Stop Shipping Everything: Why supermemory Killed Its Viral Product

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil explains why he despises coaches who sell how to get rich, and Eric separates them from the Bill Campbells and Matt Mocharys who coached Apple, Google, Coinbase and OpenAI without charging founders. Neil reads a cold pitch promising him an extra million a year and Eric dissects why it fails before the first reply. Then the two ideas Eric wants every operator to react to: supermemory killed its viral company brain to protect its core, because unshipping matters more than shipping when anyone can build anything, and Paul Jun of Ramp's brand as software, where a design file carries the brand into every asset so designers do the new work. Neil's take on ChatGPT agent ads, and BugBasher, the Devin agent Ramp gave a card and a phone that made $75 selling pest-control leads in four weeks. A sharp episode on focus, coaching and what AI agents can already do. Key takeaways◾If someone doesn't do the research before your check, it gets worse after it◾When you can ship anything, unshipping is the discipline that keeps you extraordinary◾Codify the brand as software so creative people spend their time on what a system can't predict Chapters00:00 Coaches who sell 'how to get rich'00:48 Two kinds of coaches: Bill Campbell vs the funnel02:03 People who are good at it, do it02:42 The Trillion Dollar Coach and Matt Mochary03:56 Neil reads the cold pitch05:14 What's wrong with that message06:00 No research before the check? It gets worse after07:03 The legendary coaches never charged founders08:25 Proven track record vs get-rich promises09:21 Unshipping beats shipping11:06 Shipping too much makes products harder11:41 supermemory's conflict of interest12:35 Content that wins on X and LinkedIn13:14 Brand as software: Paul Jun of Ramp15:25 Are you working like this? Design files and AI-pilled designers16:10 Boomerang employees prove the vision17:02 ChatGPT agent ads are coming17:35 BugBasher: the AI agent that made $7519:36 Agents that lose you money

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for anyone listening, if you're getting pitched by people who are telling you how to succeed and their version of telling you how to succeed is them creating content and how to succeed, they usually haven't done anything in the past and they usually haven't made any significant money. So you can listen to them if you want. This is why, and I know it's controversial, I don't care for coaches. I just think most coaches are a waste. On the flip side, if someone is truly, really successful and they have a lot of money, I've seen almost in all cases, those people willing to give advice for free. If they don't want to give the advice for free, they won't give it even if you pay them. So it's either they give it for free or they're not going to give it at all.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  I haven't seen really too many successful people being like, I will charge you for advice and this is what I do for a living.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  I would say there's two types of coaches in my mind, Neil. So you have the coaches that coached like Steve Jobs, that coached like, you know, the founders of like Intuit or like, you know,

• 1:35Speaker 00

  these tech coaches, like Bill Campbell was his name, I think, right? So that's like a coach that everyone knows in Silicon Valley, right? And that's someone that has kind of been there, done that, and is coaching those founders up. Then you have coaches that are selling things, right? Which you see quite a bit on Instagram, for example, right? They put you through a funnel and all that. And actually, funny enough, I had talked to someone that yesterday worked for someone that we know in the coaching space, right? Very, very successful YouTube video, we'll just call it that, right? Back in the day, okay? Has even done business with, you know, people that I know very closely and has not paid those people, right? So anyway, all that to say is like, that is an example of a coach, but that's like the coaching use for almost like just to try to extract maximum value from a monetary standpoint.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  What Neil's talking about is you do have these Silicon Valley type coaches like a Bill Campbell, who didn't actually really collect money. He was just out there paying it forward, right? So I think there's two types of coaches. And I think some people can, anything can be weaponized for maybe trying to extract too much money.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm just a believer that the people who are good at what they do, do what they do, they don't go coach on it. You could get people who you want to pay for something very specific and maybe it'll help you out. Majority of the coaches that I'm talking about online that I just despise are the ones who are just going to teach you how to get rich.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Or versions of that, like, I'm going to teach you how to become popular and grow, blow up your personal brand, or I'm going to teach you how to do marketing and get a million views on Instagram, like, but that doesn't equate to revenue. It's just, they're pushing hocus pocus because they don't know how to drive real revenue.

• 3:16Speaker 00

  So let me talk about, so we talked about these two coaches, right? You have the legendary Silicon Valley coach, Bill Campbell, who actually, there's a book I read called The Trillion Dollar Coach. That's a good one, right? Because he formed all these, helped form all these companies. So he actually coached, he mentored, so he used to be the CEO of Intuit. He used to coach football at Columbia University, right? So he actually ended up mentoring Steve Jobs from Apple, right? He mentored Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin from, both of the co-founders from Google. Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Twitter, now, you know, X, co-founder Jack Dorsey, right? Matt Moshiari, this is the one that I talked about, this is also a great book as well. But the great CEO within, that's a great, he's like known as a coach, but he coached the CEOs of Reddit.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  So Steve Huffman, Coinbase, OpenAI, and Flexport. And he, to my knowledge, he does actually charge for coaching. So these are the coaches that I think are worth their while. And so when Neil, Neil and I had talked about this a couple of years ago, the coach that I had actually had founded companies before and was a VC before and had worked with some of these legendary VCs. And so to me, he was a founder and investor, that to me was worth it. But I have never really gone through kind of these other, you know, what Neil's talking about. And I, we have seen more scams than not.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Dude, so I get pitched, I'm going to cover the person's name so you can't see it, okay? I get pitched a lot, the message says, hey Neil, hope all is well. Love the content, I had a crazy idea. If you'd be down to hear it, stay safe. And I respect this dude for his hustle. And I said, what's the idea? Okay?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  So what did he tell you? Because I love your content, I find it very valuable. And two, I feel like you're leaving a lot of money on the table. To give you an example, I'm CEO of TakeCultivation.com. And last year alone, with one single content creator, you're able to cash back over $1.1 million. Hello, the industry that you're in, the type of value you're giving to your audience, and the type of, you know, content you're making, there's no reason you can't be doing that, if not more. Would you be open to having on a quick 10-minute call later today or first thing tomorrow? Just to see if I can even help. If not, at least give me the blueprint to scale what's there and fix that bio. Stay safe, I'll talk to you soon. Awesome, what did he tell you?

• 5:19Speaker 01

  So he sent that, and then he responded with, you there, brother? Because I didn't respond back. And my response?

• 5:26Speaker 00

  What'd you say? We are in that kind of business, we wouldn't care for that extra million revenue. Oh, did he even see it?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  I don't know, he didn't respond back to that.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  He didn't see it, he didn't see it. But...

• 5:38Speaker 01

  No, but none of my other messages show read from him, so I'm guessing he did see it.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  I don't know, I don't know, but...

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Because none of the other messages say delivered or read or anything.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  See, so let me tell you, let me tell you what's wrong with the message that he sent to you. So I don't know who that guy is, right? So let me just say this, so this guy reaches out to Neil and is like, hey, you know, hey, brother, you know, first of all, like, I don't know if he's saying, hey, brother, but like, when you talk like that, hey, brother, and you're like, you're wearing like a tank top, like, you gotta, if you're trying to do a business deal, at least look a little bit presentable, at least wear a t-shirt or something like that, right? The second thing is this, hey, you know, brother, you're leaving so much money on the table. So that kind of makes me feel like an idiot, right? The third thing is like, you know, I'm going to help you make an extra million dollars. So basically, you did no research on me, right? So you did no research on me, you don't know how big my business is, you don't even know what I do, and you're just sending these out, and you're trying to be personal, but people can see right through that, right? And so when you act like that, how you do anything is how you do everything.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  So if you're like that already, that's how it's going to be working with you.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Dude, you nailed it. If someone doesn't put in the time and the research before they talk to you, imagine what's going to happen once you hire that person. You're screwed. People typically try the hardest to get your money. Once they have your money, it's usually much worse. And dude, you experienced this, you recently hired someone for, I think it was content ideas, and they were so irrelevant, you gave them feedback on why they did things wrong, and it's not even relevant for your business, and what did they come back to you with? Sure, but that's not included in our scope, we can fix it, we just want more money.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Yep, which doesn't make any sense to me. Like, you're clearly early in your career and you're trying to learn, and then you're like, you're only looking at the monetary gain, which is not a good thing too. Like, sure, Neil and I talk about revenue and all that, but there's a time to learn and there's also a time to earn.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yes, but dude, you nailed it. I think that's a very valuable lesson for anyone who's listening. If someone doesn't put in the effort before they get your check, what happens after you give them the check? It's usually much worse, not better.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  So one final thing on the coaches piece, and then we have a few other things that we can cover here. But Neil, I actually did some research here with, you know, Gemini, right? So the most famous Silicon Valley coaches did not charge their core founder clients for money. Instead, they structured their compensation through equity donations or provided completely free of charge. So Bill Campbell, the most legendary one that I was talking about, so he never accepted a single dollar for his executive coaching. When coaching founders like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, he routinely refused salaries or fees. If a company is just not paying him, he would demand they donate the entire amount to his charitable foundation or local community causes. He believed that accepting a paycheck would create a conflict of interest, stating that he wanted his advice to remain entirely objective,

• 8:22Speaker 00

  but he was already massively wealthy, right? Now, Matt Moshiari is the next one, right? So he built his reputation on coaching the top tech CEOs entirely for free. Inspired by the idea from OpenAI's Sam Altman, Moshiari decided he only wanted to spend time doing things he would naturally do for free. By offering world-class guidance to elite tech founders like Naval Ravikant and Brian Armstrong at no cost, he built unparalleled trust and insider access. But he now charges people. So he does selective coaching now, but he has an agency now that does the coaching. It's $10,000 to $12,500 per month for regular executive and team-wide coaching. So he made it into a business eventually.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  He made it into a business, but he has a proven track record, right? So when someone has a proven track record and has done well, that's a little bit different, and he's not promising you that he's going to get rich. I'm not saying, and nor is Eric saying, that all coaches are bad. It's the coaches that are trying to charge you money to make you rich are really bad, or a version of that, like make you popular, right? Or anything instantly that can lead to making money online.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll say one more thing, because this actually does tie in with marketing, right? This, because this is what actually gives marketing a bad rap. The people and I would say, the majority of people in the coaching space, I think there are some good players in the coaching space, but the majority, right? It's a lot of, it's a lot of short-termism, it's a lot of, hey, get rich quick, I'm going to help you make money fast. But what ends up happening is anything that comes quick ends up going away quickly, and it ends up leaving a poor taste in most people's mouths, which is why that industry is more despised than other industries. So I'll just leave it at that, I want to come to this next topic over here and get your feedback. So Neil, my conclusion now, with everything around 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

• 10:08Speaker 00

  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. AI is that? 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 Answer2Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Unshipping is actually more important than shipping today, so let me explain. So when you ship, you can build anything, you can build any product, you can build any CRM today, you can build any voice thing, you can build any SEO tool, you can do whatever you want, right? The world is your oyster. The problem with that is that when you start to ship everything, kind of similar to trying to create content for everything, you become known for nothing. And so this company over here, known as Supermemory, they started doing this one thing. So let me share my screen with you real quick. So this guy, how do you pronounce this name, Neil? This is your people.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Dravaya?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Dravaya? Ah, Dravaya Shaw, okay, thank you for that. So they launched this company brain, because a lot of people are talking about these company brains, right? It's like, hey, you know, this company brain can, you know, reach attachments, read attachments, it can read Slack deep links and all this stuff. They basically put the entire company on this, right? Like, people loved it, dah dah dah. And then they realized that after putting in all these resources, it was taking it away from their core business, which is pushing the frontier of memory and continual learning for agents, right? It was taking away from their core business. And so even though you see companies like Coinbase shipping more than ever right now, you see Robinhood shipping more products than ever right now, right? You see Google shipping more products than ever. When you're a startup, you can't actually do that, even though you can ship anything, because you have very limited resources.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  We've talked about the concept of bullets versus, you know, barrels versus ammunition, right? So ammunition, you might have a lot of ammunition, but you only have so many barrels that you can fire initiatives through. When you're a startup, you have less barrels than a large company. And so you have to be even more focused than before, and you have to focus on unshipping things and shutting things down quicker, because we're in a world now where you can ship anything.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Dude, that's true, and we're also seeing people just ship too much stuff that just makes products harder to use. That company that had the valuation of ten-ish billion dollars that Eric was talking about, the reason I think they're doing well and they're getting a lot of hype is because it's just over SMS and they just kept it simple. It's, you wanna build more, but you wanna build more without people, A, having to see it, and B, having to interact with it. In essence, how can you just help people solve their problem and do more on your end, versus just showcasing everything to a user and just giving them tons of interfaces that just make their life harder?

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Yep, and this is, this resonated with me, because recently we had consolidated a few of our products and our initiatives just to focus in even more. And so this is interesting, because he said this, like, hey, we have many, many developers, startups and enterprises who already use our memory engine in production. So they're using their core product, right? And so what ended up happening was that, you know, this, this company brain thing that they were building, ended up having a conflict of interest with larger companies that they work with, like Cognition or Notion, which are hot startups right now, right? And so you don't wanna have conflict of interest with these clients, and because eventually they're gonna stop paying you. So he said this, shipping is important, but unshipping is even more important for us. We wanna make sure that everything we do, we're doing, we're the best at doing.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Using some other company brain products and agent harnesses made me realize that putting one hundred percent of your time in something can lead to great results, and since we are not able to do that, our product was average, not out of the ordinary. So if you wanna be extraordinary, you have to do extraordinary things, which means unshipping.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, it's, it's, I think it's spot on. But that's a kind of content, by the way, that I think performs extremely well on X, will do really well on LinkedIn, will do terrible on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, I don't know, hit or miss. But that content would do very well on X and LinkedIn.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  The best mid-market and enterprise-type leads for me this year came from X, right? And it's from, it wasn't even AI content, it's content that I wrote myself, right? And the AI content, sure, it performs, it gets a lot of views, but when it's my content written by myself with a point of view on it, that's what, what gets people interested, right? And so, speaking of X, Neil, I have one more for you to react to over here. Your, your brother-in-law, Heaton Shaw, shared this.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  Okay, so, brand as software, so this guy, oh, I was gonna say Kimchi, this guy's Paul, so his profile has Kimchi in it. So I thought his name was Kimchi, but, so he leads brand at Ramp. So Ramp's a pretty hot company right now, two hundred eighty-four thousand views on this one. So he writes a very long article over here, and it talks about this, this concept known as brand as software. So it's a very long article, Neil, a very long article.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  But, so let me just do this, Neil, let me just make it easy for us. Let's just hit the Grok button over here, and just see what it says, okay? So it says, "I call the opportunity 'brand as software', software that carries a company's point of view, values, and constraints into the work itself. Highly skilled designers spend their time reproducing decisions already made while the brand dies by a thousand paper cuts. An agent can carry audience, product truths, voice, and visual system into the work, so the guideline finally answers back. Pair artists who invent the language of builders who turn those decisions into living infrastructure treated like a product, and taste remains human and reputation becomes software, the system carries a score so that people can make music, not noise." What this guy is really saying, this guy Paul Yun, what he's saying is like, look,

• 15:56Speaker 00

  the way we used to work with designers, you and I as marketers, Neil, the way we used to work with designers on the branding stuff is, we would almost do all the marketing work first, and then say, hey, designers, go ahead and step in, come for cleanup work, right? Which is not what a designer wants to do. This is why, at least from my experience working in startups, Neil, designers always hated working on the marketing stuff, because it's always just like a throw it over the fence type of thing, and they're like an afterthought, right? But the idea here is that this allows that type of work to be codified into software. So you might have a design.md file or multiple files that make your brand consistency there. So whenever Neil wants to create out a landing page, or I wanna create out a new ad, it's just brand consistent. And then the, the brand people and the designers, they can focus more on the new stuff, right?

• 16:39Speaker 00

  The, the stuff that's more strategic, and they can continue to upgrade the brand guidelines. And so they don't need to worry about any last-minute stuff, and so we're all becoming more enabled, and that's what I believe brand as software is going to be. In fact, I think most people, most stuff is gonna become as software.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like it, I agree with it.

• 16:56Speaker 00

  I mean, how are you guys working like this right now?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  I don't think most people are working like this right now, but they should be.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  That is true. I mean, the way we work on this right now is we use what I was just mentioning, design.md files, and then you can have workflows and things like that. But I think you need a lead designers that's super AI-pilled, because someone like me or someone like a Neil, we might know a little bit about this stuff, but at the end of the day, you need someone that's super on top of it, which just gave me an idea. I'm just gonna go to my designers afterwards and say, hey, what are we doing about this? I'm just gonna send them this article, so.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Not just that, if they're not AI-pilled, I already know what Eric's gonna do on that one. If they, they don't know the right answers, it's like, oh, you don't know all the stuff that you should be knowing?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Well, dude, I'll tell you something, Neil, so we had, we had a creative leave recently to another company, right? And he, he just came back. I'm like, when I talked to him, I was like, why are you, why are you considering like leaving this other company? He's like, not AI-pilled enough, not fast enough, right? It doesn't give him the energy. And so when he's back, I'm like, hey, if you're gonna come back, I actually want you to make a difference on these things. And so I'm gonna send you stuff, and I want you to move a lot faster, I want you to speak up. But I think it says a lot, like Neil, I'm sure you've had boomerang employees, we do as well. But when you have boomerang employees, it actually reinforces that the vision that you're driving is the one that's true to you, because people wanna come back to your vision, right? So a lot of times, like, if you're starting out, you're listening to this right now, maybe you're one, two, three years into your business, it's about staying the course, and it's not an easy thing to do, but, you know, I'm gonna throw one more at you, you can react to this one.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  ChatGPT agent ads are coming, what are you gonna do about it? What do you think about it?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Um, so ChatGPT agent ads, we'll test it out just like every other channel and see what ends up working. We don't look at it as much of a difference to marketing to humans and agents, whether it's ads or organic. You're still marketing through platforms that are controlled by algorithms and bots and machines, and you just gotta persuade people. The persuasion may be through more logic versus using emotion, but you gotta persuade people to check you out.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Yep, I'll give you one more, because we have a couple, a couple of minutes here. So Neil, I saw this yesterday, this one's more for entertainment. So this is another article from Ramp. So the cool thing about their company, by the way, is look, you have an engineer from Ramp, Sandra Likes Frogs. The other one was the brand person, they're all publishing content that's getting, and I think they're all amplifying the content, because you have a bunch of engineers, so they're doing engineers, designers, you know, other people at Ramp, and so I think they're all amplifying each other. And there's this product called Triordanal, which allows you to do more employee-generated content, like EGC, and I think that's what they're doing right now, they're all kinda amplifying each other. And the cool thing is, at the end of their post, too, they all have like, there's like a little recruiting link at the end of it, so they can just continue to get more people, right? It's more awareness to get more people.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  So the cool thing here is that Sandra from Ramp here said, you know, "We gave an AI agent a Ramp card and told it to make money," okay? So as far as they're concerned, this is the first example of an agent where you tell it to make money and it actually made money for you, okay? So here's what they did. They gave Devon a Ramp card, so I'm assuming this is Devon from Cognition, right? Or maybe they just named it Devon. So they gave this AI, maybe, a Ramp card, which is a, you know, temporary credit card, and a phone and email, they named it Bugbasher, okay? And they told it to sell New York pest inspection referrals, okay? So the tool is called Bugbasher, so Devon is in fact from Cognition, that's the, the AI coding tool, okay?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  So they gave Devon a Ramp card, phone, email, and then they told it to sell NYC pest inspection and referrals, okay? So four weeks and many phone calls later, I think over ten thousand phone calls, Neil, it made seventy-five dollars, right? So the first publicly documented AI B2B sale from a cold start. Every twenty minutes, a heartbeat checked the inbox, Stripe, and calls, and then revised prompts and its shared brain from transcripts. It added a Spanish or Chinese ask, leaked its system prompt on one hundred ninety-seven calls and found our systems in Git when Slack installed. Our exterminator paid seventy-five dollars, a one exterminator, paid seventy-five dollars via Stripe, agents heal climb well, but still struggle with long-term planning and go make money. So that's the lesson from this, but it seems like it's one of the first documented cases of an agent just making money.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  That's really cool. I think we're gonna see more of that, and then we're also gonna see a lot of cases of agents causing you to lose a lot of money.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we've seen that already, where someone, I think, last week, it overspent on their card by five thousand dollars.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  On your card?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  No, on their card. Someone shared it on X, and they said they only shared it for one transaction, because it's tied to like a link account, right? Which is from Stripe, and then it spent, it overspent by five thousand dollars.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think that's gonna happen a lot more than, a lot more of this, because people aren't that smart, including myself, so.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  All right, so anyway, guys, that is it for today, we hope you enjoyed it, and we'll catch you tomorrow.