Anthropic's Growth Team Is Just One Person

0:00Eric Siu:Using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com.

0:29Neil Patel:So Neil, I think a good starting point on this one.

0:32Eric Siu:So did you know that Anthropics Growth Team is just one person? Yeah. So I didn't know that. I just read about it this week. Let me just give the context for everyone here. I know we can go into it. Obviously, I think they have a bigger marketing team to just one person. But you can go through it first because it turns out I changed my password. So I have to log back in. Sure.

0:51Neil Patel:So there was a report on someone putting it on X on how Anthropics Growth Team is just one person. and look at everything they've done from just one person. They have done a miraculous job, but you have to look at it a few ways. One, a lot of products actually grow through the product just being really good. If you look at some of the best companies, yes, a lot of them eventually end up doing marketing, but good products are much easier to grow naturally than having a crap product and amazing marketers. The second thing that most people don't report out in this is their growth team is one person, but how many other companies are they contracting with externally to help get things done like their Super Bowl ads or the creative solutions, right, for the Super Bowl ads?

1:39Neil Patel:I think they had, was it four commercials?

1:41Eric Siu:Yeah.

1:41Neil Patel:It was four different commercials.

1:42Eric Siu:Yeah.

1:43Neil Patel:So they have quite a few people that end up working on marketing externally and internally, even though their growth team is one person, I actually believe it is more people working on marketing internally. They're just not marketers. So we work with a Silicon Valley startup. They're not publicly traded. They're valued over a hundred billion dollars. There's not that many of them. So you can take a guess. All right. And we help them. Is it an AI company? Not an AI company. Okay. So a hundred plus billion dollars privately owned. Eventually they will go public. I'm assuming that based on A, their valuation, B, they raised a crap ton of money over the year.

2:26Neil Patel:Are they worth over$500 billion? They're not worth over$500 billion. There's only one. Yeah, that's true. There's actually not that many. Probably shouldn't have said them out, but it doesn't matter, right? Anthropoc could be, in theory, less than$500, but yeah, it's not. I said no AI. So yeah, that actually eliminates them. We'll let people guess. Yeah, they can end up guessing. So we help them with a lot of different things in marketing, from SEO to GEO and the list goes on and on. And we help them in many countries. Take a guess who we work with on their marketing team. One of the C-level execs?

3:03Neil Patel:No one. We work with engineers. Okay. And we have been working with engineers for three years. I think this is our third year on our contract with them. We just work with engineers. So the point I'm getting at is in some of these companies that are startups based out of San Francisco, they do marketing. and a lot of times you're not dealing with marketers. You're dealing with engineering people and product people who are helping or who you're working with marketing. And the same goes with Airbnb. That one I can mention. So years and years ago, when I had Kissmetrics, my old startup, we started doing consulting to reduce our burn because we don't want to raise more money.

3:43Neil Patel:I think at that time, we raised$4 million. Yeah, so we added some consulting and consulting that wasn't related to our products so that way we didn't have to keep raising money because we had more inquiries. One of the companies we closed was Airbnb. I got connected with, I believe his name is - Junie. Nathan, the CTO and co-founder, right? I believe it was one of the co-founders. I believe his name was Nathan and he was a CTO. So I worked with him. I worked with someone else on engineering and we're fixing all of their SEO issues, content issues, duplicate page issues, We were trying to figure out how to optimize their conversion rates.

4:20Neil Patel:So we're working on so many different things and not once out of working with them for, I think with them, maybe 12 months or 24 months or something like that. I know it's less than two years, but I believe it was more than one year. Not once had I ever talked to anyone in marketing. Quick break.

4:37Eric Siu:One of our ClickFlow users just told me that they're saving 90 plus hours a month on content alone. ClickFlow is our AI SEO product that actually does the work. Not just here's what you should do. It does it. It creates content in your voice. It helps you with other areas, such as finding the right internal links and creating FAQs. We spent years making it, perfecting it with our clients so it doesn't just sound like AI slop. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com.

5:01Neil Patel:If you're serious about AI SEO, you should check it out. Back to the show.

5:04Eric Siu:Yeah. So here's what I'll say. I mean, so this guy tweeted this out. So basically, Anthropic's entire growth team was just one person for 10 months confirmed. This is what we just talked about, right? So single non-technical person running paid search, paid social, app stores, email marketing, SEO for the$380 billion company behind Claude. Here's how one human is doing it. The job of a full marketing team, it starts with a CSV. So here's what I'll say to all of this. If you look at the revenue chart for Claude from the last two years or so, it's like going, going, going, and it goes parabolic.

5:33Eric Siu:And that's when Claude Code, like the Opus models, 4.5 comes out, 4.6 comes out. really I would say the last year year and a half or so Claude really started to take off and they're launching all these products like crazy to your point it's the marketing that's when your marketing is so good your product is so good and it's consumer and business and you're touching enterprise yes of course you're going to grow it really quickly right and to your point a lot of this stuff like he is kind of reinforcing like okay paid social paid search or whatever he there there's a marketing team and by the way you when you have all the technology you have you should be able to you're not looking to automate away humans, but you are looking away to automate away processes.

6:09Eric Siu:And that's why this person can do more. But there's a lot more than this. Like if the product sucked, it doesn't matter if you had the best growth person in the world. It's still, you're polishing a turd. It's still a turd.

6:18Neil Patel:It's still a golden turd, but it's a turd. Yeah. What we've seen with Silicon Valley-based companies, a lot of them may not have a big marketing team, but there's other roles that are involved in marketing. So at our agency, NP Digital, we do a ton of app store marketing. So like, let's say if you're Netflix, you have an app, you would want it to rank really highly in the app store, right? Or we've done app work for like Tinder, right? The dating app. So what we found with a lot of Silicon Valley based companies, when we're doing different marketing initiatives, we tend to deal more with technical people and actually no marketers.

6:58Neil Patel:It is very reversed from working with like Fortune 500 companies.

7:03Eric Siu:You know what's funny? So when I used to work at startups, it was the engineers that helped me. So I led marketing, but I worked, I found that I got a lot more leverage working with the engineers because they think about things in systems, right? They don't think about the tasks themselves, which is actually interesting. This brings me to a point. I was listening to the CEO of Sierra, the AI company, right? So he was chairman of Salesforce, I think, for a while, or up the board at Facebook and also OpenAI for a little bit. So Brett Taylor is his name. And this quote I really like, he said, look, talking about replacing humans is like it kind of sucks.

7:36Eric Siu:It does suck. But when you talk about AI replacing workflows and processes, that's what we should be thinking about. And I think a lot of people, that's the resistance right now because they tied their identity into doing the actual task themselves when it was never about that. right and i think that's a much easier way to put it than like you know like all the all the stuff that gets views right that gets clicks like i have all these dot charts that go out like this replaces this this releases this and it gets people arguing with each other but at the end of the day what what we really mean at least what i really mean i think you mean this too is you should be looking at replacing processes it's not so much about all these bloated you know you don't want to hire humans like i said last time to do robot work yeah and two things one you have to be careful in

8:18Neil Patel:what you read, like when people are saying like, oh, look at everything we did with just one grilled person. Is it really one grilled person? Or are there a lot of other people dipping their toes in marketing?

8:28Eric Siu:He for sure works with a bunch of engineers and he's probably hired a bunch of consultants. But you can see here, this is like a case study from, you can see that this is their branding, right? So like, oh, as the growth marketing team focused on building out performance marketing channels across paid, search, social, mobile app stores, email marketing, SEO. As a non-technical team of one, they use cloud code to automate repetitive marketing tasks. Sure,

8:46Neil Patel:they do that but there's no way it's just one person i agree with you and the second thing is you were talking you just mentioned brett taylor brett taylor for people who don't know uh sold the company to google back in the day it's really amazing what he did he was supposed to be the ceo of salesforce decided to back out was on the twitter board push during that transition uh-huh yeah he pushed elon to end up for the board forced elon to end up buying uh x when he tried backing out for a minute. And then I believe he's also on the board of OpenAI. I think he was to help with that transition. And I don't know if he's there anymore.

9:22Eric Siu:I'm pretty sure he's on the board. He has a conflict of interest now because he has the chatbot company. Sam Allman praises it. Yeah, I'm sure he does. But that kind of seems like a conflict of interest. I think he's still on the board. I'm 99 % sure. Maybe. Maybe he's still chairman. I don't know. He's not that much older than us. Yeah. Wikipedia says he's still chairman.

9:41Neil Patel:Uh-huh. Yeah. Did you see, so talking about replacing people, did you see the X comparison of Sam Altman, you know, and I hope no one passes away, but Sam Altman passing away versus Elon passing away, what would happen to the companies? No. So they were just like, well, if Sam Altman passes away, and again, Eric and I don't want any wish ill will to anyone and we don't want anyone to die. But if Sam Altman passed away, they're just like, it wouldn't be a big deal for OpenAI. Brett Taylor would just take it over. He's already on the board. He's an amazing operator. And some were arguing that it may even operate better with Brett running and being at the helm of OpenAI.

10:21Eric Siu:Potentially. But you can't lose Elon.

10:23Neil Patel:You can't lose Elon. They're like, well, who's going to replace Elon? They're like, oh, we're going to have a lot of problems.

10:27Eric Siu:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

10:29Neil Patel:But that just goes to show, and this is a problem I think in organizations, and I've seen people talk about this all day long. I'm not valuable like Elon Musk, but I remember when we were pitching NP Digital to investors a long time ago. Oh, you tried to raise funding?

10:48Eric Siu:Oh, I remember this.

10:48Neil Patel:Yeah, this was a long time ago. It wasn't really raising funding. We were going to sell a chunk of the company. Yeah. And when we were doing this, I don't know when this was, but maybe like - Three years ago? three, four years ago, I guess, maybe four years ago. So when we were talking to potential people, they would all ask the question of what happens when Neil is gone, right? Key man risk. Key man risk. And then now, again, as I told everyone earlier, I'm no Elon, we don't really talk to investors at all anymore, but we don't really get the question anymore on key man risk.

11:21Eric Siu:Yeah, which is good. So do you think today, okay, if you were to go away, like the company could continue on as is. It would continue growing all the things. Same growth rate next three years, average?

11:36Neil Patel:I think growth will slow down a little bit. Okay, yeah.

11:39Eric Siu:I think you don't have the key man risk.

11:41Neil Patel:I have key man risk in multiple areas.

11:45Eric Siu:But anyway, I think it's good to call that out. But I do think going back to it again, the whole idea that AI here is here to replace processes, I think it's also hard. like we're doing our hackathon next week at my company. Right. And I was, I'm just seeing the people, the things people want to build. They want to build dashboards or they want to build keyword research tools. I'm like, bro, like you're, you're building things for humans to still use. Like stop, stop thinking like that. Like think outside, like you got to think about things that only robots can do. Right. Because I look, I look at the stuff people are talking about on X.

12:14Eric Siu:Like I'm not doing, I'm not running ads myself. You're not, you're not either, I'm assuming, but on X or they're just talking about it on X. Like they're running ads. Yeah. They're like, I use Cloud Code to basically manage all my ads and I'm spinning up like a thousand different variations or whatever. And like they're showing their process. I'm like, you know, whether it's like working correctly or not, or even if we do like a 10th of that, that's cool. Right. Because I don't think you should be like spinning up ads or whatever. And I think if you're an SEO, you got to be learning the different dynamics around AEO, probably learn some Reddit, learn some YouTube as well.

12:42Eric Siu:You got to be very dynamic. So like even us going through this hackathon process, number two, it's very important for me right now where I'm like, hey, I got to take a quick look at what they're working on. I'm not involved in the hackathon until the very end, like the show and tell, but I'm like, you got to like constantly keep things like on track. Otherwise it can just go like really haywire.