Marketing Against The Grain

wanna to make some facebook ads for the ic that is basically trying to connect their marketing data to cloud code you need really good creative and you need ten times the amount of creative that you used to on facebook we got their costs down from eighty two down to fifteen dollars is the average like seven day trailing your coding agent is now the smartest marketer the best marketer in the world if you give it all the context that it means to do its job yes so cody at graph dot com you are out there building in the marketing world kinda at the frontier marketing ai and i think you've learned a lot and on today's show you're gonna break down what are the key agent use cases of marketing right now and we're gonna build and deploy some agents live so before we get into the agent building maybe walk us through you're talking with tons of marketers out there where are they finding success with ai and agents today yeah i just to kinda zoom out like what what is an agent right is software with the thinking loop with a live data stream that it's making decisions on top of right like at it's core fundamentally that's what it i think people think about an agent and they're like oh we put god in a box and then run a google ads account like that's you don't have gotten a box run a google ads account right like you you it's a very your ad strategy and an agent can help you manage and do that on a basis right exactly it right and so actually what's more effective is i make custom software that's running a process that again maybe the is like a part of that a agent part of it right for so for example how we use it for like google ads agent is we'll look at all the search terms that are coming up and we'll basically be like okay we're gonna scale this one to ten is this search term have basically like the search intent that's related to the product if no i'm gonna you know basically it's a binary i do a negative match on that keyword and yeah i'm never gonna spend on that keyword again right you use the l you've use inference right only when you need that inference i'm trying to run as much as i can as software because that's the cheapest like you know way for me to do this and we're kind of like against this like as a company like our our kind of whole thing is like we're anti token maxing right and that's what we're all about outcome maxing it's like just trying to get to the best result and that's a blend of tokens and then it's a blend of deter traditional software exactly and you there's so many people just like building stuff that has no value in the world just because they can and that's like the wrong way to do it my observation and see if you agree to squeeze that the the advertising world has changed most dramatically probably any part of marketing outside of maybe search in the last couple of years and the big change that i don't think people fully come to reckoning with is that all the advanced ai targeting is now so good that you now you need money an idea you don't need the data and the targeting nearly as much as used to but while you need really good creative and you need ten times the amount of creative that you used to and where if you used to run a campaign with five ads you probably now need to run a campaign with fifty ads five hundred ads and that's what i'm seeing of the people who are really doing this at like the best best level is that what you're observing are you finding something different no we're finding the exact same thing i think the only difference is that we're not launching simultaneously like three hundred ads right say for example we're gonna launch ten ads per day and we're doing it on that cadence so that we have these learning loops that occur where it's basically okay like all marketing is now code right say you're making static image yes right those static images are just a json blob that got sent to nano banana or chat b t image two point five right so i can store that code in a database like a post rest database and i can give each static image its own unique id like a sku number right so when i upload that you know content into a an ad within facebook ads i can have basically a log of all the information that was i can have what is the pain points as desired outcome that this is based off of did i pull this from a competitor ad library and that was like the source material okay here's the json blob now i can connect that to my data if i use a data pipeline data warehouse i can actually connect my facebook ads data to that specific ad and then when i give that to my coding agent it now can understand okay here is the type of content that's actually creating like outcomes let's go in a learning loop so every ten you know again we're doing ten new piece of creative per day we can go through two to three cycles per week on top of that that turns into those three hundred ads per month but just going and dumping three hundred ads what we found unless you have a massive budget it just ends up you get stuck in this learning phase depending on the company type and again if you're if you're b2b or if you're consumer there's a lot of different variables here if you're pros etcetera but what we found is by going through these loops you can basically figure out we call like a persona matrix i can figure out what are the emotional triggers what are the situations that they're in and what is the market actually responding to and then basically like i i think about it as like a field of view like i have a wide field of view and then it scope in to like what is that fit it's the exact same thing that you're doing previously but it's at a velocity and a scale that was way faster or way higher than you know before was even possible hey guys we are covering a ton of ground and i know you're probably feeling little overwhelmed and you wanna learn even more well good thing we've got a ton of resources for you you can scan that qr code or you can click the link in the description below and we'll get all of those for free you know kyo and i wrote this book loop and it's about this exact idea right you're probably running meta campaigns that are performing okay when they start but you know ninety days in are probably performing you know twice as good three times as good as they were when they started right yeah i'll anecdotally i'll give you an example we just we're working with a private equity company it's a portfolio that they have they have two hundred and fifty like physical locations we took their cost per lead on google ads down from like seventy dollars down to thirty five and four weeks we yeah same ad budget on facebook we got their cost per lead down from eighty two fifteen dollars is the average like seven day trailing in same four week period this is just create volume and basically like agents doing negative match keywords to you know on google ads right and they create a volume on facebook this is no different than what a human would do right it's just the velocity that that can happen at and the scale it's it's speed and scale software you're running this account right it's like basically they're i almost i i call it like day trading like ad channels they're basically like day trading facebook ads or day trading like google ads it's like how this is happening it's almost like this quan like function that's that's on top of this technology and this is actually like you know i think the biggest thing if you walk away from this conversation today i like i want you to take is that your coding agent is now the smartest marketer the best marketer in the world if you give it all the context that it needs to do its job yes maybe we go into that maybe pull up an example of one of the paid agents or let's build one live and kind of talk to people when you say context and and data like what the heck you mean and totally say like speed and scale what do we actually mean i wanna make it real for people who might be still thinking about this world in the older way so high level i'll just run through this fast i know for the sake of time but basically i just wanna talk about like what is marketing engineering which we've kind of discussed already the infrastructure that you need and then we'll actually go into the deploying of the google ads agent facebook ads agent seo agent called email agent i'll do list so on the marketing engineering side like we've talked about this sum already like all marketing is now code you should build systems monitor the systems find things that work build the workflow automate the workflow audit the workflow and then improve the system so what we have found over the last like eighteen months like what does your coding agent need to actually go and do this marketing engineer gt engineering it's a stack of things so it's a data pipeline a data warehouse a cloud server a host code media storage databases for your agents so that they can record their actions that they're doing recurring job or task based cro jobs application authentication so that you can have you know your for example say if you make dashboard that you want to have you know hidden like but shareable to your team you can do that the shareable links and then a git manager so it can be multiplayer so you can have multiple people say for example your five team members working on the same code base at the same time and then a tailored api gateway that enables you to do calls nano banana or apollo or c dance or apple amplify whatever tooling you need to actually go and do this work right so the open source version of this i'll share this with you guys so that you can share with the audience it's basically everything here but for today when i'm going to be doing is just using this is literally what graph is as a platform is everything that i just described here and then we're gonna go and build some of these agents out right so everything i'm gonna get access is through the graph cli and we're gonna build out an agent like this so what is this agent again it's some type of software with thinking loop with a live data stream that it's making decisions on top of so the facebook ads agent basically research the target customer desired outcomes and pain points i'm then gonna generate created i'm gonna automatically upload the facebook ads i'm gonna measure the performance winners scale losers get turned off the winners influence the next round of creative production but before we go on there's a really important thing that i think a lot of people have trouble with cody which is that like generate the creative and auto upload marketers do not like giving up control it's like wait no i made these five things i know what these five things look like i wanna upload them i am not comfortable with like these fifty things that i did not well i guided i was kinda like the creative director but it i didn't make them how do you help people get past that way of thinking i think what it gets to is like you're doing this work on the front end so that you trust the creative that's gonna come off the other side right like you're giving a brand style guide right like what are our fonts what are our colors how what's our language that we use like etcetera and then also like what i what we typically do for example when we do it about ford to put engineering engagement with the company is we're basically like looking at their historical ads using that is basically source material and then also going through like a creative loop with the team to be like okay yes no like which of this passes right you can also build in a gate for a human at this level as well where it's like every new piece of creative a slack message goes out to them and that person is basically like rejecting or accepting that creative right that is something that's also possible and then that builds up a repository of like what you know the human has okay mh which can then influence the net like the future creative production but again i i i think it just comes down to the scale and like we see this like we're working with the company where this is exact problem is happening right now is like a human was in the loop to begin with the velocity of creative at this point has gotten so large let it know human could actually there's no human no human can look at a thousand ads a month right and then also run their other job and give feedback on those thousand ads right but those ads when you look at them like they're on brand they're talking to the pain points that way you've like to define all those pieces but we're hitting on something really important there are a lot of people who giving up that control initially is gonna be really hard especially if you're in regulated industries there's a whole host of of challenges here i think what we are saying and that's really important is one you can build an infrastructure to get really high quality output like for example in the loop book we have this concept called a taste profile cody where it's literally all of your customer and brand identity data insights emotional triggers everything in one file that allows an agent like this to make far better decisions once you have something like a taste file then the thing you do is kinda what you said is you have a human review and give feedback and annotate for a while and that a while might be weak a while might be three months depends on your company how conservative or non conservative you are but i think what you found and what i've also found is that in doing all that upfront work you get pretty close on the creative quality side it's not gonna be perfect and there are gonna be a few outliers that are imperfect but the vast majority are gonna be very good totally and i i think again in the regulated space like human in the loop is a great piece to have yeah yeah exactly like we work with the company that's in like you know the financial markets right like to eat there's just things you can and can't say right obvious exactly but you can cod that into the system too right absolutely absolutely and like over time we're like okay cool like here's the language that can and can't be used right and also here's the language that like facebook is more likely to flag when we put it as an ad so like let's not use that language but this language is like more acceptable right all of that can be built into the system and and when i say an agent right like again this is just code that a human can go and modify based off of like their gut intuition what they're feeling and what they're seeing right we have agents that are just running themselves right like for example we have a google ads agent that's running for the startup up right now that their cost per lead was eleven hundred dollars when we started with them this is four months ago pain got it down to two hundred fifty what's hilarious is the eleven hundred was like still profitable for them like that would depending on your model it can be right total no but this agent basically what is it doing it every day is checking the data that's coming back from google ads and from google analytics and then it's rewriting its own software so it's basically rewriting the software that's the deter that's running the google ads account so it's in this site infinite loop words just basically optimizing itself based off of the live data that's coming from the market as it goes and deploy these ads and what is it doing it's like researching the keywords it's making the ad sets it's making the ads it's making the landing pages that it's sending people to so it's building that whole funnel optimization basically on top of the back of this i think that that was a really important sidebar thanks for talking us through with like how you handle this creative and automation at scale let's get back to the agents and kind of the core agents that we're walking through here so we can build a couple yeah absolutely yeah so again another example of this would be an seo agent right so same idea of research chart keywords that a bottom of funnel related the brand research the article that you should write based off of what's ranking on page one you write the article published the article to the cms v and api and then you refresh those articles i think this is the biggest piece that people miss with this type of work is like any of these pieces of content you can go and basically like make them better just like a human should be doing based off of the library we had a team of people doing this for the last decade it's super totally totally so with all that said though let's actually jump into it and we can go through one of these deployments so i'm start with the facebook ads one and and just for everybody watching following along youtube what you're you're in cloud code here yep so i'm in cloud code and i've given my agent my coding agent cloud code basically access to that entire stack that i described previously so that data pipeline that warehouse so i put all of my data all of my marketing data into the data warehouse through that data pipeline again i'm using graph dot com for this but you can do this open source as well you can use graph you can use hubspot you can use a there's a ton of different things exactly you gotta have those core foundational elements and you have to have a way to get it to what you're calling coding agent but it's really like your architect they're doing coding their system building all of those things that they need access to all that and is that access coming through an mc server coding no so it's through an mp package that we basically created that gives endpoints to all of that stack that i described but also creates this like unified and api endpoint for all the tools that we have within the platform so as an example like we bundled two hundred and thirty different tools what do i mean by tools like for example if i'm trying to do nano banana creations or i wanna scrape a linkedin profile or i'm trying to do keyword research for we're using for example under the hood the data for seo api for these all of these endpoints are basically catalog within that mp package and all i have to do is just say you know with words right like i wanna go do this thing let's go and deploy the savings agent so let's actually do that now i'm just gonna use transcription and i'm gonna go and say this i'm gonna say i wanna make some facebook ads for the ic that is basically trying to connect their marketing data to cloud code so that they can do data analysis and for example like a google or facebook ads audit it within this so for the actual creative use go to graph dot com and look at the style guide just on the home homepage of the website and then use the k api key with the nano banana to create the static i just want them to be a square format ten eighty by ten eighty when a buyer ass ai for a solution like yours do you know if you're showing up or not and hubspot we've got a great product that actually helps you get discovered in ai search hubspot au helps you show up in these moments with the right answers buyers are looking for before the first click before the first fill that's the moment hubspot au is built for go check out hubspot au you can trial it for free and it's gonna help you understand how you're showing up an ai search and how you could show up even more so i'm gonna kick that off cody you're doing this voice which by the way just for watching this is like becoming the d factor facto way of working if you're not using voice ai and transcription like that you should and that was like a very casual like low key way to to do this like if you were doing this for client you'd have different files and different servers you'd be accessing but i think that's a really great overview of how you would actually prompt to build one of the agent systems you're looking at totally and i think about it as like c working with like a a a team member right it's basically i'm going back and forth with them i'm teaching them the thing that i'm trying to do and then once i've gotten to the point where like this is actually what i'm looking for at that point i can be like okay look at the conversation that we just had i now want to go and turn this into like a process into a repeatable process that is code that is an agent right like what we described previously and then deploy that to the server so that that's running on a cro job on a daily task right where it's like daily monthly you know hourly you know some of them that are functioning in that way so and how do i work just to kinda talk through this so this is now working in the background at this point i would kick off another aging and just to show you a different way to do this please so we have plugins within graph for example i have an seo plugin all of these plugins people are just starting to publish them to github they're just yeah different agents it's different way to structure agents and again that agent what is it it's code thinking loop live data stream so a plugin that we have is an seo so i'm gonna say i wanna implement the seo plugin look through the graph cli live plug for that and walk me through the process and just for context i have already given my coding agent access to the facebook ads api the google ads api my cms which we use strap mh i an open source one and then also to instantly ai which is a cold email software so that's what's happened beforehand is basically you know how we can go and and do this and i get this question all the time so i just wanna digress here for a second like please please i see on social media facebook ads accounts getting banned for agents interacting with them and it's it's so funny to me because like people have this perception that like the agent is gonna go and like that that's the reason this is happening the reason it's happening is the agent is spamming the api endpoint and it's breaking the pos of facebook ads correct and so why is that happening is because it's going and doing like all these reads trying to pull this data in so how do you solve this why do we even need a data pipeline in the data warehouse that is the solution for all of the data analysis so when i am doing data analysis it's only happening from the data warehouse and then the only way that i'm really using the api with my coding agent is just for rights just for uploading those facebook ads just for uploading those keywords or making those new ads within google ads etcetera alright let's go through what we built yeah so so far again we're waiting on inference right which is like challenge with all of these pieces but basically in the background what's happening is facebook ads is now going and creating the initial media that i described using nano banana to actually make the actual images and nano banana is a image generation tool yeah exactly like google and you're paying you know per api call for that creative which is a fraction of what you would pay it can grasp designer exactly exactly and so what it's done is it went to the page of the website it's now scraped out basically what colors that are being used like descriptions of the actual creative etcetera we're finding that honestly chat image is the best for this i just use nano bona banana takes that's what came to mind yeah but with this you can go in these loops basically making that creative on the google ads side what's happening now is i'm basically having it do bottom of funnel keyword research for the keyword phrases that we should basically be bidding on is using the data for seo api to go and find this and also pull data from our own google search console because that's connected so that we basically have a list of like the keyword phrases that we can go and create a campaign that we're going after then on the seo piece i had to install the plug and at this point we are capable of publishing an article right so for example i can say we're doing a campaign right now facebook ads for business type i'll say write an article for facebook ads for we'll say pet grooming publish data article or use a system that's basically defined within the plugin there and so what's defined within the plugin is again that exact thing that i talked about previously where i'm just giving it a keyword to go right but it's gonna research this article write the article and then actually publish it to strap it through that api to the live site so i'm gonna do for pet grooming and then part this the article i'll do strap for publishing and then on the final piece just to talk through what we can do on the cold email side so again we have cold email that's connected so we're gonna go and basically creates a daily cro job that's extracting the net new post from a creator i'm gonna give you their linkedin profile url we're gonna then going to extract the engage from that post and then do a waterfall enrichment through the email providers that are available through the graphs cli tools to find the emails validate the emails with million ver verify then upload those to instantly via the api key so again describing the workflow that i want and then i'm letting the coding agent use all the tooling that it has available to go and basically build out that workflow and this is the new way to do this like historically oh i would go and try to use or zapier like the joke that we have or that we keep saying is like friends don't let friends do n like go straight to code that is the best way to do this because it is the most flexible and it's the most capable i connecting all these different data sources why would i go and manually drag and drop a workflow and then the feedback we get on this is like okay i wanna visualize it i need to see the system it's like just ask the ask the coding agent be like visualize the system for it exactly and it's gonna go and generate basically what that graphic looks like we agents right agents is in in this case it's just like a thread in your cloud code right you know we just showed a few different threads each of those and agents that's doing a task and if you do the foundational work of the plumbing the api access and everything then you can just describe the system and have that independent agent go and work for you and i know that can seem intimidating for a lot of people but with the help of smart technical people and getting the initial setup done like the ongoing usage is pretty pretty manageable right you're seeing so many people out there building just stuff because they can build stuff now with agent coding right and the building stuff was never the barrier it was hey do i really understand the problem to build the right thing do i have a group of people who are man focused on what needs to change in the market so that that product changes oh and by the way am i willing and prepared to do all of the upkeep and maintenance and iteration to actually make this thing good and that's the hard part like we're working for example we just boarded this company yesterday and it's a marketing team of two i mean it is a fifteen year old organization right and yeah it's a huge company but basically like he has told his boss you know our contact there has been like i i don't wanna hire more staff i just wanna pay for like this tooling basically yeah that is where the budget is now going to and what we're seeing is like this one person when they have this tooling you know that they're surrounded by it's suddenly a hundred x employee right they can do things that were like it would take teams of people historically and also just running circles around everybody that they're competing against it i'm just curious your guys thoughts on like what the cmo role like does that even exist anymore is it only like i see the summary line for you is essentially the cmo role as it is constructed today is dying because you don't have the right talent pipeline of people to do what is required and partially is like a lot of see most for a long time i think we're kind of more professional managers than they were marketers yep and what you're outlining i think is right which is if you're a deep crafts person in marketing you can do the work of ten or a hundred people with enough token spend and the right data access and systems like that's those things are non trivial things right but the but but it is important and in the book and loop we talk a lot about like you wanna get rid of context caring people who exist to just move information around and that there's you know this idea of like a super contributor where like a whole person can now own an end to end you know meta campaign for the example we're talking about on the show where it used to be well i gotta wait for my freelancer to get me the ads and i gotta wait for my like analyst person to get me the data from the finance team like all that stuff can now happen live and happen with one person and so i think you're seeing that that being said you still need cmos in the future because if i can have one of those ten hundred x people then i'd have ten of them or twenty of them or thirty of them right like there's no bounds to like the upward balance of growth and you still need a human to manage an orchestrate just the ratio of people you need to do the work is changing i think significantly it's just like how many of those people exist today part of the issue is like that's probably like most optimistic case sub a thousand yeah i kinda close out question to you here cody is like if i were watching this episode and i've never done any of this right and i'm just like oh i'm buy on what these two people are selling and that there's a new better way to do this like where would you start i think the first thing is just like give again your cloud code your codex whatever your daily driver is api keys like have it stored locally in an environment file and just have it go and try to do work for you like what you would go and manually do for example like a say you're trying to clean a hubspot or you're trying to do something get a hubspot api key and go and try to get your coding agent to do that action for you that is the first place you're gonna be shocked by what you're gonna be able to get done with that the the other piece i just wanna piggyback on top of is like i just showed basically how to interact with coding agent to like do this initial build and like how i view an agent right it's like yeah everything that i just did with it you can then take that and again crew that into the system that's running its yeah i'm not saying every day you go in into cloud code and you're like okay cool publish the article it's like no every day three new articles go live i deployed that solution into a server and that is just running again on a cro job running that process that i described and then optimizing itself based off of the live data stream that's coming back to it so cody this has been a masterclass in how to think about scaling your marketing with agents you've given us real tactical breakdowns of everything thank you so much for joining us on today's show i know i got a ton out of it before we close out where can everybody find you if they wanna learn more yeah totally you can go to graph dot com where i'm very active on twitter and also on linkedin basically documenting everything that we're seeing be functional also growing you zoom channel right now thank you so much we'll see everybody on the next episode let me tell you about a show i love science of scaling hosted by mark robe each week host mark robe founding cro at hubspot senior lecturer at harvard business school and c founder of stage two capital sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets strategies and tactics to scaling your company's growth they just did a great episode titled the only sales role that will exist in twenty thirty with christopher o'donnell founder day ai it's a must listen listen to science of scaling wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully into well i can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot grow at him

super excited to be here to talk about why your marketing is broken but better yet how we can all fix it all of the things that used to work are really drastically changing and it's not that we're doing something wrong it's really that the rules of marketing have changed and we have to change with them they changed pretty drastically for hubspot in may of twenty twenty four and i want to bring out my great friend kip bald the cmo at hubspot to go through this story because he is the one that had to explain this to our ceo yam so kieran set up a little bit of what we're here to talk with you all about today and this is not a pretty chart that anybody wants to explain to anybody correct and so what happened for a long time more visits met more customers and that equation is now broken and what that means for all of us in the world of marketing is that we've moved to a world where volume of visits matter to the a world where value of visits matter because what happened in the same period of time is very fascinating we saw an eighty percent drop in our traffic we lost a hundred and forty million visits in a year but we managed to increase our leads our demand generation by twenty percent which seems exceptionally counterintuitive but it's not when you realize that that core shift is in the value of the traffic we maintained and grew versus the lack of value in the traffic we lost so this is the setup this is the opportunity we all have it used to be a buyer with land on a blog post read all your blog post download upload your ebook and spend a ton of time on your website now they're having those conversations with chat gp with claude and the entire buying motion has changed the best way for me to explain this to might be a model we're all very very familiar with the old funnel every marketer loves a funnel the old funnel is very effective in the inbound marketing area it worked great it was very linear you put more visits in is easy to get a lot of visits you got customers out of the bottom the new funnel the ai era funnel is exceptionally different it looks way more like an hourglass up top awareness has really broadened it's scattered out completely because you have a ton of new channels you have creators you have ai search you have in endless new platforms being built but what's happened is all those platforms wanna keep people on their platform so it's gotten way harder to get people to actually come from them to your website so getting visits has never been harder but ai has made personalization tailoring your content finding and messaging the relevant buyers easier than ever and because of that the conversion rates are actually getting a lot better and it's easier to increase your conversion rates which brings this hourglass funnel to life so we are in this new era of marketing with a very new shaped funnel and for this new era we are gonna pause that you need a new framework and playbook for doing marketing kieran and i when we lost all that traffic set out to build a new playbook we call that playbook the loop we have a book coming out on tuesday we're very excited about it thank you for being here and the loop has four very simple but important steps that any marketer can follow the first is all about expressing your taste and judgment with ai the second is tailoring your content to your audience and the channels they live in the third is amplifying your message across the new modern buying channels where your buyers are hanging out and spending their time and then the fourth and maybe one of the most important ones is all about evolving taking the lessons you learned in real time and applying them so that the next loop you run gets smarter and gets better result you run one loop for a campaign for a tactic and it compounds over time your results get better and better that is the plant we're gonna take you today through the entire loop in detail not everything but we're gonna give you some of the highlights we think are the most important and i wanna talk to you a little bit about the first stage of the loop the express stage and i'll let you in to a little secret this is kip favorite stage of the loop we are seeing a lot of things generated by ai and that's the world we live in today you look around the room everybody here has access to the same tools the same prompts the same models and it's not that the output ai has given us is bad it's just that we see it everywhere it is the sea of same now why does that even matter well for a hundred years the last hundred years the hardest part of marketing has actually been making things marketers have had to figure out how do i spend the amount of time i have to make things for my customers and that took a lot of time a lot of resources and a lot of effort that's just no longer the case ai can generate an infinite amount of stuff about anything and so the hard part has actually drastically changed making is no longer the problem chosen is the problem choosing what to make when the cost of production is free judgment is the only thing that has a price and i want to really emphasize that when the cost of production is free judgment is the only thing that has a price and so that's why you will hear a lot about taste you have to have taste taste is the foundational part of how you be an incredible marketer today and kip and i truly believe that taste and judgment but what do we mean by taste what does that even mean taste is when a man creates a beverage drink that tastes horrible the flavor taste horrible and he refuses to change it because he knows people consume his beverage not because of the taste of the drink but because of what it says about how they want to express themselves such red bull a ten billion dollar company taste is put in water into a beer can call it liquid death and marketing it to the punk kids who are embarrassed by the drink that they're holding that company is now worth over one point four billion dollars ta is put in a fifty cent eye patch on a perfectly sided model with the strap line that says the man in the hathaway shirt all the vs sold out hathaway shirts for years based upon that single ad and the absence of taste is jaguar ignoring seventy years of heritage creating an ad without a single car in it and ad created for award shows not for people who buy jaguar cars and see in their sales decline ninety seven percent over a six month period taste is such an important part of marketing and today it has been able to understand what will resonate with your customers long before it ever does and here's the exciting thing for all our marketers ai does not have taste ai will give you the medium of everything it was trained on and that's where all of your competitors live it means you have two choices you can either outsource your taste to ai or you can actually describe your taste to ai and teach it what it is and this is the most important lesson from this section you never outsource your taste to ai you instill your taste to the ai so it creates things that are uniquely you but how do you do that well we have something in the book called the taste profile you basically write your taste down now it sounds simple but there's some complexity in there you have to understand three core things you have to understand who your customer is how do i garner trust them how do they talk you have to understand your stories your brand stories your product stories the why you story and why now story and most importantly you have to understand what resonates with my customers why will they stop scrolling for me why will they spend a little part of their precious time during that date with the things that i create now in marketing we've called these things brand style guides or ride in style guides or position in docs that live in folders that no one ever reads the taste profile is a live even artifact it updates each and every time when you're doing marketing and the more you learn about your customer the better it gets and every time ai creates something for you it reads it before it creates that thing let me give you a quick example the left hand side is a webpage page created with without taste profile you could package the up and sell it to any saas company insert their logo and strap line and it looks like eighty percent of saas companies today the webpage page on the right has been instilled with our taste profile it's uniquely us differentiated and that's the value of doing this so the taste profile has two core building blocks it has your customer taste it understands all of the context by your customer and your brand taste please subscribe to our youtube channel we are near a hundred thousand subscribers kip and i want our first youtube plaque please please please please please or that's express now that i've actually created by taste profile i wanna craft market in for my customer i'm gonna hand back to kip to take me through the taylor stage okay so the taylor stage is the second step of the loop and raise your hand if you're like me and you open netflix and you scroll around for fifteen minutes and don't end up watching anything because you're completely overwhelmed normally about ten minutes in my wife yells at me and then it's like what are we watching i was i don't know we're i'm i'm too overwhelmed that is the perfect example of the world we are living in today we are in the midst of a content del this is to me one of the most alarming trends that's happening in the last two years we've seen a four x increase in ai assisted content i don't think all of you all have seen a four x increase in attention or views on your content no but that is what's happening and it's drowning out so much of the work everyone in this room is doing so what we can actually do about it the first thing you need to understand is that the half life of your content is far less than ever used to be i old enough to remember when the titanic was in movie theaters it was there for two hundred and eighty seven days the average movie is now in a movie theater for five weeks a drastic change the half life of your post on linkedin less than twenty four hours that email you work so hard to send out you're gonna get half of the audience in the first two hours we live in a very different time everyone is bombarded by information and you have to tailor your information to actually break through the way i like to think about this world of content that we live in is in the simple two by two matrix and there's a few parts in this matrix i think there are a lot of people in the dead zone those companies are in the slot factory they're creating a lot of stuff but the quality of that content is very low there are some brilliant brands making amazing amazing campaigns but they're just doing it at very small interval they're in that invisible excellence they get a little attention when they do that remarkable thing but they're not doing enough what we all have to work on moving towards is that top right which is remarkable and relentless it's not enough to just create great content it has to be great content at scale that's now possible because of ai remarkable content means unique unique data you need customer stories unique examples things that you couldn't go and just make asking a traditional ai model like chat gp or claude in the taylor phase we want to move to the remarkable and relentless quadrant how do we do that because that seems overwhelming i wanna tell you a very interesting story it's about a woman named sabrina rama ke and i have been lucky enough to become friends with sabrina over the last couple years and she's a remarkable woman but she's one person just herself and over the last twenty eight months she's built a following of three point four million followers not a big team not millions of dollars one person and some time and a very thoughtful strategy and i wanna give you her secrets today the first secret is that she has two ways of trying to be remarkable and relentless the first is in getting remarkable how does she know what content to actually is gonna resonate with her audience and in what channels it's going to resonate in she has two processes the first is she starts long she makes a long form youtube video or a long form me and el email newsletter and then cuts it into small pieces and multiplies it across all of her channels the second strategy she uses is starting short she'll take very quick thirty second videos couple paragraph linkedin posts and she will test twenty thirty ideas over the course of a week or two and figure out which couple of those really take off they really resonate with her audience so much that she needs to double down and create deeper richer long form content this is the formula for content strategy and tailoring your content in the new ai era the second part is being relentless and it might seem crazy but this is sabrina system it is her actual system that she uses to run all of her content but it's actually very straightforward she has one piece of content either that long form or one that hits from that short form and then she has built an ai system that actually takes that and rewrite the scripts for video actually reform that for linkedin with a hook that's more important for linkedin because she knows what her linkedin audience cares about for example this system is what allows you to not be spending twenty four hours a day building and making content kieran that's how you tailor some content one of our really critical stages about getting that content out into the world and that's all about amplifying it can you take everybody through it okay everyone wants to you marketing and distribution playbook what we tried to cover in the book but i wanted to give you a snippet in one channel something that you could action take away and apply on the monday does your experience with ai sound a little something like this you've been prompted for twenty minutes the output is polished confident and completely useless that's what happens when ai doesn't know anything about your business hub hubspot ai works with your actual customer data every interaction every signal your team has generated over time so instead of prompt and hoping you ask once and ship it check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses we wanna do paid advertising and paid advertising is going through a renaissance because of ai and i wanna give you a quick example of how that's happening the nba finals it's june twenty twenty five and there's a creator called pj j s taro who came on the marketing of screen show and told us about an ad he created for the mb finals that competed with all other brands now these brands were spending hundreds of thousands or dollars if not millions of dollars to create these ads pj used ai in a couple of thousand dollars to create an ad for a platform called ka and his ad outperformed everyone else's and that's a consistent theme across this presentation the ad used to be the most expensive part of doing and paid advertising that no longer is ai can do that for you the question is are you creating enough of them and this is a really important data point ro is a north star for any paid advertising team return on ad spend whether that's direct or incremental and what this data point is telling us is the same brand same budget spend it in the same platforms if you do ten creative ads you get a certain amount of return not spend but if you increase that to twenty creative ads each and every month you increase your ro ads by sixty five percent sixty five percent by doubling the amount of creative ads you do and this number is pretty exponential so if you are the one create in ten ads and you get three dollars back for every one dollar you spend if you go to twenty that's six dollars if you go to a hundred that's thirty dollars why is this even happening it's because creative is the new targeting in paid advertising creative is the new targeting for years paid marketers used to optimize their audience the right job profile the right job description the right likes the right interest building our lookalike audiences you would spend hours perfect that audience it's no longer the case meta and google understand your audience much better than you and we've tested this in hubspot when we do manual campaigns versus using meta advantage tool we see a better return on ad spend by twenty two percent when we use google's performant max we see a reduction in cost to acquire companies by thirty three percent they understand the audience much better than you can your job is to create enough creative ads around different jobs around different jobs to be done to allow the algorithms to pick who your audience is then you benchmark for paid advertising is twenty creative a month but actually that number can keep going up and your return on the investment can keep getting much much better the second thing is you want to optimize for quality knock quantity you want to tell the platforms the type of demand you want to acquire if you ask it for form fields it will give you a bunch of low intent demand if you ask it for qualified leads it will do a little bit better if you ask it for booked meetings a little bit better but what we want is closed one dollars that is actually what we're looking for how do we even do this well we enrich that paid advertising platforms with our first party data and they do a much better job of acquiring the right intent for your company and that's what we mean by the distribution playbook are changing there's a bunch of new tactics two very simple ones that you could start with on monday is to increase the number of creative ads you put a night in each and every month and allow the algorithms to pick your audience and tell them what good looks like enrich the paid advertising platforms with your first party data connect your crm and tell them exactly what you want now in the book we give you a bunch of these tactics and a bunch of experiments so will work some won't the real skill in a marketing team in the future is how quickly you learn that and i wanna pass back to kip to go through the last stage of evolve to tell you how quickly marketing teams that can learn today so kieran just told you you're gonna run some experiments we all run experiments some work some don't work it's the marketers that learn that make all the difference and loop is all about learning and to really emphasize this i think the whole lesson comes from an important story from nineteen o three in nineteen o three there were two teams of people they were trying to fly one had one point five million dollars the backing of the us government his name was samuel lang he spent years perfect the perfect airplane it crashed into the potomac he took one more shot it crashed again then you had the wright brothers they had a thousand dollars no government backing but they had a very different approach they built very cheap gliders and they would fly the glider it would fail they would fix based on what didn't work and they would build a new one they try again may iterate really quickly nine days after samuel lang crashed the second time the wright brothers flew at kitty hawk that is the power of learning and that is the power that we all now have thanks to the new tools at our disposal when i think about how you build and run a modern team in marketing one of the most important switches that i think everyone needs to make is moving from quarterly campaigns and calendars to a sprint model for example we've moved to running two and six weeks sprints if you run a two week sprints that gives you twenty six opportunities to learn in one year if you run a quarterly campaign you of four the quarterly campaign is the equivalent of samuel lang the twenty six sprints that's the equivalent of the wright brothers and that is the opportunity it used to be really hard to do these things because you had a bunch of manual work to pull the data look at the data you'd forget to look at the data you didn't wanna have to create a deck and you'd spend more time doing admin than regular marketing and the important parts of marketing now ai has made it very easy to automate all of that data gathering all of that debt creation all of the administration around running sprints and what i have here is our actual format that we use to run sprints and anybody who wants could take a picture of this this is something you can do today or when you get back in the office you can literally take a picture of this put it in your ai tool of choice with campaign data from your most recent campaign and it will populate and create a first version for you and give you a potential next sprint that you might wanna go and run this is the power of loop and the power of learning that is the entire loop we started with expressing our taste and judgment with ai then we learned all about how sabrina tailor her content with ai kieran gave us a master masterclass in advertising and amplify there's other important channels there ai search creators they're all in the book we just didn't have time to share them with you today and then i talked to you a little bit about evolving and how you should think about running yourself or your team differently in the future the most important thing that i think we wanna leave you with today is a story that happened on may six nineteen fifty four there was a very interesting thing that happened in the first part of the twentieth century everybody who ran and like ran thought it was impossible to run a mile in less than four minutes just just not possible you your human the body was gonna break it was gonna do damage to it just was physically not something that could happen well that's not true because then roger ban ran a three minute fifty nine point four second mile the interesting thing about that though is that within the next twelve months over a dozen people also ran a mile in under four minutes and what that really tells you is that it is a mental breakdown a mental gap that stops you for making this progress and that is probably how loop feels to a lot of people today it might feel daunting being remarkable and relentless or figuring out what your taste profile is that might feel hard but it's a mindset shift that we had to go through our traffic dropped eighty percent we had no choice i would strongly encourage you if you if you have an option those things haven't happened to you yet that you take the action you break through and you run your first loop it can be a simple tactic it can be a simple campaign kieran close this out tell everybody about the book okay so this was our very first time doing a presentation about the loop we really appreciate you you'd being in our our first audience kip and i have poured everything into this book but it's the combination of our learning and then eight hundred and ninety seven youtube videos that we have recorded with the best brains in the industry and we put the best prompts templates and tools to make it actionable we hope anyone who reads enjoys it if you wanna connect with us you can go to marketing against grain and get us our first youtube clap please please please i know i'm desperate but hey and we really appreciate you sticking around and actually listen to the loop and we hope you enjoy it we hope you find it helpful thanks everyone thanks everyone we appreciate your time today thank you let me tell you about a show i love science of scaling hosted by mark robe each week host mark robe founding cro at hubspot senior lecturer at harvard business school and c founder of stage two capital sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets strategies and tactics to scaling your company's growth they just did a great episode titled the only sales role that will exist in twenty thirty with christopher o'donnell founder day ai it's a must listen listen to science of scaling wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hotspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot girl at him whoa

what might shock you is today less than thirty two percent of people who search actually click on a link google and this shift is destroying your business today we're joined by amanda nat she is the c author of zero click marketing a new book that's out as well as chief evangelist at spark toro we're here to help you understand how search is actually changing the rules to succeed in this new world and you're gonna wanna stick around because we got a load of more data points that are gonna really change how you think about growing your business let's get to today's show you know on today's show we are talking about an interesting dynamic that search the actual act of people asking questions online is growing at a really rapid rate and it's happening in different places in different ways than ever before but the amount of people clicking in those searches and coming back to a website as they traditionally done is vanishing and in your book zero click marketing is all about what you need to do to be successful in this new world and i think to set this up amanda you have some really interesting data we have a lot of data but if there's one big takeaway that i want people to really get from this episode it's this one it is the zero click search study from just a couple months ago so in twenty twenty six what happens after a google search at this point about thirty two percent of those searches go to a click thirty nine percent nothing happens and then twenty nine percent of the time the user conducts another search and so those latter two stats represent zero click searches at this point today sixty eight percent of all google searches and without a click and so for every one thousand us google searches only two hundred and thirty two clicks go to the open web now the other thing i wanna point out is this is not a new thing so i think people are tending to think of this right now as oh ai disrupted search ai disrupted this and that but that's actually not true i think if anything ai is accelerating that trend a lot but this has been happening this zero click search right it's been happening at least over the past ten years so if we look at this data over the past ten years in twenty sixteen forty five percent of google searches and without a click and today that's sixty eight percent and over the past couple years this is the fastest we've seen this trend accelerate could we go back amounted to the very first slide mh because if i looked at this slide i would say okay like i'm a business i really have depended upon google search for some amount of time thirty two percent of people will click on the link that makes me feel pretty bad because that's come down a long way but wow there's still thirty two percent of a lot but then you actually look at the sub break breakdown yes and it's actually much worse because of the thirty two percent six is going to a paid ad twenty seven percent is going to ai mode or a google property and sixty six percent of the thirty two percent is going to the open web so this would tell you the thing that most people fear about ai which is death of the web and google was the last bastion of the open web is pretty true that we are going to be in a pretty different world where the open web does not look like it's going to exist in an ai world and i'm wondering do you agree or disagree with that based upon that data i yeah i'm inclined to agree i mean to that point i mean even though google is sending fewer and fewer searches they are still the leading referral of all referrals to the open web right like even though sixty eight percent and zero click searches google is still the largest traffic referral right so in that sense yeah they are kind of the last bastion of whoever is sending traffic so i think this is really what begs the question here you're seeing to follow up to karen's point like the open web is changing a lot and the other thing amanda that our friend nick just shared an interesting data point with me the other day where a lot of the high credibility websites are actually shutting off access to ai crawl and so google's also becoming one of the last places where you really get a full content experience because people are worried and publishers are starting to change their behavior around do i wanna give ai access to this content that i monetize or not and maybe we're happy giving it to google because google was able to send traffic their way and help them monetize that's not the same with chat or claude etcetera so kind of brings us into this world of if everybody's did way less traffic to their websites what the heck do we do thanks for watching today's show if you want the best ai resources we've got for you this week you wanna scan that qr code or click the link in the description below and we've got an awesome set of stuff for you yeah and so when we are getting less traffic to our websites this is the whole zero click marketing thesis right this is where this comes into play because that one this is now we're talking about how do you win in a world where you were getting fewer and fewer clicks and ever and so the other thing i want people to think about is okay google is sending fewer clicks but also google is still the largest refer of traffic because people are still using google right like something like eighty percent of search happens on a traditional search engine most of which is google after that people are searching for things on e commerce sites social media and the last of which is ai or ll tools that represents about three percent so even while we feel like more and more people are using ai tools google's is not sending clicks people are still using google and the other thing to note is that if people are also searching on e commerce and social media that also means that there is a one in five chance your user is searching for your solution in a place other than google and so that actually does give us the data right the data that shows oh this is why we actually do need to market where our audience is which e commerce platforms are they using which social networks are they using what ai and search tools are they using which new sites do they frequent right all of those places we should be marketing in those places and now we know where to do that kind of marketing part of this data i think for anybody watching us to understand the magnitude and here something you and i talk a lot about we get a lot of questions about is people will ask us hey should we just like abandon traditional search engine optimization and just do this new answer engine optimization stuff and all the data that we talked about on the show so far today would suggest know that that would be a bad idea and in fact the challenges that search has diversified so much that you need to do traditional google search and search and optimization and any other relative search engines to your market which could be tiktok if your a consumer good it could be certain review sites if you're a b b company if your e commerce could be amazon etcetera like what's your take here and if somebody's watching this in terms of where they should focus their time and effort to get customers from people out there searching willie this is just kind of best practice marketing and that you start with what platforms are relevant to your ideal customer profile and then based on the platforms how do you reach that person and predominantly what's been true forever is google search has been the most relevant platform for most companies right most people are doing their research on there and so you want to invest in search and i think what the data is starting to show is search is being democrat and search is being diversified across platforms and i think that's gonna continue to happen and so you would want to step back and say okay well where do i need to be what platforms are applicable to my customer and then based upon those platforms how best do i reach them and i think google search will still be one of those platforms but i think over time it will not be as important as it has been i see no world where google search is the predominant way that someone discovers and buys products in the future yeah absolutely i mean i think more and more we need to think about search as less of a platform and more of a behavior right love that search happens everywhere right kip and i live through this right i think hubspot probably were the poster child for a company that lost a lot of traffic yes i know kip has a great sec the clicks went down we lost a hundred and forty million visits in over a twelve month period of time so we kinda had to like figure it out but what i think most people would probably want to know next okay this is great i'm getting a real idea of what's going on but what the hell do i actually do and so maybe we could get into if you're a business that has been fundamentally dependent on google search and that there's this kinda rises air click searches what advice are we given people in terms of how to do marketing in this kind new phase of the internet yeah i think we can lead into that by if it's okay i don't know if you've covered it a lot in the show before but if we unpack the hubspot traffic thing first and talk about what people can learn from that yeah can we do that yeah i've been talking about hubspot in my keynote on straight and marketing yeah thanks man what's funny this thanks tell the world that we're mad but but it's funny like hot hubspot used to be like oh search is awesome and look at the hubspot story and then it was like search is being disrupted look at the hubspot story we tell you what i've been telling and then you can tell me like oh or dumb and we hate it okay so i've been telling people it was about hubspot losing about eighty percent of organic traffic this was q three or q four twenty twenty five yep and you know this kind of went viral and seo communities people were like well whoa no hubspot what are they gonna do but at the same time in q four twenty twenty five that was when hubspot also reported all time highs in terms of revenue so hubspot didn't actually lose money right but when we look at the pages that lost traffic the pages that lost traffic where things like most popular movie quotes how to find the shrug emoji we are gonna straight on our own journey oh my gosh hate this is actually turning into a roast session i love it no gosh no never no joking i'm we're fine but hubspot kept the traffic on all the search terms that matter yeah crm automation software right all those things which are core to what you do right that actually drives your business forward and so i've been talking about this you know to pick a fight no no i'm kidding of to show people like seo used to be about this bigger game of let's get bunch of organic traffic and then we'll grow from there but now it's become more you just need to get the right traffic right i think we say a similar thing to you about that that we lost a lot of low quality traffic right and we were able to use ai to create a much better experience for the traffic that we did get to monetize it in a more effective way right like karen and that's i think that's essentially the the story here well for better and for worse i think there's one thing and you have said this in the past and i think you and i are totally align with this which is if you are going to do something a true scale and really try to be world class in that thing you will always get over your skis and so if you want to grow traffic in a way that no other b company has grown traffic before you will go over the edge of what you should do because you were trying to get real scale and so i think we lost some things we shouldn't rank for because we were really trying to like build an just the limit push limit bar limit and so we lost some stuff that really we shouldn't have rank for then we lost the i think the one thing that people did miss is take catch point and you brought it up as well is there's like traffic you shouldn't have because it doesn't convert and we lost a bunch of that and that was us going over our skis then there's what we would call historically like low quality traffic right so we had like high intent traffic and low intent traffic we lost low intent traffic but i would say because we had so much low intent traffic it actually did generate a lot of demand for us because you have to keep in mind that at one point we had more traffic each month than like a tech crunch or entrepreneur dot com and so even small conversion rates which i think on low quality traffic was zero point five percent it's still netted i'd actually reasonable demand so that was a hold that had to be filled but i think the way i think about marketing today is there is now a fundamental difference between building an audience and building the right audience mh and those two things are fundamentally different things now absolutely i mean you could probably pick out just about any creator or brand whatever you wanna call it right who has a sizable audience and look at the platform they're on and well this is personal right but like how much money do they make right like yeah you look at all these tiktok influencers if you just like have that right recipe for the viral video right you can grow your following very quickly on tiktok and then you see a lot of these people you know i guess i don't know if it's happening now but at least a couple years ago a lot of these creators started selling merch right like t shirts their catch phrases all that stuff like did people actually buy them you know yeah and you also see a lot of these creators like they don't exactly quit their full time job to no sell t shirts that say nope it's restock time well i i think this is an important thing for help everybody understand is i think that all of this the zero click market road it's a net positive for the world of marketing it might be painful for many of us marketers over the transition but i don't know what both of you think it's like the last fifteen years you could monetize a transient audience an audience of just a random person searching for you finding this thing once and like you sell of a product and you move on now to really grow and monetize effectively i think you have to build a loyal audience and gain trust influence and credibility and then what happens with those loyal audiences is you monetize them at a much higher rate so that's like how the math works but it's a very different way of thinking and i think most marketers in what i'd call the inbound marketing era from like mid two thousands to like kinda twenty twenty two twenty twenty three had to ob assess about like i'm just gonna you know there's a bunch of fish swimming down the stream and i'm just gonna like yank a few out and now it's like no i gotta have a pond of of all my fish right and i think it's it's just a very different way to think about running a marketing strategy yeah and i think we're gonna see a lot of going back to basics because then how do you do that you also do that through really good positioning right really good positioning states exactly who you are who are for but it also states who are you are not for yeah you know does your experience with ai sound a little something like this you've been prompted for twenty minutes the output is polished confident and completely useless that's what happens when ai doesn't know anything about your business hubspot ai works with your actual customer data every interaction every signal your team has generated over time so instead of prompt and hoping you ask once and ship it check hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses i think the challenge is today because you're online and marketing through platforms you were trying to balance marketing for the person and marketing for the algorithm and that is actually the hard thing and so there's a creator who i think is a really good writer that was in the kind of product growth space and doing really well and then i've seen him on x like have viral x threads for every topic you could think through medicine movies nothing to do with his wheel wheelhouse and he's obviously using ai and so he's chasing the creator payouts at the expense probably of his audience because now he has a really mash up of like people who are not interested in his core thing that he's actually known for right and i i think about that for the marketing against the green our youtube channel is i think there was a period of time this year where we got burned type because we're like trying to figure out if we should chase the algorithm and actually start produce content i don't still don't think either us a enjoyed actually doing no and then as soon as we went back about six weeks ago to just do stuff like let's just do this because it's a cool thing to do the channel's doing better we feel better and so i i think that is the the dilemma for folks is there is the algorithm and what's the best example of this is steven bartlett steven bartlett started with ceo channel was like for a long time it was used to be a diary of him being a ceo and then he changed it up to be business podcast now i would say that youtube channel is one hundred percent just tailored to what the algorithm wants there's no other strategy than like what the algorithm wants and that works for him right but there's a continual balance between those two things that's such an interesting call out because if you are a creator just trying to chase the viral vitality of those creator payouts it's a volume game right now you have to appeal to as many people as possible but then in doing that you have to just kind of do everything exactly which basically just means you're playing an information arbitrage game you're a horizontal creator yeah steven bartlett is a horizontal creator you go from politics and if you actually look at the thumbnail like because i've done some of this and all the people have done it but it's pretty much all fear mon and not again i think his podcast is cool but it love steven bart one hundred percent dictated by the algorithm it's like so laser focused and on the algorithm and so and if he wanted to do a different type of podcast that appeal to only ceos it would not be the number one podcast in the world what she has right now right would be a very different podcast but i think that horizontal creator play is not a good thing for most people because it just dilute deletes your audience if you're ever gonna sell something it's really hard to sell something to to that kind audience absolutely what's the expression it's those riches and the niches yeah yeah and i think that's true than ever i literally i was about to say something similar that i think we live in a world that drastically favors depth right would you have a democrat access to intelligence with chat claude per complexity whatever the breath is covered now you might wanna get breath package in a cool way from somebody like legacy stephen bartlett but i don't know that you can have karen like thousands of stephen barclay right like that there's gonna be only a few people view steven bartlett though you can have hundreds of thousands millions of people who are really deep on something and it's like wow if i care about this thing this person has spent more time effort thinking and doing this thing than anybody else and that i think even is extremely niche is we used to think this was important like ten fifteen years ago it's ten times more important now because of ai yeah right that's such a good point i think there are now more people or more creators who have kind of started to go in that horizontal direction but that's only after many years being focused on depth right you know i think like maybe one good example of this might be cody sanchez right right like years and years ago she was known for boring businesses buying up laundromat right like that was what she talked about and i know i think she still does but in the recent years she starts to talk about business a little bit more generally and so where that works for her is probably that she established that long standing credibility deep in that area of expertise before kind of expanding a little bit more and now she might be a little bit more mainstream or more and more people are hearing about her who aren't you know her core listeners or her core audience and they might still think of her as like oh isn't she the laundromat lady but she is also more than that right yeah yeah yeah start deep and then kinda brought night okay so we've gone kinda gone through the hubspot story i think we should try to then give people some advice but i what is the zero click mark and playbook or how have you and ron thought about that yeah so the book is actually starts out with a bit of a a brief history of digital marketing which i think is kind of fun but then we dive into five rules for the zero click marketing playbook and so the first one is gain a deep understanding of your audience truly understand like what their pain points are what influences them where they're hanging out but two then go where your people are we broke that out as a separate rule because it's really crucial for marketers right business leaders to know exactly where your audience is hanging out three stop fighting the tide and give platforms and people what they want right so this is a little bit of like do we optimize for people or the algorithms right and it we say you can do both there's the way to do both you have to do both you have to do about you right you do have one or the other you're not gonna be as successful as you need too that that's a good point it isn't really a choice it's you have to do okay fourth it's build a zero click marketing flywheel that scales with decreasing friction and then the fifth one the last one is lean on measurement not attribution to prove value so that actually represents a big chunk of the book we have a whole section on just measurement versus attribution incremental lift blah blah blah so those are the five rules what's the most important i think the most important one at least for today is go where your people are right understand your audience and go your people are we've talked about how that sounds obvious because it's like saying oh just go do really good marketing but how do you do that what does that actually mean so that's what i wanna know right so it's you can't stop at oh my audience uses linkedin so i'm gonna go there or oh they watch youtube maybe i'll make videos it's like that's the first part of it right so it helps is to ask progressively more useful questions so figure out channel source tactic right like which channels actually reach your audience right like sure everyone today is on every social media platform but which one is the one that matters most for your audience and for you right so which channels actually reach your audience two what are their sources right like which specific people publications podcasts subreddit communities influence your audience where they already are and then the last one is tactic figure out your tactic what can you actually do with those sources on those channels can you pitch them on some c marketing can you do some creator sponsorships do a little bit of digital p right and then if you can or if it makes sense too the last thing to think about is where is our team actually good you know like is your team made up of really strong writers then i still think that focusing on a really good blog or newsletter is still a great way to produce content if you have someone on your team who's pretty charismatic or good at video the great right video yeah it's a figure out what you're good at what your team kinda likes because the other thing too is you you know this is harder to quantify as like a business kpi but part of it is if you or your team don't like being on a certain platform it's probably not gonna be that successful you know like you you kind of have to also lean into your strengths like a really good example of this that i always love is the duo social media accounts right it's like they just decided they were gonna master replies and funny replies yes they had some really cool stunt and stuff too but like that's something anybody can do they just decided hey we have a unique personality we've got a cool brand and we're just gonna lean into it hard and i think that's part of like when you say go where the people are it's not just like go and show up there it's like go in an interesting way that's authentically you that's going to help you stand out and really connect with people in a way that you're failing to do right now yeah yeah and also i'm glad you brought up duo because the other thing too is really focus on that zero click value and so zero click value what that means is giving the value native to platform that stands alone on its own without needing further context right so you can consume all the videos on their tiktok channel featuring duo the owl and whatever you don't have to have a duo account to get value from it right like there might be some niche stuff sure right those deep cut references sure but you can just watch all their videos and have a good time with it so for them the zero click value was entertainment brands don't all have to do entertainment but that was their form of the zero click value i i think that's really interesting point you know karen something you and i have talked about before but i think it's really relevant here when you are trying to build those deeper relationships what you end up doing is building like some level of value debt like there are some brands and people i follow where i feel like i'm getting so much value like i feel obligated to go like buy their product or buy their book or like period i think there will be a bunch of people who watch our show that they'll they'll buy our book because they'll like oh wow don't know if i need this book or not but i've watch like a hundred episodes of this podcast and like man i should go by the loot book because i just i feel like they'd spend a bunch of time and giving me a lot of value i wanna like participate in that and i think that is a lot of the way commerce happens now in a way that i don't think a lot of businesses understand they understand and it's hard to measure it is hard to measure yeah so if you were lesson in you're like okay well i definitely need figure out what are the best platforms for my audience what is the best way to do that other than like trying a bunch of different platforms is there like a pretty easy way that people can go figure out what are those platforms there is and i at the risk of sending release held promotional but i am chief evangelist there at spark toro you could create a spark toro count we also have free accounts so i don't feel too bad saying this but you could type in a search like just describing your audience and plain language like oh my audience ceos of compliance companies and then you hit enter whatever and then we'll run a work for you based on search data clicks stream data and some social data and will literally show you where your audience over or under indexes on certain platforms relative to the average us web user we also work in like canada and the uk so that is also a part of our dataset but that way then you can search for your audience and then you can look at it and go oh this is really interesting like my audience happens to really over index on claude like maybe i should do a little bit more like ai optimization so that i can get picked up by these tools like claude people will find me there was a recent analysis i did on it was an audience of skincare enthusiasts like i was playing with this idea skincare enthusiasts you was in that audience enthusiasts i've been on the korean skincare products crazy what's going yeah so you could you do a search for that right so i would play this idea of like led light therapy masks the really expensive god we have one of those you just reminded me we have one of those we bought a really expensive one and have not opened it yet few months ago you've just reminded me to open it that is all the time bought that i've bought that i love it great which kind i'm not just by the way the most hearing thing so fine the way i look for products and this is not the way like this why you would never look for investment advice i just associate it'd be in the most expensive one where it it'd be in the best once yeah whatever voice best one is the one i have the technically best is rarely the the know but then i don't have to research that is my thing was like i this takes removes time for me having to do any research yeah i think like key learning amanda is that at some point we're gonna go christmas shopping at kira house but it's a bunch of open product yeah god that we can get at all at night tonight so this is great well i mean that's interesting though because so the led light masks there are a lot of really really cheap ones but okay this is kind of an aside like guess an like as a care ent a lot of the clinical like studies showing the benefits of led light therapy it's on like medical devices so if you're buying a super super cheap mask most likely it's not going to be at that quality of medical grade devices so here it makes sense that you would choose the most one because they're most likely yeah but anyway update him don't balance okay so i did an analysis a spark search on this audience like who's likely to buy this four hundred dollar mask and the interesting thing that i saw was that this audience really over indexes on claude they use chat gp like average compared to the average web user but they use claude a lot more frequently than the average web user and even just having that little that seemingly small data point that kind of also shifts your mindset about the kind of user that might buy this product you know because totally does i could picture them now it totally does right because then you start thinking basement block coding away with with the red light last out of everywhere i'm wearing the mask told you get you can still you can still it your computer while i use that your promo i got a for this episode karen it's just a video of you in the red light mask i'm gonna have it on the next episode but that'll be the youtube up now with an next one but so anyway like you can use it tool like spark toro i i think spark might be the only one that offers this though to get a sense of what your audience is like what tools are using what platforms are on because like we just said that data point alone tells you a lot about who that user who that audience member probably is right it it gives you those clues of like how do i market to them what are the way they think about these problems and i don't know just thinking about like the fact that they use claude so much more than chat gp i find that really fascinating because it i just kinda tells me to like are they making like agents yeah they do like are they using claude code or lot you know you know like what are they doing and they're spray throughout the other facets of life and how can we kind of meet them where they are yeah okay i'd love the rules from the book karen did you have anything else before we closed out today today's show no the one thing you definitely have in your favor today but it may be getting hard to get distribution in certain platforms but it's never been easier to understand your customer yeah and you can really target again going back to like there's riches in the niches like you can really laser target marketing at a core audience and i think that is where marketing is going back to we had a say in when we got hit by that traffic decline we were moving from volume to value which means we were really focused on like how we create more value for our target audience and i do think that is a way to do that is having a much better understand another i love that amanda a good luck on the launch and at everything of zero click marketing i hope everybody goes out there and checks it out and thanks for sharing all your thoughts and date on show oh my god thank you for having me thank you so much this was so much fun let me tell you about a show i love science of scaling hosted by mark robe each week host mark robe founding cro at hubspot senior lecturer harvard business school and c founder of stage two capital sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets strategies and tactics to scaling your company's growth they just did a great episode titled the only sales role that will exist in twenty thirty with christopher o'donnell founder day ai it's a must listen listen to science of scaling wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hotspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot grow better

we have the best entrepreneur i know da shah c founder of hubspot he's got a brand new project he's gonna take us through a tour of what the heck is happening in ai right now why everybody needs a solo crm and second brain work on a day to day basis and more importantly where's is all of this going and stick around because he's giving you a super secret discount code for his new app use spot that is exclusive to the show this is going to be a bang so let's get right into today's show okay dawn mash welcome back to this show always excited to have you on where we wanted to start dim is that you've been deeply in the weeds of ai for some amount of time you've built a bunch of different things and you're seeing what's not working and basically what do users love what's working in an ai knife so can you maybe just give us the the landscape you know how is ai working today and what are you excited by well thanks for having me again on the show if we back to prehistoric times which is november of twenty twenty two at the chat moment right everyone's sort of woke up to chat is like oh this is amazing can do amazing things and it could and the interaction model at that time was you sort of typed in a prompt and and something often useful and sometimes amazing came back and although no one really named the moment there was a similar moment that it happened november of last year and what happened was multiple models around the same time frame got much much better from a reasoning perspective so back then you issued a prompt it would do its best it would just like a first pass like here's your thing and you could obviously interact with the output but in november of last year what happened is the model sort of got better at reasoning and self reflection so you could give it a higher order task that would take longer so it would kinda take its time with it and sometimes you could even instruct it's like hey you know think deeply about this one you know take your time and it's important and it would go do that the primary use case that sort of really blew up as a result of that capability is agent coating or a pipe coating which is now you can give it a a coding task and it can go and can go do things and produce something not just a line of code not just one module but build entire products or apps or features and things like that so that's the sort of curve we've been on and i've been kinda all over the ai thing but now it's like i was up till four am last night gentle coating on yeah know the new project which which we'll talk about and the reason is it feels like like i have this you know superpower and it would be like a waste of the universe's time for me to go sleep it's like i've got access to this thing how can i sleep like that's not you know because like that's you know five hours i'm gonna lose you know building this next thing that i can go and obviously that's not sustainable well i'm that's suggesting you know every and you know work twenty four seven or something like that but it's just so much fun because now you can sort of willing into existence a feature or an idea or a project or a article or a book or anything because the models have gotten you know just so good now yeah you know you c find hubspot the hubspot and then you have built a bunch of things since then and one of them was agent dot ai and was a marketplace for for agents and then as you said like things have evolved even more since you had started that project and so november reason got a lot better what are things that you can do now that you had dreamed about that you couldn't have done pre those models like what has really changed for the things you can bring into the world yeah so agent dot ai is now you know part of hubspot in a new product we just launched called agent builder so we lost for the marketplace that's the part that did really work i don't think the world was ready for an app store for agents just quite yet i think it's gonna happen someday day it will happen but agent builder is now part of hubspot and what i've been working on is this thing i've had in my head for a while now called youth spot and what you spot is is a a crm for one person companies but it's part of use spot with part best sort of really fun and interesting about it is this thing called second brain yes and you know there's lots of different definitions of it but i'll give you mine since i own the domain second ring dot com i get to oh you know that ambition oh jealous of your you do so and i've had it for a year so it's it's not you something that just you know crossed my mind but how many people have tried to give you money for that domain a fair number act on my list of domains that out ranks like i own v coating dot com also which is i've seen that i mean i own prop dot com anyway bunch related domains if you think of any ai word ga owns it dot com tyler own house trying to i know always succeed hey if you're enjoyed today show we have put together some of the best ai resources on the plan to help you get better at marketing with ai you can scan that qr code above or you can click the link in the description below and get those right now but the idea of a second brain is sort of almost self des write the idea this kind of digital auxiliary to your own personal brain right so we have awesome brain very energy efficient and and they're great and they build memories over time and you know when we sleep they sort of kinda factor the stuff that you've remembered and things like that there's all this kinda magic biology that happens but there are also limitations to our human brains which is okay well it can only hold so many things in current memory at a single time sometimes it sort of loses the plot because there's only so much you know capacity it has so there's limitations to it it's also limited in the sense that we only have one of them that that there's only so much you can do is the idea of a second brain is a power boost for your brain it's so now that we have ai can we say oh well ai has been progressing and that's been awesome the models have gotten smarter and that's like the iq getting higher and higher but the reality is the model itself is sort of frozen in time right whenever the training happened it's like okay the wait scott established and now it's this black box that you can kinda feed things into and get things out of but it has no concept of memory on its own right and what second ring does is it kinda supplements an ai model with an actual memory and things that it should know about you your business the things you're trying to do and what's happening in your world and can sort of bring that in and then it can be layered on top of a frontier model like a gp now six astro or you fable or anything like that and and you can sort of do like much more amazing things than you were able to do even a year ago that's the part that's exciting so in terms of the second brain this was like a thing that caught on after andre k x open ai i think founder talked about yeah creating an l wiki for their agents so the agent can kinda have the own level wiki which means it has memory and can get to know things over time and i think the concept that maybe you're excited by is that you as a person collect information you collect information in the emails you receive you collect information in the delinquent lincoln contacts that you get you collect information from the meetings that you have like meetings have become much more valuable but not because instead of trying to jot down a couple of notes you actually have the full transcript and ai can parse that and get smarter over a time but is the way you think about the value of the second brain as pre ai you had all of this information that you were collecting and that you probably were either unaware of how valuable it was or you just could not keep in top of and now you'd have a real agent system that has per persistent memory and can actually make sense of that and value of that for you as the user yeah that's exactly it so you know pop kinda l wiki idea which you know really blew up with especially within the kind of geek tech circles the idea was to be able to take things that you might have an enough ob sitting in or on your file system on your local mac or the the mac mini you bought just to do this kind of stuff and you can run an l against it sort of builds this wiki with you know pointers between documents and things like that so it sort of creates this network style or graph style structure using the power of an l and then you can sort of chat against that kind of personal wiki so the underlying concept is kind a very second brain ish it had a couple of challenges to it one is you sort had to run it on your local machine and there are benefits to that for sure but it also sort of kinda pre poses that you're gonna be able to reduce the things that you want in the wiki into some sort of file yeah resin on your file system because that's the that was used to kinda slur in know data violate l and my thinking on this and i'm gonna geek out for just a little bit in that concept with the the l wiki you know the file was effectively the primitive and then you can use that to kinda build out the wiki and do inference around it the way i'm thinking about in the second brain that's inside you spot is there's a set of primitives but the primitive that i think about is is i it's an object and there are different kinds of objects of which file is one you could have an email you could have linkedin post you could have a linkedin end and all those objects that they're related to each other have connections between them forming this very very rich graph of nodes and edges connections between these objects and so what's cool is that then you can say okay i'm i've got this way to hold things in this kind of object with links between object's format now i can build connectors to say okay i'm going to bring in information from this thing from my email from my linkedin from my twitter from my whatever and the brain sort of gets bigger and bigger over time and then as you interact with it even the prompts that you put in and even the questions that you ask even the response emails that you send are all objects so the the kind of phrase i have in my head is like everything in you spot is an object everything right like your history everything all the memories and it glean everything that's sitting in this object and now it's like you can expose that second brain across multiple interfaces the most natural is you spot has a chat interface as you would expect very much like gp or a claude and you can interact with your second brain you can put things in you can pick things out you can have long running tasks you can run cloud agents against it this is a very kinda open call or hermes inspired cloud agents that say oh i've got your second brain i'm watching for this kind of stuff and you can kinda program your own agents to run on top of it and then you can also just provide that second brain to any ai app that you're using over mc so the idea is build this set and brain it's value compounds compounds over time it learns from you and the things you plug into it then you make that second brain available to yourself directly and that yourself indirectly possibly through a chat or a quad so it's sort of portable so you build it you owed it it's yours and you take it with you wherever you want and you can build agents on top of it and things like that i brought it up so i wanna make sure people get that concept because it is something you have to wrap your head around if you think of this as a personal crm and you're thinking like contacts and companies because when you go into your second brain on you spot you see like tweets that i've sent tied and then briefings ins and you can see our prompts you can see all of the interactions happening so kip and i did a really popular youtube episode of had a bunch of linkedin reactions and you can actually go into like who's like it stores everything as an object so it's like this giant knowledge graph of everything happened across the data sources that you want to populate you well there's a couple magic things happening here wonder mesh the whole second brain concept i think was kinda relegated to do for a while like oh i've got my ob upstate in database and i know how to set it up and it's like very should i be offended or i'm not sure that should definitely be offended not no you should be if an you're door you like me in a door it's fine shout it to someone here while you say because there's this guy called eric morrison der you should check i know if you've seen this guy in youtube at eric morrison he's yeah he basically does like these amazing like ten eleven minute videos making fun of ai influencers and he did one on like second brains and it's one of the best and funniest videos you'll watch and it's all of the people who have created second brains on instagram and like okay just door out on them so yep i agree yep i do agree that it is like i would count myself as like a secondary indoor the reason i'm bringing this up is der i've had the good pleasure of knowing you for gosh fifteen plus years now and you're really good at taking this thing that was for these really technical people and making it accessible for everybody you know you know the every person version and i looked at what you've done with the second brain and people be like oh well he actually puts a second brain thing made it easy put it in the cloud i'd actually argue you're rei imagining what people should think a crm is it used to be the crm is like oh i have this person's exact name address email phone number and that's how i think about my relationship with them and it's like oh they like my linkedin post or may watch my youtube video that's like it's completely different way to think about the relationships we have with each other especially if you're like a solo and you would have never been able to like fathom tracking this stuff before yeah that that that's exactly and i'm you know thinking for the the do reference of chime i'm definitely work for what sort of the you know course of my life over the last now thirty plus years is i take things that only do could use or would use and democrat it for others it's effectively that's true you know twenty years ago when hubspot started was there's this thing called the internet and you know you can now build applications of not just static web pages of some you can actually you know build websites that serve customers and build applications or whatever and there should be billions of businesses benefiting from this thing called the internet and let's go build something and and democrat kinda access to what was them called inbound marketing and now it's the same sort of it's like okay there's this new thing called ai and we're just on the you know very very pre and we sort of get to you know geek out on on these kinds of things but you know there are tens of millions hundreds of millions of people that are sort of using ai to you know some minimal degree but there's so much more they could get out of and and what even from business context like crm i think the the evolution of crm will be at the heart of it this kinda second brain style context and hubspot building that for go to market teams and i'm sort experimenting on the fringes and you spot is specifically focused for one person companies it's like if it's just you you're a solo operator yeah this is the crm for you right it's so a very lightweight second grade oriented crm and then we are so one of the very first emails we exchanged to post the chat moment is like we said there will be more smaller companies and turns out that that it started to happen to the extreme where like there's a lot more solo and very very small companies because you can now do a lot more with ai and i think the needs for those people are very different you're kind of showing like even the context in second brain is very interesting because it's like those are all people who have interacted with you can use spot in some way on across your different social accounts or email or what have you but the other thing der is said it's like very proactive like my you spot daily email is like become one of my most read emails just because it has all this knowledge about me and it's like kinda managing me and it's telling me where the opportunity is you know we're launching this loop book in a couple of weeks and it's like all a lot of that emails is about that and it's like fascinating how good that stuff now is yep two things one on the kind of small business front some stats i think are fascinating so the world have seen an increase in number of new company formations that's been happening now and the us census bureau puts data out strike puts data out in twenty twenty five we have the record highest number of new company formations in the united states than we've ever had in in history and roughly just a little under five million new businesses were formed through july of this year we've already exceeded four million so we're it two twenty twenty six will be another record year so that's actually interesting what's even more interesting is the us census bureau breaks this out they have they bucket all the new company formations into two types of companies they're the companies that are one person companies and will remain that way they have no plans or unlikely statistically to hire an employee in the next two years that's how they define these kind of one person you know solo companies and then they have the other bucket which is people that are likely yep they're one person right now but they're likely to grow into companies that will have employees and will grow beyond the one person the percentage of new company formations right now that are not expected to hire any employees by the us census bureau definition is now eighty six percent are not expected to hire eighty six percent of all new companies started are not expected to hire not expected to hire and so and yeah they may be right they may be wrong sure but they have a crap ton of data and they do it statistically based on the industry based on the geography based on everything they're like okay based on what we know these are companies that are likely to have employees in the classical sense so it's not gonna be just the you know the original prop provider or founder owner of the company so anyway and that sort of makes intuitive sense now right it's like okay a lot more people are gonna be like oh i could do things i couldn't do before as a result of ai then there's obviously the dark side of ai we're seeing labor market disruption we're seeing roles being reshaped and redefined and so a lot of people are like okay well yeah things are either unstable maybe i got laid off i can go start a company right i can go do i've been had i had this idea to be a consultancy in whatever domain that i had expertise and why not put up my shin up now and and get started i think unless year like in the very small like there's when i say small group i mean i like there's still that group is still big and like real ai pill people unless you have fully connected your reason model to all of your context and tools that can automate tasks you probably still don't really understand how incredible ai now is for you to do work and one of the reasons for that i think one of the concepts that would be really cool for you to explain you talked about one of the shifts is the reason i'm all it's got better in november so you could bring the do key second brain than i was do second brain and it does take a lot of setup and it does take a lot of like logic and how how to do it and everyone could benefit from this but i think another development from what i see in the industry is agent harness that's all anyone talks about his ai pill it's harness so could you maybe explain what is an agent harness and why that was so valuable to the building of you spot you know everyone talks about the models right models get the headlines it's stable five point one is z t six astro but it's the hardest that actually delivers the results and the way to think about it the you know best analogy i have is the ai model think of that as the engine of of a car right it's like it's got a horsepower it's the thing that sorta of has all the kind of latent energy that can actually do something or a battery if you're in the e kind of thing but that on its own obviously is not gonna get you from point a to point b you actually have to have the car right and the car is what kind transports you and so the harness is effectively the car it's the thing that harness is the engine or the battery and says okay i'm gonna put wheels on i'm gonna give it a steering wheel also that human even can drive it maybe put a gps there so the odds of you getting to point via you know go up all the things that sorta of capture the energy of the engine the model so to speak and sorta direct it for a particular goal or outcome you're looking to achieve so that's what a harness is so even when you're interacting with something like chat or clot c or pick your thing of choice you're not interacting with the model you're interacting with a harness in those cases that open or t build and where the real sort of energy in ai is now is building custom harness that says okay chat is great for that awesome love it claude is great for this but you spot itself is implemented as a custom ai harness so say okay if i were building an ai app that was solely for one person companies that did crm and had a second brain what would that harness look like what tools would i give what data would i give it access to what skills would it have what are the interfaces look like and so you can sort of say i want my particular kinda ai harness for my particular purpose to behave in these ways and that's effectively what a harness is it's like custom building a car effectively based on what you want to do with that the engine alone doesn't do very much yeah it's amazing but it doesn't do that much on its own your agenda harness purpose bill for solar finder who would want to use this and when you dreamt up you spot use it for a watt what were your like you're a founder who does a bunch of things like what did you want to use for i'll give you like an example is there are things that i should be doing that i don't and the reason i don't do them is because the economic cost in terms of calories i would have to spend to do the thing mh are just high enough that i'm never gonna get to so they just like right under the water level of something that would be interesting so i'll get you that we talked about domain names earlier and i'm a hobby you know domain investor you know i'll get emails offers from people say hey i've got this domain for sale or that domain for sale and i may even go a couple rounds of negotiation based on my level of interest in that domain i'll get know inbound i'll hear about domains someone will tweet at me someone was like so there's all this stuff in the ether and there's no possible human way i'm gonna be able to follow up on all of them right like okay well i don't know what it's worth so i have a tool that i've built that does a domain right this okay based on the words that's used on the length of it all the kind of factors and historical prices or whatever it's like zillow for domain names right trying to come up with a an estimate for the domain value anyway so the use case is take all the things that are in my second brain new things coming into it and tell me if there's some opportunity that i need to be jumping on or something that i start the negotiation and and then i just dropped off because i forgot like it there's no malice intent i was that it was not a negotiating ploy i just i just forgot and now i get this executive briefing email and that kip made reference to and every used spot user gets this it's the kinda of core value prop is that like here's what's going on in your world like you have this negotiation happening by the way the you know hint that domain is valued by our tool three times more than what the the seller currently asking for it to get the deal done you know like if you really want it don't out of lazy that's not do it you know follow up and so every morning now i get this executive briefing that says oh here's what's going on in linkedin hear are the people that are commenting on your post that you haven't heard from before and they have a hundred thousand plus followers because it knows everything about everything that that's more world and that's stuff i want and the kind of final step in the process which i think has been missing for a lot of people is that that's so i get this exact briefing awesome and it's a useful and then it's like as i get the exact briefing it's like oh it would be so much better if it also knew this like for instance there were a time when it was not connected to twitter it's like well there's some things that happened in twitter that also should be part of my second brain so we build a twitter connector and all that stuff comes into the second brain but then the the big leap was like it doesn't always get it right right it'll come up with things it's like it's like oh here's a domain name or whatever it's like yeah that's in manufacturing i i really even if it's a awesome deal it's just not of interest to me right i'm into software into ai here's the thing so i i literally respond the email sends me that you spot sends me and say hey that domain is the manufacturing domain in general i don't care about those and so that fact the fact i don't care about manufacturing domains once again everything's an object goes into an object called a fact fact der mesh is not interested in manufacturing oriented domain names and so now the next time it builds an executive briefing it'll go through the entire second brain of things related to domains what facts do we know about der mesh in his world that will impact and make the next executive briefing better and it takes like thirty seconds for me to respond just like if i had like a all knowing you know executive assistant which i've never had an executive assistant but this is what it would feel like to be able to just kinda ping them with stuff whatever they send me things like let you know and you can send anything to it so like any it doesn't even have to be it could be proactive you can say and you just email agent at use hubspot dot com and say hey i've got this one and in midst of this if i forget this in seven days remind me and and that's you just type that in right and because it's ai it's natural language it'll put that in the brain it'll say oh here's i'm building the exact briefing oh yeah that's right he told me to remind him to do this if you hadn't done that and they can check as to whether and if i had done that don't bother me with right right i did the thing i said i was going to do there don't need for a reminder so it's smart everyone has to kinda learn two things like how to manage someone is you have to like manage the ai and there is like some systems level thinking that you still have to do which is like systems level i'm thinking is basically what are the steps to complete the task yeah to really maximize how you extract value from these things you kinda have to know how to do those two things yeah yeah one thing i i've i've have to share it because of some personal passion for me is that you spot was built for me literally like the company of one was me is like you know outside of hubspot you know i'm doing angel investing and i'm doing domain purchase and things like that and there are a couple things that like annoy me and part of me being me is it's like i try to fix my own annoy is i try to configure the universe university of my liking right in my own small kind of ways and one of things that bothered me about the existing frontier models and models themselves are great and the harness are great but it's like i have fo so i'm i'm a you know regular let's say chat user which i am but then you fable five point one comes was like i i wanna use fable for some things or whatever but then this like i have to bounce over from chat now it's not just the annoy of the fact that i have to switch the ui that takes five seconds no big deal and they're similar as far as the ui the thing that bothers me is all the memory that i have in chat gp it's the thing that not to know me yeah right it's the thing that's holding all this stuff and so when i bounce to you know claude just for a day or a week or something like that now i'm judging claude based on the model when the model is only like a small phrase actually the equation of the the results i'm willing to get it's like if if fable five point one have the same memory that chad gp had the results would be so much better and so part of use spot is the you should own your own memory you should own your own second break and you should be able to take that second brain to chat pt to whatever and you know and use it within a use spot as well but that's the idea is this kind of portable open memory that is yours not kinda bearing frontier harness somewhere so yeah yeah kinda building on that der i think it'd be really helpful there's a lot of like cool hot tools out there that are kinda similar which you have instinct you have g bot you have a meta released tool the day before recording this called muse which are similar blends of this concept you're talking about with you spot right like yeah an agent that's doing some proactive work it has some context second brain type information about you depending on the tool a little different like what do you think about this category of stuff and how does like you spot fit in in that whole world yeah so i think there there's this category loosely called personal ai agents and or assistance and i think it's a massive category it's a consumer product right so you look at you know talent and instinct and others that are in there and rock in it's like there's this whole cluster of things and i think it's a massive massive market but it's also a dangerous market it's gonna be a battle of the titans in that particular market because it's so massive it's like everyone is going to have a play in that market right you're gonna have the philanthropic the open in the rocks and that all of them even apple likely some days is going to be in that in that market and that i i look forward to those days when their consumer great ai products what you find is doing is solving a different problem it's like okay this is not a general like manager family finances and schedule calendar appointments with your kids not that people won't use it for that it's like fine but that's not the use case i'm solving for if i go through the you know we've identified seventy one like here are the things we want people to be able to do like them that are front and center and they're go to market use cases they're about building reach from a marketing perspective they're about winning more deals it's like how does a founder led solo operator what i call like a instead of a solo i called like a super leonard ai powered solo one of the kinds of things they need to do to grow their business right so it's a very much hubspot es thing and once you sort narrow down the focus there are a bunch of things you don't do like you don't have to worry about it like you're building a crm you're not building a thing that can do everything on their son right it's not you know general intelligence or a general assistant so that's yeah what allows me to sleep at night it's like you know i have very few rules in business you know one is never own a restaurant number two is never be a landlord and number three has never compete with sam alt yes you know those might i have simple rules and it's like yeah i don't wanna compete with the open ai and the tropics and and and those consumer players would you say the say brain concept i know you're targeting primarily founders but like any knowledge worker anyone who has data they're collecting like whether it's email or you're linkedin contacts or there's a whole range of different reasons you would use that product is it like founders primarily because it's crm and so the concept of crm is usually associated with the business or how do you think about actually this is applicable to a lot of folks but like it's better to try to dis steal into like a core ic to begin with i'll let you know a secret since it's only the three of us friends you know chatting about things is that the use case and the request for knowledge workers is already there we have hundreds of users that are using it for that use case we even have users that are hubspot customers and that are saying hey just for my own personal i'm a sales rep and i use hubspot and i wanna do it for my own kind of thing in my productivity as i deal like whatever it is i do you know people will use it for you know broader knowledge worth type it doesn't have to know just bc crm you might be you know product manager at a you know software company or whatever and you're not looking to be a a super and mike sort of business approach to this has been when you build the product you need to have like a narrow scope in mind and so like you know so i said okay not just crm broadly not even small business not even vs one person companies then i like then i took it even further like well what kind of one person company is like okay no b2c no e commerce no retail shops no hair salons no restaurants i want to sort narrow in on where would this kind of thing bring the most amount of value right it's like oh considered purchase relationships matter those kind of things that where you would need a crm right that that's the or this kind of a crm and so that's the mental model i have in my hand that's what i build towards and this is the exact same thing we did with hubspot when hubspot started it's like here's a the target market we're building for when we make product decisions and roadmap decisions this is what wins out every single time to argument but if people are are looking to give us money and would be happy customers of the product we have i'm happy to let them use it if you're getting value out of it and wanna give me money more power to them right as long as you won't have them un undo influence the product road roadmap and you keep in mind who you're building for and so right now if you're a knowledge worker and you're like intrigued by the second brand idea and spot dot com you know what we should do here's what we should do so the product is ten dollars a month right now cancel anytime so we'll do a promo code for we'll make it up here on the fly awesome let's say brain the grain okay brain the grain you heard it here i'll put it i'll set it up by before this goes live and i will take the price down from we will say seven dollars instead of ten dollars right now that is the standard price right now oh wow and is it just a is it all subscription or credits as well what if what of your an absolute man and you're you yeah if it's a consumption based model so yeah yeah first launched this it's like okay there's a few things i wanna sort of flip on its head because part of the you know this is kinda inside hubspot baseball but was again where amongst friends is that you know part of the kind of motivation for these kinds of bets is partly testing markets testing new ideas that we can then sorta of carry into hubspot right so there was years ago i had this idea like oh i built something called chat spots it's like chat ux for a b b application is gonna be a thing and so that idea kinda carry through and we have what is now reed assistant which is awesome so i need a hubspot in pretty much every other crm is it's like oh it's got crm with ai really cool ai inside a you spot invert that it's like it's ai that has crm inside right that has some tools and skills and things like that that are for crm but it's actually an ai harness that's what it is the station is ai and so one of the things that i wanna test i wanna test monetization models right i wanna say okay well we just went to pure consumption based model what does that look what does the adoption look like for you know this end of the market and obviously testing the one person company ideas it's like okay well we're gonna see millions of these they're gonna need a crm i think the world needs something more powerful than a spreadsheet instead of putting everything in google sheets but less overwhelming than a full crm yeah that's the lesson we've learned over the years right and this sorta i can meet that goal so i'm like okay can we make it simple enough but it's not as overwhelming as as a full fledged crm would be but you'll get more organized because try to build a second brand in google sheets that's not gonna go very well right like that's not what the thing is designed for so back the monetization thing the thought that i had was okay to test a pure consumption model if i wanna make it pure i would say there is no monthly subscription cost you just pay based on your credit consumption right that's the kind of fullest form of consumption that's a problem in the sense that then there's no credit card on file there's nothing or whatever so the question i asked myself is what's the cheapest i could offer a subscription price and and and still charge a credit card that answer was one dollar so the original kind of launch price for the first one thousand customers was a dollar a month but the idea now is i wanna settle settle in on a price that doesn't make it just appear impulse buy it so it's ten dollars a month is to kind of the official price includes a certain number of credits and my hope is that people will use it more than ten dollars like you're gonna get more of value out it that's the idea right like that's the whole thing and we will have power users that and and we see the same thing in the kinda of the frontier kinda ai apps where they have have a twenty dollar product and a hundred dollar product a two hundred dollar product and it's all based on the value that you're getting and and they have you know customers at all all tiers so anyway that's the thing i'm that's the experiment i'm running what are the really early power users what are the core use cases like we talked about kinda why you got here but like we got you got thousands of people using this thing now like what are people doing so i i think some of the more i'll call it creative use cases is they're storing and what we would in the hubspot world called like custom but they're just making it up in terms of like storing things as a effectively a note and i sorta had this use case in my mind but i really fleshed it out completely is they're doing what we would call like prospecting so like this is the kind of thing i'm selling whatever it might be and they we'll subscribe to newsletter articles and they'll say oh and i i read this stuff whatever like fuck i want you to go through all the things that i subscribe to and then like okay here's a description of the kinds of people i want i want you to scour through everything that goes into my brain and if there anything fits my ideal customer profile i want you to add a a note for me and remind me to do something about it and that's right like just so it's basically like a lead scoring for lack of a better term based on an ideal customer profile describe the natural language and where the input is whatever coming into the second brain and the thing i really like about this and the at my core i have a very limited set of philosophies and one of my biggest ones is the best products end up starting with a very simple set of primitives in new spot there are a very simple set of prem there's objects there's connections between objects there's an interface which is chat like services to get to those things and cloud agents to be able to operate on top of those things on top of the second brain and that's it there is nothing else everything else in the system can be described as well as those other four things and so what ends up happening over the fullness of time is once you get the primitive right ish and primitive enough people will do crazy creative things over time like don't try to pre anticipate all the possible ways that people would put objects and links and inbound connections together wherever and if you make it available via mc p and and you plug in mc p and then it's like they're don't look right like let them kinda filter out what is or is an interesting and let them put the pieces together in in creative ways and then we can take some of those ideas and and build some skills if you will for things that are know more common use cases but yeah i love to show like one quick use case to just to bring it to life this is like pretty simplistic actually but i thought it was like pretty cool which is you know trying to help a company try to hire someone and you can give it a job description and it can extrapolate like the criteria that goes into like well makes that person great and you can enrich it with other things like hey this person is linkedin profile is great this person is great like that's the kind of person i want to hire yeah and it goes okay like that's great i understand who you want to hire and you can give it some say hey like just geo this whatever it may be and then it can scour your linkedin contacts and it gives you like this pretty amazing breakdown of who's in your contacts at the different level that they're at and then it gives you like who's is the best match and then it gives you like who can you can go and ask for a referrals so matt's good friend i didn't even know matt had changed roles so the way because so i i i soon after i ran this i actually reached out to and says hey matt you're were working in a different company and he's like yeah like i've changed roles and i like awesome do you have a referral and so it kinda brings the life how valuable data you have is in a way that you probably don't know the other one that i'm going to run now that i've actually done this that i had thought about kip was anyone like in our posts about loop that has some sort of other relationship to content that would suggest their interest in loop and then you can actually reach out to them and say hey do wanna join the ambassador program that's literally exactly what i was doing right yeah because so that's literally a was gonna have codecs go and computer use and do that for me but yes i was doing that exact same thing i think i can help you manage a lot of your email contacts so tells me what i'm doing today who i i'm meet in all of these different things is like who hasn't go back this is my good friend i talked to whatsapp he's was like ay went quiet like a hundred and thirteen months ago it's like okay some of these people i actually better are say to so is pretty wild how it brings to life like data that you have that's really valuable in a way that you were not able to use again it and it's not like just a second brain because second brain is a lot of like portable memory so i was actually when you were saying that would you ever think about brandon and na a solo crm and portable memory because i just love portable i that's the one the valuable things you can have own your memory as such a great tagline totally but because you've added agents you can create workflows and actions so i kinda get this you know the still crm but maybe we could just touch on why these cloud agents are of value yeah so cloud agents are effectively these little helpers systems agents that are are running once again in the cloud you don't have anything running on your computer that have access to your second brain and you can schedule them it's like hey every monday morning i want you to go do this thing and you describe it in natural language and it goes and does that thing and you can say hey anytime i get an email in from internal email from spot dot com domain let's say i want you to do this thing i wanna scour if it mention these people or this topic or this or whatever ready to the y project and if so i want to label at this i want you to text to me because you know it's it's important or whatever you know send me a notification and that's the idea it can sort of watch and do work twenty four seven on your behalf in the background right it's like it's always running looking for those triggers either scheduled or when something happens for instance one of the ones that i have running is if someone mentions hubspot on linkedin and that post gets more than i think i have it set at twenty likes or something like that send me an email i just wanna know mh or included like in the next briefing i just wanna know with it oh something and then i have a if someone said something negative about host hubspot and only has two likes i wanna know right and it's that kind of thing as that you can use it as monitoring to trigger automations data lead scoring any number of kinda use cases but that's that's the the fundamental premise i love love the idea little helpers so you can help you take action on your second brain this is awesome dha i will be in the product and i'll come back to you guys some thoughts k appreciate your support thanks for yeah this is was fun thank you alright bye while that was an incredible walk through da mesh we appreciate under understanding where you are living in this ai world taken us through you spot given our listeners a super valuable discount code we love that you can find that down in the description below we'll see everybody real soon on the next episode of marketing against the grain let me tell you about a show i love science of scaling hosted by mark robe each week host mark robe founding cro at hubspot senior lecturer at harvard business school and c founder of stage two capital sits down with the most successful sales leaders in tech to learn the secrets strategies and tactics to scaling your company's growth they just did a great episode titled the only sales role that will exist in twenty thirty with christopher o'donnell founder day ai it's a must listen listen to science of scaling wherever you get your podcast this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow at

danny young is the c founder of supplements brand i eight they have gone from zero dollars in revenue to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue in under two years and eighty percent of that is coming from meta advertising on this episode we get danny to disclose his entire playbook how they do creative ad tests and a scale and the one thing that truly matters for anyone to scale a matter whether you're spending a small amount of money or a large amount of money danny gives all of the secrets all of that and more on this episode to mark against the grain dani welcome to the show thank you karen so we are here to talk about growth of the company is pretty incredible we can go in many different i think one of the things we would love to start on because we do have a ton of marketers founders trying to scale our company is just your use of meta and the growth you've seen through meta as a platform i think you're told us right before we came on in camera that you're spending upwards of three hundred thousand four hundred thousand dollars a day at last i heard it was a hundred or a hundred fifty thousand dollars so it sounds like you're still managing to grow through that platform and what i read up in one of your interviews is you feel like they're still eighteenth to twenty four months of runway and so we would love to try to extract the meta playbook from all of the things that you've learned because i think it's as applicable to like bd companies as b b companies and so that would be a great place to start sure i mean you know we started the brand twenty months ago so we launched in december of twenty four yeah last month was our twenty of months so last month we had twenty point nine million in monthly revenue we shipped to forty six countries you know eighty plus percent of our spend currently is on meta so that's something that we've been able to scale quite rapidly over the last twenty months right and of course we've gotten stuck along the way but along each area of that we got in stock i think the key thing that allows us to continue to unlock spend and do it efficiently i would say is content alright because it doesn't matter you know what brand you are whatever it is if you don't have good content good assets you know partnership ads a ton of static tons of videos and a constant refresh of it you know it doesn't really matter right because the reality is you can go on know youtube or whatever and then you can find out you know different meta account structures you know l one l two l and etcetera and then you can test in and revise all of these different aspects i think that's the easy part you know to be fair especially in nowadays with cloud mc how it the at buying part of the process can be so it all goes back to creative a especially van you know how diversify is your creative you know so that's something i spend a lot of time on just ensuring that we constantly we have a flow of new creative and within the new creative how do we fit it in you know into that count karen i heard two things that i wanna make sure i underline for everybody watching on the show one danny is your like eighty percent of our investments in meta one channel right and most companies that i talk to they're way too diversified they don't get special and deep enough in a channel to actually get blow out growth because they just have this scarcity mindset that they're like oh no one channel can be that big for us in how we distribute our product and build our brand and you are actually proving that wrong and i'd love to hear more about how you made that decision and and why you think this works yeah so i think when we think about what we'd be able to do right so you know we'd be able to continue to spend on meta you know from day one we knew that was gonna be a number one channel and of course there has been ups and downs with it know but you know we're it all wise we'd being able to continue to increase spend why keeping cat flat you know so a great example is you know again we just released our q two earnings last week again where a public company listed under p on the nasdaq and so everything everyday mentioning is public information i data point is validated and then so in q we spent roughly a bit think about seventeen million to eighteen million dollars just on paid marketing we had a c of three hundred and five dollars and keep in mind our average order value is roughly about two hundred and thirty dollars so this is quite high average order value and then q two we spent thirty three million dollars pay marketing right and then so you expect that your c is gonna go through the roof alright yeah our c actually dropped from three hundred and five to three zero one mh q two yeah while still remaining that ao and it actually further dropped in july to two hundred and thirty nine dollars per customer and again i think a lot of this has to deal with the creative of diversity and just continue to ensure meta constantly getting these things signals these new creators that we're constantly pushing out right hey if you're enjoying this episode please click the link in the description or scan the qr code because we got a ton of great resources for you could we maybe me dig into the how because i think if you're listening to this and like what i can scale my ad i can improve my efficiency of acquiring that spend like how do i actually do it and i think from what i've heard spending time with some medi folks recently is the ai functionality with meta has become so good that you have to worry much less about targeting and budget optimize and there's two kind core things that people seem to be using a lot of value based bidding and so value based bidding is instead of me saying kinda just acquire a customer or a user i can say no like i'm gonna tag these kind of customers so for you all it could be hey that people who buy the david beckham package is like worth five hundred dollars to us they're the kind of people i want meta to optimize for and then what you mentioned as content right creative test at scale but i don't think people really can fathom the scale we've tried a v setting it didn't work for us yeah so actually that's why we went back to your ceo for all of our ads right and then we've actually found significantly lower cost for us to acquire customer versus v okay you know we run mainly again cb and ninety percent of of our meta ads is on as again we've had a lot of iterations of the structure i think now we've got in a very good home on what structure at least works for us could you maybe describe her audience which each of those things are because they're probably gonna hear the acronyms but not really understand like what are those different targeted options so maybe just talk about the targeted options and how you've tested through those so people can really grasp that right now the meta ai is so smart you know you don't really have to worry about targeting right so instead of targeting you let your creative do the targeting so as long as you have different creative and now are diversified enough then that's where the target comes in play right so even do right now for you know any of our ads we don't have to target men and women eighteen to sixty five blah blah blah all that stuff right i mean right now at our scale we do do certain geo targeting if we wanna to home in but yeah i would say it for the first you know sixteen eighteen months it was those all broad based targeting and letting met ai algorithm decide that because any a lot of times you know everyone's bias and you the marketing guy whatever the always thing they may be smarter than the ips right which is usually the case yeah lot i can do it better about blah yeah etcetera but the reality is you know yeah tell a lot about their founders that operating an hour scale and it's very similar account structures right you let the creative do the targeting i think the key thing is yeah not error reading is gonna work and even if something works well it could work maybe well for two three four months and then stops right and then you're constantly having to reinvent constantly you're having to ting up the structures you know for our longest time you know we had like two hundred different ad now we've limited to roughly about fifty to sixty ad and within these number of ads again you're you're testing your minimum of ten ads per ad and then it could be anywhere between you forty to fifty additional ads depending on whatever a campaign or whatever asset type is in so on the target to make sure people kinda follow along because i think he's system really important which is in the old world if you were trying to target cross right i imagine my cross could be a good target audience for you all you would put in like your targeted option right like probably put in like kinda different crossfit gyms they could have on their profiles all of those kind of things now it sounds like the way you target cross is through the creative so you create actual creative that the ad platform would optimize towards people who are clicking on an engagement with that creative which would be cross is that a good way for like people to think about the change in terms of how you target through the creative versus like you used to target through segmentation and audience lists a hundred percent right so that's why you have to let your creative so you mentioned a good example around well crossfit so for example i say arena right you're world number one tennis player with have love content within her so again we're targeting individuals that like tennis right again we don't actually have to best say and we're targeting tennis players but they were targeting fans of tennis players as well individuals that play due to our ads same day unless with high rocks if you're talking about you know cooking right yeah depending what gl ones jan you're you're targeting that segment but you don't actually have to set anything up in meta to be able to do so here and i think this is like the biggest thing that's changed in advertising that people don't understand is that when you and i were coming in advertising it was all about targeting and you just spend all your time on lookalike likes and email matching and targeting and you spend very little time on creative it like the eighty twenty was like eighty percent targeting twenty percent creative and danny i think you're telling us it's completely flip where it's like targeting needs to be sub twenty percent of your time effort and creative is now the thing i would say it's ninety ten right now yeah oh wow okay right in in terms of creative yeah versus you know what you do on on meta piece right because you even now with meta the ad buying he's a lot of that again you can have parts of that being automated you know with the you know cloud mc p again there's also also a few other software solutions out there that can help you launch ads at scale and then all the key thing marketers need to do now it says really hone on the creators right you know the hoax the ct the yields right i mean one thing that we're constantly looking at also nonsense to click through rates but what's the yield percentage of the click through rates because you could have potentially very high click through rate yeah but then not many people actually land on the website and so there you have a very low yield landing right so for us wise we always wanna make sure that hey you know we don't need you know ten percent click rates where hit us need you know two three percent click rates as long as the yield percentage is above forty percent right so for that type of scale could you maybe give us a quick overview of the size of the team and how you actually scale a creative engine to produce that many different creative for the ads from day one we've always ran this as like a very ai native type of organization not just a marketing team operations finance every single team and what say you know quite ai native yeah i mean right now if you think about where our scale is we guided cast last week right on we'll do in the range of two hundred twenty to two hundred thirty million usd in revenue and we'll have a team about seventy to eighty people right now we have seventy people of course we're hiring additional roles but that means we have roughly about three million usd revenue per employee so i think this it's quite good as you per that metric yeah so i think i mean talk about the marketing team you we have about maybe you know twenty people yeah combined right yeah across all functions and etcetera and is all of that creative coming from that team like an internal team or how have you mentioned you know the amount of creative your producing internal we do work with a few agencies as well in terms of a content because and the reason why we do so it's just making sure that our content is also always very diversified yeah right because yeah know normally if you are of internal everyone gets used to a certain style blah blah etcetera right so that's why you always wanna make sure that you have external agencies that have different styles and etcetera that you can then feed into meta you know ultimately for the creative diversity piece alright by majority i would say is they'll in house and i would say right now it's roughly about fifty five sixty percent static and then the rest videos yeah one thing i wanna make sure i ask because i think i would ask if i was in the audience it's paid advertising historically has been like really data science and quan because you had to do so much on the target budget optimization build your ro models build your for the c models build your payback models you still have to do all of that but because it's tipped so much in towards the content and creative not all historical paid marketers would actually be great at like creative at scale if you're like hey this is a really important part of the business it's a huge part of how we generate revenue it's like twenty four months more scale when you hire for a person who you think can actually up level the creative make it better who are you hiring is it like a traditional paid marketer or is it someone very different than we haven't thought of like what is your profile yeah so i think the key thing now again is it's just gonna be the creative strategist right and oftentimes you'll find you know at the scale wise right and even the biggest companies out there that that was during let's say two to four hundred million revenues i mean the most creative person actually you're always gonna be the founder of ceo they're how ones that are kind of leading this up yeah because you know the product so well they know the ambassadors there's know what's possible and etcetera and that's why you're seeing yeah i lot of the brands that are doing well usually led by highly creative individual at the top yeah basically that's leading everything and then of course you have individuals that you know create their strategies copywriter those are much much more important now than just you know the pay media guy right yeah yeah what one quick follow up you are a serial entrepreneur right if you go to your linkedin profile you're your friend or friend or friend or friend or fend i know you were in group home which i'm sure meant you learned a lot about paid advertising how do you know so much about paid advertising you're like damn and i hate how much he knows about i know just like you know the ins and insides of this and so given that you're just a founder for a very long time when did you learn its depth of knowledge about this yeah i was saying again i mean you know i grew up in the us you know i started working very young yeah technology was something always i would say that came natural to me and of course i love my pay advertising or a customer acquisition experience came and when i moved to hong kong sixteen years ago i launched a e commerce company that was called you by i buy and then that was acquired by group yeah so i group up on and i was their asia ceo i led that from being zero to about two hundred million annual revenue the far and left so i had lots of you know hands on experience and again at those times you really had to quote dig deep in terms of you know targeting segmentation of that and again like you said it wasn't really about to create right you just really had to master the at buying piece of things yeah so i think that gave me a lot backbone into this and you know post group on also was an investor in the early stage you know companies i was an early investor in in honey that i was acquired by paypal i a see an investor in alan which is now europe's largest digital insured about about five billion dollars so through my experience as that my entrepreneur i was able to learn quite a lot and then with i am eight you know i knew from day one i wanted to build this as a direct to consumer business and then so given how important that piece was you know i'm the type of founder that leads by example and i really like to get into weed of things to really understand because you know that means no one can really be me right as well we're spending you know three four hundred thousand dollars a day you know even if it's a one two percent difference that's quite a lot of money yeah and then so just being able to know the data all that stuff that's the really important randy also if you can yeah get very closer to the meta and google teams right because they're gonna provide you lots of insight and resources that are normally not available but of course you have to be a certain spend to be able to do that for example we meet with them every two weeks and of course you know i try to meet with them as much as possible during those meetings as we're always very insightful yeah yeah yeah the insider knowledge what one thing you mentioned there is again we have this learning for a long time which is no matter how glossy you wanna make your ads like hey we're gonna make it incredible brand ads so we're gonna make incredible video it's like the static images that don't show off the way you want your brand to look always perform much much better and so one of the things i wonder how you think about as a finder is you mentioned sixty five percent of all your ads today are static but you're investing more in video i assume you've like built some sort of elasticity model so you can see the runway is like eighteen twenty four months and that's a core part of your revenue and so you probably are thinking how do i make sure that our maybe or not how does our paid advertising how grow the brand and so when meta begins to saturate i'm still a brand that's growing and i'm not just dependent upon a single channel how do you think about that for companies that are primarily growing through a single channel like kip said meta but i still wanna build a brand i wanna make sure that we are a recognizable brand what's your thoughts on that does your experience with ai sound a little something like this you've been prompted for twenty minutes the output is polished confident and completely useless that's what happens when ai doesn't know anything about your business hubspot ai works with your actual customer data every interaction every signal your team has generated over time so instead of prompt and hoping you ask once and ship it check hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses at least from d so of course your medicine spend our number one channel from day one right and right now is about eighty percent we are also diversifying to new channels as we speak so for example app love you know take tiktok you podcast podcasts you know streaming these are all channels that we're ready testing with or we'll get into you know within the next you thirty the sixty days right so that's you know important for us but again i still feel even our current spend on you know meta three hundred to four hundred thousand daily that there's still you know lots of upside there right i can see a path where know to repair i mean you know within the next yeah six to twelve months i could easily see us spending million dollars a day on that still right right because i think part of the reason why is because we're in forty six countries right so the us and gonna makes up about less than half of our business so there's so much more upside there but also what the point you mentioned about diversifying away from end because i think you know one ke from day one is that from an offline perspective we've actually our hell over a hundred fifty events yeah so for example we just did one in new york i wasn't there right so we we just did like a paddle event there wimbledon we had like pete events over course of ten days us open will be there so we're actually at a lot of offline events and we're at these offline events of course we'll have some of our ambassadors there and of course we also have our scientific advisory board there so this really puts a face yeah to the brand and individuals customers other ambassadors can also meet with myself my team and individuals that represent us so i think that's actually very important that not many brands do they just focus online but i think that's actually part of the reason why we're able to scale in q two and subsequently in july but our cats stayed flat and even went down and i'd attribute that to a lot of the stuff that we're doing offline danny i i wonder if you could do me a favor i bet you have an ad or some ads on your computer there i'm thinking about this as i'm an audience and they're probably like oh gosh i don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on ads i have some money and my belief is like it all starts with one great ad like you get one great ad that actually performs really well you make money off that and then you're kinda off to the races you've probably seen more ads especially meta ads than any human on the planet or it like top d style if them the planet it i don't think so bad i bet you have because you've been so involved in the making of them it would just be really cool for you to show an ad and to get your breakdown of like what makes it good and what you would change like i would love your taste of the characteristics that anybody could take and apply to their product their business and maybe make a great at sure so it's a two minute at but it gives you an idea you know what we'd be able to accomplish in the last twenty months right so and again we're not trying to sell it and and this is just yeah factual things that we've been able to do over the course of last twenty months it's a parent company in i talk a little bit about what i at you know we created this create nutrition simple i make just covers everything in one such what are you willing to do that'd be the best we're very strategic in the businesses that we go into i don't know whether any of you know about i but you should get i because it's got ninety two ingredients that's your secret i that's my secret i you know you don't have to take you know eighteen tablet every single morning it's just easy and it's so good for you and the longevity of your life i look forward to this every single morning it's actually my incentive to drink more fluids because i just don't really enjoy it unless i mix that i am made it the more that i took i had made the man i've been feeling incredible guy i made gives me that my immunity and and strength the i can wake up every morning and feel good and and perform well and i think for me not only has my doctor recommended for me i know i done so much scientific research and so that makes me feel like i'm in really safe hands well for salt is guy introduced me to the brand and you're welcome it's amazing product it's really working that's why it shows i am made with this one billion dollar grow financing and we're able to test so much more going into more channels test new creative test new offline activations partnerships so this growth financing is goes beyond as an acquisition but really for you guys are gonna be the marking really red bull of supplements very cool sports partnerships yeah and just trying to do things very differently and stand out in like a super crowded so did that stupid true right like to good example of the company we're it's just like you have to be aggressive if you're in a crowded market yeah you know a perfect ad a given idea will be me trying to figure out all of the supplements that i have and when i need to re buy them that's why i thought this was awesome not something that really attracted me is like okay i don't have to like figure out have to buy this one in that one you know my they run out each and every month whereas this one here you can just get it all and one thing in sac it's like that's makes my life easier breakdown for us like the things that you think are good about it and like what the lessons people could learn if they were just you know they might not have david beckham up they might not have all these people but like they can tell a good story and make a good ad and you're or somebody who's spend a lot of time doing it i'd love to kind of pick your brain on so like again even for ad right i mean we've basically compiled the last twenty moments you yeah from our history and we started yeah with like a kind of like a movie scene right and then right off the bat you had david beckham speaking so it already captures people's attention your first three seconds say people have to be very they want to watch it continually right and two minutes is actually very long these days right but you know we kept people continually engaged you know throughout that time with new people and new images new new footage and it ultimately there was a lot of science and credibility pieces you know right after david we had doctor don which is the scientific officer and then many many people continue to add that so ultimately i think if you make a good ad you the credibility and the trust becomes very important especially now in the age of ai where you know now a lot of times you you'll don't know what's real what's not you know so if you can showcase more real people porn partnership as of real individuals i think that speaks volumes hey do you have a question about ai marketing if so you're gonna wanna hear this this is critically important we doing an amazing ama at hubspot un bound event where we're gonna answer all of your burning questions more importantly we're gonna take every single question we're gonna do a mail bag episode where we answer all of the questions no matter what live and we'll give you our real and unfiltered take so you wanna submit your question please we would love to hear from you so click that link submit the question and you'd either gonna be read on the un bound stage or on this podcast live and you're gonna hear exactly what we have to think about it and again click that link in the description below so that you could add your question we can't wait to hear them was that built all through humans because i know you had a a sa i know if i'm pronouncing her name correctly but you had have a link yeah yeah you had an ad that was done by an agency on ai the cost i think twenty five thousand dollars that created two hundred and thirty three million views yeah so that was last year right before the us open i paid twenty five thousand dollars for an at ai was very early actually to utilize the ai at last october even though it's less than a year ago right and it generated two hundred and thirty three million views on instagram yeah it was why do you think i i know part of that was because you were so yeah i think you said in in were so you were it was so early on ai that people are in inc because it actually said me with ai does that still work today or you think that ai has become such a kind of over saturated tool and create creative that people actually are more inclined to look for a human generated versus ai generated like do you still use ai in your creative ads so everything really depends on execution i mean people still pay attention as long as it's execute it well right so yeah that's a key differentiation again it'll hurt you a it's sloppy but it it's very well done then i think people will appreciate it and any kind of tips on how you do that like tools that you use or ways that you integrate ai along with the humans like how how can someone use ai to scale their creative without looking like every single other ad that's created with ai we bill our own internal tool you know for static great static at scale right we looked around you know the the market and i mean we couldn't find anything that again worked for our liking because again for us we're like a premium brand right so we wanna ensure our brand quality is steer and then what we build internal tool that's able to you know on a weekly basis that allows us to test out at least minimum of five hundred different ads on a weekly basis so that's our own scale and i think when you have humans involved can he just need someone that has really good taste yes and they really understand the out because a lot of times i think that's a challenge too right is that yeah someone says oh i create this with be and then you look at the outputs like shit and like it's like mh so i think the key thing is like what everything is like the person that's working with the ai they also have to know what's a could help yeah yeah yeah yeah especially a marketing because if you're coding that you can say you know code this thing test this thing make sure it works marketing is so subjective and so if you tell ai hey create an amazing ad that looks really cool meta it's subjective right so you actually still need the marketer to like understand what good is and that's why ai is so hard for marketing that gets a greatest assistant but it's hard to create the final thing you want without someone who's really good he still need the marketer who's really good to to be able to dictate what that is correct on the same thing with landing pages right and again we've been able to create a ton of landing pages utilizing ai but it still requires a lot of yeah yeah time and effort to really make sure that it's good yeah because like you said you can just tell someone me to just create it you can create it in five minutes but it's instead actually good right the key thing is you can use those tools and we do a lot you know clogged madness you know chad video forget we use all of the tools but we spend a lot of time before something actually gets live into the production in the era of ai everyone's become a marketer and in some ways that's awesome and in some ways it's not and that's the conversation i'm gonna have with the cmo of open ai call fleming and he and i are sitting down together on the main stage at unveiled on september eighteen at ten am we are going to do an awesome session called beyond the click ai ads and what's next we're gonna unpack how the marketing playbook has changed how ai search and ads are changing what marketing is gonna look like in the future if you're gonna be an bound please join us we'll see all september eighteen awesome danny this was a killer killer overview i think you give everyone the kinda modern meta of playbook to scale on that platform and actually to integrate ai into how you're doing advertising and so we super appreciative of your time coming on this i'm sure you're really busy building such phenomenal brand i will be a happy customer with my one sat versus my many many different supplements that i have today i don't have to remember to buy them all all the time and then i also get to be a little but a part of the the ecosystem with all the incredible sports folks you have and feel like i'm one of them but thanks again for your time one last thing i wanna also mention about the marketing piece right is that again it doesn't matter we can be the best marketers in the world blah blah blah etcetera right but our product doesn't work if all falls parked yeah yeah and then so i think the best form of marketing for us has been our product right yeah and again it's like the everyone's asking me hey you know we got david beckham yeah he's a cold cofounder founder right but we also got arena sa we got johannes we got jay s we got ali bare you know a few days ago we just announced lily collins right and that interesting thing for all these individuals they all came to me right and it was through an introduction via their doctor or their nutrition was that they gone to the product and then once they started taking it they felt better noticeably and the great thing about these athletes and these celebrities is that they have so much choice and options when it comes to this category any category but they chose to take i on it a daily basis and once they felt good yeah they're like hey i want i'm partner for this company so that's something that no form marketing can pay for right yeah yeah the best for a mark and it's having the best product if everything else is much easier if that's true very cool yes great thank you so much thank you danny we also appreciate your help thank you so much thank you appreciate it let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully great well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot girl at him

the number one question kip and i are being asked at the moment is is that chief marketing officer role diane do you know that there are less cmos in b b this year than there ever has been in the past in finder well they expect so much more from their cmo not just that but the shape of the actual marketing work as cmo has to do has drastically changed is the cmo role going to disappear and when is it going to happen here's what we believe we believe that the role is actually going to die for certain companies what does this mean for your career are marketing careers in trouble here this is the most requested show that we've done in a long time i have been tagged in multiple linkedin posts i've gotten dms i think you are on multiple group chats in which this topic comes up and it's one that hits close to home it's about is the chief marketing officer or the head of marketing role at any company is it dying is it no longer important and you have i think a good story that you got back channel from a bunch of entrepreneurs and founders kinda kick us off with that yeah i'm hearing this more and more i will say that it has definitely taken its roots from s f if you look at the data the data will tell you that the cmo role in b to b has dropped by about ten percentage points so there's less kind of roles ten less cmos yeah no some of those folks maybe because we're calling them something different but that's still ties into what we're talking about which is when you talk to some founders today they think of marketing as hey there's a growth discipline and there's a brand discipline and one marketer has continually failed to do both of those things well and so what we will do is we will put the brand and product into the product org and we will put the growth part into the sales org and then me is the founder does not have to worry it but this marketer that i'm continually disappointed with who cannot do both of those things and i am hearing that more and more i have also been asked through this show a multi of time by marketers because they're like is this true is there cmo and head a marketing role no longer gonna be a thing am i gonna have to report to my sales leader or my product leader and i think it's a great conversation because i we were saying off mike i'm like i've got some takes you've got some takes you're like kind in the middle you told me i think i'm going to find out what some of my takes are let you do this episode lag i've been thinking about it a lot actually i thought about i thought yeah i think we're gonna maybe disagree a bunch and so i think what we wanna do in this episode is maybe explain why it's happening what are the reasons that it could be right what are the reasons that it could be wrong and maybe neither of us can see reasons that it's wrong where reasons that it's right and then if we were in a room for of finder and we were having dinner and we were sitting across a bunch of founders and they were saying like we don't need head of market and we don't need to cmo and we were trying to convince someone one way or the other what would we tell to say what would our advice be oh i love this i think i might wanna start us off by just throw you should start off because you're the one who's getting socks because i strategically changed my role title i'm not even smart it's pretty smart of mute well you you talked a little bit about like the framing of like why are people maybe write to do this and why are they wrong to this or why stopping maybe start with why do you think it's happening well my hottest take is relevant to this topic here and i'm gonna just throw a big freaking grenade into the show today marketers aren't good enough that's why it's happening that is why it is happening i agree with that i wish we had different takes here what's too basic to be like all marketers aren't getting i think marketers have come through a system that has disadvantaged them and the last twenty years of marketing was all about i need to be an extreme specialist mh and if i am an extreme specialist if i i'm the best in the world of email marketing the best in the world it ads are the best in the world of creative that is how i get to be a cmo and now we're waking up and founders are like well i don't need just this one thing to compete in this world i have to be great at all these aspects of marketing the competitive marketplace is more brutal than it's ever been in the history of business and i can't live with a head of marketing that says like good at product marketing or good at brand marketing you know or just good at paid ads and so because nobody that i talked to is good enough at all those things i'm gonna hire a few different leaders who have more breadth than give me the coverage across this things like that would be my initial argument if you want all the resources from today's shows click the link in the description or scan that qr code okay so somewhat similar in some differences i think what's happened is because it's become so competitive in the market and i i actually think finder are somewhat changing as well and founders i talked to more and more really care about marketing and it really have takes about marketing so they have real understanding of what they want whereas in the past i don't know if that was true they may have just asked their network who's good and they took them some time to figure out is this had a market even good or not like a lot of offenders ask me this is what my marketer is doing is marketing either is this good is this not good neither they have like real takes but i think that marketing has gone to such extremes and that ai has meant that the growth discipline you have to be more technical and growth minded than ever before and on the brand and positioning side you have to be much more creative narration storytelling you to be really great at those things more than ever before and it's really hard for a single person to str both of those things right to be at the extreme of both of those things and i think that means that the market leader continually disappoint that's find on one of those things what what you're describing is the key paradox of this entire topic in this entire show where we're talking about the cmo role dying we're also talking about the fact that marketing itself has never been more important right and the importance of marketing is actually what's contributing to the death of the role exactly which seems extremely counterintuitive right like you would think the exact opposite thing would be through and it's not because i think you gave a really good articulation of why it's like wow with so much competition i have to be world class in all of these things to give marketing and a little bit of credit here if you are any of the other c suite there are complex roles but they are a single disciplined role yes and that is the hard thing about being a cmo or a marketing leader is as you said i have to really understand position and i really have to understand what makes brand brand i really have to understand how to do great in person event i really have to understand now you can hire folks for these things but because i think the founder is so much more interested in marketing and they're in the weeds they expect so much more of their head of marketing or cmo in terms of their knowledge across those things and most marketers do come in through like singular channels like men through single channel and then and then broadened but what is one way you can actually still be successful if you do not have that breath and that's hiring mh and for me i think that what marketing leaders i see get themselves into trouble so many times when their founder loses trust is they themselves don't have the core knowledge of that thing and so they hire bad people and that's what it contributes to is like per yeah hiring so there's two things i wanna come back to hiring in a second but before we go to hiring i wanna talk a little bit about just the fact that marketing used to be a black box it used to feel magical you know a a ceo a founder used to be like i don't know how they're doing this like i don't know how they're write in this copy i don't know how like i turn around this website looks this way used to feel like literally like magic and now the reason i think this all happening because the average founder could be like well i've got some skills in my ai tool and that's now my baseline expectation for a marketer needs to be significantly better than that and there are a lot of marketers who are not better than that we just did an episode where we review an entire agent marketing team and came to that conclusion that an agent marketing team is better than an average marketing team yeah and and so i think part of the death of the cmo role is a reckoning of like the talent and where the marketing industry is at the moment because of what we've kind of come through over the last two decades and maybe maybe marketing was a little too easy for the last two decades the second point you just brought up was the point around hiring and most people think that marketing is about like understanding the craft of marketing which it is but it's more importantly understanding how to hire and build people who have these disciplines and parts of marketing that you are not an expert in but that you can collaborate with them to get a unique and better result than either one of you would have gotten on your own right right exactly i think that's the thing that i see seen those as marketers leaders fail out as well if they don't have to be expertise and why you have to get your hiring and correct but because you may not have the domain expertise you don't know how to hire for that role and so you continually like flame out on hiring for that role and actually what i find is like the founder has talked twenty of your leaders mh and they're just widely uni impressed and what sometimes i cmos those understand is like when they are widely under pressed with your vp or product marketing or your vp of brand they don't think like why that person not really good they immediately think why my cmo them that we correct my both thinks that's good that's not that's a bad bad thing that's a bad thing and so i think that's why it's happening why don't you give your take on should it be happening should the cmo role be dying there's a real like pattern here it's actually brand product into product org yeah demand growth into sales org so is this the right way to structure and modern marketing team i think it is under a couple conditions oh wow okay this is surprise and i thought you're gonna be vent like a note here no i'm a p i'm one of the things that people don't know about me i've i i'm i i'm not self interested i am i'm a p and so i would say one it's especially true earlier in a company's growth journey because you need to move faster hiring a unicorn head of marketing is really hard hiring two or three really really great kind of maybe director level marketing people is way easier sales counterintuitive that like hiring three people would be way easier than hiring one person but i think it's true so i would say that at that point it's true i would say it's also true like if you're a great company and you're growing like weeds doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing yeah a hundred percent it it which is need explain counterintuitive and i wanna say to get doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing which means i'm better off not hiring a cmo than hiring the wrong cmo you yeah i can wait around and there are great cmo out there right like that we should one of the things we should say is there are some amazing amazing amazing heads of marketing but sometimes the timeline find those people is twelve eighteen twenty four thirty six months and you don't wanna hire a bad person in their instead and so i think i would do the structure you're talking about instead of making a bad head of marketing hire this all being said i don't think you can be a truly truly remarkable company high scale high growth without one person really driving that ship so either you have a cmo or in fairness you have to have probably multiple founders and one of those founders is spending the majority of his or her time on marketing yeah that's my balance take what do you i think that's super balanced i did not think your take was gonna be in your yourself interest you don't need to do that i just thought that you would disagree with it for some different reasons and so that makes tell me why let me push back at some of that so i agree with some of what you said but i wanna go back to the first part of that which was the structure which is okay if you do your thing those three people let's say you're gonna hire like a head of demand and that head of demand has been hired by sales and then you hire a product marketer and then you're gonna hire someone to do like creative and that and they're not gonna be hired by product leader because that's the structure we talked about i don't think you actually solve your problem in that i think the number one thing a bad cmo or a ahead of marketer does is actually build a team in their image and it takes you a long time to like fix that because now you've got a lot of people who are not up to the standard you want and the truth thing you said is you are better off not hiring one of these marketers than hiring someone below your bar but the cmo that has failing one of the things are failing at is really been able to understand how to hire that talent because they don't understand that discipline well i would say there are very few sales leaders and there are some but there are very few that would really understand how to hire an incredible demand leader and there are very few cp or product leaders and again there are some but there are very few that would be able to hire a great product marketer or a great brand person and so if you want that structure you've just changed the shape of your problem in that you can't find the cmo that can really spike in the technical discipline of marketing and the creative discipline marketing they are unicorn unicorns they are hard to find but they are right there and you don't wanna hire her head of marketing because you don't build a team in that person's image you may not be like up to the level you want but now you have two other people who are still build the marketing team and are still probably gonna make very similar mistakes as the person you were going to hire to run out two people make a mistakes two people make a mistakes instead of because you don't have a shared bar yeah and so i think the only way it works and i agree with what you said the only way it works and i've seen examples of at work when you have a founder who is just a really incredible market here and it doesn't mean that they're in the weeds on every part of marketing but they just understand it they just get it and they know what good looks like and they can push people to excel and they know what to hire and they know what they're looking for and again i think that group of finder is as small as trying to find the group of cmos that you want it's all small group yeah where i thought you were going which to me is the biggest case for having ahead of marketing and for non eliminating the cmo role is that marketing is a game of magnitude and like it's about big big wins and it's really hard to have big big wins when all the work is very diffuse and disconnected across a bunch of different teams it's much easier to have big wins when you it's all connected with one person one team who's really taking those bigger swings and that's to me is the number one case for having ahead of marketing is because you have head of marketing because you don't wanna be irrelevant you are trying to stand out in a ever more crowded marketplace and you have to have bold high magnitude big impact things and those things don't happen when you have somebody working for a head of product somebody else working for a head of sales the second you do that right like one of the things you and i know karen is the first very practical thing that happens what's the head of products timeline you know six twelve months they're thinking about their vision what's the head of sales timeline this month this week today and so even that timeline friction causes a bunch of shit to just not happen right right and that that structure also would tell you that what people feel is those two things are somewhat disconnected and that growth and demand is disconnected from product and brand and that's the reason they can consider in different teams i also don't think that's true so that you know the example i would give is if you are an early stage company or even just a company that's in scale mode let's say you are really great at performance marketing and your your growth in demand team or sit in sales and they fine tune the editorial copy and they understand how to build conversion and they're right there span on a bunch of landing pages it has no tie to like your a product marketing or your positioning because they're really just thinking about how do i feed the sales team this month and the problem is that if you think about your paid advertising at scale it wants to somewhat be aligned to your position because when you stop advertising you don't wanna be forget you want to be build the momentum around like the position that you really wanna be memorable for and so there's actual real work to do across a growth and demand channel and how you want to be positioned and remembered and those two things are disconnected in that structure and i don't think mark i think it has been disconnected for a long time into like these small teams with niche expertise and i think what we're saying we wrote a whole book about this loop we're saying that we think marketing is going to actually come back to be a team of generalist yes who can do much more with ai and because of that that team should really work as a single unit to make sure things are coherent to make things they can prioritize right like it just like any team right you're not gonna have a segment all your sales team sit in product in a segment of your sales team sit in martin it wouldn't make any sense right totally and and here's the thing i would say and this i think about like i've done marketing for a long time i'm decent at being ahead of marketing and i think people prioritize the wrong things when looking for head of marketing and that's also part of the problem i think there are kind of three things that are really really important which is experience skills and mindset would you agree with that it could be in those three i think ability to hire talent and that means they even okay they're mindset hiring skills and experience yes of those four things what do you think most people like rank them in order of importance experience experience one then what experience hiring scale mindset that's why i think people put skills above hiring i think the average person is experience skills hiring mindset and i think the order should be the exact opposite it should be mindset hiring skills experience hey do you have a question about ai marketing if so you're gonna wanna hear this this is critically important we are doing an amazing ama at hubspot un bound event where we're gonna answer all of your burning questions more importantly we're gonna take every single question we're gonna do a mail bag episode where we answer all of the questions no matter what live and we'll give you our real and unfiltered take so you wanna submit your question please we would love to hear from you so click that link submit a question and you'd see gonna be read on the un unveil stage or on this podcast live and you're gonna hear exactly what we have to think about it and again click that link in the description below so that you can add your question we can't wait to hear them i'm not that good at any individual aspect of marketing if you just want me to get go do this one marketing thing i'm not going to be outstanding at any one thing of marketing the thing i'm good at is my mindset around solving problems and being counterintuitive being really bold around solving problems and i have very unique processes and taste for finding the right people who are the best at those things to go and do them and then i do have skills and like i teach myself a lot of kind of foundational so i know those people are doing a good job or not and then yeah i have some experience that i draw from but it's the least important of those four things yeah i i think those things are somewhat interconnected like you're really great at hiring in why are you're really great at hiring well you have experience in hiring you've hired forty thousands of people so i think your first twenty people are probably not as good as your last twenty people so i think experience matters there you are actually great at the craft marketing so you do understand how to hire people and you're you are relentless to hire and that's the very first thing i learned from working with you is how to hire better and how important is to hire they do help each other but i think what you're doing is stock ranking them yeah i'm i'm i'm having a four string and i'll be honest with you even hiring is more about curiosity than experience i like it's about it's about going out and learning what the best version of some type of work looks like and who does it and talking to all those people and being like oh this is what somebody really great who does this work looks like and now i'm gonna go and find one to work with me which yes you need some experience but experience is not everything yeah i disagree screw that on a hiring but that's just my experience in that yeah i definitely agree that you can have a process right like you can definitely have curiosity to learn like what's great in this role i think experienced those teach you some things about hiring and like you know i've i've made the gotcha hire i made a couple of bad hires and the bad hires like gotcha that i would never make again and like you know one gotcha was oh my god this person must be the best person ever because i really need to hire this real quick and i wanted pressure to do it and so because i'm under so much pressure and my bar comes down because i'm so eager to hire that person and you started the show with like never do that and i can't describe how good advice that is to like i'm not i wanna go into like how many because i mean maybe people i hired like is that me but like i but everyone makes like i wouldn't say bad hire is just not the right hire for for the thing that we were trying to do and anytime i've got that wrong it's actually been that reason yeah it's usually because i've realized that i've changed my bar based upon the pressure i was under to get someone to do that thing and i think that that probably is the number one reason fast growth companies hire not so good marketers and i think your advice would be okay it doesn't need to be product brand into product demand into sales but figure out any other structure that you could have a marketing team but i'm lowering your bar for the person who's gonna to run your marketing team and wait until you find someone that you are really excited by until you hire that person never make a choice with a metaphor gun to your head yeah always goes poorly for you doubly so when in a high hiring is evolved right and that's kinda the the point we're underlying here so i i do think like going back to like the role of a cmo is like it's better when you have the right person who has has those things and can bring it all together it's hard and i think the last fifteen years of marketing has pushed people out of the path to become a well rounded super journalist and like you talked about in loop i do think super generalist people who can do a lot of things well are the future of marketing and they're the next generation of cmos by the way here like free business idea for us is we should just start like a cmo school and just have a hundred people a year in a cohort where we just teach you guys how how to be ahead of marketing and place them and should do that i think the number one request i get from founders i know is can you help me hire my marketing leader is literally always and i always feel i don't know how you feel i'm not again there are great cmos and but the the ones i recommend are always like in a role and have ten other offers and so i always feel like i fail that question because i don't i have like you know a small handful of people that i will always recommend and they're like yeah i don't the last thing i need right now i was another offer i'm like okay i'm chasing like someone right now like oh you know to try to help for one of my founders the other thing is you can be a great head a marketing and cmo and again to give marketers some you know credit here which we are and you just don't jab with the finder right it's like there's a bunch of characteristics or criteria that will help that cmo will be successful or not and some of them are outside of their control but yeah cmo school the new cmo and then place them would be a pretty great business i'm sure some founders will hit us up and asking you do that yeah if you think we should do that let let us know maybe we'll do it in our for fun in our spare time does your experience with ai sound a little something like this you've been prompted for twenty minutes the output is polished confident and completely useless that's what happens when ai doesn't know anything about your business hubspot ai works with your actual customer data every interaction every signal your team has generated over time so instead of prompt and hoping you ask once and ship it check hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses so what the hell do people do karen we we've debated this and i i think where we've landed is there's a lot of situations in which a cmo is no longer the right thing but if you want to build a really great enduring company i think you do need cmo for all all the reasons we outlined in this show so if i'm out there and i'm running a company what how the hell do i think about this what do i do yeah my advice still is number one thing if you can find that person that can spike in both areas try your best to hire them and you know sell if you can find the great person pay them whatever it takes and and like convince to to it's short money right so let's say you can't do that and so then i do think you should figure out a structure that you could still allow you to hire talent but do not lower your bar but then i guess the the thing i'm stuck when i was telling you at the start i was like i'm not sure what i'm gonna say for certain things let's say you are a great company but you just can't get the person you want there's a small number of people they're locked up right now so then you come down and you go okay well i'm gonna still hire some of these folks and you figure out a structure that works for you maybe they all report to the finder maybe they all report to a product maybe they all report to the head of sales i'd like to head of sales and a lot of cases is going to be a disaster unless you get their right sales leader just so i'll just throw it out there the only other thing you could do is take a bet on someone and pay someone who is incredible to be mentor like that was the only thing i could like figure figure item maybe don't give them they're not the head of mark and cmo role but if you can actually take someone and they have like a eighteen month to your path like hire them say okay like i'm gonna bet on you to be our future head mark and cmo i think you can be one of folks but i'm gonna pair you with a mentor and i'm gonna pay that mentor a bunch of money to advisory and help you know move you along that path i think that's another option let me tell you why i think that's a really important option for people to consider because there's a point we haven't made yet in the version where you don't have a head of marketing and you have these people work for like your head of product or head of sales you probably do that because you're like oh my head of products awesome my head of sales is awesome it's my c founder it's it's whoever right you're taking that awesome person and you're def their focus and you're stretching them thinner and what you and i have seen firsthand is you could have honestly the best person in the whole world that's something but if you stretch them too thin they will start performing badly yeah and the way you actually solve that problem is to do exactly what you said it's like oh well i'm gonna hire somebody who i think could maybe grow into this role i'm gonna contract with some really awesome cmo adviser to help help that person get through yeah i think that one works pretty well because a lot of what that person just needs is what does good look like how do i manage these folks how do i set up a strategy how do i set like clear feedback loops and i think that as someone can come in and do that for twelve months seeing that person can learn a lot so they're are the options i have i don't think it's any easy thing and for the last ten years this has been the number one thing i got asked to help folks with and there's never like a great easy answer i never have a great easy answer for it i thought your last piece of advice there around like getting an adviser and trying to coach somebody and i think especially true the one thing i would add to that karen is like let's say you might have found a really awesome marketer who's really good at brand marketing but not good at growth and demand generation but you think they're really smart well you can have them work with a growth demand generation like kind of advisor to help fill them out right or vice versa or what have you and i think that is a reasonable path to do it so and and by way if you're a founder you do that path and one of the things you do is you try to spend time with that adviser because sometimes you can get that adviser to come on and be your head of marketing if things are going well like the really good people you need to just have a long term relationship with you're not gonna get a top one percent marketer just cult but if you have lots of back and forth with them over a year or two and they know your brand crazy they know the business that's how you're gonna get them right i think this is the best advice maybe on the show i i've thought about this before even the best founders we've tried to hire me versus other founders and you know someone reaches i tell you and be the right time right we're not the only ones right there's a bunch of folks will never be the right time and i've always thought i can tell a great friend from not a great friend and then that other founder checks with me all the time and like gets to know me and like talks to me about their business and maybe asked me hey do you wanna use an advisory and that's not just for hiring your head of marketing that's just great advice for hiring so some of the best hires i've made had been like twelve month processes i think the best hires are usually getting to know someone over a period of time and like you can work with on a contract you can get to know them in a bunch of other different ways and usually the best people are not like hey i'm available now i'm ready to be hired they're like i'm gonna build a relationship with this person one of the things that i always have is a keep warm list yes who are like my dream hires i just put them in there and like you know you first look at it at you're like i of no clue i'm gonna hire any these folks but i check with them how are you doing how's your role going here's what i'm doing blah so i think that's great advice and and by the way if i was a really bold filter and i was at a company that was growing like this i would have like three to five of those people and i would throw them a baby bit of equity or a little bit of cash every month to be an adviser and i'd have like five of them as and i'd be like no because it doesn't matter like and i just ping them questions and get feedback but then i just five x to my chance that i'm gonna get one of them to come on and then it's like you know nine months later you're about to raise your series c or or or whatever and you're like hey i'm gonna do this help me think about how to announce it oh by the way i'm looking to hire this person and they're gonna be like i like this person all their they're about to raise this round they got a great runway i see what the future is like i'm gonna go and do this thing yeah i think that's great advice i think that's actually the best advice for how you hire this role alright so the cmo is dying but we think that death is kinda justified in the short term and i think we believe that over the next few years it's actually it will have a resurgence it's not that the actual role itself is dying or is not important it's that we don't have the right talent pipeline for the new world yes is that or is that where we're walking away with today yes a hundred percent that is my take as well is that we are going through a period of time where there is a personnel to skill set mismatch in a lot of cases and there's going to be a new wave of folks who will come up and fill that skill set that founders are looking at so i i i think you've described it perfectly which is i don't think that the role is any less important i just think there's a mismatch in the talent pipeline right now and that will be sold over time yeah so if you want the simple formula i think for why the cmo role is in decline as you stated karen down ten percent and for b b companies it is because the talent pipeline is not there and the bar for what companies need a marketer or be in the importance of the role is up you know and so that's not so that people can't make a kinda okay hire right and so those two factors equal the cmo role going down think it's gonna keep getting more important but i think the talent pipeline can catch up and we'll catch up i totally agree alright well if you're a founder or a marketer who wants to be a cmo i hope that you found this super helpful we appreciate you watching today today's show we'll see you next time on the next episode marketing gets screen let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully in integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow

sabrina we are so excited to have you back on marketing against the grain your last show was one of my favorites and you're back with one i think is even better today we're talking all about how you turn your social content and your social dms into money for you and for your business and you have built something amazing that as soon i saw i knew i had to have you on so thank you for coming back and walking us through it today yeah super excited to share what i've built so on an audience side i'm now approaching three point five million followers but i think the important thing i focus on is like how to convert all of that attention into something meaningful for my business so i'm happy to share some examples by the way yeah yes so let's get right into it because you are doing some of the best work of anyone i've seen about growing a social following but not just growing it monetizing it really well yeah absolutely so this a real instagram post that i think accumulated over four million views and when i paired it with a dm automation over a hundred thousand people engaged with this post and just this post alone grew my brand one hundred thousand followers on instagram and another one hundred thousand followers on facebook where it went viral as well and it's really simple like you share value in the post and then you ask people to comment a keyword so that they can get some kind of lead magnet or a detailed guide a detailed playbook so over a hundred thousand people did that on keyword is clearly codes you people needed to reply codes here we see codes running through the comments are yeah it's really funny because you'll see like pop ups over here in the bottom right of people commenting in real time like while we're doing this your dms have to be insane in comments have to be just un manageable they are i tell everyone at dm me on linkedin because that's like the only inbox i can manage like but you can see the comments coming in emails are coming in this is another instagram reel and the reason i show this one even though it i didn't get millions of views used got about two hundred thousand views but this real grew my business by adding ten thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue or a hundred twenty thousand dollars in arr this one first made you a hundred and twenty thousand dollars for the year yes and it's still making me money because people are still watching this still commenting so this was posted to only a month ago in july so imagine like one to two years for this post i'll keep repo it as a story maybe i'll change the hook and post another format like it's gonna end up making me probably thirty thousand mr just from this post paired with a dm automation so people will comment the keyword here and i'll send them over to either my app or lead magnet for my app in this particular case it was sending them to this how i'd start a one person business plus personal brand with ai in thirty days full playbook and my app is organically introduced within this blog post just like how i've learned from hubspot you know you guys invented inbound marketing but this is how i'm doing that in a really organic way adding a ton of value giving so much value for free and then organically just introducing my product towards the end what's a product kit just remind me my product's potato so it's basically like the agent layer for social media marketing so most of my users hook it up to claude chat or hermes and then say hey post the social media or scrape these youtube videos and tiktok videos and now you can create dm automations directly from claude or chat sweet i love that and yeah here's a bunch of dm automations just so you can see how they look so they're all managed here in in place which is really really nice and today i'm gonna walk through exactly how to build this within club i love that before you baby we build this you actually show us one of the videos i think people would be really interested to understand what is it really successful like instagram really even look like because you say two hundred thousand views or a million views or four million views and it feels like una unsustainable and it's actually i think more straightforward and simple than that so i'd love it if you just like kinda played it and broke down how you think about making these videos as the first step of this process that we're talking about today so the most important thing for any piece of content as many in your audience know is the hook like in a video context it's gonna be what they see on the screen whatever you're saying in the first couple of seconds and any visual hook that could be motion so a lot of instagram creators where like jump into frame or they'll hold a microphone or they'll be doing something so that it stops your scroll in this case i have just a very simple on screen title hook ten chat gp power and the one thing that kind of unlocks morality for me is keeping your hook as broad as possible think of your contents as a funnel so your opening hook should be as broadly general as possible so as many people can start watching the video and then throughout the video you actually get more and more granular like here's what exactly what we're talking about and in this particular video you can see there's a lot happening on the screen which people talk i'm basically yeah basically walking through like different cool chat gp tricks like i personally love this one eli ten explain to me like i'm ten like just dump it down for me you know and it's pretty easy to understand so it's basically here's the keyword okay and then here's some kind of footage showing it here's h here's the footage showing how it works explain k and it's very easy to understand and so that's my number one tip for broad morality if that's what you're chasing like make the topic just as broadly understandable by as many people as possible hey if you all work completely blown away with sabrina like i was and you want her system to use for yourself you're gonna wanna click that link in the description below or scan that qr code and get it for yourself for free okay so that seems achievable it seems like some people could do right and and like but i think the there was a mastery in there which is like the starting broad and keeping it so simple is where i think most people mess up they get too specific and two in the weeds with it all exactly and they start too specific and that's not necessarily bad because it builds authority with the people who understand what you're talking about they realize well you can really get into the weeds so here's a good example that did not go mega viral but still drove a lot of business to me right so here i have a very general hook though claude killed my social media like very easy to understand even if you have no background in ai and then what i do immediately is i start with proof boom k forty one point nine million views in thirty days screenshot by the way claude made this screenshot course like yeah and then so this immediately hooks people because it's like oh like i understand the hook i understand the proof and now i'm gonna talk about what it is and then i show another visual like here's the lead magnet you're going to get and then i also tell you not only can you build this for yourself you can build and sell this to clients so there's just so much value to get you to comment this keyword here and you got huge stuff animals in the background i mean it's with yeah that's my visual luck there i love that but i think one of the things i would break down was i knew we're about to show show what happens next with like the dm automation but i want everybody to listen to how you speak like even when i was talking about stuff down was you're like that's my visual hook you see everything in the core elements of the system that's necessary to be successful and you're making sure that every element of that system has a job and it's doing the job it's supposed to do yeah absolutely like even for this video if you go back to it i think about the color contrast of the on screen hook like it pops out it's red very much it's just in your face i actually tried different color variations with instagram trial reels i tried about five you can actually see how lazy i am i just put this red one on top of the white one i don't know you can see that just i love that so there i have variations where i like three different colors stacked on top of each other because it's so interesting but i found red work the best is what you're saying the red work the best in my trial reel so i tried white i tried black background red background like a blue or purple background and i found red for this particular image worked the best because it jumps out at you i also sometimes try different hooks like the hook here and the white the previous one i tried i believe was secret codes for chat and that went viral as well but i was wondering could i find an even better hook so this went three times more viral than the than the first one i like on this one how the red matches the l heart you know like there's oh get into the subtle psychology of marketing where it's like the reaffirm affirmation of of the visuals that people don't even think about but i think what often happens in these short form videos is people are like oh it's just like a thirty second clip it's not really important and it's actually way more important the shorter it is you have far less margin of error and you have to get it much tighter and much more correct and be willing to be flexible and test which is what you just walked us through which was great yeah absolutely and and in just so people in the audience know like i treat short form as advertisement for my long form i know that i'm not going to be able to teach you everything i want to teach you in a thirty second video it's impossible but the purpose of these dm automations is to get people to my newsletter or some kind of lead magnet or my youtube playlist so they can get to know the real me so they can build like that real meaningful relationship like seeing my long form content and what value i can add and so you know so there were people in long form who like dismiss short form i just view everything as a funnel again short form is just my top of funnel and then driving people to my newsletter my lead magnet my offer or my youtube where i build a really meaningful connection with them i love that framing and it's very simple heuristic short form is advertising for your long form stuff and long form can mean a lot of different things okay i think everybody now gets what it means to make a successful video and it's not magic it's just deep thoughtful choices and testing now you've taken the next level and basically set up a a set of automation to actually monetize this video walk us through what that means what was like a lot of people watching probably don't even realize you can automate your direct messages and like that that's even a thing that exists yeah so the really cool thing is like this entire time i been getting people giving me my email on the bottom right corner like it's been working life so it's like it's literally happening in the background time seven while i sleep on this video and this is roughly what it looks like so let's dig into it so this is an automation for my potato deal in august and basically how it works is when someone comments on my post with a certain keyword first i'm gonna ask them for a follow this is the message they get if they don't follow me oh i'm sorry this is exclusively for my followers please click following okay once they follow me then i ask for an email address go again email capture for my long form very important so please drop your email send the guide here plus add you to my free newsletter once they provide their email then i send them the dm which is what they were wanting so in this particular case this is just a promo i have for august okay mh and then here is the deal itself the button and this is the url it goes to i put a tracking link here so i know exactly how many people are clicking and converting and then i also put another button here i like to just provide something extra so in this case this is a series of cloud tutorials for beginners and then i just put that url here and then after all this i send it to a web hook so that i can store it in my subs newsletter or in your case a crm my club hubspot crm because again we wanna take the social media attention you're getting and actually convert it into leads or contacts in your crm or your email by the way we're leaving out really important thing these social media networks are fantastic they help you reach people that would have never learned about you don't also a walled garden ecosystem that you don't own and they could ban your account or their algorithm can change and so you want to move people into a system that you own that you control that you could manage relationship whether that's crm if you're a business person or a a a solo or maybe even just a spreadsheet even if you're just like doing this personally because you're just trying to do some hobby thing it doesn't matter but if you want to own the relationship you do not want to let the the networks have the control because at some point i promise you bad things happen like things change and you will you will miss that you didn't take advantage of doing exactly what you're showing right here so most people don't know this but early on as a content creator my twitter account got banned and my youtube account got suspended and i never was able to recover the twitter account the youtube account i had to like ping people on twitter youtube support and eventually they unblock it but there was absolutely no reason no i mean i was making eight just basic ai tutorials at the time i didn't even have many subscribers on youtube but like those two experiences back to back taught me very early on like you absolutely have to build your own little empire outside of the social platform forms what and what if your account gets hacked there's tons of reasons why you want redundancy and you want some ownership specifically to you and the systems that you run and or kinda like the admin for mh absolutely agree and so yeah this is a great way to do that again we're we're really trying to get people from instagram or facebook over to your system whatever it may be now for this particular case i'm actually hooking it up to any then where i have a whole flow that checks their email again because i'm adding it to my newsletter so i'm really sensitive about email deliver durability and then it adds them to my newsletter here but hopefully you're using a crm like hubspot which makes this a lot easier than have emailed out we obviously you could do this in hubspot we have our own agent builder workflows you can do this in and eight n you can do it in zapier here there's a bunch of places that you can do this but what i love about this is you haven't spent a ton of time talking about the technology the technology is out there people and it's not that hard it's how you think about using the technology the fact that you just said this exists because i care about my email deliver ability and i wanna make sure that i'm checking that these are like real and legitimate emails that's the thing that matters like yes you have to set up a system but knowing if that is an important step a lot of people don't know that and then they mess up they get get really bad email deliver maneuverability and then nobody reads the stuff that they're writing yeah and i i know this only because i went through it too like just when i went started out i did not read enough content about email marketing and deliver ability i was just you know just take everybody on my email list and then you watch your deliver ability rates to drop i mean that is literally money guys my email newsletter is my number one highest converting channel highest roi it's not even close compared to social media okay so just just in the context of how i think about funnels and social media that's why i say all short form is just top of funnel my newsletter is the by bottom most funnel highest roi highest converting and i always wanna take care of that by the way i think you just signed yourself up for a part three a couple months from now just all on the email me newsletter like we we'll we'll we gotta do a show just i mean look you i've as a marketer i've sent billions of emails probably in my lifetime so like we have a lot of stuff to talk about when it comes to email marketing deliver ability newsletters and and how you think about content strategy and how you use ai to make really amazing email content there's a lot to do you want the step by step walk through everything we've talked about today five minutes again and running check the video description click the link but today we're talking about an even better topic which is like how you actually run these automation seats so people even know you have a newsletter so people even know that you have a product to sell the thing i wanna remind everybody is like as good as that instagram real video is that you showed of those four million people that watched it three point nine nine million that was probably the first time ever hearing or seeing you right and they're gonna have very little awareness and familiarity with you and you have to have these type of automations and next steps to actually build the deeper relationships which is a beam you've been talking about throughout the episode yeah i was actually trying to pull up the stats here instagram web is a little bit limited compared to my phone but yeah this particular real eighty percent of yours were non followers meaning they do not no idea who you were no idea so this was their first exposure to you ever yes and people in my existing audience are like why do you post those videos i've already seen them and i'm like well eighty percent of the people watching have never seen them this is their first introduction to me this is my opportunity to get them like on a different platform like my youtube or my newsletter to build that relationship like that's why i keep posting them you know oh to have the problem that your audience cares and watches your stuff enough to to complain that you keep up posting the same thing over and ever a little secret everybody watching if that's your situation you're living a good life i promise you it relevance is a much bigger problem than the problem i it's true yeah so what i love is you can now build this in your ai agent whether you use cloud dot ai cloud core cloud code hermes chat gp work this works across any ai agent tool so i'm just gonna show you in cloud dot ai web chat so for those of you who don't have coworker or gl code this is an even easier alternative basic claude as as as the cool kids sometimes call it yeah yeah so yeah the very first thing we're gonna do is head over to customize k we're gonna add the potato connector that is what allows you to create these dm automations it's gonna manage them all for you so if you're not familiar with a connector it's basically allows claude to use the apps you use so if you use hubspot gmail air table slack now claude can access those same tools it can send a message in slack on your behalf it can read your emails and draft to reply so all we're gonna do is click add in the top right corner click add custom connector connectors are amazing and if you're not using connectors in any ai tool please please do i they're they're a huge unlock yeah definitely so here you can name it potato and then the remote server url just type this m c p dot potato dot com slash m c p okay if you're using a different ai tool by the way in potato settings bottom left corner click api you can just choose which tool you're using and it's gonna walk you through the exact set of step okay so if you're using codecs here are the instructions hermes etcetera this is actually useful for installing any custom connector like it's same instructions you just change like that url okay so let's go back here so click add i already have it but it should show up like this you'll be asked to log in so go ahead click that login in and then you're set that's all you have to do okay so x out of that and then let's just test real quick that the connector works so i'm just gonna copy this from chat so just to test that everything's working correctly we're gonna list the connected social accounts and while this is working to make sure everybody's watching understands these connectors it's like claude or chat you or whatever ai tool is using the product for you it's like you know imagine instead of you going and clicking ui it's working directly with the product for you thankfully it doesn't have to go and click a ui but it's doing the same thing you would do if you were over in the product just in a little easier more automated way yeah exactly so here all our accounts are connected and we can actually publish directly to these accounts but now let's go and make our dm automation so here just a really simple prompt create a facebook and instagram dm automation when someone comments the keyword in this case it's do basketball on any post yeah ask for a follow i was rather to think of a keyword i haven't done before and i was like i appreciate this one and cool thing you can put any keyword guys like you can make you can have it fun you can have it related to the post some people like to do crazy keywords that aren't related at all yes for fun then here i'm gonna say ask for the follow this is optional by the way if you don't want them to follow if you wanna send it immediately you can remove this and then send your free guide in this case i'm just gonna send them to my newsletter as soon as they go here they see subscribe to my newsletter k so click enter and reminder the length of steps in an automation like this it's normally requisite was with the value if you've spent weeks working on something and it's super high value and it would save somebody thousands of dollars you can ask them to do a lot of things if it's super lightweight and super low value you might only be able to ask them to do something quick like i'll hit a follow and then i'll send it to you whereas like follow email multiple steps you will you have to deliver the value that's requisite with that right yeah and there's other approaches as well like i see people skip the follow but they will send them to a a pretty long via cell like a a video sales letter and so they skip asking for this stuff and they go to ad of value introduce them with this video and then sell them on and offer so it really depends how you wanna against structure your funnel the cool thing is you can experiment you can ab b test and see what works here by the way cloud is just asking which facebook page i should run on so i'm just gonna run it on my personal so i want it to go live immediately or create a draft maybe someone on your team needs to approve them so you can actually just save them as a draft i'm just gonna click go live now and when it's working you can see here what the tool is doing so i always recommend people actually click on this and like see what's happening might look a little bit scary you don't have to understand every single thing but that way you can kinda see how claude is using the mc p tools that you've connected to it kieran has a new term sabrina that i'm gonna test on you that i'm really loving that he calls ai s and you're an ai sla if you don't read the details of what ai is doing you don't read the skill it makes you don't read the code it's writing for you you're just like asking it some questions and just taking it that's doing everything perfectly and just keep going you're an ai s and you're you're basically telling people do the opposite don't be an law instead understand what it's doing because what it might be making a mistake but two you're going to learn and actually be able to maybe make some tweaks or changes the next time you're doing this i love that term i i'd really try to emphasize that in a lot of my education like i know everybody views me as like automation automation automation but i always really encourage you to like understand what it's doing like i'm only able to trust it because i spent so much time reading it understanding it understanding what permissions i'm giving it you know in case something could go wrong like it's really worth taking the time to invest in understanding and reading what it's doing i interviewed david epstein this week for the pod who wrote there's awesome buck inside the box and he's got the simplest heuristic of this brain first or tool first thinking you wanna be brain first thinking versus tool first thinking when i think about you you are outlining the system you know exactly the step that you want you know how you want it to work and you are using these tools to actually scale that system that you have in your head there are a lot of people just don't know what they're building and they just outsource it to a tool and have the tool do all the work and normally that leads to really bad outcomes at the end of the day yeah in my case as well if it's an area i don't know anything about like seo is something i've had to learn about in the past couple of months my first attempts at seo i was like i'm sure it could just do everything right well yeah terrible results you know i was putting press releases out they weren't being picked up by other news outlets i didn't like i didn't even know that was a possibility until my friend seo expert was like no here's how you would structure it here's how to prompt clot so that you get the results when he puts out a press release everybody picks it up you know same press release same content but i'd like to tell people in each facet of marketing it's a rabbit hole just content social is a whole rabbit hole with a lot of expertise and it takes years to master guys seo is another rabbit hole and the more you master it like the more leverage you have with ai like my personal formulas ai leverage equals your skill times your clarity so if you are an seo expert for ten years you know exactly how to phrase the prompt to get the results you want you know how to diagnose when something goes wrong you know which tools to hook it up to and you know what feedback to give to help improve the system better you just described why market and awesome hey do you have a question about ai marketing if so you're gonna wanna hear this this is critically important we doing an amazing ama at hubspot un bound event where we're gonna answer all of your burning questions more importantly we're gonna take every single question we're gonna do a mail bag episode we answer all of the questions no matter what live and we'll give you our real and unfiltered take so you wanna submit your question please we would love to hear from you so click that link submit the question and you'd either gonna be read on the un bound stage or on this podcast live and you're gonna hear exactly what we have to think about it and again click that link in the description below so that you can add your question we can't wait to hear them no you did because the reason i love marketing is because i i've been doing this for more than twenty years and the more i do it the less i realize i know you know like that is like i'm like you know like i often think of like jira dreams of sushi and how he spends his whole life like making sushi and learning how to perfect this thing and it's like you could spend lifetimes trying to get good at marketing and never get there it is like an almost endless pursuit yeah it's really fun for me too i think coming from an engineering background i was worried that i wouldn't be good at marketing but i just approach it from like the systems view yes oh thinking like critical to marketing yeah so it it helps i kind of remove the the personal aspect like oh this didn't work so now i feel like wait i have a system i'm trying different things i'm seeing what works and i'm gonna double down on the winners and every day it's like that every day i'm learning new stuff like right tell everybody i work with there's no fail either one or we learn something and yeah you often make more progress from the failure and learning than you do from getting something right mh definitely so i think the dm automations are creative so one thing i wanna point out is like since i've built this to be tick what that means is everything is synced so you can actually edit stuff directly in here and it will sync to whatever clot tells you or you could tell claude to update and it will be shown here so i i've just built it that way so everything is in sync so here's the basketball keyword here's asking for the follow and then here's the lead magnet that i'll click here okay okay cool so now everything is created so i think i was just going to go ahead and test it so let's do it okay this is just some other random it's instagram account i have so i'm gonna search for a sabrina here also what you're doing search it is important to do what she's doing i call like being a secret shopper like going through the experience somebody would have with you and just not assuming it's right you know actually going through and only takes a few minutes but it's a game changer to make sure it's working the way you want it to be okay well let's try basketball alright and now this account which is what you're coming from should get a dm over your account you get a stop now k man for commenting i i don't know if i i actually don't remember if on this demo account i follow an un follow all time so we'll see if i'm following already it's i'm following okay so let me click follow oh okay i wasn't following so this is actually what a real person would go through by the way yes this this is why it's so important yeah so like it is a choice if you want to include following because there isn't an easy follow button just from this it's not embedded in that experience again back to what we're saying the platforms have a lot of control of how some of this works and that's why you like your email newsletter and other things that you have control over yeah actually on that note like something i recently learned was tiktok will sometimes hide the link in your profile if you are getting too much traffic on that link because they feel like you're directing people outside of the platform so that's like crazy to me of them that's wild rather it's to the it's literally insane at the same time but we just saw the experience you went through it's very yeah conceivable that somebody goes to try to follow you they click it wrong they just see somebody else's video and they're gone right and so that's when you say introduce friction it means people get distracted or you know their kid is asking them a question and they put their phone away and they come back and you know just relaunch instagram the next time so you have to be thoughtful on the friction they're you're adding yeah it's it's so interesting because like i'm also the primary builder of potato like i've i've coded the first version i built it to quite meaningful revenue solo and like a lot of the product principles around removing friction for example in onboarding making sure they get to that i'll home as fast possible it's the same thing in marketing systems mh it's like what are all the friction points we're introducing are they worth it is the friction point like i'm investing in the product and therefore it's gonna be worth it or is it just an annoying friction point that we should remove from the product and that will make it better so a lot of that like thinking from the product side i i try to apply it as well on the marketing side so we can see here once i followed okay now it says here's the free guide i mentioned tap the button to open it click get free guide and this is my landing page to subscribe to my newsletter so i teach ten million people blah blah exactly and so you're not asking for the email in the dm it's taking them they feel like they're making progress and they're gonna put their email in and then once they do that then you're gonna gonna go straight through to the content they want yeah and i and so another option is you can ask for the email in the dm so i have been experimenting with that a lot and i'm i am noticing slightly better rates of completion with that but again it it depends like what your offer is like can you create something here that has higher conversion rate like that's the whole game at some point like you've got the basic funnel the structure but now it's like okay let's swap out the content see what converts etcetera in as a marketer for dentist for a long long time and sold billions of dollars worth of products there's no right choice but i will say there are key elements of conversion rate the first is the process itself that you just said like for example oh it's easier to just reply your mail the dm then have to be disrupted by this pop up but at the same time then what is the totality of the experience like for example if you were delivering something that was maybe not good on mobile and and needed to be desktop then you wouldn't you you you might actually not wanna do this pop up take their email and say hey i'm gonna email to you so that they can go and have it in their email to go and open on their desktop you really have to architect the key variables of what that person's gonna experience and there's always a few choices and you wanna think through what would be the best choice or the choice i would wanna make in this process and if you're able to do that the conversion rate normally follows that logic i love that yeah yeah so this might be irrelevant but i personally didn't like this because when i actually went through this and type my email the next thing is like download subs stack mobile app and i'm like what hate that i didn't notice for the longest time but this is why you have to go through do it this is why you have to secret shop your stuff yeah i was like what the heck up i feel like i feel like it's not a good ex like you should at least get like the next step should be they see my newsletter it shouldn't be like download this other mobile app so then people were messaging me like oh i downloaded your app and i was like what what out i don't have a mobile and they were like oh the subs gap isn't that yours because i signed up in your newsletter and then it had me download and i was like no that's how i thought about it like like people were telling me so i was i was by the way listen in all of this people don't know anything about you they don't even know what subs is you know they don't know if you have a personal app or not they only know what you very explicitly tell them and that's why these types of automations are so important because that you're actually directing people this is what i want you to think and know hundred percent yeah and so yeah just talking about a couple of other option so let's say if you want to enable asking for an email all you have to do is this or you can tell claude as well if you want to enable the web hook all you have to do is this and put your web url and if you wanted to do this directly within cloud you might type a prompt like this so when someone sends the keyword k asked for follow get their email send my free guide and send all this data to my web so really simple variation to it the other thing i wanted to show is that you can do all of this in bulk but i know your audience is very experienced with marketing so this is awesome but basically you could have a spreadsheets containing all of your lead magnets tracking links etcetera and the keywords yeah yeah this is what mean and that spreadsheet is literally just prompt you just show per row you just showed per row in different parts and but it makes it very simple for you to yeah do it across a bunch of different campaigns exactly so here i put a couple variations because be this is really what i do so this is an example that sends them to my newsletter and gets them subscribed and this particular newsletter is also incorporating my product organically this one sends them to a youtube playlist because i also am trying to drive youtube subscribers and then this one is a tracking link for my app because i basically have a specific promo and then i want to track how many people are clicking it from this particular real and converting to paying customers so it tracks it all the way to paid conversion so these are just different ideas if you're not sure what kind of lead magnet you could send or freebie because i mean a lot of people who are setting this up for the first time they think they have to create like a crazy complex lead magnet for every single keyword mh but you can actually send them to existing things sometimes if there's a new tool i'll just send them to the tool i'd be like here's the tool if there's interesting news like ant topics hiring people to teach ai i'll just send them to the news article it doesn't even have to be my content sometimes like i'll just direct people there because it's valuable because they yeah because i still just like follow yeah especially if he's a lightweight ass like just to follow right yeah yeah yeah it's like oh yeah this makes sense i'll follow this person because i really wanna do this thing and then they'll read it in good and it's like oh they'll see your next video and then they'll you know give you the other email and this is how marketing works yeah exactly and another tip for those for instagram and facebook you can do all the same things in your stories so that's what i like to do as well usually each of my stories gets around forty thousand views and those are your like die hard fans like because you have to click into a story to watch it right that's not being pushed to them in their feed so like like these are people who are clicking they care about your brand they wanna see what you're up to and so conversion rates and click through rates tend to be be higher in stories so always recommend also doing this with stories you are so deep into the social media automation game nobody's doing this i think the average creator for sure should be doing this the average smb who doesn't have a team to manage it absolutely and even if you have a team you want to be able to run and scale more campaigns now you know the good thing about marketing is there's never a shortage of ideas it's the shortage of time to actually get the ideas out and into the world yeah and the beautiful thing about this is like once you set it up it's self fulfilling right like i don't really go back and check a lot of the dm automations they just keep working while i sleep like literally twenty four seven one of my biggest regrets with instagram was not setting this up earlier because i felt these types of posts were cringey i personally didn't like seeing like oh comment this but so many people in my audience were like can you just send it to me because i can't like screenshot it in the video right like because like i put everything in the video as well you don't have to comment most of the time like i'll show you here's the link or here's the prompts but people were like it's too fast in the video i just want you to like send it to me and so i started doing this because people were asking for it and it ended up really blowing up my instagram and my facebook i feel like there's a hard eighty twenty of cringe content which is like twenty percent of the people might be a little offended about it but eighty percent of people is like no this is exactly like the clarity and specificity i want thank you and you think it's cringe because you're so close to it yeah thanks right and you realize that like this the first time everybody is ever seen anything from you and what you said was just super clear and explicit and then like that work for them mh yeah that it a lot of it in marketing i'm always like checking my ego like like i made these assumptions and that i was wrong like people told me marketing is all about having a really high level of self confidence and being happy with just like getting kicked to the face every day you know like you you know you're gonna fail you're going to miss more than you hit but you have to believe that you're gonna hit and then when you hit you're gonna hit big yeah it's it's crazy i i it's i love i love marketing as well even though i don't like traditionally consider by myself and marketing but it's so interesting to me like what are the systems i can build to make my life easier so that i'm not spending like all my time chasing people down being like oh hey you wanted my my leg gray like here it is as a lifelong capital marketer i think i have the credibility to say that i think you should retire any notion of thinking you're an engineer and call yourself a marketer because you you are a marketer you've taught us so much about marketing in the last sub thirty minutes it's it's been incredible and i hope that everyone takes away some of the key lessons short form video is advertising for your long form video short form video follows a very specific formula we gave you a lot of those key attributes and that automation around dms and any type of long form content you have to monetize those dms is a game changer for your personal brand or your company and sabrina you shared your success i think many many others are gonna be successful after watching the show thank you so much for being here with us today awesome thanks so much was really fun alright thanks everybody we'll see you on the next episode of marketing against the green let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and of this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hotspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hubspot grow better

so you probably spend hours an hours a week endlessly trying to read email newsletters get news updates scroll social media all these things just to learn a few things that are gonna actually help you personally or professionally well we got the one and only matt wolf here and matt you've built an ai system that basically solves this problem and instead of spending hours across your week it's like having your own you know say operative or analysts go out find everything that's german to you from the places you care about and makes it quick and easy to consume and find and we're gonna talk all about like how you came up with it how you built it all of that today so thanks for being here yeah hey kip karen great to see you guys again thanks for having me back and yeah i'm excited to to share what i've built because it definitely makes my life a lot easier so hopefully we can show it off to other people and show how it can make their lives a lot easier as well maybe just go ahead and pull it up for us so that people understand what we're talking about matt and walk us through it and then we can kinda go into the how you build it how to do it and how to think about it sure yeah so this is my main dashboard here and i'll give you a a quick tour of the dashboard and then you know you guys could feel free to to dig in and pick it apart and ask questions or whatever so the ai intel page what this page is doing is it's looking at all of these websites that you see across the side here so it's looking at ant philanthropic open ai alibaba amd apple newsroom etcetera like pretty much every tech company it's looking at their website and what it does is first it looks to see if the website has an rs feed and if it has an rs feed it's gonna pull any news that it found on the rs feed i miss rs assess it got un cool matt and i love rs yeah so like rs is real simple s it's like a a way for these sites to allow like rs feed readers to keep on top of it it was really big during the blogging days but it it sort of faded away over the years and so less and less sites use rs anymore but some do so it will look for an rs feed first to see if any news comes through an rs feed if it can't find an rs feed it's secondary thing that it does is it maps the websites site map so every website has what's called the site map dot xml file which is essentially a table of contents of like everything that you can find on that website so what it does is it'll like take a snapshot of the site map the first time you use this app and then every single time you open the app again it double checks the site map to see if any new pages have been added to that site map since the last time you checked so if there's no rs feed it's just looking are there any new pages on this company's website that weren't there yesterday and so that's how it's kind of finding new news constantly on these websites even if they don't have an rs feed and then it also watches like ten crunch and the verge and you know gizmo moto and a lot of these sites that that talk about tech a lot with a filter for like is this about ai so there is like an ai api connected in the background so it'll read the news and go okay this has nothing to do with ai don't pull it forward to this dashboard so that's how this news page is working and this is actually using a feature in codecs that is also in cloud code so you can do this in both of them but it's the scheduled feature where every i think i think it's running on five minute cadence so like every five minutes it's running these checks so if i come back here five minutes from now and refresh it again it'll probably found new news from rs and site maps and stuff like that just this alone has a multitude different use cases for our audience like product marketers can use it for a competitive intelligence content marketers can use it to make sure they get the latest information that they can create content run the one thing that's super cool that you're doing is like it basically goes and checks like open and it says okay here's what the site looked like last time i checked and here's what it looks like now oh like they've added this new page and it tries to go look at that new page and extracts if there's any news how does it know the difference between these two things like are you index and and store what their site look like yeah so in the background it is saving like a a snapshot of site map each time so that it it can look at the site map again and see if there's anything new that's added in fact on this news page i actually have like a little archive so you can actually see everything that is found over as long as i've been running this whole thing see so it keeps like a database of all the news that it's ever found in here so that it's not duplicating up the same news as well and so my process when i'm actually going through this news is i've got this little mark is red button so just like an email inbox i'll just sit here and go mark is red mark is red mark as red as i look at the news and to determine if it's interesting by find something that's interesting i just open it a new tab here and i could read this article once i've done reading this article i jump back over to my dashboard hey if you loved matt's episode today and you wanna get this system yourself scan that qr code click the link in the description below while you're bringing that up one thing i would tell everybody watching this if you're obsessed with people coming to your website to consume information and like click on your ads or call actions that's dead host it's gone no i'm being serious like this is a really important thing for anybody who monetize attention on the internet whether you're a media company or a company like hubspot or anybody in between like this is a massive change in how you find and consume information well i i would almost argue that it's more killing something like a google search because i still do open these articles and read them so if you're like a tech crunch or the verge or one of these kinds of websites and you're still surfacing good news i'm still clicking open and reading the article you're still going to their sites you're i'm still i'm still going into the sites and reading them myself but i do think ai sum is gonna slowly kill that too but right now i am still going and clicking because as somebody who keeps up with the and writes a newsletter and makes youtube videos i want all the little nuances so i don't do a lot of sum stabilization still because i am sort of trying to pick out nuances that the ai might sort of skip over but i also think i'm probably unusual in that sense where most people are fine with just the quick summary so that's the ai intel page here i've also got this little reminders tab here which if i push something over to reminders it kind of saves it in another and it basically means it's something i wanna res surface again later i've got this newsletters tab here which is very similar to the ai intel page but it's subscribed to like every ai related newsletter and the way i built this was i created a brand new gmail account and i haven't shared this gmail account anywhere other than using it to opt in into ai newsletter that's the only thing this gmail account works for it'll soon be spam by a bunch of other people i'm sure but at least that's me for moment we'll find it yeah i haven't shared it anywhere other than the newsletter so if it does start getting spam it's because the newsletter company started to back around exactly but what this actually does is it reads the newsletters for me on a set cadence i think it's reading every hour or so and it reads through all the newsletters pulls any news to the surface and then d duplicates it so if there's a piece of news that's being talked about in five different newsletters it's only gonna show up in my list once but it is gonna show you know the platforms that shared it like this piece of news here was shared in the deep view and the ai polls this piece of news here was in alex vol thursday ai repository and ai news super ai pulse you get the you know you get the idea it's pulling in the news once and then telling me all of the sources of these and sort of sneaky little thing that i did here was i don't want any of these newsletters to unsubscribe me like one of the the best practices with newsletters is if somebody hasn't opened or clicked to the email in you know ninety days or something like that they'll just clean list and take you off yeah so when you actually click on a link to open one of these news articles it actually redirects you through their newsletter link it doesn't grab the sort of raw and it could but you don't want it to no i don't want it to i wanted to i wanted to grab the link from the email so it's sending a signal back to their email provider that i'm actually reading the email still that's cool though you're not actually reading reading all the the news they're reading you're reading the information but you're actually never seeing the inbox or they email marketing and news newsletter i mean it is still pulling in like let's say they have sponsors it will still pull in their sponsors right i've got this like a new tool section where yeah it's filtering out like if the newsletter mentioning tools it's pulling into this new tools inbox as well and oftentimes that's their sponsored link so they're even getting clicks on their sponsors from me as well so they're still getting that signal and oftentimes those new tools will end up on my site or end up getting mentioned in a video or something like that i i don't even know if it's sponsored or not i don't have this set up to tell me it's just pulling in whatever it finds so two things on this i think this use case is awesome this exact use case has been on my list actually meant to set this up where i would have basically yeah an agent per different category of things i want to learn and then have my own inbox but a thing i have the agent trained on is things that i care about like so if i sent for all of the finance newsletters it has like my portfolio and how i invest and then it extrapolate that into the stuff i care about extracted from those newsletters ai would be another one that i have to add in and there's a couple of the other ones but like i think this use case alone is just gold but the second thing that kip point is and this is how i work as well it is kind of the death of the internet like it like you know you know if what you're talking about for a minute this this is the paradox is like what happens here because it's a far better way of working right you can personalize everything based upon the things you want everything is just data and so now you could just extrapolate and customize that data whether it's to use newsletter an email a web page doesn't matter you never have to visit any of those things and you get the exact like when i read and use there maybe i love thirty three percent it and the rest of it like so like listen to an album these days spotify kill listen to an album albums right i used to listen to albums i can't listen to albums anymore i like oh they're the three songs and i just keep listening to the three songs that's kinda what's happening here is like i'm going to just end up wanting the things i want and not looking at any of the other things and i will be all in my own little space it will not be in the internet mail my own the lens ad right and that's the thing i've wonder for years about ai as it kinda of breaks the relationship between the creators and the consumers in that what is the payoff for creators long term if all of their stuff is just like data that gets filtered by an agent and it it's never seen in the way it's meant to be seen and the same way albums are rarely listened to in the way they've were meant to be listened to yeah i don't have a good answer it's just like one of the fascinating things about what's happening it's definitely something i think about a lot because you know my business is reliant on a newsletter as well like that's a big piece of my business i'm also a content creator right i've got a youtube channel that people can literally go to my youtube video click the summarized button and get the summary if they wanted to right now that already exists on youtube so like these these are definitely things i think about a lot i also think that people like us are kind of on the bleeding edge so i don't think you know a lot of people like i i don't think the mass market is going and doing this kind of stuff yet i think most people are still like reading the newsletters and going and reading the websites but i do think it's only a matter of time before this stuff just gets democrat amortized and easier and easier for anything anybody to have and yeah yeah it's hard to do right now but it's not gonna be hard to do and in and if you i actually think youtube is the most def def platform on the web because i i have an agent that goes and takes all the transcriptions of stuff with them but it i would never replace me one to watch my favorite youtube creators yes it's such a visual personal experience that your channel is incredibly visual you show a ton of cool stuff you can't really get that from a transcript yeah well one other thing i wanna chime me in that's related to this but like matt if if you're watching this video you might be like oh this is really cool does this actually cost me to do like what's your estimate that that what this cost because that's also german it's very different if it's fifty cents a month or thirty dollars a month of like who's gonna do it right yeah that is true so in in the background the apis that are running this i think i'm spending probably in the range of twenty five to thirty dollars a month i don't have an exact number because if i go and look inside of my my api dashboards it's sort of a mix tens of dollars not single dollars or pennies and i guess my point is we know how many people don't spend more than a dollar on content on the internet right let alone spend twenty thirty forty dollars to summarize free content right absolutely you only do that if you're like it's matt's case kieran where it's like your time is worth way more than that forty dollars but there are a lot of people that's not the case i just think that the starting in ai was kinda fun just because it was novel but actually the you couldn't really build really close stuff now i think we were in like peak now i think ai is not novel it's like someone overs saturated and everyone talks about it but we are in peak like fun time to build stuff and is the best time to i play around and build things like this what i worry about is like the next phase is we are going to the all knowing ai coworker phase yeah yeah don't worry about it you the human open your mouth and i will feed you with all the stuff you will be bandwidth you don't need to worry i'll do it all for you right like i'll go figure out the data sources you tell me what you want i'll go it you don't need worry about anything i've played with some of these tools and that's how they work and in that world they're gonna be able to do this for pennies yeah well i also think we're entering a world too where going to be easier and easier to run local models if you want to yeah yeah i'm sure you guys all saw the m five ultra announcement out of apple and yeah things like that are i mean most people are aren't gonna afford an m five ultra right they the it starts at like ten grand to buy one but this is very very early days eventually you know fast forward a few years down the line that level of compute is gonna be like your everyday computer that most people have that can run the best of the best local models and now you're getting into like the cost to actually run these is the cost that it is to plug your computer into your wall right it's be the electricity cost so you you know i think we are gonna get to that point where even these ai costs to do this stuff in the background it's just gonna run locally eventually for for this kind of thing right like the the really really smart like in coding stuff like if you're building really big projects you'll probably still use cloud models but to run something like this that's just like d duplicating news for me and giving me a quick summary like the cheap open source models can do this stuff for me right now it's just a matter of getting the general consumer computers to catch up i think but i mean it's definitely something i spend a lot of time thinking about it and i i agree i think things like commentary and opinions and stuff like that are what's gonna keep people watching youtube videos but any sort of youtube channel that's just like here's factual information i think it's gonna struggle i know of course yeah i think informational content of any kind is dead gone yeah kyo and i are doing a live ama at hubspot un unveiled event on september eighteenth at eleven fifteen am we want your questions please submit any question you have for us we are gonna answer them directly and honestly and the best questions are gonna get picked and answered on stage live in front of everyone and we'll give you a shout out so please click the link below and drop us your questions okay this is actually really cool is there anything else before you show us how to build it that you wanna make sure we know oh go through these next few things really quickly i've got this brand page because most of them are sort of functioning the same way in the background the brand page is looking for mentions of future tools matt wolf beauty bench which is a benchmark i built matt wolf dot com it didn't find anything today but you can look in the archive and this is basically like a google alert for me so it's looking for any of my names or brand names or anything like that and it pulls them forward for me when any websites are talking about me brian mentioned tools used to be pretty like meaty subscription and you just kinda like an afterthought you could just pay like ten grand month year to do something like this yeah yeah yeah in the last conversation that kip and i had we actually showed how i built my second brain where i sort of ingest all of the youtube videos and content that i come across well i built a second brain tab here that looks at that same ob upsetting folder for me and then res surfaces five things twice a day so it comes in at seven am and two pm and it res resurfaced five things from my second brain every day and what it's doing is because codecs has access to my slack and my gmail and my google calendar i give it access to granola so it can see transcripts from meetings and things like that the stuff that it's res servicing for my second brain is the five things it's thinks are gonna be the most relevant to me in that moment based on what it knows about me so good one of the big problems with building like a second brain sort of system is that people just use it to the dumping ground and never come back to it and i wanna have that like active recall i wanted to sort of constantly res surface stuff that i saved that's why i saved it i wanna remember this and come back to it so twice a day this is bringing stuff back to my attention like you know these youtube videos that i've saved in the past and then just for fun i had to make an audio overview so it has almost like a little like notebook l kind of element to it where it'll read the five things to me so i could just press play put it on two x and have it give me like a quick like here's what you need to hear in the moment right now and then there's this reminders tab like i can push stuff forward from my ai tell my news my brand pages i could push stuff forward here and i also have a chrome extension so if i come across tweets or articles or things like that i use my chrome extension and it saves that piece of information that i found on the web to this reminders page and then i could add notes to the reminders on like why i saved this like tim ferris made a post about the following seven documentary shapes his thinking and was like okay cool i'm gonna save that i wanna wanna check out some of these documentaries so i saved stuff in here that i i wanna read again later and then i have a little folder so i can sort of organize them into different things you know i've got some tutorials and physical gadgets that i've come across and we're doing a segment out of live stream called ai or real where we debunk you know youtube shorts and instagram reels that people seem to think are real but we're pretty confident or ai so i've been saving those as i come across them that's reminders tab can i ask you a quick question with that because i love second brains i've been talking to anyone who builds one to compare and contrast one of the things i was gonna add to mine and i can't remember again if we were on or off mike is i was going to get more deep into codecs is to rebuild my second brain into codecs so i saw your original video and i've seen some other folks rebuilding the codecs the thing i was gonna add to mine was a clipper you mentioned it there which is a chrome extension and like i could clip an article or clip a youtube video it would tag the youtube video and it would just automatically get the transcript and then extrapolate things that i care about for my second brain do you have any relationship between the things that you're tagging with the chrome extension and is it pulling things into your second brain or are those two things separate like that reminders where you're storing all this content does any of that end up in your second brain is like things that you want to recall and remember in there they could so my second brain is still built on ob city so i'll use the ob web clipper if i wanted to go directly into my second brain and then i have like a custom extension that i built for this tool to save stuff into the reminders so they are kind of separate i mean the way i would probably do it is save it to my reminders and then when i'm sitting at my desktop browser open the article and then also say into ob so there's a little bit of redundancy i'm sure that's would be something too hard though is just to like have a button here to like push to second brain and it would just push it over you know yeah the one other cool feature that i saw there's a youtube challenge really good against predominantly claude is chase and he was the original person i watched that i kinda built a second brain similar to his and he recently added voice so you can talk to his second brain mh that was actually pretty pretty awesome that's the other thing there's two other things i wanna add like voice and a web clipper yeah yeah that's essentially like the voice idea i'll probably add that to my second brain tabs so good he can just have conversation conversation like he you're right walker and you can talk about all of the things that are in there yeah yeah yeah i like that a lot i like that a lot i do talk to my second brain but i do it inside of codecs so yeah my codecs is sort of mapped to my ob folder and so i'll have conversations inside of codecs but yeah that's something definitely you should just like add to the dashboard and then the last two tabs here i have an audience tab which sort of tracks my social media stats now this one is actually not scraping directly i'm still manually entering them like my youtube channel just past a million so it's like that's not up to date congrats thank you but i do go and i have like an add stats button and on this dashboard i'm adding them manually yes so i can i can track the growth across all of my channels you can see like the full audience footprint and each individual social media channel and how it's doing here so that's that and then i've got my sites tab which is literally just using the plausible api to tell me like my web traffic to my various websites that's like my core dashboard that i use right now and i can show you inside of codecs here what some of this is doing if we want god this is great i'm getting a ton of things i need to go do it's gonna to do like here's this lost this whole weekend man yeah yeah yeah yeah great so here's the quick peek inside of the chat gp app it used to be called codecs but now you know it's got everything all built into a single platform but you can see all these automations that are running here and you could see that they just kinda keep on running right here's the brand alerts ran ten minutes ago the ai intel ran twenty four minutes ago the site intelligence two hours ago control tower daily brief so these are all running on automations and then and you could see instead of codecs they're running them every two hours to pull in new news and new you know brand alerts and things like that you know cloud code has this as well i'm i'm pretty sure pretty much all of the powered ide have these like scheduled things in there but like all of these automations that are happening they're not actually happening like in the code of my dashboard it's just telling codecs x or would tell claude code to go and run these automations so the automations are just happening right here inside of you know whatever ai ide you're using here so i went and made a video recently where i tried to clone this whole thing and rebuild it so like anybody can use it and my original prompt was me just like brain dumping via audio everything i wanted into this this thing right keep up to date on all the latest news keep me on up to date on brand alerts checking inside a gmail slack granola a reminder section a page that has an audience tracker a news newsletter page like this was all just one giant prompt to kind of go and build this thing and it built out the bones of the whole thing and then once the bones of the whole thing were were built out i just started going module by module and optimizing each module until they were all working well i think this is really important because i think sometimes matt people see what you showed at the start of the show and they're like oh my gosh we wrote this ten page perfect prompt he knows how to do all this and it's like no this is like literally just a pretty simple brain jump and then you got something to react to and you just basically made voice edits you just just like nope it doesn't do this i wanted to do this other thing and you just spend a little time and iterate it to get it what you wanted it to be yeah no that's that's exactly it i just kind of went back and forth with voice it would build something and i would come back and i would just speak into what i want again i tend to send a lot longer prompts when i'm speaking but yeah i just kind of went back and forth now the original dashboard that i showed you was actually built out over months and months i just went and rebuilt it because i wanted to make this like open source version that anybody could go and download and use so my original dashboard started as just that social media analytics page and then i went wouldn't it be cool if for if this like same page pulled in news for me and then i built a news module and then you know i just like wouldn't it be cool if this was like a google alerts kind thing as well and then i built the brand module and then i came up with and so like that was built over like weeks and weeks and weeks and then once i knew everything i wanted and i wanted to like rebuild it as something i can give away to people i knew everything that was gonna go into it because i sort of iterate integrated over time and then when i came back to chat gp here i just went and had it rebuild the whole thing because i knew everything i wanted in it now it shows you how personal software is becoming which is like in a know historical world you had to i want this feature okay i have to go and find like products that have that i want that feature okay i need another product that integrates with that product just to get that feature now you can just go to the ai i need to do this oh it'd be cool that did that it it'll be like and it's all kinda mapped to how you want to work it's so personal in terms of how you can create software to do these things now yeah and absolutely yeah does your experience with ai sound a little something like this you've been prompted for twenty minutes the output is polished confident and completely useless that's what happens when ai doesn't know anything about your business hubspot ai works with your actual customer data every interaction every signal your team has generated over time so instead of prompt and hoping you ask once and ship it check out hubspot dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses so this is the new one that i built here and it doesn't have anything in it yet i made a youtube video where i showed how i built this one but this one it's got a lot of the same stuff in it the industry tab the mentions the reminders the audience tab the newsletters i also built a task list into this one which is just a very simple task list where you can add single task list or current task list it's like a very simple like to do list here but if you go into the settings here this one you can completely customize however you want so you could go into the industry page tell it like what is important to you in your industry i know the text is probably really tiny for you guys because it's really tiny for me even on my big monitor here but you can go in here and say i want ai news that shows just technical advancements and news about stuff we couldn't do before today right so you can give it like a little bit of direction of where you want it to go with the news you could tell it how many updates you want it to pull in every day you could plug in industry topics of ai machine learning generative ai whatever excluded topics for me there's a new tv show coming out with david harbour in it and the character's name on that show is matt wolf so i'm like any mentions of david harbor don't pull those in for me you know please mh you subscribe for a bunch of use is that what this is doing or it's just looking into the web no this one's just looking at the web this is the one that's looking at rs feeds adam feeds and so maps yeah you can add track sources here too so this is where i add like open ai and then i would add you know philanthropic blog and google gemini blog and you'd come in here and add all of the like url sources as well that track the rs asses and site maps for you then at mentions this is for the brand alert sort of page you add your name your social handles your official websites things like that and then it actually has identity aware filtering so that sort of like is this the right matt wolf is this related to stuff he talks about or is this completely unrelated it has this like identity aware filter in so it'll try to filter down to stuff where it thinks it's only talking about you it's not gonna be right a hundred percent of the time but i would say it's like ninety percent right and then you've got the newsletters page and this one is a little bit complicated because you do have to connect google oa client id and client secret to get it to actually read the gmail for you but it's it's not that hard you you there's a little link here you open this link you answer the questions and then you come back and you plug in these two details this is where you would create a new gmail account sync that gmail account up and then subscribe to newsletters audience tab this is where you would come in you'd would add all your social media accounts you can even add so if you have like two youtube channels you can add two different youtube channels and it'll track both of them and then so right now this one out of the box does not actually need ai to track all of this stuff it will just track it using like cro jobs and things like that but i have this ai curation where if you come in you can plug in and open key and then throw key a gemini key and actually my newest version the one that's actually on github but it's not showing here you can actually plug in local models there's basically two tools you can use to run local models on your computer and you can pull in those two tools llama and l studio l studio and then so if if you have a computer good enough to run a local model it will actually use the local models here so you can just plug in all of those settings and it will do everything i showed you and i put this whole thing on github where anybody can just like download it wow so if you did wanna actually use this the simplest way to use this is to literally open up either your chat app your cloud code app whatever id you're using and just say clone this repo for me and then plug in the repo and then once it's done sort of copying the files off of github for you onto your computer it just give it this prompt install any necessary dependencies to make sure this runs properly then start my local host and open it in my browser you do those two things and you'll have it running so good i'm actually gonna use this this is great kieran we're we're this is what we're doing this weekend right yeah we're course friday we have a weekend ahead of us yep yep and the big idea here is like use this as like the bones yeah but obviously not every single tab here you're gonna want and yeah just go into you know cloud code or check gp it just tell it what modules you don't want add new modules that we didn't think about or talk about here and you know build it out into your own thing this is more meant to be like a starting point to go build your own dashboard out yeah it's a great foundation for you know your quote unquote second brain slash personal system and if you wanna get started it's such a great starting point it has a lot of the things i think most people will want absolutely yep this is like literally having a trained analyst info analyst at your fingertips to save you a bunch of time and not just like give you the updates you need but actually help you retain and remember the information that is most important to you and i if you're somebody who's making content like you matt this this is an invaluable tool right because it's just where you're gonna surface ideas for your videos for your newsletter everything else which we talked about so here and we create a bunch of content so we're we're certainly in kieran do you have anything else from map before we close out the show no i've got a link to the to the github excited to build my version of this the used newsletter aggregation was actually on my list and so there's there's like a couple of things you've actually built that it's gonna save me a ton of time awesome soon yeah i mean and free to hit me up if you running any yeah well it's support as always you come with something amazing to show us we are so lucky to have you on the show today and we'll see you next time yeah thanks for having me it's always a blast and happy to come back anytime alright we'll see everyone on the next episode of marketing against screen let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and of this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hotspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrate well i can see the clients whole history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally miss hotspot hubspot grow better

every influencer is telling you online you can replace your entire marketing team with an agent marketing system but is that true on this episode we're about to find out i am going to use an entire agent marketing team to do all of them marketed for a high growth ai company and we're really gonna see can we fire our entire marketing team and replace them with ai all of that and more on this episode of marketing against the green okay so we are going to do some real marketing on this episode we're gonna do a live using an ai git repository that blew up last week some company outsourced their entire quote unquote marketing team it's all done through a bunch of skills and plugins that cloud code or a chat boutique can use you can install it and it theoretically gives you an entire marketing team now what we're going to do is actually use that to do real marketing for a fast growth ai company and determine together is this really good can it really do mark then what does the output look like can you really replace a portion of your marketing team where a lot of your marketing team with these skills plug ins these marketing systems that people are outsourcing and giving away online so first of all let's pick the company and the way we're gonna do this is we're gonna go to so ramp release tons of cool data on fast growth ai go to market companies and i'm obviously always interested in those and and they give you lots of data and lots of information but we're gonna go through and look at i wanna look at which ones are growing the fastest so we're gonna look at which ones are growing the faster so brock attention one my momentum in eleven so these are kind of fast growth ai companies when we go to market space we're gonna pick one mind because we are a user of one mine hotspot hubspot but also they're number three and so if you are doing marketing in and you want a marketing system to be really good you would wanna help take number three each number one so let's pick one mind as our kinda case study here and now i wanna show you the marketing team we're going to use so we have it installed we're gonna access it here in cloud code and there's a bunch you can do with this some of it would be better if you had internal data but we're gonna use it for a company that who's did we don't have but there's still a lot you can do so you can basically all of the website you can do a bunch of things around copy and messaging so conversion and optimization copy and you can do a lot of things around paid ads email seo and ai search social competitive intelligence a lot of product marketing here and the launch and position in app store and analytics so i was kinda messing around i think we're gonna do a website audit we're gonna do some copy because copy is really hard to do in that we are gonna do some product position because product position is really hard to do we're gonna do some competitive analysis we're gonna do some geo which means we're going to actually figure out if we can appear higher in ai search engine so we're gonna do some real marketing here for one line so stay tuned one mind obviously this is gonna take me a little bit of time to too because i'm gonna do it live but we're gonna edit a little dance so you can just see what i'm gonna do and then see the output and i can give you my raw and filter feedback on if this is good or not so there's really two options if you're creating a brand context file i would kinda recommend you do it from internal information which maybe this is what they want you to do what we're gonna do is we got rid of the brine context file and we're gonna run it cold we're gonna just say audit one mind they sell sales agents to b revenue leaders and enterprise saas company so let's see what it will come back with but i think this is a cleaner way to see the value of the skill and so here's what you get back and there is a full audit that i'll quickly bring up but these are the kinda quick fixes so the first one is that replace the headline everyone wins with ai agents that qualify demo and close here one my website it's basically saying hey you don't really know what you all do and it wants to change that to be very specific ai sales agents that qualify demo and close while your team sleeps now what it give us is a pretty ai type headline that doesn't really distinguish many other type of headline you'll find in the space these are ai sdr and so i think this is where her you cannot replace marketing and judgment marketing and taste and actually real copyright skills right i just think copyright skills are timeless ai has not changed that ai is not a good copywriter and so i think the push it's given which is if you read this headline you don't really know what the value of the product is hey everyone wins sounds good customers in your business sure give every buyer and customer to life of experience but it's not speaking to like the problem itself right that's like quite broad and so there is truth in the middle and that this could be more specific to the value one line create but you certainly wanna wanna go and change it to ai sales agents to qualify demo and close while your team sleeps because every other ai sdr i suspect would actually sound like that hey if you like what you heard in this episode and you want more click the link in the description or scan that qr code we have a ton of incredible resources that can get you started do in the next stuff in a very short amount of time the other things it's saying is there's four cta types and we should collapse into just one which is watch d cell don't think we should collapse them into one because they serve different purposes but we should certainly work in the names so you can like watch mindy cell here and then the other ones are really like you know book time with us and that is his case studies so i think again some truth in the middle put a hard number above the fold so it's basically saying hey you have like a bunch of cool things from customers and you don't see them on the homepage i think that that's probably good advice and then show the mechanism ai joins your zoom call it's basically pointing out that one of the value props of one mind is actually the ai can join your zoom call and live demo the product and that is actually pretty huge for b b and it's not anywhere here really get a sense of that and i think what they want you to do is really try and talk to mindy but if you're new to the space you may not understand that and so i do think that some of the kinda of core value that one might deliver is not representative on this page and then basically it's telling you that publisher your pricing because transparent pricing especially for answer engine optimization is pretty big because someone searching for you and kinda wanna know what price you are and if they don't know what price you are they may not ever visit your website now it's harder for something like one line because i suspect their price fluctuates a lot based on consumption that is like the headlines right so i've given you the kind of core headlines these are the most immediate fixes but if you actually look here it's a pretty good overview pretty good audit here right i think if you're our small business or a marketing team with like limited time and limited resources this is pretty good right this is a pretty good pretty good way to audit your website i think the value of this audit is really gonna be dictated by how good your brand context file is how good your ic context file is so it actually knows to audit based upon who your customer is and that you've built that context from information like sales calls internal information that is unique to your business versus pulling from your external assets that you want to audit right alright so we'll do one more a little bit of copy and then we'll jump into some other things that the agent marketing team can do and let's see how the copy is and so we jumped the on there on the one line audit because there are follow ups skills which makes sense if you have an agent marketing team you have someone that will do the audit pass that off to a copywriter and the copywriter will improve the things the audit has surfaced so i wanna give them credit here and again we'll provide the link in the comments if you wanna go download this from the github yourself it's not us it's not mine at my own content system on my own marketing system that i will continue to give away on the show but i wanted to try someone else's to see if it was true that you can replace your marketing team with these agent systems and we'll give you the link you can download from the github so basically what it's doing here is they have a copyright in process and then they score them so i've done this as well as it's you can run through a different panel and the big thing here is when your created systems the agent who's doing the copy passes that off to other agents to a review the agent is not reviewing its own work and again that's why i changed about the audit and here they hand off to a panel to something that d i hate the words ai slot and so what does it come back with again i can look at the full one in ob city in which will quickly do but it's come up with a recommended it has its own score mechanism i do score everything myself and all the systems that i create i don't know i find the scores i kinda like do i trust them i don't know even i create them and the methodology but i will say this is a headline is pretty good your chatbot deflect your form delays one cells i like that i think that's much better than what they have today and it's much better than the generic initial headline that we were given and that really shows you having these purpose built skills really matters because these skills is then can actually ingest context in this example the contacts to write great copy and then give you something like this so here's three runners up when to you audience burn by failed ai ninety five percent of ai sales pilots fail the other five percent don't use chatbot bots pretty i like that want self select the exact buyer build for teams that outgrow chatbot bots but on i'm ready to double head can and then differentiation okay this is going differentiating matters most an air rep that joins the video call and actually demo the product alright that's not very good that's not really differentiation i think these are good right again in if you are a solo marketer if you are a founder is probably better than what you will get back from most average marketers and so i think this is pretty good so all it pretty good copy pretty good i think what we're proven here is that ai can do an above average job it cannot do a world class job let's get into some other tasks i believe position is incredibly important and they have a position in skill and i think most position skills that i've seen are terrible so so now we've done our audit we think that's good we've got a great headline a headline that is better than whoever is doing one mine today sorry for whoever's done one mines headline today and was much better than the first agent give us because the agent was doing the audit than plus given the suggestions and it's always better than if you take those suggestions and give them to a specific agent who is tasked at doing that job that's how you build great system so now we're going into position in so it comes up with a category full cycle ai sales agent at what line is the only one that does qualify live demo objections close video calls the full cycle modi is the wedge so full cycle ai sales union is not going to be a great category however again and i'm trying to give the none ai influencer everything is insane version of this and given the version of like hey a real founder or a marketer is this useful for them i think what we're continuing to show here is ai is better than an average marketer and a great marketer or knows how to take this and turn it into something so this is not the right category but what it's giving you is a nudge to say you're better than an ai which is a very crowded space and you might wanna start to think about how to remove yourself in that space and articulate your product in a different way so you separate yourself from the pack and i think that is pretty good advice the thing is it's not easy to do and so it's not gonna replace the actual incredible product marketer who can figure out to do that but it gives founders marketers a nudge in the correct direction biggest find in the buyers tell ai the truth research used this reframe will mind from a cheaper sales rep to a better sales intelligence so buyers reveal intent to ai this is a great one because there was a study last year that said that ai could predict purchase intent to within nineteen percent of accuracy because of the person speaking into it and so natural language is the best way to decipher intent to buy and so what one minor sitting on is a better intent model today the way most companies build intent models is through data enrichment that data enrichment does not include natural language speaking to your customers a far better predictor of purchasing is talking to your customers and this is what it's getting at it's saying hey like you're not a better sales rep you are a better sales intelligence that is awesome right this is super cool this is so much better than what i think an average product marketer would probably come back with so what you're learning in here is a bunch of ways to actually create real ai systems as well so we're not gonna go into this will be too much but you there's a whole lot of work in here there's a ton of work in here and again i would write this good not very good right and that's still a great mark for ai in marketing right i think begin good is above the average and it allows a marketer to really elevate what they work on because ai is doing a lot of this work here and i are doing a live ama at hubspot un event on september eighteenth at eleven fifteen am we want your questions please submit any question you have for us we are gonna answer them directly and honestly and the best questions are gonna get picked it answered on stage live in front of everyone and we'll give you a shout out so please click the link below and drop us your questions so awesome website audit copy positioning oh i think they're all pretty good uses of this system let's do one more here let's get into some demand gen stuff we're doing a lot of coffee we're trying to really have a do copy because that's one of the hardest things to do competitive tear ends ai is great at that i don't think there's anything we're gonna learn by using the competitive tear down i sure it's very good ai is very good at as a research tool i'm actually interested in this geo which is like how you're appearing in l so that's actually run that as our next one okay so we ran the geo audit i wanna show you a quick thing that happened because it actually is useful for you if you're downloaded different systems or skills to use from a repository to use so we kinda came back and give me a you know a score basically said it wasn't they weren't very visible and here's some of the things you can do to fix and all of these i think it make a lot of sense which is they don't have a lot of things in their homepage to extract into the l m's so they're gonna be invisible but really what i noticed was it wasn't doing this properly it was not query in any of the m's it was really just doing web search and so what i did was i ran a trace in the trace space it just tells me exactly what it did and so you can see here this one he is it's again loading these kind of reference files i'm very curious how it's some loading this because it doesn't exist so it's kinda making up things which is kind of a little warrior and then you can see here it's query in the web it's not clear an l which makes sense because really to query l m's it's going to need some tools but it was interesting that it did not tell me that it just went ahead and ran it it didn't actually flag really in your systems you should always flag if the ai is not able to do the thing it it's able to do so give me a full audit what i do it properly and i could see that from the trace but i still think good learners here right like that trace command if you think something is going wrong or you want to see how something works but you should always be curious about how something is working the trace is really useful let's do one more let's do the email based on your recommendations on how we can improve positioning for one mind and who our ic is draft me a two email sequence campaign to book meetings with that ic for sales team alright let's do the email so we're gonna go a few beautiful thing here let's get the highlights so here's a two email secret day one your buyers are lying to your reps your buyers align reps lead with buyer's truth research from the position to work so this is the hey the big reveal that you have sales intelligence you're building sales intelligence not just an it's the inside the this ic hasn't heard yet so that's going to look at that one and then day three twenty eight days to fifteen with no extra head count follows this up with the proof okay it's so sales cycle that's kinda not great because i wouldn't know what that means but key decision each email uses a different angle so email two isn't just bumping this to your top your inbox that's pretty interesting most people do do that plain text no html template one call action per email both ps lines carrier wheel content now color so let's get into it d swapped against the full pattern checklist alright cool so gives me this the insight they they're said your buyers are lying to your reps preview text new research and what happens when ai runs to sales conversation that's pretty cool first your buyers name competitors on first call they share real budget figures they say it live why they're not ready to buy they just don't say any of it to your reps this is very good it's better than most emails i get i actually kinda i'm worried about how good this is and then email to the proof okay we can definitely improve this headline a little again it judgment really matters but your domain expertise really matters but let's see a quick follow up wanna share specific numbers rather than make you take my word for very cool one of our superhuman closed a hundred and ten thousand dollar deal end to end with no human in the loop that's pretty pretty sweet if your team is spending more time qualifying and then close and awesome i think the average company could use this and it would be better what than what they're doing today and so email really good and so we're gonna stop there and so what have we learned i come into this thinking i build a lot of ai systems and i think there's a lot of junk being built and i think it takes real time to build something good and what i wanted to show here is can you really implement an agent marketing team and have that team do a lot of your marketing work for you and it's not for large organizations with very large marketing teams who probably have individuals doing each piece of the marketing for them but if you're a solar founder if you're a smallest team and you want to be able to do more i think we have proved that these agent marketing systems are really good they are likely better in in many cases than average marketers tiers and what have we learned i think we've learned a lot about building marketing systems here they actually have a lot of context files i in the start of this video said hey they only have one context file the brand context file my system has many they actually when you run the trace and while that's doing all the scales have their own context files and so you need to have real context files map to each scale so when they we're doing the audit they had a context file they read from on how you do a great audit when they were doing copy and that headline was really good i would use that copy if i was one line i would just copy and paste that copy that headline from my home homepage they read the copy dot m md file to figure out how to actually create great copy great headlines and they use that to create that headline so you have md files for each of the different skills that help that scale be better what the task was trying to do if you download something from the github or you use someone else's system you wanna make sure it's from a trusted source first but then if you're like hey i wanna figure out what this is doing so i can customize for my needs that trace command can tell you exactly what's happening so you don't wanna be an ai s and just like hey i'll just download this and let it do what i'm was gonna do you wanna like be really in curious like how can i make this better ai will do all things at times right that's the other reason you wanna do that trace command like is it doing what i think doing so when we did the geo audit you saw that it was load in a context file the brand context that is not there anymore because i removed it now what i was doing actually was remembering the context in the conversation so that's fine but it ran the entire geo audit which is meant to be q l and did it all via the web and then give me their report back now if i was just a person using the system and wasn't curious i would say oh this is for my l results but actually if you looked at what it was doing it didn't have the ability to pull from the l because it couldn't use claude computer checks as complexity and chat and ai reviews so it just said here's an audit i did it a different way but didn't flag that it didn't do the thing you expected it to do all in all i think we have demonstrated that if you really take the time to build a marketing system fine tune to your business and i do think now if you're a team of any size if it's fine tune to your business it is going to really elevate your work and allow your marketers to work on higher value tasks and ai is an incredible marketing assistant and these systems are really powerful i hope this was useful for you i hope you got a lot from it if you want to download this mark os that we've used in this video we'll provide the link to the github again it's not ours it's someone else's to do your own validation and making sure you trust it and we will see you on a future episode let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the clients hold history calls support tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot hubspot world at him

for most people ai is making your marketing worse for a select few it's making it ten times better and it's especially true i see more slot marketing today than i ever had before and i wanted to get to the bottom of why that was happening on today's show i'm bringing on david epstein he's written three new york times best selling books his most recent book inside the box gives you the exact understanding of why ai is creating s and how we actually solve them so i want you to stick around because david's giving us real formulas and frameworks to actually do work with ai we're gonna walk you through all those in detail and you're gonna come out of the show transformed and how you think about using ai and how you're actually gonna grow your business i wanna ask you if somebody who's deeply looked at how ai is impacting how work happens in your book you talk about a concept that really struck me which is around going slow to go fast and as as a marketer myself i was struggled with that because everybody's yelling at you to do everything all the time mh and you feel like you're constantly behind it's very counterintuitive to slow down you know i was describing the work of a researcher named bent flu a danish guy who was oxford professor who studied projects of all kinds digital transformation you know solar farms you name it and he ended up with a database of sixteen thousand projects over decades and he found that very few of them coming on time and budget and very few delivered the expected results and coming on time and budget and and the difference between the ones that worked and the ones that didn't he around was a pattern the the bad pattern was what he called think fast act flow where you just jump into producing stuff you maybe haven't to defined your problem that way well maybe having to defined your customer that well whether that's internal or external customer and you move into execution and so you you go through the thinking face fast and then you'll act slow because you'll start learning these lessons painfully once you already have momentum and everything will be slow the opposite pattern the successful one was what you called think slow act fast where you really put the brakes on you put some constraints on early you define the boundaries of what you're trying to do you define the strategic goal and then once you do move into execution you'll move really fast much faster because you sort of understand what the sandbox right it's like that they is saying from advertising give me the freedom of a tight brief like that that that kind of frees you up to work and so some of the interesting examples were like i spent a bunch of time with ed cat mall the c cofounder founder of pixar and he told me that they would keep directors in story development for years like refining and simplifying the core of the story what is the message who are we trying to reach with this who's is it going to resonate with and and often stripping away characters to kind of simplify too and that's why they didn't end up having like shot and inside out because it was just getting too complicated that seems inefficient except what ed told me was that the costs and complexity only explode once you move into production that's where you get huge yes number of people coordination cost communication costs you know etcetera and so it actually was really efficient to do this slow thinking and i i saw that all over the place where i was interviewing top practitioners like one guy tony fide fidelity about legendary designer and entrepreneur he told me that the best advice he thinks he gives entrepreneurs because he mentors a lot of entrepreneurs today is to write the press release at the beginning of their project mh not at the end because that forces them to say who do i think i'm targeting what problem do i think i'm solving for them what are the most important features of this thing that you know only fit on one page and so i actually ended up doing that with my book because he convinced me and and and it does slow you down and it's kind of annoying right totally though but actually but but a lot of things that are processes that are annoying are good for us because they force us to slow down and really think hard he he c founded the smart thermostat company nest and he forced the team to work inside a literal box where he had them prototype the packaging before the product is that this is what the end user is going to see this little box has to be able to communicate all the things that we think are most important so we have to get those su distinctly we have to understand what they are and if it doesn't fit on this box it may be some cool feature but it is not a priority now so it's going on the back burner so it both made them think about their customer how they could message in that small space that's the most important space they would have and ruthless prioritize what it was that they wanted to be focused on at least for that first iteration karen and i are doing a live ama at hubspot un bound event on september eighteenth at eleven fifteen am we want your questions please submit any question you have for us we are gonna answer them directly and honestly and the best questions are gonna get picked and answered on stage live in front of everyone and we'll give you a shout out so please click the link below and drop us your questions hey if you're enjoying today's show we have put together some of the best ai resources on the planet to help you get better at marketing with ai you can scan that qr code above or you can click the link in the description below and get those right now you could make an argument that the internet has made marketing way worse because it's actually dropped the cost of doing marketing or even building a company if you're an entrepreneur drastically and that's actually taken off a lot of the healthy constraints you're arguing should exist and so if somebody is out there and they're working in this environment where they're just move and move and move really fast like what's one thing they could do to maybe slow themselves down and start shifting into that you know going slow to go fast mindset i would start doing some of those things like tony said with with writing that press release and not quickly i mean this should be something that you're really thinking about you're putting on one page and should be detailed you should even write maybe the testimonials that you hope people will say at that time because that can give you clarity about what is it that you hope is popping out to people and i also think you should have multiple team members do it independently final jeopardy style because you've mentioned getting people on the same page right which i think is difficult you know maybe easier when you're small but also difficult when you're moving fast and when things are changing and i think if you do that you're going to see almost inevitably people have some different ideas of what it is that you're going for and how it is that you're going to message it and what they hope people say and so i think doing those things separately like no influence from one another then come in and look at them and say alright what do we all think are the priorities here and where is there some mismatch because you really need to get on that same page and and slow down to make sure that that you're there so that exercise is probably not going to be fun you're going to turn up some different understanding because it will expose some assumptions that people have that they haven't really been talking about but it's one of those things i think that psychologist called desirable difficulty where it slows you down it might be a little frustrating but it it leads to a better outcome great strategy has to hurt has to be pain a good way to put it you know so that's what you're saying is like hey let's get the pain up upfront let's make sure the things that we disagree on we know those before we actually build anything so that the thing that we're building whether and that thing could be a product or that thing could be a website page or a landing page or an add doesn't matter but you have to do that up upfront where it causes ten x the pain down the road that's right pain up upfront vastly preferable to pain after you're doing this stuff right and then you have momentum then you have to change directions i mean that's you know let not as great for moral morale where when it's up front you know i don't think it has that that same impact and in that process i think you should also think about this other famous adage that people don't want a quarter inch drill want a quarter inch hole in the wall so it's like that not what cool thing can i do because you can do all sorts of cool stuff with ai or the product you're building or whatever right again never been easier to do too much but what problem am i solving for them whether that's a brand image that you wanna make them feel this certain way whether that's letting them know what this product really does in terms of solving their problem not that it's like a broom with a laser pointer also that that may be really cool but what is the problem you're trying to solve and so i think really slowing down to to make that very very explicit because i think with ai i mean i can see this even when i'm designing presentations right yeah i'm i'm fairly nifty with some of the graphical stuff and now with some of the ai i can like bells and whistles galore and so i actually did do one presentation the first one on inside the box that i did well i just over did it a little but i actually think it made the talk a little bit harder to follow for people who are hearing information for the first time i knew the information so it's stuff lying around no problem for me to follow but at that point i got a little seduced by the cool instead of doing what i usually do in my writing and my talks which is my audience doesn't know anything about this so i have to throw everything of mine out the window it made me just lose a little bit of track of my north star which is audience that knows nothing about these topics not me who has been spending years thinking about them too interesting follows on that one we do the same thing i think this is an epidemic of marketing right ai is making this worse right because it's like yeah i can pull from all of your product docs and capture every last little feature and that's not what people want the right level of abstraction and reduction of stories to simplify is actually what people want and i think that is can of german remain to actually doing great marketing today in a world of abundance you know real not scarcity but simplicity is gonna be more powerful than ever in clarity markings yeah yeah deep clarity and a real practical example of this just talking with a guest who has five to her marketing agency in the last year and she does a lot of content and writing for people and the one thing she does is she has a sub agent at the end of everything she does review cold just as a stranger to give cold feedback despite that like she and and whatever tools she's using have been going on and on she has some has another ai agent come in and just do it cold for that reason how do you actually get the level of just una unexplained knowledge and as marketers we all have knowledge that we just we think everybody knows and nobody knows that a very few people know it no now i was just gonna say that's such an important point because you know there's both scientific research showing this and i think people understand it and practice in the real world that basically everybody assumes that the person they're talking to knows more than they do about the same thing right there there's this whole context that we've built up over our life in our heads from all the things we're exposed to and you can see this in psychological research that people just talking in a way that assumes that the person knows more of what is in their head than they really do and you know the epitome of this is like when i'm reporting when i've been spent time at the military reporting or i've spent time with nasa and it's like i'm remember a one time in nasa they were throwing around so many acronyms so i'm just stopping and because my ultimate goal is to represent the reader even if i know what it is you know i'm supposed to ask the basic questions because i'm i'm serving the reader and sometimes i just stop and say what is that thing again and they would just throw them out and there was one point where one of the nasa engineers used the acronym squat and i'm like what all it's crazy to think i would have it like a star wars character by the way yeah and so i'm like like i had to laugh like i'm sorry because i was asking i was stopping them to ask about all these acronyms and i'm like what how do you spell that and what does it mean and actually the engineer said well nobody can remember what it actually stands for we don't know all we know is that for launch to be cleared the squat lloyd have to be green it's like something to do with windshield forces or something but i'm like it was so it had gotten so ingrained like they didn't nobody know they were talking about it anymore right and so i just think it's it's anything that makes you sort of over index on on realizing that this person does not know everything you know because that happens even with people in the same company working on the same team is they make assumptions about each other and they don't know so yeah i think it's a really important point one of the things that fa to be about people who make things like yourself is the through lines the themes across all of their work you know like you know the odyssey just came out and everybody's talking about how nolan who made the odyssey could he used to be obsessed with time and time is kind of like the theme of all of his movies in one way or another know as somebody who's read most of your books i i look at them and it's like to me there's this theme of where you decide to play spend your time focus it's far more important than what you do was kinda like is is like a through line to me i don't know if i seeing that right like when you look at your collective work what do you see as your through line that like actually has kept you doing this for as long as you've been it yeah like what's the kind of thing that you're you're examining in different ways one thing that motivates me first of all is when i see what i think our explicit implicit mist translations of research about human performance i mean so my first book was about genetics and athletic performance because i thought almost every topic that related to that that people are usually talking about implicitly out in the world was misunderstood so one thing is is i really get interested in what i think our public misunderstandings of research on human performance and that in in in a way is the through line of all this stuff is how do people figure out what they should be doing in the first place and then how do they get better at it and so in some ways i saw my last two books range and inside the box as sort of companions or one following on the other where there's this deep literature in organizational behavior about what's called the explore exploit trade off and what that means is explore is like finding new knowledge you know developing new products etcetera exploit is taking the stuff you already know or the things you you you've already worked on and just drilling down on them and extracting whatever value you can out of them and with this big body of research says it's now been a being applied to people also is basically that you wanna be cycling between these phases of explore and exploit which can be difficult because once someone finds something of value they tend to go in on that and never come back to explore and then you get you know all sorts of things like the famous example of kodak which invented digital photography and sc it because they were like why would we mess with the thing that is already good going for us and so to me range and inside the box where like the explorer book is like how do you find out how do you broaden your horizons figure out what's you're good at what interests you you know getting this broad tool set having that power and then inside the box was the exploit which now you've got those things how do you put boundaries around it so that you can focus and leverage that power so i wouldn't have used that explore exploit stuff because it's kind of ugly language from the research literature but that's how i've viewed the through line really of of all of my books how do you figure out what your what you should be doing how do you build the tool set for it and then how do you focus it into achievement by the way this is the success of life for anybody is is doing what you just described and doing it and i would add doing around something you care deeply about and your passionate about so that the quality of effort and an output through those learnings are actually really good i think that's fascinating to me and i wanna actually kinda dive in a little deeper around the putting in practice and the exploding part of it because i was talking about inside the box with some folks on my team and they brought up a real conundrum and i was like i'm gonna talk to david about that and they're like oh yeah i understand that you want these constraints and i understand that we gotta slow to go fast but it's like i just don't think you're giving me enough to solve the problem i don't have enough time i don't have enough people i don't have enough money what have you and and they're like i think you're just passing that off constraints and it's actually i i'm i'm not resourced to actually do this thing how do you what would you say to that person yeah i think a few things so first of all people always want more of everything like if only i had more resources if only had more of that and there's a lot of evidence that that doesn't necessarily lead to to better work so let me go because i'm so interested in space let me go back to some of my nasa reporting where two things happen one so one of the first readers of inside the box was a guy named ed hoffman who was the first chief knowledge officer at nasa which means mean he sort of like a psychologist who's in charge of organizational learning from both mistakes and and successes and he was reading and said i have to tell you about this project called lc cross where the engineers ended up with half the time in the budget that they expected so what did they do well they complained and said we need more time and we need more money and then a team leader said well let's say we were going to solve this how would we do it and immediately that like flipped them into this mode of of problem solving and they said well we can't build from scratch so we'd have to borrow tech so they went and took imaging equipment straight off of army tanks and engine temperature sensors straight from nascar and they built the probe they confirmed water on the moon and that became part of their their work habit now if they had a quarter of the time and a quarter of the budget would that still have been true i doubt it so there's that you know there's a line but i think even that exercise of if i had less how would i get this done often boost people into this creative thinking i mean if you have nothing right it's a difficulty but nasa got away from some of that stuff which is why they started contracting with private companies who are still kind of frugal and small and innovative or the indian space research organization sent to probe to mars for less than the budget of the film gravity right because they they couldn't do it the way we could with like this huge rep repulsive powers they had to loop around the earth and send it to mars they became very innovative and so i think those exercises can be really important and and by the way so if people are con complaining about frugal say i visited with amazon mh in almost everyone i meant there this company that has like unimaginable resource literally endless money basically right and everyone there was complaining about resource constraints so i was got really interested in that and it turns out that frugal gall is one of their core principles and so they do resource constrain all these people because they wanna stay in that mode that they grew up with which is the way to innovate its scale is actually to to be really frugal and then you find these solutions in smaller ways and then we can scale them up instead of trying to do these sort of huge implementations so i think everyone's always gonna want more resources more time things like that but is the cognitive scientist dana willing has put it your brain's not made for thinking it's made for avoiding thinking whenever possible because thinking is energetically costly yeah and so if you're just given like you know all the resource and open field of possibilities you will default to what psychologist call a path of least resistance where you'll reach for the easy solution right the one that where you don't have to think is hard where you can just throw money at the problem etcetera that needs to be blocked for you to do innovative thinking so that's one thing and i think the second thing is people really underestimate how complexity explodes when they get more resources and bring in more people and things like that so this is known as brooks law from the famous computer scientist fred brooks who designed some of the computer systems that led the first moon landing and then founded the computer science department in university of north carolina his laws is known as when you add more people to a project that's already late it will be even more late because you think all we needed is more more people but we really underestimate the coordination costs the cost of ass simulating people to the team the communication costs all these things and so you'll just make it even more late so in the abstract more and more and more always seems better but it's it's just not the reality so our i think our brains aren't always wired for for again these are desirable difficulties right yeah this this is like the classic against the grain counter intuitive thing if you're a leader out there you want people complaining about right timelines and res sourcing you want that friction and if you don't have that friction then you're probably not pushing hard enough but you gave i think the leaders and the team is a good compromise point which is go through the exercise and understand is it possible yeah like do you have enough to actually find some way to do this with these constraints and if you don't then maybe you have to like tweak them a little bit to open it up but you're much better to start there than giving the team everything and then having them get down the track there's ton of complexity you're never gonna be able to kinda you know put the the toothpaste back in the tube right because it's just it's gonna just creep that's right you can add those resources later right if you and in in the process of that exercise you may find a solution for something that you didn't know before maybe the whole thing can't get done so then you add the resources but now you've got that innovative thinking where that won't happen if you start with all those with all the resources so you know do that exercise it will also force you to say look if we had to cut something out what would it be and that can be clarifying too this is kind of interesting a little bit related that i saw one ceo of a company that i i spent some time with where it was growing really fast and then they had probably overrun a bit mh and and had to pull back a little bit and so you know at at some point they were gonna have to cut some things out but they were still doing great right but they just probably overs shot a little bit and he came up with this exercise he called the legacy constraint where he he came went to his team and said if if we were going out of business in two years and nobody knew it but us we couldn't tell our clients or customers what will we do differently and immediately people started saying things like well i'd stop worrying about that thing that bothers me all the time or i would put less time on x and more on why because that's where the real value is or were my real challenges people started talking about using skills that they had that they felt were unused mh in the organization because it's like once you get into an existential crisis people will bring more to bear so they weren't going out of business in two years no way i mean they weren't going out of business period but they were going to have to do some cutting of projects but it was just so interesting to see what that exercise did to people in terms of putting them in this mode where they were thinking about prioritization and using more of their own skills i i do that with my teams a i'll i'll go in with a team that might be doing fine but i think could be doing amazing and i i'll often just ask them if we just rebooted this thing right now and you could just stop at everything what would be your new like bottoms up view of what what you should do how you should spend your time and i'll talk to them about it i was like how different from what you're currently doing and it's almost always vastly different right like it's not just like there's like oh we do this twenty percent more it's like eighty percent of what they doing they would stop doing and do this other stuff which is dramatic and shows you how systems can put people in bad situations yeah that's there's like two really interesting things about that one you're helping them combat i think maybe the most be doubling of all human biases which is the sunk cost that right like once you've gotten momentum in a direction whether because you've spent time you've spent energy you're gonna keep doing it even if it's not the best path anymore right whereas if you say if i were starting again today this is often with sort of investments and things where people will say would i make this investment if i were starting today and the answer is no then you probably shouldn't keep investing in that thing right it's just because you've you've sunk time into it basically but it's it's very hard for for people to stop right because once you've got momentum you've got momentum and and the other thing i think about what you're saying is you're helping people do a practice that sometimes called design freeze mh this is usually for designers where in order to combat like since computers have come more into design it's really easy to change designs like crazy there's actually a front page article on the wall street journal a little while ago about how the us went from being the world's leading ship builders to being complete lag where we're outsourcing it and a lot of it had to do with we never stop changing the requirements because you can add so many features that we never say like stop make the thing and that happens in design called the christmas tree effector or feature where it's easier than ever with technology to ad features so you just never stop and so the practice of design freeze is basically saying okay we've done some stuff everyone is stopping no more changes now we're gonna get together talk about lessons if it's something that we can test we're gonna test the prototype wherever it is right now and you do that repeatedly and so i think what you're alluding to is both helping people think about the sunk cost or sunk cost bias and also a form of design freeze we're saying let's just stop for a second and put our heads up and see if what we've learned and whether we should be doing something different i think that's right i i think there's moments in your life where you just something happens and it causes you to learn a lesson and for me i i think about back to the gosh what a decade ago whatever when when slack was getting started at atlas and had this product called hip chat we were big hip chat users and it was slack before slack and and hip chat started a couple of years prior to slack and it was a really good product we used it all the time and that business i think was growing like multiple hundred percents year over year right and slack comes along and it turns out that atlas just completely sized the opportunity that the market for this thing was not this small tuck in to their product portfolio but like should've have been one of one if not the core part of the product portfolio and it kind of gave me the lesson of like opportunity cost versus sunk cost it's like mh you waste all your time in the sunk cost and your whole focus needs to be is there an opportunity cost that i'm missing out on am i actually focused in the highest magnitude areas and i think that's especially true for marketers because they kinda you get caught up in the river of marketing oh i gotta do my linkedin post i gotta do my website update this week instead of actually saying oh what is the couple of things that i can do that would really be transformative because that's what my where my customers are spending time or where maybe i have a unique ability to tell that story and i think you're framing around these lessons and the sunk cost fallacy is really really good do you know the origin story of slack stewart started but i forget how it actually started it was really a video game a game development company that and it was just their internal messaging system and the game development company was not going to work and i think it there was even a point where they said you know alright investors we we we can see that it's not going to work like take some of your money back you know which is an amazing call right but then slack which was their messaging system became the product so i think that really gets at what you're saying where it's like they sort of incidentally made this thing and saw that there was an opportunity or somebody saw if there was an opportunity so i just think that emphasizes your point of right it's like the thing you're doing may not always be the best opportunity in there times you should reevaluate that yes and and kinda calls back to an early part of the conversation sometimes people like to do what they're interested in versus what is the right thing and the right opportunity and you know in the slack case you know stewart and that team were interested in video games to start with they kind of missed and and event and in inadvertently discovered the big opportunity yeah so one of the things i like to do when i talk to everybody is understand how they work in this modern world and so you're somebody who's writing all the time mh and i assume you're using an ai and all these fun tools that everybody's using like what has changed about how you write and like what have you learned to be better at writing in this new world that you can maybe share with everybody watching this is having to write things on a daily basis what are the tips that you would give i mean i don't use ai for writing i i will sometimes put a paragraph i wrote into ai and say you know or a few paragraphs and get it to do its own version sort of and i'll see if i think it's better and if i do then i'll say you know i got gotta i have to do better maybe i'll look at certain phrasing and things like that the author who i i profile inside the box is a l day you know who sold eighty million books she said she like wrote some children's story and then it had ai right one with the same topic she gave and she thought that one was better so she was like it then pushed me to be better you know she didn't use it but but it pushed her to be better right i use it for other things for sure mh but i don't tend to use it for writing because one i like writing i mean i find writing quite painful it's very painful you know but one of the other things i love the most of my life i was college eight hundred meter runner that was very painful they eight hundred meters like the hardest race ever you you really love fame i'd ran track it's painful yeah so if someone had asked me in the middle of writing a book or in the middle of training of an eight hundred or something and said you know are you enjoying yourself and say are you insane it's torture but it's so engaging i find it's so engaging and that's how i find writing painful but very engaging and and i start to realize through the process which is really important because again i wanna write for an audience that is unfamiliar with this i wanna assume that they have not heard of any of the stuff that i've heard of you know except for maybe company names and people stuff like that but one thing i've noticed is i'm i'm pretty good at that but nobody is perfect at that and so i'll often you still have these assumptions of things you're familiar with because there's so obvious to you now if you've learned about them and so when i do the writing it starts to become apparent to me of what i don't actually understand well enough so to make it really simple and so that tells me okay this is where i need to go back and do more reporting or more interviewing or more research so the writing process for me is also really important process for figuring out what i think i understand but i don't understand well enough to really be writing it as well as i want and so i have to go back to to research like this psychology finding the illusion of explanatory depth where people will say they understand how certain things work and then when you ask them to explain it or draw it or whatever you realize they understand they realize they understand a lot less than they thought and so that comes out to me in the writing process so i think that's important to do and i enjoy it and and find it engaging so i'm for sure i'm using ai but you're using stuff you don't like to do you're doing graphics and slide deck presentations and that probably that kind of stuff more so than the actual core thing you like yeah and i can tell you the most like efficiency boosting use of it that i have which is not exactly writing but is using this tool so i first started using this tool called sykes dot a i s c i t e dot ai and then i sort of made a version of it for myself where you can upload a scientific paper because i'm i'm always reading tons of scientific papers you can upload the paper and it will first make a map for you of all the other papers that cite your paper and it will show which ones of those are highly cited so you can themselves you can start to get this trail of what is like the line of influential work and it will dump into a list what are called citation statements a little excerpt showing how all these other papers cite your paper of interest so you can quickly see is this a passing mention is it substantive is it ref mh it will try to automatically separate them into ref and confirming or just mentioning and i'd say it's right like eighty percent of the time you yourself to check but of course twenty percent is not tiny but that i used to do that by downloading tons of papers it manually only go go to the university yes control ethic my way through them so it turned a day you know in some cases into an hour so that's my most efficiency boosting use we'll work you're doing that's transformative i you're basically building a real time like kinda of knowledge graph of any pop that you're trying to go down and learn which is fascinating and and the thing it probably most helps with is sift out papers i would have read part of before realizing they were not substantive mentions help help you not waste your time yeah yeah going back a little bit further the thing i wanna make sure everybody takes away from this this little part of the show is i love what you said it helps me understand that i do not know this thing well enough to explain it simply right i think that's where most marketers fall flat it's like oh i work for some technical product some manufacturer who's doing this hard thing and i kinda understand the science in the process but don't really understand it and it turns out it's very hard to teach somebody else something if you don't understand it really well yourself and i think in the ai world people are outsourcing that more and more and it's actually making the problem worse not better and i i think your push for people to go deeper there and use ai eye to automate maybe the the learning and info gathering side of it is really smart well thank you and and i think and you know we're still it's still early days but we're seeing some of the first studies on how ai affects human cognition and there are some causes for concern where the shorthand i've been using is that ai can often look like gps for your brain where if using gps you don't really learn how to get around if you're always relying on it and i think there's some similar evidence with ai where if you're using it for that really some aspects of that learning phase it's like you just don't work as hard as you should be to learn this stuff like you have this feeling of fluency i'm going back and forth i'm really learning fast but then when people are sort of tested in various ways they didn't learn as well as i thought they did so i think that's a a danger to be aware of to kinda close out the real reason i wanted talk to you today is because i thought inside the box in this notion of constraints was like perfectly timed in a world of abundance and ai and people being able to do everything and ever everybody should read the book before they read the book what is your like biggest takeaway for this ai tech marketing world in terms of like the framework concept of the book that you think like oh i'd really encourage people to be aware of this keep this in their head because it's gonna help them make smarter decisions on a daily basis a behavioral constraint brain first tool second when it comes to ai do your thinking first and this has been shown in studies where if you use tool first brain second you will not learn the same way that if you do brain first tool second so it doesn't mean not the tool but brain first tool second and i think that's really important because it is so s to not do that very much so and so that is one of the main kind of behavioral constraints i've put on myself with whatever it because so s productive just go playing around prototype things and that's great like prototyping stuff is fast but use your brain somewhat first and and somewhat you use your brain first and then tool a second karen who who does the show with me who's who's out today for the tool first brain second we're kind of starting to call that being an ai s because you're just like you're just writing a bunch of stuff in you're having it generate this document that you don't really read and then you're moving that other document to do something else with it and sooner like ten steps into something you've actually not thought about not paid any attention to and you're just kinda being an ai s yeah have you ai slab i like that i might the have have you seen that cartoon where it's like someone on one end says yeah it's great i gave it these four bullet points that turned into a six page memo and the person on the other side is was like yeah it's i got the six page memo and i turned it into four bullet points right and that's the example of like those two those are two people are doing tool first us not brain first yeah yeah absolutely and and i also think something i've been doing for myself that that i that's based on a like a cutting edge genetic lab that i wrote about in the book is subtraction audits where it it people have a natural what's called additive bias us like we always add yeah solve problems instead of taking away and i think that's accelerated in the age of and so i will for myself do what this lab did where put all of my current commitments projects on post it notes on the wall quarterly and then i'll say if i had to cut something out this quarter what would it be and then i do it because otherwise it just grows and grows and grows and so that's always painful because it wouldn't be up there if it wasn't something i wanted to do but also you know i have a finite lifetime and a finite energy and you just can't do everything you wish you could first of all i love that i'm stealing that second of all anybody watching this hey think that's like the ultimate career hack right now is if it and not just doing that for yourself but actually being the person within an organization doing that and saying hey i think we should stop this one thing so that we can focus more on these couple of other things that are more important i think if you do that a handful of times you'll be right and you'll see your career velocity really engage because you're gonna stop yourself and your team from being spread to them completely agree okay well david this was awesome everybody should go and check out your books i really did love range and inside the box i love how you framed them as like explore and exploit now that you you said that i that's how i'm gonna think about them from now on really appreciate you joining us today we'll see everybody really soon on the next episode thank you for having me let me tell you about another great podcast this old marketing hosted by joe po and robert rose joe po and robert rose two of the most well known experts in the content marketing space talk about the latest content marketing trends and discuss how businesses can use content to attract and retain customers each podcast show features a discussion of content marketing headlines rants from joe and robert on what's going on in the industry and a this old marketing example from the past that we can learn from always useful entertaining and never more than sixty minutes they recently did an episode called doing the job is no longer enough about the changing relationship between companies creators and employees listen to this old marketing wherever you get your podcasts this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of hubspot hubspot is a crm platform where everything is fully integrated well i can see the client's whole history calls support ticket emails and here's a task from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot grow at him it's