Marketing Against The Grain

today i'm gonna show you why meta new use assistant is the best marketing tool you are not using especially if you're trying to grow an audience and make money on meta properties like instagram and facebook let's get into today's show so let me explain news to you for folks who might not be familiar it is a personal ai assistant from the folks at meta and the best part about it it's free i can't believe what i'm about to show you doesn't cost you anything you can access it on your phone on your desktop for the purpose of the pod today i've got it here on my desktop and use can help you on tasks and do those tasks asynchronously which means you can schedule to do things for you or you can just say hey i am looking for this shirt and keep looking or i wanna fly to hawaii but i only wanna fly if i can fly through los angeles to listen the price is less than seven hundred dollars a person those are the type of consumer questions you would ask a new ai agent personal agent like muse now i wanna take you behind the scenes and i wanna show you hey you can use this new tool muse to actually grow your business i wanna give you what i think is by far the most slept on use case for marketing of any ai tool out there right now i also wanna break down how muse can help you do better marketing on instagram and could be a real true instagram strategies for you we'll do a separate show on facebook i know a lot of you are big into facebook marketing but for the purpose of today's episode i wanna keep everything tight so i wanna focus everything on instagram and how muse is a game changer for turning your instagram audience into customers the first thing i did is like i asked muse what can you do against my instagram account and so for the purpose of today show i have signed in to our marketing against the grain instagram account we'll put the handle down there so you can follow it if you want but also you can see what we're talking about and so when it comes to instagram muse can do a lot of really powerful things one it can give you audience intelligence so we're gonna talk a lot about this today map who's following and engaging with your post one thing that's really cool about music is that you can give it a description or a document of your ideal customer profile and it will look at a given post or all your posts and see what percentage of folks engaging with your content on instagram actually meet that ideal customer profile and better yet it can even return a spreadsheet of who those specific people are so you can get a better understanding of who's interacting with your content alright so if you're enjoying today's show we have you covered we just dropped a free guide on how to do instagram marketing on use it's gonna show you how to grow your account how to better engage your followers and the ones that you've already earned it's gonna show you how to turn that engagement into spreadsheets automation and ads that actually convert for your business so if you want this guide scan that qr code or click the link in the description below alright and you'll see here that we're signed into the marketing against the grain instagram account still an early account probably like many of you have and you can do some amazing work with it it can give you a full insight of how your content working on instagram it can give you content ideas can give you ad creative it can help you benchmark against your competitor so if you can see how your accounts performing versus competitors it can help you draft and publish post it's basically a full on instagram marketing machine and by the way it can even help you manage your d inbox in instagram i did a little bit of this before we started today show because i didn't want to have to have everybody waiting for used to go do its thing because some of these things like doing all this audience analysis does take time and like i said all you have to do is sign in to whatever instagram account you have very straightforward it and so it said hey i'm gonna work on all six of these work stream and come back and it's done a full growth strategy for marketing against the grain and what's interesting gave me a headline headline is you don't have a reach problem you have a repeat ability problem two hundred and and seventeen thousand views and thirty days ninety six point seven percent from non followers but only twenty nine bio link taps from the eight hundred seventeen profile visits so what's telling me we're getting really good reach but that reach is not turning into subscribers for the podcast which is obviously something we want again that's a call if you're watching the show hit like hit subscribe we'd love to have you continue to watch future episodes of the show so let's look and see what it bait for us today hey what's really cool is i've i been really enjoying using muse i used muse and i used rock bot a lot we'll do a rock bot episode on a future show but notice i didn't tell me to make me this pdf i didn't actually tell me what the marketing grain branding and colors and fonts are it's just picked up and use that from the research and from the creative on the instagram account pretty pretty intuitive makes it feel like something like you could go and just show this to a coworker no problem right like that's pretty amazing so we just kinda went over this so we got our total reach how many we're engaging we get likes and shares and give a strategy of what to double down on what to stop us says hey don't do solo podcast podcasts clip cuts as the primary feed stop branded explain without a cultural hook broadcast only postings with no replies it's like hey lean into pop culture marketing second do collab do more events that's what's gonna get you deeper connection and engagement and borrowing cultural heat lens and everything else is noise so it's basically saying hey when you do content around what's happening in culture things really take off these are good insights these are insights anybody wanna have and it's like hey our engage are creators they're not cmos and we reach a lot of vps of marketing and cmos with the pod clearly we have a gap there and how we're doing that on instagram and it's even giving me some very specific handles and the signal of who they are which is really cool again very thorough it's giving me advice of like four pillars one weekly rhythm signature format content engine creator distribution community depth this is like if you are just especially a very small team or a team of one this immediately makes your marketing on instagram ten times better it's it's pretty remarkable it's even telling me what content to go shoot and what is the format of that it's a real it's a carousel like you know the ugliest chart to see a mo can show your social team isn't failing str into q4 four like what and so these are like interesting content angles some of which i would do some of which i would do again this is like we're not outsourcing our full taste and judgment ai we're actually thinking about what are the ideas that the use of suggesting in this case could be valuable then how do up level that idea with my own taste judgment creativity and then obviously meta wants you to do some ads obviously that's a big part of their business so they're gonna give you ad creative and an ad strategy here and this is a very robust summary as you can see if you are looking to engage with a certain muse can help you with a content strategy on that it can help do with some of the automation of the content strategy for you 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 i wanna show you now that what i think is the single biggest thing that muse can do to help your marketing every time i talk to marketers they're like well my head of sales or my ceo they don't think social media is valuable because social media doesn't really attribute to revenue well and i think there's something that muse can do that can drastically change that for all of you so before we get into that i wanna show you that music can also just build you a content schedule i had to build me a rough content schedule for the upcoming week and it can do detailed images and create a lot of this content i have found that the image quality and the image model that meta is using from use isn't quite there yet it's not as crisp and as polished as the open image model and i would probably maybe take these brief edit them and then use the open or banana banana one of the leading image models to build those out and put it with some original photography and everything to actually make this content compelling okay we broke down that muse is your c copilot and your coworker for all things marketing on instagram now i wanna show you how muse helped you turn instagram into a money making machine for your business and this is how i asked it one very simple question can you give me a csv spreadsheet file with all the people who watched this post include any public contact info like email or phone number for them and what's interesting because i was really trying because this post as you can see is a video from my episode with cody it's a little clip out of that show and what we have here is we've got twenty nine likes on this post from three days ago and i think we've got a couple thousand people who have viewed this clip k makes sense that's a type of quick clip or video a lot of you will probably wanna have and to r or should be posting on instagram so what muse can do is it's pulling together all twenty seven there were twenty seven people who would like this post at the time they're going to find the twenty seven people who like this post because it can't do viewers unfortunately what it can do is lakers and comments so obviously if you're running the play that i'm about to show you you wanna do everything you can to optimize for people liking and commenting on your post and so all twenty seven l identified i'm enriching each profile for bio website and a public email phone they've listed themselves instagram does have some like t and pacing issues with pulling this information so it can take a little while which is why i did this in front time but you could just set up a request in muse to check muse every day to see if you have a new instagram a post and do this task with each post maybe after it's been live for a day two three depending on when you get the majority of engagement on your content and you know what you don't even have to know when you get the majority of engagement in your content you can just ask news and it's gonna figure that out for you so took a little bit of time and i think it did take like fifteen twenty minutes and it came back with this document so got usernames you've got their full name from their bio you've got their instagram url we know how many followers they have if is this account verified and if we can pull from their bio we're pulling from their bio we get their website and if there's any public email or phone so it has built this pretty awesome spreadsheet for us and you're like cool so i now know for example that this clip from cody and i was talking about how you build marketing systems and how you build those agents to help do marketing for you now i have twenty seven people who i know are interested in that i could take this spreadsheet and i could upload it into apollo or hubspot data agent i could enrich this list and get phone numbers and an email i could call these people like let's say for example i was a services company and i sold services around this video that they engage with i wanna call them and say hey i think you're interested in this would you like a free consultation or can i send you a more in guide so that you can get a deeper understanding how can i build that initial relationship or you might wanna put them in some type of outbound email sequence or you might wanna see if they're a customer or an an in motion prospect already so that you can as a marketing and sales team engage with them appropriately this was one post over a couple of days imagine you are doing a post once every day or two on instagram you're building that audience and you have this motion you are constantly able to feed high interest people that you know are interested in a very specific thing that's like that's one of the things instagram i'm really good at is you were publishing short clips or short carousel cells that's got a real hook or angle and you're probably not gonna wanna do this on like some meme or pop culture post but a post like the video that i did this for where it's cody and i talking about building these systems that's something we're like oh clearly these people care about this they want to do more of this and that is really powerful and so you can then go and take these people and start putting them into your marketing and sales strategy this to me conquer one of the biggest social objections we've ever had which is oh my social is completely disconnected from my revenue no more at this point if you can build this motion effectively your ceo or you if you're the founder you're gonna be like how do i double triple down on my social content and my social audience because there's a big opportunity here and by the way we haven't even talked about direct message automation we did a great show with sabrina rama a few weeks back go into the archives and check that show out you'll find it very valuable but you can do a lot of the dm automation she's talking about with news now and so muse really is your instagram marketing machine and it can do so much for you look it can also schedule these enrichment where it can go and look at a given post or or set of posts at any one time and you can actually view and edit the scheduled task which is pretty cool it also tells me that it's not possible to count the people viewing the video as i said instagram does have some rough limits on this stuff so you wanna make sure that you are doing it on a regular basis so that you're not trying to batch a bunch of it up get caught by instagram limits and not be able to do what you want this is muse and you can use muse for anything which makes tools like this very overwhelming what i wanna do today is i wanted to show you one deep clear way to use muse which is use it to help you build your instagram strategy understand your audience and what content they need build that content out using muse or any other ai tool of your choice start publishing that content and then use muse to help you find who's engaging with that content take these spreadsheets and then operationalize these spreadsheets in your marketing and sales process to turn your social engage into customers for your business i think this is a magical workflow that nobody's doing right now and at some point when everybody's doing it it's probably not gonna work that great but now no one's doing it and it's your opportunity to take advantage of this and get some extra growth in your business i'd love to hear one how you all are using news and two what you'd like to talk about what it comes to muse and marketing next please leave us comment below i will check out all of those thanks for watching today's show please hit that like hit subscribe button and we'll see you next time on marketing against the green 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 integrate 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 spot throw at him

your next website visitor isn't a person it's an ai agent with a credit card meta muse hit three point four million download loads and is the number one app in the apple app store in under three weeks it browse from its own computer and shows up nowhere in your analytics today we're gonna break down what's happened with personal agents how it's impacting your marketing strategy making your old marketing strategy obsolete and what strategy needs to replace it alright karen we've got i think one of our most exciting shows in a long time we have hit the next evolution of ai and it is these proactive personal agents meta muse instinct g bot we're gonna break down what these things are and the data around them and i know you've got some takes so i wanna kick it off with you right away alright yeah kip what are we gonna show in this i think we're gonna set we're gonna do a bit of a setup we're gonna tell you how quickly the personal assistant space is growing and one of the things you're looking at right now is my instinct i have instinct now my personal assistant on whatsapp and this is pretty exciting because i'm a european and you know the us really wanted to slow down the ai arms race they could just move everything to europe because europe's where ai goes to have a you know a sleepy casual bit of progress because we don't get access to a lot but i've got access to instinct and so we wanna try to paint the picture of how big this category is become and why it's going to leave your existing marketing strategy obsolete and so let's get into like a little bit of like what's happening here so you kinda talked about news i think muse had an incredible launch three point four million downloads it's number one app on the us app stores talked about instinct that's come out one billion oh hold on hold on before you go to instinct really important thing about me kieran to put it in perspective in the first thirteen days muse was live it had two point five million downloads claude for the same same period of time it's first thirteen days had four hundred thousand g had two hundred thousand chat gp in that same had three point one million so chad gp was like six hundred k ahead of muse but muse is like in that chat gp moment kind of velocity that's happening right now yeah i'm meta i think meta who have not been renowned to launch great products recently have really nailed it here and i think from my little you know ai network people are actually pretty amazed at that product and think it's a great product you had muse you had an instinct you had dots from open ai you have g bought i think the instinct one is pretty phenomenal right one billion raised at a ten billion and with zero price i well i early earlier on and i was like hey how do i pay for you and he's like nah figure that out later and so that's a whole other episode because i have a lot of thoughts on that and so what what what's different about personal maybe we should just tell the audience what is actually different about personal down and you and i think you said used does a good job of showing you this but yeah i could show it right now what you're talking about it we were in the kind of chatbot reactive era and that meant you basically would talk to the chatbot and i wouldn't do anything until you talk to it they got better over time they had memory but for the most part you are extracted information from that chatbot personal agents are different because they have memory they have preferences they have access to all of your tools they have access to a lot of your calendar and gmail if you are really a ai pills and willing to do that i a pills i still struggle would given these tools access to my email and then permission i think what you and i have done is set up separate emails this is a emails if you wanna set up these tools give them an inbox and then forward the emails you want them to have access to is to that inbox karen and so like showing what you're meeting in muse you see like it's showing you like a run rate of the activity has done and is doing it gives you the history of the approvals you've made what upcoming if you have any scheduled tasks your actual like identity your memories and everything which is everything you talked about and it's making this like a persistent part of user experience because these are the core elements of the platforms and we're using this example similar for g bot opening eye dots instinct this whole category of these new personal agents and so the funny thing about this episode is we have for the most part taught you all how you deploy ai in your marketing sales go to market to grow your business better this is all about how the consumer uses these tools to make all of that obsolete we will get to a part where you can still not be obsolete right at the end we will tell you how to save yourself from the kind of obscurity of being made obsolete by these tools if you're enjoying this episode and you want all of the resources you can click the link in the description or scan the qr code to get them all delivered to your inbox but what do you even mean by that i wanna kind of flip into crock bot and show you an example of this because something i was playing around with and if you're a marketer watching this just get ready to cry a little bit but it's fine because we're all going through the same pain alright so dropbox bots cool right like brought gru allows you to set up different bots and then those bots have certain jobs and that they can hand off tasks to each other and that's really cool you have a little team of agent doing things for you you know we don't give yourself a lot of credit but we have been right about a bunch of things and one of the things we talked about a long time ago actually was i'm much more interested how ai changes how people buy products and had that is gonna impact all of the ways that we grow our businesses versus how we deploy ai in a marketing sales and so on yes because no one except for like a couple of sick out there no one wakes up in the morning and thinks you know what my ideal day is today buying in software might be a decent officer right because it is a task of i think insurance you you know ball bearings it doesn't matter right so here's an example of this ai buyer committee and i have basically different jobs in here and so i have a buyer and that buyer will take a task and this task is i'm gonna try to figure out how to buy an ai and meet an assistant no take app for a certain company so the research goes off and tries to build a list so this is build in a buyer committee and so they'll go off do a bunch of research create a list of products that actually fit the brief and then they passed it kept to my favorite person that's skeptic i don't believe any of the you're lying and so the skeptic is pressure testing in all of these things right and so they're kinda acting them like your cto your it department whatever it may be and they're trying to poke holes in that original research and then you have the final buyer so the researchers is like the user the person who wants to use the product the skeptic is like the it team whoever it is it has to deploy it and they're pressure tested it and see if they believe in those things and so you see they're pressure attached here and say i don't know if that's true about these different tools and then it hands the final shortlist list with that context to the buyer so at the moment the buyer is actually coming back with a final shortlist list for the human buyer but if i said actually who would you buy and i can add them just like i can slack or anything like that and kieran explain for people why this is different than somebody doing the same process in like basic chat gp or basic clock yeah i think the thing that is different is you can actually set up these autonomous agents and they can kinda complete these tasks and they can be skilled in those tasks and they can hand it off to another agents and those agents coordinate among themselves to do a different job but they actually have different roles so my researcher is programmed to act like the user and they're really looking to see if this fulfill their needs they're doing research to say hey i've got these needs this is my day to day this is the value i need from the product this is how i wanna use it what are the products that kind of meet my needs and just like in a lot of companies they'll do a bunch of research and then this skeptic is basically play the role of the person who has to deploy it what are the problems with if i have to deploy this tool to a lot of folks what are the security concerns all of these different things and then they hand it to the buyer and the buyers the person who actually has the budget ownership so in my case it was the head on sales and they're looking to see if it would make their sales team more profitable what is it gonna actually automate okay like the person says they'll use it the it team says okay this is the best tool in terms of how we would wanna deploy it and the company of our size and then the actual final buyer saying is this gonna be of real value to my team and so they have different roles and they're able to pass across work and collaborate on those tasks with those different roles and you can set them to do this autonomously i could have something like this run every single day until i find something i actually want and by the way the other thing here that i think it's really important that we talk about is what we're about to live in a world without margin and arbitrage and i don't think that's a good thing but what i mean by that is what you just said here is that these can run all the time so let's say you're a company that sells on price and you use discounting heavily and you use that as a core strategy then i am just going to run a bot like you just showed that's constantly gonna monitor every day what discount and everything you're doing versus the historical until i get the best deal right i'm not gonna just roll in and be like oh i'm gonna buy it be like no research all the past history okay great i know that good is forty percent off or greater awesome check every day until it's forty percent off greater so you're losing margin as a company yep right off the bat if you are not differentiating on brand and story human connection all the things that we're gonna talk about later in the show it's a mess i don't think anybody understands the seismic shift that is happening and just like how the economy is going to work yeah i did a similar thing an instinct i don't think this is the best use case for instinct i think instinct is much better as a personal assistant managing your email managing your calendar work some of your tools making reservations for you checking to see if tables are free we can actually try some of that out so it did to restart they all build artifacts so it has its own file and build artifacts it's still doing a pretty great job that this is all free by the way still going off to do a side by side the way i set instinct up differently from g was i basically said which one is the easiest one to buy online that i don't have to talk to a human right i'm a person and i'm like i just wanna buy one these tools i wanna talk to sales and so fathom it it had like a pretty good online buying experience and had transparent prices it had so i basically created a prompt that said what is the best one that i can confidently buy online when without i'd having to interact with a person but instinct if you connect this to your internal tools i suspect it can actually see what saas tools you're using what saas tools you're not using to your point like how do i optimize my usage to save money but i think instant is much more geared towards personal assistance i i think like you using it am i using instinct not using instinct here's why hearing i have a tesla owner i drive a tesla model y love my tesla i can build g bots from my tesla i can hit the mic button while i'm driving or while the car is driving me and i can ask my existing team of bots to do things or i can build new bots right and that's pretty amazing and so it's put me down that g rabbit hole here for example i have built a version of a g bot that i took from kevin rose because ke one of the things that's really cool about g is that you can share in a g bot you've built as like a template for anybody else to go and build off of which is i think really powerful so kevin rose has built this whole g bot around storing and indexing like content and i did it for the pod for marketing against the grain and so now i have a data store of every episode of the podcast the videos i can go ask questions i can get clips of anything i want and every time we publish an episode it generates new oh that's video clips for me and it's stitching together multiple parts of episodes for what the best clip is and i'm using j to decide of which is the new decision model that's a whole another show we'll get there to decide how to cut these clips together but i just you know i show up later in the day any day we've dropped an episode and this is all just done for me it's one bot it goes grabs the youtube transcript no no no i went and downloaded every historical video of the show and it downloads the video every time we publish stores it on a cloud server then i can query those videos or do anything i want with those files you and i could go back to an episode we did six months ago and say hey oh i remember that we talked about this you know this a strategy can you clip out the three minutes where kieran really broke it down and it will just go find it it'll clip it out and just give me the video file so i could basically the thing i said at start where i want the clip of me saying that yes you can do that okay do it people bought live demo i find a clip where kieran said that ai will change the most transformative part of ai will be how it changed how consumers buy products alright hey g i need you to do me a favor here in a while back on marketing and screen i don't know what episode said that the most transformative part of ai is not gonna be how marketers use it but how ai transforms the buying process and how consumer shop and buy can you find me that clip and give me the full video clip so that i can use it on social thanks why we kinda wait for that one thing i say so why do i think instinct has taken off so much i think it's because it's in a channel that you already interact with other people and so it's seamless to start using the actual onboarding experience is pretty cool like you just added to whatsapp and there's no onboard basically and this is my other thing is like all this onboard and and how do i increase usage and everything it's kind of all solved when you just have an assistant in place that you talk and it just does anything you want and so i think part of the reason people are so in love with it is because it's not a new thing you have to learn you have a while that basically around how much money these agents are starting to spend because they're not just doing the research you can give them a credit card and they can buy products for you right does your experience with ai sound a little something like this you've been prompting for twenty minutes the output is polished confident and completely useless and 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 prompting and hoping you ask once and ship it check it out at hubspot dot com this is one of the key lessons everyone needs to understand it's not that these agents are just doing research they're doing buying actions already here's a crazy stat for you stripe publish some awesome data that the most popular personal agents like use sc bot and instinct they now use links wallet which link is a product that stripe does that allows agents to pay and purchases made with link have increased thirty eight x that number spans across those three products but it's all the checkout data and i also saw separately kieran that instinct it's already doing a billion dollars of what's called gm gross merchandise value of transactions already same they're gonna take transaction revenue and when they do price and they'll have subscription they'll have top ups for additional credits and then they'll have transaction revenue and that is why they're getting that valuation this is pretty good like this is like personal shopper right and can go off and find limited edition yee and it's off trying to look at a discount and see how i can find them really cheap so again this is just kinda like just talking to someone in your whatsapp up and i do think that is a prime reason why this tool is working so well it can research anything and buy anything if you willing to give it your credit card in the way you know kip said it's a pretty great shopper actually i might just turn into my personal shopper it's a great shopper all of these personal agents are very good at shopping you know what they're really good for kieran i needed to get a box of football cards for my friend's birthday shout corey happy birthday and it helped me know when the pre sale was gonna be flagged when the pre sale is but it couldn't buy them because the website had a agent blocker you know it wouldn't oh this lost and zach which is an important topic it has a important topic actually okay so before we quickly just show off muse and i let me keep out pause because it was a great thing around this it was in g to see if i can get it i can i just remember it because they someone did of all the big sites that are blocking things oh yes yes the biggest example of that is actually amazon because it's such a great shopper it's going into amazon and trying to find the best deals and i know that amazon has started to block meta muse and it's blocking all these agents right it doesn't want anything crawling in its side and trying to help these people be personal with shoppers a lot of the media publications are obviously blocking these bots reddit it's actually starting to limit the amount of tools i can actually scrape and ingest this information there is no chance that these large conglomerate websites don't start to value what they have much much more and stop these bots access in them well so let's break this down if you're a barker out there what's going to happen oh if you're if you're a business or founder there's a battle that's going to be thought that you're describing kieran and it's gonna be fought first on two fronts one it's gonna be sites like reddit who have unique and proprietary information that they don't want this bots to take advantage of right the next sites like amazon which is low margin businesses if your profit margin is only a few percentage points sub ten percentage points and an ai agent is basically taking that away and only shopping when you're doing special promotions that basically are zero or one or two percent margin then that's a killer to your business at scale right it can't happen and so i think that you are going to see a bunch of backlash between the agents and the retailers especially on the e commerce side over the next six to twelve months right g bot came back here okay so you wanna see how good my bot did this dude prove me right g bot show how smart i am okay it said it searched all the episodes the closest match is a twenty seven second clip from kirin solo episode ai expert copy the best ai content system ever alright you want me to play it yeah play it it it gave me these three different videos the first video is the main clip i've talked about this for two years everyone is fixated on ai being integrated into marketing sales your go to market and how disruptive that will be well actually i think the most disruptive thing is going to be ai agents doing the buy in right let's go let's go let's go agents come on come on now baby yeah to even said him the thing i be talking about two years so so but let but how freaking incredible is that but i have a personally by the way i could've requested this from the car i like i could've just been walking along like it bought me a clip of me saying play it back to me would you need to get all a story short video of you do doing that in the tulsa so i'll do it as a short for the channel i love it kieran it did that and it did it in like ten minutes by the way like a junior marketer would never been able to find that clip oh so a human would have never found that my prompt was literally like find this general statement across all of our episodes i have no idea when it happen that's crazy are you using me muse do you have an anything on the muse we're not allowed nice thing yeah you're not allowed to use muse over in the slow europe ai adopt sleepy europe i am using muse and i like it a lot i wanna give everybody a little marketing hack for these personal assistance and that kieran muse is really good at drawing insights from your social accounts one of the things we're gonna talk about in a minute is brand and social and i think this ties into it really really well so for example i've got muse working on a task for me look what my original prompt was i said i need your help me i've connected with the marketing the grain instagram account and i want you to look at anybody who is a marketing leader vp of marketing cmo director of marketing that interacts with my content on this account and i want you to pick the three most popular posts from the last month and give me all of the marketing leaders who interacted with each what account is that you're meta account the marketing against the graham instagram count so it needs to be like a facebook account yeah yeah instagram account some meta account right right by the way karen you can also do this with your ads oh i like that one which let's do a we're probably gonna do a whole show on hold me what jim i'm using ads it's working on doing this all for me it says right here it doesn't have a full yet list yet because instagram has been t this screening of the lei but it's screening all three hundred and sixty two people who like this post and so you know what i did here first all i love the ux of muse that you can like react with an emoji and reply it's very like messaging me you know which i love but i also then just like okay great as you get those results back also enrich them with any public email or phone numbers that they provide so i can go from posting an instagram message to getting a full list of people who interacted with that that i might wanna do follow on marketing sales or engagement with that's pretty dope that's it's pretty dope use case yeah yeah these it comes back by the end of the recording today because it's getting throttle but i'll probably do a whole show on this use case because i think it's it's gonna be a killer use case but mu is awesome and it's very similar to g to instinct that you showed and i think we've done a good jolly kinda breaking down the mechanics maybe we should talk about how does break your marketing yeah yeah yeah how do we how do we all make it through this crazy world so if you think about it like there's the old versus new marketing they're are the same journey it's just gonna be different rules so and this is again thinking through it from the consumer so the consumer goes through discovery then they figure out like what are your promises what are your promising to do for me yep what is the proof you can do that and then like me retain them because i'm a happy person and so one of the ones that i think is like pretty fascinating to think about how it breaks and i this kinda summarizes it pretty well and then we can get into some actual specifics of what you should do if you look at the era of how martin has changed with the way technology has changed we used to be able to just go directly to market to brands right like hey i can create some stuff and i can give it straight to you whether that's through flyers whether that's through whatever form of advertising there was nothing in between it was like easy for me to access the consumer and then we had much more intense so we have these algorithms filter in for intent and the most well known one as google's blue links and this with the intent era now there's all these filters between you and the consumer i've raged about filters on here about like linkedin change is changing its algorithm youtube changes out they all changed our algorithm and your a slave to that filter you get filtered in or you get filtered diet and so you're you're removed from the consumer well the ai is the delegation era right i'm delegate and all this work just someone else i don't even care about you i don't even care about you're reducing who cares my agent cares i don't care so you're so far removed from the consumer because there's another person in between you and the consumer there's a gatekeeper and that there's a team of people india from rock there's a whole team of people between you and the consumer and you get filtered out like here i can still be in the filter in some respects like i can be one of the select few in the delegation error you just get removed you're not part of the process really and that drastically changes how you're gonna have to market to people and so i have a couple of ones that love you to react to alright the first is basically we've talked about this one sound right like how you get discovered the old world you win attention you rank and search you drive traffic right we focus seo content we get people to the website we compete for that attention and it's like how do we just get people to hear about us and discover us like search paid get into the website convince them that we're for them but now you have to actually figure out how you get recommended by agents and we've talked about that which is like the agents gonna decide what brands are we're showing up seo is partly about being how you're recommended for agents that consideration strengths dramatically we've talked about that in the book loop which is like you become much more educated through your agents so if you look at what we just went through none of this actually matters the agents using it you actually have to figure out in that g buyer committee how you end up being one of the three that that buyer committee comes back with and that's a whole new rule set because now it's like what influences the agents i think there's some very interesting takeaways for everyone here one of the ways i've described here in the last ten to fifteen years of marketing especially b2b to b businesses selling to other businesses is that most marketers focused on what i'd call capturing demand they found people who were researching were super high intent were already asking about their product or service and then they were trying to capture that through webinars ebooks paid ads do you agree with that yes that playbook is now fundamentally broken and if you are trying to live in a capture the demand world you are going to fail what's interesting to be karen as we're talking about this that you know in the era of inbound marketing it was about how do you create remarkable content that brings people in now it's like you have to have even more content we talk about this in our book loop you have to be remarkable and relentless because you have to show up to all these agents but you have to now go higher and earlier in the buying process and get into that range awareness level yeah so that people will even consider you that that agents we even know who you are and most of these people are playing way down in the funnel you playing in the capture demand stage then all those people are gonna it it hit like a truck right and what needs to happen is you have to move your marketing much further up and then the other insight i was having this week here and talking with the team is that in the old route of marketing used to have growth marketers up at the top of the funnel you know people who were helping you optimize for search and conversion rate now i need growth marketers is not at the bottom of the funnel doing this stuff like i showed you with muse it's like oh well i got this attention in this awareness on social how do i now convert that into like pipeline through follow up and ads and email and everything and all these micro tactics versus me just going out and farming and capturing demand out in the world yeah you have to monetize every single piece of attention you can fight for that other one i think is gonna really blow people's minds is this one right so now you're like well what do you promise right not for for years is like position and messaging and category right either create category comes synonymous with it or i'm an existing category and you all understand what that category of software is and i become a known entity in that category and i position really clearly for my target audience and i can have different slogan and i can frame things in their language and this is a real skill this is positioning and position is kind of a timeless of skill but then i'm like is it because what just happened in every example we showed they weren't my words they weren't the brand's words they weren't the product marketers words they weren't the words that were written on the website the agent is trying to validate what you say so promises don't matter proof matters plus it rewrite your position in all of that work you've gone to the craft the position in the tagline the slogan the blah blah blah it all gets wrote by the agent yes and so who gives a fuck it's totally wild so what are we saying agents are a bunch of engineers right have you ever sold engineers they don't give a shit about warm and fuzzy and position and blah they care at functional validate prove here's the thing they do care about kieran and why your messaging still matters i'd argue is they care about the word of mouth and can sense us out in the world i agree lot people totally your influence and are humans and what are customers out there saying about this thing and so word mouth investing in customer love turning your customers into it's always been important that's not ten times more important that's validation i promises don't matter validation and proof does correct i think this is what we're telling you is like it is never been more important to nail this stage because humans can be swayed by a great position and agents can only be swayed by validation and proof and you have to really understand like there's really simplistic thing agents hate if your price is hidden pricing cannot be friction your case studies need to have number specific outcomes you need to have everything written and transparent so the agent can make good decisions if you're a brand then you're trying to ob you ob escape yeah obviously is the word alright when we're what it's one i'm karen words what is the are like i added to choke up poke choke and a latte check yeah add that one noted add to that one no add to that one my ai bought i'm gonna ask rock all all the times you've mispronounce for from the of a podcast do that one all that times ke has mispronouncing and word alright well well first of all i can because it came back and i already asked and have many times you've complained about content algorithms on the show and it's and it found six different times thing that you have complained about content algorithm so yeah if you're trying to hide that stuff because you want your salesperson to sell out you're screwed to a human no longer matters the agent actually needs that to sell that back you don't want public pricing you have some features timeline data all that stuff is private you're just gonna get ignored the agent isn't gonna think you are a credible player the agent isn't gonna do what the humans do the humans are like oh i guess need to talk to a sales rep to get this information the agent's gonna be like well why would i talk to a sales rep to get this information clearly they don't care about it i'm gonna go to some company who is giving me the information right and this is the point you made in the episode which is your retention strategy is gone yes you cannot retain people with some lifecycle campaigns hoping that they're kinda just using these tools and kinda forget about the fact that they're paying you money because now the agent can constantly compare you against alternatives it can constantly look for poor service and grade you it can constantly look for better alternatives it's gonna be able to make switching costs really low because it's gonna be able to take your data and do it all for you and actually migrate for you these agents can use tools and you're gonna have to win on value you're gonna have to win on usage you're gonna have to win on being a great product and so everything changes because these agents become the primary person you're trying to convince and that's what the summary of this episode is i feel like these tools do feel like living in the future this is another step change into a different world and so if you're somebody who's watching the show and you're out there trying to grow a business you're trying to do marketing what do we think you should do first thing i think we think you should do karen is go try at least one of these tools to understand what's possible yourself right like that is i think going to be pretty key because kieran quick example let me show you before we close out i got at least a sample from yous so i had a social post on the channel found some various specific people who have engaged with it though it needs a little training i said fine vp and cmo and this person said not a vp and cmo and it's kinda wrong but you need to go out and use these tools to understand what's possible right and and that's why we're showing so that that's step one step two i think we're saying is you have to go build better brand awareness social awareness further the funnel and you can't rely on capturing demand and you need to start moving your time and your budget away from capturing demand to creating awareness and demand up at the top of the funnel right right proof and validation matters more than the promises you make you at least have to have proof and validation to be alongside the promises you make i think that is incredibly important i agree with that the additionally karen we're saying that word investing in customer advocacy customer reviews customer references that are public also are way more important they've always been important but now they're even more important in this new world right and then the last thing i'll just sum up with is when you are selling into an agent all of the buy happens online which means you have to think about does the agent have everything it needs yeah in a transparent way to choose you and you cannot have some of those things hidden and gated so only the human can sell to another human because the agent is now making purchase this decision so you will lose every single time because of that one hundred percent though i do think these agents are gonna start calling people we should give one agents a phone number and do a whole show about them like calling reps and seeing what the reps calling people because that has become a problem already in the us yes there's a whole legal things around calling alright so we gave you some tangible takeaways we gave you i think some mind blowing stats about how fast this part of the world is growing and changing and how that is gonna fundamentally change the way your customers your users shop and buy if you have follow on questions you want us to go deeper into any of these things in a future episode please drop a comment below hit like hit subscribe and we'll see you real soon on the next episode marking hits 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 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 better

the future marketing team is going to look very very different than you as a marketing leader want to understand what it is you can impress your ceo or if you are a marketer you're gonna wanna understand the skills that belong in that team so you can be part of it well on this episode we give you the three core components that will be part of every future market team we bring them to life to show you exactly how they're gonna work we give you the key skills that are gonna exist in that future marketing skill and stay tuned until the end because kip and i give you our exact playbook of how we would bring a marketing team into the future and make our ceo founder and board incredibly happy so let's get right into the today's show alright kip so we did an episode called the cmo role is declining in and that is because you and i get a ton of questions on whatsapp we get a ten questions online the second most asked topic is hey am i gonna have a job i'm a marketer and i hear my marketing leader or my cmo is being told to reduce the size of their head headband there's that and then there's i am the marketing leader and how should my team actually work and be structured and do the things they need to do right it's like two sides of the same coin and we're gonna tell you what we think today and bonus stick around we're gonna give you some really crazy but viable ideas of how you could structure your team in the future but here before we get started i think that we just gotta get straight out of the way that i don't think either one of us believes that like hey in the next year or two you're gonna have these marketing teams of one and you're gonna have one marketer who works with thousands of agents and is just doing everything i don't think that is a real possibility and i just wanna put people to ease right now with that do agree with that yeah i actually agree with that and actually there's been some pretty interesting data and so i myself believe the general kind of narrative online is well every board is telling their ceo that their marketing team should be able to do more with less and ga came out with a study on a survey in twenty twenty six and it said hey thirty nine percent of cmos are trying to reduce the size of their head count and trying to reduce their agency costs and primarily driven by ceo and board requests but then they also looked at well you say that but let's look at where the marketing budget is going and they found that actually the marketing budget more of it was going to head can't and less of it was going to tools there was a great study at emily kramer she has some really cool things online with ai marketing and she basically researched every kind of company above a certain revenue size research their career pages using an ai and found that the proportion of marketing jobs hasn't really changed it was about four percent five percent of all of those jobs and so it's interesting right like i do think the narrative online is that marketing and teams and marketing leaders and cmos were being asked to reduce the size of their teams and so you'd would expect head count to be going down but there's no data to suggest that's happening and i think that's what we wanna cover because you and i believe it's gonna actually more look like the team is being redesigned and reshaped versus is actually being drastically reduced in size yeah well first of all when we talk about ai the thing that happened kieran is that ai and inference and token budget became a big part of everybody's budget and that's at the market level but across the company so when you think about what is happening your board your ceo everybody who's running this company they're grappling with like hey i have this cost that's pretty substantial and growing that i didn't used to have so like what the heck do i do and how do i think about it and the first thing i would really urge everybody to do is i don't care if your marketing budget is a hundred dollars or a hundred million dollars you have to first think about how much of that cost is gonna come from inference come from tools tokens the the ai doing manual work that you used to have to maybe hire an agency a contractor a full time team member because i don't think you can even understand how your team is going to look or how they are gonna work without that karen and i find that you and i as we're building all this stuff we keep wanting more and more tokens and more and more inference spend right we covered a lot about today's show you probably have some questions we are giving you free additional resources to answer any of those you can scan that qr code or click the link in the description below and go get everything you need your marketing budget also has to include token cost and token cost is not a software cost actually it's more like a head count cost and so i think overall if you are a market leader dura a cmo or even a marketer it'll be better for you to actually understand how you redesign your team to actually make the founder the board the ceo feel like you have a grasp on how mark should look in the future versus all just slash a bunch of head ends and make you happy and so maybe we should start with what is the marketing team of the future and what changes do you and i think will be in that team like how drastically will it be different from how people work today well i think building off the first point karen is like you are going to have agent team members right even if those agents are doing tasks for some folks on your team and we're seeing very specific parts of marketing where that's happening we're seeing it in content workflow and content automation we're seeing paid creative and ad placement work we're seeing that some in design and video editing there are kind some obvious places where those agent coworkers workers beyond coding and web development which is also important is kind of rising and coming up so the first thing you could do to look really smart to your ceo is just add that like ai token credit expense line item to your budget most marketers i know kieran they see those tokens in this credits as like a bad thing and they're like well that takes away from this other stuff no foundational used to spend money in marketing on people and programs and now in the future you're spending money on people programs and token slash agents right and so if you're spending money on those three things karen i would go back to you and say like well how do you think about the division of cost there and how do you think about how your human should be structured when they have these new agents that they're working with yeah i think so first of all one thing that interesting in is that token line item i think people are gonna struggle with it because they hate it it's also unpredictable it's unpredictable it could be going up and it going up you might say well my team is more ai native but they could be more ai stupid correct and ai stupid is i'm doing stupid things with these tokens swap grenades everywhere yeah do i get like i always say like hey there's just swap grenades happening inside of companies and that's right that's part of what's happening right and that's a problem with token costs like the the person with the least amount of marketing expertise and the highest agency person with tokens is likely gonna be your most costly employee and also create a bunch of internal slot so number one i think is okay what is the number one role i think will be in the future marketing team and it'll be different from what is today i do think that we are going to see this kind of ai pill marketer this super see that has a personal ai stack and i think that personal ai stack is like i have the context layer for marketing so i write all of this information into a context layer and when i want to build assistance or agents and read some that context there so number one they have context then they connect all of their tools so now i can use all of these tools through my skills that i'm using through my ai assistant so i build skills and it's in cloud i build skills and it's in codecs or chat or i'm using a personal assistant and so now i have like my team layer right i'm using ai to do some work myself it's using tools it's read different context or my autonomous agent is just doing stuff for me and that agent is basically doing a bunch of work through the tools through the context we've called them like super general as super see i think of them a lot as like a zero to one pipe marketer and that they can do all marketing to a certain level okay and i think that's incredible because there's a great a quote i've always remembered from a founder i know talking about how they got to over a billion dollars in valuation and he's like well one thing we really understood is there's a couple of things we need to go deepen and be true our class and at any given point of time and everything else we can kinda be pretty good at and that's fine and then we would like change over the course of the year and decide well we have to go really deep here in these two things and so that zero to one marketer who has that ai personal stack can actually do the zero to one across a lot of things to give you some heads space to say well what are the places i need to have depth of craft okay so the first thing we're saying is super journalist kind of the ten x marketer who can do a lot of what i'd call very good but maybe not great marketing with these tools that's one kieran i think the second thing here is the people on your team they all have to have good management skills because they're managing ai agents and systems and tools and so if they don't understand the basics of even human and work management they're not going to be good and that's how you get the slot grenades and you get all the bad work because they're actually oh i'm just gonna do everything i'm not gonna be prioritized i'm not gonna be associating all this work with my goals which is the third thing in the book loop kieran that just came out that we wrote we talk a lot about sprints and being very outcome focused in the work i think and i know that you believe too that the future teams are going to have sprints and that's like maybe a two to six week burst of work but all of that work is gonna be focused on a very specific outcome and that outcome focus stops you from building all that random stuff wasting ai budgets and being distracted yeah so we have the ai c marketer and there's a couple of rules that they have to a adhere two and i work style they need to do for this to work and so a couple of things i believe they should adhere to is you never source your thinking to ai which means to your point just because you can do everything with ai it doesn't mean you should because you will get into the habit of just like i'm just doing stuff but i'm not really internal anything that i'm doing and i'm not really checking to see if it's beats a certain quality bar and so you should never outsource your thinking which means you should do the critical thinking and you should actually do the work with ai you shouldn't just outsource it ulta to ai i think you should never add source your taste we say that on the book loop which is you have to have some taste you actually have to teach ai what your taste is and why the things you're creating are the right things for your customers are the right things for your prospects and then to your point you have to focus and so sprint actually force the focus because their outcome based not task based they're basically like well what's the outcome we're gonna achieve in two weeks and we're only gonna pick two the three outcomes and just and me is the kind of ai pill super generalist marketer zero to one marketer i can actually go after that and do that and so there are a couple of the rules to make that zero to one marker really successful in your future marketing team i agree with karen i think one of the things we're also saying that if your team is just a zero to one marketer or a group of zero to one marketers you're gonna be pretty good but you're not gonna be great and you're not gonna be able to actually be fully successful i wanna try something on you like one of the things in the second chapter of fluke we talk about how we're in the middle of a marketing renaissance and that doing marketing say similar to being in like renaissance era florence in italy well one of the things that happened in that era is that you had masters and apprentice and what's interesting to me is you described the zero to one marketer they're kind of like an apprentice they're learning they have access to all these tools they're able to work and learn really quickly but then you still have these masters who understand their craft deeper than anyone else and in renaissance italy they worked on these big bridges and buildings things that were one really important two took a lot of depth of knowledge and expertise and three took a freaking long time and you have to have these masters working counter if your whole team is just working in two weeks sprints it's gonna be good but you might not focus on those big long term like needle moving game changing pieces of work in your strategy that have to happen so i'd argue you need deep specialists who i also think ai makes to next better at their specific craft to helps them go deeper versus wider and you need them working on your big long term projects do you agree with that yeah so i think you still need depth of craft let's give an example of what we mean because i think what we're saying is you have like zero to marker they can do a lot of stuff they have some kind of rules that we've talked about they work in sprint so there's core icons because if you don't work in sprints i'm telling you you will just end up doing a lot of different things and it'll be hard to focus i sat down for a half a day on the weekend i'm back playing tennis so now hopefully at the weekends i can play more tennis and not just kind of rot my brain with ai but when i'm not playing tennis i was would just rock my brain with ai and so i spent ten for half an was like oh no half a day and i was like okay i'm gonna you know work on this piece of content and i will tell you i probably worked on five billion different things and i got to the end of the day and i was like shit i went on the i didn't do that think i didn't i actually didn't do anything i was like i was like oh i've created this funny image i tried to put me and my friend in a wrap video template that's going viral i was like what am i doing first of all the fact that i wasn't the friend and the rap video i was trying to and you didn't send it to me i am deeply personally here well i haven't managed to put us in it i was actually gonna do it for our friday post to celebrate our first week of loop and i haven't done that either kip because i have ai dream myself marketer well i did do this i did this okay alright what you so i think this is a good example of like what you know depth of craft i would say i'm a zero to one in trying to do short form video myself yeah neither one of us are short form video video experts and so i used a new opus five point five model and i'm a zero one marker and so what can i do at opus five point five well i give it our book loop and then i went back and forth with different kind of story arcs and i said i wanna create a ninety second trailer for our book and then i went back and forth and and created some visual styles of how to bring that to life so story art visual styles and opus five point five is freaking insane for animations there's no other rule being used it's opens for five point four it there's no plug ins there's no apis but it makes the point vale which is like i can do this but i bet you an incredible storyteller slash designer could do much better so this is the corn story we tell at the start we talk about the chat launched we talk about this being bad for marketers we talk about how hubspot wrote the content marketing and playbook and then wow look at this drop we we dropped eighty percent of our trapping ten months that sucks and why is that well look at our little revenue again keeping the theme of the corn field it goes up twenty percent traffic is a vanity metric and then we look at this cool thing inbound was built for google now this isn't the loop i thought you would give me shit by this because it's not using properly and loop is built for the ai with a different stages circle back cool this is the hathaway man hathaway shirt but these are all the key ideas from the book taylor in this video but you tailor lots of email for everyone now you're right for one person amplify your buyer stopped googling they ask ai now you can put like super per ninety second summary of yeah the core ideas from the book i thought this was really good just saying look it's back to the horn the story we tell right at the start by the way here five years ago we would have spent thousand dollars thousands dollars to have and by the way we would had to plan two months ahead of time to have this video done exactly this launch when we see the zero to one marketer can do good it's pretty good i that's pretty good i'm a good marketer i think i'm a good storyteller tyler so i did do a lot of work to tell the story its first version was not good at all but it was so quick to cycle through it so freaking quick and so i think that you can do good but there are gonna be some places that you're going to need real depth of craft like my opinion kip is you're gonna need depth of craft on positioning you're gonna need depth of craft on real brand real design aesthetics real video real story helen and so those things are not going to be doable through zero to one marker i can do some stuff i can make it good but i would want someone like with the real depth of craft to bring that to life and elevated most businesses think they know their customers they have the data the records the history but it's scattered across three teams and four systems which means no one can actually use it hubspot connects it all every interaction every support ticket every conversation into one platform every team can work from so when sales talks to a customer marketing and already know the full story and when you know more you grow more check out dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses well i think this is the point though in a world where non specialist marketers can get way farther than they ever could before it changes how you actually need to do work on your team we talked about that with the sprint models and really outcome focus but it also changed like how your team should be organized and work so then the third thing kip is i think forever forever marketing teams and all teams have been organized into tree structures right everyone recognized as the functional tree structure and that actual structure was originally created in eighteen eighty five so there was a guy called daniel mc and he was basically the person who ran new york rails and was building all of the railways and he designed that to try to figure out how information would flow across an organization and so that's the reason those was org drugs were created is because this is how actual information should go across a company and we've used them forever because humans are constrained by context you can actually only hold so much context in your brain and so you need this big functional you you know this context you know this context and you all talk to each other in this way and product and engineering have moved away from that they've moved into pods and sprints and we talked about sprints earlier but pods are basically we have an outcome and we'll just get a collection of people who have the skills to achieve that outcome and we'll put them into a pod and make them run the sprint model until they've achieve that outcome and i think you and i believe mark has never worked that way it's worked as like a whole little army of the domain experts with these kinda of tiny little teams and the pod model i think is a better model for marketing and i think in the future market inversion of a team it will look much more like how our product and engineering work than it does in terms of how our traditional marketing team works today you know i i think partially care you think this because you're an engineer at heart and you want yeah i know to work like engineering five but i think what you're saying is we've been using this model since the eighteen hundreds maybe we should think about some different models changed right that that was model is because humans were constrained by context the reason we have a lot of specialist roles is because i can only retain so much information and act on that information so i have to specialize in something ai on constraints context and so now i can act on a lot of things well i think this is a really important point if i was listening to the show and i was like hey kip kieran what the heck do i do the very first thing after like maybe listening to the points and recommendations we're making here is look at my team whether my team is me or my team is a hundred people and i look where are humans trying to move context and information around because that is the best single best thing ai is good at and you want to remove that context caring kieran done some great shows on second brains we've done a bunch of shows on agents but imagine what it would look like if you didn't have to have those people moving context and information around right exactly and that's what this pod model like this is a little example diagram yeah you would have basically okay i need to like have some folks in who would figure out mid market pipeline or new user activation or customer expansion and it says certain number of people with agents right the pod is humans plus agent with shared context and so everything i'm doing i'm right into the context layer and i'm reading from the context layer and i'm writing back to the context layer and so you have all of these pods but the pods are right into the context read them back from the context and so the agents understand all of that context so if you are working on the mid market pipeline and you have an agent in there that agent can use context from the other pods to help you make better decisions the example i was using for someone yesterday was if you were in a company and you could hire a one person who knew all of marketing sales and product you would have that person because they would make better decisions because they would have all of that context to be able to make better decisions across those different disciplines it doesn't work that way because you can only retain certain amount of information but the agents are incredible value adds to these pods because they are un unconstrained by context and they can help you make better decisions based upon everything they're learning across all of these other parts and that is why this is such a great model and why it's a model for now of all i think it's a great model for now second of all it leans into the unfair advantages ai unlocks kieran let's give some very crazy ideas around how you might even build on this pod model in some bigger bolder ways i'm gonna kick it off crazy idea i would give to you is that what this pod model assumes that you just outlined really great model it assumes you know exactly what you should be working on and i think most marketers don't know exactly what they should be working on because there's so many options there's like an endless options of where to focus your time one of the things i would potentially try if i was a marketing leader is i'd have my zero to one marketers my marketers that have access to like a good amount of tokens the right tools who can go build the video like you show right i want them go actually discovering where we should be focused i want them testing and building in different parts of my market to actually understand where there might be a spark where i might wanna point a whole pod point a master running a pod to actually go in go deep and get all of the value up we need an exploratory team in marketing that's like hey yeah i'm not an expert this but i'm gonna go do some stuff that's good enough to know if this is gonna catch fire for my product my market what i'm in what do you think of that i put that in this zero to one marketer i think a zero to month but i'm say they should live outside of the pod that there's like a separate team that there's their try and shit yeah to basically figure out hey what's gonna work and then what they find they hand off to a pod that is yeah led by a master who can go and scale that and i hundred percent anybody's really thinking about building a team right now i wanna try to illustrate this for people because i think i actually totally rude with you so this is kind of the concept we've talked about which is like there is an ai marketer who owns this little system they own context they own connection skills artifacts that's their personal system the context is obviously shared across all marketers but they're basically doing a lot of work with this system and then there's a domain expert that sits on top of this and they're like going deep in one place where you wanna start like position in our brand i think what you're saying is let's say this is a pod and let's say this pod goal is to ten the number of new paying customers right and that is a known entity they know they're gonna do that through paid advertising and they know they're gonna through that through life cycle market and they know they're gonna do that through some expansion mechanisms what you're saying is there's a version of this pod with no domain expert that lives over on the right hand side and it's just do shit it's like try stuff until you move it into a pod and the pod is actually doing it with a clear outcome in mind but your pod doesn't have a clear come in mind other than fine signal well what i'm really saying kieran is that your marketing should be a lot more like land man have you ever watched the show land man no i've thought it's a great taylor sheridan and show i highly recommend going and watching it but you know there it's all set in the oil fields in texas and what's interesting about that right is it's expensive to set up a drill and drill for oil and so there's a lot of work in testing and strategy that goes in like where am i gonna set up this crew and this oil rig and go and find oil ai has made marketers finding their metaphor oil really really cheap we're just not taking advantage of it and and that that is the fundamental problem that's happening here and what you need to do is say hey i'm looking at my map i think there's a bunch of spots where we could find some real loyal and be really successful i need to go and deploy my people there to go and test and i'm not using like my deep specialists i'm gonna use my zero to one marketers and then once somebody strikes something i'm moving in my specialist crew and i'm am getting as much oil out of the ground as humanly possible maybe not the best metaphor but it does kinda work y ai brain rock sorry look what done hey so well you're talking i took my story about pods and the eighty eighty five tree structure yeah claude can do voice overs oh what you this is silver claude what this to work in us what is this what it's existing silver pretty shitty even bad voice over i literally just give it like the story i just told to you literally just now insane insane like makes them cool i mean that is insane right that is insane well this is a great example of why marketing teams that have always operated the way they always have are at a just huge advantage to everyone else right that's really the theme of today's show is we wanna help you think about not that like ai does work differently but ai enables teams to organize and build differently here's where most marketers make the mistake here they have their generalist marketers or maybe they're less experienced marketers working on wrote unimportant things you need to have ai work on those things and have those marketers go out and look for oil they need to go and test to find big upside opportunity versus like trying to make your email marketing five percent better right and i think that's one of the core takeaways we wanna ready to take away but maybe give us the last final recap of today's show here of like if you're thinking about redoing your team what are the core things you gotta consider yeah so let's talk about what we think are things that we have confidence on and then some more crazy ideas and so if you are gonna work in the marketing team in the future you are definitely gonna have super generous we call them zero to one marketers they have an ai personal stack they're using share context layer they're using share tools and then they have skills and agents that can use those tools and then they have enough market expertise to do a lot of stuff then you'll look at it and you'll will say okay nah there's like two things we really need to invest in you can continue to do that but i really need to name my position in and i really need to get great short from video we're gonna bring on like incredible product marketer who has a background in position and and we're gonna bring on someone to really hone in our short form videos then we're saying actually those zero to one marketers and these domain experts are craft experts they work in pods and so the pod might be i want to like totally build the category that i'm in and make myself synonymous with that category that's a that's a pod i have to go graph after that mission i really want to ten x the number of users and paying teams coming into my company that's a pod that's a mission and you'll have a collection of zero to one marketers agents and a depth of craft person someone who really can help elevate that and then what you're saying is you should also have a venture marketers go dig for oil yeah go figure out like how you bring value back to the pods really find new stuff so there's a new pod to go and build either that generalist grows up and and runs that pod or they get a pod set up and they go back and keep looking running more experiments what we're saying is things used to look like this yes alright we used to have tree structures eighteen eighty five and they were built for information to move around them and you can see this is pretty cool and now that's with your freaking animations dude look this is the how the marketing team kind of replicated it yeah and now i look at this cool thing that's no long how it works now you have pods for ensure contacts you have marketers you have agents information's flown in seconds how cool is this dude let's get your caught out out of here i mean it's so good alright all seriousness it is completely different how we need to work today we hope that this outline some of the different ways to think about it if you have questions drop them in the comments hit like subscribe we'll answer all those questions and we'll back real soon on the next episode marketing against 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 hub spot 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 two 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 whole history calls of port tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot girl at him

we have had an avalanche of new models from fable five point one to t to opus five point five and that is become a problem for marketers because these models are actually pretty good at acc content now you have hundreds of thousands of people all creating content with the very same models in this video i am gonna show you how you can build a creative context os it's three tiny files and it's gonna teach the ai how you create content who you create for and what you think is actually good in this twenty minutes you're gonna be able to build a very first version for yourself and at the end of the video we'll give you a singular graphic that teaches ai how to do this for you all of that and more on this episode of mark against the grain the problem would create in a lot of content with ai is actually not that ai is not a good content creator it just creates commodity content and that is a great line from a writer called nicholas cole commodity content means it could have been said by anyone it's not distinctly used so it's using the same reg ryan in patterns and produce the same commodity content content that could be said by anyone lacks perspective lacks point of view doesn't say anything about how i see the world the best content is really created by that person from their perspective right you don't really want ai create content for you you want ai to be able to repeat what you say in a multitude of different ways and that is so important and i wanna be really transparent and honest about this if you are not a good content creator then you probably are going to struggle to use ai ai is really great if you already have perspective points of view things to say ideas to bring to life and you already can craft content now i will say if you watch this entire video and you want to improve your ride in it will teach you what you need to get better at to make ai a great content assistant for you on this video what i wanna show you is how you as a writer can actually create a creative content os and actually enrich and instill the things that make you distinctive you into ai and that's super important but as i said if you are not a great content creator or you want to become better even just watching this video will show you the areas that you need to improve on the thing to keep in mind is today's l m's already have an extraordinary amount of content and you don't need to build another big giant knowledge base or you don't need to build a really complex second brain you just need some simple context files that we're gonna give you in this video that instill your judgment your experiences your beliefs your audience your quality bar into ai which creates those things for you so really when people are using ai to create content it's just missing these kind of context files that will actually bring your content to live and make it distinctly you the models already have an extraordinary amount of knowledge the model is missing the stuff that makes you you it's missing that context and that is what we're going to build we're going to build three files that can help you elevate your content to really stand out from all of the other things being created but also feel like it's really authentically coming from you so this is the finished creative context os it has a folder called creative context and inside there there's three files there is a creator dot m d file and that really explains how you think and how you create the way you do it has a audience dot m d file that explains exactly who i create for and what they care about and then really importantly it has a taste that nd file and that teaches ai what i think is actually good and that is so important and taste is actually going to come from you it's not gonna to come from ai like people don't want to do any work anymore they just want ai to tell them well what is my taste who is my audience you need to actually do some work to make these things really good but the great thing about this is i've made it so simplistic that the ai could guide you along the way for a hundred years the hardest part of mark was create things that was the hard part how do i create this blog post this social post this land page all of these things i would have to create to attract an audience and then turn that audience into customers now it's so much easier to create things i often say when the cost of production is free when it's so easy to make things with ai judgment and taste is the only thing with a price it's the only way you're gonna stand out and so now the problem has shifted from how do i make things to how do i choose what to make and how do i have taste to make the things that i may distinctly me and different from everything else and this system helps you do that and it actually helps you to instill these into your ai assistant so it creates things with these in mind you can put them into codecs you can put them into claude chat t any ai environment that works for you okay let's start and we're gonna get in and do some live work i'm using codecs and chat to do this right now but first we're gonna teach ai how we create and there is a bad way to do this you could sit down and you could write my tone professional i'm a little conversational i like short sentences i'm insightful i'm sometimes humorous like basically just tell an ai these kind of buzz words the best thing that you can do is you can give it your actual work so the example here is i give ai my actual work so i exported my linkedin post i exported my subs archive i'm going to do youtube i didn't do it for this example but i also have a lot of content on youtube and other places and then what ai will do is it will actually extract all of the best posts best themes and what i'm gonna give you here as part of the file at the end is the exact prompt that i use because the important part is that it doesn't just verbatim choose the highest engaged post we will give you an image and that image will be able to give you all of the things i went through you can get it right here in the comments you can click the link in the description or scan the qr code to get them all deliver to your inbox and that infographic you can just give it to your ai assistant and i can start to build that you're a creative context os it actually works with you to say is this the kind of post that you believe your audience will really resonate with them and there are some reasons to do that so some of my top posts are really once off things when i've changed roles so there's has been a specific launch or i've done a specific post with a bunch of satire in it and they're just not repeatable patterns they're really more once offs and she wanna extrapolate all those out of the things that you're going to extract patterns from so here again your performance is really finding in the best candidates like these are the kind of posts that are performing really well but your taste is actually decided on the training set and that's so important because you again are doing some of the work so when i went through it i selected a smaller number of things from my linkedin an an example we had a post about the decline of the cmo role that did really well either a post about the modern b b marketing and playbook that was done through a bunch of conversations i had with leaders i just post about how you reframe the idea of ai slot and then i did this post that was kinda humorous about how product marketing might work at the companies like ant ent i kind of went through it and decided that these were distinctly me they worked really well for my audience i did the same thing for subs stock and that's kind of where i went to for the creator md file and let me show you how this worked in practice by sharing my actual screen okay so you can see here basically you can play around with this and we'll include this in the tutorial that we give away we'll give away just an image that contains the full tutorial and then you can just upload that image to your ai assistant and kinda replicate this for you so you basically say i'm gonna give you five to ten pieces of the best content you can use any platforms now will one of the pushback will be well i don't really have an audience i haven't really started and i'm trying to figure out how to use ai to do this as i said much easier if you just start to write if you start to write you get better right in you have some success have some data to actually start to use with ai but if you really wanna get started and you just wanna start to use ai straightaway away you could for a hundred percent just swap in posts that you believe would represent the style you want to use and so there's a old methodology of how people got better at copyright and called copy work and copy work was basically taken a copywriter or a writer that you really loved and you would like to be able to mimic some of their style and the style is really structured and it's how they structure the way they write and everyone has learned from other peoples and how they do that very few people are very unique they've all kind of inherited their writing and stuff from someone else and so there's nothing wrong with doing in that and the way copy work would work is you would literally just write out their words you would take it something they wrote and you would write it word for word line for line i did that that's one of the ways that i got better a copy as i just picked a bunch of writers and i would just sit there with a pen and i would write out their words and this is pretty similar if you don't have any content and you're really at the start of doing this for you is you could take someone's content and you could basically use that to start to figure out what your style would be and then work with ai to like edit it and craft it for your unique taste now you still have to get good at create content you cannot skip that part so even if you have creator dot d created you're still gonna get back something that you yourself are gonna have to edit you yourself are gonna have to elevate and make better so it will focus on how i think how i build arguments recurring ways i explain ideas tone and sentence style recurrent creative models and what makes my work to distinct now these things here focus on should be unique to what you want to focus on this is what i want to focus on so again the worst version of using ai is go into these youtube videos and take exactly what they do and just reg it you actually want to customize it and make it distinctly you and map to what you wanna do so then it looks for things that stay true everywhere and then if i'm doing stuff for linkedin or i'm having doing stuff from subs and then i'll add in youtube it has a little line to tell me how i would amend or adapt the ryan in style for those platforms so you can just have one creator dot md file and it's applicable for all platforms and then this is kinda what we'll do right it'll have the core dna like you're right in dna it will have how i build ideas it will have my return creative modes it will have my voice this is an abbreviated version which is what i asked it to do and then it will actually have you know how these work in linkedin or how they work in subs and north star ai should preserve the way i see the problem not average me out right it should not make me into ai now again i'll go through at the end high you use system it is not to create final versions of content and you can use it forever you want to use it but i don't use it for final versions of content so that is the creator dot md file so next is your audience an me file right so you want some real context about who your audience is and there's three core ways you could do that one of it is pretty interesting you can actually just start with five dream readers you can give ai their linkedin profile or their x profile actually put a real face to who you want to read your content if you wanted me to read your content you could give ai my linkedin profile and then it can start to turn those profiles into some characteristics of a real audience now there's some other cool thing that i was able to do so this one in the middle is basically how you can analyze comments and i wanna show you a quick way that i was able to do this and shout out to da she's been on the show so the cool thing about youth spot is you spot has access to all of my data feeds and so anytime i'm doing things it can actually start to update its information about me and one of the things i've been doing is enrich in my audience send md file with the comments from linkedin because it has access to all of my content and everyone who's liking my posts and everyone who's commented on my post and what i ask it to do is build a profile from the people who are engaging with my content now i say that's like one input it should not override the other two things that i'm gonna show you the first one was given it real profiles so it could get characteristics of those folks the second is if you have content being able to get the people who are engaging with your content and have an ai extract characteristics from them because they're already the people who are liking your content right that's a pretty great thing to do and you can see you spot is able to give me some pretty cool information on the people who are actually engaging with my content and provide a lot of characteristics the one thing i did here in the prompt that i give you spot was i made sure that it actually ignore any kind of comments that looked like ai sixty percent i think of all content on linkedin right now is created by ai so you have to be pretty careful about that that's the the bonus and the second one is external research and again i will show you quickly how that looked on my screen when a buyer ai for a solution like yours do you know if you're showing up or not in 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 can show up even more so this is the prompt for external research obviously for the first one if you're asking for it to look at existing profiles you can just use the same prompt but ask it to actually use existing profiles versus going and looking for external research and then for the second one is pretty unique it's either that you can get the data of people consuming your content engaging your content some other way or you can do it through your spots so i can't really give you a cookie cutter way to do that so here research people who match my target audience and help me understand what they currently care about i already had a audience that d file that i give it to enhance with external research if you're starting from scratch you wanna give it some paragraph or two of who your ideal audience is you wanna write it out if you don't currently have it written out anywhere and so it looks at their current biggest priorities recurrent frustrations and problems all of this information and then it goes to public sources practitioner discussions linkedin post reddit all of these different things now this is the most simplistic version of this if i did this in codecs or or cloud code it would have access to apis since you give it a bunch of apis and then we have able to pull this information pretty readily but i'm keeping this super simple and then it's an abbreviated version so it will show you who you're create for on what they care about again if you give it better access to apis you will find it like gives you incredible information what they already know what they are tired of what earns their trust what feel is novel to them and then the north star do not explain why ai matters explain what excellent mark looks like because ai exists i think that's a pretty good one so that's it three steps really simple your dream readers you can grab their profiles little bonus step if you're able to get the comments to dms and then that external research and that goes into this audience that md file so now you have your creator dot m md file and now you have your audience that d file and let's go into the last one that we're going to create okay let's do the final version and that's the taste dot d file and this is the most important part because you have to have taste and you have to figure out what your taste is and how do you teach ai taste if you have none ai is not gonna give you some you never outsource your taste the ai you instill ai with it you cannot i source it because ai will give you the same as hundreds of thousands of other people who are using ai to create similar things and this system can really help you understand what your taste is so you have to do the work but ai can walk you through it and let me show you what that means okay so the first thing is if you have a list of great writing that's even better so if you already know what are great right and examples or great content examples that really have resonated with your audience and work for your audience you can just use those and give ai a clear articulation of why they really matter why they work for your audience why they would resonate with the people that you're creating content for you know there's a great example there's a website that has famous business memos and there's another website that does famous position statements and there's a website that does the best ad copy that's ever been created over time and i used to always read through those and so you would bookmark those and you have clear examples of what taste meant for you why these resonated with you and why you were able to explain them being so good obviously you can use some of your own content as well but if you don't really have that list this can make it really easy for you so you already have a audience dot d file and so what ai can do and this again is tailored for me so make sure when we give you the file at the end you want to adapt your prompts for the writer that you wanna be the content creator that you wanna be and it will basically create a list of potential write in that appeals to your audience now again this is abbreviated output it will can create as many of these as you want i chose twelve to fifteen and the giveaway that we're gonna give to you at the end but you can increase that number the twenty twenty five so for example it would come back and it would say position and this is one of the best position in series of all time and give you a little bit of the reason why your audience would love this kevin kelly one thousand truth fans why would my audience at md file i love this because it has a simplistic framework that is really easy to understand and is repeatable that's something i love very similar to paul graham like sharp operator real resonance an idea that sticks span thompson he explains a phenomenon that actually was happening but no one had put a name to it and then claude hopkins is just one of the most analytical data back old school copywriter comes from a scientific background and so these were the ones i actually picked myself and so the abbreviated version is just kind of shown you the ones i already picked and then again this is what i wrote and i wrote a bunch more but you wanna say why you love these pieces of content right the thousand and truth fans one simple idea what high durability creation and algorithms by ben thompson explain something happen and breaks it down gives it a name and makes it easy to digest this is what people mess you or yourself have to be able to explain this to ai you can't just say please do it for me because you're not gonna get a great outcome then the ai can actually interview you and so it will actually start to like ask you what bunch of questions and you can tailor this to whatever you're trying to do and better yet you can tell ai what your mission goals are and it can tailor the output we're gonna give you and they're tutorial we're gonna give you to your needs and so it will come down and we'll ask you again if this is abbreviated it but like are you really focused on an original idea or like really great write and i'm like no the idea matters is way more than the right and what mace contra is good a strong argument or the mechanism underneath it even if it's not fully proven and the answer i gave was really the blend of these together right a strong argument with some validation but sometimes you can't validate everything sometimes some things are just an idea when is a framework useful when it compresses a pattern and makes it easier to remember so it actually interviews you to start to understand the writer you wanna be and the kind of taste and judgment that you have and then it will produce your taste dot m d file and it has some of these things your what is your core taste you know one short mental model beats a broad summary simplicity really matters always make sure you teach one useful idea you explain the mechanism you compress complexity has all these things never do these polished writing with no original idea fake con ai smooth right in that loses personality you have to have personality you have to have a quality bar that it runs through and then what's the published test could the reader explain the core idea to someone in ten minutes or less because that may it shareable if not simplify again and so that is the taste dot md file you basically create a list either you have that or you have ai created from your audience on md file you tell ai what are the kind of pieces of content and really resonate with you your audience and why and that why matters that why is actually i understand why this piece of content was so great i can actually explain it you know make this really easy turn on whisper flow and just talk to the ai or turn on voice mode and talk to the ai and then you basically have ai create that taste dot nd five for you but one of the best things that this is good for and i think this is the way most people who are using ai for writing and find value inclusive of me is basically as a quick idea aviation machine and then as a quick kind of spa partner with your content never to create the content i just can't have ai create content for me and it's just an alien concept for me i've never been able to have anyone create content for me i could never have someone write something on my behalf and so that could just be uniquely me but i just don't understand why i wanna do that because i love writing ryan is how i get thoughts out into the world and myself how i internalized thoughts and so i just would never i'd outsource my taste to ai and i would never outsource my thinking to ai but i need ideas and sometimes i just write something that's in my head and i just write it out and sometimes i'm just like well what would be like what's interesting you know i need to like have some idea idea have someone to go back and forth with so here it we'll read your audience dot md file and again we can give you these prompts in the creator dot d file and then it will start to research what's happened across a couple of subjects again this is a pretty simplistic way of doing this in my actual version i have a bunch of api setup but i didn't want make this too complex and i just wanna show you some of the ideas that it would bring back so again these are all pretty mapped to my audience and so brings back an idea it says what is the signal why my audience cares about that what's my angle it reads my creator dot md file and then basically says what's the thesis so i took this one the new mark and jobs are really ownership jobs because we're talking a lot right now about how marketing teams will change and i won't get into we're gonna do a whole episode on that but i think that's a pretty interesting one and so i ask it to create a first draft hey this is create a first draft and it's fine it's looking at the different three files but really it hasn't really a deer to taste that md because it's loading all at once and so it's better when you actually ask it to like read one file and then really crystallize it and so it has like a good skeleton of a post because i do like things that are broken at and really easy to understand concepts and so this breaks marketing into judgment systems and cleanup and has a pretty good frame on why marketing would look way now i wanted to run it through taste so reg run it through the taste of md file and show me the revised draft and it's just so much better right ai isn't just changing marketing jobs it's un bundle the marketer pretty good right un bundle the marketer that's a great hook right at the start and then a lot of that work that used to sit inside one role is being split into three different roles judgment what should we do what is actually worth automated and is this actually any good ai makes producing some things cheap it doesn't make deciding what's worth produced and cheap that got that for me when that's a line that i've used if you go all the way back to what i said nicholas cole said is ai i should repeat the things you say the best content creators have a couple of bits and they do those bets for a couple of months and they do them in a multi different ways you don't wanna have right content you wanna have it repeat the things you already believe and say in different ways and this is a great example of it through the taste that empty file systems someone has to turn that judgment into something repeatable you give the right context you connect the right tools you build the right workplace you put quality gates in place i'm pretty sure that this research might come from a post that i wrote already and then clean up this is the part and that way puts an ai transformation deck prompt drift data gets stale integration spray quality slowly degrade all true and it gives you what changed i think that's a really really really really really good first draft again i would be able to improve it i would add some stories i would actually like finesse it a little bit i would see if i actually agreed with that but as a person who can i go back and forth with and give me a great idea that fits the way i think about ride that's pretty great right i wanna show you a different way to use this so i had a linkedin post that didn't perform very well and i'm doing this live and i would love to see how it would make that better can you run through my taste that d file and tell me what edits you'd make so i think this is actually a good post it just didn't actually hit the way i thought it would hit and that part of it because linkedin has changed or algorithm again but i'm actually curious about what my taste that md file woulda have said because this is one i just read out and sometimes that i do that i'm just like i have a thought i just read it all and then put it out straight away yes i thinking it's the car is strong the strongest parts what i changed make the hook more decisive i think that's true nearly old markers you shouldn't you should never say early marketing teams aren't just getting smaller they're change in shape it's way better compress the ga paragraph i totally agree with that there's just too much here it's like word solid and so ga says yeah it compresses that it doesn't look like simply dying it looks like we redesign us better be careful with ar removes that limit okay yeah so let me ask you to red draft who we red draft already marketing and teams aren't just getting smaller their change in shape nearly every market leader i talked to has been asked to do more or less but the data suggests something more interested in simply done downsizing in it's cut this done for me that doesn't look like shrink it looks like we resigned i know that people gonna say oh it's done the it's not this it's that you don't copy paste this it's just for ideas three changes are happened the zero to one marker one person cannot take an idea from a blank page to a ship v one research blah i mix them match a couple of ideas here and i think that was the biggest problem with it i introduced too many ideas and it's actually trying to focus me on one because if you remember my taste that empty file that was a big part of it so that's the system i think this is like all you need if you can just do this you don't need to over complicate it you don't need to do all these other complex systems you can basically just build this creative context layer and then actually use it for your writing but again you have to do some of the work and if you are just at the beginning in the content creation you should just do a bunch of content creation to find out what works for your audience and maybe ai can help you a little bit but i don't think it gets really good until you figured out and stuff and you have some data to give it and you sell the day that i could give it now again if you wanna start from scratch you don't have an audience do the copy work you someone else's content that you're inspired by and use that to follow along this tutorial you too can elevate your ride in not get lost in to see a same this and not be referred to as ai sla i hope this was a useful episode i will see you all on the next episode of marketing against green 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 integrated well i can see the client's whole history recalls port tickets emails and here's a test from three days ago i totally missed hotspot spot grow at

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 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 like 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 stuck 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 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 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 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