neil's point, you can't just use these skills on their own because whenever I try to use the skills on their own, it just, It doesn't feel right, right? And then the video, the numbers also reflect on it. But when you actually spend 5, 10, 15 minutes on it, just 5, 10, 15 minutes, it becomes 10,000 times better, right? And it doesn't take that long to insert it. So you still need humans in a loop. You still need humans constantly tweaking these things.

The problem here, and I wouldn't say this is unfair to the people who were working on the channel before, but it is really kind of unfair comparison. Eric's skill level is much higher than the people that were working on the channel. So when you take AI with someone who's good, the results are much better than when you take AI and someone shitty or mediocre.

Yeah, but also, I mean, that's another lesson, right? What's happening for anybody that makes hiring decisions now is you can actually afford to wait for someone who's good. You don't need to just throw people at the problem anymore, right? And that is, I don't think many people have realized that yet. And like, that is actually my big concern for society as we make this transition. Like, I think everything's gonna be okay long-term, but there's gonna be a period of job displacement. And Where do you think the job displacement's going to come from? Because we talked about this. Oh, Bain says, you know, 94% of people don't find value in AI. And then it's like only 2% of consumers pay for AI. Well, what do you think? Why do you think most people are most people? It's reflected in numbers over there. No shit, it's 94% because those people aren't good with this stuff, right?

No, they're not.

So don't be like that. Be like the top 5%.

Yeah, and the way I look at marketing hiring is if someone doesn't understand AI fully in their role, I'm okay with it. I'd rather have an amazing person and teach them how to use AI than have someone who's amazing at AI but lacks the experience and the strategy and a lot of the fundamental concepts that are required to actually make the AI perform better. I actually see the reverse being easier in which you hire amazing people and you teach them what they need to know. And that's not a big deal because when you think about it, AI changes so fast in marketing, even if someone's really good at using it, well, they're good at using what's out right now, A month later, there's something new out there that they got to learn and play with. So it's okay hiring really amazing people and then teaching them how to use some of these tools to be even better.

My take on it is we just interviewed a senior SEO person this week, right? And she has heavy promotions at the SaaS company and I really wanted to make it work. And so what we do with people now is like we have them send a video, right? On, hey, just show us how you're working with AI in general. We want to see how you're talking about it. You know what she did? She literally sent a clearly Claude-designed template and just read off of it. And I'm like, she did so well in the initial interview, very personable. But when she did that, I'm like, bro, you're just like reading off the template and you're just, you'd even put effort to try to change what it looks like, right? 3 doors in, only one is the way out.

Wait, what role did you, were you interviewing for?

It was like an associate director type SEO. Yeah.

Okay. So their job was to do SEO. Yeah. On-page or link building or a bit of both?

Technical.

Okay. So technical, so more on-page. When you interview them, do you feel they were really good at technical SEO?

She could talk the game, right?

And forget talk the game, do you think she could actually do the work?

I think she could do the work to an extent because the thing is she had the experience, like the stuff she talked about, right? The results that she got before, right? And then she knew how to use like certain terms and things like that. But when I started to press her, I knew she was reaching her limit.

So she was more so, would you say, someone who was researching, riding the coattails of other people in the organization and understood the vocabulary when it was able to talk it, but was probably not the one who actually drove a lot of the results?

I don't think she was riding off the coattails because she was like the only— she's the only SEO at this SaaS company, right? Okay. It's been around for a while, so I don't think she's riding the coattails. I just don't think there's anybody else for her to look up to.

So the problem with her is, is You think she's good at technical SEO. You didn't like how she uses AI.

It was more so, I'm sending you slop grenades. So I'm taking something from Claude and I'm just reading. I'm not even, I didn't, it's clear that I haven't even thought through what I'm about to present to you. And so I'm just reading off of it. Right. And that is how it's going to be working with her.

Yes. If someone's too lazy to review the work before they send it to you, you're, you're in for a nightmare because You look at this as like a partnership or a marriage, as people say. People typically put their best foot forward before a contract is signed, right? Like when someone's making a sales pitch, they'll tell you everything that you ideally want to hear. But then the moment it's signed, you may find out that it doesn't work the way that they said, and then you may have some buyer's remorse. But if they're lazy when they should be putting their best foot forward, you got a problem because that's just the start of laziness and it's much worse than what you're really seeing. That's a good point.

So what Neil's saying, best foot forward, when you're doing an interview, you're going to bring, you're going to be wearing a suit, you're going to be very well presented, right? You're going to be well prepared. And this person was not well prepared, right? And this person was a fan of this podcast, so probably no longer a fan of me, right? But I had my AI reach, because she used AI on me, I had my AI reach back out to her and I said, hey, this is Eric's AI assistant. You know, Eric and I took a look at the work and, you know, we just had a question. Is this, you know, is this AI generated? Da da da. I started asking all these questions, right? And then basically it was like, that was the end of it. Now let me give you the flip side of this. I just talked to a guy right before this, right? This guy worked Razorfish, iCrossing, right? All these agencies, right? So I'm like, okay, how are you using— so my take on this from hiring people is they do need to know the AI game. And he's like, oh yeah, you know, I use Jev. I'm like, I'm reading X a couple hours a week. You know, I'm building this and building that. I'm like, why do you want to leave? You've been playing the agency game your whole life. Why do you want to leave? We're too slow. I'm like, what do you mean you're too slow? Oh, we can't, you know, all the things that I want to implement, I can't implement right now. And, you know, it's, we're just, I'm like, there's, he's like, there's too much inertia, right? There's too many, you know, technical And things, and so he's like, "I want to move where I'm unencumbered," right? I'm like, "Well," and so my take on it is I want to hire the AI people because they're naturally looking for these things first and foremost. They'll never stop being curious. Like for you, I've never seen once in your—I've known you for what fifteen, sixteen years? There never has been a case where you and I have stopped learning. These people never stop learning. So I believe if they aren't teaching themselves this stuff right now, I—I'd rather not have to have to teach them, right? We can teach them the new stuff, but they have to be naturally curious on their own. So this guy was like going toe to toe with me and all that. Right? And you can see like, it's just like when we're brainstorming on stuff, when you're brainstorming on deals, for example, the structure of a deal, what do you think about this? What about this? Right? Call my tax guy over here. Hey Eric, what do you think about this? And you call your other friends. It's fun.

It's fun, dude. On a side note, you mentioned, you know, the lady putting her best foot forward. I have, I don't know if I ever told you this, I have an interesting Zappos story. No. So one of my buddies, Jason, you don't know him, Ordered shoes from Zappos and he was trying to get them, you know, for a date. So, he ordered some like nice fancy, not fancy, but dress shoes, 'cause he didn't really have any dress shoes, but nice shoes nonetheless. But they weren't like too formal, but they were formal enough. So, he calls Zappos and he's like, hey, I placed this order a week ago. It hasn't even shipped. What's up? And they're like, oh, we're going to get it shipped soon. You should have it in 3 to 4 days. And he's just like, wait, that's going to be too late. I ordered these shoes for a date. And they're like, oh, well, this is the shipping you picked and everything. But he's like, but I want to put my best foot forward. It's a shoe company, right? Yeah. And the person on the other end on Zappos started cracking up and they're like, all right. They're like, we're going to overnight it to you. And they sent him the shoes the next day. He got them. This was before things like Prime and all that kind of stuff happened. This is when Zappos used to advertise, you know, those airport containers where you put your shoes.

This is Zappos before Amazon bought them.

Correct. Yeah. This is before Amazon bought them. But I just thought that was a really entertaining story. He told me this years and years ago because that caused him to continually evangelize Zappos and keep buying from them. And it's like, people forget the little things have such a huge impact on your brand and your marketing that people just like focus all their efforts on like, we need a rebranding campaign. How should we redesign our logo and our website? We need to focus more on pay-per-click and optimize, you know, our CPCs and get our CPAs down. We need to figure out how to rank higher on Google. And I'm not saying you shouldn't think about a lot of those elements, but people forget some of the core fundamentals in business and how some of those core fundamentals actually have a bigger impact on your overall marketing than just how you're running your Google ad campaigns.

Neil wouldn't have said this 15 years ago.

No, I wouldn't have said this 15 years ago.

Neil is very, he's still very metric driven, but he was almost all metric driven before, but now he sees the fundamentals.

Yes, because I believe the fundamentals move the metrics more than fine-tuning a campaign. Just like, how do you put a price on a really good product? You eventually can because you can see the ROI in the numbers, but early on, a product that is 5 times better than your competition means either winning or losing, right? Or even if you look at the Uber story, what Uber did better than Lyft was subsidize more. In all transparency, that's what they did. They just made rides cheaper. They were willing to stomach subsidies more than their competitors, and they got that formula down where they're willing to lose more per ride than anyone else. They were more capitalized for it. It helped win mindshare and market share. And then once they had it, they started fixing the economics so that way they could be profitable, but they gobbled up the market first. You know what's interesting?

So back then in 2010, when I was going up to SF all the time, I was using— I wasn't using Lyft or Uber, I was using Sidecar. So I think Sidecar actually— so you've heard of Sidecar? Yeah. So Sidecar was actually, I think, number one at the time, right? It was cheap, convenient to use. The app was probably the best experience at the time. Now the difference is, Lyft, I mean, they have like their, I think their own like cultural stuff, right? But the founder, like Travis Kalanick from Uber, he was just a hell of a competitor, right?

Yes.

He's just, I'm gonna subsidize, I'm gonna raise the most money, I'm gonna do whatever it takes, and I'm just gonna outwork the other person, right? And so I think slowly he eroded Sidecar away and then even Lyft away as well. So I think the founder's competitiveness matters quite a bit as well. And it's all that excellence is the capacity to take pain quote. And Travis was the best competitor of the 3, I think.

Yes. He's really good at raising money. And I think that's a huge aspect of it.

Sales.

Yes. Because if you don't have big enough coffers to compete, you're screwed. It's just like, I've had people tell me how they can build a better Waymo alternative. This was a long time ago when Waymo started. And I'm like, this is going to be a hard business for you to ever win. And this person was pitching technology that can turn any normal car into a self-driving car. And how it could be done really cheap. Forget how well the tech works. They were showcasing how it worked on some Toyotas and Hondas, and they're saying it worked really well. But forget how well the tech works or doesn't work. The real issue here is Waymo can lose $5 billion, $10 billion. You can say as a startup, you can move faster and all these kind of things. You cannot stomach that much of a loss. It's too hard to find a company willing to give you $5 or $10 or $15 billion and say, it's okay if you lose this. There's just some markets, and I would say AI is one of those markets. Anthropic and OpenAI and a lot of these players are really massive and they would've never been massive if they couldn't have gotten billions of dollars.

Yep.

It's too expensive of an endeavor without being able to raise $5, $10, $15 billion. I don't think someone who raised— if you only were able to raise $1 or $2 billion, I believe you would've lost the game. It just requires too much capital.

When we talked about Instinct last week, the reason why he has to look at raising billions of dollars is because he has to subsidize all these free users and he doesn't want to monetize for a while, right? Bless

you. Bless

you. So if that's the case, he's like, he's competing with the biggest players in the world, like Meta. They can subsidize their agent forever, right?

Muse,

yeah. Yeah, Muse, Meta Muse, exactly. So for him, I think it's, I don't know how it's going to go, but he does have, he's growing 10% day by day right now. But I do think he's going to have to overraise a lot of money right now. And it's a very competitive space. And I wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now. I think it's too tough, so.

Yeah, have you seen a lot of marketing platforms are already starting to integrate with Muse now?

Which ones?

I just got a notice from HighLevel the other day that they're integrating with Muse.

Shopify's in already. Uh-huh. Yeah.

There's a few more. There's a few bigger publicly traded companies that are integrating with them. I'm blanking on their names, but I've been seeing announcements for a week or two because Muse is just catching the market by storm.

Yeah.

And dude, I think I talked about this in the last podcast and I had Muse send out some emails for me M&A to reach out to like advisory companies.

You told me it didn't go that well initially.

It didn't go well initially. So I had a call with someone this week and I didn't get too many responses back, but I had a call with someone in the UK.

This is one response that you got?

Yeah, from Muse.

Okay.

And we had a video call. They're like, oh, it was really great talking to you. You know, how'd you hear about us? And I'm like, oh, I had Muse reach out to a lot of people and you were one of the few that responded. And they're like, what a great way to make us feel special. And I'm like, you should feel special because you responded. That sets your company apart from the others. And they're like, oh, that's a really good perspective.

So where's that call going?

They'll send us some opportunities. I don't know if we'll buy any of the opportunities. It's like, you know, when you deal with bankers and they try to pitch you stuff, they're just like, we got this company. It does 8 figures in revenue, a solid 7 in profit. You know, yeah, they'll take 7, not 7, they'll take 8x. That's in line with their thinking. I'm like, okay. I'm like, is it a business? Yeah, they have no churn. They're growing really good. I was like, what's issues with it if they're growing like 25, 30% a year? They're just like, well, one client makes up majority of their revenue. And I was like, so there's a lot of risk here.

Yep.

Or they had another one for me that are like, business won in the United States, you can just pick up for very cheap upfront and then the rest of the money will just, that the company splits off will pay for the rest. So it'll be a really good deal for you. And they work with all these amazing brands. I'm like, yeah, let me take a look at it. And I see the fine print notes. Yeah, they grew 70% in revenue over the last 12 months. This is an old company, but all of a sudden one or two contracts made them grow 70%. It's like, cool. So you're trying to sell at your really real peak and this is not sustainable and you're probably going to go back down. And oh, by the way, some of the revenue you're getting is from other agencies. The moment we buy you, we are going to lose this revenue and there goes a lot of the revenue and profit.

Yep. Let's talk about the wine and dining game, right? So let's say, you know, Neil and I, we have people that invite us to these sports events, right? Come to this Laker game over here. Come to this Dodger game. We have the suites over here. We have the president's suite, all this stuff, right? So, and especially in the agency world, there's a wine and dining game. You have to meet the clients. You could go back and forth, especially LATAM as well, right? You got to wine and dine them even more, right? And so, So I want to talk about the wine and dining game and how to play it to our preferences, because some people, the way they like to play it, it becomes like a whole thing for multiple days.

Yeah. I've met a few of our competitors who are agencies and they found that pay-per-click ads produce good leads, but they're expensive and they can't make them profitable. Cold outreach hasn't worked out too well for them because most people don't want an email or a call. But when they do cold outreach to their ideal customer, and when I say ideal customer, it is the ideal company, the ideal person within that company who's the decision maker, and they offer them tickets to like a Formula 1 event or whatever it may be with them. And they'll do like a box and they'll get like 20 of their ideal clients or 10 of their ideal clients and one person. They find that people are much more obliged to respond. and accept it, and they close really good deals that way. I think that's really good. But the way I like the wining and dining is actually the way the banks do it. So we bank with Bank of America for our international accounts. So even though we're in the UK, Bank of America provides our UK bank account. Even though we're in Brazil, Bank of America, like when I log into bankofamerica.com, I can see all our Brazil and reais, and we can do that for almost all the countries we're in. They sent our CFO because they knew he was a huge England fan to one of the World Cup games with Holland and— not Holland, Netherlands? Not Netherlands, Norway. Sorry. You know Holland. Netherlands versus England, right? Or Norway. Sorry. Norway and England, right? The player was Haaland.

Yeah. Haaland from Manchester City.

There you go. And they also paid for the Marriott, not Mandarin Oriental Hotel. And he just had to pay for flights for him and his wife, 2 tickets. He didn't have to interact with Bank of America or anything like that. They were already a customer. We're a good customer of them. They just offered the tickets. That's a good offer. We're about to sign a deal with Wells Fargo. We're in contract phase. Most of the contracts are already reviewed and done. So we have signing next week. And they didn't try to offer us anything to try to close the deal. They already know we're closing it. We already spent a lot of money on it. They're just— dude, I just got the email the other day. Like, check this out. Dodgers. So check this out. I got an email, me and some other people on my team. They're like, hey, I want to get ahead of the next round of sports and entertainment tickets we have available here. Most are offered on first-come, first-served basis, although in some cases they request specific games or events. Okay. NHL Kings, glass seats. NFL Chargers and Rams, Wells Fargo Suite. NBA Lakers, Wells Fargo Suite and seats. MLB, you want the Dodgers and Padres, limited playoff tickets may be available. Concerts or events at Crypto.com Arena or Honda Center. They're just like asking, like, do you want anything? Not because they're trying to get our business. They already know they have our business and they're just trying to maintain relationships. And what's cool about this, they would offer multiple tickets. It's not like I had to go and interact with some of them depending on what it is, if it's not a suite, it's not like I have to interact with people and get a sales pitch. They're like, we just want to say thank you. I like doing events that way. We've done events for some of our customers where we don't take them to games to try to win the contract, just show appreciation. And if they want to just go by themselves or whatever, no problem. Here's the tickets, go have fun.

So the way I see that is it's a retention mechanism, right? So people remember you. To me, it's like the amount of times that they see you, they remember you because it's like, oh, I actually need something. Oh, It was actually Neil that hooked me up with this thing. I should have a chat with Neil. He probably knows someone that I should talk to. Oh, we happen to know the right person. You should talk to this person on the team over here. So you— this is hard to measure. You don't know what you're going to get back from it, but you know you're going to get something back from it. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

So I got a text message the other day from one of the competing banks, and they knew we were going to move, and we showed them the offer that we got from Wells Fargo, and they weren't able to match it. But at the last minute, they messaged me saying, hey, Neil, appreciate the other call earlier today. If their bank could get to X dollar amounts and Y global cash leverage covenant with addition to minimum US trailing 12-month EBITDA of Z dollars, Would this impact the decision on the refinance? We're not approved on this, but we're thinking of ways that we can get to the X-dollar level while still having a limit on how far US EBITDA would, or minimum on how the US EBITDA would need to be on downside scenario, right? And the difference between this current bank versus Wells Fargo is Wells Fargo will just operate us based on our global numbers while our current bank only operates us on the US numbers.

Mm-hmm.

So as we keep growing more globally, It makes it harder and harder to grow the leverage when we're having crazy growth overseas, slower growth in the United States. And I was just like, in my mind, I'm like, you have the opportunity to see this.

You

have to move, yeah. You're trying to match it now. You could have matched a month ago when we already had this conversation with you. It's like, it's at a point where it's just like, might as well just go with the person that's already adapted to me. Why would I— it's my business with someone That I had to convince to adapt with us versus the one that's willing to adapt from day one.

This is no different than hiring. You're hiring another bank that's already willing to do so, and someone else is now they're trying to do it when it's too little, too late.

Yes. And I've been having conversations with them for months about this and they weren't able to do it. And a month ago, I told them more than a month ago, I told them that a competitor of theirs is— they're like, oh, we can't, we can't match it. Now, last minute, they're like, hey, what if we match it? And I'm like, dude, Yeah. Why?

See, this actually reminds me of when Steve Jobs handed over the reins to Tim Cook for Apple, right? He said, Tim, don't try to be like me. Don't think about what I would've done. Just do the right thing. And this is no different than how Ritz-Carlton or Four Seasons operates. They want their staff to do the right thing. This person, whoever you interact with, didn't do the right thing. They tended to follow policy too much and they didn't stretch outside it. They weren't creative.

I even talked to the guy who headed up that whole division. In the United States, they weren't able to do it, but now they're like, they think it's above 50% chance that they can do it. I'm like, I just think it's—

At this point, above 50% chance. Okay. I'd rather go for certainty. It doesn't make sense. So speaking of texts, Neil, so I got a text from one of our mutual friends yesterday. So we're in this chat group. Okay. So this is where I think starting a chat group is cool, but we're both in this chat group and then this person's like, hey, Hey, by the way, this is Neil Patel in case you don't have my number saved. I'm just giving Neil's name in here, right? I wanted to see if you'd be open to a catch-up call in the next few weeks. A few things I'd love to discuss. Number one, comparing notes on AI initiatives. Can share what we're seeing across all the enterprises we're working with. Number two, this AI community, I want to see what's working and what isn't working. I'm hiring someone that will help scale this community, da, da, da, through AI transformation. Let me know if you're down to find time. You know why he sent me this text?

Why?

There's no other context with the text. What is your best guess as to why he would just send me a screenshot of this text?

Who sent you the screenshot of the text?

Our mutual friend. I can't say, but yeah.

And this is just someone who just messaged him?

Yeah. We're both in like this chat group.

I think he's just like, what the heck are people doing? Like just bored and just like talking about how terrible it is.

No, it's more so the reason why he got— so imagine he gets a text message from someone in the group. He runs the group. Okay.

Oh, it's someone from the group that's actually messaging him.

Yeah. So he takes a screenshot of the text.

It's not a random person.

No, he sent— yeah. He takes a screenshot of the text and sends it over to me. Right.

Okay.

Basically laughing at the text. Right. He didn't say anything. other context besides this. So what is your best guess as to why he's sending me this text screenshot?

Because he thinks the person's an idiot.

Because, I mean, partly yes, partly yes. But I'm like, dude, like, I think it's fine to start a community. I think it's fine to start a text group or whatever. But when you're trying to sell and you're acting like you're not trying to sell, people can see it. That's what I'm saying, right? It's like, don't try to say like, I'm going to try to compare notes or whatever, right? Is

it one of the communities that you're not allowed selling? Like kind of like a YPO?

No, it's not. It's like imagine I started a group, right? And I have like 10 people in it, right? Everyone does well. But when you start a group, one of the kind of unspoken words is like, don't try to start a group and then like just try to— if you want to sell someone, like tell them on the side, like maybe you're trying to sell someone, but don't say like, I'm trying to compare notes or whatever. Because the moment you try to do that, like people aren't idiots. They see what you're trying to do and they don't appreciate the fact that you're beating around the bush. Just be upfront.

I think it's easier to sell if you're just direct and you say, I have something for you. It produces X. Let me show you. If it doesn't, don't waste your time with it. I think people appreciate that and they like it. When I get direct messages and someone's saying, I'm going to give you, I can do X for you and I can prove it. Here you go. It does well. But dude, you want to hear one of the worst sales pitches?

Was it when they call you brother first?

No,

brother, brother, brother, brother. Hey bro. Hey brother.

No, but so my, one of my friends sold his house and he sold it for a pretty penny.

Is this in Las Vegas?

Yeah, it's in Las Vegas. You know who it is. Okay. So transaction happened. It was expensive home. I won't mention his name, but it was a $25 million event and he made really good profit on it.

He bought it for like $18 million?

No, way less. Okay.

15, you helped too.

All right. So he profited a pretty sum. Let's call it 8 figures in profit. And I'm just rounding here. So let's say 10 out of the 25 was profit. I'm making up the number. Right away someone comes to him and says, hey dude, I want to help you manage your money. Okay? And he knows this person. This person did something that was really unique or interesting in which he said, look at the people who have had the best returns, the 10 best investors. So he is like pointing out Bill Ackman and Warren Buffett and he's listing their returns and he's like, you want to know what's crazy? My returns are up there. Look at my returns. They're roughly 30%. And he's showing one client account, only one client account. He's like, I manage over $200 million. But look at this client account. I'm so good, dude, that I should be charging hedge fund fees, but because I know you, I won't even charge 2%. I'll do it for like maybe 1%. Right? And the first thing that I got from that, and he was telling me the pitch, I was like, if he's producing 30% returns, his business would naturally flourish.

Why isn't he managing more money?

Yes. A, he would manage way more money. 2, he wouldn't have to pitch that hard. Yeah. And 3, you're not producing 30% returns. You just showed one account that was getting 30% returns because they owned Nvidia and some of these AI boomers. Actually show all your accounts. If you're just going to show one client account, people are going to assume you're full of crap and you're actually not producing that. And then the big thing is, is they told him, dude, if you want to build another house, don't buy it with cash. You should just buy this stock over here. You can get 70% leverage and it barely moves down. So it's only moved down one time in the last 10 years. So it's very unlikely that you'd ever get a margin call. So I'm like, dude, this is so inaccurate. And I know that symbol. And I was like, this stock, you would've got a margin call this year alone. If you bought the stock in January, because in March it went down more than 10% and it went up within a week later, not back to where it was, but close enough. But I'm like, when you get a margin call, you got a day or two or whatever it is. They don't give you a week or two to maybe the stock will go back because it could just keep going down. They'll just liquidate your, you know, liquidate you unless you come up with the money.

Yep.

And I was like, dude, this guy's just pitching you risk. And then he's just like, dude, I know. And he put it into ChatGPT or Claude actually of how often that stock went down more than 10%. It's a lot more when the financial advisor was saying, and I'm like, people don't understand that you can just check this stuff. This is a terrible sales pitch. I'm like, who would ever sign up for this?

Multiple things there. One, that guy's an idiot for the way he, he like to expect that he can pitch someone else like that, right? He hasn't thought through his pitch, number one. So that's idiot move number one. But idiot move number 2 is also not being direct again, right? Yes. It's trying to beat around the bush with someone that is clearly smart, that has done well for themselves. But this is how also how these people make money too. They will eventually find someone who's unsuspecting and be able to get their pitch through.

And idiot move number 3 that he did not disclose is people don't realize when Berkshire Hathaway buys stock in a company, a lot of times they have a different deal than a normal retail trader when they're buying large positions in corporations. Or maybe a Bill Ackman negotiated a unique deal. We as individuals do not get all the deals that they are able to get. Maybe the certain class of stock or certain provisions or access to certain things.

And then you get better price too sometimes.

Correct. Because many times they know that if they go in and they buy 20% of your company, it's going to cause the stock price to go up. They work out unique deals. You are not getting that same deal. You can't compare, oh look, look at my returns, we can, or we can just copy them and we'll get the same returns. It doesn't work that way.

ChatGPT is on fire, but here's what I want to call out. So Neil, this is a chart, because we like charts over here. So let me show it for the camera here. So this is someone adding $500K in ARR just by adding their app to ChatGPT plugins because ChatGPT plugins is making a comeback, right?

Yeah.

So what I'm doing right now, I'm taking our repo from Carrot because Carrot, believe it or not, Carrot is— it drives a good amount of leads coming in for us, right? It's the LinkedIn account-based marketing personalization and the landing pages. So I'm like, dude, you take AnswerThePublic, you take, what is Ubersuggest, right? Why don't they just— why don't they become ChatGPT plugins? Because those are— it's a great distribution channel. He's like, I've never seen anything like this. We added $500K in ARR this week. We haven't stopped growing since we launched our new ChatGPT plugin since last Tuesday. So the way I see it, like I mentioned last week, ChatGPT plugins, ChatGPT marketplace, these are all going to be gold mines and the ability for you to take what you built on ChatGPT, make it into a website, make an MCP as well from it, and then make it a plugin. I think it's just going to— we're going to see explosion in apps, in plugins, and I think we're going to see an explosion in entrepreneurship as well.

Yeah, I think we will. What we're finding with the plugin ecosystem when it comes to ChatGPT is it can drive some revenue, depending what you consider some, but if you're at scale, what we're finding is it helps more with retention than it actually does with revenue, which for us, the retention number generates us a higher LTV and more profit than the $500K that you add in MR.

Yeah, I find, I mean, I don't know how it's going for you guys right now, but the conversations are starting to shift. It's beyond just marketing now. They're like, hey, we're spending like $15 grand a day on tokens. Can you help us with that? Can you help us with this? So my thinking is that because we can do more now, right, our TAM kind of starts to expand a little more. But what are you seeing?

We don't see any of that. We very rarely ever see corporations ask us to help them save on tokens.

Yep.

We are seeing a shift in the market in which customers are coming to us with problems instead of what they're looking for. So before we would say, I'll use a random example, a company would say, I lost some Google traffic, I need to gain back my rankings. Or they would say, hey, we're getting all this traffic. My conversion rate is really terrible. Can you help us increase our conversion rate? It would be very specific. We're spending $5 million a month on Google Ads and our ROAS keeps reducing each year. So can you help us fine-tune our campaigns and get our ROAS back to what it was 3 years So people would come to us with very specific asks. Now people are coming to us with very specific problems, right? And I know the first group, I kind of identified the ask and the problem, but now it's more like our leads, our revenue is down 6% and our leads are down 32%. that we lost a lot of leads, majority weren't qualified. Our close rates have gone up because we've lost a lot of bad leads, but it seems like we're still getting good leads. What would you do if you were trying to reverse this company and grow it? What would you change in our marketing? What would you adjust? And they're not coming to us with, we lost this traffic from Google, or we lost it from organic Instagram or Facebook. They're coming to us starting with the business problem and they're saying, as marketers, what can you do to help us solve it? And they don't necessarily care how we solve it. They just want it solved. It doesn't mean if we just say, oh, we can solve it and we're going to do X, Y, and Z, they're going to give us a contract.

Mm-hmm.

They're more so going to us and maybe another 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 other competitors, and they're asking us the So all the same questions and they're comparing what people say and they're going with the solution they feel is the best for their business.

So here's my point. I think we're kind of saying the same thing. It's like it used to be very specific. Hey, we just want you to help with SEO. We just want you to help with paid media. Now what it is is, hey, we just want you to help with this problem set over here. So with this problem set, you might have multiple ideas. You might say, hey, we'll help optimize your paid media here, your CRO over here, but we also see an opportunity to fix the funnel over here from like, oh, your chat's broken over here, right? But that is value that's happening because we're all able to do more now. And that's why I'm saying that TAM is like, I'm not just saying it's token optimization, but it's more so like, just solve our problem here. We're spending too much on AI over here. We want to see more value from it, right? The other thing I want to bring it back to, Neil, if you want to fit, do you have any point you want to finish off there? Because I want to come back to one thing. No. Okay, so I want to come back to customer service being the best form of marketing or one of the best forms because Neil just mentioned Zappos is amazing because back in the day they wanted to deliver They want to make happiness happen,

right? Delivering happiness, Tony Hsieh.

Delivering happiness, yeah, Tony Hsieh, great book by the way, I read it and rest in peace, Tony Hsieh. So Nordstrom, right, if you've returned a tire, they don't sell tires, right? If you, back in the day when you return a tire, they would still refund you or give you something for the tire, right? Because they were like no questions asked basically on the refunds, right? So they want to create delightful experiences. Now when I think about delightful experiences, I think about GrokBot for example. So SpaceX, right, their team is hooking me up with accounts, they're saying, hey, here's more credits for you, here's credits for your team as well. Guess what? I'm telling everybody about it. In fact, I started paying for it. I just got Grok bought Teams for the team this entire week. We had an issue with it. The entire thing went down, the uproar, right? That's when you know the team is like using it heavily. Yes. And so then I reached out and hey, can you fix this for me? Hey, I'm about to do this webinar. Literally in about 30 minutes, this guy from Josh, this guy named Josh Kim from SpaceX, like their growth leader, he said, hey, I solved it for you. I was like, hey, I'm about to do a webinar in 1 hour right now. This shit's not working for me. Can you help me, right? He's like, don't worry, I got you. 30 minutes, done, right? That is delightful experience. Let me tell you an undelightful experience. I've been buying these tennis shirts from on.com, right? Remember I told you I had an issue with on.com? They refunded my thing without giving anything back, but my Muse got 40% off and replaced the order, right? There's an odor issue again with one of the orders because it split it into 3 orders. And so now it's reaching—

Why did it split it into 3 orders? Your Muse did that or On split it into 3 orders?

Muse did it because it wanted to, you can't On does this thing where it's like, oh, if we give you 40% off, it only applies up to $500. So then Muse is like, okay, we'll apply the 40% for the biggest order over here, and then we'll split the other 2 20% coupons you have. So it's going around it. So this is bad customer service because one, if you give me a discount, don't do that to me where I have to split it up like that. Number 2, don't refund my stuff without telling me. Number 3, don't say we can't do anything else because of policy, because I'm telling you right now, I'm going to talk about you in a negative way, which I'm doing right now. Right. So that's negative because if other people listen to this, they're about to buy On, they might buy something else now, right? So maybe don't do that to me.

Yeah. And that's the place you play tennis, your hat, right?

Oh, this is Sunset Tennis Club. This is different. This is like a little tennis membership thing.

Oh, got it. By the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Yeah, that's one of the courts. They use multiple courts. Like, by the way, Sunset Tennis is great marketing. You know why? Like, hey Eric, how's it been going for you? Can we hook you up with this? Can we do this for you? What else can we do better? Hey, how was that session with your coach over there, right? These are things that are memorable and it's like, oh, these people care. Oh, I just spit everywhere. People care, right? Or you can share some experience. I'm sure you have amazing experience when it comes to traveling, for example, right?

So sometimes very negative experiences. My, I would say my worst experiences is I tend to stay at Marriotts a lot because of the memberships and the status and the rooms are pretty affordable and nice enough. Like when I'm traveling for work.

Yeah, it's just a Ritz-Carlton, you know, it's just a St. Regis.

No, I usually don't stay at Ritz-Carltons or St. Regis. But those are Marriott, by the way, guys. Those are Marriott.

Yeah.

I'll stay like at a normal Marriott, not a Motel 6 version. Sometimes I will. The last hotel I stayed at was a Holiday Inn when I was in São Paulo, which it was delightful. I had to clean the floor, like I had hair and stuff like that. So I was like cleaning it up myself. I was kind of gross.

That's, that's a 1-star or 2-star?

I don't know what they call it, but I was cleaning up stuff and I had to figure out how to turn on the AC and eventually found the room. And it was like a portable one that was in the wall. But whatever, maybe normally I stay at a normal Marriott, like average, like a 3-star hotel, sometimes 4-star. And when I'm staying at a Marriott, my travel internationally is at random awkward times. So sometimes I'll arrive really early in the morning. And if I have meetings early in the morning, even if I don't, I want to check in early in the morning. I don't want to check in at 3:00 PM or anything like that. So typically my team, not typically, they will. They'll book the night before. So then that way I get, the next day I can check in early because in theory I checked in, I paid for the night before. And I was in Canada at the, I think it was called the Pinnacle Marriott. And the lady at the front desk is like, oh, sorry, we can't give you a check-in till 3:00 PM. I was like, why? I'm like, I paid for yesterday. And she's just like, no one notified us that you weren't going to actually check in that day in the morning of. So, you know, you got to wait for 3:00 PM. So I'm like, so you charged me for the day before and I have to wait? And I was like, and I know my assistant notified them because I do this often enough. And then I message them, I get the email that she sent to them and she's like, yeah, we sent it. She's like, oh, sorry about that. I guess it was our fault. They're like, we'll get you a room right now. And what irritated me about that is you had a room right now and you wouldn't give it to me. But when you found out that you screwed up, you're willing to give me a room right now. And it was the same room type, not an upgrade or anything. And I don't care for the upgrade. I'm not asking for that, but you had a room available and you said no to me when you messed up. But the moment you found out that it is your fault, you're willing to give me a room. But other than that, you wanted me to wait till 3:00 PM and I still get charged for the previous night.

Yep.

To me, that's a terrible experience. I still use Marriott though. And the reason being is status. And depending on the corporate plan you work on, you can get some cheaper rates. So the money savings is worth sometimes the inconvenience or the pain, but we just track all those kinds of things. So then that way when they mess up, they have to make it right.

You know who does a good job with this? So people like, you just mentioned a scenario where Marriott chalked it up to policy, right? I actually had a situation with Grokbot support where they chalked it up to policy because someone on my team paid for something and I'm like, hey, can you just Can you refund that? I'm going to— I'm about to pay for the entire team's account, right? Can you just pay for that, right? Can you just refund us? No, I understand, you know, but on policy I can't. I'm like, dude, like I'm literally about to pay for like the entire like company here and why won't you just give us that money back, right? Because they had a billing issue, right? They weren't willing to do it. It's another policy thing. Now on the flip side, when you go to an amazing hotel, right? Like a Four Seasons or something like that, right? They won't chalk it up to policy. I think in fact, like the Ritz-Carlton will say like, hey, they have a budget for each person where you can go above and beyond the policy, right? Or they'll go shop for you. It's like, oh, you know, maybe you want to eat a certain thing, right? Maybe they'll, maybe it's not on property, but maybe they'll go get it for you, right?

Yeah.

That's a delightful experience. That's what we call like a 7-star experience. I remember the Airbnb founder was like, here's a 9-star experience. It's like when you show up to a hotel and your favorite rock band is playing for you there, right? Like that's a 9-star experience. And so the reason these are so important, the reason why Ritz-Carlton does this or Four Seasons does this is because people talk about it ultimately and they're going to talk about it to their friends who are probably ideal clientele too.

Yes. I just don't want to pay for the Ritz and the Four Seasons costs when I'm traveling for work because it adds up so fast. And I know people are like, what's the difference between spending $500 versus $1,000? Well, if you have that philosophy with money, after 10 years, you know how much you've burned? You could just put that money in the market or somewhere else and done some good with it, especially when you're only there to sleep and you're not even in the hotel room. But on the flip When I travel with family, I'm willing to pay for the Four Seasons, but it never ends up being that way. We always pay for the Disney version, like a Disney cruise or whatever. You pay Four Seasons pricing, but you get Motel 6 type of experience.

Yeah, but you still liked it.

I still like it because my family's happy.

Yeah,

so I don't look at the expense from that aspect as, man, I didn't get luxury, but I pay luxury prices. I look at it is my family's really happy with me. If I had to, I would've paid double to keep the happiness and the family unit strong.

See, I guarantee you, you weren't irritated when you had Motel 6 experience with Disney, but you were very pissed off when you had the Marriott experience.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because when I have the Disney experience, I'm forewarned that it is not going to be the food I want to eat. I'm forewarned that it's not going to be a room that I like and it's extremely tiny.

Oh yeah. And all of you are in

All of them in there. We have to share one bathroom instead of multiple bathrooms. And I'm forewarned on all this kind of stuff. The wife notifies me, but it's not that she knows I'm still not going to like it. But when I see the room and I don't like it, but I see how happy my children are and my wife is, it makes it worth it.

Mm-hmm.

But when I'm traveling for work, I just want enough comfort Room service is ideally preferable. If I don't have a hotel that doesn't do room service or cleaning, I usually don't stay there. And the reason being is if I'm flying for long trips, I only want a carry-on suitcase. So, I don't want to— what is it called? I don't want to have to check in. So, I just want it where I can just give it to the hotel, they do laundry, and I can still travel light. Although I did recently get one of those suction bags.

Oh yeah, me too. Me too.

Air compressor. Uh, no, it's not that. It was that, that guy, that really popular interviewer, podcast interviewer.

There's a lot of those.

Uh, business podcasts, African American, uh, British accent.

Stephen Bartlett.

Yes.

Yeah.

Uh, and he was talking about how he uses, um, one of them and I bought it and then I saw the reviews after, like about air compression bags, not that brand. And what they said is it wrinkles your clothes a lot more, which creates a whole new problem that I did not—

Oh, did it actually do that?

I haven't tried it out yet, but I know it's going to wrinkle.

Mine says— so I read the Amazon reviews for mine and it said there wasn't a wrinkle problem. In fact, it was straighter. Like—

It depends how you do it. There's a way to fold the clothes in air compression bags, but forget the product you buy, they all make your creases harder Because you're compressing the air. So if it's folded right, you'll see creases on your shirt wherever they are. It'll just be stronger creases. But if you do the rolling method, the creases aren't there. So I had—

I don't want to do the roll method.

Yes. We have a lady who works for us, Ellen, every day or 5 days a week, and she cleans and stuff like that. So I was like, Ellen, test this out. And she put my clothes in there, compressed it. We left it in a day and she's like, it creates more wrinkles.

Oh, that sucks.

And then we tried the roll method and she's like, your clothes aren't as crisp because the The way she packs my clothes, it's just very nice. And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to use the air compressor unless I really have to.

I haven't tried it yet. It's just sitting there. In fact, a lot of the nice luggage I have, like the— by the way, the Sterling Pacific, they hooked it up again. Thank you guys so much. The Rolls-Royce, it's so nice. And I'm almost like— they have this titanium version of it now where it's even nicer. Nice. Again, they're better than the Romoas for sure, but sometimes I'm like, man, this is so nice that I don't even—

You don't want to scratch it.

I don't want to scratch it. It's too nice to use, you know?

And then they give you a bag to put over it.

Yeah.

But then I don't want to use the bag because I'm too lazy because then you got to undo it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's still the best bag. So I figured, I mean, because we're doing such an organic episode, we can talk about either some of our marketing highlights from this year because this year, guys, by the way, we're in Q4 now. Right.

We're in Q4.

The year has gone by really quickly again. So what are the highlights and lowlights from a marketing standpoint? Or we can also do the highlights and lowlights from a business standpoint too.

You want to start off with the business and then go with marketing later, or you want to do marketing first?

Yeah, I'll go business highlights and lowlights. Let's start there first. So for me personally, one of the biggest business highlights this year has been pushing, and you know I'm going to say this, but But hiring more AI-native people, and which immediately factors in with people who are adaptable and curious. I thought that one of the lowlights this year was actually starting the year thinking I could train people, right? Where it was like, oh yeah, I'm going to do all these hackathons, we're going to do all these group trainings, we're going to do all these things. The smart people kept building smart things. The maybe not so AI-native people kept building dumb things, right? And at a certain point, Like my CTO is just like, dude, stop thinking you can train them, right? Like he said that at the very beginning, to his credit. But as soon as I realized that, like things just started to move a lot faster. And every day I can tell that people are having a lot more fun at work and it does actually feel like a video game now. And by the way, I can tell during interviews now the people that feel like work's a video game versus the ones that don't. It's just easier when it feels like a game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's 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 AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

Uh, so we're doing highlights first?

Highlights and lowlights, right? Up to you. Yeah.

Okay, so I would do— my first highlight is, um, even though the economy has been really bad, I know that doesn't represent the S&P 500, but if you remove all the AI companies or ancillary companies, most businesses are not doing well. And this year our churn is one of the lowest it has been in a very long time.

Wow.

So that was a huge win for us. Another business highlight is we've gotten a lot more of our international divisions in order. I would say by next year we'll have no international regions losing Which is a huge—

That's a first, right?

It's a first. We thought this year was going to be that year. It did not work out that way, but we're so close. I do believe it'll happen pretty quickly next year. I don't think it'll take till the end of next year, but I would say it would happen worst case, maybe middle of next year. And at this point, there's not that many regions that are losing money, so the losses aren't that bad. Another business highlight is I had legal drama over the last few years. Silly stuff like companies pay you, they go bankrupt, they try to claw back the money. People then try to badmouth you online and saying something it actually really isn't when they sued, maybe call it 74 more companies to try to reclaim money as well. And if you're a big enough company, I'm not saying we're large, but we're large enough at scale if you look at our headcount and our revenue, When you get sued for stuff, they throw the kitchen sink at everything. They'll make whatever claims, even if they can't prove it, because— and then your job is to get them knocked out because the more things that they can throw in there, whether they're real or false, the more doors they have to try to reclaim the money. Mm-hmm. And then your job is to shut those doors, which then makes it harder for them to reclaim the money. And that's how you get to settlement because They know that they're bleeding you for legal fees. They know that they're making money because a lot of the lawyers on these bankruptcy cases make thousands and thousands of dollars an hour, literally $2,000 to $2,500 an hour. Like the FTX case, did you know the lawyers have billed, I think it's getting close to around $700 million in legal fees to deal with bankruptcy?

The lawyers always win.

The lawyers are always winning on this, right? So I'm not saying what they're doing with us or not, but a lawyer, if you're making that much You get paid no matter what. Why would you be incentivized to close things up fast when you get paid first? You would just drag it out.

Show me an incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

Correct. And with these bankruptcy cases, we had a really good law firm representing us. They're like, we'll try settling as early as possible. We're having discussions, but he's like, people don't want them. And we've dealt with these types of cases, not just once this year, but multiple times. There was a few, there was a big, a decent-sized pharmacy company That, you know, we have a mutual friend who has a pharmacy. Yeah. We had a pharmacy company.

We

had to deal with bankruptcy there in which they shut down and they wanted money back. But when you try to ask for settlement early on, they're just like, no, no, we want all the money. Just keep going. And the reason being is they need to bill some hours. If they don't bill some hours, they don't make any money from you. So that was a huge business relief. And if I had to say business cons, The economy didn't recover the way I thought globally. I think tariffs and war has hurt us. I'm not trying to be political here. I'm not trying to say some president or a nation should or should not have done this. People can decide their own opinions, but I'm just saying from a business aspect, those 2 things did not help marketing. Right. With tariffs, companies are like, well, if our customers had to pay pay 10, 20% more. It's going to be harder for us to sell cars or whatever. They cut marketing budgets first. That really hurt us last year and that trickled into this year. The other thing that hurt us is war, inflation. Things are just more expensive. Like if we work with a company that is a logistics company, like we have a logistics client, everything costs more if they're paying more for fuel prices, right? Like shipping, et cetera. That means that e-commerce companies have a harder time selling and offering free shipping because it's more expensive for them to ship now. Like all these things impact businesses at different— it all trickles up and whatever happens to the end consumer eventually hits the businesses and it impacts their bottom line, which then impacts us and everyone else in the food chain, right? Yeah. So I would say those 2 things really hurt us and that hurt us globally because we do a lot of business in Europe and in Asia. And with things like uncertainty, it causes a lot of companies to just pull back on budgets. Yep.

That being said, we're still very optimistic about 2027. So I am.

Yeah, I'm not as optimistic. I'm not saying that 2027 won't be a better year.

I think it's going to be better. That's why I say I'm very optimistic about it being better.

I think I'm hoping that war and all this kind of stuff is over by 2027. 2027, which will help. But I'm not optimistic that normal non-AI businesses will flourish like they used to. I think it'll take time before normal businesses are growing at a nice clip. I think we just got to figure out a lot of things, not just in the United States, but globally. There's just a lot of problems. And we're seeing, at least with a lot of the companies we work with, because some of them are just massive and deal with everyday consumers, They're seeing people try to do payment terms on basic essentials like toilet paper and groceries.

Oh, that's the worst. That's basically credit card debt.

Yeah, but it's a really bad sign if you're doing that because you can't add it to credit card or you can't get credit card. Like there's something wrong if people have to get payment plans for groceries. And I'm not saying the individual's good at saving or bad at saving, or they're doing something right or But when you hear more and more of those stories, when you work with some of these large corporations, they're sharing this data, it's kind of, for me, it feels like doom and gloom and kind of sad. It's not about how I'm living my life or how Eric's living his life. It just sucks to hear about people struggling. And I don't see that getting better for the very bottom unless governments across the world are just like, hey, if you make under $100 grand, just don't pay taxes.

Yeah. Again, I'm optimistic about next year being better. I'm not— we're still going to have a lot of problems. I think to Neil's point that this K-shaped economy is going to get worse, I think. And I'm concerned about not just the wealth gap, but the cognitive wealth gap. Right. And so that's for politics. But let me just talk about one other thing from a business highlights and lowlights standpoint. Then we'll move over to marketing and highlights and lowlights, and then we're going to eat at Javier's. But so our change has been this year is that us as a marketing services software company is that we are makers and managers of bots, right? So we make these bots, we manage them, we optimize them, we upgrade them, we maintain them, right? So, and a big bot that we made this year that has helped a lot with our recruiting, because recruiting is just, it's an evaluation game, right? You're evaluating if people have like the promotions and the tenure initially, then if they respond, you send them the questions, right? And then if they pass that, then people get shortlisted. Now, what's been amazing to me is we talk to these recruiters right now, right? Almost none of them are AI native. No problem, because we just have these running the whole time and it's just shortlisting people every day and it's shortlisting to the point where it's like, oh, okay, it asks them 6 questions, they answer it well, and then they'll make it over to my team and they'll get over to me quickly, right? And so that has allowed us to move a lot faster on the recruiting side. And the funny thing is when we show recruiters the workflow, they're like, oh, this is exactly what I wanted to do at my company. And then when they get to me, I'm like, so why haven't you done it right now, right? What's stopping you from doing it? Oh, you know, they're just, you know, they don't let me do it. Then I'm like, why do they need to let you do it? You can just build it, right? Yeah. Right? But it's just amazing to me that it's not allowed. So talent to me is downstream of everything. And Vinod Khosla, who now owns Seattle Seahawks, has said—

Yeah, good for him.

Has said that, you know, your people are the company, your people make up the company, right? And I've seen both sides of this before. You've seen it too. You have an amazing executive team, right? But I've seen it where when I let up on the talent, things fall apart. But when I don't let up, and the good thing is these workflows allow me to never let up on talent. It allows me to continue to tweak it more

Yeah.

So yeah, that's been good for us.

That's cool.

Yeah.

So now let's talk about marketing highlights and— Lowlights. And lowlights. I can

go first if you want.

Yeah, go first. Okay.

So what's— we can just go back and forth here. So what's been nice is the YouTube channel, because I started to add those skills now, it's actually driving leads. I think I told you a couple of weeks ago, someone reached out and then someone left a comment, right? And then for one weird reason, I was looking at the comment, I'm like, there's a weird aura around this comment. And I just looked up the name, right? And it's like, oh, this person's like a VP of AI who's been at this company for 11 years. They just raised a $100 million round, right? And then not only that, my team, the sales team is like, hey, there's a lot of people that are actually seeing your AI content now. So my CTO and I hopped on a call this week for SingleBrain. And there's our sales guy was on the call too. And I was like, hey, just tell me like, where did you find us? It says you came through like a webinar email. He said, oh, I just watch your YouTube videos, right? And so I'm like, the YouTube videos work now because the YouTube's more fun now because the skills are taking care of it. And YouTube's actually driving, we're talking mid-market to enterprise-level pipeline. And that to me is a highlight more so not just for the YouTube thing, but because I am unencumbered to do whatever the F I want and I will not be held back anymore.

Yeah.

Same for you, right?

Yes. It has helped a lot. I would say marketing highlights for me is I've really streamlined content production where it takes the least amount of my time for filming, which was a huge aspect. And they come to my house, which makes it easier.

Yeah. Because your house finished and you have so many different scenes you can shoot, right?

Yeah. So that helps. I would say another huge highlight from marketing aspect is we've won a lot of awards this year. Like we won Performance Marketing Agency of the Year. by ad age. That was hard to win. Uh, went to award ceremony. I was the first one to probably bounce from the room.

For sure. You probably left, like, when'd you leave?

I left after we got it. We had to go on stage. I was like, all right, I'm out.

Peace. That's great. I love it.

Because it was like going for a few hours. I'm

like, because then you have to schmooze and network and all that. No, I don't think you mind.

No, I don't mind that. Um, It was really interesting going to an advertising event. A good amount of the people were not from the advertising industry. A lot of them were just random people there that just got tickets. And I think some of them were just trying to meet other people to date or marry. It was in New York. There was a lot of single women. Oh. I know this because I got hit up by a lot of single women like, oh, We should change numbers. I don't wear a wedding ring. I don't like jewelry, but I am married. And I would tell them, I'm like, oh, I'm married. I'm good. And I was like, I'm flattered. I said it in a much nicer way than that. But I forgot how many single people New York has. And then what else was a big marketing highlight? We're getting more and more enterprise leads. So that's been great for us. We're getting more global pitches than we've ever had before. That's been a huge win. Yeah. A downfall, I think most people have this problem, they're seeing less traffic. That has been definitely a downfall. We're getting more social views in general. I took a screenshot of one of my Instagram views for 30 days. I don't know if I sent it to you or I saw it. You did.

A couple million. 5.5, 6?

It was something like that because remember we were talking about it and I was like, yeah, I don't get that many views. I got maybe like a million views.

And then you're like, oh no, you have 5.5 million.

Yeah. And then I saw it the other day. I think it was, it was, where is it? Professional dashboard. Let's see. Yeah. Views 12.7 in the last 30 days. I'm like, I get a lot more views than I actually realize in 30-day period. And I produce pretty specific content. Just didn't realize that I get views. I don't pay attention to my social media. But Eric knew something was wrong because Eric's like, you get millions of views. I'm like, no, I think I get maybe like 500,000. He's like, no, you get millions. And then I actually checked. So that was a win, but not really a win. I just didn't actually know how many views that I get. The other huge win that I would say on the marketing side was my team is speaking at more events, so I'm not speaking on as many. And I would say the last downfall, but it was a personal win, is my summer was extremely slow this year for speaking, but that allowed me to do a lot of family stuff. And I can't remember the last time I was home for like 2 months straight with no travel. It was really refreshing. I was like, wow, I kind of dig this life. I don't think it's going to be permanent, but I've been really pushing my team because the economy is bad. I'm like, we should acquire in all the regions that were the weakest, where I had to travel to more so I can cut back on the travel.

That's good.

So not slow it down where it's zero, but make it somewhere more manageable because I really enjoy things. And I learned this one from Eric because he keeps sending me a quote that came from X.

He doesn't keep sending it to you. I send it to you once a year to remind you.

Yes, he reminds me of it though, but he reminds me more than once a year, but he sends it to me, let's call it once a year. And dude, someone was asking me a question earlier today on my team. They're like, do you want to buy a company for X dollars? And it would be a really big acquisition. They're like, but you would have to put in Y more dollars and we can create a bigger company and all this kind of stuff. And I'm And I was like, if I told them, I was very direct. I was like, if we can get a good deal, I love deals. Eric knows this. I will put in the Y dollars.

Yeah.

I'm like, if we can't get in a good deal and we're paying normal market rate, why the heck do I want this company when I can find other ones that are at better deals? And they're just like, but you could create a bigger company. And I was just like, you know, and I admitted to them on the phone. I'm like, I'm not that person who's like an Elon Musk where I'm built to just keep going after a mission. I'm like, I'm pretty content in life. My life's not that bad. I don't have any stress. The money is not going to change anything really. I'm like, yeah, whatever makes the best returns with the least amount of stress is what I optimize for, not what makes the best returns and causes the most amount of headaches. Mm-hmm. Someone the other day pitched me a company that we can turn around and we can make a killing But it would be a headache. And I'm like, I don't want a headache. They're like, but you would miss out on making all this money. I'm like, I'd rather pay more for a deal that has no headache than one that is going to create a headache for me because my life is chill.

It's that Eskimo story from Alaska, right? They asked the fishermen, oh dude, the private equity guy comes in. Oh yeah, we can catch way more fish. And then he's like, well then what do I do with all this money? He's like, well, I would just go back and fish, but he's already doing it right now. So you're already doing it right now, right? And so A couple things on my side. So outbound has been working for us, right? Oh, that's awesome. So outbound's been great for us. Like it's, I think this week already it's booked like 5 good calls.

Oh, cool.

And that's significant because these are more enterprise companies, right? And people want, we talked about this earlier in this podcast, but people want more help now. I think part of it is because some of these people consume the content. So they're like, hey, we know you're helping with marketing. And that's led to another thing that's kind of related to marketing. We're just creating a bunch of wedges now. So Neil might have Ubersuggest, he might have AnswerThePublic, right? These are just different wedges to find us, right? So Single Grain, people know us for marketing there, right? Single Brain, oh, AI implementation, but then it's like, people are coming to us for Carrot now. It's like,

oh. Eric said 2 different companies, Single Grain, his marketing one, and the second one's Single Brain.

With a B, yeah.

Yes.

And so my whole thing is like, we were talking about ChatGPT plugins earlier. It's like, dude, at this point now, because you can just build these wedges so quickly, you just build as many wedges in. So they might come for one thing, but to Neil's point earlier, the problem set is expanding. They want you to solve a problem. And so you get people in there, oh, you can do that? Oh, you can do that? Okay, we want that. So people want more now. Right? I think the expectation is getting higher. That's another thing. And that's been good for us. I will also say that Gary Vee liked to talk about, you know, it's all about having 15-minute meetings, right? I will tell you in a remote environment, it's all about having— when you have a problem, it's all about having 15-minute standups. And you just keep hammering away at the issue until the problem is solved. And you just inject a bunch of intensity and then you just disband the standup. And that's been good for us.

You also did release like a website with a ton of skills or—

Oh yeah, Skills Dojo.

Yeah. How did that go?

That went well, but you need— what I learned from that experience is you need— what I'm learning from our 4 deployed engineers and our 4 deployed marketers, what we're calling them, is that the engineers don't have the distribution know-how or the skill, so you need to pair them with the marketers because the marketers actually understand funnel drop-off rates and they understand distribution, they understand churn a lot more. The engineers are so used to building, so we're trying to train the engineers up, but they'll never get to the level of a marketer, and also we're trying to train the marketers up in terms of being builders, but they'll also never be at the level of an engineer too. But I do believe that being like deep in one area and T-shaped is helpful. So that's how that's gone. So it's a good thing, but we need like a marketer that's on it.

So yeah, that's the hard part. It's like we all have tons of ideas. AI makes it easier for these ideas to come out, but unless you have people really focus on these projects, they rarely ever produce the results that you expect. But another approach or philosophy that I know people have taken, and I've taken this too in the past, is because AI makes it easier to crank out products, it's okay if you don't have someone to focus on it. You can just do 10, 20, 50, 100 of these ideas and just crank them out. And the ones that get, that naturally have legs and are gaining traction, double down on those and just ignore the rest. It just makes it cheaper to figure out. It just makes testing cheaper and to figure out what actually gets traction.

Yeah.

And spend by, Spending the least amount of time.

Yeah.

But the issue that you're seeing, and Eric talked about this at the very beginning of the podcast, is all these things cost money. It takes someone's time to release these experiments. If you're using AI, you're still spending money because AI has token costs, although token costs are getting relatively cheaper. And I think you're going to start seeing better economics because a lot of these players want to go public, although none of them have really said when they're going to go public. I think there's maybe some issues or security concerns or whatever it may be.

Actually, in a few weeks, Neil, I think Gavin Baker reported this, but it was like, it used to be 80% of tokens were frontier, and now it's actually flipped to 80% of token spend is actually more of the open source ones, or open— what's called the open weights, not necessarily open source. But what Neil's saying is like, back in the day, you couldn't really throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. Today, you can kind of do that more. Yes. But the focus elements, actually, I'll say a lowlight is because I talk about AI within my company, People, you sometimes you have some slop cannons coming out, right? Where they're just like, yeah, Eric's talking like do do do do do everything, right? And I'm like, no no no, like it's got to tie in with like a business result. Forget traffic for a second. How are you driving pipeline and how are you driving revenue, right? And it's just because I sat in on a meeting the other day and literally four other people that had five different ideas each. And then the leader of that meeting was like, no no guys, we're going to focus on one thing, one one. One funnel, one offer, and that's it for this one thing, not 20 different things, right?

Yep.

So that part's important, but you brought up a good point because one of our creatives said, I didn't know Higgsfield launches, their requirement within the organization is you launch one new feature a week, so that's 50 new features a year, right? And you see a lot of these companies doing it, but I think they are doing the throw spaghetti against the wall because then you can just look at the engagement metrics and you have a large user base, you have distribution, so you just bet harder

on it. And you just cut the ones that Yeah,

exactly.

Yeah.

So, but you do need to have like a good technical person for that. So yeah, that's a lot.

You do. I've learned over the last few years, I prefer creating service-based businesses over tech-based businesses. I perform way better in services than tech. It's not that, and I spent the majority of my career in software over services. Although I did spend a good chunk in services over—

But I think you partnered with your brother-in-law was a good partnership too, because he was very tech-oriented.

He's very tech-oriented. oriented. My tech chops are nowhere near what it takes to thrive and succeed in today's world. And I was telling my brother-in-law this and he's just like, dude, he's like, this happens every generation. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, when you started, you were like dot-com boom, like this is great. And he's like, there was a lot of entrepreneurs who were like, man, I don't know how people adapt to this dot-com world. I prefer my old school way. Life was great.

Yeah.

And he's like, you adapted really well to the dot-com boom, he's like, you have the capital now to adapt to this whole new AI world and you can just buy companies. But he's like, you personally are struggling to keep up with all the changes. He's like, it's so fast and there's so many. So he's like, how do you do it? And I'm like, I just hire people. I try not to keep up with it. I'm like, I just don't have the time. I'm like, I got a family now and kids and I know these are just excuses, but I'd rather choose some of those things. Yeah. Yep. Versus working 70, 80-hour weeks constantly and trying to keep up with everything. It's like, it's just too much.

Yeah. And it actually makes more sense for you to think from a capital allocator standpoint now because you've already put in the work and then like there's different seasons of life too, right? Now what we were just mentioning earlier, if you're an Elon Musk, of course you want to continue to grind yourself. And by the way, we really respect Elon.

Yes.

But I would never want to live his life. No. Because the level of problems that he's working on is so tough that it, and, and some 4 or 5 different things and you're flying all the I wouldn't want to do it.

Same with Target. Like, he talks about like going to groceries, he's like, I can't. He's like, there's too many threats on my life after Charlie Kirk and stuff. He's like, it's just too risky.

Yeah.

I love going to Whole Foods or Bristol Farms or whatever it may be and doing grocery shopping with my kids. We think it's fun and it's a treat. Like, so much so I stopped doing a lot of Uber Eats because we find it fun to just hop in the car and be like, hey, you want ice cream? It's— yes, I can get Jeni's ice cream and get it Uber Eats to me and deliver But the kids have a better experience when I park the car, we walk into the store, like that experience, the environment, the smell of the ice cream cones that they're making, it just makes them happier. And I was like, oh, I like living a normal life.

Yeah, your priorities change over time in your life. Yes. But by the way, like if I'm in Neil's shoes right now, okay, like you've been in business like 14 years longer, right? It's like you've been through the grind already, you've worked extra hard already, right?

It's like, okay, well now I have this machine and if I just focus on capital allocation, I can continue to optimize my machine and continue Continue to live the life that I want to live instead of having to travel all the time and all that. So things change. Yeah, and my co-founder was talking to me today and it really hit him. He was just like, hypothetically, if the business went to zero tomorrow, what would you do? And I was like, I'll just stay home and play stocks. And he's like, that's it? He's like, would you start another? I was just like, no, I'm over it. I don't want to start another business. I'm not into the grind. And he's just like, And he's like, you really do like the chill life. And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, could I go and create something else? I'm not saying I'll be successful or not, but I think because I have enough capital, I can figure out how to buy my way into some sort of success. Maybe not as big of a success, but some sort. But I'm like, I'm just at a point in life where I'm just like, man, I just keep reinvesting my money and just chill. And yeah, I'd rather have that life.

Yeah. And I'm sure you've run the numbers 10,000 times already.

Yeah. As long as I control my expenses and I don't get crazy, I'm like, I don't need a ton of money. I'm like, life is chill.

Yeah. So anyway, guys, that's it for today and we will see you tomorrow.