I Interviewed The #1 Agency Owner Who Scales D2C Brands to $100k/day

Yo, what's up guys? I got D. Dang. On the podcast. An absolute legend. We've been in growth circles for a while now. Me and him both have had growth marketing agencies and have spoken on stages across the industry. We're going to talk about a few things. AI and marketing, what to do with NANN and automation, how to automate your workflows in AI and a bunch of other things that are super cool. So stay around. It's going to be super tactical. We're going to skip past like most of the fluff in this podcast, as you guys know. So D, welcome on bro.

Thank you. And also I'm probably going to end up grilling Nick around a whole bunch of stuff that he's doing.

Absolutely. I'm ready for it.

Spoken in like years. Absolute years. So I think this is going to be a fun one. And I mean we both seem to be curious cats, so I think this is going to be a fun one for sure.

Super curious, dude. I chalked that up as to why I continue to win because I'm not that smart. I just continue to learn from people smarter than me. So if you guys are like that, you're going to like this. So first off, what's. What's top of mind for you today? Like what are you. What's the biggest problem that you're trying to figure out right now?

I think a few things, you know, in, in in D2C world. So right hook started off as a, in 2017 as a will run your Facebook ads type of agency. Right. 2017 was like if you knew how to put ads together in D2C, you're golden, right? Yeah, pretty much. If you had something to sell that wasn't. I mean even lead gen was great and easy back then too. And you had so many more options and all that other stuff, especially with all the poke data. So we started off there, 2017, fast forward to fast built her name because I was just openly sharing information within certain Facebook groups back then. Kids. Back then it was Facebook groups. Discord wasn't even invented yet. And Right. So like start started just sharing stuff, spreadsheets, how we think about things, etc got invited on stages, which I thought this is kind of wild. Why the heck do they want this like random Asian dude to like speak on stage and shared stuff? Right. And the timing.

Smart Asian dude.

Well, I mean, you know, the, the ethnicity comes with a few presumptions which aren't always true because. Right, I agree. And then anyway, so started sharing, started getting on stage and the setup was really nice and really forced. It was all luck really that that notoriety led into. Then Covid we all freaked out for a second there.ios14 we all freaked out for a second there. And then stimmy checks. And when the stimmy checks dropped, anyone that was sitting on D2C was just that thing was shooting off like a rocket. Cause alcohol was involved. Getting stuck in your bedroom was involved. And buying things was also involved with all those stimmy checks. So that was back then. The game is so dramatically different now I think in D2C where you really have to be intentional about how you want to build a brand, especially if you want to build it to eight to nine figures or build to sell for a meaningful exit. So a lot of what's top of mind for me and for the team Right now is November 2022. I think it's 22 or 23. November 23rd, this chat GPT thing shows up and I'm sitting there. I vividly remember this moment. I turned her to my wife and I go honey, we're fucked. And she's like what are you talking about? Because it showed up on the news, right? This is regular old like Australian Public Network news chatgpt. This latest thing is AI going to take over the world. And I went honey, we're. And she goes what are you talking about? And I go well this thing is only going to get better, not worse. And once it starts to teach itself how to get better, it's going to be able to move faster than this dumb brain can. And at large most like, you know, meat covered brains can. Can move, you know, the speed at which we can move. So that that was the first thing and then the next thing also. So that's one piece and then the other piece is really understanding how we can shed and we're still working through it a lot but shed that identity of very much like a technical media first and performance through that lens to go. How do we grow a brand more. More holistically actually look at their cash conversion cycle, actually look at their ebitda, what type of contribution margin they have, what is their product line look like? So really getting all up in their business and how do we position ourselves as. So without being like either a school.com type of a place where it's like how to start a brand and get into their numbers or. Or without just painting ourselves as same old same old. We are performance marketers first. We really want to start peeling that back to go. We're growth marketers. First. So those are the top two things really, that we're really pushing. But the AI thing is, I mean, it's everywhere. There's no shortage of FOMO. You go on LinkedIn and everyone's just like, I built this one AI agent that does these 45 things that also happens to wipe my ass. How awesome is this? Comment, wipe my ass if you want a copy.

Yeah, comment, wipe my ass. And then my mini chat agent will take it from there. Yeah, no, for sure, dude. And, well, thankfully Robotics is probably far enough away where that's not a reality, but in a few years, who knows? So with that being said, are you finding the clients, like, is this a necessary rebrand out of, like, reactivity? You think, like, right now you have to do it and it's hard because you guys have an identity in the space, or is it because you're trying to future plan and you're in the future?

So door number two in terms of future plan, the perceived need for someone to come in and manage your meta ads or your TikTok ads or your attention marketing is still really, really strong. That's the perceived need, right? But it's one of those things where you've been in the game long enough. A patient will come in and say, well, I've got this rash. My need is just, doctor, make this rash go away. And then we dig a bit deeper and diagnose and do some blood panels or MRI or whatever and be like, bro, you're rash. I could give you, I can give you this lotion. It's going to make a rash go away for three days. And on day number four, you're going to have to come back in the clinic again and that rash is going to show up. Because what's really happening, if you want the rash to go away is this other thing that lives at a much deeper level. So that could be your positioning or the fact that you only have one hero product and you happen to like. For example, I was talking to this brand two to three years ago who came to pitch me because they saw my content. They're like, hey, man, I really like your stuff. I started this brand. What do you think? And the positioning was, it was a makeup remover, completely organic, cotton piece of cloth. That's all it is, right? But it's sustainable, earth friendly, all that stuff. And it felt really good on the skin. They gave me a sample, it was selling for $27 with a lifetime replacement guarantee. And I go, this isn't an ads problem like your unit economics. You Just gave them a lifetime replacement guarantee and it's 27 bucks. So your repeat purchase is like dead. You just killed that just from the positioning alone. But the perceived needs was ads. Right?

And it always is. That's the fun thing about what we sell is it's inherently. They think, they think they need. Then you get on the call and they're like okay. It seems like most business owners, let's call it 80% think that it's like more inputs, more ads into the funnel, more traffic into the funnel. So when you're talking about embeds or like how can we embed ourselves more into the nature of their business? Analyze cash conversion cycles. Look at how fast they liquidate ad spend to, to get to ROAS 1.0. Let's say what is it that you guys are doing right now or have thought of that you're going to do in the future that is like sort of cutting edge for a performance marketing agency, quot unquote.

So I think the, and here's the, here's the beautiful part. Just by having those conversations up front as early as like the discovery call and then moving. Even when we do any type of diagnostic, we insist on doing the diagnostic at the business economics level first.

Me too.

Right. So then, so it has nothing to do with all the magical tricks that we have in within our bag for like how to buy media or how to do creative strategy or any or like, you know, how to come up with hooks. Sure, all those things matter. But we look at the core part of it to go. Let's assess the athlete at their most baseline core performing metrics. Right. Like, let's look at their V, the equivalent of like what is your VO2 max? Like what is the quality of your sleep, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those things matter regardless of your sport.

Yes.

Right. Regardless of your sport, those things matter. Like how much iron do you have in your body at any given time? How well do you recover from fatigue? Those things matter for any human body. So what are the core things that matter for any type of business is getting built. It just so happens to be a brand, not a service business or anything like that. But we start there. What, what type of targets do you have? Like can you actually articulate your end point or at least your two year forward point of revenue and profit? Let's break that down to one year and then look at how much contribution margin you actually need to cover your operational expenses and then that whatever, whatever's left over for that target. But starting Those conversations, which weird some of people out because they're like, yo, you're kind of all getting all up in my business here.

A bit like a doctor, I love you. You're speaking my love language right now. Because there's guys, there's so many agencies that will charge a percent of ad spend and have no idea about the contribution margin of the business. And then they're left in the dark as to why they get cut six months later. And they're like, wow, I was making the money. And it's like, well, no. Was the business more profitable? And they're like, well, I don't know.

Right. Yeah, for sure. And I don't know if it's out of, like, anything nefarious or. It's just that certain agents usually not. I felt it firsthand. It's almost like a. Is it within my remit to start asking those questions, or do I risk offending my client by asking these fairly intimate questions? Right. It's. It's. I think the analogy that I was using with the team months and months ago was, do you really want, I don't know, like, relation, Spousal relationship advice from your accountant? You know what I mean? Like, we got potentially one thing if.

They have a successful marriage. Yes, totally.

But, you know, you know what I'm saying? Like, we got. He got hired for this one thing, and then now he's just like, unsolicited advice on that other thing.

Correct.

So. So I had to. We really had to retrain the team. Cause even a lot of the team felt really awkward. They're like, is this. How do I even ask these questions for the existing, like, portfolio of clients? Right? Like, how do we talk to our partners in that type of a way when historically we haven't. What if they get funny? How do we navigate through that? So they had a lot of fears, which really. What turned. What ended up happening was a lot of. It was a sigh of relief to be like, oh, my God, you're the first people that actually asked me this shit. Yeah, we're like, oh, that's cool, dude.

That's such a. That's such a key point. Because both me and you, being business owners, entrepreneurs, you desperately want to be understood. You, like, if you're like me, have you ever worked for people before? Like, you go through this where you don't actually have to be the entrepreneur. And then you get there and it's like, it's freaking lonely and no one actually cares, or you feel like no one actually understands your business except you and that's a lonely island to be on. So for like.

Because you're not sharing everything. Yeah.

Correct. Yeah. Because you don't know how people interpret it. There's a lot of fears in how you communicate it. And there is a way to do it. And you can be transparent with your team. And I like to be, I like to be as transparent as I can be. The only thing I'm not transparent on these days is payroll. Just because I've see it, like, cause a bunch of unnecessary comparing problems. But other than that, I try to be as transparent as I can with the team, but it's. It was a concerted effort till I get there. And yeah, it's just like, it's hard to do, but it's a sigh of relief. Typically when your performance agency, like, you guys come in and they actually want to understand that I'm like, dang, maybe they actually care. Maybe they're not actually trying to maximize their take home.

Right.

For the first time ever.

Yeah, totally.

So to me, that's, that's a huge, huge thing.

And you've been in the agency game, so you know this firsthand. Like the, the. That back of mind thought on the receiving end of are they just trying to increase their take home is always there. It's always gonna be there. Right? Because we can call it, you know, like, agencies do this all the time. We're part of it too. Like, we can call ourselves growth partners or we can call ourselves whatever the fuck we want to call ourselves.

Yeah, you can frame how you want.

You can frame however the hell you want. But bottom line is we're a service provider. Right. Unless we have actual skin in the game, we're putting money into the brand or anything of that nature, sure. Then the basis of the entire relationship changes. But outside of that, we're a service provider. That's all it is. So it's just really being able to scope out what is the service that we provide not only at the business level, but then also at like the human level. Right?

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah. Last thing on like agency deliverables. I just want to point out I've never spoken about this on the podcast, but dude, did you have a realization similar to me when I was in the agency game? I thought it was all about like, we build ourselves as a performance agency. I'm like, cool. So long as our ROAS is above whatever with the baseline is, they'll never cut us. We'll just be like, we'll be good 100% retention. And then I Learned that the like client management game is actually more important than the tactics and the performance improvement. So what was the big. What was. I'm curious, what was the biggest lesson you guys had as far as like the secret to client retention? I've talked to Ray about this too and you guys do some really cool, unique stuff that's actually good for both sides.

Yeah, for sure. So a few things. So at the primary core, what drives the underpinning philosophy behind it is our company core value number one, which was stolen from Atlassian actually I think. Right. Which is focus on the client's success and everything else will follow.

Yeah.

So that's, that's core value number one. And everything's kind of driven with that. Core value number three is like deliver. Wow. Which was stolen from Zappos. Like every touch point, everything that we put forward, does it make him like. I'm not talking. We were not talking, like fantastical. Blow their minds away every single time. But even something like a wow, they actually took time to do that. That's cool.

But get to an aha moment quick.

Yeah, basically. Exactly. Um, and the, the underpinning psychological understanding that I'm always trying to continually reinforce embed with the team is the ad accountant isn't. Is never the one that makes the decision. The human is. So make sure that you're appealing and you're observing the human who's making the decision. And you know us in the count type people tend to assess the success of something through the account. Right. And we tend to hire people who are really great at reading re. Almost like reading the tea leaves inside of an account. Yes, but can they do the same and read the tea leaves when they're sitting in front of a person and they're explaining something and the person's just going like, yep. Huh. Yeah, cool.

Yeah.

Right? Yep, that's cool. And just like no eye contact. They're not sitting forward, but you're just rambling on within the Google sheet. Right. So I think building up that, that muscle for a lot of our team becomes. Is a key thing. We're doing a really big push now to really put forward not only, not only like curriculum training, but then also just like sit down training with them also like follow through. So we have this thing now internally where we just do roast calls. So hey, here was a client call that I had recently.

I love that.

Right. And we'll. They'll just. We've gotten, we've gotten to this place where I've got a team now who, I mean we're a lot tighter. At the peak, we were like at 120, 130 people now. Now we're a lot tighter. There's this sense of like, people. The core team seem to be very okay with just posting a video and saying, roast me. And I'm going, this is awesome.

I love that so much. Those are my people.

Yeah. And we've got that almost at like a 90 plus percent of our people are like that now. Which is, I feel so fortunate around because prior to this it wasn't like that. We had team members that were a bit more like, only if it's a win. Only if I've got a wife, I'll share that. And I'm a bit more guarded about the other stuff. The difficulty with that though is then you don't actually get to do sponge mode where you're in a room with a bunch of people who are smarter than you or more capable than you in other different dimensions. Right.

And if you don't, I mean, if you don't show areas of improvement, you don't grow. Like, it's hard to break patterns. You have to break to rebuild. So I'm a big believer in that totally.

And from an employee and from a career standpoint, most of the time, I found in my experience running this company is the moment people stop feeling like they can continue to learn at the organization that they're at, they start to go like, I feel like I'm at the top of the mountain here. Everyone's pinging my DMs asking me for advice.

Uh huh.

What the heck's going on here? I want to go into rooms. Yeah.

Yep. And right. Like, I've been susceptible to that in my career too. And I always tell my team, like, when I start to feel like that I have a heuristic now where I'm like, hey guys, I'm looking to be humbled. Like, please humble me. Like, please correct out if I'm saying something like, it's been a while, Take me down, please. Yeah, I know it'll be good for me.

Yeah, for sure. 100%.

And that's happened so many times. Uh, and yeah, it never feels good at first, but then it always feels good in the end. Dude. Yeah. Thank you for talking me through how to embed. Now we'll get on more juicy tactical stuff. The more exciting stuff that people want to know. The stuff you're doing with AI I. I agree there is, we talked about a little bit beforehand, a world that we see this, whether it's a Performance agency or what we have in house, which is kind of like an in house agency growth agency. The services are equity brands. What are you seeing as far as trends go? Where are you seeing departments being more efficient? What changes are you noticing like currently right now?

So right now let's timestamp this first because. Fuck me.

Yeah, I know bro.

Right now we're in September, in September 2025, so.

Correct. We're going to need an AI verification stamp that this is an AI avatars of me and D right now.

Because next month it'll be like, you know, it'll just. It's this exponential curve thing is so hard to. To wrap my head around like start of. So start. Okay, maybe I can talk you through like backstory a little bit. Not too far. Just this year, right. So start of this year, the way I kicked off my year was I attended Eddie's AFA event over in Nashville and AFA Agency Founder accelerators. Eddie just brings a whole bunch of people together and they're all agency owners. And I made it my mandate for this year to really understand where different players in different pockets of industries where they're at with AI adoption, AI usage and AI outlook in general. And that all started because we went on a family vacay last year end of year to the UK and so when you're commuting on long haul you just get to like consume stuff for. And I happened to chance upon this one YouTube video. Do you play much in the crypto world?

No, not much.

Right. So neither do I. Right. Like I'm just like a super boring. Just put some into Bitcoin and like all disabled. It's me. So nothing crazy. And then I. But I chanced upon this one YouTube video where I. It's the found. It's an interview with one of the founders of this firm in Singapore called Virtual's Protocol. And Virtual's Protocol started off as like a gaming NFT thing. At the peak of like NFTs, they pivoted because NFTs went to fucking zero and created this one AI influencer kind of anime style called Luna. And Luna live streams on TikTok I think like 20.

I've seen Luna before.

Yeah, right. Luna has her own token also. And Luna is fully autonomous with an AI brain. If you go to the Virtual Protocol you can actually see her brain processing a bit like you know when GPT or one Gemini. You can see their thinking right before they spit out. They spit out the question. So you can see it live. It's live streamed Just so the virtuals can do a flex and be like, there's no human intervention here. We actually built this. That's cool, right? And what really got me was that Luna live streams, she's voice enabled, 11 labs. She replies to comments inside of in real time, she replies to the comments in the stream. Crazy, right? And she's given. And there's machine learning in there too. So she's given the objective of getting to a hundred thousand Twitter followers, if I'm not wrong. Even though she's more visual on other platforms. So I think they made it a bit of a challenge for her. And because she's autonomous. Here's the part that got me. Because she's autonomous, Luna autonomously put out a bounty to get to find four contractors to draw in real life like a, like a mirror mural of her, right? Put out a bounty, vetted the people, chose four, verified that the work got done and then paid them in Luna token. And my brain just went, holy, we're right, like super novel, like trivial use case. But I'm going like, I don't understand any of this world. I need to go talk to people who do because this is like the next level shit. I'm not a. My first venture was a tech startup, but I was on like the business and sales side, not on the tech side at all. So I'm like a tech dummy. So for this year I just started tinkering around with that, whether that's like open source image generation tools. January was like, look at. If you go to my ig, you'll see I did this one post that went. Got, you know, like a few hundred thousand views just around clothes, clothing swaps. And everyone was like, oh my God, clothing swaps. This is absolutely fucking crazy. September now it's like, what are you talking about? It's just nano.

Yeah. You know, isn't that funny? I was playing with Nano earlier and it's like no one knew that word a month ago.

Totally. So the speed at which it's moving, it's there. And then I guess the other part is just building internal tooling with. With anytime. Luckily for me, I'm not that much of a techtard. So I can kind of, you know, talk through it and know what's what, understand basics of basic enough to be able to navigate the waters through something like N8N which is just like a grown up version or like a. Just a geekier version of Zapier.

That's what I was going to say is like me being a huge zapier head. Like our whole business, unfortunately, is what I always say is, like we have a $10 million plus business duct taped with Zapier at every stage. So what, like most businesses?

Yeah, Right.

Well, that makes me feel better. I didn't know that actually. I just said right at naturally. But that's good to know. Usually I feel like most people end up growing up maturing, hiring a development team that can actually work with the endpoint and the APIs. But yeah, if other people are using APIs or in Zapier, the duct tape businesses together. Amazing. What do you find that N8N does? Like, the limitations that Zapier make or whatever other automation tool like you were running into. Just, it wasn't working.

So a few things. The first one is the ability to include a code node, right? So that itself allows for the customization portion. So you can insert a node where you can insert Python or JavaScript. Most of the time, JavaScript ends up being the default, but you can put that in there for any other nodes or features or functions that you just can't find as like a preset step. So like in Zapier, for example, like if it's very much like if this, then do that. Conditionals. Yes, just. But. And also just the ability to run loops, for example. So as an example, a lot, a lot of a bunch of players within the Internet space tend to use it for scraping, right? And if you're scraping, say, if you're scraping, say like a competitor's TikTok or you want to do a content piece about a certain brand, you're scraping like their last, you know, Alex Hormozi's last 200 posts. Because you want to throw it into.

Walk me through this, because that's super relevant. I use a beer to scrape a.

Bunch of stuff, right? So say you want to do. You want to do volume, and you go, I want to scrape Alex Hormozi's last 200, like Instagram, like Instagram reels, just so that I can pick up his voice. Because I want to learn how to be a content creator.

Tonality.

Yeah, pull out his tonality or the way he structures his posts and upload all that stuff into an LLM. Now, I can scrape that, but what would most typically happen is I'll use apify. I'll scrape it, and what will come out the other side will not be transcript enabled because it'll just be the link to the video and a few other things.

Yeah, that happens to me all the time.

Right. So then the Next point from there is I have to have some step in my automation tool to be able to extract the audio from that video to throw into like Whisper for example, right. Which is an AI tool that can actually transcribe on the fly. But If I have 200 videos and I try to cram it all in, it might just crash the whole thing. Right? Especially if I'm self hosting or if I've got something like a Zapi for example, and I just have a bunch of runs, I'm just tallying up runs.

And that's you're really running up your bill.

Right, right, right. Whereas with N8N, because you have the option to also self host and run several of these in parallel where there's no incremental cost of each one that you're going to running with. You're just paying for the compute, right? So you can go host on like a digital ocean or wherever hostinger, you're just paying for the compute. And then beyond that you can just run whatever you want to your heart's content and set conditionals too. Like I really want to paste this out. Let me set a loop in here, finish. Every time this process gets finished, it adds one row to my sheet and then it starts off the loop again as opposed to a backlog of 200 and then it goes and does something. Okay, so just things like that really.

So what you're saying is A, it's more cost efficient and B whatever your mind's eye can conceive, it can pretty much do.

Yes, with, I mean with certain limitations. But that limit, that ceiling's pretty darn high.

Yeah. What are the limitations? What haven't you been able to do within it? And maybe this, it can do with this.

I think, I think like go for going for volume. It's, it's, it's a bit more challenging to do just understanding how to like if you're building fairly complex frameworks, right. Or complex kind of workflows rather where you want to do one thing and then pass off to another, you can do it for sure. It's doable inside of the software, it's more so. And this is what I love about building in N8N and really tinkering with a lot of like building internal tools, just internal efficiency tools. Right. Like almost nothing market facing at this point. But a lot of it's just like it really taught me the discipline of thinking like a programmer. Very, very programmatically, very logic driven, step by step and thinking around the corner to go, well, if I build it like this now, will it prevent me from. From expanding out the workflow later? Or if I build this monolith of a workflow, will it fail midpoint and have to start, like, the 16 steps prior to it again and just wait for 45 minutes?

That happens to me as a discipline.

Yeah. Even as a. As a discipline, it's so awesome because the. What I found was the more I built and the more I hit these errors, you know, like, I'll have like some of these stupid monoliths that I built was literally like, hit the run button. Oh, my God, this is so awesome. Hit the run button. And it's going to automate everything, but it's going to take a while. So I'll go to the gym and I'll come back and I come back and then it's like, dink you. It's clear it out. Like step 1652, dude.

I do that too. And with various AI tools, like, even in between meetings, if I have five minutes, like, I'll throw a prompt because I was like, all right, I want maximum efficiency and effectiveness here. I'm going to go for a walk for five minutes. And I'm just like, if it errors out, rerun it again with these, like, criteria and then come back and notice that the contingency aired out too. Shoot, I guess I'll have to wait till the next meeting. Yeah, totally. No, I get that 100%. So as far as I caught another one of your posts where you talked about basically, and I talked about this too. Doom scrolling. Doom scrolling for good. Like, the earliest example of me doom scrolling for good was maybe 15 years ago. I unfollowed all my high school Facebook friends. I was just out of high school or in college, and I followed my dream 100 and my feed was only those people. And that just like, that opened so many doors that I probably don't even know how to even articulate. But you just know. It's like, proximity is a power law for a reason. So I saw your post on doom scrolling on X too, where you're like, hey, like, you know, doom scrolling can be good. Therefore, I built an AI bot named Tina. The Doom scrolls for me. Tell me about how you came to realize that that was something you needed and what she does for you guys on an everyday basis.

So that really. That's one of those internal tools, right? So to go. Okay, well, what We. We have a brand. Come on. We want to immerse ourselves into what? How all the other players within that brand space. How do they talk, how do they present, how do they do whatever. Now we can do it at a, at a manual level like this, or we can then just go, what can we build to pull out to provide some type of patterns? Because not everyone has that skill of identifying things quickly and efficiently as they're scrolling through. And because we're human, something else might pop up and we end up doom scroll. We get getting into like brain rot. Because that's just how life fucking works. Yeah. So, yeah, build this internal tool called. It's called TikTok, Tina. And you just punch in, you just punch in the handle of whichever account that you want to, that you want to go scope out the post limit. And it'll just pull in all those posts and then throw it into Gemini. Because we're in D2C, so it's not info, it's not very transcript or script heavy.

Yeah. So we throw short form script mainly. Creative elements are more important.

Right. So we then prompt Gemini to go, hey, what do you see in this? Right? What is. Tell us about the first three second hook. Tell us about the audio, the underpinning audio vibe. And it's not some crazy prompt engineering. I literally ask it, tell me what the audio vibe is.

That's sick. And it knows what, knows what that means.

And then it knows what the heck that means. Right? Like this is what I mean by like, we're fucked.

Just tell me the vibes.

Just tell me the vibes, Tina. And then like, Tina, tell me, tell me, like how quickly do they cut? Right? So is it fast paced or is it more like like calming creator type vibes? So we, you know, if we can do that for like, enter five brands, enter eight brands, get that analysis, we have the link to that TikTok anyway. So we can do the human portion, but we also get like the aggregate analysis to go. Overall, this is what the brand is doing. These five posts tend to do that. So like, here's a ratio of the type of post that they're putting out. And here's the overall vibe. So it's a really great starting point. You know, it just brings that brand research or like competitive landscape process down to like half with the same level of potency, if not more. You know, so small things. So, so helpful.

Who uses that internally? Is it media buyers? Is it ams? Is it creative strategists?

Mainly, Mainly creative strategy just to understand, like, ooh, we're starting to see some trends here. This is kind of cool. Let's add it to this month's like you know, rotating repository of what's hot this month, what's working and how we can ideate. Hey, it's working in this other industry or like this one other pocket, can we bring it to another one? So sometimes I'll be curious and I'll do like what's popping off in Booktok. Yeah.

You know so you guys have these different. Yeah different areas that you have like different Tinas. Dude, that's like if I had to pick my like doomsday fantasy for a marketing agency it would just be a server farm full of like people doom scrolling. And I just go around and I'm like why are you stopping on that? Like what? Why'd you tell them stop there Totally walking around asking. But that's, that's very post apocalyptic performance agency. Like a black mirror episode for sure. So we'll take Tina. That sounds a lot more, a lot better than having like a matrix version.

Are y' all playing with. How are y' all playing with AI?

So a few different ways I'll have to drop it to you like my favorite way right now like Delphi for when I think about. Because as you guys know we primarily work with creators who are info heavily. Like info heavily and we're trying to recreate them. So the first thing that I'm trying to do is maximize efficiency on like the Q and A call side. Because on info side your product delivery isn't a physical E commerce. We do ship out like hats and merch and we have all that. But primarily you're like thinking course so you want like we're working towards very close like an AI world where you have an AI bot like give you the mechanized product delivery in a linear format instead of like self serve modules where you're watching a video taking an action. Watching a video taking an action. Which is like my whole philosophy to info is there should be a proven process, a linear format to an outcome, a community accountability in the form of when you get stuck, people push you forward and then there should be Q and A experts to find blind patches and queue up the product development or roadmap. So that's the four point system. It's pretty simple but hard to implement obviously it's a lot of, a lot of hard. So like AI bots do that and right now like paces our cash cow sub2.com he has over 20 million trained words that pulls in every time he does a new YouTube video, every time he has a new X post anything. It all sucks into his hive mind. And the thing like Delphi AI has really figured out the tonality thing. Like they have different custom instructions based off of his purpose, his tonality and then like, you know, situational custom and responses. So I have this thing programmed to a T and we have different use cases per performance. The use case in E commerce may be a little bit less, but like it's still, it's so far ahead. I've tried so many curated custom knowledge bots and it makes custom GPTs look like light work, to be honest right now. So that's the primary way from an info standpoint. The other stuff that I'm using a lot, OPUS reels for tests. We use those for a lot of tests. Like we have an in house post production team that's about 15 deep right now and even they use Opus AI. But I'll sit in on creative meetings and Scott, our creative director, he'll be like, all right, no OPUS usage for this project. Like it needs to be perfect kind of thing where okay, you guys can use opus, but these tools are getting better. So like my first AI creative workflow that I taught on last year to our, to our team and externally to our mastermind students was AI Knowledge Bot. So like let's say Delphi, but you guys could use custom GPT is basically like a huge heat sink or data sync of all their inputs. Ask that about a topic, you're like, cool. I want to cut up like three things that marketing agencies are getting wrong. It comes up with topics and it timestamps YouTube videos or the source videos that it pulls from. That's important. Like anytime that AI generates, you have to worry about hallucinations. You have to worry about hallucination like prompting or like whatever else. And you're like, hey, are you hallucinating? That's inefficient. So I'd rather just source stamp anything that it's outputting. It's like, give me the output. But then also I give little sources like it would be if it was a book. So that way I can click on the video, I take the video link, throw it to opus, cut to real and with Opus, clip anything I'm putting in the exact thing I need. So if it's like cool, three things market agencies are getting wrong, I take that and throw it into opus on clip anything for the prompt and I'm like, please compile all the three things, like all the things that market agencies are getting wrong. Now I have the creative element and then the last thing, how I get that as far as like the actual hooks, If I'm going to output that and make it externally is I use a little plugin. There's probably better ones, but ChatGPT for YouTube, it is just a little chrome extension that sits and transcribes automatically the whatever YouTube video I have. So the flow is find it with the knowledge bot, click in, find the YouTube video, copy and paste it. Get the creative element for opus, and then it transcribes, and then I have a prompt that actually rewrites it using like 300 different hook frameworks. So now I have hooks plus the creative element. Dude, I'll send you the presentation. It's a game changer. You guys could put your own flavor on it and it would be sick.

It's so funny how the universe works. I'm just having a moment right now because so unbeknownst to you at all, last week I made a commitment to myself to take content seriously because I've been super patchy with it, right? And I've been.

Me too. Me and you both.

I've been so patchy with it and just like, oh, but there's always something more important. I'm like the equivalent of the guy who's overweight who really wants to go to the gym. But then something always is more important, like, oh, but I got work right now. Or like, oh, I got a meeting and I'll make time for gym at some other point, right? Like, I'll make time for meal prep at some other point. I'm that guy for content. So I made. So you just sharing all that? That's just sauce for me right there. It's perfect timing. Perfect timing, dude.

Well, I'm glad to have given some value in there. Those are ways I was in this stage, though, two years ago where I was trying so many AI tools. And you're right, the exponential curve of it AI is iterating at such fast iteration cycles where it becomes so hard even for someone who won. Like, I used to win via iteration cycle. Like human iteration cycle. I was a human algorithm. I was like, cool, refine, rewrite, hook, rewrite the hook, rewrite it again. And I was like, damn, AI does the thing that I'm really good at. Better than me. That's unfortunate. I'm gonna have to find a new skill. So that's. That's kind of what I. What I thought is like, okay, now what? AI can't do the pattern recognition, the chaining, the different tools. You're right. Like, even N8N gets tripped up when you have to integrate too many daisy Chains in a row, right? So I'm like, okay, in this next phase, I can survive off of that. Understanding the patterns between all these tools and daisy chaining them, like together. And in the future where it can do that, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'll figure that out next.

I heard this. I heard this really awesome line Yesterday, just watching YouTube videos about content because I need to school myself up again. And they were talking about AI and the one line that they dropped, it was a conversation between Neil, I forget his last name, and Caleb Ralston, who was like, off right now because he's.

Like, you know, or Moses acts creative director.

Yeah, totally. And so it was a conversation between. Between two of them and one of them dropped the line. In the world of AI, you aim to be relatable because AI is going to do the remarkable part, right? And I'm like, oh, snap. Okay, that makes a ton of sense. So at, at the workplace, it really is the ability to sit down and like. Because here's the thing, right? The one difficult part about AI right now is you can't, as much as GPT can, remember stuff about us. You can't just fill in the blank like you would with a pal or like with a colleague who you've worked with for a long time and be like, yeah, yeah, I just want you to create this. You know what I mean? Like, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah. No, it's thought process is too linear and it doesn't understand cues and it's too dense when you want it to be succinct and yes, all that.

Yeah, for sure. So the, the actual, the actual work, the output itself, absolutely. I think those parts are going to get eaten up. But the orchestration to your point and being the node connector is still a bastion that we can hold onto for a bit. I think sometimes I feel like sometimes for a few years, like this feels like the Titanic. It's just there's this wooden door. I'm just gonna cling onto this as long as I can and then see what the fuck happens next.

No, dude, I talked about that in my last YouTube video too. I'm like, okay, well, at least until. Because I'm a big believer in person events that can't be replicated. Like, the one thing you won't be able to send your fathom or read IA note taker to is your in person mastermind events and have it do the networking for you yet. Maybe in the future where it has like some sort of like, the more cost efficient way will just be like, hologram, I'm guessing until robotics get to a point where they're cost efficient enough to send your robotic JV manager or whatever, and it's going to do biz dev for you. But, like, we're hopefully three to five years out from that being even remotely a possibility. I've seen some robotics in motion, but I'm a big believer in your right, like, being the connector, being the node connector, and especially like in person, even more than virtual, and I talked about it too, is like, dude, I don't know, we're like months away from this conversation that we're having being like 90% able to be duplicated by AI. And that's. That's. I was going to say scary. But you know what? I'm going to be optimistic about it and say it is the way it is and we're going to figure it out. Like, it's just. It's just what it is. And you guys are going to have to, like, adapt and especially like, D. How many times have you adapted in this industry? We've been through a few different cycles. This one is definitely more, I would say, ominous, potentially, than others that we've been through, but it's like it's another cycle and it's tech, so it's just going faster than typically what we've seen.

Yeah, for sure, Absolutely. And the. I'm just trying to hold on tight to the surfboard and the surf, whatever the waves might be. I'm just hoping it's like, unfortunately, it's. It's, you know, it's iterative and it's frequent enough to wrap our heads around it. It's not this giant tsunami that comes out of nowhere like, nothing, nothing, nothing. And then this, like, huge thing.

Yeah, you're correct. It's not the perfect storm or whatever. So it's just like. Yeah, it's a rapid iteration and sometimes anytime that I felt, and thankfully haven't felt this for a while, there was like an era about a year ago where I was like, damn, nothing I do. It was like a regression towards nihilism. It's like life is meaningless, AI is taking over. So then I was like, okay, I just talked to my grandpa and he doesn't even know about ChatGPT yet. So, like, we have this, like, I always tried to keep in mind the people in our circles are like, we're early. Early adapters, whatever the term for that is. I think that's an actual term. But you know what? I Mean, yeah, it's like we're still on the, we're still on the preface of this and there's a lot of people that like humans are slow to adapt things. So anytime that you're like, okay, life is over tomorrow, this thing can just replicate everyone. Even if it could, even if it could at a better effectiveness, optimalness rate or like efficiency rate, people are just going to be slow to adapt and there's going to be. So some people that just like will refuse to adapt. So there will always be a market for one to one human services, no matter how inefficient. Which is cool.

Totally.

I guess.

Like, right, you know, it's just funny because like I love your line about like it just is what it is because the moment we can, we can go, it is what it is. I need to find some way to be at peace with that. I think life moving forward becomes a lot easier rather than trying to hold on to today and just like grip onto that. Because there was, there was a point in time where humans got paid to go, hi there, how am I? Take your call. Oh, you'd like to get connected to Mr. Smith, please? Hold the line.

Right, you know like yeah, yeah, that's a job. And when you think like is that peak human fulfillment? And you're like, well no, not really. Just like that is what it is. That was what we were used to at the time. So therefore. Yeah, yeah, dude, I anchored that into even earlier today. I don't know why I had this thought. I was like, man, like 150 years ago there weren't even cars. I couldn't even get to work in like 20 minutes. Like I could today. And just that brought me peace as dumb as it is. Like humans are freaking adaptable. Yeah, that's one thing I know about us.

Yeah, absolutely. And the, you know, I have a lot of conversations around the whole like ubiquitous and just the employment market in general, what that's going to look like 5, 10 years and ask me on any given day and I'll probably have like a completely nihilistic answer to completely techno optimist one and be like, everything's going to be completely rosy. What are you talking about? But the I think what's fast? And you know, like I think thinking in timescales is really helpful and thinking in like where's the alpha for now is where I can then go like, okay, I can find some peace in this. It gives me a short term, short to medium term goal to look towards to go, is there alpha in this space and they're already these like bro.

That'S a great heuristic.

Right? Because there are these, there are these gen zers who are like clearly capitalizing on the alpha. Like for example, there are so many nano, like not. I wouldn't say so many. I'm noticing more and more show up on my Instagram feed gen zers who are capitalizing on just Nano banana agencies. Makes sense, right? All they do is just go, you need B roll, you need some kind of like ugc. I don't even care about your stance on the ethics of AI generated ugc. I'm just going to be the best at manipulating these tools and being the cross tool person to be like created a mid journey, move it over to Higgs Field, manipulate in Higgs Field, move over to Nano. I know how to manipulate these tools to get the best outcome for you. And I have no overhead because I'm the prompter and if I need to scale my team I just have to copy paste the prompt. It's not this multi step SOP of like you know, toggle the background layer, do the transparency, mask this one thing. You don't need any of that more. And they're just going, this is what I'm going to do for a while.

Yeah. Then I'm going to move on to the next thing.

And they're going to move. Yeah. And then I'm going to move on to the next thing because you know, youth I guess like yeah, it is early 20s. You just, it's just awesome.

I do miss that when you have time as your like time is a premium for you or not time is a premium. The opposite time. Time is all you have. You don't have money so you're long on time and it's nice. You can sit there and do anything you want and beat anyone on that.

Yeah, for sure. And they're really starting to pop up. So all these pockets where people are just like I'm going to capitalize on this alpha and it's going to go bananas for them. Yeah, man. It's just a funny space. I'm excited about what's coming next but I'm definitely like watching as close as I can all the time.

Dude, me too. And that's. Dude, that's probably a good end thought especially for all the viewers is anytime there's people like me, I tend to stay in the future. At my worst time in the future and I'm worrying about the future. There's people who at their worst are in the past and they're stuck in the past. The. The thing that I've noticed is that any time that you're in either one of those dimensions, focusing down on what you can do currently in the present eases anxiety, eases tension, makes you happier, advances you to whatever's next. So if anything else, do that.

Absolutely.

Cool.

Whatever it takes.

Any last thoughts?

Whatever it takes to stay in motion. And yeah, like, I think last, last thoughts. Watch the space. Like not, not as like a throwaway line, but actually watch the space. Like listen to how marketers are doing it. Marketing against the grain is awesome. The HubSpot guys, they always dropping stuff by how they're tinkering with AI. If you don't want to subscribe to like 45 different tools because, you know they almost drop a video daily around how they're using AI, watch how marketers are using it, watch how programmers are using it, watch, definitely watch how creatives are using it. Because yeah, it's just a bunch of tools. So fun.

Sweet. And last, last thing. And then I promise we're going to go. I noticed that you guys are looking and expanding in the Aussie office. Aussie office. Just mirroring the accent. What roles are most in demand right now that people should apply for if they're watching this?

Growth strategist, selfishly for us. Absolutely. Growth strategist. If you can think holistically about building a brand and you get excited about looking at it from a. Let's build this as a business standpoint. So really it's almost like a mini or fractional C suite type thinking for smaller brands, I think. Right. Or. And a benefit to larger brands. And definitely creative strategist. Just that Gen Z Professional Doom Scroller for good type who can then go, I know how to translate this to performance. Such high demand right now. Really difficult to find for me at least.

Yep. Cool. Guys, if that's you, if that spoke to you, I'll drop the link for that. JD Job description below. I don't know if we use that slang anymore. D thank you so much for coming on, bro. It's always, it's always, always good connecting. We have a good conversation. We should do this more.

We should do this more. 100% cool.

Cheers, guys. Peace.

See everyone.