Anthropic's New MOAT Is Insane

0:00Eric Siu:Anthropic sees a moat, Neil. So what do you think this moat is if you already guessed on this moat? This is too obtuse. I don't think you're going to get it. So try it.

0:08Neil Patel:No, I don't think I'm going to get it. I wouldn't say it's enterprise, you know, or adoption or anything because they're already at all the enterprises are adopting whatever platforms they want. I don't know.

0:19Eric Siu:So this is interesting. This guy, Jaya Gupta from Foundation Capital. So he tweeted this. So Anthropic sees this mode. The scarce asset in enterprise AI is shifting from intelligence to mission. And we're seeing this right now, Neil. So same thing, you're getting demand for agents. We're getting a lot of demand for agents and we're building out these revenue agents right now. And what's happening, Neil, is our agents, because my team wants to have agents like mine where they can ask it to do whatever and it has a lot of content. It's connected to all the data that we have internally. And there's like all our SOPs, all these things, right?

0:51Eric Siu:And what I'm realizing is that permissioning is a very big deal. So obviously you shouldn't let everyone in your company see all of your QuickBooks information or all compensation information, right? You shouldn't have that. And so you needed this. So models are now good enough. The harder question is whether companies will let them act inside real systems. So will you let them write code? Will you let every one of your team members merge changes with your code, right? Or touch infrastructure or trigger actions? That is a big deal. And you need to have this governance in place. And some companies are launching this right now, like Zapier just launched something in terms of governance.

1:27Eric Siu:And so I think you're going to have to piece me a lot of these things together. We're doing the same thing as well. But that's why we slowly started to test on ourselves first with our single brain unified intelligence. And then we're slowly rolling it out to clients too. But they're all, I'll say all of the clients right now, they're all on pilots because we want to make sure that we're building with them every single week because every client has different needs. And that's why I'll tell you, having to get SOC, getting ready for SOC 2 compliance, all these things are a huge pain in the butt, as you know.

1:53Eric Siu:but we want to make sure that we're building these things right as I'm sure you guys are too. So governance matters, permission matters quite a bit. Otherwise, it's going to become a poo-poo show at your company and you don't want that to happen.

2:04Neil Patel:Yes. And also when you are leveraging some of these marketing tactics, let's say people are going to, marketing agencies are creating agents for others or you're going to ride on this way. Keep in mind that if something has been out there for six months or a year and is already popular and like, man, I missed the boat. If you switch the marketing angle to focus more on enterprise, you'll be shocked at how much slower companies adapt and you can penetrate. And then if you're like, well, in the US, they're already starting to adapt. That could just be in the US. And a lot of other countries are much slower to adapt than the US because a lot of this technology gets rolled out from San Francisco to the whole US and then to other countries.

2:43Neil Patel:So what you can do is say, hey, I'm going to end up creating this for, you know, SMBs or enterprises in Portuguese or in Hindi or in whatever language and then adapt for those countries that you know will eventually follow through, but they're not there yet.

2:59Eric Siu:Yeah, remember we talked about this, Neil? Institutional AI versus individual AI. So individual AI could be like you using ChatGPT to help it figure out recipes for you or plan your travel or whatever, okay? Institutional AI is, for example, Neil and I are both marketers. We both know quite a bit on market. I won't say we're the best in the world, But we have a lot of SOPs. We have staff that help us. And so what ends up becoming more important is the skill.md files that you have throughout your whole organization because that's how these agents read this stuff, right? It's all these skill.md files.

3:27Eric Siu:The more that you have and the deeper they are, the more of an advantage you're going to have. And you want to go institutional in terms of deep in one area and not just try to be everything to everyone.

3:36Neil Patel:Yes. Did I give you the example of how AI really messed up a family vacation for me? Yeah. You told me this like three times where it spent like$7 ,500 over or something like that? No, no.

3:48Eric Siu:How it put me on a cruise ship. Did I tell you that? No, no, no. Go.

3:52Neil Patel:How Michelle wanted me to spend more time with the kids. She accepted, as my wife, she already knows I work a lot. It's more so the kids are starting to cry. Like even my daughter said, you haven't come to any of my school functions. I'm like, I volunteer during lunch and stuff. She's like, you haven't seen my open, you won't come from open house and see the homework I did.

4:08Eric Siu:You haven't seen my open claw.

4:13Neil Patel:And I'm like, honey, I'm so sorry. I had a conference booked three months ago or some meetings in a different country. I can't just fly back from Italy and then fly back over. And so my wife planned a Disney cruise using ChatGPT. Shitty internet, coordinated with my assistant so she knows when my calendar was free and all that kind of stuff. So the Disney cruise from Vancouver to Alaska, ChatGPT ends up breaking down like,

4:41Eric Siu:oh here's a perfect date in june keep in mind i had a few dates open for many months or a few

4:47Neil Patel:weeks open and it tells my wife how june is the best time all right so then we tell some friends

4:54Eric Siu:who have kids similar to our kids age that are in that area like hey do you want to join us and

4:59Neil Patel:whatnot hands down everyone we told some of them may end up joining us but um hands down everyone we told said, why are you going in June? July is way better. June is not a good month to go on the cruise. So my wife goes back to Chad, hey, you told me June is the best month to go. Everyone's telling me July. And they're like, oh, you make a good point here. But the reason I picked June is when you look outside, you can still see a little bit of snow at the top of the mountain, which looks beautiful. So that's why we say it's the best month. But then you can't do crap outside because of the weather and it's not conducive.

5:36Neil Patel:I was like, you've picked a crap month and made us waste money on a non-refundable trip and not just a little bit of money. Flights, I think, were like$4 ,000. The cruise,$20-something thousand dollars. I do not know how the heck people can afford this Disney cruise. I was pissed off at the price. People don't have options. This isn't a fancy room. This is like a Motel 6-looking room. I'm like, how the heck does it cost this much money?

6:02Eric Siu:they just charge that much and get away with it but chat chpt this is how chat chpt screwed you out of 30 grad probably more but yes to start off with and it picked the wrong date probably

6:13Neil Patel:probably and then i'll have forget the cost on that i'll have crappy internet for the whole week

6:19Eric Siu:so i'll be very unproductive that will cost you even oh yeah it's gonna cost you way more

6:25Neil Patel:yeah but i get that one because i've been working so much and eric sent me amazing x quote or quote from x from this uh guy talking about the net worth versus spending time with kids and how you can't take it with you and i agree with him and i've been trying to make it better but i actually found i've probably traveled more this year than last year and it's probably worse i was just gonna

6:48Eric Siu:say before you said that i was like i need to remind neil to reread the irr meme so the whole idea with that one is nobody your daughters are and your your son's not going to care at age 21 how much your irr was at 31 versus 25 so you can spend more time with them right i was going to say neil you've actually regressed this year so you need to reread that yeah it's gone a little

7:10Neil Patel:crazy you've done really well you've cut back traveling a lot if i'm not mistaken like i've noticed on a list trout and you spent a lot more time on operations on your business like actually doing the work instead of going out there and trying to build a brand, collect leads and all that kind of stuff. What has been, out of curiosity, if you had to put some tangible numbers or percentages, what would you say, rough range, because I know it's too hard to exact, but you probably have a rough idea because I know you would have already adapted if it was hurting you.

7:39Eric Siu:Yeah. So here's what I can share. So I will say, Neil, we can do a quick comparison. At the high point, I was probably traveling half of the year. So 140 to 150 days, sometimes even like 170 or something like that. I think you're probably on track for probably a little more than that. It sounds like.

7:57Neil Patel:I think I'm on track for like 65 % to 70.

8:00Eric Siu:Okay. So Neil's worse than I am, but I used to be kind of around that. What I found though, is that me focusing on my business, I'm working harder than I ever have. And so usually Neil and I would be focused more on, or at least for myself, I'd be focused more on strategy and driving distribution. And this to me as part of driving distribution. But I'm doing more than I ever have done. So I think now, Neil, you can't just be a strategist, you have to be a doer as well. And you and I have always, we're willing to kind of pick up a shovel or like clean the bathrooms if we have to do it. And so I would just say that I've been more productive than ever because I'm not distracted by travel.

8:34Eric Siu:And I'm able to quickly meet with people more. I'm able to quickly just, you know, huddle them or something like that, right? So communication cycles are a lot faster now. And I would just say that without me focusing on this, I wouldn't have gotten the single brain thing out, which I think single brain is the AI marketing services company of the future. And that to me, like building that future is very important.

8:58Neil Patel:Yeah. No, I think that's a great use of your time. But let's go back to your organization, Single Brain. Okay. I know for a fact, AI has helped you save. in addition to whatever you spent if you look at total savings it saved you probably over a half a million to a million dollars and told you where to save money without reducing headcount like without having to fire people or anything like that it's actually saved money in a positive way

9:25Eric Siu:yeah so what i can report on is um so i i did i actually made a video on this yesterday neil so um my agent just on saving cost savings and loss i spent 7 500 on tokens last month okay But the savings on that, if you do 500 grand divided by the 7 ,500, that's a 66.66x return, okay? Just on that alone. And I made those cuts within three days. So we cut a ton of software costs. We did cut contractor costs, but we didn't cut... What I can proudly say for right now is from that, we haven't tried to cut full-time costs, okay? And that's a good thing. I think it's like a lot of people are saying, oh, we got to cut 20%, 50 % here.

10:03Eric Siu:I talk about it a lot, but that's not something that we're actively doing, right? now that also on top of that Neil the way my team uses it now like sure I spent the 7500 but that was the the toll booth to get everyone else using it like this so everyone else is getting a lift they're like oh I built this over here I built this I saw someone Neil on the team build this we have something now that can crank out like 400 600 ads and we're hooking it into single brain we have like an API for that and then end-to-end having Alfred our agent build out cold email infrastructure, which we've talked about a little bit.

10:37Eric Siu:So it's building out all these end-to-end things. Had I not spent the time and the money on that, we wouldn't have been able to show the team that we can do it and unlock it for everyone else. And that to me, I think we can see the gains on that. They come back to me in like six months or so, but I think we'll have harder numbers there. Also, Neil, the single brain website generated in two hours, the enterprise leads coming through that right now, that's real. That's real pipeline.

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11:06Eric Siu:It creates content that actually sounds like you, not AI slop. And there's a free 14-day free trial. Okay, back to it.

11:13Neil Patel:Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm with you. And I've been in the opposite. I haven't been in the trenches as much as Eric has this year in business. My role this year, if I had to say, I've been spending, and even a lot of last year, but it's gotten worse this year. I spent a lot of my time networking and doing meals and doing presentations. When I say presentations, I'm not talking about going to a conference, even though I do that quite a bit and I just finished one up earlier today. I'm talking about like going into companies and meeting their executive team, doing presentations internally about business strategy, marketing strategy, how they can adapt, what happens when low-cost competitors enter the market, how should they adapt their marketing messages and pivot, still try to maintain and grow market share.

12:00Neil Patel:and we'll do lunches and dinners with these people and get to know them. And the reason this is important is I'm playing like a game of whale hunting, right? I don't actually hunt whales, but you guys get the point in which... You call this a spearing, Neil. Spearing, yeah. What I'm trying to do is land multi-seven or eight-figure deals. And it's a lot of those. It doesn't matter how good you are with AI or marketing or any of that stuff. a lot of that comes down to relationships and whining and dining and meeting and hanging out and just getting to know people because people don't like signing big contracts with someone they don't actually know.

12:41Neil Patel:I'm not talking about, oh, I see Neil and Eric on the internet type of note. I'm talking about sit down and have a drink, even though I don't drink alcohol, but like, you know, have a meal or break bread or whatever you want to call it, like really getting to know the person, their family and what they do for fun and all that good stuff.

12:57Eric Siu:You know, what's unexpected Neil is the pilots that are coming through right now for single brain a lot of them are to your point relationships and a lot of them are through what YPO right you know I talked about but that YPO is networking what Neil's talking about as a form of networking I think that's very everything comes down to relationships at the end of the day um and I think I think it is high leverage for Neil to be doing this and Neil I've got I got a question for you what happened to that