Will This Be The Info Marketer's Decade In Software?

You know what's interesting too, Neil, you talked about how we do things, right? So I sent Neil a text this morning. So 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've 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 9 figures, 10 figures, or operating 10-figure companies a year. And 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 you're shortchanging yourself if you're not creating content.

Absolutely.

As much as Neil and I complain, or more so myself complain about having to make content, 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 podcasts?

Uh-huh.

Yes. This is actually really easy for me to answer. So let's say this is 75 minutes. All right. Long-form, 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, 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 content or 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. 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 for, for per month, right? You divide, 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, that's just a year.

Yes.

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 interestingly 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, if you were starting from scratch today, what would you do? And Neil, what did you say?

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 a 504 loan. 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 7 loan, 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 And by the way, like 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 Neil, I saw Ryan Deiss tweet this 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? Yeah.

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? You know, if I 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 published 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, you 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 can do all this stuff, right? All these kids are doing right now. And then you got to study like, you know, 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, you know, 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. 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.

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 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. So anyone who's watching on video, Eric's copying her poses.

So let me read this to— let me read this. Maybe this will be more entertaining for Emma. So This article here, it's really long, okay? In fact, she will definitely be bored. Emma, you're going to be bored for sure, okay? So, 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? 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, 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, like, judging on how the team has grown over the years, like the people that have, you know, chosen and taken upon themselves to learn, that is what is— this all kind of comes together, right? We're talking about this, you know, 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.

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 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. You know, prior to OpenAI being released.

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 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 the 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. And 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 a—

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 think most of Europe, like Western Europe.

And why do you think that is?

Um, 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, Neil, 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 Here's the thing: that concept doesn't that 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? 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 two 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 they— 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, the only reason— 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 mindsets, right? Well, I think that's a good place to end, guys. We will catch you next week and yeah, have a good weekend. Thank you.