Tesla 20x'd Sales by Cutting 64 Clicks to 3

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire It took 64 clicks to buy a Tesla online, 30 of them signing loan documents. Eric explains the five-step algorithm from the book of the same name (question, delete, simplify, speed up, automate) and how it 20x'd Tesla's website sales. Then the data: AI-generated ads are beating human creative on completion rate (92% vs 90% on connected TV), Shopify's Q2 shows $116 billion in GMV and a platform built for AI agents, and Neil's case that SEO and GEO are merging into one thing, brand. Eric on the new agents he is testing, Instinct and Meta Muse, and the week's grand finale: Rohan Nayak's post on how Pocket FM went from zero to $500 million in ARR with an AI ad machine that makes 17,500 ads a month. Key takeaways◾Question, delete, simplify, speed up, then automate; most people automate first and fail◾SEO or GEO, the long game is brand; you have to show up everywhere◾A 2% to 2.25% CTR lift cut Pocket FM's CAC by 30%; build the ad machine around that insight Chapters00:00 Tesla 20x'd website sales: 64 clicks to 301:35 Buying a car on a website02:55 AI ads beat human creative on completion04:19 Shopify Q2: $116B GMV and AI commerce05:38 SEO and GEO are merging into brand08:04 Search everywhere optimization, again10:49 A SaaS company diversifying off SEO11:46 Instinct and Meta Muse agents14:15 Pocket FM: $0 to $500M ARR with 17,500 ads a month17:11 Build your own ad machine

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. By the way, Neil, I want to tell you a story here. I've been reading this book from the guy that was the president of Tesla. I think his name's John McNeil. The book's called The Algorithm, okay? It talks about the Elon algorithm.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  But there's a chapter I went through where he talks about how Tesla 20x sales on their site. So here's how they did it. Basically, it took 64 clicks to buy a vehicle on the Tesla site. Thirty of those clicks were just signing loan documents, Neil, like going through a bunch of different things, right? And so what they did with this algorithm, there's five steps to the algorithm. Question, delete, simplify, speed up, and automate. I'll say it again. Question, so question all the requirements. Delete whatever seems to be stupid. You probably should be over deleting, and then you should be adding back later, right? Simplify what the process is. Then you speed it up, and then you automate it. Right now, too many people go for automate first, and that's how you screw up a lot. Elon has even said that himself, and this is his algorithm.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  But they started to question everything. It's like, wait, with a loan document, why do you actually need to have like 30 or 60 pages or whatever? So they questioned it, and they challenged, you know, how it should be done. And the loan docs, I think, take like three clicks or something like that now. But they optimized the site. They optimized the whole manufacturing process, like, hey, instead of having like, you know, 20 different colors or 60 different colors, why don't we just have like three or four different colors? And that way you simplify the process, and that simplified their entire manufacturing. So that way, they actually started to get a lot more throughput out there in terms of shipping more cars. But people were able to buy a lot more cars on the website, and that's how they actually 20x sales on their site.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  It's crazy how people buy a car, like a Tesla, on a website, right? I would have never imagined that like 10 years ago. I'm like, ah, no one's gonna buy a car on a website. Times have changed, and people are actually getting used to making very large transactions digitally.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  It's just, but I love the whole thing around the first part of the, like, questioning everything, right? Like, why does it have to be done this way? And the cool thing is, you've seen this, Neil, like, when we, when you or I hire new people that are coming out of college, or even people that are in high school right now, they, they naturally have that built in. They do, because they don't have any preconceived notions on how to work. They just naturally question everything, and they just work in a new way. So it's kind of built in already with, with younger folk.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yes, the, the, the Elon thing specifically, I believe it was Domino's Pizza that he was comparing it to. And he wanted it to be very simple, like Domino's Pizza. He's just like, why can't it be like this? I also think what makes it easier to buy a Tesla is they don't have too many options. If you want to go buy a Mercedes, and I use Mercedes example because it's the most common car I tend to buy, or manufacturing brand for automotive. Mercedes has tons of options. Like, you can pick like 50 options for a car, or something ridiculous like that, which just makes things much more work. With Tesla, you may not like some of the options, but you just pick from whatever they have, and it is what it is.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Yep. By the way, this is funny. Okay. So Neil, I wanted to share this with you. So there's basically this study right now that shows how AI ads are beating human creative on completion. Okay, so let's talk about what that means. So let me share this with you, and here's a little hack for you all that are, that are watching right now. So this site, how dare they put a paywall up? Well, I just go to this other site over here called removepaywall.com. And you just put the URL right after, and the paywall is gone. I'll just leave it at that. I got that tip from Elon, by the way, on X. So with AI becoming a common part of the creative process in advertising, brands and content makers assessing its effectiveness against non-AI content have a reason to cheer. According to data from global advertising technology platform VDO.ai, never heard of it.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  On Connected TV, AI-generated ads recorded a 92% video completion rate, VCR, okay? Slightly higher than the 90% seen for non-AI creatives. A similar trend appeared in online video, where AI-led ads achieved a 71% VCR compared to a 70% for non-AI ads.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  What are you guys seeing?

• 4:40Speaker 01

  I don't know the exact numbers.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Well, that's something we're gonna have to report back on, and we'll report back on this in the next few weeks. I just think it's interesting.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  I just don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fine. It's okay, because we're gonna come back to that in a, in a few weeks or so. But here's another one for you, Neil. So we look at Shopify's, you know, Q2 2026 earnings transcript. So we can see here, okay, that, so what they basically said was that, I think it's, in terms of online purchases, so through Universal Commerce Protocol, which is something they developed through Google, and the Shopify catalog, I think they're saying that agentic purchases have gone up by 3.6x year-over-year, or their sales have gone up 3.6x, contributing to faster onboarding and smarter decision-making for merchants, right?

• 5:35Speaker 00

  So Shopify reported a 32% year-on-year increase in GMV to 116 billion and 34% increase in revenue to 3.6 billion for the second quarter of 2026. The company emphasized its strategic focus on expanding its addressable market by providing a unified platform for merchants of all sizes, leveraging its open ecosystem model and partnerships with major tech companies like OpenAI and Google. And so its infrastructure advancements, this is basically, this is, this is enabling commerce that makes it easier not just for people, but for agents as well, and that's gone up 3.6x year-over-year. And I think we're gonna see a lot more of this. I think this is gonna grow faster.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  So, you know, on a side note, let's actually talk a little about SEO. We haven't talked about SEO for a while on this podcast. I was having a conversation with an entrepreneur earlier on this, earlier this week, I believe it was Monday. And they were breaking down how SEO no longer drives any traffic. People don't use Google anymore. If you're not doing GEO, you're gonna end up losing a lot of business because now everyone's using AI. And you can call one GEO, you can call one SEO. I know there's some nuances and differences. But in reality, what I'm seeing, and I don't know what you're seeing, you may disagree with me on this or not.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  The platforms are becoming merged. What I mean merged is, Google's experience is looking more like ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is trying to integrate some of Google's experiences within ChatGPT. In essence, I believe if you fast forward a year or two, they'll look much more similar to each other than what they do now. And whether you want to call it GEO or SEO, depending on the query type that you're going after, you're gonna have to optimize for whether it's an answer, or whether it's 10 blue links, or six blue links, or video to be included. You're gonna have to just be, you're gonna have to show up. And what marketing is turning into, in my opinion, even though it's digital and a lot of it is performance-based, where you can track the ads,

• 7:42Speaker 01

  it really comes down in the long run to a brand game. I believe, yes, you need a good product or service, that's always been true. But the person who builds a stronger brand is the one more likely to win in the long run. Maybe you're not the biggest, but you'll be big enough where you're happy. And a lot of marketing dollars are gonna be shifted towards things related towards branding, even if it's digital, because paid Google ads really do help build your brand, right? YouTube ads, Instagram ads, they all do help build your brand, even though they're really trackable. And it's more so showing the right type of campaigns to the right type of people on the right channel. And in the long run, I think that's gonna drive the majority of sales.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  And every big company I work with, the majority of their revenue come from their brand. But ranking on Google, being in GEO, being on Instagram, it all helps.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Frictionless Growth Marketing, hosted by Sonia Thompson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing, hosted by Sonia Thompson, shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders, showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. With the brand. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics,

• 9:18Speaker 00

  then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency, again, www singlegrain.com. Check it out, and if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. Yeah. So what I would say is this, Neil had this saying called search everywhere optimization. It applies even more today, even though he, we haven't heard him using on this podcast in a while. But it is search everywhere optimization again, right? Um, just a little different, but same, right? And so the way I see it is, um, you know, the, the good news now is like, you see a lot of kids, they're actually starting to create content. I actually saw like a seven year old created a, like a, like a Instagram thing yesterday. I was gonna send it to you.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Wait, seven or seven D?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Seven years.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. She was talking about something that I, I think is funny that I would have sent you, but I didn't send it to you on Instagram. But anyway, so the whole, you know, it's not, back in the day, by the way, just so everyone knows, like, the SEO game was the game in town, right? Every, you optimize it. It was pretty like, it was pretty like, you kind of knew what you get back. Like if you produce more content, you, you get more links. Um, and maybe you acquire some websites and then you, you make sure you're updating your content, you're deleting your content. Like everything that people were sharing, it's like, it mostly worked, right? Today, a lot of different things work, which means attention is spread. And remember, we talked about in, in marketing, it used to be the rule of seven for people to get your attention and take an action. Today, we think that's probably more, we went up to rule of fourteen.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  It's probably more rule of twenty-one, rule of twenty-eight today, um, because attention is so fragmented. Um, but to Neil's point, even if you're a niche creator, let's say you are, are creating something around like, interior design for Amish people or something like that, right? Very niche. Guess what? The people who buy from you, when they can use, are they allowed to use technology, Neil?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I don't think they are, because we have them at the ranch. Um, and they typically don't use technology when they're logging, uh, taking the logs off and stuff like that.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, just if we entertain it for a moment, let's assume they can use technology. You would have a very niche audience, right? But again, like, using the example, looking at Neil's YouTube channel, looking at my YouTube channel. Uh, for my YouTube channel, just speak for myself, when I used to go wide, it didn't drive conversions. But now when I go, when I go lower, um, when I go more niche with like, not just marketing, but talking about the latest AI marketing and business trends as it relates to my business. That is very niche, right? And that's going to get the right attention that I'm looking for at the end of the day. Um, so what we're really saying is that you're gonna, you have to work even harder today than you did before. And, you know, we, whether you want to use the word omnichannel or search everywhere optimization, or whatever it is exactly, just know that it goes back to what we first started with, with this episode.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Is that you have to be not just adaptable as an entrepreneur, if you're an entrepreneur listening to this, but you have to be very adaptable as a marketer. Those are the ones that are going to thrive in this new world. And I think everyone's going to realize in the next few years that they have to become more adaptable. It's just the most adaptable ones today are already winning.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yep. Do a, a lot of life just comes down to adapting. Um, I was watching an earnings call for a SaaS company. And, or not an earnings call, they're at the Goldman Sachs event. And they're talking about how they're working on other channels to diversify away from the SEO hit that they ended up taking. And they were talking about how CEO isn't driving them on a traffic, but they're focused on YouTube and other things like that. Um, but yeah, no, it's, you know, it's.

• 12:44Speaker 00

  What's the company? Can you name the company?

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Is there anything dangerous if you name the company?

• 12:51Speaker 01

  No, no, there's nothing dangerous. It's, it's, uh, I, yeah, I don't want to name the company. Um, people can look up their own analyst reports and stuff like that, but they, they need to adjust and they are adjusting. And if they don't adjust, you're pretty much gonna struggle and not do as well.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. A few more things, uh, to talk about before we, before we get out of here. So I, I wanted to share this Mark Pincus thing, and then I wanted to share a bit on Meta's Muse, which I want to share some takeaways from that. I've also been using this new bot called Instinct, Neil. Neil, you know how you have a lot of points, right? I think you still have a lot of points, yeah?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  So, okay, Instinct, I'm like, hey, I want you to find all the events. Uh, I want you to find all the events I should be speaking at in the next twelve months. I want you to also, I hear, I have a X amount of points over here. I want you to, and I want to go to Japan, for example, and these days, I want you to find the reward flights. They found me all the reward flights and how much they would cost. They found me all the events I should be speaking at and all the different angles and how it would reach out for me. I said, oh, by the way, I'm doing this, uh, this, this global AI summit, uh, in November. Uh, we, we're, we're looking for maybe one, one more speaker or so. Um, and I, I want you to find, you know, the people who are nearby in that area, because it's in Europe. And because like we, you know, um, this organization doesn't have budget to necessarily fly all the Americans over. And it, it did that, right?

• 14:08Speaker 00

  And so instinct is pretty interesting. I think a lot of these bots are going to become interesting, but, um, because I'm talking about Meta Muse already, let me just talk about that real quick. Meta Muse is the autonomous agent that Meta released earlier this week. Neil, you know why I like it? Because it's connected to your Instagram. So I can say this, I can say, hey, you know, uh, I would like to go to Italy with my girlfriend, uh, in the next May, okay? And, uh, I want you to create an itinerary for me, a visual itinerary, based on who I follow on Instagram and also all of my saves. And it has all of your bookmarks, all those useless bookmarks that I was bookmarking over the years, they're on, they're now useful now, right? And so, and I said, hey, that's cool, but I'm like, I want to use it for business. So I was like, hey, can I, can you actually handle all of my meta ads?

• 14:52Speaker 00

  And you can see everything and then like, you know, um, like, is that going to be more useful with you? Because you have, you're connected to everything on Meta. It's like, yes, well, absolutely, right? Um, so it can do that. But the, the other thing that was more practical was I was like, hey, I want you to, uh, audit my social media, right? And I was like, yeah, you're posting too much, right? It's like, you're posting too much. And it's like, the funny thing about you, Eric, is like, you're posting so much and I look at all your bookmarks and you are not following all the things that you love in your bookmarks, right? And when I hosted a poker game the other day, Mark Manson was, was like, yeah, your stuff is really good. You're just posting too much now, right? And so I'm like, okay, that's pretty good. Like both Meta, because Meta has all the data in the world and it has my bookmark, because that's all my behaviors and everything. I'm like, that's pretty good. So I'm going to be using that more.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Now, the last thing, the grand finale now, Neil, is this piece. So Mark Pincus, um, our friend Mark Pincus from Zynga. So he posted this, check this out. So.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And when Eric says our friend, he's joking.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm joking. We don't really know him. But, um, we did talk to Zynga about doing a poker deal a long time ago. That was like fifteen years ago. But anyway, uh, so amazing story, must read for breakout consumer AI. So this guy, Rohan Nayak here, he shares this, he's co-founder of a company called Pocket FM. I don't know what they do, but they grew from zero to five hundred million in ARR, annual recurring revenue, adding two hundred fifty million dollars last year while being EBITDA profitable, okay? Thirteen hundred word posts on every growth tactic that worked for us. I'm not going to go through everything here. Um, but I think we should talk about maybe like the first two or three, okay? So what got us from zero to four hundred million ARR in the US works in every country? Number two is retention and monetization hacks. Number three is localization is greater than translation, all right?

• 16:33Speaker 00

  So Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas with our own pool of one-person studios. Fascinating. All right? So acquisition playbook for zero to ten million AR in any country in six months. We run a ninety-second video trailer of an audio drama as an ad and ask users to download the app if they're interested in the rest of the source. So they hook them in and download this to continue. One core insight after spending one hundred million dollars on acquisition is, if the click-through rate CTR for an ad goes from two to two point two five percent, our customer acquisition cost, our CAC decreases by thirty percent. Fascinating. We remodeled our system around this insight and built an AI-first, two point two five percent CTR ad manufacturing machine that works in every country.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  For every new country, we take our hit shows, use LLMs to extract and the most intriguing moments, write a five-minute script combining all of the best parts. The first sixty seconds has to have a hook every five seconds and needs to end with a crazy cliffhanger to force a download mid-scroll. If a marketing video is not hitting our benchmarks, two point five percent CTR and fifty-five percent three-second through, uh, through play, a creative director gets involved to change the hook or cliffhanger to get the numbers out there. AI allows us to make one thousand ads per show and in total we do seventeen thousand five hundred ads per month. When a business, uh, creating scales from one to two, ten thousand ads, the normal thing is for CAC to skyrocket. But with what I just shared, we seven to eight X our user acquisition budget without increasing our CAC materially.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  It took us eight months to figure this out, but the timeline from zero to ten million in every country got shorter and shorter. Z, US revenue to twenty-five million in nineteen months, US is now seventy-eight percent in total. Germany to twenty-one million in eleven months, France to ten million in three months. We can just leave it on that. That's fascinating.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really cool.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  By the way.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  It, it works really well for a lot of consumer-based businesses that have mass content that you can just adapt. And if it's stuff that's really popular, it's easier to click, create ads that, uh, can be more appealing.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I, I think maybe to apply this to agencies for a moment before we get out of here. It's how can you create an ad system, an ad machine that's like this? And how can you have, how can you model it for every customer, right? So how can you make this a reusable, a system? Um, and by the way, I would also say this. Everything that we've talked about on this podcast, when you go on YouTube, when you download the full thing, just take it to YouTube to transcript or take it to any of other, your other harnesses. And there are some good ideas here that you should figure out how to make it into a skill or something that's reusable. And then you do a lot better. So that is it for today and we will see you tomorrow.