$30B Founder: SEO is Dead.. Do This Instead

All right. So we had Dharmesh Shah on the podcast today. Dharmesh is interesting. One, he's probably the most listened to and viewed guest that we've ever had. And two, the reason he is that way is because Dharmesh runs HubSpot, which is a $25 or $30 billion company that makes billions and billions in revenue. And he's a billionaire. He also is sort of like a hacker. So he launches little projects all of the time. Sometimes they work, sometimes they fail, sometimes they make $5,000 a month. And so he's probably the only person on earth that has this perspective of both being a big thinker and launching new projects.

Yeah. And on this episode, we wanted to talk to him about the early days. Like, how did you actually get HubSpot off the ground? You had no money, you didn't have any connections, and he figured out a new model of marketing around blogging and SEO. And we wanted to talk about what did, what did that look like then? Because today with AI and ChatGPT, seems like there's a new opportunity. And I have like more energy than I started with because he's got this kind of, I don't know, there's like playful builder, like get-after-it energy that's pretty contagious.

All right, give it a listen. Let us know what you think in the YouTube comments. Dharmesh, what's going on? How are you?

Doing well. Back from a busy but fun week at Inbound in San Francisco.

Did you guys get together in, in SF?

Yeah, we did. Dharmesh is like, you know, this was his Coachella. He's there. He's the guy. So Sam, I go to San Francisco and basically like the street is shut down for the, they take over that, that area, the Moscone Center, and they have this thing called Inbound. And so Dharmesh is like, hey, after your talk, let's go hang out. So we go hang out. And my first question was like, dude, so what, what is this? Cause I'm, you know, I know it's a, I know it's a conference or like sort of this event. I'm not like confused about that. But I'm looking at it and there's these giant, you know, like they make those block letters and it just says inbound. It doesn't even say HubSpot. First thing is, is like it says inbound and then there's all these people walking around and I'm just thinking, why are they here? What is this all about? And he actually told an interesting story about like the origin of this that, that I think is kind of a, like a pretty interesting business strategy. Dharmesh, tell the story. You, you were, you told me something, you go, I was talking to Brian and he was talking, he was telling about these, uh, very well-funded companies that were, had CMOs that were trying to get website, like traffic to their website. And here's Dharmesh just blogging for fun at home and he's getting like way more traffic. And then, and they kind of looked at that. They're like, they have a chief marketing officer. They have an ad budget. They have like all this stuff. How are you getting 10 times more visitors to your website? Like people come into your store. That they are, there's something here, right? Like, wasn't that the story?

Yeah, that's exactly the story. So the, you know, the, I was still in grad school finishing up writing my, writing my thesis. Brian graduated a year ahead of me, but we would still get together like once a week and chat about ideas, right? It's like, okay, well, you know, because we had kind of considered the possibility of starting a company together. And while we were doing that, he was working as a venture partner at one of the VC firms here in the, in the Boston area. And his sort of job, his role was to help these startups go from rinky-dink little startups and get scale, right? And it was just to help them with their go-to-market, marketing, sales, you know, how do you get customers? And so we'd be meeting and as part of my thesis work called Unstartups: The Patterns and Practices of Modern Software Entrepreneurs, because I'm a software guy and my thesis advisor, who's one of the tougher advisors, but like 3/4 of the way through is Dharmesh, like you've got a lot of words here, but there's not a lot of data. This is not like Dharmesh's opinion. This is supposed to be a thesis. This is, you know, you have to have some like research and things. And this is, you guys know me well enough now. So my immediate thought was, well, what he's asking for is going to involve like interacting with humans. Uh, and that sounds awfully unpleasant. That's not what I signed up for. And so I thought this, like blogging was a new thing at the time. I'm like, well, maybe I can like write, you know, write a blog and maybe I can get comments on the blog and I can use that as like the citation of the research. Like, oh, well, you know, on my blog article I said this and some people said this or whatever. So that's, that's what I did. I started a blog. And in order to come up with a name for the blog, I just took the first two words of the title of the thesis, which was On Startups, stuck the words together and put a.com at the end of it. And this was, you know, in the early days, so that was available. So registered it for, you know, $15 or whatever it was. And anyway, so that, like, how do I get people other than my mom and, you know, two friends to read it, right? Like, what do I do? And so then I kind of dig in. It's like, oh, well, there's, you know, this thing called Google and they've got two types of traffic. You can pay your way in or you can do what's called search engine optimization, can get organic traffic. There's social media sites like Digg and Reddit at the time. It's like, here are the things you do in order to get people to your website, right? That was a collection of things. And so those are all the things that I sort of dug into obsessively and learned about. And we can talk about some of those because I think that's a good topic even for today as things evolve. And so Brian's watching me do this now when we're meeting, he's like, Dharmesh, how's that blog going? It's like, ah, it's going pretty well. Here's the traffic. He's like, How the heck are you doing that? I'm like, oh, well, there's this thing called SEO and there's this, you know, like, here are all the things that you do. He's like, well, yeah, like my portfolio companies, like they can't get a hundredth of that traffic. They should be doing this, not whatever it is they're doing. Like stop the madness in terms of spending this budget on things that are just not, you know, not driving any engagement. Um, and so that was the kind of genesis of the kind of idea of inbound marketing. It's like, okay, well, everybody was doing it wrong. They needed to be doing it. Like, let's pull people into your website that are kind of curious. How do you educate them? How do you put value out there? And our kind of catchphrase at the time was, you know, try to add value to your prospective customers before you try to extract it. Like all other marketing was forms of how do I extract value from you? How do I interrupt you at dinner? How do I, you know, get you in? And we were the opposite of that. And so now back to the conference. So when we did that, we're like, okay, we didn't have a product yet, right? We're like, okay, well, here's the things that we're doing. I was using stuff that was, you know, the common things like Google Analytics and, you know, blogging software and things like that. So two things we decided, one was that the reason so many people weren't doing it is not that it didn't work, it was that it was just too hard to put all those two pieces together, all the pieces that you needed to do. Anyway, we'll put that aside. So we're like, okay, well, there's lots of nodding of heads in terms of the idea being right of this kind of inbound marketing thing. And so we decided amongst other things to say, okay, well, let's start blogging about that. Let's see what the market has to say about it. Let's start start getting up on stages when we can get up on stages. And then part of that, we're like, okay, well, let's have people that are like-minded that believe in this, this kind of new way. Let's get them together. So the first conference was at a Marriott that was across the street from the office. It was like 200 people in a ballroom at the Marriott. And we made the decision when we started the conference, it was like, this is not intended to be a company conference. The idea here is there's this thing called inbound marketing, which we think is a better way. And all this is really doing is we are acting as a host to kind of bring this community together to talk about these things. In fact, we actually forbade, I don't think I've ever used the word forbade before, but it's like you're not allowed to pitch HubSpot from stage. Not if you're a HubSpot employee, you're not allowed to pitch any of your companies from all the speakers that we had. It was just all of us internally at the time. And so we sort of kept that up. That's why the conference was never named HubSpot. You know, this is the 17th year that we've been doing that event on an annual basis. And we, it was a convening of the community, not a tech conference, the classic sense where you see the CEOs get up there and pitch their book and like, here's what we're doing. And that's, that proved to be good. There's a few smart things that I did that I would recommend that everyone should go off and try to do this, but a few things that work if you're really looking to kind of start a movement, start a category. We did not trademark the term inbound marketing, even though we had coined it.

Right?

And, and we were starting a company, right? So it's like, okay, well if this thing is actually gonna be a thing, we want everyone to use it. We want people to put it in their job titles and their job postings. It's like we want it to be a thing. And the way to make it a thing is to make it accessible to everyone, make the event accessible to everyone. So even in the early years, we had direct competitors that would send like half a dozen people that would send their entire team to the inbound conference even though HubSpot was a competitor. So that was, it was a, yeah, it was an industry event, not a conference.

I've seen this happen many times. So I was part of the early blogging community. First as like a reader, like I was really passionate about a bunch of blogs and then I had my own small blog and then I somehow became friends with a bunch of the people who I read their blogs about, read on the blog. And it was like from '08 to like '14 or something. It was like a really magical period for blogging. And back then we felt like freaks where we— there was very few of us and we were kind of weirdos. We basically all nerds and we loved like other meeting other nerds. Then when I lived in SF with Sean, there were startups, but then there was like crypto and crypto was like the same thing where it was a very, very small and very passionate group of people. And it was the same thing. They were freaks, they were weirdos. If you told someone what Bitcoin was, I was one of those guys where I laughed at it and I'm like, this is a joke. What are you guys talking about? And my takeaway from hearing you tell this story is that I've seen this happen so many times where there's niche communities or, you know, also with like early YouTubers. We knew early YouTubers and it really became a thing. We have seen this happen so many times where a small, a small group of really like unique or odd kind of odd people that, but it's very tiny. It's crazy how the signal is like how passionate they are.

Who's that now?

I think AI is already, it's our, that's, that's past. Uh, so like that's not it, but I think that like Peter Lovells has done that with like the Indie Hacker. That was really cool. But what do you, what is it? Uh, Brian Johnson, was that 2 years ago? Like the Body Hacker. Uh, it's obviously easy for me to say what is past. Uh, but it's a hard question. I don't, I don't actually know. What, what do you think it is now?

Well, I was thinking about first the, the strategy that the HubSpot thing did with the category creation when you make it about a movement. And a way of doing things instead of like starting with your company and your product. And so I was thinking, who's done that well? And I thought of two just like little examples just while he was talking. And the first one was Bryan Johnson. I think when Bryan started, he didn't have a product to sell. And so he basically was like, he just made this like this way of biohacking longevity, let's call it. And then he named it the Don't Die movement. Like, it's like if you believe what I believe and then you think the way is to like use science and be like, yeah, a little weird about how you're going to— yeah, I'm going to sleep at this time. Yeah, I'm going to put this mask on my face. Yes, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to get this test done every 6 weeks. Yeah, I'm going to do all these weird things because I believe in this way of living. I thought he did an incredible job of that and he created that, that movement of, you know, the longevity movement, really. Along with Huberman and others. Of course, not one person or one company ever owns these things. And so, so I thought that was one example. And then another example that's a little bit, you know, just smaller, more niche. I thought, you know, I was thinking about, okay, so HubSpot basically had this— the people who believed in doing this new form of marketing. And then HubSpot became like a tool you would use naturally if you were going to do that. Like it built the tool for that community. I was thinking, who else did that? And I think one is, um, what Russell Brunson did with ClickFunnels.

Yeah.

So first the idea, just a rebranding of kind of like the funnel, the word funnel. So it's like, oh yeah, like we already had websites, we had landing pages. Yeah, we had growth, we had all these other words. But then to like own a word like inbound marketing of like funnel. And then I think they have like funnel hacking competitions and conferences. And it's not called the ClickFunnels, like, if, like, the ClickFunnels meetup, you know, it's for people who are great at funnel hacking and funnel building and have generated lots of sales. And they make them feel like stars and they give them a huge plaque for how many sales they've driven through their funnels. And of course, if you're going to build funnels, you should use, you know, ClickFunnels. That's like the natural, like, the secondary thing underneath it. So I thought, I thought Russell Brunson did a great job of like popularizing like a way of marketing and then selling the way to do that well. All right, guys, if you're liking this interview with Dharmesh, you might want a little gift from him. So Dharmesh has put together a bunch of AI prompts that you can use to help your brand grow on AI. So the old way of getting discovered was people would Google and then you want to be at the top of Google. Well, the new thing everybody's doing is using ChatGPT or Perplexity or all these different tools that are AI tools. And they're asking questions and they're searching for stuff. So how do you get found there? How do you get discovered in AI? Well, you got to make content that AI likes. You got to make content that the AI knows how to read. Well, how do you do that? That's something that Dharmesh has put together. He's got a bunch of prompts, a bunch of things you can go put into ChatGPT, and it will give you ideas for content writing that will help your brand get discovered by AI. So if you want to get the prompts, go to Dharmesh's, um, site. It's a, here's a QR code. There's a link in the description as well. And there's 100 of them. You can literally just copy paste them and start using them for your company.

Check it out.

It's pretty cool. All right.

Back to this episode. So one kind of category of ideas that I've been obsessed with for 30 years, which I think is a really great category, like broadly defined category of ideas is making inefficient markets efficient.

Right.

And so the kind of macro level definition of an efficient market is that every transaction that should occur does, right? It's like, oh, an efficient market is like, oh, someone wants to sell X and someone wants to buy X. That transaction happens if it's an efficient market. So a good example is like the public stock market. Someone's willing to share, sell shares at Y price. Someone's willing to buy shares at Y price. And so that transaction, when it needs to occur, does occur. And so then the question is like, what makes markets inefficient, right? Thing number one is the buyer and seller don't know each other. So there's just no way to connect the dots. Thing number 2 is the buyer and seller know each other, but they can't come to some objective way to kind of determine price. By number 3, they can come up with a price, but there's not enough trust for the actual transaction to clear. So there's all these things that make markets inefficient. And if you look across kind of the span of history, um, some of the most money that's ever been made are when someone took an efficient market to which there was what I think of as like latent economic value that was just being wasted as a result of these transactions not happening. They essentially took some of that inefficiency out. Um, so eBay was an efficient market for these niche market product goods, like, uh, like Pez dispensers and things like that. It's like, oh, I've got this thing that I'm obsessed with, or I'm selling, and here's the buyer. Google, in a way, was creating an efficient market for niche information that says, I'm writing a blog post about how to build fences for llamas. Here's someone that's looking for that content, that's fences, and Google is the market maker. For niche market content for the viewers of that content across a really, really long tail, right? That's, that's what they did. Um, and so this idea of a community is really a form of, from a business perspective, is a form of creating an efficient market. These are people that would enjoy knowing each other, maybe transacting, maybe they do business, maybe they hire each other depending on what the community is. But just the act of pulling those people together, you're removing some market inefficiency. And as a result of removing market inefficiency, you get to participate in some of that economic lead and economic value that you uncovered. And that's how communities make money. And when they do well, they do really, really well just on a kind of profit margin basis because they're relatively cheap to kind of get started, almost self-sustaining if you can sort of kind of get the people together and you get to critical mass. It's actually got lots of other positive effects versus just, uh, blogging or something like content creation is because you have these kind of network effects. So wherever the community is already aggregated, it's sort of hard to disrupt that once the good community gets going.

So one of the other things we talked about when we were hanging out was you were telling me this story about like, hey, like early on I was blogging, it was getting this kind of crazy amount of traffic. And then we realized like, oh, there's going to be other people who want to do this. And then we built a tool. And I was like, one era of marketing was like when that was like, you know, early to like as it matured and HubSpot became like a huge beneficiary. And then I started thinking about— I think we talked about like a few other eras of marketing. It's like, okay, when Facebook launched its ad marketplace, which I think was something like 2010-ish range, but like paid ads across Google and Facebook became like a dominant way to market your product. And a bunch of people did that.

Cool.

Then I was like, you know, there was one other one that I was like, I told you I was— I thought I was late to even though it was right in front of my face, which is what I call algo jacking. And there's two people that I met that I think have done this incredibly well. And they even told me about it specifically to my face. They told me the secret. I was too dumb to like acknowledge it. And, um, the first was actually Steve Bartlett. So I hired Steve Bartlett when he was probably, I don't know, 18, 19 years old. He came to work for me and Steve had this one skill that was like really interesting to me, which was he had, he was building up all of these social media pages, random themed accounts, and he could grow them very fast. They were run by like a single 19, 21 year old. Person and they got like 10 times more engagement than my corporate accounts.

What's an example page?

So he had one like Freshman Problems.

Okay.

And he would just post something and then like all the college kids would laugh at like the memes and the freshman problems. But guess what? Once you get the attention and trust of every college kid through your, you know, freshman problems, you know, uni problems, he would create these pages like that. Then he would then just shove in a product and Spotify and others and Nike would come and pay him $100,000. To reach that audience through his accounts. And so he had this like method, I guess, like in the same way, Dharmesh, that you were like just a guy blogging in his bedroom and you were like basically outpacing these venture-funded startups with CMOs and budgets and, you know, marketing professionals who couldn't get 1/10 of the traffic. The same thing was happening. And he literally was in my office. He was sleeping in my office at the time. And he was telling me, he's like, yeah, you got to think about, you know, Jenny in her bedroom. She's just scrolling. And like, what's going to make Jenny in her bedroom care? She's not going to care that you launched your app. And like, how do you get it? How do you pay attention to that? And he started thinking about just work backwards. What does the algorithm want? Give it that and then find a way to slip your product in giving it the same things. And now if you look at one of the most successful podcasts in the world, Diary of a CEO, the reason one of the most successful podcasts in the world is because he figured out how to algo jack YouTube and Instagram. Like, look at the engagement they get on social there. It's, I don't know, 1,000 times bigger than what we get on our podcast. And if you think about like, you know, he, he, he worked backwards from the algorithm. So what we do, for example, is we have our product and then we try to share it and it may work, it may not work. What he did was he changed his product completely to be what the algorithm wanted. So it started as the diary of a CEO, his personal diary. Okay, not that many people wanted that. Then he started interviewing other CEOs about CEO stuff. Yeah, some business people wanted that. If you go look at his feed today, it's like Seth Rogen. Health, sex, conspiracies, you know, like whatever. And it's basically like the mass mainstream thing, mostly in the format of they've lied to you about carbs, they're lying to you about this. And they're like, but guess what? That's what the algorithm wants. And when I, when I say the algorithm, really it's like what people like to click on when they're bored. Jenny in her bedroom's bored scrolling on, on, on her phone. MrBeast did the same thing. Like, if you go talk to MrBeast about a great video, what's a great video? One that gets a lot of views. You're like, well, by that definition, is McDonald's the best burger? And he's like, well, yeah, it sells the most burgers, so it's the best burger. It's like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, well, we have different definitions of best. But his thing has always been like, I want to make the videos that get views. So I work backwards from what's going to get a view. I work backwards from how do I get views. The algorithm is basically what is What does YouTube want to show a billion people? And I'm going to try to make that video. And even though I saw that, that trend, that sort of algo jacking trend, um, you know, I didn't really understand it. And I think, long story short, Dharmesh, today you see a new trend. What do you see today as like the next thing?

Yeah.

So let's talk about, because I think there's real value in some, um, some history here. So the thing that I was doing back when, uh, HubSpot got started, and we made a brief reference to this, it was called search engine optimizations, SEO, and the kind of practice of, and there's an entire industry now that has been about search engine optimization, which is how do you increase the odds that your webpage, your website will rank in Google organically, organically being you're not paying, you know, ad dollars or whatever, it's for free, you know, how do you kind of rise in the rankings? And there was an entire discipline around how to do that. And kind of pulling on your thread, Sean, around, kind of algo hacking, the way I'm a positive kind of guy, it's like, it's really optimization, right? It's not a hacking in the sense that you're sort of, what you're really doing is just saying, okay, knowing what I know about, let's say in this case, Google is looking for, right? Here's what I'm going to do in order to kind of have my website go up the rankings. And there's actually layers to the game. And the first layer is always more of the hacking, like how can I trick the Google algorithm into ranking my website versus somebody else's website. And there were lots of practices that were kind of later labeled as being kind of black hat because like, oh, it really likes when it sees the keyword that someone's searching on, on the webpage. It's like, okay, well, I'll just put the keyword on the webpage 500 times, right?

In white font on white under, at the bottom of the page.

Exactly. And that was level 2. It's like, oh, well, Google got too smart about that. It's because, because that would actually like show up poorly and in other results, and I'll do it in a tiny font or a white font on white back. And so it was just this game that was constantly being played to try and trick the Google algorithm.

Google would do an update every, uh, year. I don't remember, whatever. And then like you all, like they do the update and then 6 months later you see an article, this company lays off 500 people or like, and so it's sort of like, so like you, you see, I remember, uh, we had, uh, we, I'm friends with the NerdWallet, uh, guys. The NerdWallet is a company that like writes articles about the best, uh, credit cards. and I was with them and they were doing not well. And then after 3 years, Google made an update and they became number 1 if you Googled best credit card. And overnight, literally overnight, they went from making $0. The 3rd year, I think they made $30 million in revenue. And it was like Google rewarded us because they changed their algorithm and we did things, the best practices, and all these other people got wiped out and it worked out. And so that's what you're kind of— you're describing of, of all these hacks and then doing it the right way.

Exactly right. And so, and I really like, really, um, as I tend to do, I went deep down the rabbit hole on SEO kind of back in the day. It's like, okay, well, what is this? Um, how does it work? And there were a couple of key insights that I think are still applicable today, um, that I think made us money, would make other people money because I think it's, it's a successful strategy, which is going back to kind of Sean's point is the first thing you have to figure out is that there are lots of smart people at Google whose sole job it is, is to deliver high quality results. To the end user. Okay, so if you say that, that means every black hat tactic you're trying, it may work right now, but you've got an army of really smart people whose sole job it is to make what you're doing not work. So it's just a matter of time. So that's kind of thing number one, right? It's like, okay, well, are there other things I could do that would make those people's jobs easier? It's like, oh yeah, well, you know, they really like it when you structure a webpage so their crawler has an easier time crawling it. It's like, well, they will reward sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, just what we will call like good behavior. Make your site clean, make it load fast, make it do the, make the content actually useful. So the, you know, I got up on stages and wrote about SEO all the time, uh, back in the day. And my one thing I would tell small business owners, that's who my kind of primary audience was, is that whatever term you want to search for, type it into Google right now. Let's go. They'll type it in and it's like, okay, well, here are the people that are coming up right now. Do you have a webpage on your website right now that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are showing up right now? And be honest with yourself, it's like, not in a self-serving way. If you were searching, if you were the actual human typing this keyword in, would you want to find your website versus what the ones Google are showing right now? If the answer to that is no, job one is to create the content that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are ranking right now, because Google is imperfect. And all those battles are winnable. It's like, ah, I see them. The top 2 or 3 are pretty good, but if I were really searching, here's what I would actually want, then produce that webpage that the actual end user would want. And 9 out of 10, 95 out of 100 times, it was just a matter of time because you got a lot of smart people that want to find that webpage if it's actually truly better for the end user than that, right? And there's a bunch of things you can do, you know, write good content, write timeless content, but You know, I have content that I wrote for HubSpot 19 years ago that still drives traffic to HubSpot.com, that still generates leads, that still generates, you know, revenue 19 years later. And this is one of the big things about SEO. And we'll talk about AEO, kind of the successor to that, which is, this is one of those things that when you're doing like Google AdWords, and then you do those things, right? It's like, as a marketer, you need to have a repertoire of things that you do to reach customers. The issue with like Google advertising, um, or any kind of advertising is you're effectively renting someone else's stage or renting someone else's microphone and you pay them to do that, right? It's like, oh, put me on the page and I will pay you X dollars. And there's a nice efficient auctioning mechanism for the price. But it's like, yeah, but the day you turn that off, the traffic turns off. Your link does not show up in the Google search results anymore. So you're basically renting and you don't control the rent. You don't control what the prices are because that's a market dynamic thing. So it's like, it may cost, $5 a click right now may cost $15 a click literally tomorrow based on what the supply and demand is. So now you are at the kind of vagaries of the market. The nice thing about SEO and doing this content-focused thing, it's like building your own property on your own land that compounds value over. So as land prices go up, the value of the thing you built actually goes up, not down, and it's under your control. If someone comes along and says, oh, I'm going to produce a better blog article, it's not going to be an instantaneous, they take all your traffic overnight. You will see them come up the rankings. It's very, very rare. That overnight some brilliant piece of content that Google finds it trusted enough to put in the number one spot instead of you. So you will see, uh, your competitors come up if someone's doing it, and you can do something about it. I mean, so there's all this positiveness to investing in SEO, um, versus, you know, paid, uh, paid channels.

And I was going to ask you this, you know, one of the painful lessons I've learned is this one phrase called intensity is the strategy. So I'm the type of guy that always liked to read the next blog, the next tweet, the next book. Because I was always looking for like, what's the better answer? Because in my head, life was a, you know, a game of chess. And if you just knew the right moves, you would win. And chess is like the wrong analogy for life. It's a lot more just like taking a chess piece and just battering the other guy as many times as you can in different ways and picking up different pieces and just keep hammering on. And I've learned that, like, you know, for most of the things in my life, I knew the strategy, I knew the answer. And the difference between success and failure was the level of intensity I took to the strategy. I think dieting, dieting is the easiest example. Like, we all know what to do. Um, this is a question of like how intensely you do it or not. But like a lot of things in life are this way. I ask you, I bring this up because I can kind of tell, and I want you to confirm or deny this, maybe I'm wrong, but your volume was a lot higher than what was normal in those days. So it wasn't even that you were the best writer or you were the smartest at SEO necessarily, but like I'm guessing what you guys did as normal was completely abnormal in terms of volume. Did you basically like, was volume or intensity of, of the marketing the strategy more so than like coming up with the perfect, you know, the perfect strategies?

Totally. This is my, has been my personal belief for my, I think my entire life as far back as I can remember is that I'm never like the smartest person out there or even in any given room that I'm in. So you can outthink me. And I think that's relatively easy to do. You will not outgrind me, you will not outwork me because that's under my control. And so I've always believed that the kind of quality of the outcomes is almost directly, always directly proportional to the number of iterations. And that's it. So if you can squeeze out more iterations compared to the next person or whatever, over the fullness of time, you win. That's like the universe says, ah, you win, right? It's like, and you just have to have the conviction. Like the problem is that the universe has a kind of a slower feedback loop, especially in the early years. It's like, okay, when you're first blogging, 4 people will read the blog post and then you have, it's like, then you like pour your heart and soul into it and then it goes to 6 and then you part your heart and then it goes to 5, right? It goes down. It's like, okay, well what the hell is going on here? But you sort of have to have the conviction to say, I know it's just a matter of, and I don't work out, but it's just a matter of putting the reps in, right? It's meaningful, thoughtful, and they don't have to be perfect reps, right? They just have to be incrementally better each time.

One of the things I wanted to do was, um, for some reason HubSpot, you guys changed your blog where I used to be able to go to Dharmesh Shah or, uh, Brian Halligan, uh, your blog, your author page, and I could sort by recent and then just go in reverse and see your early blog posts. And it was pretty cool because like Brian was very casual. You're like, this doesn't, this guy doesn't sound like a $30 billion company. And it kind of like gives anyone inspiration because it's pretty great. But if you go to onstartups.com, which is your personal blog, and you can kind of rig it where you like sort by recent and you got to change the URL a little bit, but you can go and look at some of your old blog posts from 2006 and a few things. One, the headlines are, are evergreen. They're fantastic. Raising Capital: Friends, Family, and Fools. Another one is Revenue Early, Revenue Often. The other one is the danger of solving venture capitalists' biggest problem. Like really good headlines for one. And two, there's days like there was a day in November where you posted 5 articles in a day. And then for the most part in 2006, 2007, 2008, when I imagine HubSpot— I don't know when HubSpot started, but I think 2006. So you are running a company or an early-stage company that probably takes up your whole life. And I think— I don't know if you had a family at that time, but I'm sure you're a very busy busy, but your personal blog is posting something like 3 to 5 articles a week. Not even your company's blog, your personal blog. Pretty crazy.

Reps work, my friend. That's the one thing. And this is, you know, um, we've talked about this in terms of as you pick an idea, um, to work on, you know, as an entrepreneur, whatever it happens to be, one of the most important kind of filters and criteria should be, is this something that I at least enjoy enough that I will be able to put the reps in. Because if you can't make yourself do something you hate for that long, for that many times over an extended number of years, it's just not going to work. So pick a market you like, pick a category you like, pick a kind of business that you like. It's like if you like e-commerce, if you like selling, whatever it is, then do that, right? Just because something else has higher margins or, you know, Susie down the road was able to create a billion dollar outcome or whatever, it just won't matter. Because if you just give up along the way, it's like, Do not pass go, do not collect $200 kind of thing.

That's so funny. Listen, in April of 2006, he wrote an article saying less is sometimes less. And it's an article written about how a lot of people say less is more. And he's like, no, I disagree with that. I think more is, more is more in terms of effort. It's pretty funny. You've been saying the same stuff now for 20 years.

Did you guys see this video that's going semi-viral of the YouTube founders? Early on. Have you seen this?

What's this? No.

So this is 20 years ago, and this is Chad and Steve from YouTube, and they're just in their office talking. But basically it's the guy saying like, they're just, they're just sitting around. They're like, I was kind of depressed last week. Like, we have 40 videos on the site. And, you know, if I came to the site, I wouldn't find— I'd be gone. I would. And they're just like, yeah, this sucks.

And this is YouTube.

This is the founders of YouTube. And you were talking about like, you know, early days blogging. It's like, yeah, I got 6 visitors. And I got 8 the next week. And, you know, being able to persist through, you know, through that time and then, and then the volume, right? Like, you just don't have enough videos. It's not that YouTube doesn't work. It's that YouTube with 40 videos doesn't work. It's not that blogging doesn't work. It's you're blogging once every 2 weeks doesn't work. Right? Like, I think that's one of the big lessons here. We didn't close the loop though, Dharmesh. So you, the new wave, we talked a lot about SEO and like, that's good because history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. What's the new wave?

So the new wave, and I think just like SEO created an opportunity for SEO consultants, SEO agencies, and businesses driving direct traffic organically, I think we have a new thing now. So a couple of things are happening. One is, and lots of marketers have been hit by the AI stick in a way, which is organic traffic that used to come through SEO very, very predictably, including to folks like HubSpot. We are very good at the SEO game. Have played it for a long time, has gone down literally by about 20 to 40% based on which industry you are in. And the reason it has gone down is that historically the practice of search is that we would go to Google, we would type something in, we would get 10 blue links, right? That's the whole game. As it turns out, there's this new thing called AI and a new app called ChatGPT, which has 800 million weekly active users. And what people are doing now is not going to Google and getting 10 blue links, they're like, going to ChatGPT and just asking a question, getting an answer. And that's it, right? It's like, okay, well, there's no click-through, there's no reason for someone who's like, oh, just tell me the answer instead of me having to go through and read the articles from those 10 blue links and then figuring out my own answer. So like, just do it for me. And so that's happening already. You can see it in the actual kind of data as we've seen. And so what's happening now is there's this new emerging discipline that says in the same way we had search engine optimization, we have what we're calling AEO, which is AI or answer engine optimization. It's like, okay, well, before people were going to Google, doing a search for my product, my service, my industry, my category, and my job was to be one of those 10 blue links, hopefully the higher the better because it's a power law curve. Now it's like, okay, well, people are looking for products in my category, services in my category. They're looking in ChatGPT. Let's just say that's the number one, number one app right now. How do I show up as an answer or part of the answer when they do that? So that's the emerging discipline of AEO. And there's a few things that are distinctive about it. One is the click-through rate in terms of web traffic to your site through AEO is going to be down because if they just get the answer, there's no reason to come read your blog post about X where you extol the virtues of how whatever your approach is.

And it also lists way less, more, way less. So if you say like, what's a good clothing company or whatever, like you only get like 4 options Whereas on Google I can click next, next, next.

And you get, yes. Which, which no one ever, by the way, did. There was a running joke in the SEO world is, uh, if you ever had to hide a dead body, hide it on the second page of Google search results because no one ever went there. All they would do is they would just rewrite the query. They would not click next. They would just rephrase their queries. Like, I must have asked this, you know, suboptimally or wrongly. I'm just going to rephrase my question instead of going to second page.

But at least I get 10. Like a lot of, when I noticed when I asked— That's true. ChatGPT stuff, it's like, they give me like 2 or 3.

I agree. Yes. So it's even more important. Uh, and, and that's a, what engineers and math people would call like a binary outcome. So it's like either you show up or you don't, right? If you're not in the actual citations in the answer that was given, you might as well not have played the game because there is no difference, right? So you're actually literally zero, um, in terms of the traction you're going to get. Okay. So then the question is, how different is it? What should people be doing? Uh, what should we be doing now in order to start getting that? Um, And so the number one thing is that, so when Google crawls your website, back in the old Google days, they have a Google crawler and it crawls websites and you can kind of control that. And there were things you do to make it easier for the Google crawler to crawl, make your site faster, make it more structured, all those things. All of those things still actually apply. The difference now is there's a, it's called OAI Searchbot is the name of the bot that's doing the search thing. There's another one called GPTBot. That does for the model training and things like that. So there are two different ones. So number one, on the off chance that you're blocking unknown crawler bots, which some companies do, it's like, oh, I only want Bing and Google or whatever to crawl. I don't want random people just crawling my website because it costs me resources or whatever. Even if you're doing that, if you're blocking it, explicitly go in and turn on the ability for OAI SearchBot and GPTBot to crawl your website, because if you don't get indexed, then you're not even in the game, let alone, you know, you have no chance of winning because you can't be in the results. Okay.

So that's thing one for sure.

Yeah. Thing two is that, and this was nice of them, is that they do report. So any, when you look at your Google Analytics or HubSpot web traffic, whatever analytics tool you use, it now self-reports when something comes from, from one of those bots, from the AI. So you can, it's a UTM source parameter on the, for those of us that do analytics, it's like, so now start, and HubSpot has this in the product now. So we will tell you what percentage of your traffic, just like we used to tell you, yo, here's how much you're getting from paid, here's how much you're getting from organic. Now here's how much you're getting from AI referrals, you know, broadly defined. So take a look at what traffic you're getting now. So as you do things, you'll know whether you got better or worse. You can sort of, like anything else, you have to sort of measure it Uh, number 3, um, and this is a tactical tip. Reframe your content, either rewrite it or put new content out there that is closer to a structured question-answer form, right? So this is less about the kind of prose and narrative writing and hooks and things like that because you're not trying to hook a human like you were back when you were writing blog posts because that's when humans were reading it. They were like clicking on the link. So you need a great page title that would actually get the click. Then you needed the actual really good content to kind of get to the lead conversion, right? Those are things you did. And you were solving effectively for humans. And Google was just a proxy for the humans, but effectively you were solving for the humans. Now you're solving for that AI crawler. And the AI crawler is trying to get to a good answer to a question that the user is asking. And it's easier, it's like if the question is, what are the top CRMs for small business and startups? There should be a webpage on the HubSpot website that says, here are the primary factors that kind of influence what you would pick or whatever. And here's why, the 7 reasons why HubSpot is the top, You know, thing, whatever. It's like, make it easy for them. Like, reduce the friction for the AI to get the thing that it's trying to look for. And the thing it's trying to look for is the best possible answer to the question the user is asking. Number 3 is all the things you used to do in classic SEO, most of them still work. You still want page authority because ChatGPT specifically, when it goes off and does things, what it does is you type a question, what's the best CRM for small business? It will take what you type into ChatGPT. And it will convert that into search queries. It'll parallelize it. So it's gonna do a bunch of Bing queries. Bing is what it happens to use, but doesn't really matter. Uh, most of the search engines are roughly equivalent, uh, technology-wise. So all the things you use to kind of rank a webpage will still help you because when Bing goes out and gets asked by ChatGPT, it says, hey, the user is asking this question about small business and CRM. They may rephrase the query, but it's still gonna do a, a Bing search. It will come back with a list of pages. Those pages go back to ChatGPT. ChatGPT puts it through the LM. And comes up with the answer that it's again gonna show the end user. So, so, you know, getting high authority links, showing up in Bing, doing all the kind of classic good practice white hat SEO stuff still applies.

Sean, are you, are you getting, have you noticed that you're getting traffic and sales for your, for your stuff from AI?

I don't pay attention to it at that level of detail, but we've, and it's not that big for us, but we've looked at a few of these tools 'cause now there's some new like, You know, the way like with SEO you'd have either, you know, HubSpot or you have like Moz or whatever, you'd have these tools. There's a few startups that have come out and been funded for this and they're basically like, hey, we can help you track this and get you into the top, you know, the top, the top answer box for, for this. And so we're trying those now, but I think it's like early still to see if we're getting any results from it. By the way, I just typed— I said, I'm a small business owner and I think I need some kind of place to keep track of customers and prospective deals. What should I be using? All right. HubSpot was the second answer in the thing. It said, uh, you know, here's, here's the top. You need to— he goes, you need a CRM. Here's what a CRM does. And then it's like, here's the top CRMs for small business 2025. But it looks like in this case, it literally just every— the ranking is just pulled straight from TechRadar's article. Um, like TechRadar has some article, I've tested 13 of the best CRMs in 2025. And it just like pulled that exact list and it put a comparison table in there, like you said, and like, it just gave me that as the answer. Whatever TechCrunch said is the answer here. So that seems a little tricky.

We've— for Hampton, we've got, we've got, we've got a lot of business. It's crazy how much is happening.

What are people looking for, Sam, that they're finding Hampton?

So sometimes it's just like, I want like, what's like an entrepreneurial group that I can refer to or I can, I can look into. So that's like one, that's a major one. But then sometimes people will be asking questions to ChatGPT as if they're an executive coach. Like saying like, I'm struggling with this problem and it will say like, you might need a— have you considered an executive coaching group or an executive like peer network, something like that? And then we get shown. And what's crazy is we don't try. Like, I was shocked by this. I started seeing leads and customers come in and it would say, we use HubSpot and HubSpot would be like, yeah, this lead or this new customer came from ChatGPT. And it honestly shocked me. And I remember the first time we got that like 8 or 10 months ago. And it was you, Sean, you asked Dharmesh, when was the time that you like the light bulb went off? I felt a little bit of that light bulb. The problem is that maybe it's not the problem. I think the best way to make it work is you just do the same things that you're doing to rank on Google.

No, but he had some good nuances, right? Like the fact that, you know, on Google you would structure your page a certain way because it's like, that's, it's like if a guest comes over for a dinner party and you're like, oh, he really likes you know, to discuss books and current events. All right, cool. That's what I'm gonna give you. This other guy really loves to debate and it's like ChatGPT loves question and answer. And so format your, your content as question and answer. It's just like a simple nuance of like the new, the new way of doing things, right?

But in general, like it's sign, like it's kind of like just do what you think a customer wants. And the last thing is even early on, Google had what was called a keyword. What do they have? A key tool. Yeah, they used to call it one thing and they changed it. So like in the early blogging days, you could type in like a certain word and it would tell you ballpark how many people are searching for it. And you're like, and then it would also tell you how much, uh, competition there is. And so I could just like replicate that. I don't think that exists for ChatGPT. Does it, Dharmesh?

It does not yet. No. Um, and it's the other thing that doesn't exist yet is that we don't really get, so back in the early years of Google, as part of the data that would come through in your traffic analytics, you would see which keywords people were searching for. It would show up in HubSpot. It would show up in Google Analytics. Google has subsequently kind of curtailed that so they don't pass that kind of granular, what we think of as like intent data, what was the user actually searching for? But yeah, I think things will evolve. So a couple of more kind of tactical tips that I think are applicable today. Sean, for you, and this may be happening automatically based on being on the Shopify platform, but one of the things that ChatGPT and the AI engines really like is structured product catalogs, right? Because as you would expect, it's like, oh, here's a, here's the standard semantic web way of describing the product catalog, which is size, color, all those things. And then another key thing is inventory. It's like, is it in stock or not? You know, can it be shipped or something? Delivery time, those kinds of things. If you put those on the website, that's going to influence as you, as you would expect it to. Like if I'm searching for, I want to buy this kind of a musical synthesizer or something like that, I want to find a site that actually happens to have it, right? That's why, you know, Amazon gets, you know, so much love generally. But anyway, so that's one thing to look at. And for you, Sam, the other thing that the AEOs of the answer engines kind of optimize optimized for is more kind of human-based stuff. So if you look at the review sites, G2 and things like that for product-oriented companies, but also it, I won't say over-indexes because that's a relative term, but it highly indexes on things like Reddit. Especially if there's like active, lots of back and forth or whatever. And if even if there's one comment in there that says, oh, here's the thing that definitively asks, and you will find that the citations that you see that show up in chat, and you could just do this through personal anecdote and just experimentation. You will find that the Reddit threads it picks up are the ones where the original post was asking a question. And that question sort of matches a question the user's asking, like, oh, what's the best, you know, CRM for small business? If there happens to be a Reddit post that loosely kind of translates to the exact same meaning, that Reddit thread post, if there's a comment in there where someone definitively says, yeah, it's HubSpot, and here are the 5 reasons why, and that comment gets a bunch of upvotes because they have access to that data. That has a very, very high likelihood of being a cited source.

This is going to be the biggest company in the world. Imagine if Google had a subscription. So Google is already the third or something largest company in the world. Now imagine every customer is also paying $10 a month or, you know what I mean?

3 episodes ago, uh, we were talking about OpenAI. Um, it's like, oh, if you could, you know, if we have to predict as to which, what's going to be the, uh, the next trillion dollar company. This is before, uh, I don't think any company had reached trillion dollars at the time we did that episode. But one was about to. Um, it's crazy how much, like ChatGPT, for it to be $800 million, like they're essentially the new operating system, uh, for this current generation.

I had a buddy and I, I maybe mentioned it on the pod years ago, but he was deciding between two very promising companies. One of them was OpenAI, and this was before ChatGPT was launched. And I think they were already worth $30 billion. And we were talking and he was like, man, I think like, I don't know if this equity can grow anymore. Like, I just don't think it can work. And he ended up taking the job anyway and he made already something like $30 million or so from his stock and he sold a portion of it so he could like be very comfortable. And then we were talking, he's like, what should I do with the rest? And I was like, man, there's definitely a world where it could 10 or 20x or more again, who knows? And it's just crazy to say that out loud that what's it worth now? $1 trillion or $800? I don't even know.

$500 billion is the current publicly disclosed round that's happening currently.

Can we do like some rapid-fire questions? We have this document. This is for the listener. We have this document where we were like preparing different ideas and Sean had— Sean said he wants to know your process from zero to one and how do you get ideas? Do you do research? What do you do to move the ball forward? And you replied something interesting. You said two things. You said, This gives me a good chance to talk about algebra. And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And the second thing you said was iteration. It's all about iteration. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Yeah. So a couple of things. One is I don't have— I don't do deep research on ideas. I don't look at the market like an MBA would or should. Most of the things I end up pursuing are either personal itches. I need the thing myself or someone close to me, either my business needs it, my wife needs it, or something like that that should exist but doesn't. And these are all the things I pursue tend to end up being software. That's the only thing I know actually how to produce. If I was a carpenter or a musician, it would be something different. And my kind of running thesis has been, and this is the reference algebra I was making, is around mathematical induction. And so mathematical induction is this very simple principle that says, as long as it's true for n 1, and it's also true that if it's true for n, that it's also true for n 1, then it's gonna be true for everything all along the way until infinity for all positive numbers. Anyway, I'll simplify this. Distilled down, what that means is if you start, that's condition 1, and if you can always take the next step, make the next iteration, it will work. Like, that's for some definition of work, right? It's like you just have to just kind of keep at it. And I'm not saying stubbornly pursue the exact same idea that you started with. That does not work, right? You do have to sort of, And iteration is truly taking kind of market feedback and doing a true loop, right? An informative loop that says, oh, I'm gonna do it, or at least try to do it better the next iteration, the next iteration, the next iteration. But that's my approach. It's like find an idea that I can, and then just get started. It's like often it'll be like, can I write code tonight? So right now I've got 3 projects in flight that are these kind of scratch my own itch AI projects. And I'm almost tempted to tell you what the 3 are because that'll force me to launch them before this episode goes live. Uh, they come—

give a one-liner maybe for like 1 or 2 of them.

Yeah. So 1 is around, um, it's like a, like a visual designer as an agent. So there's lots of great image generation tools. There's, you know, ChatGPT has one, there's Nanobanana that's now from Google. But what's, what I've always found lacking is the actual process I go through as a non-designer. As a business person, like if I'm doing a social media post or doing a blog post or something like that, it's like, like I have a process, like, okay, I wanna come up with like visual ideas, what would represent this? Then I wanna see 10 possible examples, then I wanna iterate, then I wanna say, okay, I wanna pick these 5 and I wanna create my own personal brand, my own style. Then I wanna apply that style to the kind of, it's like there's this, this kind of workflow that I go through and like that's just painful and I'm too impatient. Like I have access to designers, this is not a matter of saving money. but it's like if I have an idea at 2 o'clock in the morning and I want to get the idea out there with a visual that goes along with it. So that's the thing I'm building is that goes through my entire flow, um, as, as an agentic process.

Do you have a name for it? I know you like to do names with the ideas.

I do. It's, and I'll put it out there. Let's, um, 'cause it's, it's close to launchable. It's called, uh, ImageGen.ai. So image generation AI.

And is this gonna be, I like one of your first or second times on, on MFM, Wordle was popular and you said that you made a Wordle alternative. Alternative. So for those listening, if you don't know what Wordle is, it's, I don't know, a game like Scrabble, whatever. And your side project where you just launched this, I think with your son, was making $80,000 per month at the time. I have no idea where it's at now. Do you have some type of, uh, ambitions or guesses as to where, uh, this is gonna be in 6 months?

Um, I don't know actually. So being a part of it, we talked about this a little bit, um, last couple episodes, you know, so I've been working as 'cause kind of part of my kind of HubSpot hat now is the agent.ai platform, which is basically a marketplace for agents. You can build agents, find agents, hire agents to do these kinds of things. So in the back of my mind, I'm gonna build this thing, but I'm building it as an agent that will be on the agent.ai platform. And the hope that is, if the utility is high enough, either it will cause a bunch of users to be added to agent.ai, which is now up to 2 million users, which is awesome. Or, you know, I have, thoughts about agents on the platform being monetized someday. And this is like, okay, for me it passes a litmus test. Like if this thing already existed, would I pay $5 a month for it or $10 a month for it? And the answer is yes. It's like, okay, well if I can sort of, and I actually posted on LinkedIn exactly what sort of the product roadmap for this thing was yesterday. I'm like, okay, here's the thing I'm building. I didn't disclose the name, but here's the thing I'm building, here's what it's gonna do. And it's like, stupid simple things right now. For instance, when you do an image generation thing right now that has text, which a lot of kind of business images that you create will have like a headline or some sort of text in it. The image models have gotten better at text, still not perfect. But one of the things I wanted to do is like, okay, well if you generate an image with text, I can pass the generated image back through AI and say, tell me the text that's on this image. So if there's a typo in it, just rerun it. Don't like waste my time giving me things that have typo in them and me just like, oh, by the way, you misspelled this or whatever, you have a typo in that. So by the time it makes it to me, it's already done, right? It's like having an intern going off and doing this stuff in the background. And then I show up and it's got 10 options for me. I can pick and I can run it. It'll do it in my style without typos, which sounds like a minor thing, but it's useful.

Sean, do you want to ask him some of these other questions? You had some pretty good ones, like the request for startup or his ChatGPT history.

Yeah, well, I'll do the ChatGPT history one. I'm just curious. So you, um, you run a huge company. You are also kind of like a scratch your own itch guy. You're investor, you do, you have many hats. So I'm just curious how you use ChatGPT. If I, if you were to pull up your ChatGPT and like looked at the last 5 to 7 searches that you did or questions and answers that you did, what are you talking to ChatGPT about?

I'm a huge ChatGPT fan, don't get me wrong. And, uh, even if I weren't an investor in OpenAI, but my, my, the way I consume ChatGPT is not through the app. The way I consume ChatGPT is through their API. So I have my own kind of command line thing that I put in. And there's a reason I do this. Um, So the, the next big advancement we're gonna see in, in AI apps generally is this notion of memory that they remember. And you'll see as you've been using ChatGPT, you will find that it's going to remember more and more things about you even though you talked about them a week ago, a month ago, right? Like it's, it's the best out there in terms of being able to retain that memory, which is awesome. The non-awesome part of it is that that memory is locked into ChatGPT. So if you ever go to Claude or if you ever go to Gemini or, something else, those things don't have that memory of you. And that's a very frustrating thing, which is great for OpenAI because it makes it very, very sticky.

Well, wait, so your personal version that you're running in your command line has better memory than ChatGPT? Why, why does that, how'd you do that?

Oh, because it has infinite memory. And what makes it the better memory is because it's under my control, it's my memory. For instance, I can go off and say, I'm going, I want to go back through, and I have this for my email as well, which I think is just another form of memory, all the email archive. And I have like 2.5 million emails in my quote quote, memory, I can go back and say through my ChatGPT history, here's the thing I'm actually trying to kind of get to. And then I can combine that with other things. I can take that memory. It's like, now I want to pass that to Google Gemini, or I want to intersect it with Google Gemini, which does video analysis a lot better than ChatGPT does, which doesn't do video analysis yet. It's, it's the openness of it, right? That, that's the, the motivation for it. It's not that I can do memory better. It's the fact that I can do more things with it because I can intersect it with other apps.

But why isn't this the product? Because I think everybody would want this, right?

Yeah, give me that.

Because it violates, okay, I have, uh, I have 3 rules of business. Rule number 1, never own a piece of a restaurant, never be a shareholder in a restaurant. Rule number 2, never be a landlord because I don't even want to maintain my own properties, let alone properties on behalf of other people. And number 3, never compete with Sam Altman from OpenAI. Those are my 3 rules. That would violate the 3rd rule, uh, which is I don't want to create a ChatGPT competitor. But where will this, this will manifest, right, is that HubSpot's building kind of memory into our Breeze assistant, you know, our AI product. And so that, that's going to happen. So localized memory in terms of, you know, for use case specifics, I don't want to create a consumer app that tries to solve this kind of for the broad horizontal group of people. But I think over time the industry will evolve where there'll be some form of like federated memory, I think, that says, oh, you can plug into this similar to how we, plug into Google Docs and Gmail and things like that. It's like OpenAI may not own like absolutely everything, but right now someone needed to do the memory. I think they did the right thing. It was not, you know, diabolically planned to, to be that way. It's just like, oh, it would, this would be a better product if it had memory. So they added memory.

Right. Okay. But be, okay. So, but you didn't answer my full, my full question. So you said, I don't use the ChatGPT app. I use it through API on my own little thing you've created, which has better memory.

Okay.

But what do you use it for? Like, what's like the last few things you've used it for?

So I do it a lot for kind of research. If I'm researching like ideas, and I use it a lot for domain names as it turns out. So I have a thing that can actually look at Google Trends. So I can say, oh, like I've come across this idea for a domain name or whatever. Here's a price. I can look that up in the marketplace right now. I can look up the transaction history. Has this domain been sold before? What was the last purchase price? It's like Zillow for domains. One of the agents I'm also working on that will launch actually this week. But I want, so what I wanna do is to say, okay, uh, vibe coding is a good example. It's like, ah, once, uh, Andrew Karpathy, I was actually part of that, but sometimes I'm a little bit later to the game. It's like, oh, I see this trend kind of picking up. Uh, like what is that? I wanna know who coined the term. I wanna know what it is. I wanna know what domains are available. What's the price? Are they any of them listed or not? Are any ones just free and clear? Like no one's, as it turns out, vibe coding, I was early but late enough where someone had already kind of purchased the.com domain.

By the way, vibe coding would fit your inbound framework. Like, like if I'm Replit or one of these companies right now, I'm creating the vibe coding, you know, movement and the, the community and the events and the blog and all that. And then like, I have the tool underneath that you could use, but you could use many others, right? Or maybe I'm Supabase or one of these other companies, like putting it behind that the way you've done with inbound marketing, I think would be smart right now.

I'll tell you one of my, and I will, I will sacrifice this idea, um, not, not for free, but, and the idea here, and this was the original idea behind, uh, so I paid 6 figures for that. For that domain. That's, I think I'm—

vibecoding.com or what'd you get?

vibecoding.com. Really? And oh my gosh. And the idea, I've logged hundreds of hours doing what some would call vibe coding and there's other terms like agentic coding I think is a more accurate thing, but it doesn't have the same vibe as vibe coding. So that, that reason.

That doesn't exactly roll off the tip of the tongue.

It doesn't. Yep. And I, and just in case I own that one too, but that's a different story. Okay. So vibecoding.com. I think it's a great idea. It lowers the bar, allows lots of non-developers to kind of get into the kind of product building game. The problem is, and I would bet lots of money on this, is that almost everyone that is not a developer by trade will do vibe coding if they're trying to build a real, so there's a class of problems that vibe coding is really, really good at. It's like if you're building software for yourself, if it's got a short lifespan that says I'm building this, I need it right now or whatever, and it's like disposable software, or if you're just building it for your team, as I only have to make it work for 3 people, and if it stops working, no big deal. But as you start violating some of those criteria, for us, it's like, no, I wanna build a production product that I build a billion-dollar software company around that's going to be long-during, and I'm gonna be maintaining this product going a year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years down the road, then vibe coding invariably right now, even with, invariably non-developers will paint themselves into a corner. That they will hit some bugs, something won't work, something will break. It will, it's just a matter of time based on how ambitious the thing is you're doing. When that happens, it's entirely possible that you actually have an economically viable idea, but you have an unviable code base because you have no idea what's happening inside that black box. When that happens, not an if, when that happens, what if there were a community in a marketplace called vibecoding.com where a bunch of engineers hang out and what they do is to say, hey, I'll answer questions for you, like mind-numbing questions. But also for $500 an hour, I will jump into your GitHub repo, figure out your problem and fix it and cause it and set up unit tests for you now and help you get through this corner that you've painted yourself into. So I think that's gonna be a massive market.

So you listed, I think, so you probably own between 500 and 1,000?

It's between 500 and 1,000, yeah.

Okay, so I could collect, if I were, you know, had unlimited money and I could probably collect 500 over 10 years. You go to, you just have an idea and you just buy it. But what's crazy is a lot of these domains that you have, they actually have projects on 'em. So I'm looking at pitchcraft.com, opengraph.com, prompt.com, dadjoke.ai, speedround.com, and it's like speedround.com, it's an investment firm, a check or no in 24 hours. Dadjoke.ai, a dad joke generator, uh, that works but not that well. And you said you have 3 other projects that you wanna launch, but you said, uh, I need this podcast to go out and then I'm gonna go and get it out. So I'm setting this up. Sean came up with the idea of being generative. This is the most generative I've ever seen someone, which is how do you have enough time to actually do all this?

Well, just, and just to be clear, the, the list of domains I put in, I don't have sites launched on them right now. So the thing I was kind of trying to share, and I may just put this up publicly, it's like, here are my top 20 domains for which I have ideas, but I don't have the calories to actually pursue them. Make me an offer. If you're, uh, but you have to have like street cred, some, something that gives me evidence that you would actually be able to kind of pursue this idea. Kind of contribute the domain and maybe some capital to kind of kick the idea off. But to answer your kind of question bluntly, Sam, my hours have not changed in the 30-plus years I've been, you know, doing this as an entrepreneur. I still think of myself as an entrepreneur despite being part of a $30, $25 billion company. For all intents and purposes, and I mean this in the most positive way I can possibly put it, I live in the Matrix. That's basically what I'm doing, right? It's like, it's like, it sounds like, oh, are we in a simulation or whatever? I personally is like, okay, my window into the world is like, okay, I've got little talking character people that sometimes show up on this other screen that I have up here in my office or whatever. It's like, and I'm just trying to play the game. And this is, and I, in the same way people play video games and do it obsessively, this is my version of a video game. And I did play video games a lot back when I was younger too. But I really enjoy it. I like it because if I were a writer, my favorite writers are the ones that spend a lot of time on world building and character building, right? It's like they create this entire, like especially the sci-fi and fantasy writers, they create this entire thing that a world that could exist that's got its own physical laws. And here's the species that live on, the powers they have and all of it. And it's this entire world that they fabricate out of thin air. They do it in words. I'm trying to, in my own small way, create a version of the universe that exists that solves all of the problems that I have or people that I love that, and that I can sort of, you know, kind of poke around at the edges and make a version of the universe that I think is a V1.1 of the universe that exists.

Does your house work like that in your, in your physical life? Like in, on your day-to-day life, do you, is your home life set up to where you've built like your own like is everything about your life exactly in your very particular way of going about it? Is it set up that way?

No, and I'm actually probably drawing the wrong visual picture. So my life is, if you just looked at how I live, it's more like the absent-minded professor. My desk is completely messy. So it's not like I have like an engineer's scientist kind of thing where like it's a lab, you know, white lab coat, clean desk and everything's kind of pristine. It's the exact opposite of that, right? It's, uh, It's just not how I work. And so I'm not that methodical about it. I'm analytical in some ways, but I actually play things actually very loose. Like I'll have a random idea and I'll drop the thing I'm working on, I'll go play with something else for a day or two or whatever. And then I'll drop the fact that I'm doing ImageGen.ai in the next few days or whatever. And now I'll finish it and get it to some semblance of kind of working. But I've said this before, but it bears repeating. A really good piece of like personal advice is that, you know, when, if a musician were out playing music and practicing when they're not doing like for 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day, which people do that. If an athlete, if a basketball player, like if they're off, you know, practicing 8 hours a day and then even between games and it's like, we never question that. We never ever question. We're like, ah, well, that's what it takes to be kind of top of that particular game, music, sports or whatever, for some reason there's a stigma attached to work.

Yeah.

And there's some stigma attached to if you just happen to make money at the thing you happen to be doing. I was like, well, I was like, he has all the money, why would he keep doing this for money? I'm like, I'm not doing it for money at all. Like, I don't care about money at all. Um, but I do enjoy the, the craft and the practice and the actual process of building stuff.

The sport of business. Yeah. You, you, um, have you ever heard of the, the famous clause that Michael Jordan put in his contract when he signed, uh, his big deal with the Bulls? So they added a clause, and I don't know if this was Nike marketing or if this was genuine, but at the time, if you were an NBA player, you signed the max contract, they would have all these rules like, hey, you can't ride motorcycles, like, you know, things that would jeopardize you as an asset to them. And one of them was like, you can't just go play like random pickup basketball games on concrete with strangers, right? Like, you might get hurt, and that's on, you know, now you can't play on company time. And he had this famous clause that he put in called the, the for the love of the game clause. And it was that Jordan was allowed to play basketball anytime he wanted for the love of the game. And I think that that's like a clause that we all just want in our, our own mental contract of how we do things. Like, you had this great tweet where you said, if money doesn't let you do the things you love doing, why else would you want it? And I thought that was so good because oftentimes I know I have to talk to my mom or my sister and I'll tell them about you. And my buddy Furkan is like this. Uh, Furkan was my co-founder of my last company. And then, but the company he built before that, AppLovin, is now like a $100 billion company. And so like Furkan's got all the money he'll ever need. Right. And they're like, oh, what's Furkan up to? I'm like, oh yeah, he built this lab called Founders Inc. in Fort Mason. And he's in there and he's there till 11 PM. And he's like, you know, he's grinding and he's he's got a new startup and they're like, oh my God, if I had the money, I would never do that. And, you know, part of it is like, well, because you wouldn't— he's not doing it for the money. He's doing it because he wants to do it. That's why he got the money. So first of all, like, you have it reversed. The money came because he is this way. Not, uh, you know, he's not— he didn't become this way because of the money. And also, like, you're right that whether it's athletes, musicians, you know, we find it like noble when they do it. But if you're a business person, you're greedy or you're a workaholic.

When your mom says that, you're like, have a seat, Mom. Pull up a chair. You see LeBron James.

Are you familiar with Jordan's contract in '96? Subsection 3C, for the love of the game. She's like, oh, I just wanted to know if he has kids yet or not. Like, it's like she's like actually operating at a completely different level than me.

Oh man. Dharmesh, we, we love hanging out with you.

You—

I always leave better than I came in. I wish we could do this for, for many more hours because there's just so many different things about life and business that we can learn from you. We had Howard Marks on recently and at the end it was the same thing where it was like I was like, man, you came to talk about investing, but you're really just talking about how to live a good life. And you're that guy. You kind of do the same thing.

It's kind of funny, right? Like the invest— the kind of legend investors we have, they, they go, they bring this philosophical energy of like almost like patience and like, like observe the world, stay calm, you know, stay calm and carry on or whatever. And like Dharmesh and like some of the builders have like a slightly different energy. It's still philosophical, but it's kind of like a let's make it happen energy. Like, let's build it. Why not? We could do this. Let's try this. It's okay if it doesn't work. Work, it is a totally different playful builder energy that I think is, is dope to be around.

Yeah. Well, I, I have a tweet I almost sent yesterday, but I wanted to get my image generator working so I could attach it to this tweet. Uh, and it's two lines I'm gonna share with you. It's a nice, uh, warm kind of closing, which is, uh, dance like no one's watching, build like everyone's waiting. Nice.

We, uh, and I, we have to do a quick plug. Uh, this, one of the ways this episode came about was the marketing team at HubSpot was like, we need you to promote this thing. And they told us to promote this thing. And we're like, yeah, let's just have Dharmesh on the pod and maybe he'll like plug it because that's way better. But what is it? Loop Marketing?

Loop Marketing. By the way, Loop Marketing is the new inbound marketing. That's what it is.

Is that your prediction?

If you want to learn about how to do marketing well in the modern age of AI, look up Loop Marketing.

LoopMarketing.com. You own that one too, I guess?

Yeah, we promised we would say it 7 times. So Loop Marketing, Loop Marketing, and Loop Marketing. Boom! Quote hit. Let's go.

They were like, I was like, can you guys read this ad or talk about it?

We're like the white font on white background at the end of the, the pod.

You, you didn't even plug it. By the way, we asked what is the new inbound marketing?

You called it AEO.

That's true. It's true. Thank you.

That's it. That's the pod.