Why you can't trust agencies, Power of words, Drawbacks of depth and non-obvious content, and more

You know, Jason Lemkin has this one over here. Basically, the question we have is, can you trust agencies? And we're biased because we're both agency owners, right? So Jason Lemkin says, so many founders are crestfallen when I tell them hiring an agency to do sales or demand gen for them in the early days has a 0% chance of working. This just never works. No, some outbound agency can't magically get you 100+ qualified leads, especially when no one has ever heard of you and you have no brand. Can they run some generic cadences for you? Yes. Will that work? Well, Will that work with 1,000+ better-known vendors in your space? No. And no, some marketing agency can't magically reach out to the 200+ top prospects with just the right high ROI pitch for you. They can make you some videos and they can give you some strategy quote-unquote tips, but what you need is truly qualified leads that can buy. 0% chance some agency can do that for your startup. What do we think about this?

Funny enough, when most startups hit us up and they haven't started anything, we don't take them on as a customer.

Because they haven't reached product-market fit?

We tell them they need to figure the basics out and we can come in and scale and fine-tune whatever they did.

You know what we tell them? We tell them we're not going to build your business for you. So like, if you— once you figure out the funnel and you have product-market fit, then we can talk, right?

Yeah. We don't like working with companies that are pre-revenue. And I agree with him. I think companies need to go and figure it out. It's just like with sales. I've been in the startup world where you hire sales consultants and try to get them to do it.

We've tried paying for this. We've done this a lot.

It doesn't work. But what works is if you can get some traction, paying agencies, whether it's in sales and marketing, they can help you fine-tune and grow faster, but they can't just come in and wave a magic wand and solve all your problems for you. You need to build a foundation and they can grow upon that foundation and make it stronger and better, but they need a foundation. They can't start with nothing.

But the turd is a turd. So you polish a turd, it's still a turd, right?

So it still smells.

It still smells. Yeah, absolutely. So, but by the way, I don't know about you, like I've hired a lot of these agents. I figured multiple times I'll give them a chance. Like, oh my God, you're going to get me like thousands of qualified leads a month. It never works out, right? So whatever seems too good to be true usually is too good to be true. And what we realized as we're approaching our 40s, right, is you just have to put in the work for a very long period of time.

For many, many years.

Yeah.

And that's it.

For decades.

Yeah. And grind it out.

Yeah.

There's also people don't want to do it. That's a real problem.

Any shortcut we've tried— there's another lesson for y'all. Any shortcut we've tried to take has never worked out for us. I can't think of one that's worked out for me.

I've actually done a lot of shortcuts that worked out by making me short-term income.

Yeah.

But it's never worked out for me in the long run.

Yeah.

And a setback. If I actually took the long approach from day one, I would've done way better. And a great example of this is I remember when I had affiliate sites back in the day, I would do deals with WordPress theme sites and make them put like web hosting and all these links for online poker in the footer. I would climb to the top of the rankings in Google. Yeah.

You had to.

And make a killing.

Yeah.

And eventually I would get hit And there goes that income. But if I took the slow and steady route and the correct approach and built value and grew my rankings organically, I would have made way less money in the short run. But in the long run, I would have cleaned up and weighed not just more revenue, but more profit.

You know, shortcuts, going back to what we talked about earlier in this podcast, shortcuts are a way of forcing things. And again, when you try to force the outcome, forces work against you, right? You got one over here on the power of words.

Yeah, so I saw this interesting video on X and it was this blind person. I know it was staged, but it was this blind person who had this cardboard next to 'em and it said, I'm blind and please help. And they had a little jar or a can hoping that people would give money. Everyone walks by, no one gives money. Again, I'm pretty sure this is staged, 99% sure.

I'll tell you something after this.

So, so then this girl comes by, sees the sign, She, she says, can I? And she takes it, rewrites it, flips it around, and she changes the words. You can't see it, but everyone starts walking by and money starts pouring in. So the guy wants to know what she did. And pretty much she changed the wording from I'm blind and please help. She switched over the cardboard, which was blank on the opposite side, and she wrote, it's a beautiful day and I can't see it. Right? Yep. It just shows you, and we've tested a lot in marketing, words have a big impact. I'm blind and please help to, it's a beautiful day and I can't see it, isn't going to mean the difference from $0 raised if you're trying to get money to $1 million, kind of like what the video is showing. I'm exaggerating on the amount of money. It's probably from 0 to call it $100 or something. But what ends up happening is when you use positivity in marketing, we see it have a much better impact than when you use negative words.

So this original video is the first video I saved on YouTube. And it's a guy where he's doing this and someone changes the copy. So this is— this also shows like the meta thing here is take what works, just redo it again. Right? How many views does this get? 179K. Oh, this was a subview because the original video got 20 million views. Yeah. And that's another tactic.

It's a response to another video and it's still got 179,000 views. That's a tactic right now.

Some people are posting like this video that Get a lot of views and then like under it, you'll see a lot more videos that are posted too. So, but yeah, I mean, copywriting 101, you know, it's how do you get into someone's psychology and how do you, when you say instead of like, please help me, it's more about you, you, you, you, you. But when you talk about it's a beautiful day, that's something that everyone can kind of feel.

Yeah.

It's the feelings that get people to convert.

It's a feeling because you're like, it's a beautiful day. Everyone's like, yeah, you're right. It's a beautiful day. And then by you saying I can't and I can't see it, it makes you as an individual appreciate the day. You're like, You know what? I am blessed. Today's an amazing day. Yeah, let me give some money.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds, great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency. We want to talk about why depth and non-obvious content crushes everything else. When you think about on— when I shared the Loro Piana, that store, not many people knew about it. That's why that one did well. By the way, the people liking it, there's people that like own a ton of like restaurants and stuff, restaurant groups in Miami. I was like, oh, these people are liking it, right? Because it's a non-obvious insight, right?

Yeah.

And so, you know, for example, when you share data that other people don't have and it does really well, it's because it's a non-obvious insight, right? What we found is, again, not going shortcuts again, but when we spend a little more time on a post and it's in-depth and it has maybe really interesting data, it's going to do a lot better. Like, that being said, I have a lot of shots on goal with these reels. Like, we never know what's going to do well. That's more like a slot machine. But when you're going to do something like a case study, for example, you do a lot of these on Twitter. Some of them do really well.

Yeah, but it's a numbers game, hit or miss. But you got to put in the energy and you got to talk about stuff that You believe most people haven't seen before. It may be out there, but if you believe most people have already seen it, it will not do well.

Yeah. And you're not going to get it all the time, by the way. On this podcast, we cover a lot of topics. I think today we covered like 14 or 15 topics or so.

Um, maybe a lot that we didn't cover. There's probably like another like 10, 10 plus that we didn't cover.

It's a nice log I built up. Um, so, but like, it's sometimes the non-obvious thing. Sometimes you don't even know what the non-obvious thing is going to be. Sometimes I think that the one that's going to perform doesn't perform, but the super— the one that had like, I thought had no chance is the one that takes off.

I did not expect the Loro Piana one to do as well.

Me neither. I thought that was whatever.

I did not expect the— what was it? Chick-fil-A one?

Yeah.

To do well. Was it Chick-fil-A or no, it's another burger joint.

No, that was Shake Shack.

Shake Shack. I didn't expect the Shake Shack one to do well. Yeah.

Me neither. Because you just never know, but it is a non-obvious insight, especially it's a consumer thing too.

Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I saw a clip of— was it of, uh, you and I? And I was talking about the Honda Odyssey.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The Deadpool and Wolverine one.

Yeah. That didn't do well. No. What's funny is I told so many people that, do you— have you seen the Honda Odyssey in Deadpool? And everyone just looks at me as like, who cares?

Why do you care? I'm like, I have one.

It's amazing. It was in that movie.

It did really well in the movie. It lasted a very long time. It took a beating.

Hondas, very reliable.

Ryan Reynolds, uh, I think talked it up too because Ryan Reynolds was selling Kias in the— in the— he was a car salesman. Um, and then he was like, the, the, the Honda Odyssey. Oh no, he hated the Honda Odyssey.

He hated the Honda Odyssey. I haven't seen the movie.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good movie. It's, it's pretty funny.

Dude, I just learned about something new. Have you heard of the Bel Air Circuit?

What's that?

There's Bel Air Circuit. There's— I think it's, uh, Bel Air Cinema as well. Bel Air Cinema.

Sounds rich.

Belaircinema.com. This is an option. Oh, there's Bel Air Circuit. There used to be Red Carpet. Dude, did you know if you had a home theater, you can end up getting— you have to have a movie quality projector, like from the movie theaters. Did you know you can get all the latest movies depending on which studios they have deals with right in your home, right when they come out the same day?

Are you going to do that for your new home?

I just got a quote on it, dude. So the quote, you want to guess how much it costs?

$50,000?

Uh-huh. For the projector, let's call it a $150,000 projector.

Oh my God.

That's good. That's not the real cost though. $100,000 upfront. And that, here's my problem with it. The $100,000 upfront, okay. But then $20K USD in movie credit, which you get for the first year, but it only covers between 5 and 10 titles.

No.

I'm like, so you're telling me I gotta pay between $2,000 and $4,000 per title? I'm like, it's okay.

Who do you think pays for this?

Uh, so this— a lot of the celebrities have it, but they don't have to pay ridiculous fees because they're celebrities and they're in the movies and they get direct deals with, uh, studios.

Sorry, I just can't—

But I'm not a celebrity. And then end of year 1 for membership, it's $16,000 yearly to cover the services. If they told me $100K upfront, $20 grand a year, and you can just watch unlimited movies that come out in theater, you don't have to go to theater, I would've done it for $100 grand upfront and then $20 a year.

Yeah.

Not $2,000 to $4,000 per movie. That's ridiculous. I'd rather just go drive to the movie theater in my Honda Odyssey, legit car, by the way.

And do it at the Century City Mall.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And pay my $20 for a movie ticket.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host, So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Dude, I think it's a good place for us to end on this one. So Axios did one, a little, a bit ago. So cable TV as a business is crumbling. So Paramount Global on Thursday took a $6 billion write-down on its cable TV business, the day after Warner Bros. Discovery did the same for $9 billion. Okay.

Wow.

So why it matters: both companies are struggling to convince Wall Street that their streaming bets will make up for those losses. Paramount Global stock tanked 12% in after-hours trading. Warner Bros. fell 9% to an all-time low after its earning release. And, um, So between the lines over here, both companies were created as a result of mega mergers, yet neither are considered big enough to compete with big tech for streaming dominance. So I don't know, it's, uh, it's tough times here.

It's—

I don't pay for cable anymore. In fact, the only thing I pay for is, uh, for cable, I guess, is YouTube TV.

Me too. Yeah, I just pay for the basic. I don't pay for the premium.

How much do you pay for this? I don't know, $65, whatever. It used to be like $29. I don't know, it's gone up a lot, but I pay for Disney.

Uh, Netflix, HBO or Max now. Uh, what else? Paramount, Peacock, Prime. Yeah, I think I'm missing one or two still.

Yeah, but they're all price hiking a little bit too. Hulu.

I pay for Hulu as well.

Yep. So Hulu, Disney, ESPN+ are together. So Disney posted a profit across the streaming division for the first time. Max, um, began turning a quarterly profit last year. Um, and then Paramount announced its streaming arm posted profit for the first time last quarter, even though it lost so much money, I guess, overall. So anyway, times are changing.

Do you pay for Apple TV?

I do.

Yeah, I pay for that too. But here's the crazy thing. If you look at these providers now, they're just releasing new movies. Like Netflix had the Mark Wahlberg movie that came out, Mark Wahlberg and Halle Berry. It was a good pastime. I watched it while I was sleeping.

Watched it while you're sleeping?

Well, right, like falling asleep.

I don't know how you do that. Neil does this thing where like he works and watches the movie and then he actually retains the whole movie. I don't know how you do that.

I usually have to watch the movie 3 or 4 times.

Oh, okay. Never mind. Never mind. I thought you were doing something like— never mind, guys. He watches it 4 times.

Well, I'm like falling asleep, like just in bed. I can retain the movie because I'm just doing like— I'm usually reading like CNBC articles in bed while I'm watching a movie. So it's not a big deal. Then I can just watch it one time.

It's not good for your eyes, the blue light before bed.

I don't mind it.

Not good for your sleep.

Do you have 20/20 vision?

I still have my LASIK. Do you know there's a trade-off with LASIK? This will be the last thing, guys. So, there's always a trade-off to everything. So, you know LASIK, they basically shave off a little slice of your cornea.

Yeah, I have LASIK as well.

So, if I use my eyes too much, if I— I've been waking up at 3:30, right? 3:34. And like by 7 PM, my eyes hurt like hell if I've been using the computer a lot because your eyes get dry easily. So, I don't use eye drops.

Do you? I don't have dry eye problems. And my eyes don't get tired.

Must be me. I don't know.

I also paid an arm and a leg to one of the best LASIK eye doctors.

How much did you pay?

When I did it, I don't know, like $15-ish grand.

Oh, I got a discount. I went to an Asian person. $3,000.

But my eyes work great and I don't have dry eye problems.

Damn it. All right, guys, that is it for today. Please go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. And please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Please, uh, help us balance out the, uh, the people that don't like the new format. Tell us you like the new format. All right, we'll see you guys later. Bye.