$30B Founder: How To Rank #1 In ChatGPT

alright so we had da mesh shah on the podcast today da mesh is interesting one he's probably the most listened to and viewed guests that we've ever had and two the reason he is that way is because da runs hubspot which is a twenty five or thirty billion dollar company that makes billions billions in revenue and he's a billionaire he also is sort of like a hacker so he launches little projects all of the time sometimes they works with a sales sometimes they make five thousand dollars a month and so he's probably the only person on earth that has this perspective of both being a big thinker and launching new projects yeah and on this episode we wanted to talk to him about the early days like how did you actually get hubspot off the ground you had no money you didn't have any connections and he figured out a new model of marketing around blogging and seo and we wanted to talk about what did what did that look like then because today with ai and chat seems like there's a new opportunity and i have like more energy than i started with because he's got this kinda i don't know there's like playful builder like get after energy that's pretty contagious alright give it a listen let us know what you think in the youtube comments yeah i feel like i could rule world to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off dumbass mess with looking back do well back from a busy but fun week at inbound in san from francisco did you guys get together and in s yeah we did it da is like you know this was his coachella he's there he's the guy so sam i go to san francisco and basically like the street is shut down for the they take over that that area of the moscow center and they have this thing called inbound and so da is like hey after your talk let's go hang so we go hang out and my first question was like dude so what what is this because i'm you know i know it's a i know it's a conference or like sort of this event i'm not like confused about that but i'm looking at it and there's these giant you know like they make those block letters and it just says inbound but doesn't even say hubspot first thing is this is like it says inbound and then there's all these people walking around and i'm just thinking why are they here what is this all about and you actually told an interesting story about like the origin of this that that i think is kind of a like a pretty interesting business strategy der tell the story you you were you told me something you go talking to brian and he was he was telling about these very well funded companies that were had cmos that we're trying to get website like traffic to their website and here's der just blogging for fun at home and he's getting like way more traffic and then and they kinda looked at that they're like they have a chief marketing officer they have a ad budget they have like all this stuff how are you getting ten times more visitors to your website like people come into your store did they are there's something here right like wasn't that the story yeah that that's exactly the story so the yeah know the i was still in grad school finishing up writing my writing my thesis brian graduated a year ahead me but we would still get together like once a week and chat about ideas right it's like well you know because we had kinda considered the possibility of starting a company together and while we were doing that he was working as a venture parker one of the vc firms here in the in the boston area his sort of job his role was to help these startups go from ricky dink close startups and and get scale right it was just to help them with their go to market marketing sales you know how do you get customers and so we'd be meeting and as part of my thesis work called un startups the patterns and practices of modern software entrepreneurs because i'm a i'm a software guy and my thesis adviser who's won of tougher advisers but like three quarters the way through is star mesh like you've got a lot of words here but there's not a lot of data this is not like da opinion and this is supposed to be a thesis this is you know you have to have some like research and things and this is you guys know me well enough now so my immediate thought was well what he's asking for is going to involve like interacting with humans and that sounds awfully unpleasant that's not what i signed up before and so i thought this i blogging was a new thing at the time i'm like well maybe i can like write you know write a blog and maybe i can get comments on the blog and i can use that as like the citation of the was like oh you know on my blog article i said this and some people said this or whatever so that's that's what did i start a blog in order to come up with a name for the blog i just took the first two words of the title of the thesis which was on startups stuck the words together and put a dot com at the end of it and this was you know in the early days so that was available so registered it for you know fifteen dollars or whatever it was and anyway so that like how do i get people other than my mom and in you know two friends to read it right like what's what do i do and so then i kinda dig in it's like oh well there's you know this thing called google they got two types of traffic you can pay your way in or you can do what's called search engine optimization can get organic traffic there's social media sites like dig and read at the time like here are the things you do in order to get people to your website right that was a a collection of things and so those are all the things that i sort of dug into obsessively and learn about and we can talk about some of those because i think that's a good topic even for today as as things evolve and so brian's is watching me do this now when we're meeting is like da how's that blog going like going pretty well here's the traffic he's like how the heck are you doing that i'm like oh well there's this thing called seo and there's this you know like you're all the things that you do he's like well yeah like my portfolio companies like they can't get like a hundredth of that traffic they should be doing this not whatever it is they're doing like stop to madness in terms of spending this budget on things are just not you know not driving any engagement and style was a kinda of genesis of the kinda idea of inbound marketing it's like okay well everybody was doing it wrong they needed to be doing it like let's pull people into your website that are kinda curious how do you educate them how you put value out there and are kinda catch phrase of the time was you know try to add value to your prospective customers before you tried to extract it like all other marketing was forms of how do i extract value from you how i interrupt you at dinner or how do i you know get you in and we were the opposite of that and so now back to the conference so when we did that we're like okay what we didn't have a product yet we're like okay well here's the things that we're doing it i was using stuff that was you know the common things like google analytics and you know blogging software and things like that so two things we decided one was that the reason so many people weren't doing it is not that it didn't work it was that it was just too hard to put all those two two pieces together all the pieces that you needed to do and it anyway put that so we're like okay well there's lots of dot of heads in terms of the idea being right of this kind of inbound marketing thing and so we decided amongst other things to say okay well let's start blogging about that let's see what the market has to say about it let's start getting up on stages when we can get up on stages and then part of that we're like okay well let's have people that are like minded that believe in this this kinda of new way let's get them together so the first conference was that a marriott that was across the street from the office it was like two hundred people in a ballroom with the marriott and we made a decision when we start the conference was like this is not intended to be a company conference the idea here is there's this thing called in inbound marketing which we think is a better way and all this is really doing is we are acting as a host to kinda bring this community together to talk about these things in fact we actually i don't think ever used the word for before but it's it's like you're not allowed to pitch up hubspot from station if not if you're your hubspot employee not allowed to pitch any of your companies from all the speakers that we add it was just all of us internally at the time and so we sort of kept that up that's why the conference was never named hubspot you know this is the seventeenth year that we've been you know doing that event on an annual basis and we it was a con convenient of the community not tech conference the classic sense where you see the ceos get up there and pitch their book and like here's what we're doing and that's that proved to be good there's a few smart things that i did that i would wreck in that everyone should go off and try to do this but a few things that work if you're really looking to kinda start a movement start a category we did not trademark the term inbound marketing even though we had coined it right and and we were starting a company right so it's like okay well if this thing is actually gonna be a thing we want everyone to use it we want people to put it in their job titles and their job postings it's like we want it to be a thing and the way to be making a thing is to make it accessible to everyone make the event accessible to everyone so even the early years we had direct competitors that would send like half a dozen people that would send their entire team to the inbound conference even though you know hubspot was a competitor so that was it was a yeah it was an industry event not a conference i've seen this happen many times so i i was part of the early blogging community first as like a reader like i was really passionate about a bunch of blogs and then i had my own small blog and then i somehow became friends with a bunch of the people who i i read their blogs about read on the blog and it was like from o eight to like fourteen or something it was like a really magical period for blogging and back then we felt like freaks where we there was a very few of us and we were kinda weirdo we basically all nerds and yep we loved like other beating other nerds then when i lived in s f which sean there were startups but then there was like crypto and crypto was like the same thing where it was a very very small and very passionate group of people and it was the same thing they were freaks there weirdo if you told someone what bitcoin was i was one of those guys where i laughed at it and i'm like this is a joke what are you guys talking about and my takeaway from hearing you tell a story is that i've seen this happened so many times where there's niche communities or you know also with like early youtubers we knew early youtubers and it really became a thing we have seen this happened so many times for a small a small group of really like unique or odd kinda odd people that but it's very tiny it's crazy how the signal is like how passionate they are who's that now i think ai is already it's our that's that's past yeah so like that's not it but i think that like peter levels has done that with like the indie hacker that was really cool but what do you what is it brian johnson was that two years ago like the body hacker it's obviously easy for me to say what is past but i that it it's a hard question i don't i don't actually know what do you think it is now well well i was thinking about first the the strategy that the hubspot thing did with the category creation when you make it about a movement and a a way of doing things instead of like starting with your company and your product and so was thinking who's done that well and i thought of two just like little examples just while he was talking and the first one was brian johnson i think when brian started he didn't have a product to sell and so he basically was like he just made this like this way of bio hacking longevity let's call it the and then he named it the don't die movement like it's like if you believe what i believe and then you think the way is to like use science and be like yeah a little weird about how you're gonna yeah i'm gonna sleep at this time yeah i'm gonna put this mask on my face yes i'm gonna you know i'm gonna get this test done every six weeks yeah i'm gonna do all these weird things because i believe in this way of living i thought he did an incredible job of that and he created that that movement of you know the longevity movement really along with hub man and others course the not one person or one company ever owns these things and so so i thought that was one example and then another example that's a little bit you know just smaller or more niche i thought you know i was thinking about okay so hubspot basically had this the people who believed in doing this new form of marketing and then hubspot became like a tool you would use naturally if you were gonna do that then i could build the tool for that community i was thinking who else did that and i think one is what russell b it did with click funnels yeah so first the idea just a rebranding of kind of like the funnel the the ward funnel so it's like oh yeah like we already had websites we had landing pages yeah we had growth we had all these other words but then to like own a word like inbound marketing of like funnel and then i think they have like funnel hacking competitions and conferences and it's not called the click funnels like if like the click funnels meet up you know it's for people who are great at funnel hacking and funnel building and have generated lots of sales and they make them feel like stars and they give them a huge plaque for how many sales they've driven through their funnels and of course if you're gonna build funnels you should use you know click that's like the natural like the secondary thing underneath i i thought russell brown did a great job of like popular like a way of marketing and then selling the way to do that well alright guys if you like this interview with der you might want a little gift from him so der has put together a bunch of ai prompts that you can use to help your brand grow on ai so the old way of getting discovered was people with google and then you wanna be at the top google well the new thing everybody's doing is you're using chat or a perplexed are all these different tools that are ai tools and they're asking questions and they're searching for stuff so how do you get found there how do you get discovered in ai well you gotta make content that ai likes you gotta make content that the ai knows how to read well how do you do that that's something that da has put together he's got a bunch of prompts a bunch of things you can go put into chat gp and it will give you ideas for content writing that will help your brand get discovered by ai so if you wanna get the prompts go to site it's a here's a qr code there's a link in the description as well and there's a hundred of them you can literally just copy paste them and start using them for your company check it out it's pretty cool alright back to subset so one kind of category of ideas i've been obsessed with for thirty years which i think is a really great category like broadly defined category of ideas is making inefficient markets efficient right and so the kinda of macro level definition of an efficient market is that every transaction that should occur does right like oh and an efficient market is like oh someone wants to sell x and someone wants to buy x that transaction happens if it's an efficient market so a good example is like the public stock market someone's willing to share sell shares at why price someone's willing to buy shares at why price and so that transaction and what it needs to occur does occur and so then the question is like what makes markets inefficient right thing number one is the buyer and seller don't know each other so there's just no way to connect the dots thing number two is the buyer and seller know each other but they can't come to some objective way to kind of determine price by number three they can come up with a price but there's not enough trust for the actual transaction clear so there's all these things that make markets inefficient and if you look across kinda the span of history some of the most money that's ever been made are when someone took an efficient market to which there was what i think i was like latent economic value that was just being wasted as a result these transactions out happening they essentially took some of that inefficiency out so ebay was an efficient market for these niche market product like like pest dispensers and things like that like oh i've got this thing that i'm obsessed with or i'm selling and here's the buyer google in a way was creating an efficient market for niche information that says i'm writing a blog post about how to build fences for llama here's someone that's looking for that content that's fences and google is the market maker for a niche market content for the viewers of that content across a really really long tail right that's that's what they did and so this idea of a community is really a form of for a business perspective is a form of creating efficient market these are people that would enjoy knowing each other may be transact maybe they do business maybe they hire each other depending on what the community is but just the act of pulling those people together you're move removing some market inefficiency and as a result of removing market inefficiency you get to participate and some of that economic leave economic value that you uncovered and that's how communities make money and when they do well they do really really well just on a kind of profit margin basis because they're relatively cheap to kinda get started almost self sustaining if you can sort kinda get the people together and you get to critical mass that's actually got lots of other positive effects versus just blogging or said like content creation is because you have these kinda of network effects so wherever the community is already aggregated it's sort of hard to disrupt that once the good community gets going so one of the other things we talked about when we were hanging out was were telling me this story about like hey like early on i was blogging it was getting this kinda of crazy amount of traffic and then we realized like oh there's gonna be other people who wanna do this and then we built a tool and i was like one era of marketing was like when that was like you know early to like as it matured and hubspot became like a huge beneficiary and then i started thinking about we i think we talked about like a few other eras of marketing it's like okay when facebook launched its ad marketplace which i think was something like two thousand ten ish range but like paid ads across google and facebook became like a dominant way to market your product and a bunch of people did that cool then i was like you know there was one other one that i was like i told you i was i thought i was late to even though it was right in front of my face which is what i call a jacking and there's two people that i met that i think have done this incredibly well and they even told me about it specifically to my face they told me the secret i was too dumb to like acknowledge it and the first was actually steve bartlett so i hired steve bartlett when he was probably i don't know eighteen nineteen years old he came more for me steve had this one scale that was like really interesting to me which was he had he was building up all of these social media pages random themed accounts and he could grow them very fast they were run by like a single nineteen twenty one year old person and they got like ten times more engagement than my corporate accounts what's an example page so he had one like freshman problems okay and he would just post something and then like all the college kids would laugh at like the memes and the freshman problems but guess what once you get the attention and trust of every college kid through your you know freshman problems you know uni problems he would create these pages like that then he would then just shove in a product and spotify and others and nike would come and pay him a hundred thousand dollars to reach that audience through his accounts and so he had this like method i guess like in the same way da that you were like just a guy blogging in his bedroom and you were like basically out pacing these venture funded startups with cmos and budgets and you know marketing professionals who couldn't get one tenth of the traffic the same thing was happening and he literally was in my office who's sleeping in my office at the time and he was telling me he's like yeah you gotta think about you know jenny in her bedroom she's just scrolling and like what's gonna make jenny in her bedroom care she's not gonna care that you launched your app and like how do you get how do you pay attention and he started thinking about just work backwards what does the algorithm want give it that and then find a way to slip your product and giving it the same things and now if you look at one of the most successful podcasts in the world diary of ceo the reason one of one the most successful in the world is because he figured out how to a jack youtube and instagram like look at the engagement they get on social there it's i don't know a thousand times bigger than what we get on our podcast and if you think about like you know he he out he worked backwards from the algorithm so what we do for example is we have a product and then we try to share it and it might may work it may not work what he did was he changed his product completely to be what the algorithm wanted so it started as the diary of ceo's his personal diary okay not that many people wanted that then he started interviewing other ceos about ceo stuff some business people wanted that if you go look at his feed today it's like south health sex conspiracies you know like whatever and it's basically like the mass mainstream thing mostly in the format of they've lied to you about carbs they're lying to you about this and they're like but guess what that's what the algorithm wants and when i just when i said algorithm really it's like what people like to click on when they're bored jenny and bedroom bored was scrolling on on on her phone mister beast did the same thing like if you go talk to about a great video what's a great video one that gets a lot of views you're like well by that definition but is mcdonald's the best burger and he's like well yeah it sells the most burgers so it's the best burgers like are you talking about and i'm like what we have different definitions of best but his thing has always been like i wanna make the videos i get views so i work backwards from what's gonna get a view i work records from how do i give views the book algorithm is basically what is what does youtube want to show a billion people and i'm gonna try to make that video and even though i saw that that trend that sort of a a go jacking trend you know i didn't really understand it and i think long story short da today you see a new trend what do you see today as like the next thing yeah so let's talk about because i think there's real value in some some history here so the thing that i was doing back when hubspot got started and we made a brief reference to this it was called search engine optimizations seo and the kind of practice of and there's an entire industry now that was has been about search engine optimizations which is how do you increase the odds that your web page your website will rank in google organically organically being you're not paying you know add dollars or whatever it's for free you know how do you kinda rise in the rankings and there was an entire discipline around how to do that and kinda of pulling on your thread sean around kinda a hacking the way i'm i'm a positive kinda guy it's like it's really optimization right it's not a hacking in the sense that you're sort of what you're really doing is just saying okay knowing what i know about let's say in this case google is looking for right here's what i'm going to do in order to kinda of have my website go up the rankings and there's actually lot layers the game and the first layer is always more of the hacking like how can i trick the google algorithm into ranking my website versus somebody else's website and there were lots of practices that we're kinda later labeled as being kinda of black hat because like oh it really likes when it sees a the keyword that someone's searching on on the web page it's like okay well i'll just put the keyword on the web page five hundred times right in white font on white under at the bottom of the face that exactly and then that was level two it's like oh well google got too smart about that is because because that would actually like show up poorly and in other results and i'll do it i know in a tiny font or a white font on the white back and slowly it was just this game that was costly being played to try and trick the google algorithm with google would do an update every year i don't remember whatever and then like you all like they do the update and then six months later you've see an article this company lays off five hundred people or like and so it's sort of like so like you you see i remember we have we i'm friends with the nerd wall guys the nerd wall is a company that like writes articles about the best credit cards and i was with them and they were doing that well and then after three years google made an update and they became number one if you google best credit card and overnight literally overnight they went from making zero dollars the third year i think they made thirty million in revenue and it was like google rewarded us because they changed their algorithm and we did things the best practices and all these other people got wiped out and it worked out and so that's what you're kind of you're describing of of all these hacks and then doing the right away was exactly right and so and i really like really as i tend to i would deep down the rabbit hole on seo kinda back in the day it's like okay well what is this how does it work and there were a couple of key insights that i think are still applicable today that i think made us money would make other people money because i think it's it's a successful strategy which is going back to kinda sean's po is the first thing you have to figure out is that there are lots of smart people at google whose sole job it is is to deliver high quality results to the end user okay so if you say that that means that every black hat tactic you're trying it may work right now but you've got an army of really smart people whose sole job it is to make what you're doing not work so it's just a matter of time so that's kinda thing number one right it's like okay well are there other things i could do that would act make those people's jobs easier it's like oh yeah well you know they really like it when you structure web so their a crawl has an easier time crawling it it's like well they will reward sometimes intentionally sometimes unintentionally just what we will call like good behavior make your site clean make it load fast make it do the make the content actually useful so the you know i i got up on stages and and wrote about seo all the time back of the day and my one thing i would tell small business owners that's some like kind of primary audience was is that whatever's term you wanna search for type it google right now let's go don't type it in and it's like okay well here are people that are coming up right now do you have a web page on your website right now that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are showing up right now and be honest with yourself like not in a self serving weight if you are searching if you were the actual human typing this keyword in would you wanna find your website versus what the ones google are showing right now if the answer to that is no job one is to create the content that deserves to rank higher than ones that are ranking right now because google's is imperfect and all those battles are win it's like i see them the top two or three are pretty good but if i were really searching here's what i would actually want then produce that web page that the actual end user would want and nine out a ten ninety five out of a hundred times it was just a matter of time because you got a lot of smart people that want to find that web page if it's actually truly better for the end user than that right and there's a bunch of things you can do you know write good content right timeless content but you know i have content that i wrote for hubspot nineteen years ago that still drives traffic to hubspot dot com that still generates leads that still generates you know revenue nineteen years later and this is one of the big things about seo and we'll talk about ae kind successor to that which is this is one of those things that when you're doing like google adwords and then you do those things right it's like as a marketer you need to have a a repertoire of things that you do to reach customers the issue with like google advertising or any kind of advertising is you're effectively renting someone else's stage or renting someone else's microphone and you pay them to do that right like oh put me on the page and i will pay you x dollars and there's a nice efficient auction mechanism for the price but it's like yeah but the day you turn that off the traffic turns off your link does not show up in google search results on anymore so you're basically renting and you don't control the rent you don't control what the prices are because that's a market dynamic thing so it's like it may cost five dollars a quicker down it cost fifteen dollars a click literally tomorrow based on what the supply and demand is so now you are at the kind of va of the market the nice thing about seo and doing this content focusing it's like building your own property on your own land that compounds value over so as land prices go up the value of the thing you built that actually goes up not down and it's under your control if someone comes along and says oh i'm gonna produce a better blog article it's not gonna be instantaneous as they take all your traffic overnight you will see them come up the rankings it's very very rare that overnight some brilliant piece of content that google finds it trusted enough to put in the number one spot instead of you so you will see your competitors come up if someone's doing it and you can do something about it a there's all this positive this to investing in seo versus you know paid paid channels and i i was gonna ask you this you know one of the painful lessons i've learned is this one phrase called intensity is the strategy so i'm the type a guy that always like to read the the next blog the next tweet the next book because i always was looking for like what's the better answer because i in my head life was a you know a game of chess and if you just knew the right moves you would win and chest is like the wrong analogy for life it's a lot more just like taking a chest piece and just battering the other guy as many times as you can in different ways and picking up different pieces and just keep hammering on and i've learned that like you know for most other things in my life i knew the strategy i knew the answer and the difference between success and failure was the level of intensity i took to the strategy and i think diet dieting is the easiest example like we all know what to do this is your question of like how intensely you do it or not but like a lot of things in life for this way i've asked you i bring this up because i can kinda tell and i want you to confirm or deny this maybe i'm wrong but your volume what's a lot higher than what was normal in those days so it wasn't even that you were the best writer or you were the smartest of seo necessarily but like i'm guessing what you guys did as normal was completely abnormal in terms of volume did you basically like was volume or intensity of out of the marketing the strategy more so than like coming up with the perfect you know the perfect strategies totally this is like has been my personal belief for my i think my entire life as far back as i can remember is that i'm never like the smartest person out there or even in any given room that i'm in so you could out think me i think that's relatively easy to do you will not out outgrow grind me you will not out me because that's under my control and so i've always believed that the kind of quality of the outcomes is almost directly always directly proportional to number of iterations and that's it so if you can squeeze out more iterations compared to the the you the next person or whatever over the fullness of time you win that like the universe says you win right it's and and you just to have to have the conviction like the the problem is that the universe has a kinda a slower feedback loop especially in the early years it's like okay when you're first blogging four people will read the blog post and then you have it's like then you like pour your heart soul into it and then it goes to six many part your part and then it goes to five right goes down it's like okay well what the hell is going on here but you sort have to have the conviction to say i know it's just a matter of and i i don't work out but it's just a matter of putting the reps in like it's it's meaningful thoughtful and they don't have be perfect reps right they just have to be incrementally better each time one of the things i wanted to do was for some reason in hubspot you guys changed your blog where i used to be able to go to dha shah or brian hall him all your blog your author page and i could sort by recent and then just go in reverse and see your early blog posts and it was pretty cool because like brian was very casual you're like this is this guy does it sound like a thirty billion dollar company and it kinda like gives anyone inspiration because it's it's pretty great but if you go to on start dot com which is your personal blog and you can kinda rig it where you like sort by recent and you gotta change the url a little bit but you can go and look at some of your old blog posts from two thousand and six and a few things one the headlines are are evergreen they're fantastic raising capital friends family and fools another one is revenue early revenue often the other one is the danger of solving venture capitalist is biggest problem like really good headlines for one and two there's days like there is a day in november where you posted five articles in a day and then for the most part in two thousand and six two thousand seven two thousand eight when i imagine hubspot i i don't know when hub hubspot started it but i think two thousand six so you are running a company an early stage company that probably takes up your whole life and and i think i don't know if you had a family at that time but sure you're very busy but your personal blog is posting something like three to five articles a week not even your company's blog your personal blog pretty crazy reps work my friend that's one thing and this this is you know if we've talked about this in terms of as you pick an idea to work on as an entrepreneur or whatever it happens to be one of the most important kind of filters and criteria should be is this something that i at least enjoy enough that i will be able to put the reps in because if you you can't make yourself do something you hate for that long for that many times over an extended number of years it's just not going to work so pick a market you like pick a category you like pick up kind of business that you like it's like if you like e commerce if you like selling whatever it is then do that right just because something else has higher margins or you know susie down the road was able to create a billion dollar outcome or whatever it just won't matter because if you just give up a along of the ways like do not pass go to not collect two hundred dollars kinda of thing right so funny listen in in april of two thousand six he wrote an article saying less is sometimes less and it's an article written about how a lot of people say less is more and he's like no i disagree with that i think more is more is more in terms of effort this pretty funny you been say the same stuff now for twenty years did you guys see this video that's going somewhat viral of the youtube founders early on have you seen this what's this no so this is twenty years ago and this is chad and steve from youtube and they're just in their office talking but basically it's the guy saying like they're just been they're just sitting around there they're like i was kinda depressed last week like we have forty videos on the site and you know if i came to the site i wouldn't find it i'd be gone i wouldn't and they're just like yeah this sucks and this is youtube is the founders of youtube and you were talking about like in early days blogging it's like yeah i got six visitors and and i got i got eight the next week and you know being able to persist through you know through that time and then and then the volume right like you just don't have enough videos it's not that youtube doesn't work it's that youtube with forty videos doesn't work it's not that blogging doesn't work it's you're blogging once every two weeks doesn't work right like that i think that's one of the big lessons here listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster connect deeper and grow smarter the modern growth playbook for the ai era built by hubspot designed for today's marketer get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot dot com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind alright back to the pod we didn't close the loop though der so you the new wave we talked a lot about seo and like that's good because history doesn't repeat but it rhymes what's the new wave clinton new wave and i think just like seo created an opportunity for seo consultants seo agencies and businesses you know driving direct traffic organically i think we have a a new thing now so a couple of things are happening one is and lots of marketers have been hit hit by the ai taken away which is organic traffic that used to come through seo very very predictably including to a folks like hubspot we are very good at the seo game have played it for a long time has gone down literally by about twenty to forty percent based on which industry you are in and the reason it has gone down is that historically the practice of search is that we would go to google we would type something in we would get ten links right that's the that's the whole game as it turns out there's this new thing called ai and a new app called chad gp which has eight hundred million weekly active users and what people are doing now is not going to google and and getting ten links are like going to chat gp and just asking a question getting an answer and and that's it right it's like okay well there's no quick through there's no reason for someone is like oh just tell me the answer instead of me having to go through and read the articles from those ten blue links and then figuring out my own answer so like just do it for me and so that's happening already and you can see it in the actual kind of data as we've seen and so what's happening now is there's this an new emerging discipline that says in the same way we had search engine optimization we have what we're calling ae o which is ai or answer engine optimization it's like okay well peep peep before people are going to google doing a search for my product my service my industry in my category and my job was to be one of those ten links hopefully the higher the better because it's a a power lock curve now it's like okay well people are looking for products in my category service in my category they're looking in chat ep let's just say that's the number one number one app right now how do i show up as an answer or part of the answer when they do that so that's the emerging discipline of of ae and there's a few things that are distinctive about it one is the click through rate in terms of web traffic to your site through ae is going to be down because if they could just get the answer there's no reason to come read your blog posts about x where you stole the virtue of how whatever your approach is and it also lists way less more way less so if you say like what's a good clothing company or whatever like you only get like four options whereas on google i can click next next next and you get next yes which which no one ever by the way did that those was are running joke in the seo world is if you ever had to hide a a a dead body hiding it on the second page of google search results because no one ever went there all they would do is they would just rewrite the query they would not click next they would just rephrase your queries like i must have asked this you know suboptimal optimally or wrongly i'm just gonna rephrase my questions instead of going to second page but at least i get ten like a lot of what i noticed when i asked it that dad should be it's like they give me like two or three i agree yes so it's even more important and and that's a what engineers math people would call like a binary so it's like either you show up or you don't right if you're not in the actual citations in the answer that was given you might as well not have played the game because there is no difference right so you're actually literally zero in terms of the the traction you're gonna get okay so then the question is how different is it what should people be doing what should we be doing now in order to start getting that and so the number one thing is that so when google crawls your website back in the old google days they have a google crawl and it calls websites and you can kinda control that and there were things you do to make it easier for the google crawl to crawl make your site faster make it more structured to all those things all of those things still actually apply the difference now is there's a kind of a oa it's called oa ai search bot is the name of the bot that's doing the search thing there's another one called gp bot that does for the model training and things like that so they're those are two different ones so number one on the off chance that you're blocking a unknown collar bots which some companies do it's like oh i only want bing in google whatever to call crawl i a lot random people just calling my website because it cost me resource or whatever even if you're doing that if you're blocking it explicitly go in and turn on the ability for oa search pod and gp bot to to crawl your website because if you don't get indexed then right you're not even in the game let alone you know you have no chance of winning because you can't be in the results okay so that's thing one for sure yeah no one thing too is that this was nice of them is that they do report so any when you look at your google analytics or hubspot web traffic whatever analytics tool you use it now self reports when something comes from from one of those bots from the ai so you can it's a ut source per parameter on the for those of us analytics it's like so now start and hubspot has this in in the product now so we will tell you what percentage of your trap just like we used to tell you y here's how much you're getting from paid here's how much you're getting from organic here's how much you're getting from ai referrals you know broadly defined so take a look at what traffic you're getting now so as you do things you'll know whether you're not better or worse you to sort of like anything else you you know have to sort of measure it in order to improve it so start looking at that traffic see wherever the baseline is today and then and start tracking it number three and this is a a a tactical tip reframe your content either rewrite it we're putting new content out there that is closer to a structured question answer form right so this is less about the kind of pros and narrative writing and hook hooks and things like that because you're not trying to hook a human like you were back when you're writing blog post because that's when humans are reading it they were like clicking on the link so you need a great page title that would actually get the quick then you needed an actual really good content to kinda get to the lead conversion right those are the things you did and you were solving effectively for humans and google was just a proxy for the humans but effectively you were solving for the humans now you're solving for that that ai crawl and the ai crawl trying to get to a good answer to a question that the user is asking and it's easier like if the question is we're the top crm for small business and start there should be a webpage page on the hubspot website that says here the primary factors that kind influence what what you would pick or lever and here's is why the seven reasons why up hubspot is the the top you know thing whatever is like make it easy for them like reduce the friction for the ai to get the thing that's trying to look for the thing is trying to look for is the best possible answer so the question the user is asking number three is all the things you used to do in classic seo most of them still work you still want page authority because chat t specifically when it goes off and does things what it does is you type a question what's the best crm for small business it will take what you type into chat gp and it will convert that into search queries it will para us so it's gonna do a bunch of bing inquiries bing as what it happens to use but doesn't really matter us most of the search engines are roughly equivalent technology wise so all the things you use to kinda rank a web page will still help you because when bing goes out and gets asked by chad gp says hey the user is asking this question about small business crm may rephrase a query but still gonna do a a bing search it will come back with a list of pages those pages go back to chat gp chat gp puts it through the l and comes up with the answer that it's the game that gonna show the end user so so you know getting high authority links showing up and being doing all the kind of classic good practice white hat seo stuff still applies sean are you are you getting have you noticed that you're getting traffic and sales for your for your stuff from ai i don't pay attention to it at that level of detail but we've and and it's not that big for us but we've looked at a few of these tools because now there's some new like you know the way like with seo you'd have either you know hubspot or you have like mas or whatever you'd have these tools there's a few startups that have come out and been funded for this and they're basically like hey we can help you track this and get you into the top you know the top the top answer box for for for this and so we're trying those now but i think it's like early still to see if if we're getting any results from it by the way i just typed i said i'm a small business owner and i think i need some kind of place to keep track of customers and perspective deals what should i be using alright tops hubspot was the second answer in the thing said yeah here's here's the top you need to it goes you need a crm here's what a crm does and then it's like here's the top crm for small business two twenty five but it looks like in this case it literally just every the ranking is just pulled straight from tech radars article like tech rate has some article i've tested thirteen of the crm at twenty twenty five and it just like pulled that exact list and i put a comparison table in there like you said and like it just gave me that as the answer whatever t writer said is is the answer here so that that seems little tricky we've for hampton we've got we've got a we've got a lot of business it's it's it's crazy how much is happening what are people looking for sam that they're finding hampton so so sometimes it's just like i want like what's like an entrepreneur entrepreneurial group that i can refer to or or i can i can look into so that's like one that's major one but then sometimes people will be asking questions to chat as if they're an executive coach like saying like i'm struggling with this problem and it will say like you might need a have you considered a an executive coaching group or an executive like peer network something like that and then we get shown and what's crazy is we don't try like i was shocked by this i started seeing leads and customers come in and it would say i we use hubspot and hubspot would be like yeah this lead or this new customer came from chat gp and it honestly shocked to me and i remember the first time we got that like eight or ten months ago and it was you sean us star mesh when was the time that you like the light bulb went off i felt a little bit of that light bulb the problem is that maybe it's not a problem i think the best way to make it work is you just do the same things that you're doing to rank on google no but he had some good nuances right like the fact that you know on google you would structure your page a certain way because it's like that's it's like a a guest comes over for a dinner party and you're like oh he really likes you know to discuss books and current events alright cool that's what i'm gonna give you this other guy really loves a debate and it's like chat loves question and answer and so format your your content has question and answer this is like a simple nuance of like the new the new way of doing right but in general like it's silent like it's kinda like just do what you think a customer wants and the last thing is even early on google had what what was called the keyword what do they have key yeah they used to call it one thing and they changed it so like in the early blogging days you could type in like a certain word and it would tell you ballpark how many people are searching for it and you're like and then it would also tell you how much competition there is and so i could just like replicate that i don't think that exists for chad does it der it does not yet no and it's the other thing that doesn't exist yet is that we don't really get so back in the early years of google as part of the data that would come through in your traffic analytics you would see which keywords people were searching for was show up in hubspot it would show up in google analytics google's have subsequently kind of curtail that so they don't pass that kind of granular what we think of was like intent data what was the user actually searching for yeah i i think things will evolve so the couple more kinda tactical tips that i think are applicable today sean for you and this may be happening automatically based on being on the shopify platform but one of the things is that chat pt and the ai engines really like is structured product catalogs right that's because as you would expect it's like oh here's a here's the standard semantic web way of described the product catalog which is size color all those things right and then another key thing is inventory it's like is it in stock or not you know can shipped or something delivery time those kinds of things if you put those on the website that's going to influence as you as you would expect to like if i'm searching for i wanna buy this kind of a musical s synthesized or something like that i wanna find a site that actually happens to have it right that's why you know amazon gets you know so much love generally but anyway so that's one thing to look at and for you sam the other thing that the aes of the answer engines kinda optimized for is more kinda human based stuff so if you look at the review sites of g two and things like that for product oriented companies but also it i won't say over indexes because that's a relative term but it highly indexes on things like reddit especially if there's like active lots of back and forth or whatever and if even if there's one comment in there that says oh here's the thing that definitively asks and you will find that the the the citations that you see that show up and chat and you could just do this through personal anecdote and just experimentation you will find that the the reddit threads it picks up are the ones where the original post was actually a question and that question sort of matches a question the user's ask like oh what's the best you know crm for small business if there's happens to be a reddit post that loosely kinda translates to the exact same meaning that re fred post if there's a comment in there where someone definitively says yeah it's hubspot and here are the five reasons why and that comment gets a bunch of folks because they have access to that data that has a very very high likelihood of being a sided source this is gonna be the biggest company in the world imagine if google had a so google is already the third or something largest company in the world now imagine every customer is also paying ten dollars a month or you know what i mean three episodes ago we were talking about open it's like oh if you give me if we have to predict this to which what's gonna be the the next trillion dollar company this is before i i don't think any company had reached trillion dollars at the time we did that episode but one was about to it it's crazy how much like chat ep for it to be a eight hundred like they're essentially the new operating system for this current generation i i had a buddy and i i maybe mentioned it on the past years ago but he was des deciding between two very promising companies one of them was open a and this was before chat was launched and i think they were already worth thirty billion dollars and we were talking and he was like man i think like i don't know if this equity can grow anymore like i i just don't think it can work and he ended up taking the job anyway and he made already something like thirty million dollars or so from his stock and he sold a portion of it so he could like be very comfortable and then we were talking he's like what i do the rest and i was like man there's definitely a world where it could ten or twenty x or more again who knows and it's just crazy to say that out loud that what's it worth now one trillion or eight hundred i don't even five five hundred billion is the current publicly disclosed round that's happening currently alright this episode is brought to you by mercury they are the finance platform of choice for over two hundred thousand companies shouldn't be surprised because i use it myself for not one not two but i have eight different mercury accounts i have seven for different companies that i i'm a part of and then i have my own personal account because now they have personal banking which is really cool feature i highly highly recommend it like i said i use it myself the reason why is because the way that mercury works is beautiful it's very intuitive and you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder it's an entrepreneur you could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and and annoy and decided to you know actually fix it himself really any type of entrepreneur you are let's say you're an agency well one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices easily create them send them to customers and stay current on your balances with all your customers well you can do that inside mercury and so i think that mercury is great highly recommend you check it out and thank you for sponsoring the show for more information check out mercury dot com mercury is a financial technology company not a bank check show notes for details yep can we do like some rapid fire questions we have this document this is listening we have this document where we were like preparing different ideas and sean had sean said he wants to know your process from zero to one and how do you get ideas do you do research what do you do to move the ball forward and you replied something interesting you said two things you said this gives me a good chance to talk about algebra brett and i was like i no idea what you're talking about and the second thing you said was iteration it's all about iteration could you elaborate a little bit on that yeah so a couple of things one is i don't have i don't do deep research on ideas i outlook look at the market like an nba wood should most of the things i end up pursuing are either personal itch issues i need the thing myself or someone close to me either my business needs it my wife needs it or something like that that should exist but doesn't and these are all all the things i pursue tend to end up being software the only thing i know actually how to produce if i was a carpenter a musician and it would be be something different and my kinda running thesis has been and this is referenced algebra i was making is around mathematical induction and so mathematical induction is this a very simple principle that says as long as it's true for n equals one and it's also true that if it's equal true for n that it's also true for n plus one then it's gonna be true for everything all along the way for until infinity for all positive numbers anyway i'll simplify this dis still down what that means is if you start that's condition one and if you can always take the next step make the next iteration it will work like at that that's some for some definition of work right it's like you just have to just kinda of keep at it and i'm not saying stubborn pursue the exact same idea that you started with that does not work right you do have to sort it and integration is truly taking kinda of market feedback and doing a true a true loop right and informative loop that this i'm gonna do it or at least to do it better the next iteration the next next iteration but that's what i approach it's like find an idea that i can like and then just get started it's like often it'll be like can i write code tonight so right now i've got three projects in flight that are these kinda distract scratch my own niche ai projects and i'm almost tempted to tell you what the three r because i'll force me to launch them before this episode goes live they can give a one liner maybe for like one or two of them yeah so one is around it's like a like a visual designer as an agent so there's lots of great image generation tools there's you know chat a chat has one there's nano banana that's now from google but what's that i've always found lacking is the actual process i go through as a non designer as a business person like if i'm doing a social media post for doing a blog post or something like that it's like like i have a process like okay i wanna come up with like visual ideas what would represent this then i wanna say ten possible examples then i wanna iterate then i wanna say okay i wanna pick these five and i wanna create my own personal brand my own style then i wanna apply that style to the kind of it's like there's this this kind of workflow that i go through and like that's just painful and i'm too impatient like i have access to designers this this is not a matter of saving money but it's like if i have an idea two o'clock in the morning and i want to get the idea out there with a visual that goes along with it so that's the thing i'm building it's that goes through my entire flow as as an gen problem process do you have a name for it i know you like to do names with the idea do it's and i'll put out there let's because it's it's close to launch of bowl it's called a image gender dot ai be generated copy and is this gonna be i like one of your first or second times on an m world was popular and you said that you made a word alternative so for those listening name if you don't know world is it's i don't know a game like sc whatever and your side project where you just launched this i think with your son was making eighty thousand dollars per month at the time i have no idea where it's at now do you have some type of ambitions or guesses as to where this is gonna be in six months i don't know a lot so being a part of it we talked about this a little bit last couple of episodes you know so i've been working as kind of part of my kind of hubspot hat knows the the agent dot ai platform which is basically a a marketplace for agents if you can build agents find agents hire agents to do these kinds of things so in the back of my mind i'm gonna build this thing but i'm building it as an agent that will be on the agent dot ai platform and the hope that is if the utility is high enough either it will cause a bunch of users to be added to agent dot ai i which is now up to two million users which is awesome or you know i have thoughts about agents on the platform being monetized someday and this is like okay for me it passes a litmus test like if this thing already existed would i pay five dollars a month for it or ten dollars a month for it in the is yes it's like okay well if i can sort of and i actually post on linkedin exactly sort of product road roadmap for this thing was yesterday i'm like okay here's the thing i'm building i didn't disclose a name but you're the thing i'm building here's what it's gonna do and it's like like it's like stupid simple things right now first is when you do an image generation thing right now that it has text which lot of kind of business images that you create will have like i headline liner of some sort of text in it the image models have gotten better at text still not perfect but one of things i wanna do is like okay well if you generate image with text i can pass the generated image back through ai and say tell me the text that's on this image so if there's a typo in it just rerun it don't like waste my time getting me things that have typo in then means like oh by the way you got you misspelled this or whenever you have a typo in that by the time it makes it to me it's already done right like having a an intern going off and doing this stuff in the background and then i show up and it's got ten options for me i can pick and i can run and it'll do it in my style without typos so which sounds like a minor thing but useful sean do you wanna ask him some of these other questions you had some pretty good ones like the requests for startup or his chat history yeah well well i'll do the chad three one i'm just curious so you you run a huge company you are also kind of like a scratch out guy or investor you do you have many hats i'm just curious how you use chad gb if i if you were to pull up your chad tee you'd like looked at the last five to seven searches that you did or or questions and answers that i do what are you talking to chat gp about i have a huge hat fan it'll get be wrong of even if i were an investor in open ai but my my the way i consume chat is not through the app the way i consume chat is through their api so i have my own kind of command line thing that i put in and the there's a reason i do this so the the next big advancement we're gonna see in an ai apps generally is this notion of memory that they remember and you'll see as you've been using chat you will find that it's going to remember more and more things about you even though you'd talk about them a week ago a month ago right it's it's the best out there in terms of being able to retain that memory which is awesome the non awesome part of it is that that memory is locked into chat ep so if you ever go to claude or if you ever go to gemini or something else those things don't have that memory of you and that's a very frustrating thing which is great for open ai because it makes a very very sticky well wait so it's for your personal version that you're running in your command line has better memory than chat why why does that how'd you do that oh because it's it it has infinite memory and what what makes it the better memory is because it's under my control as my memory for instance i can go off and say i'm going i wanna go back through and i have this for my email as well which i think is just another form of memory i'll email archived and i have like you two and a half million emails in in my quote unquote memory i can go back and say through my chat history here's the thing i'm actually trying to kinda get to and then i can combine that with other things i can take that memory like now i wanna pass that to a google gemini or i wanna intersect it with google gemini which it does video analysis better than chat gp does which doesn't do video analysis yet it's it's the openness of it right that that's the the motivation for it it's not that i can do memory better it's the fact i can do more things with it because i can intersect it with other apps but why isn't this the product because i think everybody would want that right yeah give me that because it violates okay have i have three rules of visits rule number one never own a piece of a restaurant never be a shareholder in a restaurant rule number two never be a landlord because i don't even wanna maintain my own properties let alone properties on behalf of other people and number three never compete with sam alt from open ai those are my three rule that will violate the third rule which is i don't wanna create a chat gp competitor but well where will this this will manifest right is that hubspot building kinda of memory into our breeze assistant you know our i ai product and so that that's going to happen so localized memory in terms of you know for use case specifics i i wanna create a consumer app that tries to solve this kind of for the broad horizontal group of people but i think over time the industry will evolve where there'll be some form of like federated memory i think that's says oh you can plug into this similar to how we plug into google docs and gmail and things like that it's like obi i made not own like absolutely everything but right now someone needed to do the memory i think they did the right day it was not you know dia planned to to be that way it's just like oh it would this would be a better product if it had memory so they added memory right okay but be okay so but you didn't answer my my full question so she said i don't use the chad tv app i use it through api on my own little thing you've created which has better memory okay but what do use it for like what's like the last few things you've used it for so i i do it a lot for kind of research i'm researching like ideas i i use it lot for domain names as it turns out so i have a thing that can actually look at google trends so i can say oh like i've i've come across this idea for a domain name or whatever here's a price i can look that up in the marketplace right now i can look up the transaction history as the it has his domain been sold before was the last purchase prices like zillow for for domains one of the agents and i'm also working on that we'll launch actually this week but i want so what i wanna do is to say okay i'll vibe coatings are a good example it's like once andrew ka that i was actually part of that but sometimes i'm a little bit later for the like oh i see this trend kinda picking up like what is that i wanna know who coined the term i wanna know what it is i wanna know what domains are available what's the price are you any of them listed or not are anyone's just free and cleared like no one's as as it turns out coating i was early but late enough where someone had already kinda purchased the dot com domain by the way vibe coating would fit your inbound framework like if i'm rep or one of these companies right now i'm creating the vibe coding you movement in the the community and the events and the blog and all that and then like yeah i have the tool underneath that you could use but you could use many others right or maybe i'm super base or one of these other companies like putting it behind that the way you've done with inbound marketing i think would be smart right now i'll tell you what am my end and i will i will sacrifice this idea not not for free but in the idea here and this was the original idea behind so i paid six figures for that for that domain that's on i think i'm dot dot com or what g five voting dot com okay really and i oh my idea i've logged hundreds of hours doing what people some would call live coating and there's other terms like agent coating i think is is a more accurate thing but it doesn't have the same vibe as v coating okay so that reason that doesn't exactly roll off the tip at the tongue it doesn't yep and and just in case i own that one too but that's the for okay so five putting dot com i think it's a great idea it lowers a bar lot allows lots of non developers to kinda get into the kind of product building game the problem is and i would bet lots of money on this is that almost everyone that is not a developer by trade will do v coating if they're trying to build a real so there's a class of problems that v coating is really really good at it's like if you're building software for yourself if it's got a short lifespan this is as i'm building this i need it right now or whatever it's like disposable software or if you're just bullying it for your team as i only have to make it work for three people and if it stops working no big deal but as as you start violating some of those criteria for like no i wanna build a production product i build a billion dollar software company around that's going to be long during and i'm gonna be maintaining this product going a year or three years five years ten years down the road then coating invariably right now even with invariably non developers will paint themselves into a quarter that they will hit some bug something won't work something will break it will it's just a matter of time based on how ambitious the thing is you're doing when that happens it's entirely possible that you actually have an economically viable idea but you have an un unfavorable code base because you have no idea what's happening inside that black box when that happens that if when that happens what if there were a community in a marketplace called v coding dot com where a bunch of engineers hang out and what they do is to say hey i'll help i'll answer questions for you like minor more questions but also for five hundred dollars an hour i will jump into your github repo figure out your problem and fix it and cause it and set up you to test for you and now and help you get through this corner that you've painted yourself so i think that's gonna be a massive market so you listed i think so you probably own between five hundred and a thousand it's between five hundred thousand yeah okay so i could collect if i were you know had unlimited money in i i could probably collect five hundred over ten years you go to you just have an idea and you just buy it but what's crazier is a lot of these domains that you have they actually have projects on them so i'm looking at pitch craft dot com open graph dot com prompt dot com dad joke dot a i speed round dot com and it's like speed dot com it's an investment firm a check or no in twenty four hours dad dad joke dot a a dad joke generator that's works but not that well and you said you have three other projects that you wanna launch but you said i need this podcast to go out and then i'm gonna go get it out so i'm setting this up sean came up with the idea of being generative this is the most generative i've ever seen so one which is how do you have enough time to actually do all this well just and just to be clear the the list of domains i put in i don't have sites launched on them right now so the thing i was kinda trying to share and i may just put this up publicly it's like here in my top twenty domains for which i have ideas but i don't have the calories to actually pursue them make me an offer if you're but you have to have like street cr some something that gives me evidence that you would actually be able to kinda pursue this idea and i'll kinda contribute the domain and maybe some capital to kind of kick the idea off but to ask your kinda questioned bluntly sam my hours have not changed in the thirty plus years i've been you know doing this as as a entrepreneur i still think of myself as an entrepreneur despite being part of a thirty twenty five billion dollar company for all intents and purposes and i mean this is the most positive way i can possibly put it i live in the matrix that's basically what i'm doing right like it's like i was like we in a simulation or whatever i personally is like okay my window into the world is like okay i've got little talking character people that sometimes show up on this other screen that i have up here in my office or whatever is it's like and i'm just trying to play the game and this is and i in the same way people play video games and do it obsessively this is my version of a video game and i i did play video games a lot back when i was younger too but i really enjoyed it i i like it because if if i were a writer you know i my favorite writers are the ones that spent a lot of time on world building and character building right it's like they create this entire like especially the sci find and fantasy writers they create this entire thing that a world that could exist that's got its own physical laws and here's the the species that live on and the powers they have in the in all of that and this this entire world that they fabric out of thin air they dude in words i'm trying to in my little small way create a version the universe that exists that solves all the problems that i have or people that i love that and that i can sort it yeah kinda poke out of the and make a version universe that i think is a v one point one of the universe that exists does your house work like that and your in your physical life like in on your day to day life do you is your home life setup up to where you've built like your own like is everything about your life exactly in your a very particular way of of going about it is set up that way no it ends and i'm i'm actually probably drawing the wrong visual picture so my life is if you just looked at how i live it's more like the absent minded professor my desk is completely messy so it's not like i have like an engineers scientist kinda thing we're like it's a lab you know white lab code clean desk and everything's is kinda of pristine is the exact opposite of that right it's it's it's it's just not how i'd i i i work and so i'm not that methodical about it i'm analytical in some ways but i actually play things actually very loose like i'll have a random idea and i'll drop the thing i'm working on i'll go play with something else for a day or two or whatever and then i'll drop the fact that i'm doing image agenda dot ai in the next few days or whatever like and now i'll i'll finish it and get it to some some sem of kinda of working but you know i i've said this before but it bears repeating is it's it's a really good piece of like personal advice is that you know when if a musician were out playing music and practicing when they're not doing like for twelve hours a day sixteen hours a day which people do that if an if an athlete they're from a basketball player or like they're if they're off you know practicing eight hours a and then even between games and looks like we never questioned that we never ever questioned we're like oh well that's what it takes to be kinda top of that particular game music sports or whatever for some reason there's a stigma attached to work yep and there's some stigma attached to if you just happen to make money at the thing you happen to be doing like well i was like we has all the money why would you keep doing this for money like i'm not doing it for money at all like i don't care about money at all but i do enjoy the the craft and the practice and the actual process of building business yeah do you you have you ever heard of the the famous clause that michael jordan put in his contract when he signed his big deal with the bulls so they added a clause and i don't know if this was nike marketing or if this was genuine but at the time if you were an nba player you signed the max contract they would have all these rules like hey can't ride motorcycles like you know things that would jeopardize you as an asset to them and one of them was like you can't just go play like random pick up basketball games on concrete with strangers right like you might it get hurt and that's on you know now you can't put play on company time and he had this famous clause that he put in called the the for the love of the game clause and it was that jordan was allowed to play basketball anytime he wanted for the love of the game and i think that that's like a clause that we all just won in our our own mental contract of how we do things like you had this great tweet where you said if money doesn't let you do the things you love doing why else would you want it and i thought that's so good because oftentimes i know have to talk to my mom or my sister and i'll tell them about you and my buddy fur con is like this fe was my cofounder or a last company and then but the company built before that app love and is now like a hundred billion dollar company and so like fe got all the money he he'll ever need right and they're like oh what's fe concept to like oh yeah he built this lab called founders inc in fort mason and he's in there and he's there till eleven pm and he's you know he's grinding and he's he's got a new startup up and they're like oh my god if i had the money i would never do that and you know part of it is like well because you would he's not doing it for the money he's doing it because he wants to it that's why he got the money so first of all like yep you have it reversed the money came because he is this way not you know he's not he didn't become this way because of the money and also like you're right that whether it's athletes musicians you know we find it like noble when they do it but if you're a business person you're greedy or you're a work like when your mom says that you're like have a seat mom pull chair you see lebron james are you familiar with jordan's contract in ninety six subs section three seeds for the love of the game club she's like oh i just wanted to know if he has kids added like was like she's like actually pretty to at a in different level than me man der we we love hanging out with you you i always leave better than i came in i wish we could do this for for many more hours because there's just so many different things about life and business that we could learn from you we had howard marks on recently and at the end it was the same thing where it was like i was like man you you you came to talk about investing but you're really just talk about how to live a good life and you're that guy you kinda do the same thing where kinda funny right like the in invent the the the kinda of legend investors we have they they go they they bring this philosophical energy of like almost like patience and like like observe the world stay calm and you know stay calm and carry on or whatever and like dha and like come of the builders have like a slightly different energy it's still philosophical but it's kinda like a let's make it happen energy like let's build it why not we could do this let's try this it's okay if it doesn't work it is a totally different playful builder energy that i think is is dope to be around yeah well i have a tweet almost sent yesterday but i wanted to get my image generator working so i could attach it to the tweet and it's two lines i'm gonna share with you with it's some nice warm kinda closing which is dance like no one's watching build like everyone's waiting nice we and i we have to do a quick plug this one of the ways this episode came about was the marketing team of house hubspot was like we need you to promote this thing and they told us promoted to this thing and we're were like yeah let's just have da mesh on the pod and maybe he'll like plug it because that's way better but it what is it loop marketing loop marketing finally way loop marketing is a new inbound marketing that's nice is that your prediction learn about how to do marketing well in the modern age of ai look up loop marketing loop marketing dot com you own that one too i guess yeah we promised we would say it seven times so loop marketing loop marketing and loop marketing boom cool that's dope yeah they were like could you guys read this ad or talk it were like white font on white background at the end of the of the pod you you didn't even plug it well by the way we ask what is the new inbound marketing do you call it ae that true hit your honor yeah thank you that's it that's a pod i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break because as you know we are on the hubspot podcast network but we're not the only ones there's other podcast podcasts on this network too and maybe you liked them maybe you should check them out one of them that wanna draw your attention to is called nudge by phil ag and whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make the new habits you could do the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference that's what that podcast is all about check it out it's called nudge and you can get it wherever you get your podcast