Will This Be The Info Marketer's Decade In Software?

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 Clay Collins predicts the indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software, and Neil and Eric react as two people who have straddled both sides. Their generation sold ebooks and courses because that was the only thing you could build without engineers, and the wall was never talent, it was operational. That wall is gone. They also cover the SBA loan changes worth watching, and then the harder question underneath all of it: if AI does the thinking, what happens to the people who stop wanting to think. Key takeaways◾The engineering advantage evaporated, the marketing advantage did not◾Twenty years of learning how to make strangers care now ships in a weekend◾Cognitive polarization is the real risk, not job replacement Chapters00:00 Content, Careers, and Time04:22 SBA Loan Changes05:29 Direct Marketers in Software11:29 Intelligence and Volition17:48 AI Sentiment Divide19:16 Wealth Preservation Fears

• 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. You know, what's interesting too, Neil, you talked about how we do things, right? So I sent Neil a text this morning, so there's a guy, I'm not gonna reveal his name just out of confidentiality, but there's a guy.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Oh, I said, I said Neil many different texts today, but this morning, there was a text that hit me on Instagram, okay? So this guy sends me a DM and he's like, "I listen to y'all's podcast in prison almost every day, literally." First of all, thank you for that. I think we both appreciate, actually that made my day. But second, I didn't know you could listen to podcasts and DM people on Instagram in prison, so I don't know how real that is. But I think the fact of the matter is this, right? Like, my key takeaway from that is like Neil's been making content for a long time. I've been making content for a long time. And throughout, from content, I met some of my best friends, right? I've, I've traveled the place I never would have imagined traveled to before. Obviously, you're gonna win business deals too. There's so many things that happen from the content creation piece.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  But the part I enjoy the most is when you see other people learning and other people starting businesses. Cause there's people that listen to this podcast that have businesses doing, you know, nine figures, 10 or operating 10-figure companies, right? A year. And, you know, I, I think Neil and I have always loved learning in, in public. And that's why I think if you're on any type of journey where you feel like you're getting to do what you want to do and you're blessed to be able to do that every day, I feel like it's a, you're shortchanging yourself if you're not creating content. As much as Neil and I complain, or myself, complain about having to make content, it's still beneficial, so.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  It, it is, and we do a lot of it. I do, I recorded earlier this morning. I did three long-form videos. I am recording tomorrow, cause I was gone for roughly two weeks where I couldn't record as much content. And I would say, I'm actually starting next week, creating two long-form, releasing two long-form videos each week instead of just doing one. So I'm ramping up production even more.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  That's good. And so how many hours do you think you spend per week on content right now, yourself?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Including the podcasts?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Yes, this is actually really easy for me to answer. So let's say this is 75 minutes. All right. Uh, long-form, short-form videos.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  So 35 minutes there. Long-form. Fifteen, let's actually call it 20. Uh, I'm adding in a new one, which is call it 60.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Charge another 60, another 30. Uh, 280 minutes a week.

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's about.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  And when I break it down like that, I'm gonna give one caveat here.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  It's not always 280 minutes a week. Some weeks are more, some weeks are less, cause I record in batches. So I'm counting, when I say 280, that's the amount of content, uh, time I spent on content for content that is posted on a weekly basis. So for me to produce next week's worth of content, it takes me roughly 280 minutes. Now, my team spends a lot more than 280 minutes, but that's how much time it takes out of my day, which is a little bit less than five hours, which isn't bad.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if we do the math on this one, it's 18.66 hours for, for, per month, right? You divide, multiply that by 12, that's 223 hours, like 224. That's nine days of content, nine days spending, uh, recording content, 9.33 days. That's, that's just on.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  A year.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, a year. And so, anyway, it's, it's, it, it, like, you, we've talked about this before, like, oh, should you do organic or paid? And the answer is both. If you can afford to do both, you do both, right? And then you try to figure out one at a time. Don't try to do everything under the sun, uh, cause that's a nice way to dilute yourself. But interestingly enough, Neil, I was gonna show something, um, but on, on the screen. And before I go into that, I saw someone posting about how there's SBA 7, uh, SBA overhaul. So, um, I remember Neil was on the School of Hard Knocks and he was getting interviewed. And the guy asked him, uh, if you're starting from scratch today, what would you do? And Neil, what did you say?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Uh, I would just go and buy a struggling business and get an SBA loan. I know people say like, "Oh, you need to put down payment and all this. You can do some seller-based financing and they can help you out there." So then that way you can still qualify.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so here, get this, so SBA loan, um, so Small Business Administration, we're talking about the United States here. So the old rule was that you can borrow at a total cumulative limit, and by the way, this is not financial advice, of $5 million across both the 7A and 504 loan programs combined. So they have these two different loan programs, right? So the, the idea is if you max out the 7A loan, you cannot get a 404, a 504 loan. The new update, um, is that the SBA has decoupled these two programs. So you can now completely stack them, allowing for up to $5 million for a 7A loan, and additional $5 million for a 504 loan, doubling the total maximum financing limit to $10 million. This is designed to let businesses buy a company using a 7A while simultaneously, simultaneously financing the commercial real estate through a 504 loan.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  So that's, I guess that's a real estate one. So, anyway, this stuff is changing all the time, but I just, I just saw that. So those of you, if we were starting from scratch today, if we knew about this, we would definitely take advantage of this. And, and by the way, like, if you look into the 7A more, I think you can, the down payment you need to put down, that might have changed a little bit, but you can put down like, I don't know, 5 or 10% or something like that. Again, you need to, you need to do your own research, cause my, my information might be dated. So wanted to throw that at you guys, but Neil, I saw, um, I saw Ryan Dice tweet this, this morning, and I wanted to share our reaction to this one. So check this out. So Clay Collins, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think he founded Leadpages, correct?

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I believe he did.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay. So, oh yeah, yeah, co-founder Leadpages and Nomics. Okay, so, um, this is going to be the info marketer's decade in software. Here's my prediction. The indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. So those that don't know, indie hacker is someone that might have been like a, a solo developer back in the day, right? You know, if I, like Levels is actually a good example, like indie hacker. He's built a lot of stuff and he's, he's kind of marketed on his own type of deal. So he's saying that the indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. And I think this is interesting for you and I both to react to this, Neil, cause we've kind of straddled the line between both, I would say. So when I came up, direct response marketers sold ebooks and courses, not because we loved it, but because it was the only thing that you could build without engineers, okay? We all wanted to be in software. That's where the leverage was.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  The wall was never talent, it was operational. So hire engineers, manage engineers, retain engineers, and become a real company. So the best marketers of my generation stayed put. The wall is now gone. Now a guy who spent 20 years learning how to make strangers care can ship a product in a weekend. You cannot compete with that person on offers, on hooks, on positioning. AI does not hand those to you in a tab. The engineering advantage evaporated, the marketing advantage didn't. For 20 years, marketers wanted what engineers had, now they have it. Okay, I have a lot to say about this, but you can go first if you want to.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, I, I, I agree with you. Markers now have the ability to do many more things because of AI. I don't believe it is easy due to AI to just go and start a business from a customer acquisition perspective, to be very clear, that specific side. I think AI has made it where more people are creating businesses, and it's actually becoming more competitive to get the attention of people out there. And marketing is becoming harder, not easier, even though you have more tools as a marketer. But from a technical standpoint, there's more things that you can do. This is just creating more competition, and I think there's just so much noise out there that it's harder than ever as a marketer.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I don't think this is the info marketer's decade in software. I, I think what, let me tell you who, who, who the decade is for now. The decade is for somebody who wants to work on hard problems, okay? And, and what I mean by that is engineers aren't going away. It's not like the engineering advantage evaporated. By the way, if, if you look at content creation, we'll use that as an example. Neil, back in the day, TikTok was very easy, early days, right? YouTube was very easy, early days. Whatever I published on YouTube, at least 50,000 views back in the day, right? Long form, right? Same thing for, for Neil too, but it gets more and more competitive. Now it's like, how do you think about, you know, the jump cuts? How do you think about the 30-second retention? Or if you're doing a, a reel, what does a three-second retention look like? And you gotta run trial res, you gotta do all this stuff, right? All these kids are doing right now.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  And then you gotta study like, you know, 50 hook packs and things like that. It just gets more and more complex, okay? So I think it's gonna get more competitive. And to Neil's point, more and more people are creating content. In fact, we, we've seen, you know, uh, uh, human-generated content be overtaken by AI-generated content. And this is a few months ago or so, right? And that's gonna keep scrolling up or, or, or growing. So I do think the best direct response marketers, um, they are going to take advantage. Because here's, what does it mean for them to be the best? It means that they're not just studying direct response marketing. And in fact, when Neil and I have been to these conferences, these masterminds in the past, the best people, and, and I, by the way, like, I, I actually have a group that I meet with every single year. These were the best of the best. Was it because they were only direct response marketers?

• 9:52Speaker 00

  No. In fact, the people that I met at the masterminds that were the best, were the direct response marketers that were only money motivated, those were the ones that never thought about product retention, they never thought about churn, okay? They never thought about talking to their customers, they just thought about making money. And they just, they always ask you, "How much money are you making? How much money?" It was always this, right? But when I think about the group that we have where we meet once a year, it's like, some of these people have, uh, you know, a holding company with multiple, multiple different businesses, and they've gone deep in that area. They enjoy systems thinking, they enjoy hiring, they enjoy sitting in the tough problems. And so it's not any info marketer's decade in software. It's always been that the people who work hard and like hard problems, those are the people that are gonna come out, compound even more. Those people are gonna get even stronger over time.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  And so I wouldn't even say it's something about the info marketer's decade. I just think, I, I, I don't agree with that. So Neil, go ahead. 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.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency, again, www singlegrain.com. Check it out, and if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  One minute, baby. So dude, I'm with you. I remember I flew to Austin to meet Ryan Deis for the very first time. And years ago, when I met him, this is 10 plus years ago, I remember him telling me that, hey, you shouldn't try to do what direct response marketers do, or get into their type of businesses. You should take a lot of their strategies and tactics and apply it to legitimate businesses. I'm like, wait, what do you mean? He's like, a lot of these direct response marketers just try to get rich, get rich quick. They don't try to solve real problems, build real businesses, so they don't last. You see them making a ton of money for a month, or six months, or a year, or even two, three years, and then it dies down and no one talks about them.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And his whole philosophy was, is you have real businesses that solve real problems for other businesses. You should take a lot of these marketing tactics and apply them to legitimate businesses, and putting that in air quotes. And he's like, you would find much more growth and be much more successful. And I was like, oh, that's a very smart way to look at it. For anyone who's watching on video, Eric's copying her poses.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  So let me read this to, let me read this. Maybe this will be more entertaining for Emma. So so this, this article here, it's really long, okay? In fact, she will definitely be bored. Emma, you're gonna be bored for sure. Okay. So the, Neil, this is related. The guiding emerging principle of AI is this, right? So intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. And I've been reading this quite a few times to my team this week, because this article was so good. And by the way, actually, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I was, I was gonna give people a tip on how you can actually remove the paywall. I'll just leave it at that. If you just type in remove the paywall, you guys don't have to pay for things like this, right? So, so the guiding principle of emerging AI is this.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  When intelligence is plentiful, Emma's the new Neil, when intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. So the people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They're the ones who will seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more, more, Emma. So in other words, what will differentiate people is not how smart you are, Emma, but your relationship to mental effort. So how many books you read, how much you like studying things, right? How much you like learning? So right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games, okay? If Emma, you're still in the room, play difficult games and reading dense books.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  On the other end of the spectrum, these are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity to not do it. Neil, we've talked about these lazy people that we know, okay? You know who I'm talking about. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really need to care about something, but they don't intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence, but is not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don't like to work hard. So let me tell you where I'm going with this, Neil. So my favorite passage from this one is this. What do you think is bad, Neil? Do you think, let me, let me just ask you this. What's bad? Economic inequality?

• 14:44Speaker 00

  So economic polarization or political polarization? Do you think, like, which one do you think is worse than, of the two?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Political polarization, what's the other one?

• 14:53Speaker 00

  Economic polarization, so wealth inequ-

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I would say wealth inequality is worse.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Now, what do you think, what do you think is worse than wealth inequality? Do you think, do you think cognitive polarization is worse than wealth inequality?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  I think a lot of these things are bad, but with wealth inequality, you just have a lot of people at the bottom who are just struggling and they can't figure it out. And it's affecting their lives in a very negative way. Some are extremely hard workers and trying, they just can't figure it out. Some are lazy, and I think that you have that on all ends of the spectrum. I know really rich people who got rich by luck and they're lazy. And I know really rich people who work really hard and it doesn't matter how much money they have, they just can't stop.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  So let me read this to you, Neil, and then I want to get your reaction, okay? So you may have noticed that the future I'm describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more, other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. So the high need for cognition people, so these are the people who work hard, they enjoy hard problems, right? They will get more and more productive, happier and happier. The rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass. So I actually think what this is, Neil, is I think this cognitive polarization piece is, it's gonna increase the wealth gap. That's what I think is going to happen.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  And so that's why I've, I've had this kind of anxiety and excitement in the beginning of the year. Because I know for sure, yourself, like, I know we like to, I'm not gonna say we're the smartest people in the world, right? But I'm gonna say we enjoy working hard, we enjoy working on hard problems. Like, I think we'll be just fine if we use these things, right? So, you know, we'll get more and more productive, happier and happier. But what I don't want to see is this, and I, I think, like, judging on, on how the team has, has grown over the years, like, the people that, that have, you know, chosen and taken upon themselves to learn. That is what is, is, this all kind of comes together, right? We're talking about this, you know, info marketers are gonna have this advantage and this and that. I think the people that are gonna have the advantage, Neil, is this high need for cognition people.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but in, just in general in life, even before AI, the people who had the right mentality tended to rise, not in all cases, but in many cases. And they tended to figure things out in life. And I think it's the same way in today's world with technology. You have the people who look at this as a blessing and want to take action. And I know a large camp that, of, of the people out there who are just like, screw this, time's already hard, this is gonna make it even worse, what's the point of even trying to, you know, work anymore, right? And you see both sides of things, and I don't know how the world is going to navigate during this,

• 17:46Speaker 01

  you know, uncertain time, because I think a lot of this creates uncertainty. And it creates uncertainty for people of all income brackets. Like, if you look at the SARS apocalypse, it's affected a lot of people who were once billionaires, and I know some people are like, boo hoo, the billionaire is now a millionaire, whoop-de-doo, they're still better off, right? But what I'm getting at is, it's creating uncertainty in a lot of markets. You're seeing businesses evaporate and vanish because they're no longer needed, to you're seeing things just start up and dominate, and you're seeing companies go from zero to a hundred million in revenue in a few months, or less than six months, which is extremely rare. And we weren't seeing any of those kind of growth rates, you know, prior to OpenAI being released.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  You know, you know, one thing I'll say, Neil, so you, you said it's, it's always been there, right? And it's true. The only difference is now this is such an accelerant that it's gonna accelerate the gap. Because in my mind, the people that have been successful, that have wanted to work hard, for, for, most people that have kind of built their own things, they had the right mindset. And the thing you've noticed, Neil, I used to go to these masterminds, what do people used to talk about all the time that I used to think was BS? It's the mindset, it's the mindset, it's the mindset. But now, as we get older, it is just the mindset. And so the thing, Neil, let me ask you this. In India, what do you think the sentiment is on AI? Is it positive, negative, and what percent?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  I don't know, I haven't been there, and actually, I've been there this year. But of the people I met, keep in mind, it's tech, I know a lot of India is heavy on tech. They like it. I haven't really seen too many people in India be negative, but again, I had very limited experience. The last time I was there was for a vet.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's overall AI sentiment when you look at different countries. So you look at Asian countries, India, China, right? Eighty plus percent, eighty to eighty-nine percent is public, right? India, Southeast Asia, right? All these, all these emerging markets, okay?

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Wait, before you give the answer, can I guess America? But you can give the other markets.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Go ahead, guess America.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  I believe less than fifty percent are enthusiastic about AI.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  It's not just America, though. What other countries do you think are negative?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  I would think most of Europe, like, Western Europe.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  And why do you think that is?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  They're worried about what it can do for their job and the stability that they have. They're worried that things can get worse for them.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  You know, Neil, I remember where the, where the dinner once, and then you used the phrase, and one of our mutual friends was listening, you used the phrase wealth preservation, okay? Which, he, he tuned into that one. So here's the thing. That concept does it, that, that also applies here too. So when you think about the developed markets like Europe and the USA, right? What is it? It's wealth preservation. So there's a lot of anxiety around not, they don't want to lose what they, they have right now, right? So job loss, AI misinformation, all this stuff, right? But when you look at emerging markets, there's a lot of hope, right? And I wouldn't even say China's emerging market, like, they're, they're number two in the world, right? You're sure there's a lot, they have a lot of large population. But they're highly optimistic, why? Because they see this as a way to modernize the work that they do and bridge existing skill gaps. And they, there's, there's hope that's tied to it, right?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  And again, but I would say this, it's a mindset thing at the end of the day, right? Because keep in mind, with the only, the only reason, one of the main reasons we became so powerful is because we want the damn war, right? World War II. And so what ends up happening is we create this empire, and then what happens is people start to get lazy and sloppy, right? You start to lose that hunger a little, you start to lose that mindset, which, when you're, when you're emerging market, quote unquote, you have the mindset, even if you're number two, you want to become number one, you want to kick number one's butt, right? You have the mindset. And this is not a mindset podcast, but I mean, marketing can be related to mindset. Well, I think that's a good place to end. Guys, we will catch you next week, and yeah, have a good weekend.