Why You Should Give Away All Your Workflows

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil opens with HighLevel's announcement that it is giving AI away for free, and why so few founders make big, expensive bets like that. Eric argues the bets are getting cheaper: anything you build now is out of date fast, so giving away workflows and bots buys mindshare that turns into service work. They weigh the real risk of not knowing your AI cost cap, rising compute and hardware prices, and Meta's open-ended AI spend. Eric shares why so few people use AI the way Andrej Karpathy describes, and what that means for AI-native firms hiring talent. Then a MacBook Pro quote, a Chinese glass company that got free advertising from the Paris riots, and what Black October's hacks mean for security and passkeys. Free value is still a strong growth lever. Key takeaways◾Giving AI tools away free can win mindshare that turns into paid work◾Know your AI cost cap before you make usage unlimited◾Being transparent after a security problem builds trust Chapters00:00 HighLevel gives AI away free02:31 Give your workflows and bots away04:30 AI costs, DGX Spark and Anthropic-SpaceX06:57 Meta's open-ended AI spend07:41 Andrej Karpathy: only 0.2% use AI this way09:08 Scale founder's big bet11:18 MacBook Pro $14K quote13:38 Chinese glass company and the Paris riots15:38 Neil's bulletproof windows17:23 Black October hacks and passkeys18:53 Be transparent when things go wrong

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  I learned something that was actually quite interesting. So when I spoke at the High Level event in Dallas, before I spoke, I met up with the founders. One of the CEOs, name is Sean. And Sean was like, have you heard of any of our announcements today? I'm like, no, I haven't. You know, I've been working all day. And he's just like, we're giving AI for free. And I was like, oh, that's a really good idea. I'm like, that's expensive. And he's just like, yes. And he's like, if you want your business to survive in the long run, you should do what's best for your customers. And sometimes you just gotta eat the cost. And what was interesting is when he was saying that, it made me remind, or it made me remember

• 1:19Speaker 01

  the days I was doing UberSuggest back in the day and just giving a lot of stuff away for free. But what was really interesting, just with interacting with the CEO of High Level, you know, it's very few entrepreneurs, in my opinion, are willing to make big, bold, expensive bets. Like, imagine this, if you're a company and people are using tokens, and you're just letting them do a free-for-all, then letting them use a lot of tokens, imagine how expensive your cost can go up, right? You know, you're talking about a multi-billionaire company, tons of users. Your cost can just go through the roof.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  But it's very rare that I see at least companies that are funded, because they've raised money as public, that still make bold bets. I would say, I think you would agree with this, because you've also invested in companies. Typically, people who have raised money, they'll make bold bets, but the bold bets usually aren't extremely expensive.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Yep, so that's what I've seen. And what I would also say, though, is these bets are becoming a lot cheaper. Because remember back in the day, HubSpot had the website Grader, right? And let me just ask you real quick, with UberSuggest, you gave a lot of stuff away for free. But for, do you remember how much of your, like a free account would cost you? Or like, how much a free report would cost you back in the day, maybe like five, 10 years ago?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  I don't, but I remember the overall product and the usage, when it was purely free, started creeping up to around like $320, $340, $350,000 a month. Which, that's a lot of money right now, but back then, that was definitely a lot of money for me.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what I would say is this.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  One, you, I had a debate recently with, so we had a new managing director join the team. And then we also had, we're talking with my CTO as well. And so the new managing director was thinking, okay, well, we should probably have, you know, IP tied to the workflows, the agentic stuff that we do. And then my CTO and I were like, we should give it away for free. And then the thing is, it's like, well, why should we give it away for free? And then my reasoning is, anything right now that you're building is going to be out of date in the next three to six months or so. So it doesn't matter, you might as well just give it away for free. Whether it's an agentic workflow, or whatever, you have a product that can run like an AI visibility report, or whatever, just give it all away for free, right?

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Because what's going to happen is, people are going to use it, and they get using themselves, sure, vast majority of people use it themselves. But there's going to be a small percentage of people that just want you to do it for them. And so if you're constantly living on the edge, you're giving away as much free as possible, you know, you're going to collect mindshare that way, and then people are going to be using your thing. The other thing, too, is we give a lot of our, we've been starting to give away our templates, our bots away for free. But those bots also have a, also connect directly to our single brain gateway, which has like, which is what we want people to connect to anyway, right? And then that kind of backdoors into, you know, our services. Because then we'll continue to service the right workflows and, you know, bots for them. So I'm on the same page with the High Level people. I think more people should give this stuff away for free.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  And more people can afford stuff for free now, or a lot cheaper. Because it used to be, like, we just started this new AI visibility report on our site. And it probably would cost like a dollar, $2 plus, maybe even $10 or so to do a report in the past. Now it costs us 18 cents to do so. So even if we do 10,000 a month, it'll cost us 1,800. And after 1,800 drives us, you know, a couple of these SQLs, it's still worth it at the end of the day.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, costs are cheaper now, but you know what costs you're getting into. Imagine having a product with tons of usage and just say, using AI features is now free. You don't know what your cap on your cost really is.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Right? Like, that's where I think it can get tricky. That's why I was shocked that High Level ended up doing it. I'm like, all right, that's a big, bold claim to make, because you don't know what your cap is. Like, let's say you get to 10,000 users, right? You can just say, all right, I'm spending $1,800. If it's not panning out, I'm going to switch it off. But on the flip side, if you, let's say you have a massive user base, and you're just willing to make something for free, and you don't know what your costs are, and you're just willing to eat it, that could be a very expensive pill to swallow. But I still believe you would make that bet, just because I know you're long enough as an entrepreneur.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  My take is this, costs are going to come down quite a bit, right? And here's, there's actually two sides to this, Neil. So I was looking at my DGX Sparks. Remember, I bought two of them earlier in the year? So at the time, I bought them for $4,000. And I knew instinctively that the price was going to go up. I didn't know it was going to appreciate this much. But each one now, from $4,000, is now worth $8,000, so it's doubled. So instead of buying Nvidia stock, I probably should have just bought a bunch of DGX Sparks and sold them, right? Like Neil's drinking fancy water, guys. He's drinking the Aquapana Stillwater, but it's in a green bottle, because he's in Italy. That's how fancy he is, okay? So anyway, anyway, guys. So when I think about this, I'm like, okay, compute's going to get more expensive. Electricity is going to, you need more compute, you're going to need more electricity, right?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  And I think that's going to drive the cost of this stuff down. And I think the High Level people know instinctively that costs are going to come down there. People are going to use stuff more. And if they don't hold the mindshare, if they don't drive the usage here, because there's a lot of feature parity, like people are just copying each other all the time, then they're not going to be able to retain their customers as well. So I believe it's an existential thing for them. Plus, remember, we talked about Meta, Alexander Wang, like saying, hey, we need to bet on all these data centers. Like, we don't know what it's going to be, but we do know if we don't do this right now, and if we're behind the curve, we're going to be in trouble, right? And remember, Anthropic, they didn't go hard enough on data centers. Thank God, they got a deal done with SpaceX. But these are, these, you can't quite pencil out as easily. So I think the data center bet is way more scarier, but I think the High Level bet is still scary enough, so.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Dude, I remember you telling me about the Meta story, and how he was telling the CFO, it's going to be super expensive. And it would have been, it would have been nice to be a fly on the wall, you know, hearing, yeah, we don't know what it's going to produce. You're just going to have to spend the money, CFO. Just be okay with it.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the, okay, the CFO's name is Susan Lee. So Susan Lee pulled him aside, not just once, but like a few times, said, hey, I need, like, I just need to let you know that if this doesn't work, this will be very bad for the company. Like, multiple times, right? And she's doing her job, like we said last time. But even Mark Zuckerberg agreed when he was doing the podcast. He's like, look, you see all these other companies building out right now, you just don't know what it's going to look like. But I think what we can say, Neil, is if we go back to what Karpathy tweeted, right? Andrej Karpathy, so the AI researcher. If only 0.2% of people in the world, which is 20 million people, are using AI like this, when you have half of the world using it like this, we're going to see way more usage, right?

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Even if they use it to 10% of the ability that you and I are using it at right now, Neil. And I do believe, I ran the numbers on this, right? I was like, okay, you have 20 million people that are working like this right now. There's only, there's 3.55 billion people in the world that are employed, okay? And of the 3.55 billion people who are employed right now, only about, let's say, 6% of them have a company, okay? And of that 6%, only 4% of those people employ 20 or more people. Which means, forget about 20 million people right now, there's probably only around 17,000 AI-native firms today, right? If you want to move to a company, and I'm looking at these AI executive chats, and then someone put it, put it like, these are all nine, 10-figure revenue companies, right?

• 9:21Speaker 00

  And someone posed a question the other day, it's like, hey, so like, do you guys think AI transformation is worth it, yes or no? And also, like, what do you do about the brain drain when your top 10% of talent all want to leave to other companies to work with other AI-native people? Because other AI players want to work with AI players. So anyway, all these numbers are, they make sense to me, based on, you know, what we're talking about, right? I think it's all starting to become a little clearer. 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,

• 10:05Speaker 00

  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, at least to me now. All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil's agency called MP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as UberSuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  You do know what the Scale founder said to the CFO, when she said, we're going to be in big trouble if it doesn't work, right?

• 10:45Speaker 00

  What happened?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  He said, man, I got $14.3 billion in cash for my company, so either way, it works out for me.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Really say that?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  No, but that's probably what he was thinking partially. I'm just being honest.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  I don't care. I'm good. What about you? And she's probably good too.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's probably good too, but he did make fourteen point three to fourteen point eight billion dollars. It technically split between him, co-founder, other investors. And I looked it up. The payment was in cash, not stock. So either way, you know, the guy walked out pretty, he's, he's.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  I mean, he was good. He was, let's be honest, he was good before anyway. So.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  No, he was, he wasn't that successful or rich. He was okay, but nowhere near that level.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  On the value of scale, right? It was good, right? I'm not saying, like, he would have been poor is my point, right?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  No, he, he would have been poor, but paper money versus cash money, you know, those are two very different things.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Yes, but I believe knowing him, knowing his capability, like, he would have been fine. Okay, his worst case scenario is like a couple hundred, you know, million. So, yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he was good, but being a billionaire sounds nicer.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, but here's the thing, you, you look at, so I remember listening to, um, you know, him talking about Mark Zuckerberg, the thing he said he appreciates, appreciates about Mark Zuckerberg is he's just making these bets. He doesn't need to make these bets anymore at this level, right? When you think about someone like a Mark Zuckerberg or Elon, for example, they're making these bets. They don't need to work as hard as they do right now. They don't need to do all these things. But they do, right? And so, um, anyway, all, all that to say is, um, I think we're gonna see a lot more of, uh, high level giving this stuff away for free. I think they're probably gonna be running a lot of stuff on, on local compute. They'll probably be buying a lot more compute. Speaking of compute, Neil, I was looking, I got, I was looking at the new, uh, MacBook Pro. Um, quote, okay, so I got a, I got a quote for the, the laptop fully loaded, fourteen thousand dollars.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Are you talking about the new touch laptop or something else?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  The new touch one. So I got a quote for it. I'm like, okay, if I get this fourteen thousand dollars, I was like, okay, what does it look like if I get a Mac Studio fully loaded? Um, with like, you know, five hundred twelve gigs of RAM and it, it's like, oh, it's gonna be twenty one thousand dollars, right? And so, again, this stuff is just getting more and more expensive, but, uh, my, my argument is like, I'm like, if, if I'm gonna be asking these things to do a lot more, then, then why, why not just pay for it?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  By the way, if you do get the new MacBook Touch, let me know. And then we can try recording the podcast without you using a mic, cause their laptop supposedly has a built-in studio-grade mic.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Really? Okay, then we can, we can both get one. All right.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. You get one and test it out. And if it works and we're happy with the quality or you're happy with the quality, then I'll buy one. Yeah, it's two, it's two thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars to start off with. I'm like, uh, that's expensive microphone.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Okay, we, we should talk about this for a second too, from, from, from a marketing standpoint too, right? Like, it's just a marketing execution standpoint. When your laptop starts to slow down, like my laptop starts to slow down, like I can't even like screen share quickly or do, record a webinar or do things quickly. It makes sense to get a, a, a nice one, right? And the way they market it's like, oh, it's touchscreen now. The touchscreen doesn't even do much, right? But the fact of the matter is, um, you know, people, they're, but they're marketing to the technophiles and it works. Because the technophiles always want the, the latest and greatest.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Did you end up buying the Duo?

• 14:04Speaker 00

  Uh, so our mutual friend was texting me this morning on the Duo. Despite all the cracks and all the other issues, he's like, it's growing on me. He's like, I'm, I'm getting a lot more done and it's way faster. Um, so I'm gonna ask you more questions and then I'm probably gonna keep my order.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  That's not bad. Yeah, I just didn't do it because it was so expensive and I was like, yeah, let's just see what happens.

• 14:25Speaker 00

  I just want you to let you know that you look at the hotel Neil's staying in right now and you look at the water he's drinking and the robe he's wearing, okay? He, he, he can afford, and in fact, you're not far, far from walking to an Apple store either.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  I, I, I didn't pay for the hotel room, so, so I did pay for the water, but I didn't pay for the hotel.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  They got you, they got you a very nice hotel room.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, every time I stay here, uh, for this event, they give me this hotel.

• 14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, okay, great. So let me, um, I wanna, since you're, you're in Europe right now, I wanna talk about how this Chinese company used the Paris riots as free advertising, okay? I don't, I don't know if you saw this, but.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  The, the window.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  You did see it. Okay, great.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was cracking up. But I was like, how did they know it's their window?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Well, it's their store.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Oh, the, the, the store is actually a Windows store.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, here, check this out. So do you see my screen?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do now. You wanna play the sound?

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so here.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  So, literally on the screen right now, you can see people hitting it with a chair. They're kicking it, they're throwing stuff at it. And it says, this Chinese glass company was able to take advantage of the riots in France by literally doing nothing. They found a video that came from the riots in France where their glass was the only glass that the people cannot break. So what did they do? They posted the video on social media. That's free marketing. And then you look at this post alone, twenty-two thousand, right? I wish they called out the, the, the, the company itself. Cause that would have been, I mean, this one got like a lot of views on it, probably hundreds of thousands of views, but, um, I think this is cool. When you just have a product that works, it does what it says on a tin and there you go.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  I would have bought it because of those, uh, you know, the safety features.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, but do you know what company it is?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Uh, it's a Chinese company.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, but what, what's the name of the company?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  I don't know how to pronounce it, but I saw the name of it.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't see the name. Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yes, listed out there online when I saw the video. But no, it's a good product.

• 16:21Speaker 00

  That's, and, and so like, by the way, um, when you think about, when you think about the best products in the world out there, right? When you think of, like, they just kind of speak for themselves. Now, that's not to say just don't do anything and just launch it. But, uh, whether it's, you know, glass that works or whether it's like an electric car that works, um, most, it, it doesn't matter how good your marketing is if, if the product is shit at the end of the day, because if you're polishing a turd, it's still a turd. So, um.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  When I was buying windows, one of the sales guys was like, I'm gonna shoot the window for you. He's like, the bullet won't go through. And I was like, yeah, shoot the window for me.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Did he do it?

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Someone else ended up doing it, but it didn't go through. I was like, sold, I'll buy it. That's how I decided what windows to buy for my house.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Let me ask you this, how much more expensive would it, was it over like the, the, the normal window?

• 17:13Speaker 01

  I think it was another two or three hundred grand on top to have the feature where you can't, it doesn't go through. You can kick it and all that and it doesn't break some, similar to the clip. You can do like an ice pick and you can't get through, but, um, the bulletproof or resistance. Now, if someone has a sniper rifle or a big machine gun, it's gonna go through the glass, right? But, um, you know, if someone's just shooting with the gun, uh, you, you're pretty safe. And yeah, I was willing to spend extra money. But for me, it was also equation of, uh, I don't have, really have valuables in my house, but my valuables, in my personal opinion, are my family. So I was willing to spend money for safety.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Because I don't know if you remember during, uh, Black Lives Matter, there was a lot of protests in Beverly Hills and people rioting and going through the streets and stuff like that of all the residences and crime and stuff like that. So I, you know, got windows where in case people bring out the pitchforks, um, hopefully I'm safe enough until the police come.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  What if, what if the police don't come?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Then I protect myself.

• 18:22Speaker 00

  How?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  No comment.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  All right, we'll leave it at that, because I honestly don't know what you have. So, but, um, let me, by the way, I just got a text message from one of my friends. So this is one of my elementary school friends. He is, he runs security at a publicly traded, uh, company right now, publicly traded software company. And so, um, you know, we're, right now, we're thinking about, cause, cause of Black October, all the, all the hacks, all the security incidents that are going on with AI right now. You know, I'm talking, I'm like, hey, are you getting more inquiries right now? I'm like, okay. He's like, yeah, like a lot, like I'm getting a lot of people just reaching out to me out of the blue, right? And I'm like, okay, so what do people do here? He's like, honestly, like I'm just reading the text over here. Um, he's like, you know, a lot of this stuff is, there, where there's gonna be, there's gonna be way more, um, but, you know, all you really need at the end of the day

• 19:10Speaker 00

  is you need to make sure that you have pass, password managers with the unique passwords or ideally pass keys, right? And a strong two, strong two-factor authentication for the things that matter. Um, and so, he, he was gonna book a call with me this week, because we're trying to, um, I'm, I'm trying to get his second opinion on how we're securing our, our single brain gateway, right? Where we have a lot of connectors, uh, for agents, um, where people can also like buy Apollo credits or Clay credits or like, you know, other credits. And so, he's like, he, he's down to help, but he didn't book until we talked last week, he didn't book a call until today. He's like, hey, look, sorry, man, being slammed, more and more security incidents. Um, so guess what, Neil? In a world of more, we're gonna need more electricity, we're gonna need more compute and people are gonna be spending more.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  So you, all you need to do right now is a marketing thing. You need to occupy as much mind share as possible with your customers, so they don't, don't turn and go somewhere else. That's, that's, I think, today's strategy.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  By the way, this is more marketing advice, not legal advice. Uh, I actually had someone hit me up a few weeks ago and they had a massive security incident. And they were just like, what do you think we should do from a marketing message? I'm like, you should be transparent with your customers and let them know there's a security, security incident. And, you know, there's a breach of data, who it impacted, what it means, all that kind of stuff. You should do whatever legal stuff, right? But from, uh, assuming you do all the legal stuff that's required, from a marketing standpoint, crap happens that you don't like in a business. Um, people appreciate when you're transparent.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  You still may get some slack or you, you still may get some crap for what ended up happening. People may be angry with you. But people are gonna be much more angry with you if you try to hide things and you're not transparent, just as FYI.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  And eventually things do come out.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.