Why People Hate Agencies

hosts Neil and Eric break down why product builders get more respect than agencies, how bad agency experiences shape perception, and why products compound better than labor. They unpack AI-first teams, compensation tradeoffs, employee churn, and why going all-in on AI without people is risky. The conversation shifts to Meta’s potential Manis acquisition, AI agents in marketing, data privacy concerns, and how creators fall into audience capture through rage bait and political content. Key Takeaways Product vs agency perception matters AI scales work but people still matter Audience capture can destroy creators Chapters (00:00) Product vs agency perception (01:38) Why agencies get a bad rap (03:56) Compensation and incentives (05:12) AI-only companies debate (07:08) Meta and Manis acquisition (09:13) AI agents in marketing (11:57) Data privacy and China (13:06) Rage bait and audience capture

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finding customer information shouldn't mean digging through emails, call notes, and spreadsheets. HubSpot Starter Plan brings all of those details together, so it's easier to track what's happening with every deal and what to do next. It pulls information from calls and emails. Then it gets to work, logging and summarizing them. Right after your call ends, HubSpot pulls next steps from your call notes and drafts suggested follow-ups. And it stays up to date for you, so you can build demand, win more deals, and spend less time on repetitive work. Your records, insights, and next steps are ready for you to act on. And you don't have to miss a beat searching for any of it. Try the Starter Plan for $10 a month. Learn more at hubspot.com. There is one thing I think we should talk about. Let me ask you a question, Neil. Why do you think it is that, we've tested this in the past, whenever you've introduced yourself as a product person versus an agency person,

• 0:44Speaker 00

  you get a different reaction? Why do you think that is?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  So you're saying when I introduce people, like, "Hey, I'm Neil. I do product?"

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Okay, maybe I'll just use myself as an example, okay? So when I used to go to conferences, I would test, like, "Hey, I'm in software," or "Hey, I have a marketing agency," right? Whenever I would say, "I have a marketing agency," they start looking around the room. They want to walk in a different direction.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Or they look down on you. Or they look down on you.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's both. They look down on you and they look in a different direction. Now, when you say you're a product, they're interested. Tell me more, right?

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Why do you think that is?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think people want to know what kind of product you have to offer. If you're in software and they're like, "Oh, can this actually help my life or make, you know, something easier for me?" If you're saying you're an agency person, they look at it as like you're pitching them for their money. If you say like you're a software product person, they look at it as like, "Oh, maybe you have a solution to a problem that they have."

• 1:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. So the way I look at it, Neil, is when you have good experiences with the product, you know the product continues to compound and you know it's reliable. The problem, this is why I think a lot of people don't, they dislike agencies, is they've had a lot of bad experiences, because once you find a really good person at an agency, you want to work with that person forever, you're going to try to get max utilization out of that person. That person ends up flaming out sometimes, right? No. That's why a lot of agencies, they throw a lot of people the problem. You have four different forms of leverage. Code, capital, media, labor. Labor is the oldest form of leverage. Okay. So agencies historically have thrown people at the problem. And that's why they get a bad rap, right? Versus with a product, it continues to get better. So my point of saying all this is the lesson I was giving to my team is like, hey, guys, like, I look at our people, like, how we build this company as a product too.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Because we're gonna need to scale and we need to continually bring revenue per employee up. But it's not to say we're gonna cut thirty to forty percent of people just like that. But we need to continue to hire AI forward people. But sometimes people think that I just want to remove everyone and go all AI and like YOLO it, right? That's not the way.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  No, it's not the way. And if you lose people who don't have the same thought process and vision, that's okay. It doesn't mean that you're right. It doesn't mean that they're right. You have to do what you feel is right for the organization. Sometimes you'll make the right call. Sometimes you'll make the wrong call. You know, like the person who I lost asked me, why don't you give me a counter? And then I said, you know, because we evaluate how you get paid within the region compared to your peers. And they weren't happy with that. They're like, but that's not fair. And I said, question for you. If you got a job locally and you applied, how much would you get paid? A really good job. They're like, maybe half of what you pay? And I'm like, okay.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  And they're like, but I work for an American company, so I want American wages. There's no winning that argument. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm not saying they're right. Sometimes you just have to move on and, you know, do what's best for yourself.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Question for you on that one. I mean, he was with you for ten years. Did he have any incentives tied to his work?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he had really good incentives plus, so on top of the base that he had, he was like, are you saying all in? He was doing really well or just saying, were you referring to his base earlier?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I was only referring to base. If you include incentives in even better.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  So he's crushing it all in. Yeah.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Within his country, yes. If you include the. Total comp, he can probably buy a new house in his neighborhood once every year and like three months or two months.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Without giving numbers here, so let's say the new offer that he got was maybe four times what he was getting all in like potentially he can make four times potentially, right?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Uh, realistic when I was talking to him, he was gonna make almost double.

• 4:16Speaker 00

  So in my mind, and and if you're listening to this, we're not gonna name names, but if you're listening to this and maybe one day, maybe Neil will take you back. I actually think Neil might take you back one day. I I think it's actually short sighted to look at it that way to potentially make double for a person you don't know versus someone you know, like and trust over ten years. It's very hard to find that. I'll just put it that way. So.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, but look, I wish him the best of luck. People have to do what's in their best interest and their family interests as well, right?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  And that it's just my opinion. It's I I could be proven wrong and I'm I'm happy to be proven wrong. Go ahead.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they they went to a company that has extremely high margins. So the company they went to has Nvidia style margins. Now where their big spend is is not actually on physical hardware. It's mainly their own. Their main cost is just advertising. So they have extremely high margins. And I was telling him, I'm like, look, the problem that you're gonna face with this company, and I gave him feedback is if you look online at the reviews, there's a lot of bad reviews. So you're going into a place.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  A marketing team in a lot of churn.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Yes, they're gonna have massive churn and they already have a ton of bad reviews. And I'm like, they're gonna have more bad reviews. So then you're gonna potentially have issues, you know, six months and they believe that the future is pure AI, non-humans. So they wanted to go to a company that believes uh eliminating humans. And in essence, what they're doing now is they're they're creating marketing related products. Think of like consulting, like helping a company grow, but only doing it through AI and eliminating all humans. Which I'm not saying won't be possible in the future, but in today's world, if you want to run a marketing campaign for a good sized organization, we haven't figured it out how to do a purely on AI with no human intervention.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, for the record, I just want to make the the record clear here. So Neil and I are very pro people. I think you need great people to run these things and great people to scale quickly. Um, and I think that's always going to continue to happen. And like I mentioned again, me or anybody on my team right now, we, we have a Claude code channel. Whoever's using Claude code right now, they are working harder than they've worked before. So they're not working less, they're working harder. And then the people who don't want to join you for the ride, that's okay. What my, my thinking is eventually they're going to find something that they like. And I do think eventually, um, there's going to be enough prosperity where everyone is, is doing well enough where they don't need to do a job that they don't want to do. But that's like 10, 15 years out. So.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think it's going to take a long time. But on a side note, did you see how Facebook bought Mantis for $2 billion?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Manus?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Manus.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  But I thi- I actually think it was $5 billion. I don't, I think 2 billion was too much. What, where, where was it? Where'd you see the 2 billion?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Everywhere.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Really? I, let me show you, let me show you. But when, when did you read? You probably read this recently. When'd you read it?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Multiple times throughout the day.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  So I read this.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Regular regulatory stuff as well.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  So, okay, here's, here's what I got from Wall Street Journal. Um, I, here, let's talk about the strategy in a second, but let me, here, let me share my screen real quick.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Uh, Wall Street Journal's 2 billion.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  But it says more than 2 billion.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, acquires AI startup managed for 2 billion. Yahoo Finance, Financial Times, CNBC, they're all saying 2 billion roughly.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So let's, let's, let's talk about this. You, you, you brought it up. So you can, you can kick it off.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Manus is an AI company that is quote unquote in Singapore, originally from China. Uh, and they ended up moving themselves from China to Singapore, although the Chinese government is now saying they did not do it correctly. So there may be some regulatory issues or they may not, they may try to block the sale. Um, and the price tag supposedly between, you know, Financial Time, Reuters, et cetera, is between 2 and 3 billion dollars is what people are saying. But I don't know if it'll go through. The US is okay with it from what it looks like. It seems like China has an issue with them purchasing Manus.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Have you used Manus?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  I have not.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  So I signed up earlier, earlier, um, earlier last year, middle of last year, I made a Manus video on YouTube. It got like 200,000 long form views, right? It's like, how Manus will make you rich. Boom. And, and. It was really good, but then I churned off of it. When the acquisition happened, I was like, I wonder how good it's gotten. So I started using it last week. I I signed up again. And let let me give you an example. So remember how I was talking about how the nine operators podcast makes like five million dollars a year? I was like, I was like, you know what? Mattis, help me find all of the advertise, the advertisers on the nine uh operators podcast and find out the right person to reach out to. And I want you to personalize the email and schedule it for tomorrow and send it for my Gmail. It did it. It did it this morning. That that was my prompt. It it literally did all of that. So in my mind, I'm like, hey,

• 8:46Speaker 00

  anybody who's complaining about there's not even enough leads, there's a how about you just go to Madison, you could just query this stuff now. And I'm saying it's it's a really good general agent. It's been good at making uh custom carousels for me. So I saw the the Instagram CEO, he made these carousels, right? I was like, hey, just copy these carousels. Mattis copied it. And it made it into a really nice format that I that I posted to Instagram, like I posted two carousels in the last uh week or so. So I think this is really smart for Meta because now they actually have a product before they were lacking uh like a chat GPT like or any type of product, right? I don't know if they're gonna give it away for free. I think that'd be smart, but they have all this intent data now and they just you can see what people are doing. And they can continue to to train um on this data. So I I think it's a smart acquisition if it goes through.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you want to know why I don't use? Use it at all?

• 9:32Speaker 00

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• 10:07Speaker 01

  The guest? Yeah, China.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  It's okay.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I have nothing against China or Chinese people. China is a beautiful country. A lot of my friends are uh from China. It's more so just data. It's like I won't use Huawei or Huawei. I forgot what it's their devices, even though they have an iPad that folds and it's like double the size of an iPad. So you can watch movies and crazy dimensions and I really want it because I don't know what I don't want to potentially have someone in another country like China have access to my data and I don't know what they're gonna be doing with it.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Have you been to China before?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I have.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Uh, Shanghai.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. And when did you go?

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Long time ago. This is pre-COVID. It's changed though.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  I think you go to Shanghai Shenzhen, it's like, it's a different world. And I'm not saying you should keep doing what you're doing on the security side. I think that's a smart move. But I think there's a lot of preconceived notion. This is not coming from you, but a lot of people think it's like, the way, because the way we talk about China in the US is very negative. But when you go there, one, they don't give a crap about, you know, all these US politics. They just want to have a good prosperous life, uh, and they're living a prosperous life. A lot of these people are.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  So my buddy Ash used to work for Microsoft. And back in the day, he would create the Windows mobile phone. Do you remember they had their own operating system for the Windows mobile phone? This is a long, long time ago. He went to China to go and demo it. And straight up in the room, they said, we've already seen it. And then the person pulls up on their computer. This is something that hasn't been released yet. Okay, this is Windows phone for the first time. They're like, we already have it all. And they're demoing it to him right then and there. And then Ash doesn't know what to do. And the guy said something, and I'm gonna butcher it. So don't quote me here. It's like, oh, I have ties to something in China, some party or some affiliation or whatever it may be.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  So Ash calls back, he ends up, uh, talking. It was either Ash or his colleague, but I believe he was there because he's told me the story. And you know, Microsoft was like, you can't do anything. Just come back. Right? And they pretty much just jacked all the tech. This is a long, long time ago, right? Uh, and then I've seen tweets from like Marc Andreessen about China and data and security and a few others who are big into tech. And this is where I disagree with the Nvidia. Uh, you know, founder in which he's just like, yes, we should be able to sell to China as much as we want. I believe not everything is money, you know? We do live in America. Um, I look at Europe as very similar to America, Canada, uh, and many other parts of the world.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying China's bad, but I just want to make sure that our country is safe and someone doesn't just have access to all their data and can shut us down.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  I think the reality is every country spying on everyone and I think the US, we definitely do it too. And it's for our own interest, right? And I think every country, you know, they're protecting themselves by being aggressive. Now, that being said, you brought up politics. Let me tell you what, I had a field day over the weekend when Venezuela, went to Venezuela, right? And so on threads, real quick, so those of you that don't know, I'm running this experiment right now on threads where I'm just rage baiting everybody. And some people, it's funny, my friends called me yesterday. He's like, dude, my girlfriend thinks you're crazy. My girlfriend thinks you've got off the deep end. It's like, has Eric gone crazy? So I will literally post, it's like, because when Venezuela was, we went into Venezuela and got the president, right?

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Their president, a lot of Americans were angry about it, but many Venezuelans were happy about it, right? So I just posted to threads, like, huh, how come so many Americans are mad while Venezuelans are happy? 5,000 likes, right? And then I was like, I was like, you know what's comedy? It's when Venezuelans tell Americans to shut the F off, right? When they're telling them what to do, 13,000 likes. So my point of saying all this is that there's a trap that most creators fall into. It's called audience capture. And what audience capture is, and we've talked about some of these people, Neil, is when you start to get a lot of engagement in one area, you start to say things that you actually don't believe and you start to double down and triple down on. So you and I, we know a guy who, you know, sells courses and he's gone hard left. And I don't know if he's actually hard left. I think you say he is, but I don't know if I actually.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I think he is. I think he always has been.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  But then we have other people who are capitalists saying that, you know, so and so billionaire shouldn't exist. And I'm like, wait a minute, you're a capitalist and like, you're saying things that you don't actually believe. So I think it's a trap that you as a creator don't want to fall into. The good thing for Neil and I is we both have businesses, so it's, I don't, we're not as incentivized to fall into that trap. You've just got to be careful.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  So I want to clarify something here. When Eric posts on threads, he's really doing this as an experiment. Not everything he puts out on threads is actually his views. He's just pushing out. Uh, little quotes and seeing what happens. And he's trying to see how that impacts his followers, his overall engagement. He even sent me a screenshot of him posting something that's political. And I think it was thousands of hearts or likes or whatever.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Thirty thousand likes.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Okay, and then he shows me right after he put something marketing related. I think he got like five likes.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  It goes to show you, like, you have to think of the thread, the threads, like, it's, you have a lot of people who are just fighting each other all the time. So you have to want to understand what platform you're on, but just be careful of the game that you're playing because I'm playing this game right now to see what buttons I can push and to see how much engagement I can get. Plus, it's also for my weekend entertainment as well. But, you know, it's, it's this experiment that I'm, I'm probably gonna stop soon. And it's not like it's gonna help drive business or anything, but it's entertaining. I'll tell you that much, so.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it reminds me of the All In Podcast, because if you look at the four on the All In Podcast, from Calacanis to Chamath, to Sacks, to Freeberg. They're all startup guys, investors, um, or, you know, one or the other, but they're all, call it, let's say entrepreneurs. When you look at them, I don't remember the early episodes of the All In Podcast, but they were not as political.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  It was all investment, the startup investments they've made, cool tech. Like, I remember David Sacks was like, yeah, you know, when you ride the bird, it feels like a magical moment.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  And, and now it's almost all politics. Would you agree with me? Not a hundred percent, but it's close enough to just a political show.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  I mean, David's in the White House, right? And then Chamath's pretty close, like, he goes to these Trump dinners too. And then, like, I, I think it's, it's very political now.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would agree with that.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  So just be careful, um, and just, I mean, if your business is politics, sure, then you can rage bait all day. Um, but I will, I can confirm that rage baiting works on threads. When you, when I go on X, for example, my feed is just everyone trying to help each other, Claude code this, everyone's sharing case studies, research and all that. Um, just be careful of the game that you play. So, that being said, we will catch you later.