Here Are All The Companies Competing To Buy TikTok, The Slow Decline Of Apple

0:00You saw the bidders of TikTok. some of them were uh came out and it was i didn't see that yeah so a lot of reasons why people are bidding for tiktok is for distribution they have a massive platform and it's just growing at least in the united states i i know tiktok globally from all the countries i've been to that it's allowed in like india it's banned but for the countries that it's allowed it's been growing and apple oven made a bid for tiktok amazon made it and people like oh amazon put it last minute i I don't know how serious they are. I actually think Amazon's dead serious. And the reason being is it fits perfectly in their business model.

0:35It's a new way to do commerce. Yes. It's a great way to do commerce. Why wouldn't Amazon want to own a social platform where it just connects shopping and discovery together? Amazon.com is not the platform for social discovery. And I think in China they do do the one-click buys, if I'm not mistaken. yeah and social discovery or social commerce is expected to grow to six trillion dollars by 2030 so you look at app loving you look at amazon oracle which was a bidder from the previous time i think oracle was partnered up with walmart at that time blackstone which makes sense you know big private equity shop they can pretty much buy anything um andreason horowitz was in there i believe they partnered with maybe oracle yeah because oracle i think runs their servers yeah and there's there There has to be a few more that aren't listed out here.

1:23Like I know Mr. Wonderful was trying to make a bid. Mr. Beast joined some coalition. I think one of the Reddit guys, was it Reddit? Alexis Zahanian. He was part of some group, right, as well? Yeah. So there was quite a few people making plays. But I don't think the Mr. Wonderfuls of the world, no offense to Mr. Wonderful. Kevin O 'Leary. Yeah, I think he has some amazing words of wisdom to pass to a lot of people when it comes to the economy and growth, how much can he afford or his private, like they have to go and raise money from different people and get a group together to make the purchase.

2:00While someone like Blackstone can just write a check. Same with Amazon. They can just write a check. Oracle, they can figure it out. They're big enough, right? Like it's possible for these corporations to just go buy something that large. Oracle can go to a bank and a bank will finance them the whole thing plus the cash on their balance sheet but there's a lot of organizations that are making a bid for tiktok like yeah we'll get together 50 60 billion dollars that's not easy to do yep yeah i think but thing here is tiktok who knows how long that distribution is going to last i think the key thing is owning your distribution as much as you can so you have a big email list like that's that's great right that will hold for longer than And who knows how long these organic platforms will hold for.

2:43And I think so key thing is, one, you're betting on the long-term distribution, which might be your email list. That's one example. But also short-term distribution is where is good organic reach right now? Okay, LinkedIn is pretty good right now. TikTok is really good right now. Reels, shorts, right? Those are good. I think YouTube is going to be good for the next decade or so. But the name of the game, I think the two moats in the future or the next 10 years, it's still going to be distribution. It's going to be data. But distribution is shrinking. yeah but if you look at tiktok or if amazon ends up buying them even if the reach shrinks down they own the channel which has amazing distribution and i don't see that shrinking anytime soon but amazon is a just distribution channel by itself too yeah they can make tiktok even more popular in the united states yeah um but when i look at amazon themselves like when you look at social media as a marketer that channel can shrink for you because the algorithm changes but if you're the one who owns a channel like meta owning Facebook and Instagram yeah the reach may slow down for you as a marketer but they don't care you have to spend more money on ads and they still do well and if Amazon buys TikTok yeah your reach may go down as a TikTok user but they're still making a killing from it because people start spending money to promote their products and generate sales you know it's interesting um I had a call with someone the other day he's like dude so what's working in b2b marketing he's like paid's getting more expensive and everything and and not saying not to do paid, but he's like, I talked to a handful of B2B marketers.

4:04A lot of them are going much harder on influencers, which we've been talking about for a while. So micro influencers, things like that. Remember Ryan Bonici? Yeah. He works for that social company later. So they, they help you find influencers and the place you with. No, I thought he works for the fitness company. No, he works for a class past or whatever. Yeah. No, he's moved over to later. I think he went to fellow and then later. Did that later get acquired by a, I have no idea. Oh, I think they're owned by, I saw on the very bottom, was it? Oh, Rakuten. Rakuten. I saw Rakuten advertising at the very bottom.

4:36But anyway, I think I was just asking Ryan because he was talking about how he moved over later. I was like, how's this working for B2B? It's like B2B is kind of where we started with it. And I think if you're going to try to be successful with marketing in general, with organic especially, you have to understand the platforms natively. Like finally, I would say for Neil's YouTube, he's posting more Nate like he's putting more time into the videos and things like that more effort into it and that's what it's going to take to be successful and I can tell the videos where I spend more time on those do a lot better versus the videos where I half-ass it on my YouTube um and I'm not but how's your YouTube experiment going right now okay a lot of my latest ones aren't hitting as well but I'm getting the team who's managing my YouTube to remove clickbait uh you i like i had a video on google's dying and when i say google's dying i'm talking about in market share google itself is growing in popularity but market share it's it's dying so they they changed a title to and i saw this yesterday and i texted him right away i'm like what the heck is this title uh and they changed it right now it is the secret seo opportunities that's bigger than google but before that the title they changed it to because mine was google is dying and i'm talking about market share and the image is market share and how it's dying not google's popularity and the image clearly says market share they change it to website traffic is this is gonna die or website traffic is dead here's what you should do next i'm like i never said website traffic is dead where the heck are you getting this is not even what the video is about yeah and i had a really polite text conversation with them like stop doing clickbait this is making me look bad i hate this and then the first comment on there you know going back to the clickbait because of that the first comment has started exploding and i was just so pissed about this i don't know why i can't see the comments and i kind of laughed actually at the same time too uh where the heck do i can see the comments it was something like next video neil's going to create a video on how google's back and it's getting traffic and it's not dead it was something like that and i'm like dude that makes you look so inconsistent it looks so inconsistent and the video hat doesn't i don't mention once how website traffic is dead and it's dying and it's gone i'm like where the heck are you guys getting this stuff from yeah and they're like look at the views i'm like i don't want the views this is how you're gonna get the views yeah and so neil's very principled about this um i think whereas these um the group that he works with they work with a handful of other creators and i think the problem is um if you stand for nothing you end up creating whatever content that other people are dictating you.

7:18But then what happens is it like I've watched one of the other creators. We've kind of talked about him. I'm just like, man, you're just kind of creating whatever that's generic. And now it becomes you're playing the wrong game now because you just want to become more popular. But that doesn't it doesn't help what you're trying to do with your business. It takes you away from the focus of the business. And then now you have another thing that's just there. Whereas you, you're staying principled with it. And you're like, no, I'm going to do this. I don't need hundreds of thousands of views per video.

7:45I'm happy getting 20, 30, 40K, which is still a lot. Yes. And I'd rather actually get that. Yes. And targeted. Even with my, what is it called? Even with my short form videos, the last time I was in recording session, they had me shoot like 12 or 20 short form videos from the first few. And they're about like, get rich and money. And I filmed them. And then I was like, how did you feel? made me feel like crap and then i'm like what's the next one i was asking my team who's like shooting like oh similar types i'm like what are all of them like similar types i'm like i'm done i'm like no i just didn't shoot the content i was like i'm not doing this the next time i'm going to studio and even when i did their last four videos which will get published you know in the month of april they're two entrepreneur make money and i'm like this is it this is done i'm no longer doing this my next eight so i ramped it up from four videos a month to eight almost all of them are on marketing and i told them all my shorts better be about marketing or else i'm not filming it yeah and they're like cool and i'm like if you want to keep sending me stuff that's other than that i'm just not going to keep the contract so they know that at this point oh and then like oh your views won't be as high the algorithm like don't care about the algorithms don't care what gets views this is what generates me business i just think they're being i'm sorry if you're watching this i just think you guys are being lazy um i'm talking to the contractors because there are a handful of marketing channels that I follow that get hundreds of thousands of views per video.

9:12So there's like Wes McDowell or whatever. There's a couple of other ones, um, that 200, 300 ,000 views. And one guy just focuses on Facebook ads, right? The other guy might be a little more general, but it's all marketing. Yeah. We, you and I have seen it before. We've had videos that get four or 500 ,000 views where we just talk about marketing. So don't, don't just cause you, the formula that you're used to is this, like, you're not adapting. We talked about adapting. You're not adapting. If you don't want to adapt, you're going to lose this customer, right? But as a side note, I've gotten a lot of DMs from people saying that they enjoy it when we share these stories.

9:44They get a lot more enjoyment out of those. Like our personal stories on what's working. Yeah, just with business in general or like whatever pisses us off. 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. 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. 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.

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12:06Well, I mean, I just told you I pissed off why Europe is failing. I pissed off a bunch of Europeans. Like, who are you to say that? Who are you? And I'm like, who are you to say that? So I'll like troll them back so they'll start to go crazy. but for me right now what's innovative around oh we're doing we're trying this thing it's called WAP have you heard of WAP okay so what WAP does it's like a marketplace where you can have people you can put up say I'll pay you know two dollars per thousand views from TikTok or something like that and people can actually they'll start to clip videos for you and they'll be a dashboard where it shows how many views they generated for you.

12:47So it's almost a way for you to buy organic views. You think about the, and we're not saying we're big fans of like Andrew Tate, for example, but you know, I think he's done really well with marketing, right? Himself, at least in the past. So he'd have armies of people creating content for him, chopping up his content, right? This is kind of the same thing where you're going to have armies of people maybe in their twenties or so they want to make money. And they're chopping up your content and they're posting it to other channels and then they get paid on, on performance basically. so we're testing that out it's called WAP W-H-O-P I'll let you know how that goes I guess and I think we'll run like a$2 ,000 test or something and on social organic social you're talking right I'm YouTube I'm going to be going into like a recording studio as well and I think I'm going to do long form like the AI standards of excellence that one yeah that's going to be like a one hour two hour video and I think I'm just going to rip through it because partly I want to selfishly train my team too I'm like guys it's all in this video if you don't like if you don't get it's like it's freaking in here right um and I'm just making more marketing videos too so I'm not talking I don't want these sensational things like don't get me wrong I enjoy the your rich bff interview I enjoy talking to Orion Terriban all these things yes those get hundreds of thousands of views but ultimately those aren't the right views and it does nothing for your revenue no it does nothing for my revenue and And I will say, dude, when I look at our leads for Carrot, a lot of them come through YouTube or they come through podcasts.

14:13So us doing this podcast, for example, I have mid-rolls for you. So it's funny, guys. I read Neil's ad for his company in the mid-rolls just so you don't get cut out of it. So it's like me, you, whatever. And those actually drive leads. And by the way, it's funny. People are asking us now how we get our podcast ads. So we have Spotify. No, we have Shopify. We have LinkedIn ads. We have Amazon ads now. Let me tell you how we do it, guys. We use a great company called Yap Media. Jury's still out. We'll see how it goes. But that's who we use, those that asked. And the final thing I'll say before we get out of here.

14:48So Levels posted this. He said, my friend, I want to talk about why Apple's in decline now. So I'm totally shifting gears now. So do you think Apple's in decline? Based on their stock price? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. As a company, as a company. Stock price, they're good for a while. Decline short run or long run? Long run. No. Okay, why? As a company? uh i believe some of the products that they have created right now that we know apple for think of iphone uh you know ipad do you need to keep buying new ones every single year no not really i don't think there's that much innovation but i believe they'll start creating hardware for other types of products like if apple had a car that was amazing or robot or robot i would buy it.

15:31And going back to the robot example, if Apple had a robot in my house and Tesla also had an option for a robot in my house, I would choose the Apple robot. I don't know why I have this trust factor with Apple and I love their usability. And it just makes me feel comfortable as a brand. I'm not saying I doubt Elon Musk. This has nothing to do with it. As an entrepreneur, I love him to death. I know some people are going to hate me for that, but as an entrepreneur, I think he's built some amazing companies and named me another entrepreneur that's built products like him. But from a usability standpoint, I still believe Apple makes way more usable products than Tesla.

16:07And I've had a Tesla temporarily. Like, as a user, people aren't that comfortable when you're driving to see your speed limit on the right side in the middle versus continually looking at the road. Like, some of the things they do aren't the most usable. Well, Apple, when they create products, they just know how to create things that are just amazingly usable, better than most companies I've ever seen out there. Yeah. So this is where we can, we can disagree. I think in the future, I'd probably go with a Tesla robot. The main reason is because the Apple of the past, the culture is different. Let me tell you why.

16:42So Peter levels posted this, right? So this is a, he tried searching for airdrop, right? He couldn't find airdrop. He's like, dude, what the hell is going on? Right. And so basically he's like, my friend just upgraded Mac OS and lost his entire partition and data. This stuff didn't happen five years ago. They ruined the photos iOS app with iOS 18 and never fixed. I agree with that actually. And he's like, I still haven't upgraded iOS because of that. And then so someone from Apple responded, this guy, Tyler, he's like former Apple employee left because there is zero focus on making a good product and 100 % focus on politics and value extraction from the company.

17:13Extremely difficult to get fired results in a many in a many people literally just hanging out and collecting checks. If you start to actually get something done, they throw things in your way to slow you down and stop you so they don't look bad. It will rot from the inside out. And here's the thing. I think you go back to Steve Jobs back in the day. I think there's something to be said about a founder-led company because when Steve Jobs was gone, it faded again and rotted, right? When you think about your company, you're driving it as a founder. I think when you have Elon there, I just hope he stays alive and nobody like knock on wood.

17:43I just hope he stays alive, right? He's the greatest entrepreneur of our generation. I think he's driving it as a founder and I think that will push them past Apple. I think Apple's dealing with a lot of this stuff right now. I feel it. I kind of feel like you feel it too. But after Steve Jobs passed away, Apple's had crazy growth but he's also had a lot of these innovations and he had a lot of distributions already because he came up with this I do believe Apple will continually innovate I'm not saying they won't go through rough patches over the next 2, 3, 5, 10 years I think all companies go through rough patches but I do believe that they'll figure it out eventually they're amazing at creating hardware I hope they do I mean they're known for their usability they're known for their experience and don't get me wrong I love my Apple products but there's stuff like this where you're starting to see issues where it slowly starts to fade.

18:33But it takes time to fade too. Yes, but it can also be fixed. Yeah, I mean, Satya Nadella, right? Yeah. He's done great with Microsoft. So I think if they hire an amazing CEO and Apple is a legendary company, I do hope they turn it around. But I think if we had to bet today, I'd go to Tesla Robot today. Yeah, that would be opposite. I would go to Apple. Yeah. But anyway, that is it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, and we'll see you tomorrow.

18:58You