Instinct's Founder Proves You DON'T Need a Personal Brand.

Instinct, the AI agent that lives in iMessage, is growing 10% a day, and Eric says its 23-year-old founder proves you do not need a personal brand to win. Neil explains why personal brands worked five years ago, why Neil Patel Digital became NP Digital to cut key man risk, and why shoppers now switch brands on a dime. Eric shares DHH's talk on all the things his team no longer does, and the OpenRouter chart where agents use 7.5 trillion tokens against 1 trillion for humans. Then the bill arrives: finance teams pushing back on AI spend, a friend burning $14K a day on tokens, and Hormozi's memo capping his team's AI budget. They close on hiring AI-native people who can keep up. A sharp episode on brand and AI spend. Key takeaways ◾People buy the product now, not the founder's personal brand ◾Every AI tool needs an ROI number, not an estimate of time saved ◾Hire people who are AI native and can prove a return Chapters 00:00 Instinct grows 10% a day, no personal brand needed 01:21 Lisa Su's Formula One badge moment 02:06 Personal brands worked five years ago 02:41 Why Neil Patel Digital became NP Digital 04:01 Shoppers now switch brands on a dime 05:32 It has never been easier to make 06:19 DHH: look at all the things I'm not doing 07:34 Agent tokens now dwarf human tokens 10:50 Finance teams push back on AI spend 11:32 A teammate maxed out the Ahrefs tokens 13:02 A friend spends $14K a day on tokens 13:44 B2B tools ship too many features 14:49 Hormozi's AI usage cap memo 16:44 Training won't fix a mindset 18:28 Hire AI-native people who can keep up Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/

• 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. All right, so Neil, you know, we should, uh, we should talk about the the craziness that's happening with Instinct right now. So Instinct is an agent.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  And it's growing at 10% a day. And it's interesting because a kid, I'm saying kid right now, the founder is a 23-year-old, okay? So I think they, they've raised, uh, I, I think a billion dollars or so, and they're valued at $10 billion.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Uh huh, it was a billion at 10.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, um, I mean, you know, it's interesting to hear him talk because I, I listened to him on Invest Like the Best, which is a great podcast. Um, where you can listen to some of the best investors in the world. And it's interesting because it's, it's the first interview that he's really done. And I think one of the things to relate this to on, uh, from a marketing angle is that you don't really need to build a personal brand as a founder. All you need to do is to just do. Like, i- if you just build something amazing that people use, whether you're Mark Zuckerberg, or you're Elon Musk, or you're Steve Jobs, or you're like Lisa Su from AMD, right? You know, she, she runs AMD. You just, you don't need a personal brand, or even Faifei Lee, who just sold her company for $8.2 billion to, to AMD, right?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  So all these people who talk about building a personal brand, this and this, they teach you how to do it, and they sell you how to do it. The Neil and I both as marketers, even though we have quote-unquote personal brands, we're playing the game because we sell marketing services.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Did you see the, uh, Lisa Su clip at Formula One?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  No, what did she say?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  So she had a badge on, she's backstage, someone's coming up like, hey, who are you? What do you do? And like, they're trying to find out, you know, my name's Lisa, so what, what do you do? I'm the CEO of AMD, you know, like, we sponsor that car.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  And how they react to that?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I'm like paraphrasing, but pretty much AMD is a sponsor. I don't know which car, AMD sponsor F1, which car is it? Uh, is official team sponsor Mercedes AMG Formula One, so yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Um, so, uh, they didn't really know how to react, you know, it's like more so like, hey, what are you doing here? But, um, I agree with you, but I do think it wasn't this way a few years ago. So not, not even a few years ago, like two or three, I would say five plus. If you go back five, six years ago, I honestly saw companies looking too similar, and you saw the rise of personal brands. And I'm not saying five or six years ago is when it started, I was saying it was working maybe five or six years ago. Because you would see like Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics, Rihanna, Fenty, right? People were leveraging personal brands to, to create companies.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  And I did a smaller version of it, I did Neil Patel, NP Digital. And at first, it wasn't called NP Digital, it was called Neil Patel Digital.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  And then it transformed into NP Digital, because we found that calling a company after my name, like directly my name, not last name, like my full name, it actually hurt us when we started going upstream, because people are just like, oh, you have key man risk. And what I mean, it hurt us, it hurt us when you talk to potential investors, it hurts you when you talk to bankers, like, they all worry that there's more key man risk. And even potential clients, like, well, what happened if Neil's not here? We don't get those questions as much, we still get them a few times a year.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Play devil's advocate on that, because when, when, once they ask what NP means, it's like, oh, it's Neil Patel, well, does Neil Patel still work there? He still does, so, so how does that play?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  It, it does, but most people don't ask what NP stands for. Some people do know it is my name, but some people just don't know and they don't care, they just look at it as two random letters. Um, most people don't know that HP stands for Hewlett-Packard. A lot of us tech people do, but a lot of random people, they go, that's HP, or IBM, right? They don't know what IBM actually stands for, but we all see IBM as a company. Again, I know a lot of people listening to this do know the acronyms and what they do stand for. But a rest of the world, like the average population, many of them do not know what these brands stand for. And the reason I was saying five, six years ago is there wasn't too much differentiation in the marketplace. I think AI's changed that.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  People are executing faster, they're creating more new innovative companies than we've ever seen before.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  And it's going back to people not caring as much for the personal brand, they're caring about the product, the service, the results. Uh, and you're also seeing in today's market that I've never seen this before, I've been an entrepreneur for 25, 26 years. People will switch on a dime. It used to be that people were super loyal to Nike and they loved them. And then it became, oh, I'm gonna try Anshu, oh, I'm gonna try Adidas, I'm gonna try Reebok. You see, you used to see a lot of people loyal to Lululemon. Now they'll go to ALO and then Viori and not care as much between switching between brands.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  That's true, I wear all those.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we're seeing it. How much loyal are you to a brand now than when you're compared to a kid? Like, when you're a kid, I bet you love Nike, right?

• 5:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  I, I don't think you have the same loyalty to a brand right now that you did when you were a kid. And I think it's a lot because we as consumers expect more. We aren't as accepting of not being satisfied and we'll just switch on a dime. And it's never been easier to switch. And because of all these things and how you had to create better products and services and how it really means a, a lot more, like from a quality perspective, I think personal brands don't matter as much, because a business has to stand on its own.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Well, you know what? I actually bring up a, a good point. I actually think there's been a democratization of being able to create these things. Because, okay, you think about when we're boring, when we're bored, there's no internet, right? There's no like, oh, like everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, there's no social media, right? Now, because information is flowing a lot faster, you're seeing a lot more of these brands pop up faster, which is all, by the way, you see these personal brands and like a Mr. Beast, for example, he's quickly spinning up, or like a Logan Paul, they're spinning up, make their drinks and all that. Like, I don't know how those are doing right now. Um, but my point is, even with AI too, like, this actually moves over to a, like a video that I shared with my team this morning. Um, the, it's never been easier to just make in general, right? Which means that the expectations for quality gets higher and the people will just default to quality. And, and especially when you have agents searching for everything, it's gonna be quality, right?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Did I send you that DHH video from Rail, uh, Railworld, Railsworld, I think? You know, the co-founder of Basecamp.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if he was the co-founder, I think he's the unofficial co-founder, I think he joined later on. But I think he was one of the co-creators of Ruby on Rails.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  But he's, I mean, he's a, talk about personal brand, he, him and, uh, Jason Fried? Yeah, Jason Fried were kind of brands back in the day, you know, from a developer standpoint, right? Now, here's what's interesting. So he, and I, I told my team, guys, this is required watching, it's like a one-hour video. And it's basically him talking about, the, the thumbnail says, look at all the things that I'm not doing, right? And what he talks about there is like, okay, you know, before AI, he's, he's like, AI really started to happen last December. Remember what I keep bringing up, Opus 4.5, right? Last December. Uh, to him, it was like November, but to me, last week of December, that's when everything started to change. He's like, the expectation's like, we can just build anything now. And, uh, look at all the things we're doing, we were just pressing enter all the time, and we're not even coding anymore, we're not even writing code, we're not even reviewing code anymore.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  And look at how much more we're shipping and look how good the design quality is, this and that. So that actually goes back to the point that people are shipping more, more and more, like entrepreneurship is more accessible to, to, to more people today. So I think that's just gonna force more competition and quality goes up as well. Um, so I think it's a, it's a worthy watch for everyone.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't seen, I'm gonna definitely check it out. That brings me to a point when you're talking about how much more people are doing without actually doing themselves. ASIC Seen Z had a chart, I have not seen it yet, but I've, uh, heard about it, quite a few people were talking about it on television. Uh, I was flying back today, so I couldn't pull up the wifi, so, uh, CNBC livestream worked out really well about token usage. And, uh, it's just showing how usage of AI is just through the roof. And a lot of the usage is not actually humans, it's AI using AI at this point.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me try to find that. So I mean, do you want to speak more to it as I try to find it?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  That's all they said on CNBC, but I believe it. And it was an interview with a Milan company. I forgot the name of it. It was like Dome Yin, Dome Y.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Do Yin?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Do, yeah, D O Y N E or something like that. I'm messing up the name. You know, they're supposed to raise money at a $2 billion valuation. And they were just talking about differentiation in today's role, which funny enough brings us back to personal branding. But yeah, I think usage is just crazy. And going back to the personal branding point, I don't think it's much of a differentiation. Nike's stock tanked when they did not renew their partnership with Mbappe, you know, the soccer player or football player. You know, it doesn't drive as much revenue as one may think. They have so many personal brands and their stock and companies are struggling.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  Do you see the screen here? So agents are a 14x increase over humans. So you can see in February 6, 2026, when the year started, agentic tokens surpassed human ones, right? This is interesting because what you see on the chart over here, so this is in the blue. So you can see as of today, as of August 7th, this is probably even higher now. So you have seven day average token usage in open router. This is only open router, right? So 7.5 trillion versus humans are 1 trillion and then mix is like 1 trillion as well. But then, when you go back to the last week of December, I'm citing like December 18th, maybe December 26th over here. You can see that agent agentic usage was still under humans, significantly under, like there was still half of humans, right?

• 10:23Speaker 00

  And so when I say things really started to take off, look, that's end of January over here and things really started to rip, right? And that's when I think AI really started to happen and become a lot more useful. And it got better and better rapidly. And now it's getting crazier and crazier every day, right? But going back to the point, I think the video with DHH talking about you can do anything now. And you really, the point that he's making is that, look at all the things I'm not doing. Look at all the the non-robot things that I'm not doing, or sorry, the robot things that I'm not doing, right? So he's not doing robot things anymore and his team gets to work on, they get to spin up like a Windows app very quickly and all this other stuff, right? And obviously they have guidelines for it. And so no matter what I do, Neil, right? And no matter what you do, probably same thing as well,

• 11:06Speaker 00

  is the people that want to embrace this stuff are flying with it right now. The people that aren't, they just aren't, right? But we also have to keep in mind too, that human inertia is a very real thing. Because if I say that this exploded last December, guys, we're still not even a year. It still hasn't been a year yet. And look how much the world has changed.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're gonna not only see this climb, but I think you're gonna see some ups and downs in between because people are spending a lot of money and they're just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Our revenue is not growing and our costs are just increasing. So we need to start adjusting how much we're spending. And we're seeing this across the board with most major companies that we work for, that we work with. Their finance team is pushing back. This is just in marketing, right? So it must be organization-wide, but they're pushing back on marketing saying, hey, you guys are just spending so much on these AI tools. We're not seeing tons of growth from this, but we're seeing rapid increase in costs and it's affecting central earnings.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Neil, so I'm gonna show you a memo from Hormozzi in a moment, talking about internal AI usage. But and then I want to give our reaction, how we're thinking about this internally. But so we pay for a HREF subscription, right? And they had, there's a limit on API tokens that they give. So I was actually gonna try to test something. And then it's like, you're out of AI tokens, right? API token. I'm like, what? And then I looked at it, it was like, it was someone else on my team that had maxed out all the tokens. And I'm like, how did you do that? Right? He's like, I was just testing that. And I think the issue was he just let it run. And I'm like, dude. And so, so I think, and by the way, this guy's a great guy. I love him. But what my point is, is a lot of people, they want more and more usage. They want more and more tools. But when we aren't holding people accountable to like, hey, what's the actual ROI? Not,

• 12:51Speaker 00

  I estimated I saved this time. No, no, no, F that, right? It's more so, what, how much more traffic did you drive? How much more conversions did you drive? How much more usage did you drive if you're a product organization, right? If you're talking about a product? But no, no estimated this, estimated that, right? I'm literally spending money. I don't need your estimation, right? I need to know what the ROI is. And I'm the number one proponent of AI, don't get me wrong, but come on, there has to be some guardrails around this stuff.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  There has to be. And all these things cost a lot of money. And I think that's where people make huge mistakes in which they just use and then think about the consequence of, oh, I just spent a lot of money from the company. Maybe not new money, but we had existing contracts and I just use up everything. So the company, if they want to use these features or these capabilities, they have to spend more money.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  By the way, one of our mutual friends, he's like, oh, he's messaging me, he's like, I'm spending 14 grand a day on tokens, right? So that's about 5.1 million a year. And so like, you know, this stuff's got a, I'm not saying don't spend on tokens. I'm saying you just got to be smart about how you use it. And I do think it's a good barometer. When you look at someone's token usage, how they're using it is important. And I think that should be, that goes into the performance review. 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,

• 14:20Speaker 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. My opinion. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called MP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you're also seeing something that's happening in marketing right now, at least in B2B. Companies are releasing too many features. And you may be thinking, Neil, how could you have too many features? We're entering in a world where it's so easy to release these. And yes, you can have product marketers or people who just focus on releasing features and marketing and making the experience delightful. But the issue is, is now as consumers, what we're seeing from a marketing perspective, they're getting overwhelmed. Like, oh, look, my tool does 1,000 things. Well, 1,000 things is a lot. I only need you to do five things really well. And this is just getting too complicated. So sometimes pushing out more faster than your competition can actually hurt you because your product becomes too complex.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  This is funny, Neil. We're talking right now, I'm looking at X and I'm looking at Neil Patel is hosting Summit Day 3. There's 910 people there. How are you hosting a summit when we're doing this podcast right now?

• 15:47Speaker 01

  You can do both.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  It's Neil's AI double.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  No, not AI double. It goes all day.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, I'm assuming other people are speaking. That's what it is. Yeah, yeah. Cool. So let's look at this memo real quick. I actually haven't, hadn't read this yet, but I just saw this the other day. I scrolled by and I just Googled this right now. So Hormozzi here says, internal AI usage cap memo. In response to requests for increased AI budgets, they aren't coming. And here's why. We currently offer 16x token spend per employee compared to average of tech forward companies based on RAM spend data from 70,000 businesses. I say this to reestablish, I actually want to look up that number. I say this to establish, for those of you who request increases, it's unlikely that you'll get it. Unlimited budgets create unlimited waste, a luxury we do not have. Okay, that part I agree with. So budget and use your tokens only on projects that have a clear revenue producing or cost savings.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Okay. Otherwise, it's likely to be fired on their shit that doesn't matter and not worth spending money on. To help you, we will be offering trainings on how to figure out what's worth working on. Biggest miss, number one. How to use fewer tokens to get same output. Think of this as AI hygiene. How to use the time AI saves you to be more effective. I think those are good trainings. AI is a tool that creates leverage. It helps you get more out of what you put in. That said, company revenue is flat relative terms compared to AI usage increases to suggest that people are largely using on projects that don't matter or using on things that don't matter. Then spending the time, the save time working on things that don't matter. Okay. So this discrepancy hints at a skill deficiency in the team, one which I hope we will train up just as we train up on AI usage. Okay.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  What did we say earlier? PS, the more clearly you can articulate how, what you do generates a return, the more likely tokens will be in your future. And the way to maximize a return is to show how little you can use and how much you can get from it.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also think you're gonna see companies reducing the cost for a lot of this stuff. They already are. Right? It's getting more and more competitive and you're gonna have the bigger players willing to lose money to gain that account over some of the new up and comers, just because the big incumbents have just tons of cash that they can burn.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Here's what I'll say about this one. I think you've heard me, my stance on this. There's all the trains you can do in the world, but it's not going to change a mindset thing. And I think what he's addressing here is a mindset thing. I honestly think that's what he's addressing. Now, that being said, I do think it is worth to train people on what is worth working on, right? And then also what does slot grenades look like? I actually put up a policy on, on, you know, our writing policy and slot grenades. And how to get, you know, how to use fewer tokens, like using Jev, right? Using, using an open router, for example, having Jev as a in-between. And you know, how to think about it, helping you be more effective. And how you also, how do you communicate the ROI from this, right? So let's just look at this. I actually asked Grok over here. So I was curious. So he said, they offer 16x token spend per employee compared to the average of tech forward companies based on what Ram said.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Okay. So reports a median AI spend of about $11.95 per month, roughly $12 across recent months. Okay. So he's saying they offer $200 per month? That doesn't seem right to me. But anyway, if that's what it is, I guess it is around 200 bucks a month, well above the median. I actually think you have to go harder than that. And I think what has to happen is you, not you, Neil, but I think those of you listening to this right now, it's more so, first, you figure out how to hire the people that are very AI native, right? And then if they can, they know how to do this well, they know how to use this well, and they know how to prove the ROI, then you give them significantly more than $200 a month. That's what I think.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  I think a lot of companies need to go back, especially in marketing, to hiring based off of past results. If you know someone really did well in your sector, your space for a competitor on a specific channel or area that you're struggling in, those are the people to start recruiting, have them focused. If they use AI to do even a better job, great. But people need to start going back to the basics because in marketing right now, I'm seeing a lot of AI fatigue. And I use Eric as a good barometer of this. A year ago, everything, AI, AI this, AI that, push, push, push. I only want employees that are AI-pilled. So now, hey, there's too much slop. People shouldn't just be spending. A lot of these campaigns aren't working. People are just getting frustrated with the expense

• 20:02Speaker 01

  and not getting the output that's producing the results that they're looking for.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think on my end, it's more so, it's the revelation that, you know, the fortunate thing is we don't have, we don't have a ton of headcount, right? So we can move quickly with, with decisions. I would say from a, from a personal standpoint, you know, ultimately making sure that the people that we have on are the AI native people that can move quickly because they enjoy working with each other. And then also helping the people that maybe don't want to work like that, helping them find out the other things where they'll be happy, right? It's just the way we see it, the way I see it more than anything, is that, you know, it's the amount that you can do now as a person, if you work like this, is a lot more. So my take on it is actually you need to hire the people that have the experience, one. But they, in my mind, for my organization at least, they have to be, they have to be AI native or else it's just not going to work.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  Cause they just cannot keep up with the other people. There's, other people are like this, they're like this, and they might have a lot of experience, but if they can't keep up, might as well just find someone else that has experience and can keep up. Well, anyway, guys, that's it for today. We hope you enjoyed it and we will catch you tomorrow.