GitHub’s Trust Problem Just Got Worse

Eric and Neil break down the fake GitHub star economy, why startup credibility signals are easier to manipulate than most people realize, and what that means for trust online. They also get into employee-generated content, the marketing channels they would bet on if they were starting over today, and why they are still doubling down on SEO even as the game shifts away from clicks and toward revenue, visibility, and AI-driven search. Key takeaways ◾ GitHub stars and other online trust signals can be manipulated, which makes surface-level credibility much less reliable. ◾ Employee-generated content is becoming a bigger growth lever for companies that want more distribution. ◾ If they were starting over, Eric and Neil would still bet on channels like podcast clips, email, AEO, X, SMS, and LinkedIn. ◾ SEO is not dead, but the old way of measuring it is. ◾ The real focus now is revenue, conversions, and visibility across search engines and AI surfaces, not just clicks. Chapters 00:00 The fake GitHub star economy 03:10 Why fake traction can fool people 08:26 The rise of employee-generated content 12:30 The 7 marketing channels they’d bet on today 18:18 SEO is dead again… so why are they doubling down? 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟 Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 million downloads. Each episode delivers actionable marketing tips and strategies from two entrepreneurs who actually test what they teach. The show is hosted by Eric Siu, founder of Leveling Up and Single Grain, and Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital and one of the most recognized marketers in the world. 🎙️ Learn More About the Hosts Eric Siu – Leveling Up: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/@neilpatel 📩 Free Resources Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/ ClickFlow: https://www.clickflow.com/ ✅ Subscribe for Daily Marketing Insights!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot's Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. Neil, have you heard of the fake GitHub economy?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Okay, so check this out. So basically, on GitHub, you can buy stars. So we've shared GitHub repos before, like my GitHub repo now, the marketing skills one, has like 2,200 stars.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Wait, GitHub lets you buy the stars?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  No, it's a fake, it's a fake star economy. So you basically hire spammers to spam your GitHub repo for stars.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Oh, that makes more sense. I thought you were saying GitHub's selling it. I'm like, why would GitHub sell that? That would just screw up GitHub.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  That would totally screw their business, like the integrity of their business. So...

• 1:05Speaker 01

  This is like people selling fake Yelp reviews and Google reviews and...

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Exactly. It's no different. Like, everyone wants, and we're fake Amazon reviews back in the day, right? So for $85 to $285 in budget stars, a startup can manufacture a 2850-star seed median. For $990 to $4,500, it can reach Series A territory. Against typical seed rounds of 1 to 10 million dollars, the ROI ranges from 3,500x to 117,000x. So at least seven open source tools on GitHub, fake GitHub history, commit bot committers, exist specifically to fabricate GitHub contribution graphs. Pre-built GitHub profiles with five-year commit histories and Arctic Cold Vault contributor badges sell for approximately $5,000 on Telegram. Isn't it funny how this works?

• 1:51Speaker 00

  Remember, Neil, I told you about, I had, um, remember, I had that Marriott Hotel program? And I was able to get, like, it would allow you to stay at, like, really nice hotels for very cheap? So there's always these underground economies of, of these things. I'm not part of that thing anymore, so that's why I'm open to talk about it. So...

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Dude, it's just, all these shortcuts don't end up working. I remember when people used to buy Amazon reviews back in the day. I'm like, but if you have a crap product... You're gonna get sales by buying the reviews and the stars. Uh, they do, they've gone better at catching people, but you end up shooting up in the systems, especially um, if you're also, you know, you're getting purchases, you're cheating the system is what these people are doing. But when they have a crappy product or service or more so product on Amazon, eventually you start getting into crappy reviews. And for every one star review, you need so many five star reviews to make it up. I'm like, the model doesn't work. It's just better to spend the time creating something that's amazing.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Dude, this is so funny. So, okay, well, I'm looking at the screen right now. So here's the marketplace. So if you want to buy premium stars, so aged accounts, uh, it's basically like eighty cents to ninety cents, so gradual, natural delivery, years old profiles with repos and contributions. This is no different than back in the day when people used to sell links on these forums. Um, mid-range, twenty cents to fifty cents, one to two weeks, some activity history. And then if you want to buy disposable accounts, three cents to ten cents and new empty profiles. And so they basically do a comparison here, Neil, where if you look at organic, uh, like Langchain, a lot of people know Langchain. So the meeting account age for people posting is like three thousand days. Um, and then, you know, the number of zero public repos, uh, six percent.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  So when you compare it to all these other ones over here, like manipulated blockchain repos, this one over here, free domain, it has uh twenty-eight percent uh public, zero public repos and then eighty-one percent are zero followers. So you can tell what's what is spam or not, but for GitHub, like, you know, they have other stuff to manage. And by the way, GitHub's owned by Microsoft, right? So I don't know how much time they have to allocate to this.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  You know, Microsoft looked at buying Cursor, right? They decided not to.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  You know who got Cursor?

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, SpaceX, but SpaceX, I'm, I'm assuming the reason the deal was structured that way is they're waiting for them to, theirselves to go public and then do the transaction because they'll have more liquidity.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  I actually, um, so the, the.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  The bull case for doing this deal is because Cursor, who is doing, I think, six billion a year, something like that, right? Six billion a year?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  I don't know. The last numbers I saw, I think, were four or five, but they're growing so fast on a monthly basis. It's too hard to keep up.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  So the problem for Cursor is at the six billion, because, you know, they're limited on compute, for example. And then, but XAI has a ton of compute, but they don't have revenue. So you combine the two together and then XAI or SpaceX, if they're valued at, you know, what is it, two trillion dollars or something like that? They can justify doing eight, because this sixty, sixty billion is still a drop in the bucket based on their market cap.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then Google just put in forty billion into Anthropic today.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Did they?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Dude, this is crazy. Yeah. Everyone wants to buy Anthropic right now.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's the number one most valued private company in the world right now. Or, sorry, not valued. That I don't know. But it's the number one most wanted private stock right now, as in companies are trying to buy more, or investors are trying to buy Anthropic shares more than any other company. Number two is SpaceX. I believe there's a girl named Zoe Talks, who's a VC on Instagram. She breaks down the list. I don't think OpenAI was even in the top five.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  You know the thing, though? OpenAI, they have a lot more compute. And so now, like, they're back in the game now, you know, two point oh. Like, every week, something changes, right? It's like, oh, I don't use ChatGPT anymore. Now it's like, five point five is out. They have this out. They have the agents out. And then they have a lot more compute. Like, you just don't know. The good thing is Neil and I, we're not parties company, so we can be promiscuous and jump around whenever we want.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  And I heard the CFO of OpenAI talk today, and she was breaking down how roughly their split is fifty fifty now from enterprise versus just general consumers.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  I think both companies will be fine. Are you gonna, let me ask you this, Neil. Are you gonna buy the IPOs for any of these?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  You know what I will buy? I'll wait for them to drop when there's a correction, when there's a big correction, so.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Cause Eric and and and this is not financial advice and people who got in early probably made a killing.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  It's more so like they're so expensive that the ROI for Eric and I to put in our money is not going to be that high. It's just easier for us to play the game with our own companies. But what's funny enough is on TV, the guy who's been being brought up a lot is Sam Bakeman Free.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  I was gonna just say that.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Because he invested in Cursor, they're like his Cursor shares would have been now worth three billion. He invested in Anthropic really early on and they were breaking down on TV. He didn't have the funds at the time and he should have never stole from customers. But on CNBC, they were talking about like, he actually may be one of the best VCs of our time. When it comes to picking companies before they're actually hot.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  You know what they say, Neil? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered, and he got too greedy. If you just played your main business and then continue to do what you're doing without having to go too far, everything would have been fine.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Well, he shouldn't have been using other people's money without their permission.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  That's what I'm saying, hogs get slaughtered. Yeah, yeah, so, yeah. Okay, so, um, and and the sad thing is, I think he came in at at what, like two, what was it? You looked at this, right? The valuation, uh.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  And his his Claude shares would have been, I mean, uh, Cursor shares would have been worth three billion. That's what CNBC reported.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  That's ridiculous. Like, he made a killing. Now, knowing him, because in Eric's analogy, he he's describing him as a hog, even though the guy was a vegetarian. Um, but I get the the, what is it called? Uh.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Hogs can be vegetarian, the analogy?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, the analogy, there you go, I was blinking on it, uh, because I think that's a Warren Buffett phrase, right?

• 7:53Speaker 00

  Uh, Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger, one of them.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was one or the other, but, um. Yeah, he would have probably doubled down and continually given him more money per funding round. Dude, even Robin Hood, he ended up buying, I believe it was around nine percent when their stock was at all time lows. That thing went up almost ten X, right? That would have been another, I think he bought like around nine hundred million dollars worth. That would have turned to nine billion. The real problem is, is one, he stole money and should have never done that. Two, the people who ran the liquidation, the lawyers or whoever, liquidated all this stuff at the wrong time. Like they undersold it, even when it came to Solana, they were selling it for what fifteen bucks or something like that?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Dude, Solana at that point.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Two hundred?

• 8:36Speaker 00

  During that period, remember Solana dropped on the one dollar, I think, something like that, or nine dollars?

• 8:40Speaker 01

  No, I think the cheapest was, yeah, like around nine and thirty. But when they sold it, it wasn't anywhere near there, it was climbing up to like eighty or a hundred or two hundred, like.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  But you know, it's not their job, it's okay. Their job's to liquidate, so. Neil, one thing that we should talk about too, I don't know if you guys are doing this, I think it's smart, I just, you know, I don't have the time for it. Someone on our, hopefully someone can take this and do this for us. But the rise of employee generated content, have you seen this?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  No, I'm curious on that one. Are you talking about employee generated like social content or?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let's just look at this for fun. So Clay, okay, so we know the company Clay, right? They do, you know, let's just say, let's just say like data.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  For for sales or for outreach, for example, so let's see what we have going on with Clay. Let me share my screen with you all. So employee generated content is basically when you have your team creating content, everyone's promoting each other. Which this is to me, this has been done in the past, but more and more people are doing it now. I think to build a, like build company pods where people are just posting. And so let's just look at this. So Clay has posts, okay, over here, I don't know if they show employees. These are all Clay, but a lot of Clay employees, well, okay, look, so I think this, does this guy work at Clay? I don't, I have no idea. But yeah, like growth at Clay over here, so Gabrielle's like, okay, this is happening over here, okay, this one gets a hundred sixteen likes. Okay, Varun posted this, co-founder, four hundred thirty-three likes on it.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  So they're just, they have employees posting, they're cross posting each other. And that's a flywheel that works for them. And then I ended up finding this company over here, I'm gonna talk to them on next week, I think, Vario employee engagement. Employee content, here, let's look at this over here.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Okay, so I disclaimer guys, I'm gonna talk to them. This was shared with me by Ryan at lunch. So this is content that drives pipeline. A done-for-you service for vertical SaaS companies to turn LinkedIn into their number one channel. So basically, they make your entire team content engineers, agentic deep research, human taste. I'll let you know how it goes, but I've seen some companies do this really well. EGC is the new UGC. Make every employee generate pipeline in their sleep. So again, we'll see how this goes, Neil. I'll be the guinea pig for this one and we'll come back to this later.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yes, please report. By the way, remember you were doing that marketing experiment months ago and we followed up on it? Maybe a month ago where you're giving away, it was either AirPods or gift cards or something like that? To set up calls with people, B2B companies?

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, what we did on that one, I don't remember the numbers, but we were generating good meetings. So good, but we, the, it didn't make sense for us to continue to pay to agency. So we're paying them five grand a month, but they also wanted 10% of revenue for the first 12 months. And every single customer we closed.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  That doesn't make sense, right? And so we, the moment we closed one, we're like, okay, guys, we're out. And so basically what we did, Neil, is we took all the sequences that were working well for them. We took all those and then now we have our own running on instantly. And the thing is this, I'll tell you one thing, Neil. They tried charging one of our mutual friends 10 grand for the setup and they said the infrastructure costs 10 grand a month. Guys, the infrastructure, using my open call to set it up, $600 a month. Instantly, they'll set it all up where you'll buy all the email domains for you, all these things. $600 a month, not 10 grand a month. You can send cold email all you want, just make sure the offer is really good. Make sure the copy is good and then you can have the agent recursively tested over time. And that's not to say cold email is great because a lot of people are spamming it now. But if you still have a really good offer today, you should still be able to stand out.

• 12:11Speaker 00

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

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Quick break for SaaS founders listening. You know how content marketing works. You know how AI SEO works. And you've been seeing competitors ranking for your keywords all day long. But you don't have the time to write and hiring a content team feels premature or just out of the budget. That's exactly why we built ClickFlow. It helps create AI SEO content that actually sounds like your brand. We're talking thought leadership. We're talking product content, comparison pages, without having to add more headcount. It also helps you do things such as building FAQs, internal linking, and telling you which old posts are hurting your domain. One user reported saving 90 hours per month, and that was a part-time employee. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com. Scale your content without scaling your team. Back to the show. So, you know, I added, like, I went to my open call while we were talking,

• 13:32Speaker 00

  and I added a bunch of topics over here with these classics, because we're running low on topics and we still have 10 minutes to go. So.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  All right, let's do this. Let's do some classics.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Okay. So you pick, you pick the, one of the classics.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Seven marketing channels we'd bet on if we're starting over today.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  My god, okay. I'll start first.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  I, if we were starting over from today, knowing what we know, knowing that there's very strong reach with clipping right now, I would do that. If we're starting over, I would take this podcast. I would go straight on what we're talking about earlier. The clipping economy. How do we make sure we have someone who's really good with strategy, clipping the right content at the right time? TBPN style, one-minute clips, we're posting it to X, we're posting it to LinkedIn, and then we have an ad at the very end of it. It could offer Neil services or his products. Same for mine, we just rotate it over and over. And then we, because I do enjoy doing this, because this podcast forces us to stay sharp, I'll continue to do this. So it's kind of a, you know, two in one.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  We'll call it number one. Eric's number one will be, the channel would be podcasting, but make sure you're also using clipping with your podcasts. Number two, the channel that keeps producing and is getting uglier and uglier is email. And I don't know why companies don't focus that much on collecting emails. One of the most powerful. Channels that you can end up leveraging and the reason being is it's in your control. You can show up in people's inbox. You're not relying on algorithms. It just keeps producing revenue. Now to collect the emails, you can do SEO. You can end up collecting emails through ads, like running Facebook ads or pushing it on your social profiles. But you should collect emails.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Yep. So number three, I would go AEO. And when I say AEO, Neil, I don't know about you, but we're the number one thing we get asked for quite a bit right now is Reddit. Believe it or not. So a lot of big companies reaching out to us for Reddit and that, the reason they want that is because they want to do better with AEO. They want their reputation to look better as well. So they they're looking for reputation management. They want community management as well. And so I kind of lumped them together.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  And when I say AEO, by the way, that does also include SEO because AEO is grounded on, you know, Google. And it is grounded on Reddit. It's grounded on YouTube as well. So we can talk about those later. But because, you know, when you look at like an AEO result, the number one result gets a lot more click through versus a like an organic SEO result.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  And one stat to keep in mind, we looked at the highest converting channels. So whether you want to call it AEO, GEO, SEO, or whatever you want. But let's specifically talk about the LLM marketing side, like GEO, which is what Eric's also talking about. It converts more than two and a half ish times than the next channel. The next highest converting channel for marketers is typically SMS. Underneath that is email and then it gets into paid advertising. So, okay, and number four from my end, going live on social platforms. I don't want to pick a specific social platform to go live because you should go live on all of them. I think there's a lot of platforms that can do that, whether it's Riverside or StreamYard or Restream.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I don't know all the names of all these platforms. I don't know which one we use on a regular basis, but we keep switching over time. What I do know is going live, we do this with our webinars all the time. It produces really good revenue.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we're live right now. Does it produce a lot of rate revenue? Don't know about that, but I'll tell you what, we're live right now. So next one, number five.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Or let me rephrase. When we do webinars, it produces a lot of revenue. And ours is, we pick specific topics, we promote it through the social channels, we promote it through email blasts, and then we go live at a scheduled time. So it's not, when Eric and I are going live here on our podcast, it's just randomly going live. It's not scheduled or anything like that, or pushed out or promoted.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  All right, number five, yeah?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, number five.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Number five. I think Neil's computer's about to die. He's like chopping out. Okay, so number five. So, number five is X. The reason I love X right now is because of the articles. When I write articles and when I write a post, I can spit up a hundred thousand views, three hundred thousand views, and it actually drives good leads. The other thing I'll say, Neil, when I wrote a post about that, that TBN post, their main producer liked it and followed me. You know what I did? I immediately DM'd him. I said, hey, are you available for work right now? Because I want to do that for the stuff that we're doing right now. And so it's very opportunistic. Um, so I think X increases your, people like to say it increases your surface level of luck. I do think it actually do that, does that. The more you publish, the luckier you get. And I do tend to think that the smartest people, especially with AI psychosis, are hanging out on X right now.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Number six, right? Number six would be the second highest converting marketing channel out there. I briefly discussed it, SMS. I don't know why people don't collect phone numbers. Um, it doesn't matter if you're B2B or B2C. It works well. We collect phone numbers. Again, it works well. And you shouldn't just call people, you should also follow up through text messaging. Just make sure you have the right permissions to do so.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Right. Number seven. So you can double dip here a little bit. So with LinkedIn, the cool thing is X has articles. LinkedIn also has articles too. So whatever article you put on X, just throw it on LinkedIn too. Whatever, so I use LinkedIn as just a repurposing platform now because I don't have, once you kind of lose the luster of the reach, like whatever you publish takes off, and then once you lose that superpower, it's really hard to get that back, um, at least from what I've seen. And I also don't want to spend a time being the reply guy and just reply to a bunch of people. So I just use that to- Repurpose articles. We use it to repurpose our YouTube videos. We use it to also clip this type of stuff too. Not as much though, but I do find LinkedIn's pretty good for driving business. Once you have the reach. It's just that we already have enough stuff going on right now. So I'm good with it. Just kind of, you know, keeping the lights on.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  But what here's all to say, the people that do really well on LinkedIn, if I were to start from scratch day. Okay. If I were to start from scratch, I would go hard on X and LinkedIn especially.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Yep. All right. So what's the next topic that we want to talk about? What was that?

• 19:32Speaker 00

  This will be the last one.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  The last one. SEO is dead again? Or SEO is dead again? Why are we doubling down anyways? All right.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  This is not, not bad, right? So, okay. Since the beginning of me learning SEO, so I think I started learning SEO in maybe 2011, 2000, maybe 2010 or so. Neil, Neil's a little earlier than I was. So people have said always SEO is dead. I remember Gary V did a bit, SEO is dying, right? And like, oh, it's so dead. And then that Bill Gurley, SEO is dead, right? All these people, SEO is dead. And so here's the thing. They might say, okay, sure, you know, Google is, uh, Google search is declining or whatever. No, it's not. It's actually going up. Their profits are going up as well. And so the search engines are healthier than ever, right? Gemini, for example, um, is, is one of the best models out there. Sure. Your website traffic might be declining, but remember this.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  The, the, the L L Ms, A E O, G E O, whatever you want to say, they are still grounded on the search engine. So really good SEO still directly affects how you convert or how you show up in the L L Ms. And that's why it's still very important.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. SEO is not dead. Um, G E O is not dead. You know, A E O, whatever you want to call any of these is not dead. And they have changed though. It's what is dead is optimizing for clicks. But from a revenue perspective, we're still seeing a lot of growth from SEO and G E O and channels like that. It's just people still focus on the old metrics like, oh, my clicks are down. Well, if your clicks are down, but your revenue is up from those channels, you should be really good in which you should be happy and then you just move on.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  Yep, alright guys, so that is it. Let us know if you want Neil and Eric to be the Marketing Bros Podcast Network. Let us know in the comments and that being said, we will catch you all later. Goodbye, have a great weekend.