Agencies That Don't Do This Will Die, How To Get 28x More Conversions With Cold Email, ChatGPT Raises $40B At A $300B Valuation, Shopify Doesn't Use KPIs Or OKRs, AI Isn't Actually Coming For Your Jobs, Marketing In The AI Era Is A Game Of Extremes

0:00Let me tell you a story here. So I went to a Kings game, a hockey game earlier this week. First hockey game ever. Okay. I was sitting next to my friend and my friend runs a SaaS company and he looked over to me. The first thing he says, he's like, Eric, we're going to fire our agency. Like that was after we said hi, the first thing he said to me, we're going to fire our agency. I was like, oh, so why are you going to fire your agency? He's like, well, here's the thing. We've been working with this agency for a while. If they're using AI, they haven't passed the efficiencies over to us. I'm like, what do you mean by that?

0:25We're not getting an increase in the output deliverables, okay? Nor are they decreased in cost. Like even if you give me one or the other, I'm happy. Or even worse yet, if they're not using AI, well, then they suck, right? Right. And so I think agencies that don't do this will die. What I mean by this is just really adapting. I look at it this way and I think, you know, the Internet to me, if you're not using the Internet in the 1990s, you know, when it came out 2000s or so, like it's a tool you're behind. If you're if you're building a home and you're not using the tools to build a home, for example, like a hammer, for example, or a shovel, like you're behind.

0:59If you're not leveraging this stuff, it's just a tool to me. well then you're behind um but like also by the way if you're not passing efficiencies over to your customers they're not stupid they're going to figure it out and sooner or later they're going to figure it out you you probably should be figuring out how you pass your efficiencies over to your customers it's not even just agencies i think businesses that don't do this um you're going to continue to get squeezed squeeze squeeze so you might as well try to get ahead of it right now yes and when you're using this technology keep in mind not everything will work out the way you want so make sure you're okay with that when i was building a home in vegas they're like oh we no longer put up a framing of a house because when you have a house you have to build all the walls this frame they're like we no longer do it manually look at this program that we use that maps it all out and it just builds it all for you in a factory and then we just send it to you so instead of it taking months it took it can take you know like a week or two weeks so we hired this company called forte in las vegas that in theory uses that technology and specialize it and they tried it on us we were the guinea pig it took longer than if they just did it manually yep um do i hate them for it no do i love how they tried yes at least the entrepreneur in me the resident in me wanted the home done as quick as possible but you gotta also account for things not working out the way you want and you better have backups because i was pissed when that happened and if i owned that company i'd be like this is the first time i'm trying it out i would have contingencies in place if it wasn't going to work.

2:32And some people don't do that. But if you do that, you're much more likely to keep someone happy and eventually figure out how to get it right. And then when you do get it right, you can show them and you can show them the efficiencies on their end as well. And this is a situation where you're going to be testing a lot of things with maybe with your customers where you might say, hey, you can be our guinea pig. Maybe you're a pilot for this and maybe we'll just charge you costs. But just expect that mistakes are going to happen. But it's, it's, you're better off doing that than not trying anything.

3:00I think the ones that are scared of this stuff right now, I just like, how can you be scared of the internet? How can you be scared of tools like the industrial, like farming and all these things, right? These are just things to make us more efficient. Yeah. Here, let's talk about how you can get 28 X more conversions, 28 times more conversions with cold email. You want to know how? Yeah. How? You can probably guess if you're to guess what's one thing that would increase your conversion masturbate massively with cold email what do you think it is uh don't send them cold warm them up so like if you already know you're gonna end up sending it to certain people how can you pixel them show them retargeting ads and then send them a customized email this is just cold email just cold email yeah it's it's very simple i send it from a gmail no your offer yeah your copy yeah well your offer so this this actually wait how does it get 28x more this is this is what um This was written by a LinkedIn post written by Taylor Heron.

3:55We actually use him for cold email infrastructure, by the way. He's great. He sends like, what, 4 million emails monthly for his customers. And so we go to him. He like warms up domains for us and all that. And it's been great for us. So he's like, look, 28x more conversions on cold email campaigns. And it has nothing to do with your cold email infrastructure. I was like, oh, that's a good hook. Okay, you got me. I've been digging into some data to confirm a ton of my suspicions, but goes against the grain of salt what I hear gurus quote unquote talk about. Changing a front end offer alone can drastically swing your entire funnel, sometimes by a factor of 28 regarding of your cold email vendor.

4:30So what he's seeing is basically it's just the offer at the end of the day. So he talked about Adam Robinson of RB2B having a free forever tier, right? Or another one of his clients went from signing up 43 customers in a paid plan to only three in the next month. It's because they changed their seven-day money back. Oh, they went to a seven-day money back guarantee for their trial. instead of a seven-day trial that was already working. So it really does come down to the offer at the end of the day. And you and I know that already, but I think it's important that we keep, we're the chief reminder officers on these things.

5:00Yes, and most people will not get a 28 times lift or 20x lift from changing their offer. You're lucky to get a 20, 30 % lift. Which is still great. It is still great. Yeah. And by the way, this is another shout out to$100 Million Offers, Alex's book. It's a great book on offers. I think anybody that wants to get into marketing, you should definitely understand that. And I think he charges like$1.99 for it if you buy it on Kindle or something. Yeah. On a side note, you see how ChatGPT raised$40 billion at a$300 billion valuation? I believe it. They need more GPUs. Yeah. But I don't even think their revenue is at$10 plus billion a year.

5:36They're on track for$13 billion by end of the year and then with the$15 million ARR by end of year. How do I know this? Because I listened to Brad Gerster this morning. Oh, cool. I'm assuming he's an investor. He is an investor. Yeah. But their last year revenue numbers were like three billion or something like that. Four or five. Yeah. I mean, that's a triple. So, you know, that's crazy growth that they can keep growing like that. I mean, the good thing for them is they this is a good example of first mover advantage. They were very much the first mover. So when you think about who is known in the software space, at least for soft drink space, Coca-Cola.

6:10Right. Pepsi is always like number two. So when you have a first mover advantage, I think they have consumer like quite a bit, like locked up. right now um and they're gonna be a strong business no matter what so um that's another lesson to learn from chat gpd if you can be first out there then you're good yeah i didn't know this uh coca-cola is worth 300 billion dollars pepsi's 250 ish percent difference oh wow coca-cola is 50 percent bigger than pepsi i thought coke was way bigger but pepsi's done a good job over the years i used to like pepsi more than coke growing up but yeah um same here and that's why i googled it because I assume like, well, I like Pepsi better.

6:46Isn't it bigger? But I'm biased because I prefer Pepsi over Coke. Did you know that Shopify doesn't use KPIs or OKRs? Really? Yeah, so they use it for guidance. But basically what Toby said was he calls, he says, good heart's law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it's no longer a useful metric. No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There's a million different tensions in a company and you can't keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing. So he says they're extremely data-afford. We have invested an enormous amount of monies and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips.

7:18But there's a lot of things that you can't optimize, right? So he's like taste, quality, passion, love, hate. The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsman feels when they've done a good job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be. And I think to an extent I agree with that. But he's not saying they don't use it at all. I think they don't treat OKRs and KPIs as gospel. I think it's a backup to number one. And I've seen this in some cases. This is just another example. I mean, he's a publicly traded company CEO. So what do you think? No, I've never really followed OKRs that often.

7:55No, you've never followed OKRs. Yeah, my team does, but I don't. I think the only thing you look at is like, how are we doing with new revenue, profit, right? I think I mentioned this on this podcast. If not, I mentioned it on past episodes. in the United States, not globally, but just U.S. Last year, we got six RFPs in Q1 of 2024. We ended this year in 2025, just in the United States with 13. But as we're going into it, from 2023 to 2024, we saw a little bit more than a 15 % growth because our U.S. went from 16 RFPs to 25. So it was one more than 50%, right? Instead of 24, we got 25. So I told the team this year, I'm like, we need to get another 50%.

8:38Because they say as you grow larger and larger, your numbers, your growth rate should start decline. You don't want to accept that. Yeah. So I was like, we need another 50 % this year. So I was talking to my team, and as we're going along in Q1, I changed it to, we need to hit at least double. And then when we got double, we're at 13 instead of 6%. 100%. Yeah. I'm like, we need 14 by the end of Q1. And then I was on the phone with Nick and he's like, dude, if I get you 14, you're going to ask for 20. And I'm like, that sounds about right. Dude, that's the problem with founders. Sometimes we keep moving the goalposts and that's a nice way to burn people out.

9:16It's true. But if Nick, for example, has worked with you for a long time, he knows how to manage you. Ideally, Nick, you just set the targets a little lower. That way, when Neil tries to double it, you know what I mean? You have to learn how to manage upwards too. yeah no there's no targets i randomly make up my own targets yeah and i want people to hit them with things like that i don't do the revenue targeting i don't do churn targeting you know the people are running the business from operations standpoint do all that kind of stuff but from marketing kpis i don't really put kpis when things are going good and you meet targets i just keep changing the goalposts yeah and i'm the same way too and so by the way this is a good example of not necessarily everything you read around management books is is true right it's like oh yeah you should do okrs kpis because google did them oh um you should you know for every one criticism you you put on somebody else you should have five compliments i tried that before by the way i i started making up compliments right and i was just like screw that right like like just be who you are i think you read all these things but eventually just learn that do what's right for you Like I remember I worked for a company, they implemented Holacracy.

10:25You know what that is? No. Okay. Holacracy is Zappos way where they don't have any managers. They just read about it. And then one day they just implemented it and then no more managers, right? All of a sudden ripped off the bandit, total disaster. That was also the same company that did four day work weeks. Okay. But what happens with four day work weeks where your A player ends your A players? I like to think of myself as an A player. I ended up working seven days a week, right? So reading all these things and being susceptible to all this information and taking action on every single bit, the shiny knowledge syndrome thing, that can really screw up a business.

10:57So, yeah. Wait, let's go back. You were saying there was a four-day work week? Uh-huh. You know this company. I think I know which one you're talking about. Yeah. It has to do with plans, right? Yes. Okay. So when you look at the four-day work week, I know you work seven. Did other people just work four? Yeah. And was the CEO okay with this? And he was working for it as well? Oh, yeah. He's like, yeah. Why can't we get all things done in four days versus five days? You're a startup. There's always more to get done. Someone's looking to eat your freaking lunch. And they're looking to kick your ass.

11:28And they've raised more money. And their team is better. Why would you shortchange 20 % of your time? So this company eventually went bankrupt. Syed and I tried to buy it. Really? Yeah. He wouldn't sell it to you? He got a better deal. But I think he would have if he didn't have this other offer. Cool. So when you look at the company declining towards the last, call it, three to six months when they knew things were getting worse and worse, did he start saying, hey, I need you guys to work five days a week instead of six? It changed to five days a week. So when you do stuff like that, you can't roll it back.

12:04It pisses everyone off. But then when people have no more paycheck, then they're even more pissed. Yeah. And then they just blame you for being a terrible CEO. And that's it. And so what happened in that situation was too many changes that were too gargantuan, too earth-shaking. Maybe you go for one earth-changing change per quarter, but you do it every week. There's a big change. You can't do that because people want stability too. So even though you want crazy goals and all that, it's not like you're pushing it on everyone all the time. You're only pushing it on your leaders. Didn't this person then do something, some project, and then go on Twitter and they got blown up?

12:43Oh, yeah. This will reveal him. No, no, don't. Don't reveal him. I won't reveal him, but he took a lot of money from a project. We'll just leave it that way. Yeah. And then it didn't turn out well. It didn't turn out well. No. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind-the-scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need.

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15:01That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. but we have this other tweet from your partner here your your your brother-in-law heaton shop says ai didn't come for your job so this is here's here's the reality with ai ai is not coming for your job for your jobs guys ai didn't come for your job it came for your mediocrity most jobs won't disappear but the people doing average work will ai automates the stuff you thought was safe not because it's technical because it's predictable i love that tweet yeah that's very true yeah What do you think about it?

15:36I know, I agree. And I talk to so many people in marketing. Almost at every event I go to, a lot of them are corporate events. Then one of the top questions I always get is, what do you think is going to happen to us X years from now? When they say us, they're talking about themselves and their colleagues. And my typical answer is, if you don't adapt and you're struggling to adapt, you have to worry. And usually the people that ask me that question are the ones who aren't adapting. Yeah. You know, it's a very simple thing. It's, oh, what do we do? Work harder? But, oh, the moment you say that, oh, my God, right?

16:12Like, oh, the thought of working harder. I can't do that. You know, I actually pissed off a lot of people. I was telling Noah about this. So I got a message from someone in Finland, right? And so they said they were trying to schedule a call for the software. And they're like, you know, I was like, hey, does this Time Pacific work? And they're like, oh, I only work 12 to 5 p.m. finish time. And oh, by the way, what is that time zone conversion? And I'm like, one, you're too lazy to convert to time zone. Two, maybe Google it. Yeah, freaking Google. Why are you asking me? And then it's like, oh, and maybe they're working part time, which is great for them.

16:51But the moment I'm like, I just read 12 to 5 p.m. Like, what is this? Right. So I go to I go to I go to threads. I post this at threads because I knew I'm going to get a crazy reaction on threads. Right. So I post the screenshot. Obviously, I make them anonymous. And I post it. I was like, this is why Europe loses, right? And then, oh, my God, that thread post right now has like 200K views on it. But my point is all the people that are responding are people that do not want to work. It sounds like a good life to me and everything. But it's like, okay, great. Well, that's a tradeoff. If you're saying you don't want to be replaced, but you kind of have to adapt to this thing.

17:24Well, to adapt, you kind of have to work a little harder right now to figure out. By the way, if you don't want to adapt, that's okay. But don't complain when the people that adapt that work harder, They end up getting the results that you wanted. Yes. It's like the people that always ask me the question in marketing, what's going to happen to us in the future? Most of them aren't adapting. The ones who are adapting, they're putting the hours or testing stuff on the weekends or talking to their colleagues about new things. And I've talked to some of these individuals at the same corporate events and they're just like, yeah, that person's lazy.

17:54And I was like, so what do you think is going to happen? They're like, I don't know. I don't care. I'm adapting. They're going to need me if they want to adapt. So what do I have to worry about? Why do I even have to think about this? So they don't ask about like the people that adapt when they talk to you, they're excited about these things. Yes. Yeah. They're excited. Like I send you stupid stuff all the time. Yeah. Hey, check out the CIA prompt over here. Check this out over here. Some of it's great too. Some is great, but I just, I'm so excited about this stuff, right? It's like, it's like playing a video game.

18:21I want to close it off on this one. Going back to you. Yeah. The attitude you have on testing new things, I wish more people in organizations had that attitude. I think most of them would probably be doing their own thing. No, I'm talking about testing new things. There's a lot of people I know who don't have the risk appetite to be an entrepreneur, but they love technology and they're willing to test. If you're not willing to test, and when I say test, when I'm giving this example of Eric, the CAA example that he's talking about, he's not only testing stuff related to marketing but he's testing all things related to ai including things like development he's at the gym coding up a game using ai i think it was mario or something mario and minecraft okay so when you look at what he's doing he's trying to understand how these platforms how this technology works so that way he can figure out better ways to use it and his job his business and all aspects of life when people are willing to test and learn they're going to be more likely to find better ways to use that technology.

19:25When someone puts themselves in a box, oh, I'm in marketing. I only need to test AI for a specific marketing task. Well, if you do that, it's not going to start giving you more creative ideas. The only way to get creative ideas is to test the application or the technology in all different possible ways. And you'll quickly start coming up with out of the box ideas to just make things more efficient for your own industry. You know, people often will say, oh, how do I get more creative? Well, the way you get more creative is not just by learning. Learning is a prerequisite. You have to learn, but mainly you have to do.

19:56That's how you be creative, right? So Kieran Flanagan tweeted this. So he's the VP of marketing at HubSpot or SVP, I guess. So he said, kind of similar to Heaton, he's like, marketing in the AI era is a game of extremes. Average no longer cuts it. So there you hear it again. Average no longer cuts it. Only two types of marketers will thrive. One, standout creatives who craft unforgettable creative. That's number one. Two, engineer-led marketers who leverage AI to personalize and scale like never before. Why? Because software is multiplying, but distribution is shrinking. That's something that's worth talking about.

20:28Distribution is shrinking. Attention is scarce and generic is invisible. We're entering the era of value. One, better software, lower costs. Two, better marketing, lower costs. To when you must deliver extreme value, the middle will disappear fast. I think the distribution is shrinking thing is very real. Yeah, but anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.