Pod Insights Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips Why Adobe Is An Unethical Business, The Path To The 1-person $1B company, And The Right Philosophy With AI About this episode In episode #2932, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss the ethical concerns surrounding Adobe's business practices, the role of AI in research and consumer behavior, and the future of one-person teams. They also discussed how AI can be used to enhance decision-making and efficiency, particularly in financial analysis. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) Adobe's Ethical Dilemma (02:57) The Role of AI in Research (06:04) The Future of One-Person Teams (08:56) AI as a Second Brain (11:56) The Evolution of Consumer Behavior (15:09) AI in Financial Analysis Prefer single topic episodes? Head over to our YouTube channel. 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!
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 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. I found this tweet the other day. I will be the main driver of this one. So Adobe seems like they're an unethical company. Let me tell you why, and you don't have to react to this at all.
0:44 Speaker 01 I'll plead the fifth on this one. You can keep going.
0:47 Speaker 00 So Level tweeted this, "Out of principle, I never use Adobe products anymore. I think Adobe is an extraordinary and evil company that destroyed their great reputation." Been using Photo P as my main image editor for years now. Final Cut Pro for videos. Okay. So someone tweeted this, Tetsua, "Adobe, F you, you snakes. Who charges people for canceling a subscription?" So I'm looking at this right now. It says, "Early cancellation fee." CAD $51.98. There will be a calculated fee charged to your MasterCard. And then Naval Ravikant responds, and he says, "Historically, Adobe products insist on hijacking your computer at the lowest level possible. I treat them as malware." And that's exactly how I felt about it before, when I couldn't cancel out of my Adobe Acrobat Pro or whatever.
1:32 Speaker 00 What the hell is going on here, man? And I think this is negative marketing, when you have a Naval Ravikant tweet this, and then this tweet got 800,000 views or so, and then Naval added another 158K on top of it.
1:46 Speaker 00 I think, you know, it's generally a better idea, and we don't have to, you just referred to Adobe here, this is in general now. Generally, I think it's better to do what's right for the customer, and make it as easy as you can for the customer, because anything like this causes negative reputation. Don't get me wrong, Adobe's still a huge company.
2:04 Speaker 01 They're massive.
2:05 Speaker 00 But things like this, it's like, dude, you're so big, like, you don't need to play games like this, man. But that's just one person's opinion.
2:13 Speaker 01 No comment.
2:14 Speaker 00 Okay, we can move to the next topic. You pick the next topic.
2:17 Speaker 01 Let's talk about how's it. You guys can all. Yeah, let's not get it. So has anyone built a large ad agency without M and A? I was actually looking for that online. I haven't found one ad agency.
2:27 Speaker 00 Research this with Grok?
2:28 Speaker 01 I did research.
2:30 Speaker 00 Grok or ChatGPT?
2:31 Speaker 01 Uh, I haven't used ChatGPT. I just actually did it by searching.
2:35 Speaker 00 Okay, here, I'm gonna run a, I'm gonna run a deep search right now using Grok. Um, have any agencies, um?
2:42 Speaker 01 Any ad agencies?
2:44 Speaker 00 Have any ad agencies gotten huge?
2:47 Speaker 01 Any ad?
2:48 Speaker 00 Huge without M and A?
2:49 Speaker 01 Ad agencies?
2:50 Speaker 00 I'm talking about billions, okay?
2:52 Speaker 01 A billion in revenue without.
2:58 Speaker 01 Uh, let's see. And I'm gonna use.
3:02 Speaker 00 You use ChatGPT?
3:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm gonna use ChatGPT.
3:05 Speaker 00 That's so yesterday, man. Gotta use Grok now.
3:09 Speaker 01 Remember, how did you reach a billion in revenue organically?
3:11 Speaker 00 Oh, you're just using normal. I'm using Deep Search.
3:14 Speaker 01 I'm using Deep Search.
3:15 Speaker 00 Are you?
3:15 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
3:16 Speaker 00 I'm at seventy sources right now.
3:17 Speaker 01 I am looking.
3:18 Speaker 00 I'm at eighty sources now. How many are you at?
3:20 Speaker 01 Zero. I had to time my response. I'm looking for.
3:23 Speaker 00 Oh, it's asking clarifying questions.
3:24 Speaker 01 Organic ad agencies.
3:27 Speaker 00 Well, while that happens, let me just tell you guys about Grok. Grok is amazing because it has a deep search function, which is doing the research right now, and it's a thinking function. So what you can do is, um, if I want a really crisp prompt, I'll ask Deep Search to, or, yeah, I'll ask, I'll ask Deep Search to help me come up with a, an amazing prompt. And then, um, I might dump that into ChatGPT, um, O one Pro or something like that. Did you find something?
3:52 Speaker 01 No, it's, it takes a while.
3:53 Speaker 00 It's okay. I'm already at a hundred seventy sources.
3:55 Speaker 01 There's nothing. I don't think there's any ad agency that's grown to.
3:58 Speaker 00 Okay, well, tell us what research you found first while we wait for these to pop up.
4:01 Speaker 01 I haven't found one ad agency that got a billion in revenue without mergers and acquisitions.
4:06 Speaker 00 And you, you, you can't even qualify for that anymore because you've done M and A. So why, why, why prompted this?
4:12 Speaker 01 Even most of the ad agencies that got to a hundred million dollars.
4:16 Speaker 00 Yeah.
4:16 Speaker 01 Did some sort of mergers and acquisitions.
4:18 Speaker 00 So what prompted this question?
4:22 Speaker 01 Someone was asking the other day, like, how big do you think you can grow organically? And I was like, well, what do you consider organic? And they're like, no M and A. And I was like, well, we got to nine figures without M and A.
4:35 Speaker 00 Hey, I've the answer here. Okay. Key points. Research suggests no independent ad agencies have reached billions in revenue without using mergers and acquisitions. This is on 200 sources. So Omnicom, WPP, Publicis have all grown. The evidence leans towards Horizon Media being the closest with estimated revenue around one billion, but it has engaged in some M and A, potentially disqualifying it.
4:56 Speaker 01 Horizon Media has done acquisitions. Horizon Media acquired.
5:01 Speaker 00 But it says, it says like limited acquisitions. It hasn't done like a lot of acquisitions. That's what it says.
5:06 Speaker 01 Look, Horizon Sports and Experience Marketing. Uh, Horizon has acquired companies.
5:13 Speaker 00 How many, like a lot, a lot or like a little, like relative, relatively speaking?
5:18 Speaker 01 But it's, you can't look at the number. You got to look at the size of the company that they acquire.
5:23 Speaker 00 Sure.
5:23 Speaker 01 So, uh, I haven't looked at the size of the company, but Horizon Media requires controlling stake in digital experience company first two. What typically happens is, is when a come, and this was before they raised money, by the way. Horizon has actually taken private equity money. When you, when you look at companies that have done M and A when they're larger, like a Horizon, they typically buy companies that are larger because it doesn't move the needle. It doesn't make sense for Horizon Media to acquire a company doing a million or five million in revenue. It's too small.
5:51 Speaker 00 We should, you know what's interesting? Do you think the PE game, especially in agencies, is going to change significantly? Um, especially in this AI world, like a lot of us during this retreat, we're talking about how PE is probably going to AIify a lot of companies where they're just going to buy the companies and then just cut a lot of staff. And then that's what I mean.
6:13 Speaker 01 They, they could. I don't know how much that's going to happen in the agency world. Um, I think a lot of agencies are already adapting. It's, and when you look at private equity, most of them don't want to go in and clean up a business. They're not, they usually aren't operators. They're usually financial people that want to put money into a business that's done really well without having to.
6:36 Speaker 01 Go in there and get their hands messy.
6:38 Speaker 00 Yep. And then there's a timeline too, where you exit to more PE.
6:40 Speaker 01 I do the five years, seven at the latest, three to five years, they want to flip again, let's call it five.
6:45 Speaker 00 Well, I got a Chinese agency for you. Okay. Given the global scope, Chinese agencies were considered, my people. So with Blue Focus Group standing out, have you heard of Blue Focus Group? Okay, that's right, my people. So publicly traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since 2010, it reported 6.7 billion um CNY. Um, is that renminbi? I don't know what that is. Um, in revenue, oh, Chinese, Chinese yen? I don't know, the Japanese yen. Um, approximately 930 million dollar US dollars at current exchange rates. This is close, but below a billion USD. So we can say this, and its growth included uh acquisitions.
7:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, of course.
7:19 Speaker 00 Suggesting M and A uh usage. I, you know, I, I think things were going to change because this actually, if we're not, if we're done with this topic, it actually moves into my, one of my topics around um how there's this guy that shared one person teams doing millions in revenue. And Sam Holman has said, we're going to get to a level where we see one person teams doing a billion in revenue. Uh, I think we're far off from that.
7:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm like, we're far off.
7:43 Speaker 00 I think it will happen at some point. Because like all records end up being broken.
7:47 Speaker 01 Uh, uh, in a, a long time from now, sure. You know, in the next three to five years, I don't think so.
7:53 Speaker 00 No, but I mean, the fact that, look, let's just look at these, some of these teams over here. Okay. Um, so this guy listed on LinkedIn. Um, here, I'm just gonna start with this one.
8:04 Speaker 01 Well, I'll go back. I believe the first person to make a billion dollars without any employees is going to be someone with a personal brand that lends it to a corporation and they just get a huge payout. Because we've already seen things close to that. I think that's where you're going to see the first billion bucks.
8:18 Speaker 00 So I want to show two things over here. So bullish on one person teams doing multiple millions.
8:22 Speaker 01 Rihanna and Fenty. I don't think she's in there running it with a massive team. It's LVMH is running it for her.
8:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think we'll continue to see a lot of those. Um, it, it's funny. Um, Mint Mobile, Ryan Reynolds.
8:36 Speaker 01 Did, did you see Mountain's uh spinning off the Ryan Reynolds company?
8:41 Speaker 00 Mountain? I mean, is that the PE firm?
8:43 Speaker 01 No, Mountain, you know, the CTV advertising company? MNTM or something like that? They bought Ryan Reynolds, um, what is it? Maximum something? MT?
8:58 Speaker 01 And
9:01 Speaker 01 acquires uh Ryan Reynolds? What is it called? M N T M. It stands for Mountain. Uh, they acquired Maximum Effort, Ryan Reynolds Marketing Agency. They're about to just spin it off and sell it again.
9:18 Speaker 00 Okay.
9:19 Speaker 01 And then Mountain's gonna go public, but I'm guessing for them to sell it back to the original founders. It doesn't look like Ryan Reynolds is involved in it. It probably means uh something didn't work out.
9:30 Speaker 00 I'll just tell you one thing. Um, during this um, this mastermind, one of the people in the group, and I'm not gonna get too into details here, but he was considering working with an influencer. And I told him that Ryan Reynolds um, with the Mint Mobile, here's what I think happened. So, cause I, I, I know someone that was one of the co-founders of Mint Mobile. Ryan Reynolds actually ended up making more than him. Um, and at least for him, he's no longer on speaking terms with Ryan Reynolds, right? Um, but we see a lot of these situations happen where
9:56 Speaker 01 Why?
9:57 Speaker 00 influencers no longer talk to the P, the, the companies anymore, right? Um, I don't know why exactly. Um, he didn't give me the details. But when I asked, cause I wanted Ryan Reynolds to speak at the YPO Global Marketing Summit. Uh, he's like, oh, can I help with that? I was like, oh, okay, got it. Um, but I want to go back to this thing over here. So guys, let me tell you about this road to one person billion dollar company chart. There's a leaderboard out there called Lean AI leaderboard dot com. Again, it's Lean AI leaderboard dot com. And this guy who founded a company called super dot com um, has this. And here's what it says. Total revenue of all these companies listed right now, two billion, okay? Average revenue per employee, three point seven million. Average valuation per employee, which is a weird metric to me.
10:39 Speaker 00 Um, I guess that's a hundred forty-four million dollars. Average team size is twenty-three people, okay? So we're on the way. So you look at Telegram, I'm just gonna give you a couple of examples here. Telegram doing annual revenue, a billion, okay? And number of employees, thirty. Average revenue per employee, uh, three, three, three, three, three, three, three, right? So thirty-three million dollars. Mid-journey, five hundred million in annual revenue. I didn't even know it was at five hundred million. Holy crap.
11:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, mid-journey is massive.
11:03 Speaker 00 Forty employees. Cursor, hundred million in revenue, twenty employees, okay? I'm gonna give one more, eleven labs, hundred million fifty employees or so. And they're getting there way faster now, and I think Stripe did an analysis too. The amount of times, the amount of time it takes to get to five million in AR, it used to be, I think it used to be like, I don't know, fifty-two months or something like that. Now it's, it's, no, it used to be thirty-seven months, now it's down to twenty-four months. So it's happening a lot faster now. And do I think it's gonna happen in the next three to five years? No, but maybe, maybe in the next decade, maybe. But check out this leaderboard, cuz this type of stuff motivates me at least. I think it motivates you too.
11:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
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12:16 Speaker 01 The, the, the thing that you have to realize with these companies getting to five million in AR or even ten, the biggest factor is not necessarily, well, technology can help things go faster, at least for you to release products. But the real key is if you look at the companies that get to five million quicker, they made people's life easier. Like, if you can solve a massive problem that a lot of people face, it's easier to generate the revenue than if you're in a small little vertical and your solution isn't that wowing or amazing.
12:46 Speaker 00 Yeah. I, I think we can close it off with this one cuz we're on AI. So Aaron Levy tweeted this, but I wanted to talk about the right philosophy with AI. So usually when we talk about AI, it might be like, oh, how many calories does my cookie have? I'll take a picture of this, right? And it'll tell me how many calories. Like, for example, I ate six tacos the other day.
13:02 Speaker 01 Wait, do you really do?
13:03 Speaker 00 Yeah. No, seriously, I do. I do. I, like, when I was in Mexico, I, I, I think I had six or seven tacos in the night. I was like, oh my god, that's a lot, right? Each taco was two hundred calories. I like, go up, and I ended up gaining six pounds in the past week or so.
13:16 Speaker 01 Really?
13:16 Speaker 00 Anyway, yeah, yeah. But today I weighed myself, I was like, oh, I only gained three pounds. But maybe a lot of it was water weight. But point is, I do a lot of stupid things with AI, right? And a lot of people. Search for random things or when I argue with my mom or I need to explain something to her and I'll argue with her and she doesn't understand what I'm saying in Chinese, so I have it translated in Mandarin. That's base level stuff, guys. The way to think about AI, in my opinion, and I'm curious to hear yours. The right philosophy is you actually have a second brain that is probably smarter than your own brain and you should be using it as a thought partner more than anything. So the deep research stuff we do, whatever. I'm not saying it's gospel, but you should at least look at it and challenge how you think about things. And so if I work for you, if I come to you with an idea and it's not ninety percent there with me using AI.
13:58 Speaker 00 I shouldn't be bringing you that idea, right? People are just lazy. Oh, yeah, I just have these ideas over here. We should just, well, okay, how much resource is it gonna, how long is it gonna take? What does success look like? All those things now, you should be workshopping that with AI. You should be thinking about these things and you'll be way better than other people. That's my philosophy.
14:13 Speaker 01 Dude, my main use case for ChatGPT is pretty much deep research and I don't really use ChatGPT for anything else. I know it can do a lot of other stuff, but I mainly use it for research.
14:22 Speaker 00 And that makes sense. I mean, Neil's very data-driven. He's a very detail-oriented person, so the deep research feature is perfect for Neil.
14:29 Speaker 01 But most other things I can do with Google and it's a quick user experience and it's great for it. For research. Typically, what I do is I type something into ChatGPT, I wait for it to ask me questions, I then respond and then I go. Cause you can just come back and you'll get your answer, cause like even right now, I'm waiting for it. I don't wanna wait ten, twenty, whatever minutes it takes or thirty minutes. I'd rather just go and then move on with my day. But AI for research is amazing. Like people talk about, oh, ChatGPT is gonna change search and everyone's gonna use it for search. I haven't seen the data on people really using it for traditional search like you would use for Google to buy a product. I just don't see it there yet. I, I see more people using Instagram and TikTok to find and discover and buy products than I do them seeing, using AI.
15:15 Speaker 00 I would say general consumers, I don't think we're seeing enough of a shift yet, but people like you and me, and you and I know a lot of tech people. Um, and plus, when you see people like Toby from Shopify tweeting this, like, for me, I'm using AI quite a bit more than Google search, but I'm, I'm.
15:29 Speaker 01 For research though, but what do you mainly use Google research, Google search for? You're using it for research now. You shifted it to AI.
15:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, what I use Google for now, uh, maybe to find restaurants I might want to eat at.
15:41 Speaker 01 Restaurants, products, simple questions. It gives a quick answer. It gives one of the quickest answers out there.
15:47 Speaker 00 Yeah, to be fair, yeah, I would, if I'm looking to transact, I just go to Amazon. I'm searching on Amazon.
15:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I, you still use a lot of the same things, but when it comes to workflows around.
15:56 Speaker 01 Where, how'd you find out about this bottle, this Yeti?
15:58 Speaker 00 Amazon dot com.
15:59 Speaker 01 But where'd you first learn about it?
16:01 Speaker 00 I didn't, Amazon.
16:02 Speaker 01 Okay. Have you, have you bought products from seeing something on Instagram or TikTok? Honestly, like, have you ever saw a product on TikTok? Okay, have you ever bought products from doing a search on ChatGPT?
16:18 Speaker 00 Let me think about this. Yes, I have. I have. So I, my eye problem. So now after LASIK, I didn't know this, after ten years, you're, you're, I have issues with lipids and if the lipids aren't working correctly with my tears, they evaporate quickly. And my eyes start hurting like hell if I use my screen, but then it recommended me the right product and I was like, hey, tell me where I can buy this product near me. And it's like, there are three CVSs near you. I immediately went to Uber Eats and I bought it and it shifted. And then, yeah, and my, my eyes feel great when I use this now.
16:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, ChatGPT did not find any single ad agency that's grown to a billion dollars without acquisition. But going back to your eye thing. If you look at your eye, you did research probably on ChatGPT to figure out what's the problem. And then it recommended solutions to you.
17:07 Speaker 01 That's a more rare circumstance for you to buy something. Other than that, did you, do you usually use ChatGPT as search to go buy stuff?
17:17 Speaker 01 It doesn't go in your flow.
17:18 Speaker 00 No, if I'm, if I'm doing, if I'm usually buying stuff, ninety-nine percent of the time I'm, I'm on Amazon.
17:23 Speaker 01 Yes, or you're discovering it from social media.
17:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, so on X or like I, I share a lot of stuff with you about microplastics and things like that, right? Or like, um, uh, loose leaf tea, like you, you're not supposed to drink, um, the, the, the tea bags, because there's, there's millions of microplastics in there, right? So now I bought a bunch of loose leaf tea from Japan, um, and I went to Google for that.
17:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:44 Speaker 00 Yeah. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I went to kettle because kettle has this amazing tea. And where did I get that recommendation? When I ate sushi in New York and the tea was amazing. I was like, where'd you get this from? And then I spent, it was like a, it was an expensive order, but yeah.
17:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:56 Speaker 00 Good stuff. But I think behaviors are slowly changing over time. Um, but I think we can agree that the philosophy on AI is it's a second brain for you. And if you work for somebody.
18:04 Speaker 01 Yes. It's not a place to go to go find products. It's a place to go. Figure out how to solve problems and do research.
18:11 Speaker 00 Yep. And.
18:13 Speaker 01 And it can help you with things. It's like an assistant as well. It can help you with tasks. There's a lot of useful cases for it, but a lot of people I talk to like, oh yeah, everyone's just gonna go to chat GPT and go find products and buy them from them like. I don't see those use case. I see more people going to Instagram and discovering products and buying them than using chat GPT and then buying a product.
18:32 Speaker 00 So I, I think the final thing we can talk about, and I, I, I use this use case last time, but we didn't go over that much. And I think you would like this because you're very numbers driven. Um, but I like using Grok to give me a deep, deep search, um, on, um, Omnicom or any of these holding companies, right? I'll say, okay, analyze the 10K. Tell me the good parts and the bad parts about this company. Then I'm ninety nine point nine nine percent sure, Neil, you've never done a discounted cash flow forecast in your life, correct?
18:58 Speaker 01 Correct.
18:58 Speaker 00 Okay. Nor have I. But when I watch videos on YouTube and I see people doing a discounted cash flow forecast, just so everyone knows that's you're mapping out the cash flows for next five to 10 years, maybe. And trying to figure out the intrinsic value of a stock, what Warren Buffett would say. So you're trying to figure out if a stock is overvalued or undervalued, right? Complicated. Okay. Takes a lot of time. You haven't done it. I haven't done it. But now. I take the 10K, I'm using Grok. Deep search is on the left side. Boom. Deep search is done. Then I switch into thinking mode because it's much better at math on thinking mode. So, okay. Now do me a discounted cash flow forecast for Tesla, for example. It's like, it did all the discounted cash, it did all these equations, right? And then the, the, the final summary is, okay. Tesla's trading on what 400 bucks a share right now 450?
19:42 Speaker 01 You gotta look at market cap.
19:43 Speaker 00 Okay, but it's just valuing on a share per share basis, right? So it's like the intrinsic value right now is 52 dollars. So Tesla is overvalued right now. That's I'm oversimplifying, but it gave me all the breakdowns, all the math and everything. And if I wanted to get a sense for how a stock is doing, if I wanted to invest in a stock, this is, this is the thing at least that's been missing for me. Um, I've always wanted that and I think you would use it too.
20:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would use that. I think Grok is, I still prefer Chad GPT over Grok, but Grok is improving at a very rapid rate.
20:14 Speaker 00 Dude, look at what he's done in 18 months.
20:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, give it another year, I think Grok will be amazing. Um, at least from a research standpoint, Chad GPT produces more accurate thorough results for me than Grok, but Grok is also faster at doing the research from what I tested.
20:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, this, I mean, I got mine done pretty quickly. You're still like 10 minutes.
20:32 Speaker 01 Uh huh, came to the same conclusion.
20:35 Speaker 00 Yep. All right, guys, so that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe and we will catch you tomorrow.
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