Why We Start SEO With The Customer, Not The Keyword

Audience-first SEO, and we've been seeing amazing results from our clients. So when most people do SEO, they start with keyword research, right? Well, we're starting with, and it's not rocket science, we're not starting with topics or anything like that. We're starting with your ICP and your ideal customer by far, right? So there was an example that I ended up giving earlier today when I was doing a recording. We work with a wealth management company, and when we look at all the wealth management terms online, there's, in the United States, there's roughly 2.7 million monthly searches. We pick queries because when you look at wealth management, it could be someone trying to understand wealth management. It could be someone trying to save for the future in retirement. It could be a business owner getting ready for a sale, or it could be an ultra-high net worth family that's focusing on generational wealth. And this company wants to focus on the best leads, the ones that could make them the most money, which are ultra high net families, right? Like generational wealth. The search queries for that audience is only 222,000 searches a month. All right? It's not that bad. So it's roughly 12x less. So when we look at last year's results versus this year, We scrapped everything from saying, hey, we're just going to go after traffic. When we started the campaign, we're like, we're just going to go after traffic for your ideal customer profile and no one else. Less leads, converts higher. The pipeline that they've built in the first 6 months is bigger than the whole pipeline they built all of last year through SEO purely by just only targeting on their ideal customers. Less leads, higher quality leads, more revenue. And that's the way I see not only SEO but GEO working, in which it's not, I'm a marketing agency like Eric and I are, it's more so, I'm a marketing agency and my ideal customers are franchises or they're enterprise businesses that are global that need help in 14 markets or 28 markets. And you start getting really specific and you're creating content and you're optimizing for rankings only for those customers and no one else.

Yeah, I'll add something to that. So Neil just talked about a case study that's actually worked out for our clients. Neil, there's a workflow that we've built right now and I've— we've continued to refine this workflow. And the way it works is it will ingest calls like this, it'll ingest from our content, right? YouTube, podcasts, it'll ingest from internal calls that we have, it'll ingest from customer calls, sales calls and things like that, or prospect calls, right? And then everything's queryable now. And what it does is it will draft content and it's using ClickFlow to do it, right? And so let me actually show you what one of these looks like. And so I wanted to illustrate this because I was running it back and forth because I'm just testing this for ourselves right now. And then this is something that we're going to roll out into ClickFlow. So this is what it looks like and ignore the design, but you've seen me, Neil, obviously I've been talking a lot about company brains the last couple months or so, right? So Like all the stuff we talk about, Neil. So company brain, how many permutations are we going to have from that? Revenue company brain, a finance company brain, whatever company brain, company brain services, company brain agency, right? Company brain agency based in Los Angeles. Like you just keep going and going and going, right? Like, how does a company brain help? So all I'm saying here is that this has gotten this workflow where it pulls from, it ingests from content that you already have and it knows what your writer guidelines are and it understands AEO practices, best SEO practices. So what I have, what I'm scrolling through here, Neil, you can see this table of contents. This has like 35 sections in this table of contents. I didn't ask it to do this, right? It just said, hey, here's like the top 30 that I want to go for, and here's bottom funnel, middle funnel, top of the funnel. And I said, just go ahead and do this. In fact, I think I have this in our Skills Dojo right now where there's a public version that you can access for free. I think if you go to skillsdojo.com, you can just access this. But the whole idea here is that when I was talking to the editor on the team, I was like, hey, Like, you know, how many, how many good quality pieces of these can we, can we crank out per month, right? Um, and keep in mind, these are more cornerstone pieces that will live on our site. So we're not trying to spam anything. Um, she's like, at least 80, if not more, right? And obviously, we try to have a human in the loop still. We can go way harder if we didn't have a human in the loop. But my take on this right now is you got to have a human in the loop. So basically what Neil said, ultimately, uh, I'm going to come back to you in a second, Neil. So. This is a new workflow that people can try. You can access it. I think a lot of people are going to be doing it this way. But Neil, my understanding from what you did for your client is that you focused it on higher intent traffic and it drove less leads, but higher quality leads. Is that correct?

You nailed it. Higher quality leads, way less leads. And this is also more efficient because then you don't need as many sales reps. You don't need sales reps to go through all these leads. I know you can say you can have AI go through it as well. For things like targeting ultra high net individuals, you're not going to want to use AI for something like that. That is very relationship based, especially if someone has hundreds of millions of dollars, they're not going to want to talk to AI. They're going to want to talk to a human.

I would say, I mean, the caveat I think, Neil, on that one is like AI can tee it up, like draft it for you, but you need to review it and you need to add your taste to it. Like AI might say, hey, based on this pattern, maybe this person's worth reaching out to, and maybe it gets it 50, 60% of the way there, but you still very much need that human in the loop with good judgment. That's what I think.

Yeah, but when you're talking about very high end and dealing with a lot of money, AI can definitely help with the analysis and tee things up, but you're going to have to get on the phone. Email's only going to get you so far. People don't make decisions with hundreds of millions of dollars over email.

Totally. Yeah, it's a really— and by the way, like, as much as I like to talk about AI, I am not saying that, and nor is Neil saying this. Neil's never saying this, but it's the relationship piece still matters no matter what. You're going to have to be talking to humans. And don't think that, oh, just because you've made all these workflows or whatever, you're not going to have to talk to humans. You might talk to humans less because you're doing, you know, you're doing very high quality work, but you're still gonna be talking to humans and the relationship game goes a long way. Because if I think about, you know, the clients that have stayed with us the longest, well, one, they came through the content, a lot of them, right? But the second piece is I have an in-person relationship with them. Same thing for Neil too, right? Every little bit that you do actually extends the lifetime value of the customer and they give you a longer leash because you're going to mess up sometimes too. They'll give you a longer leash. They're more tolerant of the mistakes that you make.

Yeah, they definitely are. And that's another thing too in marketing. I was talking to one of my buddies the other day and we were talking about moats. A moat could be, it's hard to leave your company. I know that sounds bad, right? If you look at Workday, for example, it is not easy to migrate off of Workday or NetSuite. That is a moat. Even if someone may have a better product or not, I'm not saying they do or they don't, but it's a moat to make it very hard to migrate off of your product. As a business, owner, I don't think you should do that, but that could be a moat in your overall business philosophy and it makes your marketing more profitable if your churn goes down or people have to use you longer because switching costs.

Dude, speaking of switching costs and, you know, we can talk about SaaS a little bit. So, you know, a couple months ago we talked about Atlassian, right? So let's just first bring this up for everyone just so everyone can see this. So just so everyone knows, Atlassian is a— they are a software company. They have Jira, they have things like they bought Loom, right, as well. And if you look at how their stock performance has been in the last month or so, they're up 82%, right? You look at the 6 months, up 97%. You go year to date, there's a little bit of a dip, right? At this moment over here. Now they're low of $58 to $162 around. And again, what I would say is this, right? They crushed their numbers. And Neil can speak to this a little bit. They crushed their numbers, but I want to speak to whether they can sustain this or not because we did talk about how we think the SaaSpocalypse is a little overblown. But, you know, I do want to talk about the future a little bit too. So you can look at this real quick. Quarterly revenue of $1.7 billion, right? Up 28% year over year. Quarterly cloud revenue is up 31% year on year. Subscription ARR of $6.6 billion is up 23% year over year. And then remaining performance obligations of $4.8 billion, up 44% over year. And then I'm just going to leave it at that. So, Neil, you want to react to this first?

Yeah. So we're looking at Atlassian stock. It's $162 as we're recording this podcast. It had a 52-week low of $56 for perspective. So it's up not triple, but roughly triple since its all-time lows. It's hard to time the bottom. And the reason Atlassian got hit so hard is People are like, you don't need their software solutions like Jira or anything like that. You can just build it all using, you know, Claude or whatever solution out there. What ended up happening was a lot of businesses decided not to try to build their own version of Jira or some of their other products, and they felt that they should focus on bigger problems than trying to replace a software that works quite well. And what Atlassian's seen is AI has actually caused more growth and more people using their products, including all these agents that are coding out there. And it's caused their stock to rise because their growth rate has been accelerating, especially their cloud revenue. And does it mean the SaaSpocalypse is real or not? That's for anyone else to decide. I'm not here to give you financial advice, but the reason their stock is doing well is They're continually just exceeding expectations. They claim it's because AI is causing more growth.

Well, I am here to give you financial advice. So here's what I would say. The reason I'm bringing Atlassian up too, so congratulations to them. I think there's some little nuances here. So, you know, I'm assuming some people on your team use Loom. You know, we use Loom as well. And Loom is the video, the screen recording tool that they have that they bought a while back. Um, here's the thing, they're making it now where my— what my understanding is that a lot of the free seats are going away, and so they're starting to charge, right? When they're starting to— when they start to clamp down on these areas to kind of drive growth, um, that is a little bit of a— a little bit of a negative signal, um, because what the— the party's kind of over in these areas, right? Um, I will also say this, this is unreal. This is a different company, Canva, but Canva is, you know, they allow you to, you know, design, you know, flyers and things like that, you know, quick designs, right? And so what they reported, I believe their CEO, Melanie Perkins—

is it Perkins?

I think it's Perkins. So they have these— there's a lot of pressures, like headwinds now. So their AI inference costs are going up a lot, right? And that's actually slashing their growth, the revenue forecast, revenue growth forecast from 30% to 20% or so, right? And so the thing is, like, there are a lot of the cool AI features they can't kind of give it away for free. It has to be for the paid users. And so the question now is, how is a company like Canva going to adapt? And when you look at Atlassian, you know, they're kind of— when they're starting to charge for a lot of these things that used to be free, like, are they just trying to squeeze as much as they can, right? And so I look at these 2 companies as a little different than, like, I don't know, like a Salesforce or HubSpot, for example, where you still have the agents doing a lot of these API calls to the CRM, right? And then, you know, Salesforce is like, you know, they own Slack too, and a lot of people are using Slack. And so I don't think they're quite out of the woods yet, I would say, with the SaaSpocalypse stuff. But my hope is that they can, especially Canva, can turn around. Because if you look at what they said, the cost reduction here, Canva is reporting lower, so lowering its cost per AI task by nearly 90% since April, which is a good thing, right? Token optimization. And they had a bunch of leadership shifts too, as well. So what do you think, Neil, about all these potential pressures?

They exist, you know, and I don't think anyone can do anything really about it other than just weather the storm and keep pushing forward. And we've seen this impact so many companies. We see it impacting marketing budgets. But if you look at the playbook Eric and I typically run is when things are really good for a lot of players in the space, We don't push as hard because it's really expensive to push hard. What Eric and I personally do in both our companies, and it's just random that we both do the same thing, but when times are bad, we push really hard because it allows us to compete due to the fact that things are cheaper and it's easier for us to— well, it's not really easier. It's still very painful for us to spend money and double down, but— It gives us a fighting chance to gobble up market share from our competitors. While during a good time, we're smaller than our competitors. Some of them have billions of dollars. We can't compete with them during good times, but during bad times, everyone slows down. So we push harder because things are just cheaper.

It's just more interesting too when there's chaos, but that depends on the person. So, you know, what's interesting too, Neil, you talked about how we do things, right? So I sent Neil a text this morning. There's a guy, I'm not going to reveal his name just out of confidentiality, but there's a guy—

Which text?

Oh, I sent Neil many different texts today, but this morning there was a text that hit me on Instagram.

Okay.

So this guy sends me a DM and he's like, I listen to y'all's podcast in prison almost every day, literally. First of all, thank you for that. I think we both appreciate it. Actually, that made my day. But second, I didn't know you could listen to podcasts and DM people on Instagram in prison. So I don't know how real that is, but I think the fact of the matter is this, right? Like my key takeaway from that is like Neil's been making content for a long time. I've been making content for a long time. And throughout from content, I met some of my best friends, right? I've traveled to places I never would have imagined traveled to before. Obviously, you're going to win business deals too. There's so many things that happen from the content creation piece. But the part I enjoy the most is when you see other people learning and other people starting businesses because there's people that listen to this podcast. that have businesses doing, you know, 9 figures, 10, or operating 10-figure companies, right, a year. And, um, you know, I, I think Neil and I have always loved learning in public. And that's why I think if you're on any type of journey where you feel like you're getting to do what you want to do and you're blessed to be able to do that every day, I feel like it's a— you're shortchanging yourself if you're not creating content. As much as Neil and I complain, or more so myself complain about having to make content, um, it's still beneficial.

It is. And we do a lot of it. I recorded earlier this morning. I did 3 long-form videos. I am recording tomorrow because I was gone for roughly 2 weeks where I couldn't record as much content. And I would say I'm actually starting next week creating 2 long-form, releasing 2 long-form videos each week instead of just doing one. So I'm ramping up production even more.

That's good. And so how many hours do you think you spend per week on content right now yourself?

Including the podcast?

Uh-huh.

Yeah. So this is actually really easy for me to answer. So let's say this is 75 minutes. All right. Uh, long form, uh, short form videos, 5 times 7, 30. So 35 minutes there, long form, 50, let's actually call it 20. I'm adding in a new one, which is call it 60, charts another 60, another 30, 280 minutes a week.

Okay. So that's about—

And when I break it down like that, I'm going to give one caveat here. It's not always 280 minutes a week. Some weeks are more, some weeks are less because I record in batches. So I'm counting, when I say 280, that's the amount of time I spent on content for content that is posted on a weekly basis. So for me to produce next week's worth of content, it takes me roughly 280 minutes.

Wow.

Now my team spends a lot more than 280 minutes, but that's how much time it takes out of my day, which is a little bit less than 5 hours, which isn't bad.

Yeah. So if we do the math on this one, it's 18.66 hours per month, right? You multiply that by 12, that's 223 hours, right? 224. That's 9 days of content, 9 days spending recording content, 9.33 days. That's just on YouTube.

In a year.

Yeah, a year. And so anyway, We've talked about this before, like, oh, should you do organic or paid? And the answer is both. If you can afford to do both, you do both, right? And then you try to figure out one at a time. Don't try to do everything under the sun because that's a nice way to dilute yourself. But interesting enough, Neil, I was going to show something on the screen. And before I go into that, I saw someone posting about how there's an SBA overhaul. So I remember Neil was on the School of Hard Knocks and then he was getting interviewed. And the guy asked him, uh, if you were starting from scratch today, what would you do? And Neil, what did you say? All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital, and they work with a whole host of global companies or global organizations. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

Uh, I would just go and buy a struggling business and get an SBA loan? I know people say like, oh, you need to put down payment and all this. You can do some seller-based financing and they can help you out there. So then that way you can still qualify.

Yeah. So here, get this. So SBA loan, so Small Business Administration, we're talking about the United States here. So the old rule was that you can borrow at a total cumulative limit. And by the way, this is not financial advice, of $5 million across both the 7 and 504 loan programs combined. So they have these 2 different loan programs, right? So the idea is if you max out the 7 loan, you cannot get The new update is that the SBA has decoupled these 2 programs, so you can now completely stack them, allowing for up to $5 million for an S7A loan and an additional $5 million for a 504 loan, doubling the total maximum financing limit to $10 million. This is designed to let businesses buy a company using a 7 while simultaneously financing the commercial real estate through a 504 loan. So that's, I guess, that's a real estate one. So anyway, This stuff is changing all the time. I just saw that. So those of you, if we were starting from scratch today, if we knew about this, we would definitely take advantage of this. And by the way, if you look into the 7 more, I think you can, the down payment you need to put down, that might've changed a little bit, but you can put down like, I don't know, 5 or 10% or something like that. Again, you need to do your own research because my information might be dated. So wanted to throw that at you guys. But Neal, I saw Ryan Deiss tweet this morning. And I wanted to share our reaction to this one. So check this out. So Clay Collins, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think he founded Leadpages, correct?

I believe he did.

Yeah. Okay. So, oh yeah, yeah, co-founder of Leadpages and Nomics.

Okay.

So this is going to be the info marketer's decade in software. Here's my prediction. The indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. So those that don't know, an indie hacker is someone that might've been like a solo developer back in the day, right? Like Levels is actually a good example of like indie hacker. He's built a lot of stuff and he's kind of marketed on his own type of deal. So he's saying that the indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. And I think this is interesting for you and I both to react to this, Neil, because we've kind of straddled the line between both, I would say. So when I came up, direct response marketers sold ebooks and courses, not because we loved it, but because it was the only thing that you could build without engineers, okay? We all wanted to be in software. That's where the leverage was. The wall was never talent, it was operational. So hire engineers, manage engineers, retain engineers, and become a real company. So the best marketers of my generation stayed put. The wall is now gone. Now a guy who spent 20 years learning how to make strangers care can ship a product in a weekend. You cannot compete with that person on offers, on hooks, on positioning. AI does not hand those to you in a tab. The engineering advantage evaporated. The marketing advantage didn't. For 20 years, marketers wanted what engineers had. Now they have it.

Okay.

I have a lot to say about this, but you can go first if you want to.

Yeah, dude, I agree with you. Marketers now have the ability to do many more things because of AI. I don't believe it is easy due to AI to just go and start a business from a customer acquisition perspective, to be very clear, that specific side. I think AI has made it where more people are creating businesses and it's actually becoming more competitive to get the attention of people out there. And marketing is becoming harder, not easier, even though you have more tools as a marketer. But from a technical standpoint, there's more things that you can do. This is just creating more competition. And I think there's just so much noise out there that it's harder than ever as a marketer.

Yeah. So I don't think this is the info marketer's decade in software. I think what— let me tell you who the decade is for now. The decade is for somebody who wants to work on hard problems, okay? And what I mean by that is engineers aren't going away. It's not like the engineering advantage evaporated. By the way, if you look at content creation, we'll use that as an example. Neil, back in the day, TikTok was very easy early days, right? YouTube was very easy early days. Whatever I publish on YouTube, at least 50,000 views back in the day, right? Long form, right? Same thing for Neil too, but it gets more and more competitive. Now it's like, how do you think about the jump cuts? How do you think about the 30-second retention? Or if you're doing a reel, what does a 3-second retention look like? And then you got to run trial reels. You got to do all this stuff, right? All these kids are doing right now. And then you got to study like 50 hook packs and things like that. It just gets more and more complex. Okay? So I think it's going to get more competitive. And to Neil's point, more and more people are creating content. In fact, we've seen human-generated content be overtaken by AI-generated content. And this was a few months ago or so, right? And that's going to keep scrolling up or growing. So I do think the best direct response marketers, they are going to take advantage because here's what does it mean for them to be the best? It means that they're not just studying direct response marketing. And in fact, when Neil and I have been to these conferences, these masterminds in the past, the best people, and by the way, like I actually have a group that I meet with every single year, These were the best of the best. Was it because they were only direct response marketers? No. In fact, the people that I met at the masterminds that were the best were the direct response marketers that were only money motivated. Those were the ones that never thought about product retention. They never thought about churn, okay? They never thought about talking to their customers. They just thought about making money and they always ask you, how much money are you making? How much money? It was always this, right? But when I think about the group that we have where we meet once a year, it's like some of these people have a holding company with multiple different businesses and they've gone deep in that area. They enjoy systems thinking, they enjoy hiring, they enjoy sitting in the tough problems. And so it's not any info marketer's decade in software. It's always been the people who work hard and like hard problems, those are the people that are going to compound even more. Those people are going to get even stronger over time. And so I wouldn't even say it's something about the info marketer's decade. I just think I don't agree with that. So Neil, go ahead.

One minute, baby. So dude, I'm with you. I remember I flew to Austin to meet Ryan Deiss for the very first time. And years ago when I met him, this was 10+ years ago, I remember him telling me that, hey, you shouldn't try to do what direct response marketers do or get into their type of businesses. You should take a lot of their strategies and tactics and apply it to legitimate businesses. I'm like, wait, what do you mean? He's like, a lot of these direct response marketers just try to get get rich quick. They don't try to solve real problems, build real businesses, so they don't last. You see them making a ton of money for a month or 6 months or a year or even 2, 3 years, and then it dies down and no one talks about them. And his whole philosophy was, is you have real businesses that solve real problems for other businesses. You should take a lot of these marketing tactics and apply them to legitimate businesses. I'm putting that in air quotes. And he's like, you would find much more growth and be much more successful. And I was like, oh, that's a very smart way to look at it. For anyone who's watching on video, Eric's copying her poses.

So let me read this too. Let me read this. Maybe this will be more entertaining for Emma. So this article here, it's really long. Okay. In fact, she would definitely be bored. Emma, you're going to be bored for sure. Okay. So the— Neil, this is related. The guiding emerging principle of AI is this, right? So intelligence is plentiful, Volition is valuable. And I've been reading this quite a few times to my team this week because this article was so good. And by the way, actually, no, I'm not going to— I was going to give people a tip on how you can actually remove the paywall. I'll just leave it at that. If you just type in remove the paywall, you guys don't have to pay for things like this, right? So the guiding principle of emerging AI is this: when intelligence is plentiful— Emma's the new Neil— when intelligence is plentiful, Volition is valuable. So the people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They're the ones who seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more. More, Emma. So in other words, what will differentiate people is not how smart you are, Emma, but your relationship to mental effort. So how many books you read, how much you like studying things, right? How much you like learning. So right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games. Okay, if Emma, you're still in the room, play difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, these are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity to not do it. Neil, we've talked about these lazy people that we know. Okay, you know who I'm talking about. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really need to care about something, but they don't intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence, but it's not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don't like to work hard. So, let me tell you where I'm going with this, Neil. So, my favorite passage from this one is this. What do you think is bad, Neil? Do you think— let me just ask you this. What's bad? Economic inequality? So, economic polarization or political polarization?

Economic inequality.

Do you think, like, which one do you think is worse of the two?

Political polarization. What's the other one?

Economic polarization. So wealth inequality.

I would say wealth inequality is worse.

Now, what do you think is worse than wealth inequality? Do you think cognitive polarization is worse than wealth inequality?

I think a lot of these things are bad, but with wealth inequality, you just have a lot of people at the bottom who are just struggling and they can't figure it out. And it's affecting their lives in a very negative way. Some are extremely hard workers and trying, they just can't figure it out. Some are lazy. And I think that you have that on all ends of the spectrum. I know really rich people who got rich by luck and they're lazy. And I know really rich people who work really hard and it doesn't matter how much money they have, they just can't stop.

So let me read this to you, Neil, and then I want to get your reaction. Okay. So you may have noticed that the future I'm describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like 2 different species. So the high need for cognition people, so these are people who work hard, they enjoy hard problems, right? They will get more and more productive, happier and happier. The rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass. So I actually think what this is, Neil, is I think this cognitive polarization piece is going to increase the wealth gap. That's what I think is going to happen. And so that's why I've had this kind of anxiety and excitement in the beginning of the year, because I know for sure yourself, like, I know we like to work. I'm not going to say we're the smartest people in the world, right? But I'm going to say we enjoy working hard. We enjoy working on hard problems. Like, I think we'll be just fine if we use these things, right? So, you know, we'll get more and more productive, happier and happier. But what I don't want to see is this. And I think judging on how the team has grown over the years, like the people that have chosen and taken upon themselves to learn, that is what is— this all kind of comes together, right? We're talking about this, info marketers are going to have this advantage and this and that. I think the people that are going to have the advantage, Neil, is this high need for cognition people.

Yeah.

But just in general in life, even before AI, The people who had the right mentality tended to rise, not in all cases, but in many cases, and they tended to figure things out in life. And I think it's the same way in today's world with technology. You have the people who look at this as a blessing and want to take action. And I know a large camp that— of the people out there who are just like, screw this, time's already hard, this is going to make it even worse. What's the point of even trying to work anymore, right? And you see both sides of things. And I don't know how the world is going to navigate during this uncertain time, because I think a lot of this creates uncertainty and it creates uncertainty for people of all income brackets. Like if you look at the SaaSpocalypse, it's affected a lot of people who were once billionaires. And I know some people are like, boo-hoo, The billionaire is now a millionaire. Whoop-de-doo, they're still better off, right? But what I'm getting at is it's creating uncertainty in a lot of markets. You're seeing businesses evaporate and vanish because they're no longer needed, to you're seeing things just start up and dominate, and you're seeing companies go from $0 to $100 million in revenue in a few months or less than 6 months, which is extremely rare. And we weren't seeing any of those kind of growth rates prior to OpenAI being released?

You know, you know, one thing I'll say, Neil, so you said it's always been there, right?

And it's true.

The only difference is now this is such an accelerant that it's going to accelerate the gap. Because in my mind, the people that have been successful that have wanted to work hard for the most people that have kind of built their own things, they had the right mindset. And the thing you've noticed, Neil and I used to go to these masterminds. What do people used to talk about all the time that I used to think was BS? It's the mindset. It's the mindset. It's the mindset. But now as we get older, it is just a mindset. And so the thing, Neil, let me ask you this. In India, what do you think the sentiment is on AI? Is it positive, negative, and what percent?

I don't know. I haven't been there in— actually, I've been there this year. But of the people I met, keep in mind it's tech. I know a lot of India is heavy on tech. They like it. I haven't really seen too many people in India be negative. But again, I had very limited experience. The last time I was there was for an event.

Okay, so here's overall AI sentiment when you look at different countries. So you look at Asian countries, India, China, right? 80-plus percent, 80 to 89% is public, right? India, Southeast Asia, right? All these emerging markets, okay?

Wait, wait, before you give the answer, can I guess America? But you can give the other markets.

Go ahead, guess America.

I believe less than 50% are enthusiastic about AI.

It's not just America though. What other countries do you think are negative?

I would think most of Europe, like Western Europe.

And why do you think that is?

They're worried about what it can do for their job and the stability that they have. They're worried that things can get worse for them.

You know, I remember we were at a dinner once and then you used the phrase, and one of our mutual friends was listening, you used the phrase wealth preservation, okay? Which he tuned into that one. So here's the thing. That concept doesn't— that also applies here too. So when you think about the developed markets like Europe and the USA, right, what is it? It's wealth preservation. So there's a lot of anxiety around not— they don't want to lose what they, they have right now, right? Um, so job loss, AI misinformation, all this stuff, right? But when you look at emerging markets, there's a lot of hope, right? And I wouldn't even say China's emerging market, like they're, they're number 2 in the world, right? Sure, there's a lot— they have a lot of large population, but They're highly optimistic. Why? Because they see this as a way to modernize the work that they do and bridge existing skill gaps. And there's hope that's tied to it, right? And again, but I would say this, it's a mindset thing at the end of the day, right? Because keep in mind, one of the main reasons we became so powerful is because we won the damn war, right? World War II. And so what ends up happening is we create this empire, and then what happens is people start to get lazy and sloppy, right? You start to lose that hunger a little. You start to lose That mindset, which when you're an emerging market, quote unquote, you have the mindset. Even if you're number 2, you want to become number 1. You want to kick number 1's butt, right? You have the mindset. And this is not a mindset podcast, but I mean, marketing can be related to mindset.

And China pulled an amazing marketing move. If you look at a lot of what's happening in AI, there's a lot of uncertainty in the public markets. The reason there's a lot of uncertainty in the public markets is Largely because of China. China's releasing models that companies are now using. They may not be as good, but they're good enough and they're a fraction of the cost. And they're just like, hey, you can use our models, it's way cheaper. And they're getting amazing penetration in the United States. And I don't believe organizations and political people like governments thought that Wait, our citizens and our corporations will want to use Chinese products. But they do because, hey, you want to offer something for 1/10 the price that's good enough to get the job done? I hate to say it, most people are going to sign up for that, including me and Eric.

Well, I'm going to share it with all new hires or all new prospects to scare them away because that is how I see it. Like, if you want to, if you, if you have If the ability or the desire to work on hard problems and you have high cognition, then we want to hire you. If not, I would prefer that you want— this is the problem I've been having. And Neil, I actually did the math yesterday. Let me ask you the question here real quick, and I'm going to come back to the article because we got to talk about Singapore too. So when you look at the— what would you say is the percentage of people that started the year AI native, like starting? So what percentage would you say that is? And what do you think it is today for your organization?

Yeah, so you're saying what people that are joining a company are AI native?

Not joining, but let's say beginning of the year, maybe 10% of your org was AI native, right? What do you think that number would be today? So what was it before and what is it now as of August 2026?

I would say, I honestly don't have the exact percentage on my team. We look at it a little bit differently. AI is evolving so fast. If you felt you were good at the beginning of the year and you didn't keep up, we look at it as you can regress and go quite a bit backwards. OpenAI published a stat. I forgot who, I think it was OpenAI. I think less than 10% of their users even use agents. It was something small or minuscule like that. And we're seeing the same thing in which people say they're using agents, they're using AI, Correctly, they're getting the most out of it. But when we dive a little bit deeper and go under the hood, when we interview candidates or talk to candidates, the quality or the results or what we're looking for doesn't match up to what they're saying in most cases. So people can say a lot, but the action when we really dig deep is not really there on what they're claiming for most people and most candidates.

So here's what I'll say. I've talked to a few people yesterday, and I've actually even pasted into this AI group, right? And so, and to Neil's point, this is not an exact science. We're all kind of figuring it out as we go. But I think generally leadership has a sense of how things are, right? So we talked, I talked to a mutual friend yesterday, and I was like, so what did it start at? He's like, well, the year we started, maybe 5%. I was like, so what is it now? He's like, 10%, right? Now, that being said, let's say, you know, headcount is 1,000. So Going from 50 to 100 is, I would still, that 50 people is still like a good chunk. And I talked to someone else, like these are both 9-figure companies, but they went from 2% to 8%, okay, in terms of, you know, the AI nativeness, right? And then for a lot of these companies, it's kind of the same. Now, I think I'm looking at our organization, like our headcount is smaller, right? It's much smaller, in fact. And so beginning of the year, Neil, I would say we started at 10%, okay?

Yeah.

As of today, I looked through the kind of people yesterday along with my CTO, so we kind of ran through the entire list and I'm like, yeah, it's about 50%. So it went up 5x. But like, if you were to guess, like, is it because we did start doing hackathons? Is it because we started doing AI office hours? Is it because we started doing training? No. And by the way, I'm like, I'm not saying training is bad by any means, but what happened is the talent standard went up. So what we look for when we hire, what we look for when we fire, and then also like, what does training look like? What does retention look like with these people? So it all came like, and the CTO said this, like, it's like, we can talk about all the training we want every day, and we should absolutely still do those things. But what matters is, are we just bringing in the right people? Much easier said than done. But that also comes down to, okay, what are your standards? What questions are you going to be asking these people when they're coming in? And then are you not afraid to be unapologetic about ending those interviews early? If the call isn't working out, right? And so that we're going to continue to refine that. But I think most companies need to think about, yes, hackathons, absolutely, AI officers, all that. But at a certain point, you just have to decide, hey, our bar is just going to be this, and that's what it is. And people are like, oh, well, those people are so hard to find. No, trust me, those people are out there because those people are actually trying to leave the companies right now that aren't on top of it, right? So if you market yourself the right way with where you're trying to go, you can attract these people. So I think it's possible for everyone.

Dude, definitely. I think it is. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier and just mindset. And I see that with so many marketers. The most common message that I get when I see marketers in person is times are hard. Google's taking away top of funnel. ChatGPT is taking away top of funnel. Social media doesn't want to send traffic to your website. You can't tell people to click on a link in your bio anymore. It just screws up your watch time, which just messes up You know, all the metrics. And I really look at everything in which, you know, it's— if you have the right mindset and you want to push hard, you're going to be better off. If you want to take the lazy mindset and not push hard, you know, you're screwed and you're doomed. You got to have the mentality that things can get better. You got to keep testing. You got to keep pushing and trying new things. In marketing, Eric and I, I don't think any times in our career we ever created a business and we're like, this is the exact way to market a business. We're going to do this. And for the next 3, 4 years, we didn't change anything. It doesn't work out that way. There's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of changes that had to happen.

The biggest losers in marketing are the marketers who are entitled.

Okay.

Oh, I lost my traffic over here. Oh, screw Google. Screw this. Like it's, it's everything to point the finger outward, but to not look inwards and be like, how do I adjust? How do I adjust? How do I adjust? And when I speak at these SEO conferences, By the way, I'm like, guys, don't even complain about the algorithm. Don't even complain about how the game has changed, right? You guys are SEOs. Like, you're supposed to be the most adaptable marketers. You're supposed to— the only thing that's constant is change, right? And so if you have a good relationship with change, that actually means for the most part, like, you have a— you're generally a higher agency person. You're okay with surfing the wave as it comes versus letting the wave hit you. And so my whole thing with marketing in general now, or even this whole, you know, debate around cognition and, you know, being optimistic about AI, is as long as you have high agency, you know, a good relationship to change, you like solving tough problems, you're going to be just fine. The ones who complain, and by the way, I look at Neil and I, never once in my 15, 16 years of knowing Neil have I seen him complain about a marketing channel not working. Not once have I seen him complain. And that's not even an exaggeration. Like we might complain about other things, but not about that.

We definitely complain about other things, but yes. I also think as marketers and entrepreneurs, We like the chaos because when times are good, we do enjoy them for the first 6 months, but then things get boring. We kind of like the ups and the downs. Maybe I'm a little crazy. I'll talk about myself. I won't say that about Eric, but maybe that's why I like the ups and downs, but it keeps me going. If things were always just good, I would get bored.

Neal, I would say I'm pretty crazy too. Remember, so Neal, and we won't go into too much details here, but Neal called me 5, 6 years ago, and as a friend, he said this, right? He's like, He called me and, you know, we're in trouble at the time. He's like, hey, it might be time to just bankrupt this thing, dude. And he's like, he's like, he's like, I have an idea. I have an idea. Bankrupt it, right? And so, by the way, like, that was a situation where I was like, you know what, it's gonna be a great story if we're able to turn everything around. And we're talking about, this is millions and millions of dollars, right? Um, what we're talking about, like, I'm just gonna leave it at that. But to be able to go through that, and be in the position that we're in today, like, man, what a ride. Would I want to do it again? No. But it's through those moments that you learn the most, right? And Bill Gates, a lot of people don't look at him too positively anymore, but I will say he has a good quote. Success is a lousy teacher, right? And that's what I would say. So by the way, let's come back to Singapore for a moment, Neil. So they're a very wealthy country.

You agree?

Right? Not company, country.

Yes.

And they are, you would say they're not an emerging market. You would say they're more of a developed market, right?

They're developed. They're not emerging.

Yeah. Okay. So what percent of Singaporean respondents are optimistic or negative about AI?

I would say most of them are optimistic about AI. Is that what the stat is? Yeah, you want to know something interesting about Singapore? Did you know all the citizens have to contribute money and that money is used for their retirement? Not like a 401, but like investment, like the sovereign wealth fund.

Yep.

So when Singapore Temasek or any of their GIC invest in, you know, these AI companies, the citizens benefit from it. So they actually can make money and participate. The reason they do this is so that way when people are older, They have home stability. They have a low population. The government also provides them government housing at a much more affordable rate and dollar amount. So then that way no one's left behind and they don't have a homeless problem.

We should have that. Like, I think we're moving in the right direction with the whole Invest in America accounts. But I think everyone should have that. So there's less of this rich against the poor thing. It's more about being productive and building things and working on hard problems. I think this whole, like, it's very easy to fall into this whole rich versus poor mentality because it's easy to blame. It's easy to point the finger, right? And then when you use language like, again, oh, screw the billionaires, whatever, but you replace the word billionaires with successful people, screw the successful people, you realize it doesn't make any sense. So anyway, wanted to share that piece.

So—

Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. I, here, I got more here, Neil. You want to see this, this WD-40 ad production center?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

When you say WD-40, I think of the spray.

Exactly. That's exactly here. Let me show you what I got here. So this is how WD-40 used AI video Amazon ads to boost performance. Okay, so let's just look at the numbers here. Okay, so I'm going to— crap. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Too many ads. Okay, so anyway, so they use Amazon's DSP. Okay, look at— dude, stop. Oh my God.

All right.

So I'm getting hit by all these popups here, but the campaign produced a— I'm just going to look over here. So this campaign produced a 45% higher click-through rate than category benchmarks with video completion rates reaching nearly 90%. So Amazon's AI-based video ads lowered the cost to create these assets at a much higher rate. It didn't provide details on cost, but I think the thing to call out here, and screw you MediaPost for all these these pop-ups. But I think we're going to see more of this. I think that you listening to this right now, you shouldn't interpret this as, oh, we're just going to create a lot more ads and we're just going to let AI do it. It's more so you're still going to need someone managing it for you. You're still going to need to hire an agency to do it because, Neil, I actually talked to a health company, multibillion-dollar— not health company, hospitality company this week, right? And they're like, okay, SingleBrain looks really cool. So what's the secret sauce, right? Like if we can build this, like what's the secret And I just looked at him and I was like, so who's going to maintain it? And he's like, oh. And then like, yeah, because he was complaining about his team the whole time. They're not— he talked about how he made— and we're not going to name names, but he was talking about how he built AI agents for each of his team members, right? Or like to do tasks that his team was doing. I'm like, the fact that you're doing all this stuff right now means you don't have enough people to actually help you. And so this WD-40 thing, the whole like, hey, we can have, we fire your agencies, do this, do that. Like, who's going to manage it for you? Right? And so we ain't going anywhere. Neil and I, we're still going to be here. So when people need the help, we'll be here. Don't worry.

It's like people telling me there will be no need for agencies. You can just do it all with AI.

Who tells you that, by the way? I'm curious.

So Entrepreneur Today told me, just look at media buying and buying ads online. You no longer have to do it. AI can just end up doing it for you. And I was like, have you run ads yourself? They're like, yeah, I've been running ads for, I think they said like 6 years. I said, okay. So back in the day there was solutions like Kenshoo and Marin, I'm assuming you remember them, that would help you do bid management.

Mm-hmm.

Eventually Google and Facebook ended up releasing a lot of the features. It got better and better. You know, there's, you know, PMax, AI Max, the list goes on and on. They continue to make it easier and easier for you, yet companies still use agencies. And one can say, oh no, there's no need, it's a scam. But what if I told you I have case studies to prove companies doing it on their own and hiring internal people using all this latest and greatest technology and then going through us and then us in many cases, For a lot of our bigger spenders, I'm talking about people who are spending $5, $10+ million a month, showing them 20+% improvements in revenue while spending less. So the delta is actually much more than 20% here, right? Because you're getting them 20% more revenue and you're spending less money, and that's after fees. So overall, it's highly profitable or much more profitable than it was. And the reason I, what I told them is the reason people pay agencies is for expertise. They see a lot of data, they work with so many different accounts in different industries, they can tell you what you should change and adjust and what you should try out. And you can end up trying AI and there's nothing wrong with it. We use AI, a lot of companies use AI, but if the AI just replicates the same strategy for everyone, what is your edge?

People go to agencies. Why? Because agencies, one, they have expertise. They also have the data as well, right? And it's not only that, it's, it's, you have the expertise piece, but you also get a shop that can handle multiple things at once. And ultimately what they're doing is they're delivering outcomes and they're taking a lot off of your plate. And that's something that's worth paying for. That's all. And so as long as humans will be hired, agencies are still going to be around.

Dude, I totally agree with you on this. Yeah.

So actually, speaking of agency, let's talk about agents for a second, Neil. So, um, so, you know, our good friend Elon Musk tweeted this. Um, so he says, AI agentic internet traffic will obviously vastly exceed human usage. So not even a close call at all. Cloudflare's forecast is accurate. So Cloudflare, um, they said humans will be a rounding error on the internet. According to Cloudflare's forecast, bot traffic will exceed human traffic by a factor of 1,000 within 5 years. So what's interesting to me before we react to this, Neil, I've been very impressed by Cloudflare. So you have probably never logged into your Cloudflare dashboard, but I logged in. I happened to just log in because I was just curious over the weekend, right? And I looked at it, I was like, dude, they have all these agentic things, all these like things you can click like the MD file, you can like add, you know, the ability for agents to buy things and things like that. I think every site needs to become like this. And I'm sure you've seen this already, Neil.

Yeah.

And like every site needs to become agent ready, right? Like how Shopify launched their UCP and there's all these, you know, PC and CP, all these things launching out, right? And so I think it's— bless you. I don't know if that's a sneeze, but I think it's helpful for us to start to think about not just answer engine optimization, but it's also answer engine optimization for, are you doing it for humans? Are you doing it for agents? Because we're already seeing—

Yeah.

that the number of agents is rising. So you want to make it easy for them to buy things, and a lot of times these agents just want to bypass the UI.

Yeah, and Cloudflare has been releasing quite a few new features. So for example, they make it easier for agents and AI to end up crawling down to crawling your site. Like they release Markdown for agents, which automatically converts HTML into just clear, concise, uh, text-based answers. And then that way the crawlers can get what they're looking for faster. Uh, and then this also, uh, reduces costs for the company. But yeah, they've been making a lot of changes. I've been logging into my Cloudflare quite a bit over the last few months, especially because they keep emailing me saying they want us to pay more money. And I've been arguing that I don't want to pay more money and I should get a cheaper price.

Well, see, the problem is Neil actually enjoys those conversations.

Sure.

I do.

Yeah, yeah. And then my team's just like, hey, they presented this, we think it's reasonable. I'm like, no, no, no, no, put me in the conversation. I'm like, I want to pay less. They're like, no, no, they're trying to charge us more. I'm like, yeah, but I want to pay less than what we're paying.

Yep. So it's— Neil wants to get more for less, and that's how you do it. That's negotiation, right? So here, like, I actually pulled up, um, the— it's like, here are all the quick wins you can add over here, right? And it's like, here's this technical groundwork. You need to expose the directory of your web services. Share login details for AI bots, preferences for bot behavior, like the MD files Neil was talking about, manage AI bots, right? And then there's like these, all these integrations down here. So what I just did, Neil, I just took a screenshot of this and I just dumped it into my agent. I was just like, hey, how high leverage was this for us? Is this for us? And so interestingly enough, for our agency website, Neil, it's like, this is like a 50 out of 100 high leverage, right? But when I looked at the other sites like SingleBrain or Carrot or whatever, or ClickFlow, it's like, yes, absolutely make those agentic, make it easy for them to access the API, make it easy for them to buy as well. They can even do these little microtransactions. Like if they want to pull from AnswerThePublic, they want to do all these microtransactions, maybe you guys can make money off of that. And so I'm like, someone needs to be on this. And ideally, I think if you're an AEO SEO person watching this right now, you should learn how this stuff works. We're just making you aware of this. And like in my younger years, I'd probably spend the time learning how to make this all work, but I just forward this to the team. I'm pretty sure same thing for you too, Neil.

So yeah, dude, I— and Recently, I don't know why, in the last few weeks, I've been getting a lot of people adding me to just random group texts, like introducing me to people like, hey, you should talk to so-and-so. And it's pretty much sales, like someone's introducing me to someone so I can buy their products or services. And people are starting to get upset that I no longer respond to them. And I do, especially if I know the people, I've If I think it's legitimate and it's good, I forward it to my team, but people are like, hey, did you respond to them? You should get on a call with them. I'm like, I don't have the time for this. I'm like, forward. I'm like, it is what it is. The picture wasn't good enough to convince me to join the call.

Well, here's what I'll say. I mean, this is like, people should learn introduction etiquette 101. And when it's a big intro, by the way, you want, and you respect the other person, you probably want to do a double opt-in. And you want to be cognizant of what their interests are. And if you spend— if you go the extra mile here, you're going to get remembered, right? Versus just randomly introducing. Now, here's what I'll say. There's a caveat to that. So if a Neil's coming from— like a Neil, if an intro is coming from someone like that I trust, like a Neil, for example, right? I'm going to trust that he's spent the time and it's something that Neil has already thought about my interest, right? I'm just going to go ahead and go with that. But if someone barely knows you and they're just putting you into a thread, I think that's rude and I think it's stupid and I think that's low cognition and I think that's part of the mental underclass. The new mental underclass.

Dude, I totally agree with this. People need to understand, you know, what a person actually wants, get their permission. It's like a double opt-in, right? You guys do it with email, do it with introductions over text. And I think that is the best way or else people just ignore it. Like I've had friends that I've known for 15, 20 years introduce me to people. And they're just like, hey, follow up with these guys. I'm like, dude, I don't have time. I'm like, I don't— I'm not even in this department that makes a decision for this product or service. I'm like, I'm the wrong person to make the introduction.

You're nice in those situations. I'm actually pretty mean in those situations. And I do like, follow up what? And I put a period, not a question mark. I put a period. So yeah, then they know not to— they know to stop doing that. So, um, Neil, did you see the cafe in San Francisco that allows you to brand drinks?

No, I have not seen that.

So, check this out. So, there's a cafe here in San Francisco where the startups can pay to brand drinks. So, ElevenLabs, you've heard of, right? So, you can do an Eleven Latte, right? So, iced double espresso shot, it's $5.08. So, $5.80. And then, Zero Click, okay? You have Rippling. There's a Berry Ripped, okay? 21 grams of protein, 14. MongoDV Greens, right? 14.5. Brexpresso, 7.5. And so, I think this is cool. I honestly think that anything that hasn't become saturated yet, like this looks pretty saturated if I'm being honest, but anything that's not saturated where you can kind of stand out. So I have a friend that like, he likes to buy these airplane ads that like fly around the beach and all that. Or if you can, I think we had a mutual friend, he bought like, you know, when you land at the airport, there's like when you walk the walkway, it's all like his company branding. And so sometimes you have to zig where other people are zagging. Like back in the day, podcast ads used to be unsaturated, right? Where you can stand out. Or back in the day, influencer ads used to be not saturated, right? So if you can attack something where a lot of your people are hanging out, I think a cafe in San Francisco that's popular actually makes a lot of sense because there's a lot of foot traffic that goes through there and it's people that you want to be seeing your stuff. Yes.

And being the first is great. If 10 other startups do this or cafes do this in San Francisco, it's not going to be effective for the 3rd, 4th, 5th. 2nd maybe can get away with it. 3rd won't be as effective. But the first, whoever's the first to do it, it was great. It was like back in the day, do you remember Million Dollar Homepage where some kid was trying to generate a million bucks to pay for something?

Oh yeah.

I think college or whatever was selling pixel by pixel. Great model, but going and creating another Million Dollar Homepage is not going to be effective. It was already done.

Yeah. Yeah. Marketing 101. That's, uh, it's Andrew Chen wrote this. It's the law of shitty click-throughs. Something might be great. The click-through rate might be astronomical in the beginning, just like email in the beginning, right? Then it just goes down. And back in the day, by the way, SMS, I think SMS, uh, is still pretty high, right, Neil?

It is extremely high.

It's still because it's still very personal, right? Um, but also like ChatGPT, click-through rates might be very high in the beginning. And Neil, do you want to see how this person ranked number 1 on ChatGPT?

Yeah.

Okay.

So check this out. So this person made a deodorant brand that doesn't exist. And 3 weeks later, ChatGPT ranked at number 1.

Okay. What did they do?

It to strangers. I spent $11 on a domain. It took me 1 hour of work. I didn't do any weird Reddit stuff, no fake reviews. And here's why I did that. So I've written a tech newsletter for 5 years, and since June I've been mapping what I'm calling the AI shelf. So picture an actual shelf in a store. You ask ChatGPT what to buy, and there's a short list of brands it reaches for, that's this shelf. That's the AI shelf. I've run almost 9,000 queries at it. No one can see the shelf. It's opaque, but it sits in front of $6 trillion worth of global e-commerce, if not north of that. So I wanted to know, can you get on the shelf? And you can. So by day 21, I got my first hit. By day 30, ChatGPT with browsing on named Maroen, and directly underneath it, this very real brand. One of them exists. One of them definitely does not. Now it only moved 2 of my 15 queries. Native still fully owns the category. I just found one little dusty shelf in the back of the store that was still open. Long tail is where the opportunity is. No surprise there. But beyond that, it reveals something about our relationship to shopping and AI that I think is going to have a huge impact. So you put something into Google and you get a list of links. You have some media literacies. You get to decide who to trust. What AI did with Merwin is it handed the copy that I wrote back to me in its own voice. And that voice made it sound vetted, made it sound like it had some authority. But of course it doesn't. And that's before agents own the whole loop from recommendation to purchase. So pretty soon I'm gonna be telling my agent to keep my cabinet stocked. So it's gonna pick, it's gonna pay, trillions of dollars are gonna be moving through this door that currently no one can audit. It's very high stakes. Almost no one's watching it. I am. I test every month, so follow along. I made a—

so all she did was just use text on her own website and it started crawling it, and then she started It sounds like she uses her site as like a promotional vehicle, but I don't know what she meant by like this AI shelf or whatever. So I don't quite understand that, but let me tell you what I would do, Neil. I would just take this Instagram link, I would dump it into my Codex desktop, and I would say, make this into a skill, and I don't even need to do anything. And I'll just send it to my team and say, hey, take it from 50%, get it to 80%, 90%, and then we're good to go.

Yeah, I do think the copy on your website has a big impact because no matter what people write about you on the internet, if your website doesn't show that you do it, it is hard to end up getting placed high in ChatGPT or getting placed at all. The second thing is listicles. We all know about that. The third thing is comparisons. When you do comparison articles of you versus other premium brands that they're recommending, that does well. The fourth thing, we've been doing a lot of this at my agency, NP Digital, We look at all the sources they're citing and we try to get those sources to just include us. See a lot of people like, I need listicles of the 10 best toaster ovens or laptops. I'm like, you do know if you type in all the queries, they're already pulling from certain sources. What are those sources? And why not try to convince those exact sources to also list you? That is an easier way to get cited than anything else. From everything we've tested, if you can just convince existing sources To include you, it beats everything else out by far.

And guys, I'm sorry to oversimplify this, but to me, AEO is, there's, you have more digital PR, you have more structuring that needs to happen, and it's just more of SEO. So people don't want to hear it. And it's still, I still find it hilarious, Neil, when people come to work with us and they're like, we got SEO down, we just need help on the AEO. And that actually means they don't have SEO down.

Right. Yeah. It's just like, oh yeah, what's your revenue through SEO? Either we don't know or it's declining or slightly up or flat. And it's just like, let's see what you're doing. Oh, this is what you're doing wrong. And this is also why you're not doing well on LLMs. Yes, there are nuances and differences, but I would say 80+% is very similar.

Yep. So let me share this one over here. So Neil, do you see this graph?

KIMI downloads and users skyrocket. Yeah, I believe this. I believe it's going to just continually hockey stick up for a while, uh, and we haven't even really seen the popularity unless, you know, something new ends up coming out that everyone ends up loving.

I'll shed the— I'll shed some context on this one just for people that can't see the screen. So what I have pulled up is, uh, KIMI K3, which is one of the, the best, um, you know, uh, open source weights out there. Um, so their downloads and users skyrocket. And so you can see here the number of downloads Shot up from— this is daily, by the way. So it shot up to 1.8 million downloads. And I think daily active users shot up from about, let's say, 75K, 70K or so to about 1.4 million. And it started to kind of peter off a little bit, right? So my point of even showing you this chart over here is when you think about the marketing behind Kimi K3, it's not like they did some crazy advertising campaign.

Same Starlink.

They run ads, but it's not like a lot, right? But to me, Neil, I like— I've heard about people avoiding certain routes just so they can fly with Starlink on the plane, okay? And then because the product is so good, right? Then you look at Kimi K3, because the product is so good, people talk about it being, you know, close to Fable levels, Fable 5 levels, which I think is a little bit of exaggeration, but it's like, it's close, right? The point is, these things are getting so good, people are like, there's a clear problem to be solved. Whether it's Starlink or, or, um, you look at Kimi. And, and on the flip side, like I mentioned earlier, uh, when you have such good marketing around something like a, uh, Open Claw had all the mindshare in the world, right? But they couldn't execute anymore. They became unreliable. And so Hermes started to take their mindshare, right? And then, uh, now it's— it— now you have other harnesses doing similar things. You have GrokBot that's, that's kind of similar. And so I think the fundamental piece of it at the end of the day is this: If you have an amazing product or service, great, you can polish it. But if you have a poo-poo product service, if you put gold, you polish a turd, it's still a turd at the end of the day.

Yeah, with what Eric was just sharing on the screen right now, it's another marketable moment. A16 does this. We've been doing it for a very long time and we do it in a different way than A16Z. We take a lot of our own proprietary data, our own research, our own surveying and create charts from it. Eric was showing a chart from a16z. They took 100% of the data from Sensor Tower, I believe it was, ran it to a16z, cited the source, which is fine, and it's getting a16z name out there as a venture fund, even though they're already well known and they probably don't need their name out there anymore. But the point I'm getting at is you can create marketable moments for your business, whether you have proprietary data or not. A16z is a prime example of this. I've seen a lot of the other charts where they're just taking data from like places like SimilarWeb. There's a lot of things that you can do like this to go and create brand recognition for yourself by just aggregating the data, putting it in a pretty format, and then sharing it with the world. You may not get as many views as you want, but if you're creating the right type of charts on the right type of data, it may really focus on your ICP and that can drive a lot of revenue in the long run.

Yeah. You know, we should spend more time on marketable moments because this is something I'm pushing the team on a lot more now. And we've talked about last week that every person is becoming part-time engineer and part-time marketer. Okay.

Yeah.

So I told the engineers, I said, hey guys, like, look, you're all going to become part-time marketers now. I'm going to show you how to do it. And so whenever we launch a new ClickFlow feature, for example, I have this shared on the screen over here. You can see that we have a little video kind of outline. This is a Hyperframes video, and then people can spin up these videos very quickly. And you can see, you know, oh, this is what this new feature does over here, right? And then actually this one got 26K views. It actually got 40K views on X because I did like a quote tweet. And so there's that, right? But who did I get this idea from? Well, you see a lot of it on X already. So Matt Van Horn, he's always launching new stuff. And so today he launches Agent Cookie for GrokBot, right? And he always has good music tied to it. So let me play some of the music over here with this video.

Real pretty, them flips impossible.

Okay, so he really likes rap, right? And so he'd always send me like, a new video and he like texts me like, hey, here's— what do you think about this new rap song? Right? And so it can— it allows you to inject your own personality too. But here's the thing. So Neil's talking about charts and things like that. I think charts are very good. I think videos are good too. But beyond that, I think it also depends on what you're publishing too. And so we have the Skills Dojo where we have all these skills. Well, the easy thing is just keep promoting amazing skills that we find on X and then add them to the Skills Dojo and give them credit. And we can keep promoting that over and over and over. That never stops. I can make short-form content for that too, right? And so there's that. Our API gateway where we allow you to connect different tools, different connectors, have different permissioning, security, governance, all that stuff. That is stuff that I can promote as well. And so that makes it more exciting for the people creating it, and it makes it easier for us to continually have this marketing machine. And this whole concept of marketable moments, I actually got it from our mutual friend Patrick Campbell, where when he was running, I think, ProfitWell back in the day, it was Every month, right? This is like years and years ago, right? There's no AI, right? And years and years ago, it was like every month we need to talk about a new thing. We need to keep our audience excited. We need to, you know, get them, get them on top of this. And I think now one of the things is, as a marketer, I can launch a lot more of these, um, on demand because I'm a lot less resource constrained, um, with the ability to do these things.

Yeah, dude, we all can just do so much more that we couldn't do before. And there's no more excuses for just not getting stuff done.

I got a question for you because we're talking about getting stuff done. This is gonna be the last topic here, Neil. Do you think there are net more jobs in Philippines now or less jobs based on how the last few months have been going?

More jobs. I think by far there's more jobs because people want cheap labor to go and do all this stuff for them.

Yep. So, so I was trying to throw you off by throwing in something random at the end of it so you couldn't guess. I wasn't trying to lead the witness, but let me show you this. So check this out. So what I have on the screen over here, this is from Truong Phan. And so he's like, look, since the launch of ChatGPT, the Philippines offshore industry, so 8% of the country's GDP, I didn't know it was that high, has actually grown much bigger. So employment in IT and business outsourcing is up 20% to 1.9 million workers, and industry revenue is up 30% to $42 billion. So AI is helping offshore workers. If you look at this graph over here, it's a back office bonanza. Okay, so Philippines IT and business services, you look at employees, 2016 it was a little over a million, um, and then now it's, oh, it's close to 2 million or so. Revenue back in 2016, uh, this looks like a little over $20 billion. It's called like $23 billion or so, and now it's, it's $42 billion. Okay. So what's happening now is AI is helping offshore workers in the Philippines do new, more complex jobs. They're picking up work training AI models or supervising AI agents. Hospitals in America are increasingly outsourcing the checking of insurance eligibility and filing of medical records to Filipinos packing AI tools. So more high-value work such as accounting or engineering is going offshore in part because AI is a leveler. You can now teach someone something complex. You can teach someone complex stuff more quickly, and it can still get done more cheaply than America or Europe. And so people might think, oh man, you know, all these BPOs, all these offshoring, like they're going to go out of business because we don't need them anymore, right? But nope, more. And we talked about this for a while, more.

I think it's all going to be more for a while, you know, and I even watched a lot of the news channels and like, yeah, you may not need as many, as much memory. Well, what happens when there's robots and all this kind of stuff? Like the memory usage will be more. I'm not saying memory— the profit for a lot of these companies will be the same. I'm just saying they'll need more.

Do you think you'll ever fall in love with one of your robots?

If it can clean 24/7 and have the house spotless, yes, because I'm so OCD.

Uh, all right, well, I think that's a good place to end. Uh, guys, we will catch you next week, and, uh, yeah, have a good weekend.