Founders Must Let The Cake Bake

0:28So one thing that was said to me yesterday, this is funny. opening the oven all the time. What do you think about that? No, I agree. And that's why I pick different problems to hop around with because the cake doesn't bake fast enough for most initiatives. Yeah. I mean, okay, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger said this. Do you remember? I think it was Charlie that said it. It's like you can impregnate a woman or nine different women, but the baby's not going to come out like, you know, in a month. Correct. Every nine babies. Yeah. It's like when we do SEO, we know if we make changes to a website right now and do all these SEO, you know, link building, brand mentions, creating content.

1:03We know we're not going to get the results we want in 30 days. We have to be patient, wait six months, wait a year. But you can push on that one topic, let it bake and have that team or department or person keep pushing while you go focus on something else. Did you want to know something? So going back to the three-year planning yesterday, something that you probably won't do, but let me tell you that's been helpful for my team. So in YPO, there's this thing called a key associate form. You know what a form is, right? So forms like you meet with these eight to 10 people a month. You never got involved with one, but that's what happens, right?

1:36So turns out, like forms have been very impactful for me. I started doing that since I was like 26 years old. And you meet with these people, you talk about the 5 % of things that you can't talk about with like your spouse or your partner, for example. So very valuable. I learned a lot because I was only 26. These people were like way, way, way more experienced than I was. So get this. My CTO, for example, he's in a CTO key associate form. So I pay three grand a year and he's with CTOs that are like way ahead of him. Right. These are significant businesses. Same thing might happen on the sales side, for example.

2:06Like there might be like a chief revenue officer form and everyone's like far ahead. And so what's happening is these people are learning through osmosis. And for three grand a year, like to me, I'm like, that's worth it. Right. And so that's one of the benefits I'm getting from YPO, I would say right now. And this just came out recently. And so food for thought. Yeah. You have an interesting topic here that says, if you hate billionaires, you have a low IQ. Yes. I believe that if you hate billionaires, you have a low IQ. Because when I log into threads, all I see is people complaining about billionaires.

2:38It's like, well, billionaires should be taxed more. Billionaires should do this. I'm like, well, if you replace the word billionaires with successful people who have added a lot of value, you're vilifying, especially what America stands for, right? Having agency, building your own thing, right? You're taking your potential to your max potential. And I'm just like, why are we vilifying success? Why? It's like, how has anyone having a billion dollars affected you or affected me? And so to me, I'm just like, we should be celebrating it. But if you're vilifying and you're pointing fingers, I believe that you have low IQ because you're blaming people have done nothing to you.

3:11Yes. And it's like, oh, well, they're extorting from people. They're stealing from people. And I'm like, wait, but anybody who has worked for these billionaires voluntarily agreed to work for these people. They weren't enslaved or anything like that. And so they can quit anytime. And it's a free market. They can go find any other job. They're not getting paid enough. Well, that's the agreement. Like the salary is what they agreed to. And that's what the market is paying. Should they be paying more? Yeah, the only area I think this fails and I get why some people hate billionaires is sometimes they use their money to get involved and manipulate things when they shouldn't.

3:47so um you know like if you look at george soros he's funded a lot of stuff and in california specifically i'm not trying to be political i'm just telling you the facts here he was one of the people that funded if you commit soft crimes or i don't know if they're considered soft crimes but if you kick crimes a lot of them would be classified as petty and you don't go to jail like stealing stuff from a store right um eventually california overturned a lot of those or some of those laws because crime just went through the roof and people were really pissed off. It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor.

4:23People's homes were getting broken into all the time. It's like, oh, cool, they get caught. They just get let go. And the police departments would keep complaining that we're just not allowed to keep them. They continually let go. That's where I have an issue with billionaires in which sometimes they get involved in stuff that they shouldn't be. And I wish the laws were pushing people away from that. I agree with you. There's always bad actors. So I can't believe I actually had a query that found the right meme. So those of you that can see this right now. So, oh, damn it. So this meme over here, you can see this.

4:51So the wrong enemy is not necessarily the rich up here. This is what's happening for most people. It's like a box over here. You have the rich up top and then the non-rich, right? And it shows the rich as the enemy. Then you go to the other side. You see the box is different. The left side, there's always the correct enemy is bad actors. You have bad actors among the rich, among the non-rich as well. These are the people who are the, that's the enemy, right? It's not necessarily the rich or the non-rich. There's always bad actors. Yeah, I agree. Like if you look at Bill Gates, whether you love or hate him, his money has done a lot for the world.

5:22He's donated probably more money than anyone else that I know of. Yeah. At least what they posted online. It's like you could hate him, but really a lot of his money has been used for good. And then it's like, oh, no, the philanthropy doesn't count. You should tax them more. And that's a whole nother conversation. but I'm just saying over here, I think most people don't think about, hey, the right enemy is people who are bad actors. And so in this case, I don't want to make it too political, but in this meme, it says like, or this chart, it's like people who use government to control you. And then on the other side, it's like people who allow other people to live in peace.

5:55I think that is what we're looking for in this world. We want other people to live in peace. We want other people to be successful. We want other people that have a equal opportunity, not necessarily an equal outcome. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to Vibe Coding from Dharmesh, the HubSpot founder. Yeah. So I think you like the topics. The topics are useful. So Dharmesh said this. Dharmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. So on where Vibe Coding fails. So you and I agree. Gemini 3 is amazing. We can probably build a lot of things that we want to build. It's really good. The argument is this, right? So Dharmesh uses, he's a CTO co-founder of HubSpot.

6:33He's vibe coding every single day. Now, everyone's like, oh, I can just build all these things. I can vibe code and shut down my HubSpot instance. But that's not the reality because you need someone to still maintain the backend, the code, like all this stuff, right? Otherwise, like for example, if you and I learn how to oil change, just because we know how to do that, should we be doing it? Or you just went to this. I thought about it. I actually did Google how to change oil in my Bentley when I saw the price. Still a waste of your time. If you map out your hourly rate, that's still not worth your time.

7:01Dude, that$3 ,000 something dollars is a lot. Okay, how long do you think it would take you to do? I don't know. But then I started looking at the type of oil you had to get and where it I'm like, I don't know where I'm going to find a store to buy this. I'm like, forget this. Exactly. So it's not worth your time. So some things are better left off for experts to do. That's why I think we're going to see a proliferation in software. But you still need focus. And like if you're building like this Yeti thing, you still need they're very focused on what they're doing. Right. You still need to maintain your app.

7:26And so that's that's his argument. Ultimately, like that's where vibe coding fails. It's great. We're going to see a lot more people building stuff. but for people that have companies already, you still should probably focus on your mission. That's where you're still probably gonna need like HR software, CRMs, ERPs and things like that. Yes. I look at vibe coding as it's cool. It can help you get things off the ground but most people, if you wanna just focus on the marketing industry, most people in the marketing industry spend their time vibe coding stuff that they should, they're just wasting time they should never do in the first place.

7:57And I'll give you an example of this. I was talking with the marketing team. They have 40 something employees, good size company. They do over a billion in revenue. And they were talking about how they're vibe coding tools that are gonna make them more efficient on social media. And I said, what do you mean? They're like, oh, well, we have content in different languages. We have different campaigns running. So we're vibe coding our own tool to help us manage this, our content calendar, our posting schedule, the tracking of the ROI. And I was like, okay, well, tracking of ROI is going to be really hard.

8:35They're like, well, we'll Vibecode as much as possible so we can have a homegrown solution that is more better suited for our company. This is no different than people trying to build stuff internally like 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And then I was like, why don't you just use a Sprout Social or Hootsuite? They're like, it's not perfect. And I'm like, you building something isn't going to be perfect either way and you could be talking about how much money you're going to save by not paying those software solutions and you can say hey you didn't pay developer to do this but the people on your end that are vibe coding are spending their time and you're paying them a salary and if you break it down per hour it would have just been cheaper to pay for hootsuite or sprout social 100 and when i said that a few of the people argued with me but the cmo of the organization it clicked and it's like you're right my team's spending way too much time vibe coding and if i look at our quarterly numbers we're not growing as fast as we used to and it could be for a lot of variables i think it's actually the economy but they're just like when we look at our output our team is using air for a lot of stuff but the and the output has increased but none of the stuff that they're really focusing on is moving the moving the needle when it comes to revenue generation yeah i'm like yeah because they're focusing on stuff that's related to hey let me build my own Hootsuite.

9:52It's what we call perceived progress. It feels like you're doing a lot. It feels like you're impacting the org. But what ultimately matters, and this is what Dharmesh said, for most people, you want to spend every calorie possible on creating value for your customers. That's what matters. And you can't do everything. You can't be everything to everyone. And so he said this, he's like, look, even with this powerful army of talent at HubSpot, the number one internal core SaaS applications that we have replaced with Vibe-coded variant is exactly zero. Zero. The number of applications we plan to replace is also exactly zero.

10:22He's like, it's not the absence of talent that keeps us from rolling out our own SaaS apps. It's the presence of what we say, focus. It would be silly to try to replace our HR team collab, expense tracking, and 100 other SaaS apps when we can just use them and buy them. Dude, speaking of vibe coding and software. So I was in San Francisco this week and I stayed at my sister's house, of course. Good deal. And so Heath and I were talking because I was there for a few days. So we were talking about a lot of SaaS apps. Ethan's your co-founder for Crazy Egg. There's a lot of SaaS apps out there. And if you look at like Lovable, you look at Cluely, or is it Classy or is it Cluely?

11:02I think it's Cluely. Cluely is the virality one. The cheat on everything, right? The cheat on everything, yeah, yeah. And if you look at a lot of the apps, they do well by making a strong premise. Like you can cheat on everything. You can cheat on everything or no coding required. You can build an app or whatever you want within five minutes, okay? When you have such a strong premise, the conversion rates are skyrocketing, right? What we're seeing though is when you make a strong promise from the data we have, because I know quite a few people that work at some of these companies, when you have a strong promise, at least with a lot of these AI companies, if you show proof elements, like I have a 4.5 out of five star trust pilot and here's some testimonials or four out of five people get the results they're looking for with Lovable or Cluey or whatever it may be, you start seeing your conversions really go up.

12:02You're seeing churn being exceedingly high because it's really hard to meet the expectation. But we're seeing a new world with copywriting and people doing conversion optimization. Where instead of focusing on your ideal customer, people are just saying, I want to focus broad and promise the world and the people who aren't my ideal customer will just churn out. The ones who are my ideal customer, they'll stick around and pay more. It's a little bit of a different philosophy with marketing because if you look at when we've been doing marketing since we started, you typically want to focus on your ideal customer profile and scale up from there.

12:39You and I have done the approach of let's just get traffic from SEO and social media on everything. If it's somewhat related and the people who aren't a fit, they won't sign up or they'll churn out. But if you look at what a lot of the new modern marketers are doing, it was what we tried back in the day in which they're just trying to get a little bit of, or not a little bit. They're trying to get a lot of everyone and the majority will churn out and their ideal customers will stay longer. Not necessarily a wrong or a right approach to it. But, you know, I know you and I approach in which we prefer going after ideal customer.

13:13But yeah, that's what we're seeing a lot now in marketing, which people are just going after everyone and let the non-ideal customers just churn out. So we should react to this because you mentioned the Cluely founder. He's only 21 years old and he put up a post. Today's the 5th, right, of December. So he wrote this yesterday on the 4th, right? So keep in mind, Cluely, they grew. They made a lot of viral content and then they did really well. Like they pushed it to TikTok. It's like, oh, my God, what app are they using? They announced that they got to like 7 million bucks or something in revenue.

13:38Yeah, but they never talk about the revenue anymore. Of course, because high churn. Yeah. So this is why you guys shouldn't talk about your revenue. But so he puts up this post on X yesterday and I want us to react to this. So he says the case for virality. There's been a lot of noise last month on X about intention as strategy and whether or not it works. As one of the front writers getting most talked about here, he's saying he gets most talked about on X. I think it's time for me to offer my thoughts. And by the way, I think he's very skilled. I think he has a lot of potential, very smart guy.

14:07So he says this, pretty much every attention first company is less than or around a year old. The relevance behind us is hyperinflated because despite being months old, we are seeing much more than some of the biggest companies. Virality compresses time and a few big moments make a months old startup feel in your head like we've been around for five years. And so he says this, startups fail all the time, but most of them fail quietly. The key difference in that attention first company is that attention first companies are hard to forget. So people obsess over a trajectory in a way that they would never for 99 % of startups who sit behind a wait list for two years.

14:42I'm gonna move on here. So he says, look, nobody's claiming that virality is the only way to build a company or even necessarily the best way, but is intellectually unserious to claim that it's not a viable way when the most, when the entire experiment has just started. This time ago, 12 months ago, I was studying for my midterms back at Columbia. Companies are built by something. So he's like, look, if you can go viral, you can sell something good much more quickly than you could in the past. But here's what I'll say. Dude, this is not new. Virality is not a new thing. This is not something that happened in the last 12 months or so.

15:08You can say short form is dominant, but there's always going to be a new format that's coming out. And so I think virality, what are some of the most enduring companies that are built off of virality? I can't think of one. Like we're talking about generational companies. Facebook. Built off of virality. Yes, the viral loop. Well, you can say those products are, but I mean like having to go viral. I'm not talking about the platforms. Facebook went viral. I'm not talking about the platform. No, I'm talking about the scraping your email book and then sending out emails to everyone. That's how Facebook really grew.

15:42Yeah, I know. But what I'm saying here, so you know how Cluey became popular, right? It's by making this content that gets, that's what I'm saying here. He's like, that's the case for virality. We're not talking about viral loads. We're not talking about like, you know, Hotmails, like, you know, sends to everyone or Dropboxes things, right? I think we're talking about here. If I'm understanding this correctly, he's like, you got to learn how to create viral short form content. And that's how you can build an enduring company. Yeah, you're talking about not product marketing. You're talking about just straight up marketing.

16:13Viral content marketing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what he's talking about. You're not talking about product-led growth. No, no. And so like - Dollar Shave Club is a good one. Yeah, but we're talking about generational brand. 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.

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18:35Yeah, because even Dollar Shave Club, it's known. I would say there's still a strong brand. It's just... Virality is cool, but it's very up and down. Yeah. Up and down. And you don't know how often it's going to hit. And here's what I'll say. Again, I don't think companies are built off of virality. I think virality helps you grow faster, but I don't think you can build a big company that's sustainable 10, 20 years from now due to virality. You have to have all the other key components there to make it work. So he lists Donald Trump, I show speed, the Kardashians, right? And he's like, this is a fundamentally different world.

19:10I'm like, no, this shit has been around for a while, right? But you know what's interesting? So with Sean, my CTO, he had worked with a handful of creators before working with me. And so technically we're both creators, right? But he said the difference was a lot of these creators, a lot of followers and a lot of views and things like that. But what he recognized, he realized after working with a few of them, it's like, oh, they don't actually want to operate. They don't actually want to grind it through to build like a real business, right? And so I think that's nice. You can learn how to build an audience, but that's different than operating a business.

19:42So sure, you can learn how to go viral. I don't think that's the most important thing. The most important thing is figuring out how you can solve problems for your customers. I've met a lot of people who are extremely popular on the social web. And what I found by interacting with them over the years is the more followers, the more views they get, the more viral they go on a specific post, it's like a dopamine hit. They feel good. They also get that rush when they go down the street and people are like, oh, that's so-and-so or that's so-and-so or let's start taking a picture with them. And they love it.

20:12But when it comes to most of those people that I met that are in that world, when it comes to doing things to generate revenue and building a business, it's not their passion and they don't care for it. They just want that continual dopamine hit. The validation. Uh-huh. Yeah. Versus, hey, let me grind it out. And you and I have been down this path before. when we go to conferences, like HubSpot's Inbound Conference, Eric would mention to me, he would evaluate when we would do our marketing school episode. Neil's line is always four times longer. Yeah. And I've told Eric this, and when it comes to my line, what's my goal for my line size?

20:59Zero. Bingo. He got it right. I don't optimize for having people coming up to me to want to ask a question or take a picture. Now to clarify on this, because I don't want someone to misunderstand what I'm trying to say, I appreciate when someone wants to ask me a question and I value it and I love helping and answering their question back. Same with if someone wants to take a picture with me, I'm flattered. I'm no Tom Cruise or Kim Kardashian or anything like that, but I'm flattered. But if you look from a business perspective, the goal shouldn't be for a business to rely on an individual and for that individual to be the head of the corporation and that individual have to go out there, talk, have people take pictures with them and for them to respond to answers for the business to grow.

21:48To me, I look at that as not only key man syndrome, right? That a lot of buyers are worried about. I think that's one issue, but I see a bigger issue. If the business is relying on one person, you don't really have a business in my eyes. No, and that's absolutely right. And the other problem too is if you're chasing the views of reality, what ends up happening, you start to do things for the views and you start to not behave like yourself anymore. And we know a handful of people that do this. It's like, wait, that's not your core business. Like, what are you doing? I think it's because they've been sucked into that world to do more for that audience.

22:19Yeah. And don't get me wrong. You could say, hey, Taylor Swift is all about her brand. Neil, you can be about your brand that is a business. and I look at if you are that person and you're driving the revenue, yes, by definition, you do have a business still because you're making money on your own and people are paying you, but I look at that as a short-term business. I don't want to put a timeframe on a short-term business, but a business that's not relying on an individual, to me, that's a generational business. That's something that can last hundreds of years and you may not have that goal and that's fine.

22:53There's nothing wrong with it, but I myself don't want to build a business that only lasts another 10, 20 years. I want a generational business. All right, guys, that's it for today. Catch you later. Bye.