How you should price yourself as an operator-creator

In this episode, hosts Neil and Eric break down how operator creators should price influencer deals, why most founders undercharge, and when sponsorships hurt long term business growth. They share real pricing frameworks, opportunity cost thinking, and why chasing views, creators, or bad sponsors can distract from building durable companies. The conversation also covers creator trust, AI fluency, data literacy, and why focusing on surface level metrics leads businesses in the wrong direction. Key Takeaways • Operator creators should price per post, not per view • Sponsorships can destroy focus and audience trust • Data fluency beats vanity metrics every time Chapters (00:00) Operator creator pricing (02:15) Opportunity cost of sponsorships (04:30) When to say no to deals (06:55) Trust, brands, and audience loss (10:28) Bad creator advice exposed (15:46) Content vs real business growth (18:33) AI fluency and teams (22:10) Data over vanity metrics

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. You and I have been talking about how we've been taking more influencer deals, and so I was just thinking about how you should price yourself as a creator-operator, or operator-creator. So how you should price yourself

• 0:44Speaker 00

  as an operator-creator. And what I mean by this is if you own a business and you also happen to be a content creator, and so Neil owns a business, I own a business, I see ourselves as kind of secondary content creators. Would you agree with that? Yes. Okay. So I believe that most creator-operators are, they're underpricing themselves. I think that if you're making less than a million dollars a year, ideally you're not doing any of these deals at all where people are offering you to do a post. But if you're gonna take one, maybe you're charging $3,000, okay, if you're under a million. If you're doing a million to five million a year, maybe you're charging five to 10 grand. If you're doing five to 10 million a year, you're charging 10 to 25 grand. If you're making 10 million plus a year, charge 25 grand. And what I mean by this is per post, okay? So someone might ask Neil, "Do a video." Okay, video's gonna be 25 grand.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  "You want me to do a LinkedIn post?" Okay, 25 grand. In some cases, you know, it will be even more than that, right? But most of the time right now, when people are messaging me, I don't know how it is for you, Neil. I just say, you know, I always say it starts at 25 grand, okay? And I would say maybe 25 to 30% of people say, "Okay, let's talk." But the rest of them are like, they're like, "Oh, we can't afford it," right? And that's good. This is a good thing, because the opportunity of costs, of the opportunity cost of being taken away from running your business is actually worth more than the 25 grand or whatever that you're being paid. And so, you know, I remember the other day, someone, someone sent us a message, and they're like, "Oh, but you only get X amount of views," but it was very disrespectful, right? I'm like, "Yeah." That's why I charge, you know, twenty five grand plus because I'd have to deal with people like you.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  And so I'm just saying that you have to have some standards when you're going to, when someone reaches out to you. Cause I think more and more of these B two B creator, operator, operator, creator type deals are gonna pop up. And the vast majority of the time, I don't know about you, Neil, but I get irritated having to make them. Um, so yeah.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yes. It's not, for me, it's not fun. Uh, but you may be like, all right, that's cool.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  And the other problem too, as Neil looks at his phone, so the other problem I'll tell you is, is one, you don't want to do it. Okay. You end up doing it and you, and you start, you, you get treated like a, like a second class citizen. And then it's, it's not, then it get, it takes you out of your, your mojo when it comes to running your business and operating your business, right? It's not just like a, like a one, like a five minute post or whatever. You have to work on the script with them. Sometimes you even have to get on a call with them. And so it might be.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Any of that. I have a team that does any of that. I still don't like it though.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I'm saying the call has to happen and then they write the script for you and then you say something that you don't want to say. It's, it's a lot of like, it just doesn't feel like you, right? But my point of saying this is, it sounds like maybe we're coming from a place of privilege and, and I would say maybe we are. But you're gonna make a lot more money in the long term focusing on your business. The other problem too is if you focus too many, on too many of these creator deals, you end up getting sucked into this creator world. Cause you know, ten grand a pop, twenty five grand a pop, you do a few of these, it starts to add up. And you're like, man, I'm, I'm really doing well right now and, and you are personally, but it's not good for your business.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  So funny. I'm like, I, I don't want to buy a Tesla because it's too expensive, but I really want a new Tesla.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Is that what you're texting right now in the middle of this thing?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  On the Tesla. Yeah, someone's texting you.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  This guy, man, no microphone texting about Teslas. Look at this.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  I want to use Tesla Model Y because it'll save me time every single day because I spend so much.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Here's your problem. You keep talking about this one and then this one's like, I'm, I'm just like, you should just get it.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  It's too expensive though. It's like fifty seven grand. But I was like, oh, I could do an influence deal.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  You had more expensive cars than this one. And it's a way better car.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  But I'm trying to live a uh an uh more modest life.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  No, that okay, see, that's the that's BS. See, that is what we call disingenuine. Okay. So but yeah, maybe you should do you should. I think one or two of these posts should get you that car.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I haven't done the influencer deal. Well, technically, I did two in December. We're in December. Um, but they were signed earlier. Now, we get head up a lot for influencer deals. We usually just ignore them and never respond back. We don't even respond with budget. We just don't respond. The two I did, they were with current clients. I tend to only do them with in two circumstances. One, current clients, or B, with companies that I want as a client, but they're not going to be as a client. And I'm I would look at who's hitting me up, because if it's another ad agency hitting me up, it's not going to help me get them as a client. So I need the company to actually reach out, and then I can get in the door and potentially get more contracts though. But I don't do influencer deals unless it's one of those two, and I'm pretty flexible.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I think I only just charged like fifty grand, but it's just for one post. And when I say I only charged fifty grand, I think I only charged fifty grand, not forty nine, not forty five. It's just fifty, take it or leave it. I've done deals where I charge a hundred, but then what I found is when you start charging like a hundred, they start wanting a lot more quote unquote involvement. Uh, and the involvement isn't worth it. Fifty grand, though, I can jump on a call. I usually don't have to jump on a call, but sometimes I'll jump on for like five minutes, introduce them to my team. My team handles the scripting, uh, and everything. They'll send it to me for my approval, then send it to them, coordinate everything, the posting, the scheduling, what they want.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  And then I just go in and when I'm filming my other content, no joke, it's usually short form. I can do it in less than one minute and one take, and that's it.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  You know what's interesting? Um, this platform that we're hosting on, they actually just reached out recently. They're like, oh, we want to sponsor this, and then the podcast, whatever. I was like, hey, we're podcast down, but hey, for the other ones, we're probably charging you at least twenty five, if not fifty. So.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  You know what favorite sponsor that we've ever had?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Is Dreamlove?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Is what?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Dream Host?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Okay, other than that one. Uh, yes, find Hetty. That was a really amazing one.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  For the record, we'll, we'll give the details on the Dream Host one because it's been so long already. That one.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  For three years, they paid us sixty grand a month for three years. They never asked for any metrics, never asked for any, and they were a great partner. We really.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  We sent them metrics, but they didn't care for it. We would have to send them metrics.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Yes. And that, that, yeah, I mean, we're getting like one point two million downloads a month. So, yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, and I would say my favorite sponsor other than that is, uh, I forgot the name. I should know it. Uh, the suitcase company.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Oh, um, Sterling Pacific.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Sterling, so there you go.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Hey, do you use the suitcase?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  I have used the suitcase. It's really good.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Have you used yours yet?

• 6:52Speaker 00

  I haven't used it yet. I'm, I'm, I'm too scared. I, I keep using my old Ramoas here because I like, I, it's too beautiful to use. It's like a stupid reasoning in my head. But it's like, here, look, I still have it over here. Like, I still have it. I still have it in its cover.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Dude, so check this out. Okay, so I traveled with my Sterling Pacific suitcase. And my dad ended up, uh, taking me over to his house, picked me up, spent some time there. And then, uh, what was it called? I had more luggage and stuff like that. I couldn't fit it all in my trunk because my dad wanted me to take some stuff that was mine. Like, I have a lot of old clothes at my dad's house. And my wife was just like, hey, we should go sell this stuff. I forgot what website she uses, but you can sell like designer clothes and make some money. And I have like, uh, not Etsy. Uh, what is it? We get checks from everyone's washing. I don't know the name. But like, I have so many designer clothes that I never wore in the past. And now I just wear like Viori or whatever it is.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Um, so I didn't have room in the car for all the suitcase because I didn't want to put the suitcase on top of like suits and stuff. I had no joke. I sold nineteen suits on that website. I only have one suit left and that was a suit that I wore at your, uh, mom's funeral. Um, and so my dad held the suitcase. So then, when I got back the stuff from my suitcase, you know, he was coming over to my house, uh, like a week later. And he's like, oh, mom washed your clothes. We'll just bring you all the clothes. Everything's clean. I was like, oh, thanks. Sounds good. He kept the suitcase, but you've got the clean clothes.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  I figured he kept it.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  And he's like, I like the suitcase. He's like, you have so many. And he's like, but I cleaned your clothes for you. I was like, oh, thanks.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  That's awesome. Yeah, but Sterling Pacific has been great. They they worked. I mean, that that was through a mutual friend of ours, a guy Tano, and I saw him with us. I was like, oh, this is really nice suitcase. He put me in touch with them and then we got a we got a very simple deal done. Um, and we talked about them and then they I think they ended up running ads towards that that um short form video as well. So, yeah, but the the point that we bring that up is is because they were very easygoing. And we didn't need to charge them like, you know, um, twenty five or fifty grand or something like that. It was just a great product and we're happy to talk about it.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but no, um, I I I think that that model works out really well in getting sponsorships. You just have to make sure that you really love the brand, you care for it. Because if you don't, because Eric and I have had a lot of uh potential sponsorship inquiries for marketing school. And we said no to most of them. And the reason we said no to most of them, especially at the beginning, we're like crap brand, crap brand. We don't like it. Terrible product. It's just like, we don't want to end up pitching something that we really hate. It's just a shitty feeling. And then, eh, forget it, getting out of your zone. It's just like, you feel scummy to your followers. And it's just not the same feeling. And then I also believe that you lose trust at the same time.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Yep. That being said, I mean, look, if it's again, if it's a big brand, we'll we'll we'll think about it and we'll take it. Um, but the other thing too is, yes, you lose trust with your brand or sorry with your with your audience, but I don't know. I mean, it again, if you go too far into the I I'm enjoying this content creation game and I like the commissions I'm getting paid or the sponsorships I'm getting paid. What ends up happening is you're you become a content creator, not a business person first. And I've seen you and I have talked about this and we should talk about this for a first sec. Because we yesterday we were talking about business creators. You were sending me some reels, right? And then we see one guy who's a CPA who Neil likes every single one of this guy's videos.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  It's so legit because Eric's interviewed some of the people that he's had on his podcast in the past. And like, dude, they they just spit so much bullshit. And I'm not a CPA, but I I would say, you know, I'm I'm pretty modest on when I say like I'm decent at something like I'll say I'm a decent marketer, but I'll never say I'm the best. I'm great.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  You're pretty good at the tax stuff.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I'm I'm pretty good at taxes. Like, I'm probably better than most CPAs.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're probably better at taxes than you are as a marketer. Would you say that?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I probably am better at taxes than I am as a marketer. That is probably a true statement.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  So, okay, but going back to, and we should talk about like what were these creators in a second because what happens is there, there, there's nothing wrong with, with this, right? But they've been sucked into creative world where everything's a sponsorship deal. And everything is like, oh, I need, you know, managers to manage a sponsor and then I need this editing team over here, all these things. And you forget that 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,

• 11:42Speaker 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. That's maybe not the best way to build a sustainable business for the long term. And then when we look at these guys, what ends up happening is the, the content you create, you have to become more and more sensational. And what ends up happening is you start to bullshit your audience. And then what happens after that is you have guys like this CPA who start calling you out on your bullshit. And then what happens is you have to start to react to being called out and it starts to become a game that you shouldn't be playing in the first place.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, like one of them, there was this girl called Your Rich BFF, okay? And she created a video on the Trump family burying Donald Trump's ex-wife on his golf course. So he can get a whole ride out for his old golf course. It doesn't work that way. Like I, I don't even need to read a book on taxes to know this. And I read a lot of books and articles on taxes because I don't just focus on taxes in the United States. I focus on taxes in roughly 28 countries because we operate in 28 countries. So I learn all the taxes for every single country to not break the law, but to do what's efficient and makes sense from a legal aspect. I don't like playing in gray areas really, but it's more so just following the laws and being as tax efficient as you can.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  And it's just like people start creating content on just the most ridiculous things to get likes. Like, uh, you know, there was this other video that he went on and this girl's just like, You know, I bought a home with cash. I shouldn't have bought it with cash. I should just put twenty percent down so I get a write-off on the whole thing. You can't get a write-off on your house. You can write off a portion of your interest. If you're a real estate professional and it's a rental property and you list it for rent, you can start doing things like bonus depreciation, but you gotta start proving these things. You've got to do cost segregation to do that. But like, when you think about all these tax loopholes and stuff like that, and I'm familiar with a lot of them, not just on a federal level, or not just on a country level, but also on a state level, at least for the United States.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  You know, like when you do bonus depreciation, bonus depreciation on real estate property does not work in the state of California. It works federally, but it does not work on the state of California. State of California, you have to, you know, straight line it anyways. Um, you can do a cost segregation and certain things you can start, uh, depreciating a little bit quicker i- in the state, but they don't accept the bonus depreciation the way the federal government does. And the point I'm getting at this is Eric's spot on. We're starting to see way too many people on social media just create content that's just a ton of bullshit so they can get likes. And it makes me just start disliking these people and be like, I don't care if you claim you worked at Goldman Sachs. You're, you're, you have no clue what you're talking about. Focus on what you know. Stop talking about all this bull crap.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Well, he- here's the thing. So, um, there's a period of time, maybe two, three years ago or so, where I was interviewing these people and I was enjoying the interviews. Don't get me wrong. But it was actually distracting me from my business. So I saw a path where I was starting to pick the guests for the sake of how many views I could get. And sure, I enjoyed talking about sex, finance, relationships, all these things, right? Sure, hundreds of thousands of long-form views, but

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Hundreds of thousands?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  You got millions of some of them.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  That's short form, the short form views.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Short form? Some of them, I bet you got over a million views, guaranteed.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Short, no, short form was like eight, seven to eight million views on some of these, right? Um, and actually, no, that seven to eight million views one was with you and me, talking about discounts. So

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, on the mall.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  But in, in Italy, but you had another one with your rich BFF, the same one that the guy called out, and she's talking about in your video, which went viral. If you want to do well in the corporate world, she's claiming that you need to switch jobs every what? Two years or year and a half or something like that? If you look at the most successful or the most, if you look at the CEOs with the highest comp packages, who are billionaires now, Tim Cook, Satya from Microsoft, Sundar from Google, what have they done consistently? They've stayed with the same company for a very long time. Like her gospel that you need to switch a job every year and a half or two years or whatever it is, it's just a bunch of bull. You know why some people keep switching jobs to get promotions? Because they suck at what they do.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  If you're really good at what you do, the company will see value and you should get promotions and do better. And if you can't, that means either the company you work for sucks, or you suck and you just don't see it, or there's some sort of disconnect in your value is not seen by them and vice versa, right? But that concept that you need to switch jobs every year and a half? No, you need to get better at what you're trying to do so the company sees value in you.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  I will say though, when I first, I think the, her advice on that one, it depends. Like if you're early in your career, maybe the first couple of years you can do that. But after that, people need to see consistency. They need to see tenure, they need to see a history of promotions. Because my very first year of working full time, Neil, I actually switched five jobs in the first year. And every job, I just, I got better and I got more pay each time. And then I started to settle down, right? Cause I was more so chasing the opportunity, not necessarily chasing money. I just didn't feel like I was growing quickly enough. So literally two, three months in, I didn't feel like I was growing enough, I would switch. But your, your future employer doesn't want to see that. They want to see consistency because they want to know that they can rely on you for at least two to three years, if not more, because that's typical tenure. The final thing we'll say on this, and I want to move on, is again,

• 16:58Speaker 00

  I have, Neil has tried this too. We've tried going long form, wide TAM on this content before. And like, sure, it gets views, don't get me wrong, but it pulls us in the wrong direction. It doesn't feel good and it doesn't drive conversions for our main business ultimately.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when we say it doesn't drive conversions for our main business, what Eric's saying is it doesn't drive conversions for us at all. Maybe if we wanted to do something else, it would drive conversions, but not for what we do. Some of Eric's friends know me from creating an article back in the day, like I spent X hundred thousand dollars on clothes and this is what it did for me. A lot of people came up to me for years after that being like, wow, you're the guy who spent all this money on clothes. That was a cool experiment. Generated zero dollars in revenue.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  You know, I tweeted this yesterday because I was pissed off. Yesterday was Saturday, December twenty twenty seventh, right? And I'm looking at everyone, you know, Andre Karpathy saying like, I have never felt more behind as a programmer. He's like one of the world's top AI researchers, okay? And then everyone's talking about Claude Code yesterday. Everyone's talking about Opus. Like, I don't know why yesterday, everything just like blew up that way. But I was just thinking, I was like, man, I hear from people sometimes, you know, there's people that are really AI-enabled right now. Like at our company, we have a designer on the team who's like, he met with my CTO and then my CTO was like, wait, why, why aren't we just doing work the way you're doing it right now? He's like, well, because I'm being told to do other work, right? I'm just like, what the heck? Like, why is he being told to do like? And then my CTO was like, wait, like, but if we did it your way, how much more efficient would he be?

• 18:22Speaker 00

  He's like, in a year, I'll probably be like, at least ten times, if not a hundred times more efficient, which might be a little bit of exaggeration. But my point of saying this is that-

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Wait, who's telling him to do other work?

• 18:32Speaker 00

  The manager, which this is what led to this tweet over here. Okay, so I put in air quotes over here. I said, look, people who say, I don't have time to learn AI, I'm too busy with work. That's the biggest BS excuse. Because the definition of work, right, is you want to be useful to your company, but the definition of useful is changing. So the way you might have designed, you know, in the back in the day, is you might have designed creative by hand. Well, today, you're orchestrating different workflows for maybe ten X the output, or for recruiting us as an example. If we're sourcing, we're using sourcing and screening agents for ten X the output, okay? And so that's the world that we're going into and we can't, we can bring you to water, but we can't make you drink. And in my mind, I'm just like, dude, there's no escaping this future, okay?

• 19:16Speaker 00

  We're gonna bring you with us, like, we want to bring our teams with us. And but we're also gonna move on very quickly from people who don't want to jump on the journey. And we're gonna like, my whole thing is you gotta do it quickly because I just talked about last week, I spoke to Wade from Zapier. And he's like, yeah, we cut ten percent of our staff. I'm like, why'd you cut ten percent? He's like, because these people didn't want to come along for the journey. Obviously, there's other reasons too, but it just, if you're not, it's not even just the AI thing. This is a very easy way to see who's down to learn right now and get better and who's constantly trying to get one percent- Better every single day. Um, and if you don't want to do it, it's okay. Just don't do it here. But I still see right now, like I'm just, we're trying to bring like, I'm very focused on AI fluency for, for twenty twenty six. Cause twenty twenty five, we talked about a lot, but we didn't do it. And no matter how much you try to show people.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  Now we're gonna bring people along for the ride, but if they still don't want to do it, like you gotta go, man.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And if you wanted to pick one thing for your team and marketing or anyone should get better on. One thing that I would recommend, cause everyone's talking about AI right now, that's fine. But I think people lack data fluency and just basic understanding of how data works. And I'll give you a great example of this. So I was shooting, uh, long form content yesterday. Cause I'm traveling for a few weeks. I shot four videos yesterday. Uh, it took me, you know, almost a month's worth of content, depending on if there's four weeks or five weeks and we'll get the shorts from it too. But it took me no more than an hour and thirty minutes, maybe an hour and twenty. Yeah, so I'm pretty efficient. And when I was recording, I take breaks in between, cause my back starts hurting and I stretch and get up and all that kind of stuff.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  But I did something called like the marketing roundtable with my team. All right. And it was the idea of some of the people that helped us with our content creation. So we sat down in a room, we recorded for roughly an hour and just spitballing about the topic of search everywhere optimization. I thought the content was good. My view count wasn't that great. And the guy who's helping fill my marketing stuff, he tells me yesterday, he's like, you know what, Neil? We should do more of them. I'm like, why? The view counts were really terrible. He's like, yeah, but if you look at the hours watch. The hours watch and the comments were really amazing compared to your, uh, normal stuff. So it's equivalent if you look at hours watch. And I said, I said, okay, that's interesting.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  And then I said, um, go through it and let me know every single person who commented. And message related to that and let me know what their job title and the company they work at. All right? So then he's just like, you really want to do that? I'm like, yeah, why wouldn't I want to do all that? And he started getting some of that data to me. I started seeing some of it this morning. All right?

• 21:53Speaker 01

  And guess what size companies they were, if you had to take a guess?

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Small businesses?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Really, really small businesses, not our ideal customers. It was actually mainly people who are interested in learning marketing versus corporations. So I was like, this is fine. I get you're saying hours, even if the watch time was ten X, I wouldn't be as interested. And he said, why? And I said, because the people watching are learning marketing. And if you look at their titles on LinkedIn, they're not just learning marketing specifically. Most of them are doing their own thing like as entrepreneurs and they're related to the marketing space. Like creating agencies or there being a freelancer and helping other people with their marketing. I'm like, this is not who's paying us for our work.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  But on the flip side, we've done some videos that get very terrible views on very specific topics like international SEO or charts on very specific topics like uh what people are doing with their budgets in twenty twenty six marketing budgets. And they tell me, oh, we shouldn't publish as much of this stuff on your social media. I was like, why? They're like, the engagement isn't as good. I'm like, let's see all the people engaging with it. So we started going through it and they're like, oh, it's a lot of people who work at corporations. And I'm like, bingo, our ideal customer. And I'm like, just because something doesn't look as good from a data aspect, you gotta actually dig in and look at the data that is relevant or irrelevant to your business and then make your call. You can't just look at surface level numbers.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And this is one of my biggest pet peeves with marketers. They just look at a number like likes or engagement and they make decisions based off that versus really diving in and figuring out, is this type of content worth this creating more of? Or is this type of content just getting us views, but it's never going to drive us revenue? Or is this the type of content that doesn't get us a ton of views, but it gets us a lot of engagement with our ideal potential customers?

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Dude, you just gave me an idea um based on what you just said. So yesterday I was using Comet. Have you used perplexities browser Comet? Okay, so for what?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  I only tested it for uh just as a heads up, I only tested it for like thirty forty minutes. My fear with all these browsers is security. So I tend not to use them and I use them on a random computer. That is not my daily computer, so it doesn't have access to like banking information, financials or anything. Cause they say a lot of these browsers aren't as secure as Chrome or Safari.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  I think that's correct. I did so a lot of these AI browsers like a comment, maybe not as secure. But I will say a novel use case for Comet yesterday, I was using it for, for example. Your YouTube comments, right? So I agree, having someone research your YouTube comments and seeing who they are on LinkedIn, seeing how big their businesses are, that's obviously gonna take time, human time, right? But when you pull up comment and you pull up your YouTube comments, right? Comment is C O M E T, by the way, not comment. But it'll look at all your YouTube and it'll scan everything and it'll actually make a table for you based on who all these people are. And you can have someone doing that with comment. And we actually have a lot of job postings up right now for people because we're on a hiring push for Q1. And with job postings, guess what?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Someone needs to review all the job posting to see if people follow the directions. Nobody wants to do that, though. I was like, oh, huh. What if I do this for using comment yesterday? I was doing all the work and it's better than any of these other agentic browsers that I've seen. But Neil is right, there is a security thing. But I think with something that's maybe a lower lift, like the YouTube where anyone can view it, I think you can have comment do that. That's in support of the data fluency thing that Neil is talking about. And going back to that, I think that's a starting point. Knowing how to talk about data and knowing how to think about it will help you better query these AI command centers for you so you can get the right data faster, so you can take action faster, so you can make revenue faster.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and as a marketer, people look at like views, likes, engagement, or the other extreme is they look at revenue, like what's my conversion rate, revenue and profitability. Now, both those metrics aren't bad, and I'm not saying you shouldn't look at them. The one on the right about revenue and ROI and all that kinds of stuff, definitely very important. But the problem with marketing is it's that big middle that drives a lot of revenue where people have multiple touchpoints. And you need to figure out in that big messy middle, what is actually gonna drive more ROI at the end? Because a lot of those touchpoints don't cause direct conversions, but they drive assists, right? Or indirect conversions.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  And if you don't know how to look at the data right, you're gonna end up spending your time on the wrong stuff in the messy middle, which is gonna screw up your numbers at the very bottom of your funnel.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  All right, guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe.