What I Learned By Talking To A Marketing Team About AI At A Company That Generates Over 20 Billion A Year, SEOs Are Getting Fired Left And Right

In this episode #2981, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the challenges and opportunities of AI in marketing, highlighting the gap between AI adoption and actual business results. They explore the future of SEO, the importance of accountability in AI usage, and the need for consistent brand engagement. The conversation also emphasizes collaboration over competition in the agency space. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) The AI Dilemma in Marketing (03:09) Understanding the Impact of AI on Business (06:05) The Disconnect Between AI Usage and Business Results (09:03) The Future of SEO in an AI-Driven World (12:07) Navigating AI Hallucinations and Accountability (14:52) Building Brand Awareness Through Consistent Engagement (17:58) Collaboration Over Competition in the Agency Space To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 01

  Do you want to know a big problem that I see with AI?

• 0:38Speaker 00

  What?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  I was at a corporate event, you know, the other day, and I was speaking to a whole room of marketers.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  How many people?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  In person, 150, 200?

• 0:48Speaker 00

  That's a lot.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  And they just work for one company, so you can assume this company is extremely large. And this is just, they're US-based marketers. They're in a lot of countries, all right? This isn't a company that generates like a billion in revenue. I'm talking about, you know, tens and tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars each year in revenue. Their profit is probably well into the billions. I don't know how much, but let's call it five-plus billion, maybe even more per year in profit.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Do they have a giant tower in San Francisco?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  No comment.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  It's so obvious.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. There's a lot of large corporations.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just, I'm just, I'm joking, I'm joking. Go ahead.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  But I know who you're talking about. You're talking about Salesforce, and I'm not saying it is them or it's not them. But I was talking to a group of marketers. And my speech, I signed some documents, there's really so much I can talk about. My speech was to talk about how they can, I can encourage their team and internal resources to leverage AI to be more efficient. And it was things like, why should they leverage AI? How can they do it for different teams like content or data and analytics? And, you know, the list goes on and on. And they have some people that I met up with that just specialize in data and, I mean, AI or marketing, and their job is to help everyone else within that team adapt AI. And one of them asked me a question.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  And he asked a question of like, hey, how can I get a position within the organization where I just have an AI role? And I just help everyone globally. Like, this would be a really cool role. I want to climb the ranks and all this kind of good stuff, which people want when they work for a company. And I was telling him about one big mistake that people lack. Cause even when I was talking to the audience, they were asking questions. Everyone's all about, oh, how do you think about agents? How do you think about workflow versus agents? You know, how do we help our clients, our customers succeed, right? Not just us succeed. How can we use AI to help with that? And constantly when they're asking questions and when I'm talking to them,

• 2:48Speaker 01

  and this was a period of a few hours, I quickly realized everyone's using AI because they are supposed to be using AI. And especially in Silicon Valley, it's being pushed very heavily. And you know, you already know I was in San Francisco, so this was a tech company, of course. But when you think about it, and I was talking to them, I was like, most of you guys use AI because you need to use AI and people are telling you to. But how's this actually impacting your signups? Your, you know, your profitability or reducing costs, increasing your LTV of customer. And very few people can tell me how they use AI to do any of those things. I'm not saying they aren't using AI. They just create all these use cases in busy work for themselves.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying AI can't help make things more efficient. But it doesn't matter if you're more efficient or not. If you're just working on shit that doesn't improve the bottom line, who cares? And you had an Instagram post that I saw the other day saying, I'm looking for AI people. I'll pay you up to $4,000 if you refer. I believe that was you.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  That was me.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  And which I thought was really cool. And I know you and I are on the same page. Dude, we want people to enable or leverage the latest technologies. But do you really give a shit if someone uses AI for all this cool stuff? And you make no, get no extra leads, no extra revenue, save no extra money? Like, do you really care at the end of the day?

• 4:06Speaker 00

  No, and so I think what matters to me and Neil's point, if I'm understanding this correctly too, is don't just use AI to AI or just because people are mandating. You have to understand the why behind it. Like, why does your organization want you to do it? They want you to be more productive, not just to use it. And I think, by the way, when I've worked at larger companies before, I never really tried to understand the business or understand the bottom line. Like, to me, it was just my job was a means to an end, right? Like, I wanted to go work on projects on the side. So I think that's largely what's happening. That's the disconnect that's happening right now. Because you and I have been entrepreneurs for so long.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  No, I disagree with this. I've seen you work for corporations like Treehouse, where you helped drive.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  That was a small startup, though.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yes, but when you worked for them, you thought about driving users and doing it profitably. You did not just say, "I'm a marketer, I need to just drive signups and more usage." You did think about unit economics and making sure you weren't losing the company.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  You want to know why I care, though? Because the previous companies I worked with were big companies with hundreds, thousands of people, right? I didn't care at those companies because I felt like I was just a cog in the wheel. At Treehouse, because it was a much smaller team and a startup, I cared a lot more. And I, you know, sometimes I feel like it's cheesy when people say, "Oh, the mission, the startup." I actually did care about that. So I, and also, like, sure, the equity, but the equity is like, who cares? It's like a fart in the wind, right? At the end of the day. But I think the key thing is that it goes back to that one word, Neil. I think it's just the why, and people are asking the wrong questions. And by the way, when I say we're hiring AI-forward people, to me, Neil, it's just like, if I'm interviewing you right now, now I just kind of start off like, one, how did you prepare for this call? You'd be surprised at how little people prepare for a call. I might just end it right there.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  The second booby trap I have is, so tell me right now, like, what's the most innovative thing you're doing with AI right now, right? And by the way, like, some people will tell me all these, these things that they're doing to drive. Traffic and conversions and some people would just tell me something they're using for their diet. For example, right? That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for people to know how to answer a question that ties in with business results and a lot of people fail at that still.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yes, and I do agree with you. It goes back to the why and people don't ask the right questions. They don't understand the business and they're just like, oh, I'm in a role in marketing. So if they're in charge of community management, they're like, yeah, I gotta manage a community. Why do you need to manage community? Oh, to create goodwill so people like the brand, but why does that matter? Oh, because if people like the brand, it generates more signups, more revenue, reduces churn, whatever. Maybe like, oh, that's all right. That's correct. Okay. So what are you doing that actually moves those metrics? Responding to a comment for the sake of responding to a comment doesn't necessarily move it. There are some things that could move it, some things that won't, like someone could be really upset. And then you save them and then it people, other people on the internet end up seeing it, creates a ton of goodwill.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  But you gotta figure out why are you doing your job? And what can you do that actually has an impact on the business? And when something's publicly traded, that was the funny part about me doing a speech. I'm like, look, I know you guys are doing all this work. I know your numbers. You're publicly traded. I can just go look them up. A company, if your financials aren't crushing it, you're not growing like at thirty, forty percent a year or twenty percent. Or whatever I think the market usually wants twenty plus percent. I don't know what they're really growing at, but generally the stock market has been down for the last three years. It's like, cool, you're doing all this stuff. What's really impacting the numbers?

• 7:29Speaker 00

  Yep. And by the way, this is, this is interesting because we're hiring more SEOs right now. And basically we have people do this quick SEO assessment. It's like you're just, it's a write-up and it's two, three pages or something like that. And I'm looking at, so I have chat G P D O three score these people. All right. I was like, okay, we're doing assessment. We want to understand how A I four they are, how strong they are with S E O. This one guy works at a very large company that has probably five thousand plus employees. And he scored a nine out of ten and everyone else scored like sevens and fives, right? And so the one line verdict on this guy is forward-thinking strategist who already thinks in the post-A I overview world in a player, right? So he clearly explains A I O. Chat based search will cannibalize clicks, blah, blah, blah. And so tying it with CRO training, but he also sees a lot of this stuff is going to go down over time.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Right. And so that to me is with a quick analysis, I'm like, whoa, okay, that's better than these other people because they're not, they're scared to even talk about this stuff. And by the way, you know, want to know, you want to know something interesting that's kind of related to this? This guy was getting paid $250,000 a year as an SEO. His entire team and him, they just got cut last week, right? And so I think what's going to happen to a lot of SEOs is I think a lot of SEOs are getting fired right now. And I think a lot of SEOs are scared. So we can choose when we want to talk to this, talk about this topic, but SEOs are getting fired left and right right now. But.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Well, let's talk about it now, but one quick comment before we switch topics. So why SEOs are getting fired? Cause I didn't know about that. We're actually seeing, uh, do they work for agency or a company?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  Company.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Okay. We're still seeing companies hire SEO. I'm assuming you are too, because you're getting paid. But going back to the event I was at, you know, they're also pushing everyone to be a vibe coder. And I know you've done a lot of vibe coding. I'm assuming you've done at least some.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I, I, I'm shaking my head because I think a lot of it's baloney. And I, I think to your point, a lot of this is like slop and busy work and people acting like they're doing shit and they're not.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm just like, I bet you a lot of you guys are using AI. And if you measure your productivity, I bet you some of you are more productive. And quite a few of you are less productive because you're just doing a lot of random shit that doesn't impact the business. Like, cool, you got more done, but you got more done that has nothing to do with moving the numbers. So who cares?

• 9:37Speaker 00

  I guarantee you, I, I do think for you and I, I'll just speak for myself. I do think I'm a lot more efficient as a strategist. I think I'm way smarter because of AI, not because of me, right? But I'm, I'm, I'll be like walking to the office and the things I strategize on, like a tax lawyer or, or like, I'm talking about other things. Like literally like I might do like a different partnership agreement, like these, these addendums and these amendments and all these things that might cost thousands of dollars in weeks. I just do them quickly now. And when I do it with other people, we just knock it out. We just sign it right there. We're done, right? Not saying you should, you guys should do that. That's not legal advice. But even the way I go about planning for family stuff and things like that. It's, it's basically my in pocket strategist. And because you and I are basically sitting atop and kind of operating the business, we can off, we can drive those types of results.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  But I think it's important, if you're also leading, you can't just dictate and say, oh yeah, you should be using AI. You're going to have to have standards and guidelines, otherwise people are just going to do stuff like this.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Dude, and in some of our contracts, like we're going through a contract with a very, very large corporation, very old company as well. I don't mean in a bad way. They've just been around for ages. They're publicly traded. And straight up, we were about to sign the contract and last minute, they had a change. And the change straight up says, and we're seeing this more and more, if you use any AI tools, you need to let us know ahead of time. And if you do use them, you are going to be responsible for any copyright infringement, right? So we would have to take on that liability.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Which I think that is a very reasonable request. If we want to use these tools, we ourselves as an agency need to make sure that we're not screwing over our client. But yeah, they requested that and we'll go back and forth and make sure it all looks fine before it gets signed, but it'll push it into next month. But yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  You know, my cousin, I saw my cousin yesterday. So she, she works for like a big law firm, right? And they don't allow the use of AI right now because it hallucinates, right? And so the one, I think they're, they're going up against another firm during a case. And then the other firm, they brought up like, you know, they cited like false cases that don't exist, right? And then their firm was like, hey, you cited these cases, but these cases don't actually exist, right? And they're like, oh, so they got in trouble for that. And so this kind of reinforces the need for, for a human in the loop. But I, I think going back to what I said too, if you're going to create these AI standards of excellence, there's got to be a way to hold people accountable. Otherwise it can get out of whack pretty quickly because again, you see the Fiverr CEO doing it. You see the, the Box CEO, the Shopify CEO, everyone's doing all these things right now. But I think we've lost sight of the fact, and it wasn't until maybe this conversation, Neil, where

• 12:01Speaker 00

  I realized that you, myself or other operators, we're incentivized to care the most about the bottom line and we can drive the most change quickly. Whereas other people are never going to care as much. And so they're just going to do whatever.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Dude, we're on the same page. And speaking of AI hallucinating, when I was at the event, one of the guys just specializes in AI for the organization, helping everyone adopt it. And I was telling him like, yeah, I've used chat GPT and other LLMs and sometimes I create charts and they're just off. And like, I'm inputting the data correctly, had a few people on my team. He's like, oh yeah, you need to adjust how you're doing it. You can actually create this checker thing that verifies everything and then reviews it. And in my head, I'm like, but why? Dude, I just inputted data. It's pretty black and white. You create a graph. It's either the output is correct or it's not correct. If we try different prompts and just messing up on it when the data is accurate. So whatever, at this point, it's like move on. He's like, no, no, you're gonna end up fixing it.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I'm like, dude, I could just have a human do it faster. It doesn't mean AI is bad, but it goes back to your point where sometimes it hallucinates and it's not accurate. And going the length of having to double, triple check everything. It's very important and people tend to forget it. Just like you saw that Chicago newspaper scandal where the guy who's in charge of the column for the top books of the week or month or whatever it is, use AI. And I think three or four of the top 10 were even real books.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Wow. So you got in trouble for that? Did he get fired?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  I don't know if he got fired, but if I was him, I would have resigned myself.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  That's a fireable offense.

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Frictionless Growth Marketing hosted by Sonya Thompson shows how modern brands grow by removing the friction in their marketing and customer experience that pushes customers away every single day, often without leaders even realizing it. Each episode delivers practical insights, real brand examples, and conversations with marketing leaders showing brands how to win with the new rules of growth, identity-driven marketing, cultural relevance, and frictionless customer experiences. Listen to Frictionless Growth Marketing wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway, I mean, okay, going back to the SEOs are getting fired left and right. So you know what's interesting? The SEOs that I'm talking to right now, these people.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  So, okay, one guy, his entire staff got laid off. And I'm like, hey, look, man, like, I know you got, you were getting paid 250. Because this space is changing so quickly right now, I don't know if you're gonna get paid 250 right now. Just it might depends on the company too, right? Some companies will gladly shell that out. But then the other thing is I talked to an agency guy and he's like, yeah, my entire team got let go and I got repositioned into this position over here where I'm not managing people anymore. Right? I'm like, why did he get let go? He's like, oh, SEO is not working more. And then there's, there's a, there's a big agency that you and I know, I'm not gonna name names. But I kind of mentioned that I talked to a handful of directors there. I'm like, why are you guys all looking to leave? Right? He's like, well, we haven't been closing more SEO deals. One, two, SEO is changing and then three, they're making layoffs. So we're scared. Right? So, look, I get it. People want to have a job for safety at the end of the day. But if something's changing, you better be able to adapt.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Um, cause I, I think this is gonna continue unless you prove yourself to be a head. Ahead of the game.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  We're seeing SEOs are still highly in demand as long as they've adapted.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  There's a lot of SEOs that are just like, you build links, you optimize your site, you create tons of content, you try to rank number one on Google and that's it. We're not seeing those SEOs do well. And even when we pitch SEO, it's not just, hey, let's rank you on Google. The ones who are like, hey, AI overviews are important. You want to make sure that you're mentioned there. AI mode is here to stay. You got to make sure that whether it's AI mode on Google or ChatGPT or perplexity or Claude or wherever it may be, you're continually being top of mind and being mentioned inside it. Cause that not only builds trust, but that's building your brand, right? They call it rule of seven, as you know, in marketing, although it's closer to 11 now these days, where people had to interact and see a brand 11 plus times before they engage and purchase. Same with social media. If you're SEO and you're not optimizing your social content to rank,

• 16:01Speaker 01

  you're making a big mistake. You're posting content, but why wouldn't you want to get the traffic from everyone searching? Dude, Zuck talked about it the other day. There's over a billion users a month that are using their AI technology. A lot of their AI technology happens when you just do a search on Instagram or Facebook or any of these places.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Dude, you just, as you said that, I was like, yeah, optimizing for LLMs where you can. I, I, I had to do the search on ChatGPT again. I was like, what's the best marketing podcast, marketing school number one again? So I feel, I feel good right now. But by the way, guys, the, the SEO one-on-one game is still citations at the end of the day, right? So how many times are you getting mentioned? How many reviews are happening? To me, a link is still a citation too. Like all those things are still in place. So a trick question I like to ask people now is like, so what do you think about AEO and, and you know, GEO? Like, how do you optimize for these? And if they start answering me like with a bunch of things that sound complex, they're just done because it's really not that complex at the moment.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I just finished up the lunch meeting and we were talking about our.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  Go to Avra?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh, no, I went to the Mayborn.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  So was at the Mayborn, eating lunch with someone and we were talking about marketing and podcasts. And they were talking to Grok and Grok ended up, you know, mentioning our podcast. And they're like, oh, cool. I'm going to start listening to. I'm like, great. Thanks. Like it is important. And they're like, do you generate any? Revenue from any of these kinds of things and um because they're asking like, why do you keep doing it? I was like, I've been doing it for a long time. It keeps you top of mind. It's great for brand awareness. Uh, and it can drive revenue, but it's a long-term play and it's people interact and engage with you multiple times. I've told you this, you've had direct experiences closing revenue because of marketing school. I've mentioned to you, I really haven't, but when I talked to Nick on my sales team,

• 17:45Speaker 01

  he always tells me, I, because I've asked him, I'm like, do we generate business from marketing? He's like, he's like, not that I can pinpoint, but he's like, when I talk to people, a lot of our customers do listen to the podcast.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  It's, I see it as a multi-touch thing. I think you can't really attribute to one thing, right? Like, for example, when I bought that, that vac- vacuum cleaner, it still hasn't come yet, but it was like Twitter and then I went to Wired and then like, you know what I mean? Like, and then there's a bunch of other, like the cookies, right? The cookies I told you to buy, like, you can't attribute it to anything. Did you get it?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Did, did, this just came in my inbox. I ordered it when we were together, right?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, they have to like hand make it all.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Look, literally got this at two twelve.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Amazing, amazing.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  But, okay, so, but my point is like, I found these cookies on Twitter and then I bought them on, using the shop app. And then I told Neil about it and he bought it, but you can't attribute that, right? So my point is, I think, so when I listen to podcasts, I feel like I'm building a relationship with these people. It's one-sided, right? And so people do like the fact now that we're sharing experiences and I feel like people have gotten to know us well. And because like, like when I went to, when I came out from the gym, like a guy approached me and this guy's, this guy's amazing. I'm gonna do a podcast with him sometime soon, but he's like, dude, I love all your stuff, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, it feels like they know you on that side and it feels like at least on one side, it's a very familiar friend, so.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, and this is all attributable to just being out there a lot and getting your brand out there.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  And by the way, like, I do, the thing I think that's good about this podcast is it forces us to be accountable because at any given time, if we want to be lazy, we can't really be lazy, so.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  All right, so we all know that, and, and this will be new for me as well because I've never asked Eric this. We all know that building a brand and being out there for a long period of time does wonders. All right, so let's go to Carrot for a minute, right? Carrot is Eric's ABM software, uh, account-based marketing. And it's been out for how long now? Six months?

• 19:35Speaker 00

  It's, uh, December.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  So roughly six months, we're in June. So call it, if you include December to now, you've gone a half a year. So if you've been out for six months, you first got traction from a LinkedIn post. I forgot what the LinkedIn post is, but you had like a thousand or 2,000 comments. It was something crazy like that.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  And that was how you got your initial traction.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  You still push it. We push it when we naturally talk about it on this podcast. We don't push it intentionally. We're just randomly talking about it. You talk about it when you're presenting like on stage a YPO, a marketing event in Miami.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  How much of the inquiries that you're getting right now from Carrot? This is just out of curiosity, are coming because of brand awareness, would you say now? Versus like SEO or the podcast or just, you know, running a promotion or ad? Like what do you, because you talked to a lot of the people. How much do you think is attributed because of the brand?

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Here, Neil, Neil, read this off. I'm going to share my screen over here. Okay? So column K is how did you hear about us?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Uh, okay. So what's the green versus the non-green?

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Green is just like, uh, conditional formatting for bigger companies.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  Okay. So YouTube, LinkedIn, YouTube, Eric Podcast, YouTube Video, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, uh, Google, single grain, YouTube, YouTuber. That means someone else. Self, I don't know what self is. LinkedIn, referral, YouTube, podcast, subscriber of email list is what it looks like.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Subscriber of Eric, I think.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Uh, subscriber of Eric's newsletter, yeah. Eric's newsletter, email, same thing. Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, YouTube, YouTube, dude, leveling up podcast. Four more Youtubes in a row, LinkedIn, YouTube, leveling up, uh, YouTube, one of your podcasts. That means they listen to more. So that's great. Three more Youtubes in a row, Google, uh, Eric's leveling up. I'm assuming that means a podcast.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Uh, and last one is YouTube.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  But you, by the way, YouTube is a lot of podcasts.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Uh, you doing your own podcast or you're talking about interviewing on other people's podcasts?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Um, no, me, me, me doing either solo episodes or, um, and I don't really do interviews anymore at the moment. So, and then sometimes they come from like, sometimes we'll, we'll have a, even though our, our marketing school channel, um, is very small right now. It's, it's sometimes it does well. So.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  So it is mainly solo videos. It's not you going on other people's podcasts.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Correct. Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but this is brand awareness. I haven't watched all your YouTube videos. I started watching some of them because I know you started doing it in the same studio that we were talking about.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  Do you like how my style looks like yours?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  It works. Here's the interesting thing. I started using a studio. Eric copied my style. Then I copied Eric by going to the same studio that he used because it was a better deal and closer. So my new style is a copy of his, which was a copy of mine, but.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, we iterate off each other and it's not like we get mad at each other for it. Like we, we, it's, we're fine. You know, it's, it's, some people get like, oh, they try to hold the, the, the, it's like, you know, when you go to middle school and someone doesn't want to reveal the rock band that they listen to. We don't do that stuff, right? And by the way, we, we want to give a shout out to the studio we use. It's in Century City. It's called Visible Audio Studios. I think it's a great studio and I, I wish that, I, I hope that they get, get even more business from this.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I asked Eric, because Eric asked me, he's like, where do you film? And I told him, like, dude, just ask AJ. It was somewhere in Hollywood. I'm like, it's far. And he found a closer, closer place. And he was just like, he filmed. I'm like, oh dude, this looks good. I was like, where did you film? And he's just like, here's the place's name. And I sent it to AJ and then he ended up calling off and figuring it out. But yeah, that, that's the thing we share. And you know what? Eric and I genuinely are competitors. He has an agency called Single Grain. I have an agency called NP Digital. But the thing is, is our market's big enough. It's like just a massive punchbowl and it's big enough for everyone to get.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  There's so much business when agencies are smaller and they're, they're, they're scared to share information. There's no point in doing that, right? You know what's weird too? Neil, I didn't, I talked about this with another friend, like a lot of, because you've worked in SaaS, I worked in SaaS. For whatever reason, a lot of agency people have these huge egos. And I'm like, where does that come from? Like, where do you get like, versus like a lot of SaaS founders, you know, are, are, most of them, I would say are generally nice people. But for whatever reason, the agency world, the egos are so big. So if you have an agency, don't do that. You might as well be humble, share the information and just understand that there's business available for everyone. And sometimes when you refer business out, you can get business back too. So just understand that you can each help yourselves make the pies bigger.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yes, and that is the right way to run a business and sharing and meeting up with other founders who are in the same space. It'll actually get you further than being like, "Oh, I can't reveal in my secret, Sam. They're gonna copy me." And that's why Eric and I are in groups with other agency owners. They're not really formal groups, but we more so keep up to date with them. We share tactics, strategies, and what's happening, things are up or down. It just all helps us grow.

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Yep. So that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. And that being said, we will see you tomorrow.