Why AI Engineers Are Beating Marketers

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

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah. It was 4 different commercials. Yeah.

So they have quite a few people that end up working on marketing externally and internally, even though their growth team is one person, I actually believe it is more people working on marketing internally. They're just not marketers. So we work with a Silicon Valley startup. They're not publicly traded. They're valued over $100 billion. There's not that many of them, so you can take a guess. All right. And we help them—

Is it an AI company?

Not an AI company. Okay. So $100+ billion, privately owned. Eventually they will go public. I'm assuming that based on A, their valuation, B, they raised a crap ton of money over the years.

Are they worth over $500 billion?

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

There's only one.

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

We'll let people guess.

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

One of the C-level execs?

No one. We work with engineers.

Okay.

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

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

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

Junie.

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

Yeah, so here's what I'll say. I mean, so this guy tweeted this out. So basically Anthropic's entire growth team was just one person for 10 months confirmed. This is what we just talked about, right? So single non-technical person running paid search, paid social, app stores, email marketing, SEO for the $380 billion company behind Claude. Here's how one human's doing it, the job of a full marketing team. It starts with a CSV. So here's what I'll say to all of this, okay? If you look at the revenue chart for Claude from the last 2 years or so, it's like going, going, going, going, and it goes parabolic, right? And that's when Claude Code, like the Opus models, 4.5 comes out, 4.6 comes out. Really, I would say the last year, year and a half or so, Claude really started to take off and they're launching all these products like crazy. To your point, it's the marketing that's— when your marketing is so good and your product is so good and it's consumer and business and you're touching enterprise, of course you're going to grow really quickly, right?

Yes.

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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

During that transition.

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

I think he was to help with that transition, and I don't know if he's there anymore, 'cause I'm pretty sure he's on the board. He has a conflict of interest now. Because he has the chatbot company.

Sam Altman praises it.

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

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

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

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

No.

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

Potentially. Yeah.

Potentially.

But you can't lose Elon.

You can't lose Elon. They're like, well, who's going to replace Elon? They're like, oh, we're going to have a lot of problems.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But that just goes to show, and this is a problem I think in organizations, and I've seen people talk about this all day long. I'm not valuable like Elon Musk, but I remember when we were pitching NP Digital to investors a long time ago.

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

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

3 years ago?

3, 4 years ago is my guess. Maybe 4 years ago. So when we were talking to potential people, they would all ask the question of what happens when Neil is gone, right? Key man risk. Key man risk. And then now again, as I told everyone earlier, I'm no Elon. We don't really talk to investors at all anymore, but we don't really get the question anymore on key man risk.

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

I think growth would slow down a little bit.

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

Yeah.

Like, I'm not doing, I'm not running ads myself. You're not, you're not either, I'm assuming, but—

On X or?

They're just talking about it on X.

Like they're running ads.

Yeah. They're like, I use Claude Code to basically manage all my ads and I'm spinning up like 1,000 different variations or whatever. And like, they're showing their process. I'm like, you know, whether it's like working correctly or not, or even if we do like a 10th of that, that's cool, right? Because I don't think you should be like spinning up ads or whatever. And I think if you're an SEO, you got to be learning the different dynamics around AEO, probably learn some Reddit, learn some YouTube as well. You got to be very dynamic. So Like even us going through this hackathon process, number 2, it's very important for me right now where I'm like, hey, I got to take a quick look at what they're working on. I'm not involved in the hackathon until the very end, like the show and tell, but I'm like, you got to like constantly keep things like on track. Otherwise it can just go like really haywire. Quick break. One of our ClickFlow users just told me that they're saving 90+ hours a month on content alone. ClickFlow is our AI SEO product that actually does the work, not just here's what you should do. It does it. It creates content in your voice and helps you with other areas such as finding the right internal links and creating FAQs. We spent years making it, perfecting it with our clients so it doesn't just sound like AI slop. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. If you're serious about AI SEO, you should check it out. Back to the show.

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

Okay.

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

Google.

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

Yeah.

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

Meta?

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

Paid.

Paid.

Yeah.

You nailed it, right? But enterprise is where it really gets interesting because it changes. Paid search is actually not number 1, it's number 2. Paid social is still number 3. But number 1, if you had to guess, where do you think most enterprises spend their money? Big brands, Coca-Cola, Pepsi. Yeah, bingo. Brand advertising. And speaking of Claude and using these AI tools, yes, it should be helping you with a lot of this stuff, especially processes. But when you're doing a lot of brand advertising campaigns, I think that's when it's really important to have the humans in the loop. And the reason being is, did you see the Coca-Cola fiasco with the AI-generated ads?

No, what happened?

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

Oh yeah.

And then people were just pissed. They're like, you took the soul out of the ads. Oh my God. And they didn't like it. And I'm not saying people are right or wrong, but if your goal is branding, because once a company gets so big, I don't care who you are, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or, you know, even in the agency space, you look at like Publicis, you're not getting your customers from paid social or paid search. You're getting it from your brand name. And we all know this. They've all these companies that are old and that are large tend to get majority of their customers from their just brand. And when you're doing branded campaigns, it has to be thought out really carefully because if you screw up a little bit, it can just really tarnish your reputation and your brand.

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

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

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

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

Similar to how holding companies will put their employees into like—

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

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

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

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

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

I'm just curious on that.

Yeah, we've been doing this for years.

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

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

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

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

Dude, that post would do well. If you have the data around it, you post it to X or whatever, that would do well.

Yeah.

Because nobody talks about how well that does and it's like a new concept, but agencies have been doing it for a very long time.

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

Yeah.

But speaking of that, you know, when I travel throughout all the world, people talk about what they do with AI.

Mm-hmm.

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

Yeah.

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

Oh, interesting.

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

Yep.

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

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

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

I agree with that.

Yeah. Right?

Yeah.

Maybe times will change in the future.

Yep.

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

Yeah, so here, I'll read it and I'll bleep out the word over here. Okay, so the meme that Neil sent me, it's from MIT Technology Review. I think it was a joke that was from MIT Technology Review, but the meme is this. If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Turns out you're effing stupid. Yeah.

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

So I have 2 things to say to this. So I realized recently that AI either makes you more of a learning machine or more of a lazy machine. So the people that use AI, for example, I'm going to guess for Neil. Neil probably asks a lot of tax questions to his AI. Okay, so more or less as a tax strategist, right? You're learning more. There's— I'm sure there's a lot that you've learned about things that you just didn't know before, right? But my point is, You're asking a lot more questions that you usually would've asked before. You're not just kind of, you know, expect like taking it and say, oh, AI, do the work for me. So when I say AI makes you a learning machine, you ask more questions and you actually expand your mind more. That's for smart people. Okay? Now, unfortunately, many people, many people like, you want to be both. You want to be lazy and smart. You don't want to just be lazy. Okay? So, because smart and lazy people try to figure out ways around things, right?

They figure out creative ways.

But if you're just someone that just throws it over the fence and you're just like, ChatGPT is going to solve the problems. ChatGPT will write my prompts for me. ChatGPT is going to write all the content for me, then you will get slopped, right? So that's the first point I wanted to make. But the second point to what you're saying is I've had my AI agents, they've started to invade my Slack channels, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so they're working in my sales room, they're working in my recruiting room, they're working in the SEO room too, and it's working with the team. Now here's the thing, I see it, their team's asking for data pulls and it's giving the team strategies, outside-the-box strategies, and it's rating our strategies and it's also offering to do the work too. Now here's the other thing that you just mentioned that gave me an idea. So Neil and I just made an idea baby. Let us let everyone know that we just made a baby. So the idea baby that we made here, Neil, is if you have it coaching your team, okay, like imagine your kids are going to be working with personalized AI tutors, right? Everyone on your team now has a personalized coach, okay?

Okay.

That has all the data that understands what that team's supposed to hit, And it's going to help coach the team, but it's also going to what? It's also going to performance manage the team too. Okay.

Yes.

Whether you like it or not, that's what's going to happen. And it's going to show like a leaderboard that way. And I think that's a good and a bad thing, right? I think we're always just, we're always just trying to do better for our companies. And I think this is great. Like I didn't have that idea for the coaching piece, but I think I'm going to inject that a little bit into my little bots that have invaded Slack, which it's been tremendous. My team's like, oh my God. I'm like, you say you like it. How useful has it been? Oh my God. 10 out of 10, 10 out of 10. I'm like, okay.

All right.

Yeah, we'll do more.

Yeah, dude, I was telling Ethan about this concept because he has his AI lab where he helps people set up.

Is it really a lab?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

And he helps people set up, you know, all this stuff internally, whether it's OpenCLaw or whatever you want to call it.

Does he charge $6,000 for OpenCLaw setups?

Uh, I think it's, I think it was either $5,000 or $10,000.

I think that's fair, right?

Businesses. So, and then including the PC or something like that.

That's a really good deal.

That's why I think it's closer to 10 grand.

If you include the Mac Mini, he's probably make— that's like the Mac Mini will cost like $1,000 or so. And then the rest, you know, he figures out.

Yeah. I think it's 10 grand or somewhere around there.

I think that's a good deal.

So, you know, I was telling him, I was like, dude, I'm like the opportunity. And I don't know if he's, if he's doing this or not, but I think the opportunity in AI right now, if you're trying to set up a big business, Outside of creating an LLM, which is very difficult and expensive, and creating those lovelables is very hard to do. You know, for every lovable that we see at $400 million in ARR, there's, I don't even know how many that are struggling, right? There's too many to count.

Yeah.

Is do consulting where you help train people's AI to produce better outputs when their employees use them. So instead of training the employees, train the AI to adapt to the humans and do this at mass scale for everything from marketing to engineering, et cetera. It's pretty much another version of Bain or McKinsey or Accenture, but specifically focused on just training AI to deal with people wherever they are versus trying to train the people, because I think it's just going to be too hard to train the people.

Exactly. So that's why I think the sooner you get it working for yourself as in the organization, like your leaders, whoever's running AI, Then you get these bots to invade your Slack channel or your team's channel. Everyone's going to learn because your team's going to feed it context. It's also going to feed— like, it's just going to be like this self-reinforcing loop. And that's what we've been doing. And we've getting— I will say we're getting more and more people reaching out to us saying, hey, we're hearing what you're talking about. Like, we want these enterprise agents set up. Like, we want these revenue agents, we want these recruiting agents, we want all these things. So the market's kind of pulling us in that direction. So we'll see where it goes. But I do think it's like what Hiten's doing for the setup is huge. I think You and I, like what we're talking about right now, even what's happening on Twitter is probably like the top 1% of the 1%. The vast majority of the world doesn't know about this stuff. And that's where I think the opportunity is. Like if you're listening to this and you're like 18 years old right now, I would just do this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On a side note, speaking of AI, did I ever share with you the results that we ended up finding? Because of our size and scale, and we're not the biggest agency, but we have enough data on certain industries where we know if you're recommended number 1 by ChatGPT versus number 2, versus number 3.

You should do that and then talk about the ads too.

No, that's already out there. We put that out there.

Oh, you did? I, I didn't know. You didn't say it here.

No. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I said it here. Uh, I'm trying to end up finding the chart, but it was interesting because I was just like, huh, everyone knows that being position 1 on Google, it's worth so much more than being position 2, but AI is way more of a winner-take-all than traditional search. So if you count the most revenue you can make is position number 1, Let's call that 100%. If you're position number 2, you do roughly 32% of position number 1.

I was just going to say that.

And guess what position number 3 is compared to position number 1?

5%?

Close, 8%. And position number 4?

1.5%?

Very close, 1%. So pretty much if they're giving, if ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity is giving you a list, it's number 1 takes almost all the revenue, then number 2, and then it just pretty much goes down.

This is the old way of SEO. Back in the day when there weren't any ads or anything, Like number one got the lion's share and then like they started pushing it down more and more and then the click-through rate started going down more and more. So we'll see what happens, but that's, that's good to know.

Dude, I don't have a, I don't have it posted. I'll end up showing you on this. Check this out, how ChatGPT ads, because we were talking about this over text.

So what Neil has pulled up, so it says how ChatGPT ads perform against Meta and Google Ads. So it shows ChatGPT versus Meta. Plus 256%. Okay.

This is for lead quality, I believe, right? Yeah, I can't see, but let me see. Let's see. Yeah, lead quality.

Okay. So 256% up on ChatGPT versus Meta, but ChatGPT versus Google, 50% down.

Yeah.

Okay.

Down. Yeah, exactly. 49%. Close enough.

What's the bottom one?

The bottom one is cost per acquisition. So CPA.

Yeah. So CPA, ChatGPT versus Meta, 46% cheaper. And then ChatGPT versus Google, 38% cheaper. So. It's clearly a winner versus Meta. And then, you know, you're still going to get—

well, even Google if you want, because at the end of the day—

On a CPA basis, yes.

Yeah, because as a marketer, we only care about CPA, right? Lead quality from Google is much higher than ChatGPT, but you also have to look at cost. Google Ads are some of the most expensive because lead quality doesn't assume cost. You can end up spending 3, 4 times for a click because someone may end up typing in like, I'm looking for a global digital marketing agency, or I'm looking for the best ABM account, ABM software solution that works really well with LinkedIn. And then Carrot could end up showing up, right? You can end up bidding on that, but it's going to be a very expensive cost per click. Lead quality, I totally agree. Google is extremely high on lead quality. But the ads are just so much cheaper right now on ChatGPT. It's the Wild Wild West.

This just goes to show you again, every time with marketing, whenever a new ad channel comes out, you want to hit it really hard before the costs start to go up.

Yes. And a lot of people are struggling to get into ChatGPT ads, but they no longer need to struggle because ChatGPT just announced a partnership with Criteo. So now people should be able to get access to ChatGPT ads for free. Yes. I was shocked that they partnered with Criteo.

Nobody talks about Criteo anymore.

Yeah, because they're known for like more of like a spammy-ish affiliate-ish type of network.

Must be a relationship somebody had in OpenAI with them. Yeah.

I would assume that Trade Desk would have got it.

Who knows? Yeah. A lot of this stuff is relationship-based. Yeah, it totally is. So, okay. But let me ask you this kind of separately, because we're talking about just marketing in general right now. Have you added, do you have APIs for both Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic?

I don't know.

So I think APIs as marketing is going to become like very big because you have the agents crawling the web, right? So I think your technical documentation is going to be important and then your APIs, because the way like I'm starting to work more now is within the LLMs, I'm just asking it to do stuff. So yesterday I was messing around with one of our agents and we use this thing to send cold emails called Instantly. I'm like, I don't want to make 5— I don't— first, I don't want to write 5 different campaigns. Okay, that's number one. And then second, I don't want to load all the copy into these individual campaigns. And I'm just like, hey, can you like create 5 campaigns for me and create like an expert panel of like legendary copywriters and email copywriters and then recursively score them until they're like, you know, 90+ out of 100. And it does 5 versions for me. I'm like, these look pretty good. And I'm like, well, I don't want to load them. I'm like, anything you ask me to do, I just don't want to do it, right? So I'm like, can you just like do it for me? And like, it loads everything. I check it. I'm like, oh my God, it loads up, right? So I'm like, with the software you have, with the software I have, we need to have APIs for it so then the agents can discover it first because I don't think other people are doing it that quickly right now. And then you have to have good documentation and Mintlify has really good SEO, like not SEO, but software documentation.

What is it called again?

Mintlify.

Mid? M-I-D?

M-I-N-T-L-I-F-Y.

Oh, mint, like the— Like mint, like ice cream.

Or yeah, that's true.

Toothpaste.

So Mintlify, they've been growing faster and all they focus on was documentation. And I think they're going to grow even faster now because all these agents, that's all they read is documentation. They don't care about like, you know, show me like a, you know, bikini sports or something like that, you know?

Yeah. And before you got into that topic, you mentioned relationships and how people close business through relationships. Do you want to take a guess on what portion, or actually I'll ask you first, what portion of your agency revenue comes from relationships?

Well, what do you define as a relationship? Like they know you from your content? Like what?

You know the person.

Okay.

So not that they know of your brand or they know of the Single Grain brand. They may also know that, but you also know that individual or employee on your organization knows the other person who's interested in working with you.

I say 20%.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

That's a good chunk.

Yeah. But we're also smaller, so.

Correct. On our SMB division, I don't know what the numbers are, but maybe somewhere similar, I'm guessing. I don't, I honestly don't know. I do know the majority does not come from relationships in our SMB division that I'm 100% on.

Yeah.

Uh, for Enterprise over the last 3 months of our sales, I don't have margins numbers yet, but—

Like 2%?

Relationships?

Yeah.

It's almost all relationships.

Oh, okay. So that's you like, but you know these people is what you're saying.

Are you reaching out to them? Are you specifically taking, are you talking about me and my relationships or relationships within my organization? Okay.

No, I was talking about you specifically.

Uh, I don't know my percentage. I know the percentage of All of us combined.

Yeah, all of us, like that makes sense. That makes complete sense.

Yeah, so when I look at like my managing director of Australia and his relationships or Javi who leads LATAM for us or Mike G, our CEO, majority, when I say majority, I'm talking about 90+% is starting to become relationships. Now some may be classified as like, oh, you got an RFP from this company. Oh, we got an RFP from that company because I have a relationship with someone who works on there or my team has a relationship with someone who works there. And we may end up winning that RFP. And if we did, you could be like, oh, you got it because of RFP. Well, if we didn't have the relationship, we probably would've never been included in the RFP.

You know, I think so relationships aren't going away anytime soon, but when you look at a lot of maybe these agencies or service companies that have become really bloated over time, they still have the relationships. So like the way is, can you acquire the relationships and AI-ify what you can? And it's not like it's a new thesis or anything, but it's like, but it's clear to me that a lot of these are moving like dinosaurs, but the relationships are still incredibly valuable. But once they start to get hit more and more, they can't take it anymore. They're going to have to tap out and sell.

I think what people forget about relationships when you're doing deals, relationships create trust. And what we found is when people, when you do good work and people move from one company to another and they know you, they, yes, there's change when they're going to a new organization, but they also like a feeling of comfort and they know that if they hit you up, and they work with you again, they can rely on you. They already know what to expect and you should be performing. And I think that trust part is something that people overlook a lot in marketing in which they're just like, yeah, we want to put the message out there. What can I end up doing to maximize my conversion rate? But they forget to really emphasize on building trust. And Google's talked about this for ages with the double E-A-T, right?

Mm-hmm.

The last one being trust in E. If you end up building that trust, I just think it works so well for you in the long run.

That's why throwing nice events are good for building relationships at scale sometimes. Yeah.

And let's go back to dinners. Do you still do your dinners here?

Every 2 months or so, 3 months. I was doing it every month for a little bit, but I'm so heads down with this. You know, my eyes hurt like hell every night when I go to bed because I'm on this until I burn my eyes out.

Have you tried drops or?

I do drops, but you have the LASIK issue I have, right? Where like your lipids don't, the oils don't come back as quickly, so your eyes dry out quickly. So I do use drops, but then because I'm just, every time my eyes come back, I just get on it again, I burn it out. But my point is, yes, I've been doing the dinners, but less. And then the thing is, all those dinners have been AI dinners, and then all those founders are also doing the same thing. They're burning their eyes out every day.

Yeah, I have the same issue. I didn't know you had laser eye surgery.

Yeah.

But yeah, I did have the same issue. Yeah, my eyes are dry. I don't really feel it like you feel it. I'm also not on a screen as much. I'm more on a phone call, so I'm not looking at my screen.

You're talking.

Yeah, I'm talking. But every time I go to optometrist, they always tell me like, oh, you need to do this. Try putting this like Vaseline type thing in your eye. I'm like, why? Your eyes are dry.

It didn't help. I did it for 6 months. It didn't help. So I went to a doctor right next to the doctor I have in Beverly Hills. The big thing I found, this is a little tangent, but like if you look at your phone too much and it's a dark room, that it like, it screws it up way faster. So don't do that. Yeah. Like I workshopped that with ChatGPT. I was like, why is that? It's like explaining all the science. I'm like, okay, it makes sense.

So. Dude, the time I look at my phone more than anything when it's dark is on an airplane.

Yeah. Which is really bad.

Yeah. To watch like movies and then I fall asleep.

What do you watch on your phone? Your phone on your—

Phone. Dude, I copied your phone. You know how I used to have the MacBook, not MacBook, iPhone Air? I ended up buying your exact same phone. Oh, nice. Right? Because when you're on an airplane—

You watch movies on this on the airplane, on the iPad.

I got rid of the iPad.

Why?

It was just harder to deal with work.

It's so good for movies. Yeah.

My problem with the iPad, I've been using, you kind of nailed it earlier. You mentioned I'd probably use AI a lot for tax-related questions. I use AI a lot for structuring-related questions and spreadsheets. So still finance, it's not always tax, but even structuring indirectly, it is related to taxes, finance, Is this related to taxes one way or another? I've always found that, and because the AI is just so much easier for me to crank out reports and slice and dice the data, it's just harder to get the data in a format I want on an iPad. And it's just easier for me to do crap with a computer.

So you're using Claude Code within the Claude app, I'm assuming?

Yes.

Right.

Okay.

That's how you're using it. Okay. Yeah. There's so many things we can talk about there, but we also export a lot of data to Excel. Yeah.

And then when you export to Excel, because I'm really good at using Excel, it's just easier for me to use Excel on my laptop than the iPad because the iPad versions of a lot of these softwares, yes, it's pretty much the same, but it's not identically the same. And it's just for some reason I just do better using it on my laptop.

Imagine if you have a— if you had a secure version of a Claw. So like NVIDIA is coming out with Nemo Claw, which is like their version of Open Claw, but it's secure, right? So imagine they come out with that and it's sitting on your phone, it's ingesting all of the text that you're getting on the updates and all that. And because you work with it as your copilot and the charts you make, it understands your behavior over time and it builds on that and it just starts to make the charts for you over time and it makes better charts for you too.

We've tried using AI for the charts so much. We try every single month because if we did that—

It's okay, just keep trying.

Yeah, we would save on the design budget. You want to know the biggest problem when we actually put the inputs into AI for the charts? This is going to sound like the stupidest problem, I wouldn't say it's not 100% of the time, but like, and it's not even 50% of the time, maybe like, uh, 15 to 20% of the time it messes up the design. So it doesn't keep the exact style guide no matter what you tell it. And then I would say 25 to 30% of the time it messes up the data.

Yeah. That makes sense.

So then, and then to fix it, because we look at the cost, right? To fix it and find the errors, because a lot of the people, the designers don't find the errors. That's more costly to us, the reputational hit, than just having it done right.

So— Oh, you can't show that to clients, obviously.

No, no, we can't. But what we find is people will say they check it and they don't check it. So then when we do it manually, there's less errors and the cost isn't that high. My design cost for the charts is call it around $3,000 a month. At $3,000 a month, yeah, I don't care and I don't want the reputational hit of just AI messing up, but one day it will get it right 100% of the time. Will it be 6 months or a year? The technology's there, they just gotta fine-tune this stuff.

Dude, I have, so this deck over here, this is a single brain, right? And it like, it drew this all and it's gonna get things wrong, but like I actually kind of like the design, right? You're paying robots to do human work.

Wait, let's go through the deck right now if you don't mind, or you do want to?

Yeah, sure, we can go through it.

So Eric has this concept of single brain and I'm going to end up reading the deck so then that way I can understand it as a quote unquote potential customer, right? So I'm going to be in the shoes of the potential customer. So in this case, do you pitch or do I read it?

I can. So this has never been pitched here. Here, I'll pitch it to you and let's see what you think. This will be a live pitch and this will be on the— see, this is why you guys should subscribe to the YouTube channel. And we have a new YouTube company working on the channel too. So they promise us 5 times more views or they'll refund us and give us our money back. I like this refund thing. This is a good deal. Yeah, so here we go. All right, so the deck over here, those of you that can't see, it's Single Brain. Now, Neil, you can see like this, this is a brain over here, but it's got a— at first I thought the brain was farting, but no. No, it's like a rocket. Because like a rocket, there's a rocket coming out of the brain, right? Um, so it says Single Brain, AI agent teams for revenue operations, 2 to 3x your revenue output without growing headcount. Okay, and you see all these stick figures over here, right? It's like all happy and stuff. Okay, I didn't tell it I didn't give it much instruction, but that's like pretty cool for a first.

Okay. And do you have a lot of slides?

There's like 11.

Okay. So do you want me to give you feedback slide by slide? 'Cause I may forget some for modifying.

Sure. But by the way, keep in mind, I, this is a very, um, this is the outline. This is not being pitched or anything.

Yeah.

But yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

And, and as a disclaimer, Eric did mention they've never used this to pitch anything.

This is all AI generated.

Yeah. And I'm assuming you're gonna modify it yourself.

Oh, for sure.

And a lot of this you may already know. So who are you pitching to?

So most of the companies, so the companies we've talked to about this right now, the ones that come to mind immediately, there's a private equity firm that owns a bunch of insurance companies. Okay, so obviously, they, we're talking like trillions of spend that goes through these insurance companies, right? There's a company that does IT services, let's say they do $100 million a year or so. And then there is another one in healthcare, they do about $80 million a year.

So what departments are you pitching to specifically?

It varies. Like the private equity insurance one, they want revenue agents to generate more conversations.

Okay.

So that's, let's call it sales. Okay. The other one, the IT company is also sales as well. The other one is more so, I think it's, we haven't, I need to get more details from the sales team, but I don't have, but they're like, oh, it needs to be HIPAA compliant and everything. So I think that's more back office.

Yeah, so Eric already knows this, but this is just context for everyone who's listening. The reason I asked that question is if you're pitching to sales, revenue is a great terminology to use. If you're pitching to marketers, if you focus on revenue operations, they'll end up thinking it may end up being a different department, but Eric's already, you know, or AI ended up creating something that's already quote unquote using the correct verbiage for the departments he's targeting.

Yeah, by the way, I do really like this design because I use Google Nano Banana for it. So within My little claw I talk to here, I was like, hey, based on everything we talked about, make me some cute slides based on, look at our brands, make it cartoony, okay? And I said, use Google Nano Banana 2, which is a new model. So just context.

I think the design's great. The only thing I would change here is the single brain. And I know AI spit this out, have someone or AI take your logo and change it from single grain to single brain. So then that way the branding is consistent.

Yeah, actually the Single Grain logo should just be a brain now, to be honest. So the single, you know what I mean? Yeah. So, okay, then this slide, this is actually where I got the quote from. The AI gave me the quote, stop paying humans to do robot work.

I like the quote.

Yeah. So you are paying humans to do robot work. This is what it says on the second slide over here. So $1.5 to $3 million annual sales plus marketing payroll, 80% spent on repetitive ops tasks, 6 months to hire plus ramp 1 person. So I don't like this one as much because I don't want to go with the angle that I want to replace anybody. I want to go with the angle that we're here to partner with the team and we're going to help make their team, you know, everyone gets to like a top high level. Because if you start using replacement language, the people on this pitch, they might not— they don't want to hear that.

Correct. And they're not going to approve, including procurement.

They're not going to approve. Who do you think's buying this? It's humans.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So go ahead.

I like this and I think you're spot on in which you just got to optimize it to talk about How humans are wasting time on robot work and there's more better things that they could be doing. And when you do it, it frees up their time, they're happier, you have less employee churn, they get more productive, companies grow. He'll get the stats from somewhere, AI will start researching.

That's good stuff. So in the slides, ideally if you're selling this stuff, it should just be like employee NPS goes up, retention goes up, all this stuff, but the number of A-players you have goes up as well.

Yes. A human on average saves X amount of time and they reallocate a portion of the time to doing A, B, and C, which we found to produce companies X% higher ROI.

And then our Glassdoor went up by like 50% afterwards. Yeah, tons of stats. So yeah, we'll do one more slide. Everybody is selling AI.

Let's go through all of them if you don't mind. These are good.

Okay. There's 14 slides actually. I don't mind. Okay, so everybody is selling AI, almost nobody's deploying it. So 8 to 12 AI tool subscriptions that won't talk to— so you can see it hallucinates, it spells correctly. incorrectly here. So instead of saying talk to each other, it says enact each other. Okay. Enact other, right? Your team spends more time managing AI tone than even today. They, today, they, okay. The gap is who deploys AI end-to-end inside of your business.

Okay.

So the point is understood, but it hallucinates.

It hallucinates. And Eric made a good point here with that enact instead of each. AI makes a lot of little errors and people would be like, oh, it's so smart. It's a $500 billion company. They wouldn't make simple errors like this. No, they still make simple errors all the time. And this is why I do charts manually or Eric still looks at a lot of stuff and does a lot of stuff manually. I think this slide is fine. I think the big thing here, and I know you're not the biggest fan of this slide overall, but it's more so showing stats on how much people are spending on AI.

Mm-hmm.

And how very little is deployed because there must be some stats on this. So you're just like, X amount of dollars just got wasted.

And by the way, this is where you work with AI and say, hey, I pulled these stats over here. Hey, I like the first round, compliment it a little bit so it doesn't come like after you in the future, right? And then say, hey, I found all these stats over here, please integrate them in and then it'll figure out where to put them in. And sometimes you have to be more specific, but I think, look, where Nano Banana 2 is, like you look at this like a year ago, it couldn't do this. Yeah. Okay, custom AI agent teams, fully managed, not a tool, an AI-managed team running 24/7, plugs into Salesforce, Gong, Google Analytics 4, Slack. We deploy, manage, you see results, get smarter every week, intelligence compounds, single brain, HubSpot, Google, Gong engine compounds. This slide needs some work, but—

Yeah, I agree, it's too wordy.

Yeah.

I got lost on the headline, custom AI agent teams, fully managed. It's— and then when you start reading the text, it's too, Technical is not the wrong word, but they're using a lot of technical jargon when I don't think it's necessarily needed.

Remember Guy Kawasaki, the Apple evangelist? So I remember his 10-20-30 concept.

With the PowerPoints.

Yeah. So I think it's like 10 slides or something. I think you want 30-point slides and then I forgot what the 20 was, in 20 minutes maybe.

It was something like that. And you know, he eventually switched to—

Canva.

Yeah, Canva evangelist. So he did Apple, Evangelist, where he made a ton of money from Apple stock. Then he did Garage Ventures, which I don't know how well did, and I'm not saying he's a bad investor, I just don't know how well his venture fund did. Did really well writing books and then did extremely well being a Canva evangelist and getting shares early on.

I have 2 funny stories about him. Back when I was still doing the interviews for the podcast Growth Everywhere, so we were supposed to do an interview. The guy shows up, doesn't show up for the interview, Comes back 45 minutes later. He's like, oh, I'm sorry, I was just surfing.

Yeah, sounds all right.

So I'm like, yeah, sounds like a very chill Hawaiian guy, right? And then I remember when I was 24 or 25 years old, I was asking about career advice on becoming an entrepreneur. And he's like, you mean you wouldn't work, you wouldn't give it your all and work full-time at this company? Why would you do that?

Right?

And then I shared that story with him later. But anyway, Guy Kawasaki, coming back to this. So he has this concept called 10-20-30 with the slides. I think for each slide you should have one main idea. That's it. Don't have all this crap, right? One main idea. Communicate. If there's a story, communicate the story. You don't need to have all this like this. This is jargon.

Yeah.

Right. So we'll do like one more. I don't want to go through all of them.

Okay.

Meet your agent team.

Okay.

This is kind of cool. So it shows the agent team. It's like when you meet your team on the agency side, like they want to meet the team, right? So Oracle SEO Intelligence, Arrow, CRM monitoring, and then Cyborg. So I have all these names, these are all DC heroes.

I was wondering, I'm like, why are you calling something Oracle? I'm like, someone's going to get confused. So it's a DC hero.

Yeah, so Cyborg is from DC. You don't know Cyborg?

No.

Okay, but you remember Arrow, Green Arrow, the guy that shoots the bow and arrow?

I think there was a TV show called Arrow.

Yeah, that guy. I didn't really watch it. Flash, you know Flash, the guy that runs really fast?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Flash.

So those are all my heroes.

Is Flash here?

Where's Flash? Flash is not in here, but we have Coach as well, and then there's like all these other ones.

Is there actually a person named Coach?

Coach is more so it looks at my, all my stuff and it coaches me when it thinks I'm like working on stupid stuff. So it's keeping me focused.

Oh, not a DC hero for Coach.

Not a DC hero. Yeah. But the whole idea here I think is, okay, meet your team is cool, but maybe there's just, you have like one key like example of what it's done for each one, but you don't want the slide to be too overwhelming again.

So. Yeah, I'm with you. I think if you take it down to 10 slides, shorten it up, use examples, tighten in the copy and just being like, Like, you know, dude, what you do really well when you sell, forget your team, I don't know how your team's going to do it. When it's your product, you know it well and you can just say like, look at what it does for HR. Let's say if they're in HR, look at what it does for sales. Well, what's your problem? Oh, your problem is this. And then you go show them a solution right then and there. That kind of stuff just does well without even slides.

And that's when you have to know your product really well. But the good thing is I would say Neil and I are pretty involved product founders, I would say. So we like to get involved in the details there. But anyway, I think, look, our point is Neil was just talking about— the reason I pulled this up was like Neil was talking about how the— his decks aren't quite there or the spreadsheets aren't quite there yet. And this is like not quite there, but I think, you know, give it 6 to 12 months, I think we'll be pretty there. So.

Yeah, where people look at AI in the wrong way, at least from a marketing perspective, they expect it to be perfect instead of looking at it as like, oh, okay, if I use it, It'll save X time and then a human can pick up the rest and then fix the gaps and it's like, oh great.

But yeah, guys, API as marketing, I think that's the future that we're going into. By the way, you talked about Lovable a little earlier. I want to, let me just ask you a philosophical question here. Would you rather have Lovable's $400 million in ARR or would you rather have Cursor's $2 billion in ARR?

I would go for Cursor and even though some people are saying Cursor is going to be replaced by Claude, it integrates really well. A lot of people who use Claude also use Cursor, and Cursor's growth is actually still picking up. I think their growth is accelerating based on the last TechCrunch report that I saw. I'm not— and when Eric's asking this question, what I'm thinking right now is which company would I want to own right now and then sell?

Yeah. Not hold.

I would want to sell both of them if I own both of them.

Exactly. So I think we're on the same page here. I would sell both, but Akash, is it Gupta or Gupta?

Gupta.

Gupta, right?

Gupta?

You're the Indian. Gupta, Gupta, okay. Akash Gupta. So I follow this guy, he's great with product, tweets a lot of great stuff. So $100 million in ARR in 8 months, $200 million ARR in 12 months, $300 million ARR in 14 months, $400 million in 15 months. So this is Lovable's growth, by the way. So what Lovable's or Bolt CEO, Bolt is like a similar company. The churn rate for everyone is really high. You have to build a retentive business. So these businesses where you kind of spin up a website very quickly, what's happening right now, a cloud is allowing you with cowork and all these things, like you're, it's allowing you to do that very quickly too. Traffic to Lovable dropped 40% from the peak as of September. Vercel's v0, which is a similar type of tool, dropped 64%. Bolt dropped 27%. And so People are like Barclays, basically these analysts are flagging it, these companies' revenue as like questionable economics, right?

Well, do you want to know some of Lovable's economics? So employ—

Well, let me, let me give you this one and then let's go from here. Yeah. So Lovable's response. So says net dollar retention is above 100%, which is good, right? But, but, but net dollar retention only measures customers who stay. So if 50% of your customers churn and the remaining 50% spend 2 times more, your net and your NDR looks incredible, but your business is a revolving door. So continue.

Yeah, so it was sometime last year, an employee at Lovable told me they were adding, I believe it was $20 million a week in new revenue. Want to guess how much was churning?

50%?

$15 million. So they're net adding $5 million, all right, per week.

Wow.

Now they've grown because they're at $400 million, so I don't know what their latest number was. This was sometime last year, but they were saying they're doing around $20 million a week. 15 is churning.

Yeah. So let me give you more metrics here, and I think this will reinforce the cursor thing. And then the cursor thing that you—

And really quick, the only reason I shared the numbers is because their numbers are already public and they're sharing them themselves, or else I would've never shared them.

Yeah. So the unit economics are even spicier, Neil. Lovable pays Anthropic and OpenAI per inference call, obviously. Okay. Every app a user builds costs Lovable real money. A source told Sifted margins might have actually gotten worse after switching to agentic modes. I think that's one of the modes that they have. So when you have 45 employees generating $400 million ARR, the revenue per employee looks legendary until you realize that most of that revenue passes through to the model providers. Okay, who's really winning? It's Anthropic and OpenAI. So meanwhile, the thing that we didn't really talk about was Cursor has $2 billion in ARR with 60% coming from enterprise contracts. That's the difference. And I still pay for Cursor, by the way. Yeah, we do too. I don't use it for all the other bells and whistles. It's always launching new features. I don't even click. I just like use the main like IDE feature, and that's all I use it for. So, and I pay the $20 a month happily.

Yeah, I don't really use Cursor, but I know we pay for it for our organization. You want to know a quick way to save money on AI?

What?

This is from my boy Om Patel. I'm saying he's my boy because his last name is Patel, but I actually don't know him.

Is that Om Malik?

No.

Okay.

So check this out. So he's on Chipotle.

I saw that. So what is this?

He's using Claude.

Pepper.

So before he Yeah, when you— you can order through Chipotle because they have really smart AI assistance. I don't know how— I'm pretty sure this is true. I haven't tested this myself. He's like, before I order a burrito, and then he's like, help me with this one problem. So he's asking, you know, uh, Chipotle, because they're using Claude, to help solve his problems, and then that way he doesn't have to pay for Claude.

That's awesome. And I, I think so that exploded on Twitter today.

Yeah, it's like 4.5 million views.

So their token cost must have gone through the Yeah, 5.6 million views already.

Last time I checked, and when I checked it was like an hour or 2 ago, it was 4 point something million.

Just a quick break. If you want to run LinkedIn personalized ads and landing pages, you can't do it on LinkedIn ads right now, but you can do it with Karrot. It's www.karrot.ai. Again, karrot.ai. And we'll see you on the other side. Yep. Did you see, um, so Meta bought Motebook?

Yeah, I saw that.

This is interesting to me. So just to explain, Motebook was a social network. It's called Motebook to kind of be like Facebook, but it looked more like a Reddit. It was like a Reddit where the bots, the agents could talk to each other. It's like all these claws talking to each other and they're like upvoting, downvoting. And it's interesting to me because it's not like they had a lot of users or whatever, but 1.6 million active agents in under 6 weeks. Okay, that's a distribution signal, right? Meta didn't buy, they didn't just buy the app, they bought the founders. They bought, there's 2 guys. Oh, Ben Parr. Wow, I didn't know that. That's crazy. Remember Ben Parr from Mashable? Mm-mm.

So like, B. Cashmore, I remember him. I don't know who that is.

Oh yeah, he's the CEO, right?

He was the founder, yeah.

So, okay, interesting. So Meta hires duo behind Moatbook. So I don't know if there's necessarily like a big acquisition tied to this, but I do think that Zuckerberg does a good job with figuring out where trends are going. And I do think you're gonna need like an eBay eBay for agents. I do think you're going to need a social network for agents. I think you're going to need a place to hire agents and things like that, review agents like a G2 for agents. That's all happening. And so you and I as marketers, we're going to have to very quickly figure out how to market to agents.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's going to be huge, but I think marketers will do really well with marketing to agents because they kind of already do without knowing because they're already marketing to bots, algorithms. And bots are trained off of humans.

Correct. Yeah.

I actually think it's a really easy transition. I think marketers are some of the best people set up to market to agents.

You know, I read something recently about how the most important thing with this AI era is your relationship to change. It's not like how smart you are or whatever. It's more so like you could have a 15-year-old that doesn't want, that's very against this stuff, right? It's just, oh, this is taking too much water, too much electricity. Okay, so they'll never use AI. Or you might have someone in their 50s, 60s, 70s that are just really on top of this stuff, right? So really is your relationship with change and how adaptable you are. And usually that's a good, if you're very entrepreneurial, usually your relationship with change is good because you're used to chaos.

Yes. I also believe that one of the key things to succeeding in this new era, at least in marketing, is knowing your place in life. And I'll give you guys a prime example of this. Eric is more of an early adopter and gung-ho on AI than I am. I still love AI. I'm not as gung-ho as Eric. My eyes aren't, you know, what was it, watering or dry? What did you say at the end of every night?

Yeah, watering.

Or hurting.

Your eyes are hurting.

His eyes are hurting every night.

Very painful.

Yes, very painful. I don't have that problem. I'm not using AI as much as Eric where my eyes are hurting every single night before I go to sleep. Now, I was talking with a friend of mine and they're just like, Dude, with marketing and companies and agencies, AI's going to shift a lot of things. I'm like, yeah, it's going to shift a lot of things for many industries. And he's like, okay. So he's like, so what are you going to do related to AI to stay on the cutting edge? And I'm like, what am I going to do or what's my organization going to do? And he says, no, specifically, what are you going to do? And I said, well, I already have people who are empowered and are leveraging this technology and are big on change and are pushing it throughout the organization. He's just like, yeah, but what are you doing? That's your people. And I'm like, I'm focused more on branding. And he's like, why are you focused more on branding when all these changes are happening in AI? And I'm like, with all these changes happening in AI, I think the one thing that is still priceless and is the moat in business and in marketing is your brand. And I think that is very hard to replicate. It's very hard to build. And I'm doubling down on building our brand and making it as big as possible, even though it's hard. Because I think that's going to be very valuable 5, 10 years from now, especially in a world of AI where there's less differentiation between corporations.

Actually, this is important because Neil earlier, right before he said this, was you have to know yourself. And I know Neil's style is, we've talked about this before, Neil's style is he's not going to be the first boat, but he's going to be the one that parachutes in. So what he knows very well that won't be replaced by AI is brand. So double, triple down on that right now. And because Neil's personality is, hey, let's kind of wait and see what happens. But I also, I have no doubts with Neil too, Because once he sees something, the way he bets, he presses the bet is pretty up there, probably number 1 or number 2 from what I've seen in my world. So I'm not worried. Like once he's like, okay, on the brand, he's working on brand, he's like, okay, this is like really affecting the company. I'm all in here. So there's no concerns, right? So for me, I'm a little different where I'm like, I'd rather, I feel like I'm playing a video game right now. So I'm all in on it. I'm burning my eyes out every day. So the point is you have to know your own personality over time. You shouldn't try to adapt to what other people are saying. Because you are you at the end of the day. And whenever you try to be something else, you actually end up hurting your company and you hurt yourself too, because you're not being authentic to yourself. Yeah.

And no doubt, like if I look at Eric and his life, we're also in 2 different phases of life and you need to know yourself really well. Like Eric was mentioning, I can't do what Eric's doing. I don't have the ability. I don't know how many hours he's working. My guess is you're probably working 70 to 80 hours easily, 80, probably 80 plus a week.

I don't even count anymore. If my eyes are hurting, just that's That's how hard they're working. Yeah.

But Eric's not doing this 5 days a week. He's doing this 7 days and he's easily working 12 hours a day is my guess. So let's call it Eric is working 80+ hours a week right now. I work a lot more than 40. I don't know how many hours I work. I probably work around 60 hours a week. I'm taking a guess here, right? I don't have it in me to work 80 hours anymore like I used to when I was younger.

I think Neil's probably 60, 70 hours, but that being said, we both think about business all the time. So let's just leave it at that.

That's true.

I think once this starts to like really move over to you, I think you're going to jack it up and you're not even going to know that you're working that hard. I'm just like, I don't feel like it's painful, but my eyes are painful. But like, I'm just so sad that my eyes hurt at the end because I would just keep going. You know, like you see a lot of these guys on X, I think it's Gary Tan and all these other people, they're cranking until like 2, 3 AM or so. I'm like, I can't do that anymore. I just, I need to go to bed at 9.

So what changed me, and I don't ever think I will go back to the 80 hours, Eric mentioned I probably do 60 to 70. I do try to cap it around 60. I don't track it perfectly, but I do try to cap my hours at 60. And it was because of an Xtra that Eric sent me. It was a year or 2 years ago.

Yeah.

And I don't recall exactly what the X post said, but it was something around passing away, you know, your kids and memories and what they're going to love you for. It's not going to be for all the money that you give them. It's going to be like time and attention. And I literally have no clue what the exact post was on X.

Oh, go for it, Eric. So if you— did you save it on your phone, by the way?

I did not.

So I'll send it back to you.

Okay.

Because Neil needs this. You need to save this as your wallpaper. I just searched IRR and kids because you mentioned the keywords there.

Okay.

So good to know SEO. So the thing I sent, I sent this to Neil in October. This was October 28th, 2024.

Okay.

So 2 years ago, roughly. 1.5 years. A 31% IRR, so internal rate of return, isn't good if your 20— your 2 20-something daughters don't want to spend time with you. Hey, you know what I'll do? I'll work really hard when my kids are young because when they're a little older and they actually know what's going on, then I'll have made enough money and I'll hang out with them then. Good point. But one thing though, they don't want to hang out with you then for 2 reasons. Number one, you weren't hanging out with them earlier. Number 2, they have other things that they want to do. Let's say you stay up until 7:00 PM and maybe you can close a sale or have another conversation with your Limited partner. You'll see the benefits right away. While if you go home, maybe you go do bath time with kids and bath time is chaos. Bath time, you don't see any tangible benefit from going, but the sale or a conversation you do from 6:30 to 7:00 PM, sure, it's tangible, but 20 years from now, you're not going to give a shit. Whereas if you had a bath time every night, your kids are going to remember. It's something you look back on and think, this was the real knowledge. I'm glad I didn't do the things that were in front of me, but I chose to do I choose to do what's important. So let the IRR percentage be lower than 31, but have your 2 20-something daughters feel like you are the best dad.

And that was probably the best thing Eric has ever shared with me in my whole life. He shared a lot with me and provided me a lot of amazing stuff over the years, but that changed my life. And that is why I'm not working at night until my eyes are hurting. Now, when I'm traveling, which is probably more than half the time, it's a different story. Some, like I'll go to Europe next week. I'll work 14, 15-hour days because I work both time zones and I'll do that for 5 days straight. So those, when I'm traveling, my hours just explode. When I'm home, which is probably a third of the year at this point, I try to really limit my hours because my daughter will tell me things like, you haven't come to any of my school functions. The other parents do. Do you not love me? A knife to the heart. Yeah, a knife to the heart. And sometimes I can't because my travel's already pre-booked, sometimes 6 months in advance, and I get a calendar notification 2 weeks in advance before her school thing. And she's like, you're not there to see all my progress. And I'm like, I appreciate it. Mommy's going to end up taking a video of it and sharing it with me, or we'll FaceTime. But I'll do things like I'll have her dress up and my son dress up and my wife, and I'll take them all out to dinner, no phones, and go to a restaurant. And spend quality time because do I want to make more money? Yes. Do I think I'm ever going to be rich like Bill Gates or Elon Musk? No. One, I'm not that smart. Two, I also don't have the work ethic in me to— like some of those guys just work and they only work and that's it. Although Elon does spend some time with family and shockingly for how wealthy he is, it's kind of crazy how much time he's able to spend with his family.

He spends a lot of time with them.

Yeah.

I'm just not able to do Neal, Bill Gates' net worth as of February 2026 is $107 billion. I think you have time to compound.

I don't think I'll ever get that high, right? That's really high, but I'm happy enough at this point. Yes, I do want to make more and I work hard to make more because I'm never satisfied, but at the same time, I'm willing to make less. And Eric was the one who sent this to me, to have a better relationship with my kids. Because I don't think 30 years from now I'm going to still be grinding it out. I would want to spend time with my kids.

So, okay, I'm just looking at the math over here. Okay, let's just, I'm going to say hypothetical math over here. I don't know, man, but keep in mind Bill Gates reached the $100 billion in 1999. He's given away a lot of money since then, right?

A lot of money.

Divorce and all that, right?

He would've been a trillionaire if he didn't sell his stock. Exactly.

Steve Ballmer didn't sell his stock.

Yeah, he's worth more than Gates.

So by the way, I'm not going to reveal any numbers for Neil just for privacy, but it's possible, Neil, within 25, 30, 50 years, it's possible.

Yeah, but I'm okay having less zeros for a better quality of life with my children.

But by the way, I sent that to Neil back then because I was worried that he might go too far on money. So that's why I sent it.

So yeah, I have a problem with my son now. He's gone too far on money.

Oh, where do you get that?

Yeah, that's true. So he's 4 and—

Dude, at 4 years old, we never even thought about money.

Dude, he stacked up thousands and thousands of dollars in cash, counts his piggy bank cash every single day. And he won't go out. He doesn't like, when I was in Hong Kong and India, I was like, what do you want me to bring you back? Candy? He's like, no, bring back the money. I was like, why do you want money? He's just like, candy's cheaper than the money. Give me the money. Okay. So then he's negotiating how much I have to give him and every day I increase. Because then if I don't pay him on that day, he adds interest. I'm like, I can't pay you. I'm in Hong Kong. He's just like, that's your problem. You should be here to give me the money.

Oh dude, he's going to be an investor.

And then when I talked to him about going out to dinner, he doesn't like going out to dinner. He's been telling my wife and I that, no, I don't want to go out to dinner. And I figured out why 2 days ago.

Why?

I asked him. I'm like, Emma, which is my other daughter or my daughter, my boy's William. But Emma told me, I asked Emma, I was like, yeah, William doesn't want to go out to dinner. Because she's like, we should all go out together on, uh, for a specific occasion, you know, for their graduation. I was like, but William doesn't like going out to dinner. And she's like, do you know why, Dad? I'm like, why? I've never asked him. She's like, he doesn't like going out because of restrooms. Restrooms are dirty. And I was like, oh, he got that from me because I'm so OCD.

Oh my God.

Like, I won't go on an airplane bathroom.

Yeah, right.

You don't? No.

14 hours?

I'll hold it.

What?

Yeah.

You crazy?

I'll go pee if I need to. Exactly.

I'm like, you can't hold your pee that long.

Yeah. But Emirates is clean. So that's a little bit different.

How often do you get Emirates?

Not that often.

And now you ain't going in that direction.

That's true. Because of the war. So I asked William the other day, I was like, do you not like going to restaurants because the bathroom's dirty? He's like, no. I was like, so then why don't you want to go to restaurants? He's like, it's expensive. It costs money. I was like, well, eating at home costs money too. We have to buy groceries.

He's like— But you're not paying. He's not paying for it.

Correct. He's not paying on either, but he's He said it costs less money to eat at home.

Oh yeah, I like that.

I was like, but I can't get him to spend money. He doesn't spend his money on anything. He doesn't want to buy anything. He just wants to collect it. And he's like, I want to start a business.

You should have him read the book, The Dhandho Investor. Doesn't dhandho mean cheap? What does dhandho mean?

Dhandho, I think means job.

Okay. Great.

Does it mean job? I don't know. I should know this. You should. Yeah.

I don't know. The Dhandho Investor is from Mohnish Pabrai. I've read it. Yeah, it's a great book. And so it's very practical. Dude, I think William's just going to be an investor and we should just give him all the investments.

Dhandho means a dhandho investor follows a low-risk, high-return framework, often summarized as heads I win, tails I don't lose much.

Oh no, no, no, no, no. You got to do heads I win, tails I also win. Yeah.

But his latest business idea, my wife doesn't want me to repeat it. It's actually good. It's related to ice cream. But he told me it has to make money. And I said, what happens if it loses money? And then he said, it'll be your money if it loses money.

I was like, oh, that's not good. Ice cream's considered a superfood. By the way, speaking of ice cream, speaking of bad food too, so let's talk about the McDonald's CEO for a moment. Yes.

I think this should be our last topic.

This will be the last topic because I really need to pee. So TMI. But so you've seen the McDonald's video where he had the 14 million view one where he like eats the Big Mac and he takes like a bite. He's like, oh man, that's so good.

He quickly puts it away. And it was a small bite.

It was like a mini bite. He's like, didn't even touch it, right? So, so like this one over here, the big arch, that's where he takes the bite, right? But if you look at his Instagram, 1.1 million, 632 million, sorry, 632K views, 2.8 million views. But look, he's not talking about anything that interesting. Look, tough love with the McDonald's CEO, McDonald's CEO on the best advice, and he's really boring and really dry. I'm not saying I'm that entertaining, But it's just like he's sitting in an office doing these, right? And the main thing is that for like 4 years or so, most of his videos average like 20 to 40K views, which is pretty good, right?

That's good.

But for consumers, like he can get a lot more views, but he's just been so consistent over time. And Dickie Bush over here is saying a lot of executives would've seen that as a waste of time and given up. But he stayed consistent. Boom, one gets 14 million views and everything else blows up. Everyone else on social media is talking about it for like a week or so. But the lesson is consistency. Whenever, whatever you're creating content, it comes down to consistency.

It really does. And I would actually say if we had to bottle up the main reasons Eric and I have done decently well, and when I say decent, you know, compared to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, of course we didn't perform quite as financially.

We did all right in a normal market.

Correct. Yeah. And the reason I would say that Consistency in which we've been doing it for a very long time and persistent. We never really gave up. We just keep going and going and we're okay getting kicked and thrown to the ground and we just get back up and keep going.

If that's one thing, this is probably one thing for both of us. Is this one thing that we're really good at? It probably is just resiliency.

Yeah.

And that's all you need in business really. If you have like half a brain and you're just resilient and you keep going, I think most people just give up too early. That's right.

But it's not just the resiliency. If, if, if it's resiliency combined with learning from our failures. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Because not only are we resilient, but we try and, and we do really try, but sometimes we don't follow through on this. We try to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. Mm-hmm. Sometimes we'll make the same mistake over and over again, like 3, 4 times, but eventually we learn and we stop making it.

Yeah. So hence, that's why we're not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, because they probably just learn once and they're good. Uh-huh. Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Uh, please don't forget Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you later. Bye!