How to Build a Personal Brand So Magnetic Money Chases You

There's an invisible algorithm that literally dictates the attention and where it goes on the planet. What we used to call social media has not been social media for a very long time.

If we know this, how can we take advantage of this as creators?

As soon as the algorithm understands what you do and what your business does, it then figures out who is the perfect audience and it is warm calling that person.

These views are translating into real business opportunity.

Everyone here is going to get less views, but they'll be better quality views. It will be the exact right person who should be viewing that content.

What's like an elite strategy that that maybe only 10% of this room could execute on, but if they did, they would be like to the moon.

So the strategy is pretty simple. It becomes—

okay, so let's get into it. Daniel, what— first things first, right now, what do you think about the current state of content in 2026?

Well, the first thing I would say is that what we used to call social media has not been social media for a very long time, or what we still call social media has not been social media for a long time. Uh, social media was originally built on an algorithm that would show you what your friends were doing. So you would go on Facebook and you would see what your friends, what your family, colleagues, all of those people, you would get updates in a chronological feed and that would come to you on the social media platforms and we called it social media. And then they replaced the algorithm with a new algorithm pioneered by TikTok and that was essentially the new age of interest media. Interest media is we don't care what your friends are doing, we're going to show you what's interesting We're gonna figure out what it is that you actually like, and we will just, wherever it happens, whoever shared it, we'll just pick that up and we're gonna share that with you. What's happening now, and this is very current, very recent, and we're only just seeing the early effects of this, is that we have something called the semantic algorithm. And the semantic algorithm means that the AI systems that run social media read and understand what it is that you're posting, and they find people anywhere in the world who really, should be talking to you, should be connecting with you. So this is a very different way of doing things. The interest media algorithm, it would basically measure everything based on likes, clicks, comments, watch time. It didn't know what it was you were posting. It just could see that it was popular and active. And that's all it knew. It didn't have any understanding. Semantic algorithms actually understand what it is that you're posting. Let me translate that all into English. Everyone here is going to get less views, but there'll be better quality views. So you're gonna, you're gonna have, uh, half the views on LinkedIn, half the views on Instagram, but it will be the exact right person who should be viewing that content, provided you upload content that the semantic algorithm can understand. It's going to find you the perfect person who should be checking that content.

And I've noticed this on Instagram. If you guys pull up your posts you will get a meta AI description of any post. And it will say, like for example, if I upload something and it was me talking about content or leadership, it'd say, "Neel Dhingra's latest thoughts on this," and it summarizes the whole thing. So it knew everything about—

It knows everything.

Didn't even have to have a great hook or a thing on it. Like obviously the packaging matters, but it's learning what you're saying. And I didn't even write a really lengthy caption on that one. It was just in the video. It analyzed my transcript.

It's a big deal. And it's a little bit like, what used to work was just post something that would get lots of engagement, and you could also hack it. You could get an engagement pod and an engagement group and get 10 of your friends to kind of like stimulate the algorithm. None of that's gonna work anymore. You're dealing with something that actually understands. It's looking at all the frames. It knows what, if there's a cat in the background, it knows there's a cat in the background. So right now, if I was to ask most people, What is the biggest, most powerful technology that's changing humanity right now? Most people would say large language models. They'd say ChatGPT, Claude, those kind of things. At the same time that those algorithms are getting super powerful and we see it, there's an invisible algorithm that literally dictates the attention and where it goes on the planet, and that is the recommendation engine. And that recommendation engine is choosing who gets to see what. And we need to understand that that's a big trend that's happening at the moment.

So I love that. Okay, so now that we know this change has happened, and honestly a lot of this has just happened in the last few months, the shift with the AI descriptions on all the content. So if we know this, how can we take advantage of this as creators so that way we can reach more people?

So the, the first thing is we want to go back to original understanding of how humans work. Humans, when they're overwhelmed with information, we have a system in our brain called the reticular activating system designed to filter information out. It's the reason that you can walk through Las Vegas and not crash into anyone, but not really remember anything that you saw. So if I walked through a crowded room, I can just kind of move through it, and then if you said, "Who do you remember seeing?" I'd say, "I don't remember seeing anybody. I can't remember anyone." So my brain filters stuff out. It's the same with your customers. They're scrolling, they're scrolling, they're scrolling. Unfortunately, their brain is filtering it out. Idea that, that is backed by evidence, that is people notice you for the first time when they see you for the 11th time. They've got to see you 11 times before they notice that you even—

notice you for the first time when they see you for the 11th time.

Yeah. So what they did is they, they took someone like yourself and they said, Neel Dhingra, do you know who that is? And you go, oh yeah, I know who that is, right? And then they looked back through your history and they say, oh, you've seen them 11 times in the last 90 days. And then I said, do you know who that is? And you go, I don't know who that is. They look at, oh, you only saw them 10 times in the last 90 days. So they notice you for the first time when they see you for the 11th time. So a lot of people, they're posting on social media and they think, oh, I've already said that, or they say, I've already posted too many times this month. You got to get rid of that mindset to begin with. People's brains are filtering you out. They're only going to see you for the first time when they see you for the 11th time. So you've got to post plenty of times.

Yeah, so just basically my interpretation of this is much of the audience has brain rot, or is not—

spot on—

okay, is not like in high intelligence mode as they're scrolling, and we need to remind them more than we need to teach them.

Yeah, remind them that you exist. So there's two things: they have to notice you exist and then get reminded that you exist.

Yeah, and I think about, you know, uh, this is a great thing you're talking about here because I see you posting on YouTube and even on social, and I'll see a topic that you've talked about for the last year maybe a new spin on it, a new packaging on it, but it's the same core topic about personal brand. Or I've seen you talk about the power curve and all the escape. That's part of why we themed our event Escape the Middle, because Daniel made a whole video about getting out of the middle of that power curve.

That's it.

And so, but I see you talking about it in multiple different areas, and I'm never bothered by it. If I'm not into it and I've already seen it, I just skip it. But if I'm in, if I didn't fully engage last time, It's important to remind me. And so I just want to encourage everyone here, like, post your stuff again. Like, go back to your stuff that you posted. The 10 posts you made, there's 2 that did better than 10. Repost them, repackage them. You could post the same old video if you want, but you could also make new ones of it.

True. And with the semantic understanding of that, if it's old content, repost it because a new algorithm is having a look at it. So that's powerful.

Also, you're saying, like, real quick, if 6 months ago you posted something that was a banger, like, go back and reshoot it, repost it.

Look, you can do stuff where if something was a banger on Instagram, let's, let's say, you can scale it down, make it a little bit smaller, scale it up, make it a little bit bigger. You can change the intro, you can change the outro, you can re-edit it, you can color filter it, color grade it, you can add captions to it. There's all sorts of things you can do to shift it, change it. Post it again.

Yeah, and I love this strategy because it's like we're getting more out of the work we're already doing or have done. So, okay, great. So then moving on to the next part.

So the next part is that people understand value propositions when they've spent 2 to 7 hours of research understanding the value proposition. So anything that people in this room have bought in the past where you've purchased something and it's been a considered purchase, it would have taken 2 to 7 hours for your brain to understand the value proposition of a considered purchase. So if you're going to upgrade your cameras, if you're going to upgrade your microphones, if you're going to buy a new car, if you're going to get a watch, if you're going to get a service like an agency to do something, 2 to 7 hours is the learning time for people to understand the value proposition. So what actually happens is that they're not noticing you because you're not posting. They're not seeing you 11 times, so they don't even notice that you exist. And then they do notice you exist, but they have no idea what your value proposition is. And people need it explained to them again and again. So think about there's content that is for getting noticed, and then there's content for getting known, and that is where you're explaining your value proposition. You have to imagine, I like the term brain rot, you are talking to people who've got brain rot. You're talking to people who are busy, distracted, they're confused. If they already understood everything that you know, they would be in your business, right? So they don't know what's going on. So you've got to go through and do explainer content. And this could be content that could be 6 minutes to an hour. And in that content, you're clearly explaining, here's where you're going to start, here's where you're going to finish, here's the problems we're going to solve, here's the prize, the payoff.

This lives on YouTube.

It could be on YouTube. You can do long-form content on LinkedIn. You can do long-form content on Instagram. Most of the platforms, we think of them as one platform, but they actually, they're about 20 products stacked on top of each other.

Yeah, I even saw on X people were posting long videos now.

Long videos on X, long audios on X, long posts on X.

But I think like for somebody who's overwhelmed, it's like, okay, just pick one place. Because I know it's when you talk about 5 different platforms, if you are normally posting short form on Instagram, you could post long form there, but I don't think the audience is necessarily as much looking for long form there. But they might be.

They can, they can. I post some long stuff on Instagram. I get, you know, plenty of, plenty of people will sit and watch it.

Yeah. Um, so, but then the other place would be, the main place would be YouTube to take that.

YouTube is a great place for long form platform, uh, long, long form content. The only issue with, uh, YouTube, you is that it does have a great recommendation engine that will put other stuff in front of people as well. So it might introduce them to a competitor. Long form on LinkedIn is really focused on just you. So LinkedIn does, like, it's up to 15 minutes and people, they're just watching you on LinkedIn and they're just getting engrossed in that one thing at a time, which is really good. So if you think short form for getting noticed, long form for people to understand what you're doing. And then when people understand, you need to give them a simple, easy way to basically signal that they're interested and connect. So what you need to do is have a lead form where people fill in a lead form of some sort. So the strategy is pretty simple. It becomes short-form, long-form, lead form. So short-form to get noticed, long-form to educate and get people to understand the value proposition, and then lead form to capture people's details and capture people's data and to get them in to engage.

Yeah, I love that.

And one of the things that I'm doing, I've got a group of 7 different companies, mostly software companies, but some agencies, and I've got like education training. And we just, with all of our companies, we just go short form, long form, lead form. And that's the backbone of the marketing strategy. We produce something like 15,000 to 20,000 warm leads a month through organic, different posting strategies, and it's short-form, long-form, lead-form.

Yeah, I love this. Okay, so short-form content, which many people are doing here, but it needs to lead somewhere. And the problem I think here, or with many people, including myself for many years, is the short-form, the only way to move forward was it leads to the lead-form. And that is too big of a gap.

Too much of a gap.

In 2026. Now some people, it does happen, so I'm not saying it doesn't happen, and it could have happened because somebody's been watching your short-form, You stay engaged. So I love that strategy. But the better, smarter play would be to actually drive them to go watch a longer video.

That's it.

A 6-minute video that'll walk them through the whole process. Even if that 6-minute video doesn't do that well, you're still getting the conversions.

You're getting the warmth required for people to give you their real data, their real information on that lead form.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then when they come through, the lead form is more— it's a higher quality.

Well, when those leads come in, that's, you know, that that's someone who's starting to understand your value proposition. They've been consuming your content. They've gone through a process. So a few key ideas: short-form content, the best things to talk about, pain points, anything that people notice as a pain point, anything that frustrates them, um, prizes, the things that people want, the things they wish they could achieve, the outcomes that they desire, and problems, the challenges that they're trying to solve, the actual technical challenges that they're going through. And if you can link any of those three things to the current news trends, so you've got pain, prize, problem linked to news, that stuff really cuts through, engages trends, and brings the right people across. Here's a— before I move on to what to put into the long form, here's a question I've got for everyone, which is, if there was a magical phone that was on your desk, and every time you pick up the phone, it auto-dials a person whose behavior in the last week indicates that they would definitely want to buy from you. Alright, so imagine you pick up that phone and whatever it is you're selling, someone in the last week has given off a ton of signals that says they're interested in what you're selling, and if you pick up the phone, it's going to auto-dial and connect. How many times would you pick up the phone?

All day, bro.

All day. Okay, so now that you've said all day, how many pieces of content are you posting per day?

Once.

Once. So you're only picking up the phone once a day.

Some people, zero sometimes.

Right? So you've got the magic phone, but you're not using it. When I say magic phone, this is what I mean by this new algorithm. The new algorithm is not just giving you vanity metrics. It's not just giving you views. It's figuring out the exact perfect person who needs to hear what you've got to say. As soon as the algorithm understands what you do and what your business does, it then figures out who is the perfect audience, and it is warm calling that person and saying, hey, check this out, Neel's got a great piece of content for you.

Yes. And then the thing that would enable that process to occur more is I've found a big problem with people is they don't— their content is not clear.

Yes.

So they lack clarity in the video. And so I'm not really sure who this is for, what pain point, problem, or, uh, prize this is for.

And the algorithm is building its understanding of you. So as soon as you start posting all over the place trying to get clicks and views, the algorithm is confused. So it's sitting there going, I don't really, I don't get it. Like, are you into politics? Are you into business? Are you into fishing? Like, it's too much stuff. So it's not giving, it's finding, it's trying to find you this weird audience that meets all of it and it's like, I can't do it. So as soon as you're just clear consistently for a little while, you've trained the algorithm, yep, this is who I'm gonna go for. Now the other thing too is don't be afraid to start a new account in 2026 because in 2026 it doesn't matter how many friends you've got. The whole audience through friends and followers, that's ancient. Right, you could start a fresh account today, and if you're clear in your first 10 posts, it's like, okay, I got you. I know who you're looking for. You're looking for this type of person. Let's put you in front of 10,000 of them.

Yeah, no, I agree. It's the person in the room who's got 12 followers, or somebody's got 1,200, and somebody's got 12,000. We all have an equal chance.

It's all been equalized. Yes, this new algorithm has equalized. I'm expecting to see small accounts of 10,000 that massively outperform on sales for legacy accounts of hundreds of thousands of followers because the algorithm is confused from the legacy account and it's clear with the new account.

Okay, so that's short form. We'll get into long form, but just before we do, you get to talk to all the major leaders. He's been on Diary of the CEO. I said 7, he's like, no, it's 8 times, Neil, I'm sorry. Like, you know, I was like, "Don't discount me a time." Like, you've been on Diary CEO 8 times, which is how I discover so many great people, but there's a reason why Stephen Bartlett keeps bringing you back, right? And it's because of your marketing knowledge, but also you've gotten to be exposed to a lot of elite marketers. We had Cody Sanchez here last year. I noticed you were there with Cody. You're with all these people and rubbing elbows, and I even saw you weirdly at Richard Branson's island, you know, recently. You know, you were talking to all these people. So when you talk to the elite marketers right now in 2026, what are they doing that we need to know? 'Cause that's what I wanna bring to the group today. Like, yes, we're gonna take, we should be posting more, which is awesome, and we can get more clear with it. But what's like an elite strategy that maybe only 10% of this room could execute on, but if they did, they would be like to the moon?

So there's two things that come to mind. Number one, is there's no such thing as mouse-flavored cat food.

So— Say that again. Hold on. Say that again.

There's no such thing as mouse-flavored cat food. Mouse-flavored cat food, right? And the reason that there's no such thing as mouse-flavored cat food is because when it comes to cats, as much as they would love to have mouse-flavored cat food, it would be their favorite flavor, they would love it. Cats would probably love like a little tin that has a dead mouse in it, and you open it up, up and its legs are still kind of going or something like that.

You guys get a little creepy, bro. I hate mice.

See, this is the point.

Rats. I hate rats. That's what I was going to say.

And the point is, the reason they—

I can feel like crawling on me right now. I don't know what just happened.

Cats like spiders and moths. We could do moth flavored. We could have spider flavored cat treats. The reason there's no such thing as mouse-flavored cat food is because cats don't have access to credit cards. They don't have any buying power. They're not very good at e-commerce shopping. So one of the things that I see is that we have this thing called market segmentation. And market segmentation basically means that there's different parts of the market. There's the top 1% who we call the luxury buyers. They typically have about 15% of the total budget available in that market. So even though they represent 1% of people, they have 15% of the budget. Then we have the next 9% down, and that 9%, they have about 45% of the budget. So the top 10% has 60% of the budget, and the bottom 90%, when it comes to having disposable income or disposable budgets, the bottom 90% has less than 40% of the budget, and it's crowded and it's noisy. Now, one of the things that elite marketers do is they understand that they're going after the segments that have money. They don't care about getting dragged down. They don't care about getting dragged away from their perfect customer. Even though the cat says, "I really, really, really, really want the mouse-flavored cat food," the elite marketer says, "You got no money, cat. Sorry." Right, I'm talking to cat owners. The cat owner has the budget, which is why when you go and look at the cat food, it's got roast salmon and turkey and it's got like pâté, right? Because they're selling to the cat owner, they're selling to the person who's got the credit card. So elite marketers, they understand who's got the credit card, who's got the budget, what is their buying, what is their buying criteria. Elite marketers are also using AI to better understand their audiences. So one of the things that I periodically do, I get people to fill in online quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, and I take all of that data and I will export it and I'll throw it into Claude and I'll say, tell me about the people who are in this list. And Claude comes back with unbelievable insights about who's in the list. So I might upload 500 people who have filled in an online scorecard. Claude will say there's 3 major segments in here. And it'll give me these, and I say, talk me through my 3 ideal customer personas that you've found. It says, well, there's this type of person, their biggest pain point, their biggest frustration is this. There's this type of person, they're wrong for you, they want something that you don't really do well, ignore them.

Yeah, right. And then you're basically taking that data and you could make better content, like target those people better.

Yeah. And, and there's this, there's this stuff called, um, correlation analysis. And correlation analysis is normally something that big companies used to be able to do. It's very tricky kind of thing, but you can just upload some data of quiz questionnaire into Claude and say, are there any unique correlations that I should be aware of that's in this data? Claude will go, yeah, actually, the people who said that they wanted the product in blue are also the ones that have platinum credit cards. Yeah, right. So like, it will figure out—

I love the signals. You talk a lot about signals, and that's what the elite— that's what I really wanted to categorize or hone in on here today. Now, if you guys heard what Daniel just said, it's— I don't know if anybody's pulled the math on this, but I believe last year, first-time homebuyers represented the lowest share of home purchases in— I don't know if it's ever, or is it ever? Yeah, it's ever. And if somebody could get the percentage, that'd be great. But I think it was under 20% of all transactions. And so it's shrinking. And so I feel like a lot of people on content, so they're like, let me help that first timer.

Mouse flavored cat food.

That's the cat food you're talking about, dog. Like they can't buy it. Like, you know what I mean? And by the way, no shame. We should definitely help first timers. We should put it in our content. But what you'll find is if you start targeting one or two rungs up the food chain, those people will be pulled up anyways because there are people who are resourceful. There are people who can get, You know, to get— we had the largest share of homebuyers last year get help from family to get into real estate. They're pooling resources, they're doing it together. So they will figure out, but they'll be more attracted to that than they would kind of playing in the mud. And I just feel like I don't want to tell anyone to not serve that group as your main niche, but I feel like you are starting to be swimming against the current.

Yeah. What you will really want to do if you're— especially if you're a small business, like if you're sub-$10 million of revenue. What you, what you really want to do is find a tiny little underserved niche, niche, and you want to, you want to go in and you want to find this little group. And that's what Claude is really helpful for. That's the correlation analysis. That's where you say— that's where Claude says, oh, we've discovered that people in New York are interested in buying a holiday home in Colorado, right?

And it's like, like a micro niche, right?

So they're just finding these little micro niche opportunities. Now there's another elite marketing strategy that I should probably tell as well, which is called Take the Rolls-Royce to the Boat Show.

Dang, bro. This sounds better than the cat one.

So Rolls-Royce used to go to the car show and they used to go out there and there's 50 different car makers and Rolls-Royce is the most expensive car maker, and people would walk up to the Rolls-Royce, it's half a million dollars. What do you get for half a million dollars? Oh, it's got an umbrella and you stick it in the door. And then they go and look at the Toyota and they go, okay, the Toyota's like one-fifth of the cost and it's got all of this stuff. And, you know, why would you spend an extra $400,000? You know, because it's just, It's just luxury branding. It's, you know, it's a waste of money. So Rolls-Royce at the car show were the most expensive and also easily comparable to other options. Then Rolls-Royce discovered something interesting, which is when they took the Rolls-Royce to the boat show, it was a completely different conversation. Because at the boat show, people are sitting there looking at $5 million yachts and they're going, I'm gonna spend one day a month on this $5 million yacht, or for $500,000 for one-tenth, I'm going to drive that Rolls-Royce every day. And people are turning up and they're bamming them on the credit card, impulse buying Rolls-Royces, right?

Dang, that's crazy.

Yeah, right? So they're sitting there going, it's a good value, it's really good because of what they're comparing it to, the price anchor. Now what I see is I see a lot of businesses, they go, oh, how does everyone in my industry market themselves? I'll just go and do the same thing everyone else is doing and I'm going to show up side by side, shoulder to shoulder with all my competition. I'm going to get compared on price and everyone's going to get confused and everyone's going to hassle me for, can I get more for less? You've got to find the equivalent of the boat show for your industry. You've got to figure out where are people not going where suddenly you are way better value and that you're not being compared to all of your peers. So I had this guy who I was talking to who was an executive coach, and he hated the fact that everyone's an executive coach. And I'm, you know, there's all these executive coaches. I said, stop telling people you're an executive coach. Become an ex— become a speaker at conferences, you know, right? Become a speaker. So he remarketed himself as a speaker, and he got booked at different speaking engagements. And people would say, how much is your speaking fee? And he would say, my speaking fee is $10,000, or I do it for $2,000, do 80% discount, if I can at the end of my talk recommend that people, if they want to implement with me, I can be their coach.

Yeah.

So he gets booked at all of these engagements. He's the big name, he's the speaker, and he's still getting paid to be there. But now his executive coaching prices go through the roof because there's hundreds of people who are the perfect people and they're not comparing to anyone else.

Yes.

Right. So he's taking his Rolls-Royce to the boat show.

He found the boat show.

Yeah.

I got you, bro. This is— that's big time because I think like, you know, it's like that whole analogy with the water. You know, if you—

a bottle of water costs, you know, yeah, different amount if it's in the plane or— yeah.

Dang, in a Vegas hotel, the bottle of water costs $8.

Yeah.

You know, same, same water. Yep. Different price. So I just think of— reason why we bring this up, guys, is because we're talking about building a premium personal brand which would escape competition, which would also escape margin compression, which would also escape, you know, all the things that are attacking the industry, honestly, from a price perspective. And you just don't want to be in the compare— like, let me look at all the vendors and see which is the cheapest one. That's not the vibe you want right now.

One more thing, because you're talking about price compression. You have to market beyond your capacity, not to your capacity. So let's say you could take on 100 customers. What most people do is they dial back their marketing as they approach 100 customers. They want to hit it just the right amount. Unfortunately, mathematically, if you look at economic theory, that will actually only achieve wages. The way that a business achieves profit is when demand exceeds supply. So what has to happen is that if you want 100 customers, you've got to market as though you're going to take on 200 and then turn some customers away. And it's so counterintuitive, but the businesses that are profitable are the ones that turn people away. So for example, I know this, I saw on social media people wanted to be here but couldn't get a ticket.

Yes.

Right? There's a drug dealer out the front selling counterfeit tickets to this event.

Right? That's true. Yeah, because we're oversubscribed.

Yeah, you're oversubscribed and that is what makes the business work. I see people do this weird thing. Have you ever been in a, like in a ski boat? You know when you like push the engines on and it comes up out of the water and then it starts gliding along the water and then you turn the engines off and the boat sinks back in the water? So it's like this with marketing. I see so many entrepreneurs or business owners, they turn the marketing engines on or the social media engines on and then the customers start coming and they go, oh, I've got too many customers, better switch that off. And they sink back down and then they go, oh, I've got no customers, better put the jets back on, right? And their business becomes lumpy cash flow because it's like, right now I've got to get it going again and switching it off, turning it on. The goal is to turn it on, leave it on, and let people be disappointed that they missed out. And it's really counterintuitive, but you You know your business works when people are disappointed that they wanted to buy something and they couldn't.

Yes, I love that because people want what they can't have.

They do.

And so this is amazing. I love this strategy because it's all the psychological stuff that goes into being premium. Okay, so now for this room, you know, that's trying to convert more of this audience that we're getting from short form, long form. Now we're at lead form. Yeah, for the lead form. Okay, you have a unique strategy on this and you've been telling me about it. You actually just made a lead form for me and you showed it to me and it was really it was really dialed in in terms of the data points that I would collect from the potential consumer. My objection has always been, if I ask a lead, and this is why I'm always skeptical of some of the longer surveys. When I get people to opt into things, I have found any piece of friction reduces the amount of people that sign up for things. So I try and make it like frictionless. It's anybody who's done anything online where you have to sign up, you notice that if there's another step, you have a drop-off. So That's okay because you— they weren't serious anyway. So it's actually a filter in and of itself by adding one more piece because then you get the serious people. You don't want more leads, you want better leads. But you're talking now about having more brand awareness, maybe somebody going to a long-form piece of content and then coming, which makes them more serious. And now we're getting to the lead form. So what is the data points that we need to be collecting that would inform us that we can improve our marketing and we can get more conversion?

So let's start at the start. They've seen a short-form piece of content 11 times. They've noticed that you exist. They've gone to a long-form piece of content. They're starting to understand your value proposition. And now it says, "I really want you to take an online assessment to see whether this suits you. I want you to take an online assessment to see whether this is a good thing for you, good fit." Or do an online calculator. Or I want you to request access to join my discussion group for people who are gonna discuss this and fill in an application to join the discussion group. All right, so they've seen—

So from a lead magnet perspective, I think the ones that would apply most in this room would be like, yeah, quizzes. Yeah, yeah, quizzes. To determine your assessment, to determine if you are ready.

Yep.

Find out your readiness score.

Are you ready for this? Yes. Is this the right choice? Which one should you get? Should you get this or this? So any assessment-based thing, now they've seen a piece of long-form content, they're ready to take an assessment. The assessment is super powerful because you've got name, you've got email, you've got location, but then they take the assessment. And an assessment is typically about 15 questions. And when someone answers 15 questions, that's when you know so much about them and that's where you can do a lot with the data with AI. So the questions I like to ask is the question, which best describes your current situation? Which best describes your desired situation that you're trying to achieve? Which best describes the biggest problem that you've been struggling to solve? Are there any solutions you've already explored? Is there anything else you want me to know? Those are the first 5 questions. And then what I would call 10 best practice questions. And best practice is, have you done this? Have you tried this? Have you done this? Have, you know, which of these is accurate for— so once you get those 10 questions, you now know all sorts of— 10, 15 questions— you know all sorts of things about them, and you can segment, you can talk directly to their needs, you can have different emails that go to different types of people, you can get rid of some people who are not right to be talking to. All of that happens once you've got the data.

I love that. Okay, so, and then the other one you mentioned was Calculators. I found, like I was just talking about earlier, that people love DIY. They want to calculate their own stuff. Now we as experts want to be like, well, we'll do that because we are the expert, we'll talk to you. But I have found that people are selling the thing that the consumer doesn't want at that point, which is a call or a conversation. They're not ready if they're in the not yet group. So letting them do their own calculation on how much they could afford or how much equity they could pull out of their property or how much they would net if they sold their home. And it's actually an accurate thing. And I found you guys are using Claude and many people are using this to create these custom calculations.

You can do custom calculate. There's different— the thing I will say with Claude and vibe coding is that you can now vibe code initial pieces of software. Keeping those current, fresh, and working becomes a full-time job. Yeah. So for a serious business, it's worth spending a little bit on a subscription to someone who figures this out and keeps it up and running. So there are softwares just for assessments, just for calculators, right? That's the sort of thing. So you can do a test run with a Claude-coded calculator, but ultimately, yeah, any calculator, any quiz, any assessment, any self-customization, customers love that. And when you put one of these live, you're gonna discover the weirdest things which is that there's a whole section of customers who do this at 10 o'clock at night.

Yes.

Right? So you are sitting there going, give me a call. And it's like, for whatever reason, you know, I'm a surgeon, I'm in surgery throughout the day. I go and research this at 10 o'clock at night. So if you give people the tools, some of the best customers are the ones who self-assess at 10 o'clock at night and then they go, yeah, I'm ready to go.

Yeah, I'll just take my own example, Daniel, just to kind of wrap up this whole conversation of like, making it easier for people to start. And I call it a second door. You only have one door to work with you, which is through the hours of these hours, and you got to call me or text me. But you need a second door, which is this. Doesn't mean that you shut off the first. It just means that you have another option for the people who don't want to talk or they just want to start this way. And I remember a guy in our— not in our group here, but a guy who I connected with through a networking group in Reno when I was there. And we needed more life insurance.

Mm-hmm.

My wife and I, we just like— we have some coverage, but I was like, dude, you know what? I think we should bump it up. So I just said, "Hey, I was referred to you. Would love to get more life insurance." He goes, "Well, here's the next step. My assistant will reach out to you. We'd like to schedule a time for you to come by the office and we'd like to sit down and have a full conversation." And I was like, "No, I just kind of wanted to buy the life insurance." You know what I mean? And so he was making it super complicated, but I meant I could have gone to that if he would have started with like, "How about we take this assessment to determine How much insurance you need, like take this assessment, determine how much money you can need for this, or like whatever those assessments are would be a great first step for a busy person because then I don't have to go anywhere and do anything.

Yeah, you've got to give people options. Uh, so there's online, there's offline. So I could say, which suits you best? Do you want to come to the office or do you want to talk on Zoom, online or offline? There's one-to-one and group, right? Do you want to join a group presentation where I'm going to present all the options, or would you like one-to-one, right? Depending on— life insurance would be one.

Yeah. Of course.

But there's group, you could say, "Hey look, we do a group presentation for entrepreneurs about all, like scenario planning. Do you want to join? If you want, come along, or do you want the recording?" There's interactive or there's asynchronous. So synchronous or asynchronous. So this is, is it happening live and now we're talking or is it, you know, those sorts of things. Strangest thing happened for one of my businesses is that we sell something fairly high end, it's in the tens of thousands. And we had an assumption that people could not possibly buy this over a text message sale. And we started questioning that assumption a couple of months ago. And today 16% of our clients are signing up having never spoken to a salesperson. It's just text. So we call this sell by thumbs, which is a traumatic thing for me at the moment. But I'm literally not one of our sell by thumbs. Experts, but we have our whole sales team, we've retrained them on how to sell by text. Yeah. And it turns out some of the best people, they don't want to talk to you, they just want to jump on text messages and they want to fire off their questions and you fire back your answers and fire off the questions. The beauty of this is that pretty soon that is very automatable, right? You can have an AI system that helps and supports the, the salespeople to get that perfectly dialed in every single time. So you want to question the assumptions that people, you know, Google had some research a couple of years ago and it said that the funnel is actually dead, the marketing funnel. And the way you want to replace your thinking about this is stop thinking about marketing funnels where you're forcing people towards a decision. Start thinking about a marketing playground. And the marketing playground is there's your business and there's different rides that people can go on. And you wanna put lots of rides around the business and you say, "Oh, you wanna take an assessment? Yeah, cool, take an assessment. You wanna watch hours of YouTube videos? Cool, that's over there. Do you wanna read my book? Here's my book. You wanna join a discussion group? You wanna have a live webinar? You want a recording of the webinar?" So you're just creating what I would call the marketing playground and people can go on as many rides as they want and then buy from the business.

Love that, man.