We FIRED Our YouTube Team. AI Took Views From 300 to 8,000 (Full Episode)

How to grow a YouTube channel with AI, win clients with the wine and dining game, and use ChatGPT plugins for growth. Eric's AI skills for thumbnails, editing and posting took his long-form views from about 500 to 15,000 to 25,000, and the people who wouldn't use them had to go. Neil says AI optimizes for average, and they cover hiring and why AI rewards whoever raises billions. Then the wine and dining game: Formula One boxes, Bank of America and Wells Fargo tickets, and a financial advisor's pitch after a friend's $25M house sale. Next, ChatGPT plugins adding $500K in ARR, clients arriving with leads down 32%, and service stories from Grokbot, On and Marriott. They finish with Q4 highlights and lowlights, from recruiting bots to Neil's 12.7M views in 30 days. The whole conversation in one place. Key takeaways ◾Skills only work when someone spends real time tuning them ◾Thank-you tickets with no pitch keep clients around ◾Pitch the fix for the client's business problem, whatever the channel Chapters 00:00 We got more views by firing 00:51 Skills took Eric's videos from 500 views to 25K 02:13 Cover the trend first, fix thumbnails and retention 02:56 Neil: AI optimizes for average 04:01 You still need humans in the loop 04:46 Bain's 94% and the coming job displacement 05:30 How we hire marketers now 06:17 A senior SEO candidate read off a Claude template 08:19 Lazy before the contract means worse after 09:27 The agency hire who said they're too slow 10:11 Hire people who never stop learning 10:53 Small touches build brands 12:19 Fundamentals move metrics more than campaigns 13:29 Uber won by subsidizing more than Lyft 14:48 Why a cheap Waymo rival can't win 15:51 AI rewards whoever raises billions 16:52 Muse is taking the market 17:38 Neil's Muse outreach lands a UK call 18:31 Red flags in the deals bankers pitch 19:25 The wine and dining game 20:12 Competitors win clients with Formula One boxes 20:55 Bank of America sent our CFO to the World Cup 21:56 Wells Fargo offers tickets after the deal 23:03 Tickets with no sales pitch keep clients 24:06 The bank that came too late 25:09 Too little, too late, like a bad hire 25:55 Steve Jobs to Tim Cook: do the right thing 26:39 Group texts gone wrong 28:10 Selling while pretending not to sell 29:12 The worst sales pitch 30:14 One client account next to Buffett and Ackman 31:26 70% leverage and 'it barely moves down' 32:20 AI showed the stock drops far more often 33:06 Big investors get deals you don't 33:53 Plugins add $500K in ARR 35:06 Neil: plugins help retention more than revenue 35:58 Clients bring problems now 37:03 Revenue down 6%, leads down 32% 38:09 Solving the whole problem set grows the TAM 38:51 Customer service is marketing 39:59 On.com's surprise refund and split order 41:40 Neil's Marriott check-in 42:59 Charged for the night before, told to wait 43:48 A room appeared once it was their fault 44:35 Grokbot support hid behind policy 45:32 Ritz-Carlton and Airbnb's 9-star experience 46:16 Four Seasons prices, Disney cruise experience 47:32 Room service, laundry and one carry-on 48:25 Compression bags and Sterling Pacific luggage 50:17 Q4 business highlights 51:01 Eric's lowlight: thinking he could train people 52:04 Neil's lowest churn in years 53:08 Bankruptcy clawbacks and legal drama 54:05 Lawyers always win: FTX's $700M in fees 55:19 Tariffs, war and budgets 56:56 Optimistic about 2027? 57:41 Payment plans for groceries 59:07 We make and manage bots 59:49 Recruiters who say they can't build it 1:00:37 Marketing highlights 1:01:24 Enterprise leads who found us on YouTube 1:02:08 Ad Age's performance marketing agency of the year 1:03:54 Neil's 12.7M views in 30 days 1:04:58 A slow speaking summer, two months at home 1:05:57 Neil only buys companies at a good deal 1:06:41 Best returns with the least stress 1:07:35 Outbound, wedges and 15-minute standups 1:09:00 Skillsdojo: pair engineers with marketers 1:10:03 Crank out 100 ideas, double down on winners 1:11:08 Gavin Baker: 80% of token spend flipped 1:12:06 Higgsfield ships a new feature every week 1:12:48 Neil does better in services than tech 1:14:02 Think like a capital allocator 1:15:28 Neil just wants the chill life Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 00

  So the story here is Neil and I, we have this YouTube channel together. Most people don't know that we have this YouTube together. In fact, most people don't even know that we have a podcast together, right? And so we have Marketing School and our Marketing School YouTube channel has been in the funks for a very long time. You look at these long form views, these videos that we're doing. So Neil and I, we're in person right now, right? We're recording this and Noah's here, you know, making things awesome. We're gonna have lunch afterwards. It's great, right? Now, what is the issue? Well, our long form videos on YouTube are only getting like 100 views, 300 views or whatever. And I looked at it this morning. I was like, one of the videos is taking off. It's like 6,000 views, right? 7, 8,000 views. So do you want to know what happened?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  What happened?

• 1:23Speaker 00

  So because I took over my YouTube channel leveling up with Eric Su. Remember I showed you a couple of weeks ago, like 500,000 views are now getting like 20,000, 25,000 views, right? On it, on average.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  500 video views, not 500,000.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, sorry. 500, 500 video views on average per video, right? Now it's like, you know, go up to like 15, 20, 25,000 views, right? That was just me making skills with my chat GPT. I said, hey, I want a thumbnail skill. And then I want an editing skill. I want a posting skill. I just want you to do it all. So that was three, four people's jobs, right? Taking over. And I was showing the people on the, on the team and these people were, some of these people were offshore, right? I was like, look, just use these skills, take it. I'm not gatekeeping anything. Here's the repo for it. Just go and do it, right? And they're just stare into the screen, right? Now, unfortunately, we had to move on from those people, right? Now, at the same time, one person who is handling our Marketing School channel, he has actually started to step up.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  And so because the skills have now given me the ability to do whatever I want. The ones that are embracing this stuff, they're taking these skills and they're applying it to our Marketing School channel. I said, hey, man, if you want to make it work, you gotta use these skills. Otherwise it's not gonna work. I don't think it's gonna work out for you either. I'm just being very honest with you, right? Cause there's no reason why I should just be able to on my whim, record whatever and just say, hey, go do it. And it just does it all. It publishes everything. It schedules everything. It handles all the editing, right? So he has started to do it and what we have started to change with this YouTube channel, Neil, is he's like, hey, you know what we should do? He's like, you know, for these one hour, 20 minute podcasts that we do 80 minutes, right? He's like, I think we should cover the first trend first. And then I think we should improve the thumbnails and I think we should level up the 30 second retention. I'm like, there we go, right?

• 3:02Speaker 00

  That we were doing it to keep the light shit on for like the last two, three years or so where we were just posting, posting, posting. I'm like, guys, you don't get better by doing that, right? So my point of saying this all is that the skills are enabling us to be more direct, be more upfront. And if people want to embrace it, they will embrace it. If people don't want to, it won't work out for them. So that is how we have started to grow our social following, social following on our, our small YouTube channel by having to let people go.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also believe in, I'm pretty sure you're on the same page. If the people were exceptional, they probably would have outperformed the AI or they would have used AI and the results would have been even better.

• 3:40Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Eric said, yeah. And, uh, but yeah, there's a lot of people don't perform and it's like. Sometimes you're not hiring average people, you're hiring below average people and AI optimizes for average, in my opinion, for a lot of stuff. And average in many cases is better than the people you have. And that's a huge lesson because if you feel your people are below average, the chances are AI will do a better job than them. Especially in marketing where there's a lot of data, a lot of examples that they can just pull from. Regurgitate and copy similar principles and strategies and roll it out. If you want exceptional, it's hard for AI to replicate, but it is very easy for it to replicate average. And I think this is a big thing for a lot of SMBs.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  Because most SMBs aren't doing their marketing in an average way. I would say they're actually doing it in a below subpar way. And this is an easy solution if you don't have a budget.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. To Neil's point, you can't just use these skills on their own because whenever I try to use the skills on their, on their own. It just, it doesn't feel right, right? And then the video, the numbers also reflect on it. But when you actually spend five, 10, 15 minutes on it, just five, 10, 15 minutes, it becomes 10,000 times better, right? And it doesn't take that long to insert it. So you still need humans in the loop. You still need humans constantly tweaking these things.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  The, the, the problem here, and I wouldn't say this is unfair to the people who were working on the channel before, but it is really kind of unfair comparison. Eric's skill level is much higher than the people that were working on the channel. So when you take AI with someone who's good, the results are much better than when you take AI in someone shitty or mediocre.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. But also, I mean, that's another lesson, right? What's happening for anybody that makes hiring decisions now is you can actually afford to wait for someone who's good. You don't, I need to just throw people at the problem anymore, right? And that is, I don't think many people have realized that yet. And like, that is actually my big concern for society as, as we make this transition. Like, I think everything's gonna be okay long term. But there's gonna be a period of job displacement. And where do you think the job displacement is gonna come from? Cause we talked about this. Oh, Bain says, you know, 94% of people don't find value in AI. And then it's like only 2% of consumers pay for AI. Well, what do you think? Why do you think most people are most people? It's, it's reflected in numbers of it. No shit. It's 94% because those people aren't good with this stuff, right?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  No, they're not.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  So don't be like that. Be like the top 5%.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the way I look at marketing hiring is if someone doesn't understand AI fully in their role, I'm okay with it. I'd rather have an amazing person and teach him how to use AI than have someone who's amazing at AI. But lacks the experience and the strategy and a lot of the fundamental concepts that are required to actually make the AI perform better. I actually see the reverse being easier in which you hire amazing people and you teach them what they need to know. Um, and that's not a big deal because when you think about it, AI changes so fast in marketing, even if someone's really good at using it. Well, they're good at using what's out right now. A month later, there's something new out there that they gotta learn and play with.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  So it's okay hiring really amazing people and then teaching them how to use some of these tools to be even better.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  My take on it is we just interviewed a senior SEO person this week, right? And she has heavy promotions at this SaaS company. And I really wanted to make it work. And so what we do people, with people now is like, we have them send a video, right? On, hey, just show us how you're working with AI in general. We want to see how you're talking about it. You know what she did? She literally sent a clearly Claude designed template and just read off of it. And I'm like, she did so on the initial interview, very personal, but when she did that, I'm like, bro, you're just like reading off the template. And you're just, you'd even put effort to try to change what it looks like, right? Three doors in, only one is the way out.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Wait, what role did you, were you interviewing for?

• 7:27Speaker 00

  It was like a associate director type SEO. Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Okay. So their, their job was to do SEO.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Uh, on page or link building or a bit of both?

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Technical.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Okay. So technical, so more on page. When you interview them, do you, do you feel they're really good at technical SEO?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  She could talk the game, right?

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And forget talk game. Do you think she could actually do the work?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  I think she could do the work to an extent because the thing is.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  She had the experience, like the, the, the stuff she talked about, right? The results that she got before, right? And then she, she knew how to use like certain terms and things like that. But when I started to press her, I, I, I knew I was, she was reaching her limit.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  So she was more so, would you say, someone who was researching, writing the coattails of other people in the organization? And understood the vocabulary when it is able to talk it, but was probably not the one who actually drove a lot of the results?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  I don't think she was writing off the coattails because she was like the only, she's the only SEO at this, this SaaS company, right? It's been around for a while. So I don't think she's writing the coattails. I, I just don't think there's anybody else for her to look up to.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  So the problem with her is, is you think she's good at technical SEO. You didn't like how she uses AI.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  It was more so, I'm sending you slop grenades. So I'm taking something from Claude and I'm just reading, I'm not even, I didn't, it's clear that I haven't even thought through what I'm about to present to you. And so I'm just reading off of it, right? And that is how it's gonna be working with her.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yes. If someone's too lazy to review the work before they send it to you.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  You're, you're in for a nightmare because. You look at this as like a partnership or a marriage, as people say. People typically put their best foot forward before a contract is signed, right? Like when someone's making a sales pitch, they'll tell you everything that you ideally want to hear.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  But then the moment it's signed, you may find out that it doesn't work the way that they said. And then you may have some buyer's remorse. But if they're lazy when they should be putting their best foot forward, you got a problem because that's just the start of laziness and it's much worse than what you're really seeing.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  That's a good point. So what Neil's saying, best foot forward, when you're doing an interview, you're going to bring, you're going to be wearing a suit, you're going to be very well presented, right? You're going to be well-prepared and this person was not well-prepared, right? And this person was a fan of his podcast, so probably no longer a fan of me, right? But I had my AI reach, because she used AI on me, I had my AI reach back out to her. And I said, hey, this is Eric's AI assistant. You know, Eric and I took a look at the work and, you know, we just had a question. Is this, you know, is this AI-generated, da, da, da? Asking all these questions, right? And then basically it was like, that was the end of it. Now, let me give you the flip side of this. I just talked to a guy right before this, right? This guy worked Razor, Fish, Eye Crossing, right? All of these agencies, right? So I'm like, okay, how are you using? So my take on this from hiring people is they do need to know the AI game.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And he's like, oh yeah, you know, I use Jev. I'm like, I'm reading X a couple of hours a week. You know, I'm building this and building that. I'm like, why do you want to leave? You've been playing the agency game your whole life. Why do you want to leave? We're too slow. I'm like, what do you mean you're too slow? Oh, we can't, you know, all the things that I want to implement, I can't implement right now. And, you know, it's, we're just, I'm like, there's, he's like, there's too much inertia, right? There's too many, you know, technicals and things. And so he's like, I want to move where I'm unencumbered, right? I'm like, well, and so my take on it is I want to hire the AI people because they're naturally looking for these things first and foremost. They'll, they'll never stop being curious, like for you. I've never seen, once, I've known you for what, 15, 16 years? There never has been a case where you and I have stopped learning. These people never stop learning. So I believe if they aren't teaching themselves this stuff right now,

• 10:58Speaker 00

  I, I, I'd rather not have to, have to teach them, right? We can teach them the new stuff, but they have to be naturally curious on their own. So this guy was like going toe-to-toe with me and all that, right? And you can see like, it's just like, when we're brainstorming on stuff, when you're brainstorming on deals, for example, the structure of a deal. What do you think about this? What about this, right? Call my tax guy over here. Hey Eric, what do you think about this? And you call all your other friends. It's fun.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  It's fun. Dude, on a side note, you, you mentioned, you know, the lady putting her best foot forward. I have, I don't know if I ever told you this, I have an interesting Zappos story.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  No.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  So one of my buddies, Jason, you don't know him,

• 11:35Speaker 01

  ordered shoes from Zappos and he was trying to get them, you know, for a date. So you order some like nice fancy, not fancy, but dress shoes. Cause he didn't really have any dress shoes, but nice shoes. Nonetheless, but they weren't like too formal, but they're formal enough.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  So he calls Zappos and he's like, hey, I placed this order a week ago. Has it even shipped? What's up? And they're like, oh, we're going to get it shipped soon. You know, you should have it in three to four days. And he's just like, wait, that's going to be too late. I ordered these shoes for, for a date. And they're like, oh, this is a shipping you picked. But he's like, but I want to put my best foot forward. The shoe company, right? And the person on the other hand on Zappos started cracking up and like, all right. They're like, we're going to overnight it to you. And they sent him the shoes the next day. He got them. This was before things like Prime and all that kind of stuff happened. This is when Zappos used to advertise, you know, in those airport containers where you put your shoes?

• 12:37Speaker 00

  This was Zappos before Amazon bought them.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. This is Zappos before Amazon bought them. But I just thought that was a really entertaining story. He told me this years and years ago. Because that's, that caused him to continually evangelize Zappos and keep buying from it. And it's like, people forget the little things have such a huge impact on your brand and your marketing that people just like focus all their efforts on like, we need a rebranding campaign. How should we redesign our logo and our website? We need to focus more on pay-per-click and optimize, you know, our CPCs and get our CPAs down. We need to figure out how to rank higher in Google. I'm not saying you shouldn't think about a lot of those elements, but people forget some of the core fundamentals in business

• 13:24Speaker 01

  and how some of those core fundamentals actually have a bigger impact on your overall marketing than just how you're running your Google ad campaigns.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  Neil wouldn't have said this 15 years ago.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  No, I wouldn't have said 15 years.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  He's still very metric-driven, but he was all, almost all metric-driven before. But now he sees the fundamentals.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yes, because I believe the fundamentals move the metrics more than fine-tuning a campaign. Just like, how do you put a price on a really good product? You eventually can, because you can see the ROI in the numbers. But early on, a product that is five times better than your competition means either winning or losing, right? Or if you, even if you look at the Uber story, what Uber did better than Lyft was subsidize more. In all transparency, that's what they did. They just made rides cheaper. They were willing to stomach subsidies more than their competitors. And they got that formula down where they're willing to lose more per ride than anyone else. They were more capitalized for it. It helped win mind share and market share.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  And then once they had it, they started fixing the economics so that way they could be profitable. But they gobbled up the market first.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  You know what's interesting? So back then in 2010, when I was going up to SF all the time, I was using, I wasn't using Lyft or Uber. I was using Sidecar. So I think Sidecar actually, so you've.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  I've heard of Sidecar.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Sidecar was actually, I think, number one at the time, right? It was cheap, convenient to use. The app was probably the best experience at the time. Now, the difference is Lyft, I mean, they have like their, I think their own like cultural stuff, right? But the, the founder, like Travis Kalanick from Uber, he was just a hell of a competitor, right? He's just, I'm going to subsidize, I'm going to raise the most money. I'm going to do whatever it takes and I'm just going to outwork the other person, right? And so I think slowly he, he eroded Sidecar away and then even Lyft away as well. So I, I think the, the founder's competitiveness matters quite a bit as well. And it's all that, it's all that excellence is the capacity to take pain quote. And Travis was the best competitor of the three, I think.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yes, and he was really good at raising money. And I think that's a huge aspect of it.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Sales.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yes, because if you don't have big enough coffers to compete, you're screwed. It's just like, I've had people tell me how they can build a better Waymo alternative. This was a long time ago when Waymo started. And I'm like, this is going to be a hard business for you to ever win. And this person was pitching technology that can turn any normal car into a self-driving car and how it could be done really cheap. Forget how well the tech works. They were showcasing how it worked on, you know, some Toyotas and Hondas. And they're saying it worked really well. But forget how well the tech works or doesn't work. The real issue here is Waymo can lose $5 billion, $10 billion.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  You can say as a startup, you can move faster and all these kinds of things. You cannot stomach that much of a loss. It's too hard to find a company willing to give you five or 10 or $15 billion and say, it's okay if you lose this. There's just some markets and I would say AI is one of those markets. Anthropic and OpenAI and a lot of these players are really massive. And they would have never been massive if they couldn't have gotten billions of dollars. It's too expensive of an endeavor without being able to raise five, 10, 15 billion dollars. I don't think someone who raised, if you only were able to raise one or two billion dollars, I believe you would have lost the game. It's just a question of capital.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  When you, we talked about Instinct last week. The, the reason why he has to look at raising billions of dollars is because he has to subsidize all these free users and he doesn't want to monetize for a while, right? And bless you. So i- if that's, if that's the case, he's like, he's competing with the biggest players in the world. Like Meta, they can subsidize their agent for forever, right?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Muse, yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, Muse, Meta Muse, exactly. So for him, I think it's, I don't know how it's going to go, but he does have, he's growing 10% a day, day by day right now. But I do think he's going to have to over raise a lot of money right now. And it's a very competitive space and I wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now. I think it's, it's, it's too tough, so.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Have you seen a lot of marketing platforms are already starting to integrate with Muse now?

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Which ones?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I just got a notice from high level the other day that they're integrating with Muse.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Shopify is in already?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  There's a few more, there's a few bigger publicly traded companies that are integrating with them. I'm blanking on their names, but I've been seeing announcements for a week or two because Muse is just catching the market by storm. And dude, I, I think I told, talked about this in the last podcast and I had Muse send out some emails for me on M and A to reach out to like advisory companies.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  It didn't go that well initially.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  It, it didn't go well initially. So I had a call with someone this week and I didn't get too many responses back, but I had a call with someone in the UK.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  This is one response that you got?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, from Muse. And we had a video call. They're like, oh, it was really great talking to you. You know, how'd you hear about us? And I'm like, oh, I had Muse reach out to a lot of people and you were one of the few that responded. And they're like, what a great way to make us feel special. And I'm like, you should feel special because you responded. That sets your company apart from the others. And they're like, oh, that's a really good perspective.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  So where's that call going?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Um, they'll send us some opportunities. I don't know if we'll buy any of the opportunities. It's like, you know, when you deal with bankers and they try to pitch you stuff, they're just like, we got this company. It does eight figures in revenue, a solid seven in profit. You know, uh, yeah, they'll take seven, not seven, they'll take eight X. That's in line with their thinking. I'm like, okay, I'm like, is it business? Yeah, they have no churn. They're growing really good. I was like, what's issues with it? If they're growing like 25, 30% a year, they're just like, well, one client makes a majority of their revenue. And I was like, uh, so there's a lot of risk here. Or they had another one for me that are like, business one in the United States. You can just pick up for very cheap upfront.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  And then the rest of the money will just, that the company splits off will pay for the rest. So it'll be a really good deal for you. And they work with all these amazing brands. I'm like, yeah, let me take a look at it. And I see the fine print notes. Yeah, they grew 70% in revenue over the last 12 months. This is an old company, but all of a sudden, one or two contracts made him grow 70% and say, cool. So you're trying to sell that. You're really, real peak and this is not sustainable. And you're probably going to go back down. And oh, by the way, some of the revenue you're getting is from other agencies. The moment we buy you, we are going to lose this revenue and uh, there goes uh, a lot of the revenue and profit.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  Yep. Let's talk about the wine and dining game, right? So let's say, you know, Neil and I, we have people that invite us to these sports events, right? Come to this Laker game over here. Come to this Dodger game. We have the suites over here. We have the president suite, all this stuff, right? So, um, and especially in the agency world, there's a wine and dining game. You have to meet the clients. You could go back and forth, especially Latam as well, right? You gotta wine and dine them even more, right? Um, and so I want to talk about the, the wine and dining game and how to play it, um, to our, to our preferences, because some people, the way they like to play, it's like, it becomes like a whole, like, thing for multiple days.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I've met a few of our competitors who are agencies and they found that pay per click ads produce good leads, but they're expensive. Uh, and they can't make them profitable. Cold outreach hasn't worked out too well for them because most people don't want a email or a call. But when they do cold outreach to their ideal customer, and when I say ideal customer, it is the ideal company, the ideal person within that company who's the decision maker. And they offer them tickets to like a Formula One event or whatever it may be with them. And they'll do like a box and they'll get like 20 of their ideal clients or 10 of their ideal clients and one person. They find that people are much more obliged to respond and accept it.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  And they close really good deals that way. I think that's really good. But the way I like the whining and dining is actually the way the banks do it. So, um, we bank with Bank of America for our international accounts. Uh, so like, even though we're in the UK, Bank of America provides our UK bank account, even though we're in Brazil. Bank of America, like when I log into bankofamerica.com, I can see all our Brazil and Reis. And we can do that for almost all the countries we're in. They sent our CFO, because they knew he was a huge England fan, to one of the World Cup games with, uh, Holland and uh, not Holland, Netherlands, uh, not Netherlands, uh, Norway, sorry. You know Holland.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Uh, Netherlands versus England.

• 22:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Right? Or not, not, not Norway, sorry, Norway and England, right? The player was Holland.

• 22:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Holland from Manchester City.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  There you go. So and, and they also paid for the Marriott, uh, not Marriott, uh, Mandarin Oriental Hotel. And he just had to pay for flights for him and his wife. Two tickets. He didn't have to interact with Bank of America or anything like that.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  They were already a customer. We're a good customer. They just offered the tickets.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Um, we're about to sign a deal with Wells Fargo. We're in contract phase. Uh, most of the contracts are already reviewed and done. So we have signing next week. And they didn't try to offer us anything to try to close the deal. They already know we're closing it. We already spent a lot of money on it. They're just, dude, I just got the email the other day. Like, check this out. Um, Dodgers. So check this out. I got an email, me and some other people on my team. They're like, hey, I want to get ahead of the next round of sports and entertainment tickets we have available here. Most are offered on first come, first served basis, although in some cases they would have specific games or events. Okay? NHL Kings, glass seats.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  NFL Chargers and Rams, uh, Wells Fargo suite, NBA Lakers, uh, Wells Fargo suite and seats. MLB, you want the Dodgers and Padres, limited playoff tickets may be available. Concerts or events at crypto.com, arena or Honda center. They're just like asking, like, do you want anything? Not because they're trying to get our business. They didn't know they have our business and they're just trying to maintain relationships. And what's cool about this, they would offer multiple tickets. It's not like I had to go and interact with, uh, with some of them, depending on what it is, if it's not a suite. It's not like I had to interact with people and get a sales pitch. They're like, we just want to say thank you. I like doing events that way. We've done events for some of our customers where we don't take them to games to try to win the contract, just show appreciation.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  And if they want to just go by themselves or whatever, no problem. Here's the tickets. Go have fun.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  So the way I see that is it's a retention mechanism, right? So if people remember you, to me, it's like the amount of times that they see you, they remember you. Cause it's like, oh, I actually need something. Oh, it was actually Neil that hooked me up with this thing. I should have a chat with Neil. He probably knows someone that I should talk to. Oh, we happen to know the right person. You should talk to this person on the team over here. So you, this is hard to measure. You don't know what you're going to get back from it, but you know, you're going to get some. 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,

• 24:46Speaker 00

  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. Think back from it. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www dot 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.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  So I got a text message the other day from one of the competing banks and they knew we were going to move and we, we, we showed them the offer that we got from Wells Fargo. And they weren't able to match it. But at the last minute, they messaged me saying, hey Neil, appreciate the other call earlier today if their bank could get to X dollar amounts and Y global cash leverage covenant with addition to minimum US trailing 12 months EBITDA of Z dollars. Would this impact the decision on the refinance? We're not approved on this, but we're thinking of ways that we can get to the X dollar level while still having a limit on how, how far US EBITDA uh, would, or minimum on how the US EBITDA would need to be on downside scenario, right?

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And the difference between this current bank, which is Wells Fargo, is Wells Fargo will just operate us based on our global numbers. While our current bank only operates us on the US numbers. So as we keep growing more globally, it makes it harder and harder to grow the leverage when we're having crazy growth overseas, slower growth in the United States. And I was just like, in my mind, I'm like, you have the opportunity to save this.

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Uh, you're trying to match it now. You could have matched it a month ago when we already had this conversation with you. It's like, it's at a point where it's just like, might as well just go with the person that's already adapted to me. Why would I? It's my business with someone that I had to convince to adapt with us versus the one that's willing to adapt from day one.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  This is no different than hiring. You're hiring another bank that's already willing to do so. And someone else is now they're trying to do it when it's too little, too late.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yes. And I've been having conversations with them for months about this and they weren't able to do it. And a month ago, I told them, more than a month ago, I told them that a competitor of theirs is they're like, oh, we can't, we can't match it. Now last minute, like, hey, what if we match it? And I'm like, dude, why?

• 27:05Speaker 00

  This actually reminds me of when Steve Jobs handed over the reins to, uh, Tim Cook for Apple, right? He said, Tim, don't try to be like me. Don't think about what I would have done. Just do the right thing. And this is no different than how Ritz Carlton or Four Seasons operates. They want their staff to do the right thing. This person, whoever you interact with, didn't do the right thing. They tended to follow policy too much and they didn't stretch outside it. They weren't creative.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I even talked to the guy who headed up that whole division in the United States. They weren't able to do it, but now they're like, they think it's of above 50% chance that they can do it. I'm like, I just think it's.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  At this point, above 50% chance. Okay. I'd rather go for certainty. It doesn't make sense. So speaking of, of text, Neil, so I, I got a text from one of our, um, one of our mutual friends yesterday. So we're in this, uh, we're in this chat group. Okay. So this is where I think, um, I think starting a chat group is, is, is, is cool. But we're, we're both in this chat group. And then this person's like, hey, you know, uh, by the way, this is Neil Patel, in case you, you don't have my number saved. I'm just giving Neil's name in here. All right. I wanted to see if you'd be open to a catch up call in the next few weeks. A few things I'd love to discuss. Number one, comparing notes on AI initiatives can share what we're seeing across all the enterprises we're working with. Number two, uh, you know, this AI community, I want to see what's working, what isn't working. I'm hiring someone that will help scale this, this, this community, da, da, da.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Um, you know, through AI transformation. Let me know if you're down to find time. You know why he sent me this text?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Why?

• 28:26Speaker 00

  There's no other context with the text. What, what is your best guess as to why he would just send me a screenshot of this text?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Who sent you the screenshot of the text?

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Our mutual friend. I can't say, but yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And this is just someone who just messaged him?

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're both in like this this chat group.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Think he's just like, what the heck are people doing? Like just bored and just like talking about how terrible it is?

• 28:46Speaker 00

  No, it's more so the reason why he got so imagine he gets a text message from someone in the group. He runs the group. Okay?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Oh, it's someone from the group that's actually messaging.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he takes a screenshot.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  It's not a random person.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  No, he said, yeah, he takes a screenshot of the text and sends it over to me, right?

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Basically laughing at the text, right? He didn't say anything. There's no other context besides this. So what is your best guess as to why he's sending me this text screenshot?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Cause he thinks the person's an idiot.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Because, I mean, partly, yes, partly, yes. But I I'm like, dude, like, I think it's fine to start a community. I think it's fine to start a text group or whatever. But when you're trying to sell and you're acting like you're not trying to sell, people can see it. That's what I'm saying, right? It's like, don't try to say like, I'm gonna try to compare notes or whatever, right? It's like, no, you're not.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Is it one of the communities that you're not allowed selling? Like, kind of like a YPO?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  No, it's it's not. It's it's like, imagine I started a group, right? And I have like, you know, like ten people in it, right? Right? Everyone does well. But when you start a group, one of the kind of un- un- unspoken words is like, don't try to start a group and then like, just try to, if you're going to sell someone, like tell them on the side, like maybe you're trying to sell someone. But don't say, I'm trying to compare notes or whatever. Cause the moment you try to do that, like people aren't idiots. They see what you're trying to do and they don't appreciate the fact that you're going, you're beating around the bush. Just be upfront.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  I think it's easier to sell if you're just direct and you say, I have something for you. It produces X. Let me show you. If it doesn't, don't waste your time with it.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I I think people appreciate that and they like it. When I get direct messages and someone's saying, I'm going to give you, I can do X for you and I can prove it. Here you go. Um, it does well, but dude, you want to hear one of the worst sales pitches?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Was it when they call you brother first?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Brother, brother, brother, brother. Hey, bro. Hey, brother.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  No, but um, uh, so my, one of my friends sold his house and he sold it for a pretty penny.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Is this in Las Vegas?

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's in Las Vegas. You know who it is. Okay? So transaction happened. It was expensive home. I won't mention his name, but it was a twenty five million dollar uh event. And he made really good profit on it.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  He bought it for like eighteen?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  No, way less. Okay?

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Fifteen. You you helped too.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Alright, so uh, so he he he profited a pretty some. Let's call it eight figures in profit.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Um, and I'm just rounding here. But so let's say ten out of the twenty five was profit. I'm making up the number. Right away, someone comes to him and says, hey, hey dude. We we wanna, I I wanna help you manage your money. Okay? And he knows this person. This person did something that was really unique or interesting in which he said, look at the people who have had the best returns, the ten best investors. So he's like pointing out Bill Ackman and Warren Buffett and he's listing their returns. And he's like, you want to know what's crazy? My returns are up there. Look at my returns. They're roughly thirty percent.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  And he's showing one client account, only one client account. He's like, I manage over two hundred million dollars, but look at this client account. I'm so good, dude, that I should be charging hedge fund fees, but because I know you, I won't even charge two percent. I'll do it for like maybe one percent. Right? And the the first thing that I got from that and he was telling me the pitch, I was like, if he's producing thirty percent returns, his business would naturally.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Why isn't he managing more money?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yes, A, he would manage way more money.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Two, he wouldn't have had to pitch that hard. And three, you're not producing thirty percent returns. You just showed one account that was getting thirty percent returns because they owned Nvidia and some of these AI boomers. Actually show all your accounts. If you're just gonna show one client account, people are gonna assume you're full of crap.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  And you're actually not producing that.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  No.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Um, and then the the big thing is, is they told him, dude, if you want to build another house, don't buy it with cash. You should just buy the stock over here. You can get seventy percent leverage and it barely moves down. So it has totally moved down one time in the last ten years. So it's very unlikely that you'd ever get a margin call. So I'm like, dude, this is so inaccurate and I know that symbol. And I was like, this stock, you would have got a margin call this year alone, uh, if you bought the stock in January, because in March, it went down more than ten percent and it went up within a week later. Not back to where it was, but close enough. But I'm like, when you get a margin call,

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  you got a day or two or whatever it is. They don't give you a week or two to maybe the stock will go back because it could just keep going down. That was liquidate your, you know, liquidate you unless you come up with the money.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  And I was like, dude, this guy's just pitching you risk. And then he's just like, dude, I know. And he put it into chat GPT or Claude, actually, of how often that stock went down more than ten percent. It's a lot more when the financial advisor was saying, and I'm like, people don't understand that you can just check this stuff. This is a terrible sales pitch. I'm like, who would ever sign up for this?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Multiple things there. One, that guy's an idiot for the way he he like to to expect that he can pitch someone else like that, right? He hasn't thought through his pitch, number one. So that's idiot move number number one. But idiot move number two is is also not being direct again, right?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  It's trying to beat around the bush with someone that is clearly smart, that has done well for themselves. And but this is how also how these people make money too. They they will eventually find someone who's unsuspecting and and, you know, be able to get their pitch through.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And idiot move number three that he did not disclose is, people don't realize when Berkshire Hathaway buys stock in a company, a lot of times they have a different deal than a normal retail trader when they're buying large positions in corporations.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Um, or maybe a Bill Ackman negotiated a unique deal. We as individuals do not get all the deals that they are able to get, maybe the certain class of stock or certain provisions or access to certain things.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Then you get better price too sometimes.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Correct, because they they know that if they go in and they buy twenty percent of your company, it's going to cause the stock price to go up. They work out unique deals. You are not getting that same deal. You can't compare. Oh, look, look at my returns. We can or we can just copy them and we'll get the same returns. It doesn't work that way.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Chat GPT is on fire, but here's what I want to call out. So Neil, this is a, this is a chart because we like charts over here. So let me show it for the the camera here. So this is someone adding five hundred K in ARR just by adding their app to chat GPT plugins, because chat GPT plugins is making a comeback, right?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  So what I'm doing right now, I'm taking our repo from Carrot, because Carrot, um, believe it or not, Carrot is is it it drives a good amount of leads coming in for us, right? It's the LinkedIn account based marketing, uh, personalization, um, and the landing pages. So I'm like, dude, you you take, you take answer to public. You take, uh, you take, uh, what is Uber suggest, right? Why don't they just, why don't they become chat GPT plugins? Because those are, it's a great distribution channel. He's like, I've never seen anything like this. We added five hundred K in ARR this week. We haven't stopped growing since we launched our new chat GPT plugin since last Tuesday. So the way I see it, like I mentioned last week, um, chat GPT plugins, chat GPT marketplace, um, these are all going to be gold mines and the ability for you to

• 36:00Speaker 00

  take what you built on chat GPT, make it into a website, make an MCP as well from it, and then make it a, make it a plugin. I think it's just gonna, we're gonna see an explosion in apps, in plugins, and I think we're gonna, we're gonna see an explosion in entrepreneurship as well.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we will. What we're finding with the plugin ecosystem when it comes to chat GPT is it can drive some revenue. Uh, well, depending what you consider some, but if you're at scale, uh, what we're finding is it helps more with retention than it actually does with

• 36:30Speaker 00

  I believe it.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  revenue, which for us, the retention number generates us a higher LTV and more profit than the five hundred K that you add in MR.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I I I find, I mean, I don't know how it's going for you guys right now, but the conversations are starting to shift. It's beyond just marketing now. They're like, hey, we're we're spending like fifteen grand a day on tokens. Can you help us with that? Can you help us with this? So my thinking is that because we can do more now, right? The our TAM kind of starts to expand a little more. Um, but what are you seeing?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  We don't see any of that. We very rarely ever see corporations ask us to help them save on uh tokens.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  We are seeing a shift in the market in which customers are coming to us with problems instead of what they're looking for. So before we would say, I I'll use a random example, a company would say, I lost some Google traffic. I need to gain back my rankings. Or they would say, hey, we're getting all this traffic. My conversion rate is really terrible. Can you help us increase our conversion rate? It'd be very specific. We're we're spending

• 37:42Speaker 01

  five million dollars a month on Google Ads and our ROAS keeps reducing each year. Um, so can you help us fine tune our campaigns and get our ROAS back to what it was three years ago? So people would come to us with very specific ask. Now people are coming to us with very specific problems, right? And I know the first group, I kind of identified the ask and the problem. But now it's more like.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Our leads, our, our, our, our revenue is down six percent and our leads are down thirty two percent. We lost a lot of leads, majority weren't qualified. Our close rates have gone up because, you know, we've lost a lot of bad leads, but it seems like we're still getting good leads. What would you do if you were trying to reverse this company and, and grow it? What would you change in our marketing? What would you adjust? And they're, they're not coming to us with, we lost this traffic from Google or we lost it from organic Instagram or Facebook. They're coming to us, starting with the business problem. And they're saying, as marketers, what can you do to help us solve it?

• 38:55Speaker 01

  And they don't necessarily care how we solve it. They just want it solved. It doesn't mean if we just say, oh, we can solve it and we're going to do X, Y, and Z. They're going to give us the contract. They're more so going to us and maybe another five or six or seven or eight other competitors. And they're asking us all the same questions and they're comparing what people say. And they're going with the solution they feel is the best for their business.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  So, so here, here's my point. I think we're kind of saying the same thing. It's like, it used to be very specific. Hey, we just want you to help with SEO. We just want you to help with paid media. Now, what it is, is, hey, we just want you to help with this problem set over here. So with this problem set, you might have multiple ideas. You might say, hey, we'll help optimize your paid media here, your CRO over here. But we also see an opportunity to fix the funnel over here from like, oh, your, your chat's broken over here, right? But that, that is value that's happening because we're all able to do more now. And that's why I'm saying the TAM is like, I'm not just saying this token optimization, but it's more so like, just solve our problem here. We're spending too much on AI over here. We want to see more value from it, right? The other thing I, I want to bring it back to Neil, if you want to, do you have any point you want to finish off there? Cause I want to come back to one thing. Okay. So I want to come back to customer service being the best form of marketing or one of the best forms.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Cause Neil just mentioned, Zappos is amazing because back in the day, they wanted to deliver, they want to make happiness happen.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Delivering happiness.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Delivery happiness. Yeah. Tony Sheik, great book, by the way. I read it and rest in peace, Tony Sheik. So Nordstrom, right? If you've returned a tire, they don't sell tires, right? If you, back in the day, when you return a tire, they would still refund you or give you something for the tire, right? Cause they were like, no questions asked, basically on the refunds, right? So they want to create delightful experiences. Now, when I think about delightful experiences, I think about Grokbot, for example. So SpaceX, right? Their team is hooking me up with accounts or say, hey, here's your, here's more credits for you. Here's credits for your team as well. Guess what? I'm telling everybody about it. In fact, I started paying for it. I just got Grokbot teams for the team this entire week. We had an issue with it. The entire thing went down, the uproar, right? That's when you know the team is like using it heavily. And so, so then I reached out, hey, can you fix this for me? Hey, I'm about to do this webinar, literally in about thirty minutes.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  This guy from Josh, this guy named Josh Kim from SpaceX, like their growth leader, he said, hey, I solved it for you. I was like, hey, I'm about to do a webinar in one hour right now. This shit's not working for me. Can you help me, right? He's like, don't worry, I got you. Thirty minutes, done, right? That is delightful experience. Let me tell you a delightful experience. I've, I've been buying these tennis, uh, like shirts from on.com, right? Remember I told you I had an issue with on.com?

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  They're like refunding my thing without giving anything back. But my, my Muse got forty percent off and like replaced the order, right? There's an order issue again, right? With one of the orders, because it's split it into three orders. And so now it's.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Why does it split into three orders? Your Muse did that or on split it into three?

• 41:30Speaker 00

  Muse did it because it wanted to, um, you can't, on does this thing where it's like, oh, if we give you forty percent off, it only applies up to five hundred dollars. So then Muse is like, okay, we'll apply the forty percent for the biggest order over here. And then we'll split the other twenty two, twenty percent coupons you have. So it's going around it. So this is bad customer service, because one, if you give me a discount, don't do that to me where I have to split it up like that. Number two, don't refund my stuff without telling me. Number three, don't say we can't do anything else because of policy, because I'm telling you right now, I'm going to talk about you in a negative way, which I'm doing right now, right? So that's negative because if other people listen, it's about to buy on, they might buy something else now, right? So maybe don't do that to me. Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And that's the place you play tennis, your hat, right?

• 42:11Speaker 00

  Oh, this is, no, this is Sunset Tennis Club. This is different. This is like a, this is like a little tennis membership thing.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Oh, got it. By the Beverly Hills Hotel.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's one of the courts. They use multiple courts. Like, by the way, Sunset Tennis is great marketing. You know why? Like, hey, Eric, um, how's it been going for you? Can we hook you up with this? Can we do this for you? What else can we do better? Hey, how was that session with your coach over there, right? These are things that are memorable and it's like, oh, these people care. Well, I just bit everywhere, but these people care, right? Or you can share some experience. I'm sure you have amazing experience when it comes to traveling, for example, right? So.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  So sometimes very negative experiences.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  My, I would say my worst experiences is I tend to stay at Marriott's a lot. Because of the memberships and the status and, uh, the, the rooms are pretty affordable and nice enough. Like when I'm traveling for work.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just a Ritz Carlton, you know, it's just Saint Regis.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  No, I usually don't stay at Ritz Carlton's or Saint Regis.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  But those are, there's a Marriott, by the way, guys.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are Marriott's.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Uh, I'll stay like at a normal Marriott, uh, not a motel six version. Sometimes I will. The last hotel I stayed at was a Holiday Inn.

• 43:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Uh, when I was in Sao Paulo, which it was delightful. I had to clean the floor, like I had hair and stuff like that. So I was like cleaning it up myself. I was kind of gross.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  That's, that's a one star or two star?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't know what they call it, but I was cleaning up stuff.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And, uh, I had to figure out how to turn on the AC and eventually I found the remote and it was like a portable one that was in the wall. But whatever maybe, normally I say a normal Marriott, like average, like a three star hotel, sometimes four star. And when I'm staying at a Marriott, my travel internationally is at random awkward times. So sometimes I'll arrive really early in the morning. And if I have meetings early in the morning, even if I don't, I want to check in early in the morning. I don't want to check in at three PM or anything like that. So typically my team, not typically, they will, they'll book the night before. So then that way I get, uh, the next day I can check in early, because in theory I, I checked in, I paid for the night before.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  And I was in Canada at the, I think it was called the Pinnacle Marriott. And the lady at the front desk is like, oh, sorry, we can't give you a check until three PM. I was like, why? I'm like, I paid for yesterday. And she's just like, no one notified us that you weren't going to actually check in that day in the morning of. So, you know, you got to wait for three PM. So I'm like, so you charged me for the day before. And I have to wait. And I was like, and I know my assistant notified them because I do this often enough. And then I message him, I get the email that she sent to them. And she's like, yeah, we sent it. She's like, oh, sorry about that. I guess it was our fault. They're like, we'll get you a room right now.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  And what irritated me about that is you had a room right now. And you wouldn't give it to me, but when you found out that you screwed up.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  You're willing to give me a room right now. And it was the same room type, not an upgrade or anything, and I don't care for the upgrade. I'm not asking for that. But you had a room available and you said no to me.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  When you messed up, but the moment you found out that it is your fault, you're willing to give me a room. But other than that, you wanted me to wait till three PM and I still get charged for the previous night.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  To me, that's a terrible experience. I still use Marriott though. And the reason being is, is status. And, uh, depending on the corporate plan you work on, you can get some cheaper rates. So the money savings is where it's sometimes the inconvenience or the pain. But we just track all the, those kinds of things. So then that way, when they mess up, they have to make it right.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  You know who does a good job with this? So people, like you just mentioned a scenario where Marriott chalked it up to policy, right? I actually had a situation with Grokbot support where they chalked it up to policy. Because someone on my team paid for something and I'm like, hey, can you just refund that? I'm going to, I'm about to pay for the entire team's account, right? Can you just pay for that, right? Uh, can you just refund this? No, I understand, you know, but on policy I can't, I'm like, dude, like, I'm literally about to pay for like the entire like company here. And why won't you just give us that money back, right? Cause they, they had a billing issue, right? They weren't willing to do it. It's, it's on the policy thing. Now, on the flip side, when you go to, uh, an amazing hotel, right? Like a Four Seasons or something like that, right? They won't chalk it up to policy. I think in fact, like the Ritz Carlton will say like, hey, they have a budget for each person where you can go above and beyond the policy, right?

• 46:29Speaker 00

  Or that, well, they'll go shop for you. It's, oh, uh, you know, maybe you want to eat a certain thing, right? Maybe they'll, maybe it's not on property, but maybe they'll go get it for you, right?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Um, that's a delightful experience. That's what we call like a seven star experience. Um, I, I remember the Airbnb founder is like, here's a nine star experience. It's like, when you show up to a hotel and your favorite rock band is playing for you there, right? Like that's a nine star experience. And so the reason these are so important, the, the reason why Ritz Carlton does this or Four Seasons does this is because people talk about it ultimately. And they're going to talk about it to their other friends who are, I probably ideal clientele too.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Yes, I just don't want to pay for the Ritz and the Four Seasons cost when I'm traveling for work. Because it adds up so fast. And I know people are like, what's the difference between spending five hundred dollars versus a thousand dollars? Well, if you have that philosophy with money, after ten years, you know how much you burned? You could just put that money in the market or somewhere else and done some good with it. Especially when you're only there to sleep and you're not even in the hotel room. But on the flip side, when I travel with family, I'm willing to pay for the Four Seasons, but it never ends up being that way. We always pay for the Disney version, like a Disney cruise or whatever. You pay Four Seasons pricing, but you get motel six type of experience.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you still liked it.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  I still like it because my family's happy.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  So I don't look at the expense from that aspect as, man, I didn't get luxury, but I pay luxury prices. I look at it as, my family's really happy with me. If I had to, I would have paid double.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  To keep the, the happiness and the family unit strong.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  I guarantee you, you weren't irritated when you had motel six experience with Disney, but you were very pissed off when you had the Marriott experience.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Because it, when I have the Disney experience, you know, I'm forewarned that it is not going to be the food I want to eat. It, I'm forewarned that it's not going to be a room that I like and it's extremely tiny.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. And all of you are in there.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  All of them in there. We have to share one bathroom instead of multiple bathrooms. And she, and you know, I'm forewarned on all this kind of stuff. The wife notifies me. But it's not that she knows I'm still not going to like it. But when I see the room and I don't like it, but I see how happy my children are and my wife, my wife is, it makes it worth it. But when I'm traveling for work, you know, I, I just want enough comfort. I, uh, room service is ideally preferable. If I don't have a hotel that doesn't do room service or cleaning, I usually don't stay there. Uh, and the reason being is if I'm flying for long trips, I would want to carry on suitcase. So I don't want to, uh, what is it called? I don't want to like have to check in.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  So I just want it where I can just give it to the hotel. They do laundry and I can still travel light. Although I did recently get one of those suction bags.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, me too, me too.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Air, air compressor?

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Inoka?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Uh, no, it's not that. It was that, that guy, that really popular interviewer, podcast interviewer.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  There's a lot of those.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Uh, business podcasts, African American, uh, British accent.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Stephen Bartlett.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Uh, and he was talking about how he uses, um, one of them and I bought it. And then I saw the reviews after, like about air compression bags, not that brand. And what they said is it wrinkles your clothes a lot more, which creates a whole new problem that I did not.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Oh, did it actually do that?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Uh, I haven't tried it out yet, but I know it's gonna wrinkle.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Mine says, so I read the Amazon reviews from mine and it said there wasn't a wrinkle problem. In fact, it was straighter, like.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  It depends how you do it. There's a way to fold the clothes in air compression bags, but forget the product you buy. They all make your creases harder because you're compressing the air. So if it's folded, right? You'll see creases on your shirt, wherever they are, it'll just be stronger creases. But if you do the rolling method.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  The creases aren't there. So I had, uh.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  I don't have to do the roll.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Yes, we, we have a lady who works for us, Ellen, every day, uh, or five days a week and, and she cleans and stuff like that. So I was like, Ellen, test this out. And she put my clothes in there, compressed it. We left it in a day. And she's like, it creates more wrinkles.

• 50:38Speaker 00

  Oh, that sucks.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  And then we tried the roll method and she's like, your clothes aren't as crisp. Cause the way like she packs my clothes is just very nice. And I'm like, okay, I'm not gonna use the air compressor unless I really have to.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  I haven't tried it yet. It's just, it's just sitting there. In fact, a lot of the nice luggage that I have, like the, by the way, the Sterling Pacific, they hooked it up again. Thank you, thank you guys so much. The Rolls Royce. It's so nice. And like, I'm, I'm, I'm almost like, it's, they have this like titanium version of it now where it's like even, even nicer. And then these, these like, again, they're, they're better than the Ramoas for sure. But sometimes I'm like, man, this is so nice that I, I, I don't even.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  You don't wanna scratch it.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  I don't wanna scratch it. It's too nice to use, you know?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And then they give you a bag to put over it.

• 51:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  But then I don't wanna use the bag cause I'm too lazy. Cause then you gotta undo it.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I, I, it's still the best, it's still the best bag. So I figure, I mean, because we're doing such an organic episode, we can talk about either some of our marketing highlights from, from this year. Cause this year, by, guys, by the way, we're in Q four now, right?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Right, we're in Q four.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  The year has gone by really quickly again. So what are the highlights from, and lowlights from a marketing standpoint? Or we can also do the highlights and lowlights from a business standpoint too.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  You wanna start off with the business and then go with the marketing later? Or you wanna do marketing?

• 51:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll, I'll go business highlights and lowlights. Well, let's, let's start there first. So for me personally, the, one of the biggest business highlights this year has been pushing, and you, you know, I'm gonna say this, but, um, hiring more AI native people. And which immediately factors in with people who are adaptable and curious. Um, I thought that one of the lowlights this year was actually starting the year thinking I could train people, right? Where it was like, oh yeah, I'm gonna do all these hackathons. We're gonna do all these group trains. We're doing all these things. The smart people kept building smart things. The maybe not so AI native people kept building dumb things, right? And I, at a certain point, like my C T was just like, dude, stop thinking you can train them, right? Like, he said at the very beginning to his credit.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Um, but as soon as I realized that, like, things just started to move a lot faster. And every day I can tell that people are having a lot more fun at work and it does actually feel like a video game now. Um, and by the way, I can tell during interviews now, the people that feel like works a video game versus the ones that don't. Um, it's just easier when it feels like a game.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called N P Digital.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also Neil has S E O tools such as Uber Suggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to N P digital dot com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side. Uh, so we're doing highlights first or?

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Highlights and lowlights are up to you. Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Okay. So I would do, my first highlight is, um, even though the economy has been really bad, I know that doesn't represent the S and P five hundred. But if you remove all the AI come, AI, you know, uh, companies or ancillary companies, most businesses are not doing well. Um, and this year our churn is one of the lowest it has been in a very long time. So that was a huge win for us. Um, another business highlight is, is we've gotten a lot of more of our international uh, divisions in order. I would say by next year, we'll have no international regions losing money, which is a huge.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  That's a first, right?

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It's a first.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  We thought this year was gonna be that year. It did not work out that way. Um, but we're so close. I do believe it'll happen pretty quickly next year. I don't think it'll take till the end of next year, but I would say it would happen worst case, maybe middle of next year. And at this point, there's not that many regions that are, um, uh, losing money. So the losses aren't that bad. Uh, another business highlight is I had legal drama over the last few years. Silly stuff like companies pay you, they go bankrupt, they try to claw back the money. People then try to bad mouth you online and saying something it actually really isn't. When they sued, maybe call it seventy four more companies to try to reclaim money as well.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Uh, and i- if you're a big enough company, I'm not saying we're large, but we're large enough at scale. If you look at our headcount and our revenue. When you get sued for stuff, they throw the kitchen sink at everything. They'll make whatever claims, even if they can't prove it. Because, and then your job is to get them knocked out. Because the more things that they can throw in there, whether they're tr- real or false, the more doors they have to try to reclaim the money. Them, and then your job is to shut those doors, which then makes it harder for them to reclaim the money. And that's how you get the settlement because they know that they're bleeding you for legal fees. They know that they're making money because a lot of the lawyers on these bankruptcy cases make thousands and thousands of dollars an hour, literally two to two thousand five hundred dollars an hour.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Like the F T X case, did you know the lawyers have billed, I think it's getting close to around seven hundred million dollars in legal fees to deal with the bankruptcy?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Lawyers always win.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  The lawyers are always winning on this, right? So I, I, I'm not saying what they're doing with us or not. But a, a, a lawyer, if you're making that much money, you get paid no matter what. Why would you be incentivized to close things up fast when you get paid first? You, you would just drag it out.

• 55:44Speaker 00

  Show me an incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Correct. And with these bankruptcy cases, we, we had a really good law firm representative. It's like, we'll try settling as early as possible, having discussions, but he's like, people don't want them. And we've dealt with these types of cases, not, not just once this year, but multiple times. There was a few, there was a big, uh, a decent sized pharmacy company that, you know, we have a mutual friend who has a pharmacy, who had a pharmacy company. We had to deal with bankruptcy there, uh, in which they shut down and they wanted money back. But, um, when you try to ask for settlement early on, they're just like, no, no, we want all the money, just keep going. And the reason being is they need to bill some hours. If they don't bill some hours, they don't make any money from you. Um, so that was a huge business relief. Uh, and if I had to say business cons,

• 56:31Speaker 01

  the economy didn't recover the way I thought, um, globally. I think tariffs and, uh, war has hurt us. I'm not trying to be political here. I'm not trying to say some, a, a president or a nation should or should not have done this. Um, people can decide their own opinions. But I'm just saying from a business aspect, those two things do not help marketing, right? With tariffs, companies like, well, if our customers had to pay ten, twenty percent more, it's gonna be harder for us to sell cars or whatever. They cut marketing budgets first. That really hurt us last year and that trickled into this year. The other thing that hurt us is, uh, war, inflation, things are just more expensive.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Like i- if we work with a company that is a logistics company, like we have a logistics client. Everything costs more if they're paying more for fuel prices, right? Like shipping, et cetera. That means that e-commerce companies have a harder time selling and offering free shipping because it's more expensive for them to ship now. Like all these things impact businesses at different, uh, it, it all trickles, uh, it all trickles up. And it'll, uh, whatever happens to the end consumer, eventually hits the businesses and it impacts their bottom line, which then impacts us and everyone else in the, in the food chain, right? Um, so I would say those two things really hurt us and that hurt us globally.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Because we do a lot of business in Europe and in Asia, and with things like uncertainty, it causes a lot of companies to just pull back on budgets.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Yep. That being said, we're still very optimistic about twenty twenty seven. So, I am.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I'm not as optimistic. I'm not saying that twenty twenty seven won't be a better year.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  I think it's gonna be better. That's why I say I'm very optimistic about it being better.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  I, I think I'm hoping that war and all this kind of stuff is over by twenty twenty seven, which will help. But, um, I'm not optimistic that normal, non-A I businesses will flourish like they used to. I think it'll take time before normal businesses are growing at a nice clip. I think we just gotta figure out a lot of things, not just in the United States, but globally, there's just a lot of problems. And we're seeing, at, at least with a lot of the companies we work with, because some of them are just massive and deal with everyday consumers. They're seeing people try to do payment terms on basic essentials like toilet paper and groceries.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  Oh, that's the worst. That's basically credit card debt.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's a really bad sign if you're doing that because you can't add it to credit card or you can't get credit card. Like, there's something wrong if people have to get payment plans for groceries. And I'm not saying the individual's good at saving or bad at saving, or they're doing something right or wrong. But when you hear more and more of those stories, when you work with some of these large corporations are sharing this data. It's it's kind of, for me, it's it feels like doom and gloom and kind of sad. It's it's not about how I'm living my life, how Eric's living his life. It just sucks to hear about people struggling and I don't see that getting better for the very bottom. Unless governments across the world are just like, hey, if you make under a hundred grand, just don't pay taxes.

• 59:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. Again, I'm optimistic about next year being better. I'm not, we're still gonna have a lot of problems. I I think to to Neil's point that this K shaped economy is gonna get worse, I think. Um, and I'm I'm concerned about not just the wealth gap, but the cognitive wealth gap, right? And so that's that's for politics, but let me just talk about one other thing from a business highlights and low light standpoint. Then we'll move over to marketing and and highlights and lowlights and then then we're gonna eat at half years. But um, so our change has been this year is that us as a marketing services, a software company. Is that we are makers and managers of bots, right? So we make these bots, we manage them, we we optimize them, we upgrade them, we maintain them, right? So uh, and a big bot that we made this year that has helped a lot with our recruiting. Cause recruiting is just, it's an evaluation game, right?

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  You're evaluating if people have like the promotions and the tenure initially. Then if they respond, you send them the questions, right? And then if they pass that, then people get shortlisted. Now, what's been amazing to me is we talked to these recruiters right now, right? Almost none of them are are AI native, no problem. Because we just have these running the whole time and it's just shortlisting people every day. And it's it's shortlisting to the point where it's like, oh, okay. It asks them six questions, they answer it well, then they'll make it over to my team and they'll get over to me quickly, right? And so that has been, that has allowed us to move a lot faster on the recruiting side. And the funny thing is, when we show recruiters, the workflow, they're like, oh, this is exactly what I wanted to do at my company. And then when they get to me, I'm like, so why haven't you done it right now? Right? What's stopping you from doing it? Oh, you know, they're just, you know, they they don't let me do it. Then I'm like, why do they need to let you do it? You can just build it, right?

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  But but it it's just amazing to me that that it's it's not allowed. So talent to me is downstream of everything and Vinod Khosla, um, who now owns Seattle Seahawks.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Has said.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, good for him.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Has said that, you know, you, your people are the company, your people make up the company, right? And I've seen both sides of this before. You've seen it too. You have an amazing executive team, right? Um, but I've seen it where when I let up on the talent, things fall apart when I, but when I don't let up. And the good thing is these workflows allow me to never let up on talent. It allows me to continue to tweak it more and more.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  So yeah, that's been good for us.

• 1:01:45Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  So now let's talk about marketing highlights and.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Lowlights.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  And lowlights, um.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  I can go first if you want.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, go first.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  So um, what's, we can just go back and forth here. So what's been nice is um, the YouTube channel, because I started adding those skills now. It's actually driving leads. I think I told you a couple of weeks ago, someone reached out and then someone left a comment, right? And then for one weird reason, I was looking at the comment, I'm like, there's a weird aura around this comment. And I just looked at the name, right? And it's like, oh, this person's like a VP of of AI who's been at this company for 11 years. They just raised a hundred million dollar round, right? And then not only that, my team, the sales team is like, hey, there's a lot of people that are actually seeing your AI content now. So um, my C two and I hopped on a call this week for for single brain. Um, and there's our sales guy was on the call too. And I was like, hey, just just tell me like, where did you find us? It says you came through like a webinar email. I said, oh, I just watch your YouTube videos, right?

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  And so I'm like, the YouTube videos work now because YouTube's more fun now because the skills are taken care of it. And YouTube's actually driving, we're talking mid-market to enterprise level pipeline. Um, and that that to me is a highlight, more so not just for the YouTube thing. But because I am unencumbered to do whatever the F I want and I will not be held back anymore.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  Same for you, right?

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Yes, it has helped a lot. Uh, I would say marketing highlights for me is. I've really streamlined content production where it takes the least amount of my time for filming, which was a huge aspect. And they come to my house, which makes it easier.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, cause your house finished and you have so many different scenes you can shoot, no?

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that helps. Um, I would say another huge highlight from marketing aspect is. Uh, we've won a lot of awards this year, like we won performance marketing agency of the year by ad age. That was hard to win. Uh, went to awards ceremony. I was the first one to probably bounce.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  For sure. You probably left, like, when did you leave?

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  I left after we got it. We had to go on stage. I was like, all right, I'm out, peace.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  That's great. I love it.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Cause it's like going for a few hours and I'm like.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Cause then you have to schmooze and network and all that.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Which I don't think you mind.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  No, I don't mind that. Um. Uh, it it was really interesting going to an advertising event. A good amount of the people uh, were not from the. Not from the advertising industry. Like, a lot of them were just random people there that just got tickets. And I think some of them were just trying to meet other people to date or marry. It was in New York. There's a lot of single women. I know this because I got hit up by a lot of single women. They go, we should change numbers. I don't wear, uh, I don't, I don't wear a wedding ring. I don't like jewelry, but I am married.

• 1:04:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Um, and I would tell them, I'm like, oh, I'm married, I'm good. And and I was like, I'm flattered. I said it in a much nicer way than that. Uh, but I I forgot how many single people New York has. Um, uh, and then what else was a big marketing hat? Uh, we're getting more and more enterprise leads, so that's been great for us. We're getting more global pitches than we've ever had before. That's been a huge win. A downfall, I think most people have this problem. They're seeing less traffic. That has been definitely a downfall. Um, we're getting more social views in general. Uh, I took a screenshot of one of my Instagram views for 30 days. I don't know if I sent it to you or I saw.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  Couple million, uh, five point five, six.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  It was something like that, because remember we were talking about it? And I was like, yeah, I don't get that many views. I got maybe like a million views.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  And you're like, oh, no, you have five point five million.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I saw it the other day. I think it was, it was, uh, where is it? Uh, professional dashboard. Let's see. Yeah, views 12.7 in the last three days. I'm like, I get a lot more views than I actually realize in 30 day period. Um, and I produce pretty specific content, just didn't realize that I get views. I don't pay attention to my social media. But Eric knew something was wrong because Eric's like, you get millions of views. I'm like, no, I think I get maybe like 500,000. He's like, no, you get millions. And then I actually checked. So that was a win, but not really a win. I just didn't actually know how many views that I get. Um, the other huge win that I would say on the marketing side was my team is speaking at more events. So I'm not speaking on as many.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  And I would say the last downfall, but it was a personal win. Is my summer was extremely slow this year for speaking, but that allowed me to do a lot of family stuff. And I I've had, I can't remember the last time I was home for like two months straight with no travel. It was really refreshing. I was like, wow, I kind of dig this life. I don't think it's gonna be permanent, but I've been really pushing my team because the economy is bad. I'm like, we should acquire in all the regions that were the weakest, where I had to travel to more, so I can cut back on the trap.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. That's good.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  So not slow it downwards zero, but make it somewhere more manageable. Cause I really enjoy things and I learned this one from Eric because he keeps sending me a quote uh, that came from X.

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  I don't keep sending it to you. I send it to you once a year to remind you.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Yes, he reminds me of it though, but he reminds me more than once a year, but he sends it to me, let's call it once a year. And uh, dude, someone was asking me a question earlier today on my team. They're like.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Do you wanna buy a company for X dollars? And it would be a really big acquisition. They're like, but you would have to put in Y more dollars and we can create a bigger company and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, if I I I told him, I was very direct. I was like, if we can get a good deal. I love deals. Eric knows this. I will put in the Y dollars.

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  I'm like, if we can't get in a a good deal and we're paying normal market rate, why the heck do I want this company when I can find other ones? Um, that are at better deals. And they're just like, but you could create a bigger company. And I was just like, you know, and I I admitted to them on the phone, I'm like, I'm not that person who's like an Elon Musk. Where I'm built to just keep going after a mission. I'm like, I'm pretty content in life. My life's not that bad. I don't have any stress. The money is not gonna change anything, really. I'm like, yeah, whatever makes the best returns with the least amount of stress is what I optimize for. Not what makes the best returns and causes the most amount of headaches.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  You know, like someone the other day pitched me a company that we can turn around and we can make a killing from, but it would be a headache. And I'm like, I don't want a headache though, but you would miss out on making all this money. I'm like, I'd rather pay more for a deal that has no headache.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Than one that is gonna create a headache for me because my life is chill.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  It's it's that Eskimo story from Alaska, right? They asked the fishermen, say, oh, dude, the private equity guy comes in, oh yeah, we can catch way more fish. And then it's like, well, then what will I do with all this money? It's like, well, I would just go back and fish. He's already doing it right now.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Speaker 00

  So you're you're already doing it right now, right? And so um, a couple of things on my side. So outbound has been working for us, right? So outbound's been great for us. Like it's, I think this week already it's booked like five, five good calls. Um, that that's significant because these are more enterprise companies, right? Um, and people want, we talked about this early in this podcast, but people want more help now. I I think part of it is because some of these people consume the content. So they're like, hey, we know you're helping with marketing and that's led to another thing that's kind of related to marketing. We're just creating a bunch of wedges now. So Neil might have Uber suggest, he might have uh, Answer to Public, right? These are just different wedges to find us, right? So single grain, people know us for marketing there, right? Single brain, so oh, AI implementation, but then it's like. People are coming to us for carrot now. It's like, oh.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Eric said two different companies, single grain, his marketing one and the second one's single brain.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  With a B. Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  And so my whole thing is like, we were talking about chat G P T plugins earlier. It's like, dude, at this point now, because you can just build these wedges so quickly, you just build as many wedges in. So they might come from one thing, but to Neil's point earlier, the, the problem set is expanding. They want you to solve a problem. And so you get people and they're, oh, you can do that. Oh, you can do that. Okay, we want that. So there, people want more now. Right? I think the expectation is getting higher. Um, that's another thing and that's been good for us. I will also say that Gary Vee like to talk about, you know, it's all about having fifteen minute meetings, right? I will tell you in a remote environment, it's all about having, when you have a problem, it's all about having fifteen minute standups. And you just keep hammering away at the issue until the problem is solved. And you just inject a bunch of intensity and then you just disband the standup and that, that's been good for us. So.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  Well, you also did release like a, a website with a ton of skills or.

• 1:10:14Speaker 00

  Skills Dojo.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. How'd that go?

• 1:10:16Speaker 00

  That went, that went well, but you need, what I learned from that experience is you need, what I'm learning from the, our four deployed engineers and our four deployed marketers, what we're calling them, is that the engineers don't have the distribution know-how or the skill. So you need to pair them with the marketers, because the marketers actually understand funnel drop-off rates and they understand distribution. They understand churn a lot more. The engineers are so used to building. So we're trying to train the engineers up, but they'll never get to the level of a marketer. And also we're trying to train the marketers up in terms of being builders, but they'll also never be at the level of engineer too. But I do believe that being like deep in one area and T-shaped is, is helpful. So, um, that's how that's gone. So it's a good thing, but we need a, like a marketer that's on it. So.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  That, that's the hard part. It's like, we all have tons of ideas. AI makes it easier for these ideas to come out, but unless you have people really focus on these projects, they, they rarely ever produce the results that you expect. But a, another approach or philosophy that, um, I, I know people have taken, and I've taken this too in the past is because AI makes it easier to crank out products. It's okay if you don't have someone to focus on it. You can just do ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred of these ideas and just crank them out. And the ones I get that naturally have legs and are gaining traction, double down on those and just ignore the rest. It, it just makes it cheaper to figure out. It, it just makes testing cheaper and to figure out what actually gets traction.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  And spend by, uh, spending the least amount of time.

• 1:11:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  But the issue that you're seeing, and Eric talked about this at the very beginning of the podcast, is all these things cost money. It takes someone's time to release these experiments. If you're using AI, you're still spending money because AI has token costs, although token costs are getting relatively cheaper.

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Um, and I think you're going to start seeing better economics because a lot of these players want to go public. Although none of them have really said when they're going to go public. I think there's maybe some issues or security concerns or whatever it may be, but.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  Actually, in a few weeks, Neil, uh, I think Gavin Baker reported this, but it was like, it used to be eighty percent of tokens were frontier. And now it's actually flipped to eighty percent of token spend is actually, um, more of the, the open source ones or open, it's called the open weights, not necessarily open source. But what Neil's saying is like, back in the day, you couldn't really throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. Today you can kind of do that more, but the focus elements, actually, I'll, I'll say a low light is because I talk about AI within my company, people, you, you, you, sometimes you have some slop cannons coming out, right? Where they're just like, yeah, Eric's talking like do, do, do, do, do everything, right? And I'm like, no, no, no, like it's got to tie in with like a business result. Forget traffic for a second. How are you driving pipeline? And how are you driving revenue, right? And it's just because I, I, I sat in on a meeting, um, the other day and, um,

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  literally four other people that had five different ideas each. And then the, the leader of that meeting was like, no, no, guys, we're going to focus on one thing, one, one funnel, one offer, and that's it for this one thing. Not twenty different things, right?

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  So that part's important, but, um, you, you brought up a good point because one of our creators said, uh, I didn't know Higgs field launches, uh, their requirement within the organization is you launch one new feature a week. So that's fifty new features, uh, a year, right? And you see a lot of these companies doing it, but I think they are doing the throw spaghetti against the wall. Because then you can just look at the engagement metrics and you have a large user base, you have distribution. So you just bet harder on it.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  And you cut the ones that suck.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  So, but you, you, you do, you do need to have like a good technical person for that. So, yeah.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  You do. I've learned over the last few years, I prefer creating service-based businesses over tech-based businesses. I perform way better in services than tech. It's not that, uh, and I spent the majority of my career in software over services. I, I, although I did spend a good chunk in, in services.

• 1:14:03Speaker 00

  I think you partnered with your brother-in-law was a good partnership too, because he was very tech-oriented.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  He's very tech-oriented. My tech chops are nowhere near what it takes to, to thrive and succeed in today's world. You know, and, uh, I was telling my brother-in-law this and he's just like, dude, he's like, this happens every generation. Like, what do you mean? He's like, when you started, you were like, dot com boom, like this is great. And he's like, there was a lot of entrepreneurs who were like, man, I don't know how people adapt to this dot com role. I prefer my old school way. Life was great.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  And he's like, you adapted really well to the dot com boom. He's like, you have the capital now to adapt to this whole new AI world and you can just buy companies. But he's like, he's like, you personally are struggling to keep up with all the changes. He's like, it's so fast and there's so many. So he's like, how do you do it? And he's, I'm like, I just hire people. I try not to keep up with it. Like, I'm like, I just don't have the time. I'm like, I got a family now and kids and I know these are just excuses.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  But I rather choose some of those things.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Versus working seventy, eighty hour weeks constantly and trying to keep up with everything. It's like, is this too much?

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  And, and it actually makes more sense for you to think from a capital allocator standpoint now, because you've already put in the work and then like, there's different seasons of life too, right? Now, what we were just mentioning earlier, if you're an Elon Musk, of course you want to continue to grind yourself. And by the way, we really respect Elon, but I would never want to live his life. Because the level of problems that he's working on is so tough that, and, and some four or five different things and you're flying all the time. I wouldn't want to do it.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  Same with Target. Like he talks about like going to grocery. He's like, I can't. He's like, there's too many threats on my life after Charlie Kirk and stuff. He's like, it's just too risky. I love going to Whole Foods or Bristol Farms or whatever it may be and doing grocery shopping with my kids. We think it's fun and it's a treat.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:49Speaker 01

  Like so much so, I stopped doing a lot of Uber Eats because we find it fun to just hop in the car and be like, hey, you want ice cream? It's, yes, I can get Jenny's ice cream and get Uber Eats to me and delivered. But the kids have a better experience when I park the car, we walk into the store, like that experience, the environment, the smell of the, the ice cream cones that they're making, it just makes them happier. And I was like, oh, I like living the normal life.

• 1:16:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. Your, your priorities change over time in your life.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:16Speaker 00

  But by the way, like if, if I, if I'm in Neil's shoes right now, okay, like you've been in business, uh, like fourteen years longer, right? It's like, you've been through the grind already. You've worked extra hard already, right? It's like, okay, well now, now I have this machine. And if I just focus on capital allocation, I can continue to optimize my, my machine and continue to live the life that I want to live instead of having to travel all the time and all that. So things change.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, uh, my co-founder was talking to me today and, uh, it, it really hit him. He's just like, hypothetically, you know, if the business went to zero tomorrow, what would you do? And I was like, I'll just stay home and play stocks. And he's like, that's it. He's like, would you start this? Like, no, I'm over. I don't want to start another business. I'm not even going to grind. And he's just like, he's like, he's like, you really do like the chill life. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, could I go and create something else? I'm not saying I'll be successful or not, but I think because I have enough capital, I can figure out how to buy my way into some sort of success. Maybe not as big of a success, but some sort.

• 1:17:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  But I'm like, I'm just at a point in life where I'm just like, man, I just could keep reinvesting my money and just chill. And yeah, I'd rather have that life.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I'm sure you've run the numbers ten thousand times already.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. As long as they control my expenses and I don't get crazy. I'm like, I don't need a ton of money. I'm like, life is chill.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So anyway, guys, that's it for today and we will see you tomorrow.