Apple Rebrands Search Ads As Apple Ads, Why We are Integrating QR Codes In Our Marketing Content, Why Being CEO Is The Worst Job

0:03Yeah, but did you see the Apple news how they're changing Apple search ads? No. They're now calling it Apple Ads. They just took search out? I believe they just took search out. I know they took search out. I believe the new name is Apple Ads. So that means they're going to do a lot of crazy stuff. They're going to start monetizing everything in their ecosystem. Ten years ago, people were talking about how when they started going to services and all these apps and they started generating all these micro conversions off these little apps, now they're doing it with ads because they're just trying to find more revenue.

0:36And they have such a large user base that it just makes sense. I totally agree with that. I think they will continually, if you look at the ad ecosystem, Google is number one, Meta is number two, Amazon is number three and growing at an extremely rapid pace. The ad business is highly profitable. If you look at Google's business, most of their profits come from ads. Waymo is not profitable. I don't care. If they grow from 200 ,000 rides to 2 million rides in a week or even 20 million, it doesn't create the profit that um ads do because ad someone clicks on something it's almost pure profit yep by the way um we've been doing this quite a bit with with today's um today's like talks overall so you have one a topic here on why we're integrating qr codes in our marketing content dude so i don't know what you guys you know i know you know that we use them in our webinars it collects quite a bit of leads we've been pushing qr codes heavily in everything so we're now even doing it in our videos where if you're watching a video yeah you can then end up scanning your qr code i get most people watch it with their cell phones but we don't care um because you can't really scan a qr code from a cell phone when you're watching a video yeah but we're still putting qr codes a lot of people watch on tv too uh-huh yeah and then a lot of our consumers watch on ipads and desktops because we produce a lot of b2b content and what's cool about it is scan the qr code go to blog posts learn more go to webinar become a lead but we're just tying in the loops from all the channels closer together and the reason i say that is it's hard to drive traffic from a lot of these marketing formats but if you start entering qr codes you won't drive the traffic volume but we do see lead quality being amazing from people who scan the qr codes yeah it makes sense i think we see a lot of mid-roll ads where they just have the QR codes in there.

2:27We haven't done it. We probably shouldn't do it. But the way we look at things now is like, I think you joined for my session of talk where I just talked about splintering a lot of the features that we have and making them into funnels. And those should be QR codes leading into them. And we're just constantly rotating these things over and over. This is interesting because one of our clients is here and we just talked yesterday very briefly. He's like, dude, like they have a high LTV product, right? Let's just call it hundreds of thousands of dollars. And this is a long sales cycle too. Like it's consumers making a big decision on their lives.

2:55Like a car. Yeah, like a car. And but even more expensive than a car. But my point is, he's like, I know you guys are trying to hit these like ROI numbers and everything. But it's like, dude, it's that's not what matters for me. It's like, I'd rather you guys just if we need to spend more, let's spend more. Let's be aggressive here. And if we can map out different products and features that we have with our stuff, I'm down to do it. So my point of saying this is that sometimes air coverage does make sense. And sometimes it's not about your ROAS or your immediate ROI. Sometimes it's about your ROI over an extended period of time because you have a high LTV thing.

3:29If you try to go for efficiencies all the time, there's a trade-off, right? That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, there's a huge trade-off. Yep. And by the way, we both come from performance marketing. I think we've learned over time that this brand stuff takes time. It takes a really long time. I always say 10 years to really get your brand out there. And I was talking to my Brazil team. I shared some of the numbers in earlier today. you know, 36 RFPs last year. And how's the traffic down around 6x yet we get more RFPs? It's because we're focusing on building our brand with the right audience versus people optimizing for vanity metrics, like how many visitors, because when we were getting tons of visitors to our websites, literally 6x more, we weren't getting large corporations hitting us up.

4:15And if we did, it would be very seldom and they wouldn't want to spend a lot of money with us. and the churn was extremely high. And as we started going upstream, when I asked my team, and this is how the conversation first came about, I was like, where do we get our RFPs from? So they started sending me spreadsheets for every region that we're in. And inbound is a portion of it. I was like, so how did the inbound ones come? And they're just like, you know, they just go to the website. I'm like, okay, have you asked them how they heard about us? And they're just really random. Like the other day, we got a really large car company, one of the largest car companies in the world hitting us up.

4:49And the way we got included in the RFP is they emailed someone random on our team that they never worked with and said, Hey, so-and-so the name was Jessica. Hey, Jessica, uh, we want to include you guys in an RFP. What's the next steps? Like, how the heck did they get our email address? And a lot of this happens from just being in business for a very long time. And people forget that, but what Eric and I have done is just being really consistent for a very long period of time. And I think that's what people, they're just not willing to do. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have said this. Most people like investing, the thing you have to do is just sit there and wait, right?

5:26But in business, you can't just sit there and wait. You have to sit, you have to wait, but you have to have, you have to take a lot of action and wait. I think the problem with most people is they want a lot of results quickly. When they don't get it, they get disappointed and they give up really quickly. Yes, it's, you got to keep pushing. You got to, there's a lot of pressure. there's external threats, there's competition. You've got to keep doing it for a long time and push hard. And I don't think most people are willing to do that. I remember with Warren Buffett, was it Lehman Brothers that was collapsing and that had some problems?

5:57No, one of them he stepped in on. Was it Lehman Brothers back in the day? It's just like, do you think he wanted to go in there and temporarily be the CEO? No. Did he have a choice? Yes. But did he still do it? Yes. Because you do things that you don't want to do. And that's how you get to where you want to be in life. Dude, this is worth talking about. Okay, let's revisit the conversation around why CEO is the worst job. But CEO and founder, I think is the worst job. But if you're co-founder, I think it's a really good job. Do you agree or disagree with that? Okay, wait, CEO, you say is the worst job?

6:29I think CEO and founder is the worst job you can have because everything bubbles up to you. Yes. But if you're a co-founder and like, let's say CMO or CTO or something like that, I think it's more fun. i agree with you this is the role that you have continue because i'm i sit in ceo and founder right now you sit in i'm ce and i'm founder and i don't even know what my title and whatever title needs to happen yeah i think they labeled me as a cmo cmo but like you're kind of between i'm not even a cmo between cmo and chief strategy officer that's how i see it yeah i i if i had to pick a real title i would probably say i'm an evangelist sure co-founder and evangelist that's probably what i do and then i deal with crap and when i mean crap i'm not talking about people or bad anything i just deal with problems all day long but you deal with problems that i think you're mostly okay dealing with instead of and there's every company has people problems but you don't have to deal with people problems i don't have to deal with as much people problems i have to deal with other problems that may not be easy to solve.

7:33Like sometimes we deal with lawsuits and I would say at our size, we probably have at least one lawsuit that we deal with a year. And the lawsuits could be random. Like a company called Medley paid us for marketing services. They went bankrupt. So then we get letters from attorneys trying to claw back money and we negotiated and we dealt with them. We have internal counsel, but some of those things I got to be involved with or, you know, someone trying to do some fraudulent things, not in our company, but someone trying to screw us over or whatnot, just double check. But yeah, so some things I just got to deal with.

8:09And those are the things where it's very time sensitive, and people need pressure. So for example, in a country in Asia, someone tried screwing us over. And I had to call the lawyers bug them, I was able to get them to go to court right away, get an injunction on that person so they can't screw with us anymore. And then boom, we can operate business as is, or hopefully we can operate business as is. And the court approved the injunction. But what I'm getting with this is I had to put pressures on the lawyer to make that happen. If I didn't, it would have happened a week or two later. And when I say pressure, talking to them probably for a few hours a day and dealing with different time zones until it happened and messaging them.

8:53and when they don't answer, message them again. And when it's 1 a.m. their time, I still call them and they don't pick up. I call the next person on their team and I keep going until I get an answer. And then I tell them, I need this done now. I just sent you money. Why isn't it done now? Like all that kind of crap I have to deal with. I wonder, you know, I have these Indian, these Indian entrepreneur friends in YPO and they are also pushers at their company. How's it going over here? Hey, how's this going, right? Do you think it's a cultural thing? Depending on the Indian type, because AJ's side, different culture, they don't push.

9:29Okay. Oh, you know what's funny? The two Indians I know in YPO are the same as you. They're Gujarati. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they speak it too. A lot of us are just like, we just keep going and pushing in business and we're never satisfied. Yeah. And that's why I think it's a net benefit sometimes. This is a culture thing. If you can be born into a culture like that, the resilience is kind of built in. It's like a built-in toy. I don't know. But yeah. 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.

10:01Shopify 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. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style. Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify has got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos. Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling.

10:31If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, Shopify.com slash marketing school. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

11:14It was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click. So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter.

11:44Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Yeah, and then when things go bad, my co-founder was asking me, he's like, dude, this is just so bad. And I was like, you know, I've been in business now for 24 years. And out of those 24 years, this has been my worst year I've ever been in business. Really? I make more money now, but the amount of problems that I'm dealing with this year are just crazy.

12:20Think about this. Signing a cloud deal with another company who said they were going to move our tech stack over to their tech stack. The engineers don't move the tech stack to it. And they're just like, we want you to pay the cloud bill. I'm like, but you said that they were going to move it and they never moved it. And the code never worked. They're like, yeah, we don't care. Even though it's free for you, we hire those engineers to do it, even though they didn't do it. you need to pay your bill to us and i'm like but you told us when we first started talking that will he pay you and you guys will make it happen it's been a year and a half and you couldn't have made it happen so why should we keep paying or not paying why should we keep going down this route when you're never going to be able to move it over yeah what they say like well if you're not willing to keep trying then you need to pay your bills because it's been a year and a half and i'm like dude i'm not going to go another year and a half and waste my engineer's times trying to move text x the job wasn't done the job wasn't done so then you deal with these these battles right they're disputes that i call them but i'm dealing with three big silly disputes uh you know some of them should have been preventable and we're dealing with the crap economy we're dealing with tariffs we're now in so many countries that we're dealing with the economy of a lot of different industries and i remember talking to my ceo he's like you know i've been through the dot-com boom i've been through the uh 9-11 i've been through 2008 the housing crisis covid of course he's like usually things pick back up after like eight months after he's like this has been almost three years and i'm like i know it's pretty bad but i but i like it and my co-founder you know of course it impacts him it impacts me as well but then when things are really bad like this and it's been one of the worst years we're double down we're reinvesting more than ever which is creating more pain and I'm like, you got to take the pain.

14:09We have no choice. This is how you climb ahead and you beat your competition when things are good. You know what people say? So they say that bad times create strong people and strong people create good times and good times create weak people. And then the cycle continues to repeat over and over and over. And that's what it is. And so when I say I like it, I don't really like being in it, but I know it'll make me stronger for the long term. And that's why I'm okay with it. Yes, no, I just got to get my kids to create good times, but not necessarily the resilience has to be built in the room too like that's a whole other thing but so i was having a dinner with another entrepreneur a couple nights ago and um they have let's call it 700 employees they probably do 140 150 a year something like that um and you know what he told me he's actually younger than us so he was like he's like look man like i've played this comparison game and like you know i thought in 2020 i started angel investing in everything he invested most of his net worth into just angel investments.

15:05Right. And he was playing the game, the status game. Um, and he's just like, dude, like what's he's become a lot calmer now. And he, he, he mentioned the word retire. I was like, why do you want to retire? Why are you not having fun? And he was like, well, the more, what a biggie say, more money, more problems. Right. So the more he grows, the more stress he gets, the more stuff he doesn't want to do. And he's doing it all. and he's like but for what right um and so he's just asking me i'm like look the way i've always looked at it money or not i'm just i enjoy the game that i'm playing right now so maybe you need to change the game that you're playing right now because i do still think that business is the best game um but to your point more money more problems did he invest in a crypto company he did yeah he invested he invested in many no i don't think you know who this is oh this is a different person he invested in many crypto companies uh you mentioned a friend of yours that invested in coinbase and just made a kill it that's another one oh that's a different guy yeah yeah but that but that goes back to what you're saying again it's it's like the bigger you grow just keep in mind like if you're doing a billion in revenue or even more than that like you're gonna have problems to deal with there and it's never gonna be completely hands-off yeah yeah unless you're an event like if you want to be more hands-off like you're an investor like you're super hands-off there but even investors look at this economy it's so bad that companies aren't going public as often anymore There's not as many exits.

16:28Home sales have been the lowest since 2009. Did you see the news on that? It's really bad right now. Miami prices are down. So Naples, it's down 6 % year on year. And then like Miami housing is down quite a bit too. And it's from the peak, I think it's down like 50 % or so. And it's going to continue to go down. And in Miami, like they've been building a lot of stuff in downtown, but a lot of people left. Like I moved here 2021. I'm back home now, right? And a lot of my friends that moved here during 2021, it's like freshman year of college. Everyone's having fun. The economy is ripping everything.

16:59Everyone's back home now. Yeah, because people like Google are like, if you work remote and you don't come to office at least three times a week, you may lose your job. In other words, you're going to lose it. All right, guys. So that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Let us know what you think about this episode where we recorded with the DJI Osmo. I set this up myself. We've got another camera over there. So that being said, we'll see you tomorrow.

17:26Bye.