Where SEO Products Are Going

Where do you think SEO products are going in the near future?

Automation. And I'll be very specific. Automate fixing your on-page code, automating the creation of your content, automating the promotion of your content, automating generating links and brand mentions, right? Automating posting it on social media and driving brand awareness. And that's what I mean. I think it's going to automate more of the tasks that people do. You still need a human in the loop from what I can tell. Technology may change over the next 5 years, but I see a lot more efficiencies to be created by these tools, but the market disagrees with me. And the reason the market disagrees, you've seen it, look how much SaaS companies are getting hit. It's like, oh, my company is HubSpot. I'm giving a hypothetical here, but let's say my company's HubSpot. Our growth rate has increased. Oh, my stock is now down 60% over the last year. Maybe HubSpot was overvalued before, but 60% hit, it's like, come on.

60% hit on 20% growth.

Yeah, so what? HubSpot is getting hit hard, Intuit's getting hit hard, ServiceNow I believe is getting hit hard.

Yeah, actually—

Adobe's getting hit hard. It's—

I went to X for this, and here, let me give you some numbers because we like numbers, right?

Yes.

So check this out. So ServiceNow, according to Grok, down 28% this week, Salesforce down 26%, Intuit down 11% in a single day. And then you see Snowflake down 26%, Adobe negative 35%, Salesforce down 35%. And sorry, this week ServiceNow dropped 28%, but overall it's down 44%. So it's happening across the board. And this is— we'll talk about the SaaSpocalypse, but let's focus on the SEO products first. So I actually think where this is going, because here's the deal, like these content, you have a content creator, I have a content creator as well. There's a bunch of content creators in the space and they all kind of, they're all a little different, but a lot of this stuff is becoming commoditized. And so I do think, I continue to believe that the way to succeed here is to upsell them into services, into managed services. And I do think the way we're going to do service in the future, Neil, you might or might not agree with me right now and it's fine, but I do think it's going to be like the Palantir model. And what I mean by that is Palantir has a base level of scaffolding for their main product, but then they have 4 deployed engineers that customize them for each customer, right? So right now when I, when I'll text some of our clients, they're like, hey, we need, can you make one of these bots that can do this for us? Like these things are relatively simple to build, not easy, but if we can build the scaffolding for all that for Single Grain, which is what I'm doing right now in my little OpenClaw, like I have superheroes, I have Alfred, I have Flash, I have Oracle, I have Green Arrow, I have all the DC heroes, right? And I'm testing them to see if they'll constantly Be proactive, iterate. And the crazy thing is Oracle, which is my SEO bot, it actually uses ClickFlow. And as it uses ClickFlow, it gives feedback, product feedback on ClickFlow as well. So it's a self-iterating loop, right? And so that's where I think not just SEO products, I think all products are going this direction. Now, do I think SaaS is going to zero? No. I think what's happening right now is layoffs, by the way, was up, I think 250% or 100% since compared to last month. crypto's getting wiped out right now, like $67,000 for Bitcoin, right? And then you have this happening. So maybe there's a market pullback happening right now too. But I think what happened with SaaS specifically going into the SaaSpocalypse was everyone's like, oh, Anthropic came out with these skills and like you can just pay $20 a month for whatever. But what we talked about for weeks and weeks here was that for HubSpot, for Salesforce, you know that if you're a multi-billion dollar company running all those transactions through it, you need reliable, You need reliable CRM, you need a reliable ERP, you can't just swap it out like that. There's a lot that goes into it. So I think a lot of these things are going to come back and maybe my sense is you and I are waiting for the market to pull back a little more.

Yeah, so I can buy more.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm like, how much more will it go back?

Yeah.

That's not financial investing advice. But Eric, the way Eric looked at me is he knows me quite well. But yeah, dude, you've been using AI to code way more than I have. And let me ask you a question. I already know the answer, but just for everyone listening, how often are the products you're creating have bugs and errors and issues?

Oh, all the time.

Okay, so—

And you think you fix it and it comes out broken the next day. Yeah.

So how is anyone going to be like, yeah, I'm going to use AI to replace my HubSpot and it's okay if emails don't go out and my leads get lost and we don't close as much revenue. And I'd rather do that instead of paying Or no, not even paying. Instead of using the free plan HubSpot has or paying $50 or whatever it is a month, people aren't going to make that decision. They're just going to pay the $50 or $100 a month or use a free plan than they are going to build that in-house because you're going to have too many bugs.

What do we say? We said AI amplifies your nature, which is also your intelligence too. And so when you hear people saying that, it's like, oh, you clearly haven't thought about this.

Yes. Yeah.

If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create Personalized ads towards your customers, and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.ai and you can join the waitlist again. It's carrot.karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. So, but here, the so I don't think the SaaS pocket like sure, we're seeing everything drop right now. I think we're going to see a broader pullback. People are like, oh, Bitcoin might drop to forty grand or something like that.

Maybe.

Maybe, right? Not financial advice, but you want to see here, let me just show you this before we move on here. I have, you know Opus, right? The little clipping bot for social.

Opus.

Opus Clip, yeah, yeah. So—

You're talking about the one that helps you find short clips from your long-form videos and so on.

Yeah.

Has it improved? 'Cause the last time I used it, it was like, eh.

I used it maybe a month or two ago. It's kind of the same. And so in my mind, right? Like even the stuff we're talking about today, like even Noah's unbiased, right? It's like we spent 80 minutes talking here. I know we have a bunch of good clips in here for your side and my side, and I know Neil has some longer form clips too, 'cause Neil tends to talk like slower and like calmly and like it's longer, but I just know we have good stuff. So here's the thing, I use my little Flash. Flash is my social bot, right? I was like, hey, just see if you can replace Opus here, and it actually, I inserted an 80-minute podcast with you and me in here, right? And it found some good moments. Here's the headline over here from these moments, Cloud Code Will Replace Your Marketing Team, which we actually did use. 150 times faster than engineers. Okay, 1443 to 1535. Here's a hook over here. High agency people will never be replaced, right? So now am I saying these are amazing? Not necessarily, but I am saying these are better than Opus in my mind, right? And then our team can do something with this. Now the other thing I was testing out, because we had a prospect come out to us, and I'm sure this is happening to you too, they're like, we want thousands of AI ads per month, right? And I was like, okay, Well, typically if you're going to do that, you need to do the research on their ad library, their competitors' ad library, what the strategy is, research the company, understand how their marketing is, right? So my little bot over here basically came out with a bunch of concepts and did all the initial research. And I was just like, without much prompting, it used VO3 to just make like a simple ad here. Now, am I saying this ad's amazing? No, but it's a boxer that's like punching and then like picks up the, the, The powder, right? And my point of showing you this is like, I didn't even prompt this that hard, but if I spent an hour, 2, 3 hours with this, if someone on my team did, right, it would be amazing. And I got the concept, I just wanted to see how it'd look. And so I can do this now on my whim. And when I have Neuralink connected to me, it's game over. I can just imagine things to life. Maybe that's going a little too far, but you get my point.

Yeah, dude, the possibilities are endless.

Yeah. For those that have imagination, which is all of you listening.

Yeah. I think there's certain people that are big believers that, and I'm a little bit biased for this because I have kids and they're in a gifted school right now. I'm a big believer that education is still really important. And I talk to a lot of people who are like, oh, with AI, you don't need to know these math formulas. Your kids don't need to know any of this. And I'm like, eh, if they actually know all this stuff and they have a strong foundation, actually some people we know, one of both our mutual friends in Orange County.

Are they really smart people? Yeah, I know who you're talking about.

Are you talking about book smart or business smart?

Just like street smart.

They're street smart.

Okay.

And I'm, I'm a big believer that no, if you give your kids amazing education and then you give them AI, they'll do much better than if you didn't give them any data.

But if they don't believe that, I don't think they're street smart. I know who you're talking about, but that like, it's obvious. If you don't have a good foundation, how can you build on it?

Yes.

So how can you just say like, that is a stupid comment.

It's a very stupid comment.

Yeah. And so by the way, Jensen Huang, so even the Nvidia CEO, he was like, the market's just wrong about software stocks. It's the same thing. I mean, he's probably— Oh, he said it. He said that, yeah. So he said, the notion that AI somehow is going to replace software companies is the most illogical thing in the world and time will prove itself. And he said that on February 3rd. So just a couple days ago.

Look, I hope these stocks tank a lot more so I can buy in.

Yeah.

And then they go back up to where they were.

Which ones are you going to buy? Not financial advice.

As of today?

Yeah.

I would buy more Intuit, HubSpot, Klaviyo. Those 3 I would buy.

You would buy HubSpot because it's not, it's smaller than Salesforce, so more room to grow.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

And HubSpot has gotten hit really hard.

Yeah.

I think too hard.

Dude, the funny thing is I saw a tweet the other day. So Figma, right? Imagine you wait 10 years for an IPO and then there's a 180-day lockup.

It's less than what Adobe offered the last time I checked. What is it now? Uh, yeah, $10 billion. Didn't Adobe offer $20 billion or something like that?

I forgot. You'd have to cross-check.

Adobe offers billion Figma. I just do Google. It's easier.

Yeah.

$20 billion. Yeah.

So, okay. I think this one's related. That's, that's worth talking about.

Dude, wait, half the price. And do you remember that something Khan? I forgot her name, but she is the head of like the, Is it FTC or something like that?

Lina Khan.

Lina Khan.

Oh yeah, she's like, this is a good deal. Like, you know, this is why it was good for me to get involved, right? Basically saying me, us stopping that deal was good.

Former FTC chair Lina Khan hailed Figma's August 2025 IPO as a major victory for antitrust enforcement, highlighting the blocking of Adobe's $20 billion acquisition allowed the firm to grow into $68 billion Independent company. Boy, was she wrong.

Yeah. It's, it's funny how time proves itself out. Okay.

So, well, it's not even that. We all knew that there was lockups. The moment lockups go up, a lot of times things go down. And when Figma first came out with their stock price, most people were like, this is overvalued. Even when Adobe offered $20 billion, most people were like, this is overvalued. This is why Figma said yes to the Adobe deal, cuz they didn't believe they're worth $20 billion.

Yep. Yeah, well, hey, we'll see what happens with them. But okay, because we're talking about Figma, because we're talking about the SaaS apocalypse here, let's talk about good versus bad software in the AI world. So I saw this tweet over here. This is from Boring Business. So he says, look, the real turmoil, go ahead.

Wait, once before we get into that, do you know what Figma's quarterly revenue is? No, what is it? $274 million. That was the last numbers that I can see. So roughly a billion a year because they're growing, right?

Wow, 68 on revenue. Yeah.

No, companies aren't worth 68 times revenue, especially if they're not profitable.

Yeah.

It's just like, where do people get these math from?

Well, that's what I'm saying. Like, it's never been, even when you think about your kids, right? They just need to, you just need to be, to beat the average, like, it's not that hard, right?

No.

You just need to make sure they're above average. That's it.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay, so Boring Business says the real turmoil in software is not so much the loss of existing customers. A massive Fortune 500 that already has their existing data on a Salesforce or Workday is not going to magically rip it out and replace with some vibe-coded internal tool. The real damage will be in the upsell of additional features that adds analytics insights or ease of use on top. So for example, if a CRM software upcharges your subscription to be able to analyze your data and provide customer insights, that feature becomes less and less valuable in a data-driven, AI-driven organization. As long as you can download the data, it's very easy for someone to use AI to draw out those insights themselves. Let me just scroll to the bottom here. The key point, the real test of a good versus bad software will come down to whether you are selling a feature or a platform. Okay, we should explain that. SaaS companies that are just selling plugin features with a monthly subscription on top will get easily replaced by AI. The companies that provide end-to-end platform-level solutions will continue to do well. In fact, a good software business might even see unit economics and margins improve because they will be cutting down their own costs using AI. So a platform would be like a Salesforce, for example, where there's actually a bunch of people building on it, right? And then a lot of the vibe-coded stuff that you're seeing pop up right now, it's just like kind of one-off features. And so those are the ones that I think there's not much of a moat.

Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think there's much of a moat there.

Yeah. So that, which is like when I think about software now, and maybe you're thinking about it this way too, when I think about whether it's Karat or ClickFlow or whatever, I think everything we build has to log into just, I bought the domain singlebrain.com where you have everything just kind of working together. Oh, that's cool.

You're going to change your company name?

Maybe eventually, but I do think everything, I do think the way we're doing marketing for people is just going to be there. You have really smart, high agency people managing these, like these 4 deployed marketers managing these solutions. And I think your headcount's going to be a lot less. I can say that, you don't need to say anything. So my guess.

Yeah. Yeah.

You should.

Yeah, I like single brain.

Yeah.

You should end up rolling it out. And we ended up getting offered or pitched by np.com. And I said—

To buy the domain?

To buy the domain. I said, sure. I said, how much you want? $100 grand, $200 grand?

What'd he say? $5 million?

No, I think they were at $1.5 last. And I was like, eh, I don't care to spend $1.5. But you know, I would buy, I told the broker I would buy npd.com and they're like, oh, okay. Yeah, we're going to talk to him. We know him. And then they talked to him.

But funny enough, I'm actually Well, don't give the numbers out in public here.

Follow up. But like, even then, I don't really care to own it that much.

You already have the main one, Neil Patel. And I have NP Digital.

And this is like, I don't really care, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't spend $1.5 million on np.com.

Yeah, dude. I want to, hey, you want to know how to make $500,000 per podcast episode that we do?

Uh, how?

Okay. So, um, you know, TPBN, uh, it was supposedly called Tech Bros Podcast Network, but it's actually called something else. It's like Tech Bro something, something, uh, programming. Right. But They actually revealed the numbers on their podcast, okay? So they do a live every day for 3 hours and they interview like tech people and they'll also talk about what's happening. And they basically do 5,000 host-read ads a year, okay? And I think they do about, give or take, about $10 million a year. Now, remember I was talking about the Operators Podcast?

Yeah.

So the Operators Podcast, they charge $500,000 per year for a sponsor. Okay, so this is— this should be interesting. There's money tied into this.

That's a lot.

So, okay, so to sponsor the Operators Podcast, the minimum buy-in is $500 grand a year for a show that reaches less than 100,000 people per episode. It's because just like TBP or Colin and Samir, the audience is incredibly valuable, niche, and hard to reach. Ridge has spent millions on podcast ads. The largest CPM we have ever paid is $40 because we don't need niche, we need reach. But if Phil started sponsoring Joe Rogan, the ads wouldn't work. Joe has 10 to 100x as a big audience, but he doesn't have people looking for a new e-com forward ERP. So you either need a lot of reach to charge $500,000 or you need a very valuable audience. And so when you think about Tech Bros Podcast Network, they might only have, you know, 1,000 people or 5,000 people at any given time, but a normal consumer, maybe their average, you know, dispensable spend a year is maybe 3 to 5 grand a year, if that. Okay. Now when you look at If we have VPs of marketing listening to this or founders listening to this, what is their— maybe they're spending $100 grand, $500 grand, $1 million a year, right? So the reality is, I mean, we do have a deal with HubSpot right now, okay? But the reality is when we're working with people, yeah, chances are we probably can charge, you know, and we have charged at least $360 grand a year, remember? Yeah, we have. So I just think that—

We charge more than $360 grand. What are you talking about? We charge $720.

Oh, that's right. Oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. So it was $720 grand.

I forgot.

Yeah, thank you. I only thought about my share. I was being selfish. So we charge $720 grand a year and I think we need someone who's specifically on, and by the way, I'm just, if you're focused on B2B podcasting, we are happy to hand it to you. We can probably offer 2 or 3 more slots. And if you have those relationships, we'll happily offer it to you to find them for us. Yeah, because I mean, look, I, I, I, someone started messaging me. Uh, you didn't send me an email.

No, I know, because they started messaging me on pricing and I told them more. So once they agree, I'll forward it to you. Oh, good, good.

Yeah, but I think we should, like, you and I, like, especially when we think about influencer deals, by default now, um, I have an autoresponder when anybody reaches out to the Leveling Up sponsorship, uh, email. It just says, like, if they want to post, it's like, 25 grand, 25 grand, it just says 25 grand, right? And then at least 25 grand, right? And then most times I still don't want to do it, right? Yeah. But my point is with this podcast, there's a lot of people that offer to do it. I think it's just got to be like at least $250,000, $300,000, $500,000 because operators, they do $5 million a year and they have a podcast network and they have 10 sponsors doing the $500,000 a year.

Yeah. This is a lot.

We just haven't had focus on it.

That's all. They don't, so they don't charge based on views or anything like that?

No, it's just like, we know our audience is really valuable and we know we can charge that. And just like Tech Bros Podcast Network, who's listening to that? It's tech bros or not tech bros, but tech founders. And we know this is a valuable audience.

It's a very valuable audience, expensive purchase. I look at it as like a mini Super Bowl ad.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Mini Super Bowl ad, guys. It's just a pain in the butt to manage and we just, we have, we don't have someone dedicated on neither of us do.

So. No.

Yeah.

I look at a lot of this stuff as you just figure out what works for you and then you go from there. But like, I think like the Ro CEO or founder who said how a Super Bowl ad is really a great value and was comparing it to companies spending a minimum of $200 million a year on ads. I was like, I don't know what reality you live in.

I listened to a podcast with the CMO of Wix. So he's been there for like 18, 19 years or so. Okay. So I think Wix, their marketing budget is $100 million a year. And he was saying, He was just saying that the Super Bowl is one of their best spends of the year. And he's like, you know, I've been marketing for a very long time. It's a different perspective, right? I'm not saying anybody's right or wrong here, but he's like on $100 million a year. He's like, that's one of our best things because everyone just remembers us, blah, blah, blah. So your mileage may vary. And Neil's just sharing data, client-side data that he has on his side. And then the ROSE CEO saying that that's his first time. And but then you have the Wix side. So it's always interesting to me to hear different perspectives. Yeah.

Yes, I agree with you. This is always different, interesting to hear different perspectives.

Yeah.

But for majority of companies, because I see a lot of data related to Super Bowl and I see companies of all sizes running Super Bowl ads, majority of them are medium to big. Medium being at least hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions in revenue, big being in the billions. And we typically don't see companies generating ROI from Super Bowl ads. And this is whether, It's us or Publicis or WPP or Dentsu or Omnicom, you pick the agency. Most people don't generate an ROI because you got to buy the Super Bowl ad, you got to buy like Olympic time slots, which tomorrow's opening ceremony, I can't wait for that. You got to spend millions on the creative and then the talent, and then you got to do campaigns around it and rally your people and maybe you want to do stuff on YouTube at the same time.

Yeah, $20, $30 million.

It all adds up.

Let me ask you a question real quick. Side note, because I was kind of talking about this with my team this week. So you just mentioned a couple of these holding companies, WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, whatever, and some of them are merged together. I lose track of this, right?

Yeah, Omnicom IPG is going through the merger.

So when you think about these big holding companies, agency holding companies, what do you think their differentiator is with each of them?

Publicis is more integrated approach. They've been doubling down more harder on influencer marketing than most of the other players. And they're probably the cream of the crop when it looks to quote unquote reputation. But from a tech perspective, my personal opinion and influencer perspective, I still think a lot of the small and medium shops do a better job. That's just my own perspective. Everyone can have their own opinion. And I'm also biased because I own an ad agency. So just putting that out there as well. But I don't think there's a differentiator outside of publicists. Publicists, when they pitch How it's all integrated, that story works well. The other big difference between Publicis and a lot of the other big holding companies, Publicis is very picky on what they buy and it's, they seem to be much more strategic. A lot of the other ones are just spray and pray.

Yeah. So that's exactly my point. So I was arguing with my team earlier this week and there, granted, there are some agencies that have differentiators, right? My whole thing was like, there isn't a lot of differentiation with a lot of these agencies. And you can actually, because the thing is like you basically have process power with people, right? And that was the old way of doing it. And so again, earlier in this episode, I talked about how the physics, the laws of physics as it ties in with business is changing rapidly. And I think it will force differentiators into businesses. But I do think like a lot of whether it's small business, small agencies or large agencies, I think a lot of them, it's just like, you know, they're helping people and like it's, they're easily, you know, interchangeable, right? For the most part. So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow. Wow.