This is 100x Better Than Netflix

Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire In this episode of Marketing School, Eric Siu and Neil Patel talk about why building a business can feel “better than Netflix,” the trap of over-reading versus doing, and how to balance philosophy with action. They break down “bet-the-fund” venture capital moments (Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, GV, Founders Fund, etc.) and explain how LP co-invest sidecars work. The conversation then shifts to recession odds vs. stock market crash probability, Buffett-style investing and Berkshire’s record cash, and why fundamentals matter more than headlines. Finally, they cover new data showing ChatGPT’s traffic referrals decelerating versus Google, and how that shapes SEO strategy—more bottom-of-funnel, revenue-focused content, especially for enterprise B2B. Not financial advice. Key takeaways Action beats consumption: books and podcasts are useful, but skills compound in the trenches. Use philosophy to stay grounded, then execute. Concentrated bets win: top VCs sometimes allocate 15–70% to a single conviction play; founders should also swing when the odds are in their favor and understand LP co-invest dynamics. SEO reality check: Google still dwarfs AI referral traffic. Prioritize bottom-of-funnel content and measure by revenue/conversions, not month-to-month traffic swings. TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Business vs Netflix: Entrepreneurship as a Game (01:58) Book Trap: Why Reading Might Keep You Broke (02:29) Execution Beats Theory: Tennis & BJJ Analogy (04:31) Stoicism in Business: Lessons from Marcus Aurelius (05:03) B2B ABM Tactics: Personalized Ads + Landing Pages (05:33) VC Risk Bets: Skype, Stripe, Uber, Cognition & More (07:05) Behind the Scenes: LP Co-Investments & Sidecars (08:35) Will a Recession Hit? Crash Probabilities Unpacked (09:20) Buffett-Style Investing: Valuations & P/E in 2025 (11:31) Berkshire’s Record Cash While Markets Peak (12:09) Tech vs Non-Tech: Target's Tough Lesson (13:35) ChatGPT vs Google: AI Traffic Trends from Ahrefs (14:36) Traffic ≠ Conversions: The Shift to Revenue Metrics (15:02) Bottom-of-Funnel Is Back: MoM Traffic ≠ Value (15:26) Enterprise GTM Shift: Attribution & RFPs Rewired (16:20) Blog Leads in Decline: What Works Now (16:47) High-Stakes Deals: Final Thoughts & Takeaways ABOUT THE CHANNEL Welcome to Marketing School, a top business podcast with 61 million downloads! Each episode features marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs who practice what they preach and live what they teach. Hosted by: Eric Siu (Founder of Leveling Up & Single Grain) Neil Patel (Co-founder of Neil Patel Digital, named a Top 10 Marketer by Forbes) 👉 Learn more about the hosts: Leveling Up with Eric Siu: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/@neilpatel Other Free Resources from Eric & Neil Growth Newsletter for top marketers: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/ ✅ Don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE for daily marketing insights! OTHER FREE RESOURCES FROM ERIC AND NEIL👇 Growth Newsletter for top marketers: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Ubersuggest: https://www.ubersuggest.com/ Answer The Public: https://www.answerthepublic.com/ DON'T FORGET TO SUBSCRIBE :)

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:37Speaker 00

  Monish Prabha says that this is 1,000 times better than Netflix. And so, he basically said that this is like orgasm. You're having orgasm every hour. He's like, "You don't need free time. This is better than free time." Do you know what it is?

• 0:48Speaker 01

  No.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  It's business. So he did a, he did a episode with The Diary of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett, that podcast. And if you think about it, the, the times you spend on your business, time I spend on my business, a lot of, yes, there's a lot of stress with it, but you feel like you're playing a video game all the time. There's so much, what I, I'll be honest with you, when I'm watching Netflix, when I'm watching anime or something, I, I start to think about business. I start to think about how useless I am on the, on the couch.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  But video games, you don't.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  No, not video, because business is the video game now. It's so fun. And am I having orgasm every, I, I don't know if I'm having orgasm every hour, but I feel like it's so fun. And I know similarly enough to you, you've called me before and you told me this, that when you close a really big deal, you get really excited, right?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  And so, I'm not saying you're having orgasm or anything, but I do feel like this is 1,000 times better than Netflix, and that's why we, we're okay with the suffering that we have to go through to run a business.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  The ups and downs make it more enjoyable.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  As crazy as that may sound.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  I like the downs, because I've had years in business where things are just going really good.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  And I get lazy and I feel like I'm not as having as much fun.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's a, it, I think as men, like sometimes you can say, "Okay, we're masochists," or whatever, but it, it, we're okay suffering, we're okay taking the pain, because we know the pain makes us more resilient and it makes us stronger. I'm not saying physical pain, but there's a lot of mental pain and anguish that goes with this, right? Like, we're not construction, like, we're not on the oil rigs or anything. I think that's way more physical pain that you, I don't think you can take it, or I don't think I can take it, for sure. Um, but I think we're talking about mental pain, that we have to, the anguish we have to deal through. I, business is such a fun journey, and I'm not saying it's for everyone, but I do agree with Monish that it's for sure better than Netflix, and, uh, at least I'm excited every hour, or most hours.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think business has been really fun. And I also like the downs because for me it gives me purpose and it makes the ups even better. But I found the book topic here. Here's the title of it. How Reading Books Can Stop You From Getting Rich. So you put this in. I'm curious because you already know my opinion on this.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, so. You know, I think there tends because there are so many podcasts available and so many books. And don't get me wrong, I'm the first proponent to read books and I've read a lot of books, right? And then I was in a meeting the other day, he's like, man, you've read so many books, right? But all the books in the matter in the world won't matter if you overread. What ultimately matters, for example, let me give you an example. So let's say I'm practicing tennis, okay? So I can read all of the books. There's a great book called The Inner Game of Tennis. Great philosophy.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Did you read it?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  No, I didn't. I have the book sitting at home, but I have so many people I've mentioned it. So I'll go ahead and buy these books, right? A lot of these books I haven't read in my home, right? I use them as reference. If I got this from Syed, if two plus people tell me to buy it or I hear it, I'm just gonna buy it, right? So, but in tennis, just because you read a book, are you gonna know how to return a serve? Are you gonna know how to serve? You're gonna have to pick up the patterns or just like if you're doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. You're gonna have to know if you're in, if you're getting destroyed in a certain position. You're gonna have to learn how to adapt to that, right? You don't learn that unless you're actually in the trenches, in business, in sales. You don't learn sales just by reading books. So I'm not saying don't read these things. I'm not saying don't buy a course or whatever to get the baseline knowledge. But you still have to get there in the trenches.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  And I think the problem is a lot of people right now, they're listening to all these podcasts and like. Maybe you're listening to this podcast too much and maybe you just need to go out there and do. I think there's a happy medium between the two. And so I think there is a situation where if you read too many books, it's gonna stop you from getting rich. Because you've stopped, you keep, it's mental masturbation. You keep learning these things, but you're not doing.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  No, I agree with you. I think, uh, I think reading is good and you should read to some extent. But um, you already know my opinion on reading too many books and listening to too many podcasts.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, to Neil's credit, actually, since I've known you, you've never talked about a book. You just talk about doing. It's just doing. And, and to your credit, like, you'll start new things and you'll make a lot of mistakes. And I'll make a lot of mistakes when I start new things, but that's how you actually learn. You learn by failing.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  For me at least. Other people may learn from books.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  I think with anybody, you learn by failing, right?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  There's not one person that doesn't learn by failing.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I have read some other, some books that have taught me some interesting lessons. But generally, my problem with reading isn't that reading's not good. A lot of it is philosophical. And when you want to try to go do something in real life, it doesn't work out the way that the book ends up telling you.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Dude, I will say though, I read a lot more philosophy now, or philosophical quotes, and I save a lot more things into my bookmarks. Because when you, you look at Marcus Aurelius, for example, dude, okay, richest guy in the world. He was the emperor of Rome and he had to deal with wars. He had to deal with politicians. He had to deal with people trying to get in his way and all that. And all he wrote was his diary, his meditations, right, his philosophies. And I think a lot of philosophies, they stand the test of time and they're so general, right? It's not like they're prescribing anything. So I think philosophies help keep, keep people grounded. And then eventually you establish your own philosophies.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  On a random note, you have something else in here that Silicon Valley bet the fun moments.

• 5:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  What is this? Like when they went all in on a company?

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so even, so when you look at a venture firm, like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia, for example, these are some of the largest venture firms in the world, right? So a lot of people don't know that Andreessen Horowitz bet seventeen percent of their fund on Skype back in the day. So Skype was bought by Microsoft for eight billion and then I think they just sunsetted it. Sequoia bet fifteen percent of their fund on WhatsApp. Thrive Capital bet twenty percent of their fund on Stripe. And then GV Team, I think Google Ventures Team, maybe?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Skype was bought by eBay. Andreessen bought it out from eBay, sold it to Microsoft.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Dude, I didn't even know that. Yeah. And then uh, Google Ventures Team bet twenty, twenty-two percent of their fund in Uber. Um, and then Founders Fund just bet seventy percent of their fund into, into Cognition. They also bet thirty percent of the last growth fund into Anduro. So all that to say is even with venture capital, sometimes if you have conviction on something, you have to swing hard. And investing, sometimes they say it's not about the the number of bets that you make. It's about the slugging percentage. It's how hard are you going to hit when you know that you have something? Just like you're all in on your business, I'm all in on my business. So even these these bet the fun moments or bet the company moments happen with funds.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I figured it happened with fun because if you look at some of the returns, they're really outsized for how much money the fund has. So you can assume that they put in a much bigger chunk of their fund into it. An interesting thing that I know that a lot of funds do is when they know that they have the Andros or whatever it may be, they'll put in whatever they can from the fund into that company. You have to remember, most of these funds have LPs, it's not their own money. So there's limitations on how much they can actually put into one deal. Sometimes they may try to get approvals or whatnot so they can go more aggressive. But what's interesting is is when they have a deal that they really love and they want to put more money,

• 7:31Speaker 01

  a lot of times they'll reach out to their LPs and say, we think this is a great deal. This is why, you know, we are putting as much as we can. We have more to allocate. Who wants to throw in more? And they won't take care or anything like that from it or management fees. And the investors love it because they can just allocate more money. And here's another thing that people don't talk about. When these funds are investing, let's say if you raise a billion dollar fund, you have someone who gives you two hundred million dollars and they're your marquee investor, a hundred million dollars and they're your marquee investor, anchor investor for that fund. A lot of them will have a deal saying, I'm your anchor investor. I give you two hundred out of a billion. You need to also deploy two hundred more million of my money without carrying without management fees.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  And I don't think the Sequoias and the Thieves.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  They probably don't do that.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  They don't have to end up dealing with it.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Because they're they're already well known.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  They're already well known and they're pretty much grade AA plus plus whatever you want to call it funds. But it's some of the other ones that are smaller, up and coming, like four hundred million, five hundred million, even a billion, a lot of them have to do deals with their LPs and allocate more money without taking any of the upside.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Dude, you speaking of investing just kind of reminded me of of the economy, the economic situation. So just just a fun, fun question for you, two questions for you. What are the odds, one through 100%, zero through 100%, that you think we're going into recession or already in a recession? Probability?

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I don't know, because I don't know how recession is defined anymore.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Because sometimes they would say, oh, two quarters of negative GDP growth. Well, we've had that, and then they say we're not in a recession. I'm not trying to point fingers at them and saying they're changing the goalpost or anything like that. I'm not an economist, so I don't know how a recession is defined.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, so you pass on the first question.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  I pass on the first question.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  Second question is, probability wise, zero to 100%, what are the odds that you think maybe in the next six to 12 months or so, that the stock market will crash?

• 9:28Speaker 00

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• 10:04Speaker 01

  I was just listening to an interview on this a few days ago, and it was from one of the big hedge funds out there, and they made a really good point. They're looking at like over, you know, the index of all the publicly traded companies, and they're looking at the average price to earnings ratio and the overall health of most companies' profitabilities. And I think the number, don't quote me on this, is something like most of these companies on average, when you average them out, are worth around like 14 times profit, which to me is very reasonable. And I'm not saying the market won't crash, but a lot of the valuations you're seeing in the public markets, to me, are very reasonable.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  It's interesting because the reason I bring this up, I was watching a video with, I talk about George Gammon. So he listens to this podcast. Shout out to George Gammon. Check out his YouTube channel. So he had a video he just released recently on the jobs report, obviously being revised down. And I think, I think in his video, it showed the Ford PE ratio was the highest it's ever been, right?

• 11:07Speaker 01

  It could be.

• 11:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he said, he mentioned that, but so he, this is interesting because he said he thinks 85% chance of recession, but he only thinks 20% chance of the stock market crashing. Why? Because we're in an era where the government's gonna, the Fed's gonna prop things up, right? And so he's thinking 20% chance, 85% chance recession, 20% chance the market crashes. And not financial advice, guys, but I thought it was just interesting coming from him.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  I believe in the old Buffett philosophy. Whether the stock market crashes or not, if these companies are doing 13, 14, 10 times profit, and it's healthy, steady companies, 10 times profit, you know, if that's your PE ratio, that's really healthy for large corporations, even 14, especially if you have like reoccurring income, and it's very predictable, and you're growing at a nice clip. I look at that as like whether the stock market crashed and these stocks went down, as long as the business performs really well, I don't really care. Why look at it? You know, and if it starts going down and crashing, cool, creates opportunity to buy more.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Do you know what percent of Berkshire Hathaway that used to hold in cash before in the past?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  If I had a guess, way less than 10%.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  13%. What do you think it is now?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so I was wrong. Right now, I don't know, 40% ish?

• 12:25Speaker 00

  27%, but point is, this is the most cash that Buffett's ever held. It's about 300 billion or so. So he just, you know, he kind of just waiting to, because there's a lot of stuff right now is, might be like a little, and stock market is all time highs right now, I think, right? Or near all time highs.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Yes, pretty much all time highs.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Anyway, I just, I thought it'd be interesting.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  But there's a lot of growth. A lot of corporations are making a ton of money right now. And when you look at the market and people talking about crash. A lot of the up movement has been from tech. If you go outside of tech, a lot of the companies like, okay, let's look at.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Outside Mag7?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, i- if you just look at outside technology, like period, okay? Like if I go to like, um, let's look at a company like Target, alright? If I look at Target's stock, uh, over the last five years, it's down. If I look at year to date, it's down thirty-four percent. Their P/E ratio is ten point five. And if you look at, oh, Google just shifted Google Finance. Let's go back to the classic view. If you look at their annual income, right? It's pretty much flat last three years.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  The stock could go up or down for a lot of variety of reasons, but like overall, pretty healthy business. You know, their net income in twenty twenty-five compared to twenty twenty-four is down one point one four percent. Like you have stability. Am I saying this is the right time to buy that stock or not? Should the stock crash or not? That, I don't know any of that. But what I do know is a lot of these companies that are publicly traded all have really healthy financials. And the economy right now with tariffs and all that kind of stuff, it's impacting consumers. To what extent, I don't know, different reports say different things. But these companies are still performing decently well, at least not from a stock price perspective, but from a financial perspective when you look at their numbers.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we'll see what happens in the next six, twelve months or so. Uh, we're not economists here. I thought it would just be interesting to talk about. But did you see that, uh, Tim Solo did a post here, uh, from Ahrefs on how traffic from ChatGPT is slowing down? So.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I saw that.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  As of August twenty twenty-five, ChatGPT, uh, point two one percent, um, of a website's traffic. I think that's what it's saying. Google is forty-one point one two percent. I think this is search share. I think that's what it is.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Uh, I, I think it's from people using the Ahrefs analytics.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, website traffic share. So you see, uh, oh, this is talking about the growth rate. So month over month growth comparison, um, you can see what's happening here. So Google is in the blue and then ChatGPT is in the green. So he's saying it's decelerating.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, and I believe, I don't know how many, what's their sample size? Do you say like forty thousand or something?

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Fifty thousand, and, and just to clarify here, this is website traffic share. So this is, uh, clicks coming to your website.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  And I think you're gonna start seeing ups and downs and there's not gonna be consistency. Just like there is with algorithm changes and these people will try to monetize and that can make it even harder. But at the end of the day, if you can get AI to cite you, we're seeing more revenue and conversions and that should be your goal. Don't worry about it from a month to month perspective, but that data is really interesting that Tim shared.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  What just, just out of curiosity, what percentage of your blog now? Cause our blogs used to be more informational content than more bottom of funnel. Call it, you know, I don't know, 50, 60, 70% is more top of funnel informational. And then now it's kind of shifted more towards bottom funnel, more transactional. What's that percentage breakdown for you today?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  I don't know the percentage breakdown. I do know we focus more on bottom of funnel than top of funnel.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like significantly more.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Uh huh, but we still do focus on top of funnel, just not as much as we used to. I do not know what the percentage is and we look at a lot of this stuff. It's hard for us as a business to measure what is more effective or not. And the reason being is our business at NP Digital has really shifted over the years. We started, I would say similar to the current single grain. I could be wrong. I don't know where your average client spend is, but let's call it a hundred to a few hundred thousand a year. Right? We started there and because we shifted to enterprise, it really skews everything.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Because how you get leads, what's responsible for the leads, the way you get leads, the way you get included in RFPs, the way you close business. It's all changed, so the marketing has also changed with it. And like when we look at our blog, I don't know what your numbers are today, but I do remember years ago was the biggest driver of your revenue for new clients.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  And same for you back in the day.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  And today.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  It's shifted actually today too.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it's even 10%.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, for you guys.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  No way it can even be 10%.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Wow, massive. Ours used to be, I would say 80% of our leads came from the blog back in the day. Now it's gotta be probably like, I don't know, call it 30 ish percent, something like that.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I'm not looking at the leads though. I'm looking at just revenue.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  So I don't know what portion of the leads come from the blog, but it's still a good chunk. The problem with my business is we. Win or die by the deal. In other words, the deal is so large. If we close a deal, it's like, hooray. This is awesome. We did a good job. If we lose a deal, it hurts really bad.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.