What's Working For Us In Marketing Right Now?

One marketing experiment that we're running is instead of spending money directly on ads, spend that money to acquire the property that already has the visitor base or user base that uses the product, even if they don't own it.

That's a continuing strategy for you.

Yeah, we've been doing that for years, but we're going back to it.

Yeah.

Like, I don't know the company name. I think we just bought something for $30,000. We reviewed the product, product was great. We're like, cool, demolish it, has users integrate it and move on because it was cheaper to do that than it is to send traffic to ads and get that.

You can start to buy a lot of these failing SEO tools in the next few years if they don't work out.

Because they're not adapting.

Yeah.

And another thing that we've been doing on our marketing is corporate webinars. So when I say corporate webinars, We now do outreach to corporations about interesting topics that we know that they'll want to hear about. And we usually—

Bless you.

Bless you. We usually do that around planning because a lot of corporations, you know, when their cycles are over because they're publicly traded. So reach out to people in marketing and offer virtual webinars just to their own teams for free.

Yep.

And we've been doing that a lot.

Tailored to help them with their planning. And people would love to have you think for them, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

And we've been finding that to work extremely well for us to get us in the door and get more meetings.

That makes sense. And what, what, how many people typically attend, like from the corporate team?

Corporate team, depending on the time and the region, anywhere on the low end, like 30, 40 people on the high end, maybe a few hundred people.

Mm-hmm. That's great.

And this is just the marketing departments. It's, it's Sometimes maybe every once in a while you'll get like an exec run come in like from finance or a CEO, but it's usually just only marketing.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of this goes back to, it's, you mentioned, okay, the EverBowl deal. Okay. In person. Okay. You mentioned the in-person things you do when you're like these little mini events that you do. Okay. This one is also like an event too. You might do it virtually, you might do it in person, but a lot of it comes down to in per— like this to me, this is all a form of live streaming because you're spending a lot of time with these people and you're building a deeper relationship. And that's why we even talked about live streaming.

Yeah, I think live streaming is a good channel. But yeah, I would say for next year, the main things that we're going to end up doing, we'll double down on our experiments from the roundtables. We'll double down on product-led growth. Paid advertising has worked out well for us in 2025, so we'll double down on our—

For direct-to-lead form fill?

Uh-huh.

Wow.

So we will—

that's retargeting or cold?

Cold. We will increase our spend by, my guess is at least a double. And then we'll start rolling it out for the international entities as well, because we've only been doing this in the US. More in-person events have been working out, whether it's in-person to a corporation or in-person to, we're inviting like 50 people at to come to our event, but we found out the ideal formula for that is we go speak at a conference that already has our ideal customer, and then we have them set up like a luncheon where I'm giving a talk just to the attendees that we invited.

You ask speakers to set that up, or sorry, not speakers, the organizers.

Conference organizers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to set it up with the core businesses that you want to talk to.

Yes.

Yeah. Which is what we tried to do that Dubai, that didn't work out.

Remember that? It was the wrong event.

That was the problem with that. Yeah, it was an affiliate event. Yeah, yeah. No, these are good. It's, we're, I mean, we've kind of talked about most things already, but similar to you, we're pushing harder on, so, you know, you and I get invited to speak at a lot of like random events. And so like, I kind of used to use it to like, oh, this is a cool place to travel to, but now it's much more intentional, right? So a lot of it's more focused on B2B SaaS, for example.

Yeah.

So that's what we're going for. Or like, could be like a marquee event, like a HubSpot inbound or something like that.

Yeah.

But like, you actually, like, you actually have to reach out to these people. I would say that content collabs too, right? Could be like a content collab for a webinar if they have our audience, right? There's some go-to-market podcasts out there, some B2B SaaS podcasts out there. And whether it's webinar collab or podcast collab, like these things always work. So why not do more?

We're also both doubling down on GEO or AI SEO or whatever you want to call it. We both still do SEO heavily.

And we try to be smart about it too. We're not just spamming, so.

Yes. We both do webinars. We both produce a lot of content on social and just be out there. I produce a lot of charts and data. I think you guys every once in a while.

We don't. We're trying to get into that. I would say that we, I think same for you too. I don't think we do the best. I think we do worse than you do in terms of posting natively to like X or LinkedIn or whatever. So we're actually, we're starting now. We're a lot more intentional about the things we write. 'Cause for example, okay, you and I have like a 5-minute clip from this. If I just throw it onto X, it's not gonna do well. But if we have a good caption for it, it's going to get a lot, like some of these captions I'll throw up, 30, 40, 50,000 views on X. That's actually pretty good. And so why don't we just spend a little more time, maybe decrease the volume but increase the quality?

Yeah, I don't really look at it as decreasing the volume and increase the quality because the quality isn't from a production or material standpoint. The quality is actually what you're referring to is writing the correct hook for LinkedIn versus Instagram versus Facebook versus X. And that you can just probably hire a contractor or have some of your internal team work on a unique hook for each platform for that same piece of content.

Yeah, so what I'm referring to, there's an internal constraint I'm not referring to right now. There's the team that's working on it, but they're already capped out, right? And so we do need to hire more to, 'cause to Neil's point, he's right. So we do need more shots on goal when you're playing social media, 'cause you don't know what's going to take off. And sometimes you might repost and then something might take off like a second time. So you never know. Yeah.

We're going to also in 2026, we're going to start sponsoring events. We're going to try that out. And when I say sponsoring events, not sponsoring the aspect of having a booth, we've already tried that. Um, sponsoring specifically from me paying to speak.

Oh yeah. Yeah. So I just want to emphasize this piece real quick before we talk about the speaking piece. Booths haven't really worked for me and booths are expensive. Same for you, right?

Yeah. We've done quite a few booths over the years. We haven't found it to work.

But on the paying to speak piece.

We haven't really done much paying to speak and we're curious on how that's going to work because I usually get paid to speak. And then I told you I didn't care about the speaking fee and if it's the right event and they'll cover costs, I'll go for free. They just pay for flight.

Yeah.

Sometimes I'll do it where we pay, I mean, we pay our own costs to speak. Like when I spoke at Google, they had a room full of our ideal customers. I had to pay for my own flight and everything. Did not care. It was a room full of some of their biggest advertisers in their HQ in New York or their New York headquarters, or I don't know how many offices they have there, but it was worth it, right? But now we're going to actually test paying to speak because there's some of these events that have a lot of our ideal customers.

To Mexico.

Uh-huh. And they don't accept free speakers.

The question is like, this will be interesting once you come back and like we come back on this in 6 months or so, is you paid to speak. Like it's almost like you have to negotiate the right stage. too, because if you get like a crappy, like 15-minute slot or whatever, it doesn't matter. Correct.

Yeah. So, but a lot of them want me to speak because they think I would help sell tickets.

Yeah.

So they'll put me on the right stage, but they also want me to pay.

Yeah.

And they'll give me a deal versus what they normally would charge.

And more props to them. I think they realize there's a lot of value in that and they know what type of pipeline they're driving. So for example, like the Google one that you did, how much pipeline do you think you drove from that? Do you know?

I don't know. I never asked my team, but they said it's worth it.

Yeah.

Well, that's good.

That's all you need to know. Speaking of which, we're talking, okay, so did we talk about how we're, is that all the things we're doing to revamp for 2026?

Oh, one really quick thing. So if I'll do like a Google thing and a speech there, the benefit isn't just collecting new leads. We'll try to work out with organizers where we can invite our customers as well. So then you add more value to your existing customers.

Free tickets, or are you discounting?

Free tickets, or we pay discounted rate, or whatever it may be. I don't know what my team works out. We then get some of our clients in. So not only are we meeting new potential clients, we're helping out our existing clients. They're happier. It ends up creating more revenue.

That's so smart. Like, by the way, guys, when you listen to this podcast, what I'd recommend that you do is take this YouTube link, go to NotebookLM, take all of our podcasts, and you can literally make an infographic. You can make slides from it. You can then take that into Nano Banana and make a nicer version because there's a lot of these little tidbits that actually don't end up getting clipped anyway. So if you can get these, then like that's another little strategy that I think we should try. All the time we spend, these 80 minutes each time should just be an infographic every time posted to social or like some of these lists of takeaways. Like I think that's going to become a strategy or more, more, more so of a, of a tactic. But do you have anything else before we move on here?

No. Okay.

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Uh-uh.

So when Peter Thiel managed people, let's say I'm Peter Thiel, I'm managing you. I'd say, Neil, you might talk about 5 or 10 different things that you're working on, but I'm only talking about one thing. Like, no, Neil, you only have one thing. Like, how's this one thing going right now? How's this one thing going right now? So he's maniacally focused when he's at PayPal in making sure that people wouldn't talk about other shit. It was just like every person has one main thing and he'd always hammer away at that one thing because it gets too complex when people start talking about other things, right? And I do think like you need a leader to do that because people do like to, like, especially if they're behind, they're going to put a lot of smoke and mirrors in front of it.

Yeah.

Yeah. You haven't heard of that before? No. Okay.

But I'm similar. I, not with—

Do you hold them to a metric?

The leaders?

Yeah. Is it one metric you're talking about all the time or is it just one project you're talking about all the time?

Are you talking about to my CEO or other people? Because CEO has to deal with everything.

Let's go executives. Yeah.

Uh, they have one metric.

Yep. And you're just talking about that all the time.

So like Mark, who runs Upemia, I only talk with him with sales. And that's it. What's a new pipeline? When I say sales, it's more so revenue. What are we generating for new revenue? Upsells, client satisfaction, right? Return, all those things. It's only focused on revenue. Your job is to make sure everyone's driving more revenue. With Mike, Kamal, and I, we mainly only talk about software.

Yeah. With you and Mike, and so I'm going like this because like with Sean and I, right? We just talk ideas and we talk about software, we talk about scalable things, we talk about the biggest problem.

Yeah, so him and I will talk about biggest problems, not necessarily from a company standpoint, but software, because he's only focused on software right now. And what do we need to do to get the product to naturally grow without doing any marketing?

And my point of even bringing this up is because those of you listening right now, let's say you have your own company, or even if you're a leader in the company, it's really— so when we have a one-on-one document with someone, there's always their primary KPI front and center. And I just like the way we look at that is like it's red, yellow, or green. If it's red or yellow, Then you're going to come up with a remedy. You better come up with a remedy. Like if it's red or yellow 2 times in a row, you're going to come up with a remedy. And that's all we talk about. We don't talk about anything else until that thing feels good. And especially if you're someone who forgets easily like myself, Neil doesn't forget easily. He's pretty on top of it with his memory, but I forget pretty easily. So with all my documents, primary KPI front and center, things operate a lot better that way because there's no room for debate.

Are you going to take the model of just hopping around different people in different divisions and help and solving one problem at a time in 2026?

That's what I do.

But not fully. You still do multiple things right now.

I still, no, I do hop around quite a bit. Like if there's—

No, no, no, no. What I mean by this is like, if I'm going and I'm dealing with sales, I can just go and focus on sales because I don't have to run the business. Right, right, right. You are the CEO. So If I'm trying to help Salo figure out our video marketing and make it way better, I can just go spend 5 days a week, 2 weeks just dealing with that and ignore everything else.

Yeah.

Like when I say spend a third of my time on sales, product, and marketing, I'm not spending a third equally each day. I just hop around, but I don't have any other distractions. You have to deal with hiring, firing, you know, revenue numbers, forecasting. You have to deal with everything. Yep.

So I'm on top of, to answer your question, this is a live audition. This is being recorded right now. This is a live audition for the COO this year to see if she can hold to a profitability number for 12 months. If I can see that happen for 12 months, then I can slowly hop off more and more. I'm really on top of hiring right now. I'm really on top of more and more on top of product because it's like, especially with ClickFlow and Carrot. And then I would say those are kind of the 2 main things. And I do hop around with like a lot of fires right now.

Yeah.

that are happening. So, but the test is, can the COO hold to this profitability number? I hit this number and that's all I'm going to look at.

Yeah.

Yeah. So short answer to your question is—

Or where I'm getting at is to be more direct, when are you going to, are you going to ever transition out of CEO?

Yes. Yes.

Okay, so you're trying to do it. This is your version of a test right now with your COO.

Yeah, it's a test run, right? And I think one of the ideas is, Working with my handy ChatGPT here, is it is good for me to work on product. It's good for us to work on like content, things like that, right? Or help with sales when that's needed. And so, you know, we'll see like there, if the CEO can prove herself on the, especially the agency side of things this year, then like, great, I can let go a little more and then focus a little more on this, the software pod side of things.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we still have 2 minutes left. I'm gonna give you one more thing before we go here. So I'm actually curious to hear from you too. So there's one sales hack that we use that works when selling to enterprise. So this one was a multi-trillion dollar company, okay? They have many divisions and this one division that we're working with or pitching right now, they have a lot of divisions, okay, under their company and there's a lot of GMs that they have and—

So this one division has many divisions underneath them?

No, no, sorry. He basically has other like peers that who are GMs of other divisions. So imagine if you're Google, you have like, you know, you have Google Maps, you have Photos, things like that.

Waymo, the list goes on.

Exactly. So he was like, you know, he saw one of my talks talking about GEO, AEO, right? And he's like, I don't think this is right for us. Again, keep in mind, multi-trillion dollar company, okay? And then I started showing him all his division competitors, his peers, and each of those divisions when it comes to organic traffic, AEO, SEO, whatever you want to call it, millions and millions and millions of visitors, okay? I pull up his, zero. I was like, how do you think that looks? Right? And so my point of saying this is like, when you're selling, you focus on them, them, them, them, them, not like how good we are. Because nobody gives a crap about how good you are. They care about how they look to their other division peers and their boss at the end of the day. And if you, if you can speak to their language and their incentives, you're going to have a much easier time of closing. At that point, I can see the light bulb go off and he's like, okay, yeah, we need to do this. Right? Yes.

It's easier close because they also don't want to look bad to their peers.

Exactly. When we're talking enterprise, like they don't, that's a big component. They don't want to look bad, right? And it's more about also preserving their status. But do you have anything you want to share around this before we hop out?

If you also do a really good job for them and you can beat the peers, they'll start making referrals to the peers on how you're amazing.

That's a good one. Uh-huh.

And because then If you do well for them and then you start doing well for the other departments, it makes them look good because you did well for them, they referred you, you crushed it for these other departments. So then their peers will thank them saying, oh, thanks for this intro.

Everyone wants to look good.

Uh-huh.

Yep. All right guys, so that is it for today.

Or not just look good. The better way to put it is how can you help someone get a promotion? If you can help someone get a promotion, they're going to be your biggest evangelist. The way you help them get a promotion is you figure out their KPIs, you help them hit it, And then if they can keep looking good, they'll help you out because you just helped them.

Exactly. And it scales well. So anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you next time.