How Claude Code Can Replace Your Marketing Team

0:28All right, Neil, let me tell you this, okay? churn save and all these emails, right? The landing page copy, all these things. You're probably paying a go-to-market person who's good, maybe 20 to 30 grand for this, right? So at minimum. So I basically had it interview me. I said, here's what I'm trying to do. Here's what the goals for this thing are. And it asked me like 10 questions. And I used Cloud Code to spit this out. And it put it in these neat folders, okay? And I read through the onboarding emails, alt, abandoned cart, all these things. It basically was 95 % there. It doesn't even look like AI copy.

0:57Even the sales emails, the pre-sale emails were good. I'm like, oh my God. So the prompt I put out to X is like, if I can create this go to market plan quickly, like what happens to not all marketers, what happens to most marketers, right? And I just threw this out there. Cause it's like, you still need people to do this stuff, right? But you need very high agency people to manage these things. And I was like, that is just one example where I'm just like, you know, the coders have already seen the light, right? They've already seen that. Jensen said this, Jensen Huang from Nvidia. He was like, you know, if people are still coding, he was like, I would prefer my engineers don't code so they can work on higher leverage things, right?

1:30And so my question is, you know, what happens to most marketers? So before I answer that question, I'm gonna give you the code example. And this is a little bit tangent, but then I'll answer the marketing one. I was talking to Heathen yesterday and we were talking about, you know, all these apps, right? Like Claude and all this kind of stuff that helps engineers and people just be more efficient. And he was telling me something interesting. He's chosen historically as an entrepreneur to mainly only hire senior level engineers. He doesn't like dealing with junior level or mid-level as much. So he prefers senior level.

2:05You should explain why. And the reason being is he finds it much more efficient use of his time. They can just figure things out on their own. You need less of them. And now with AI, he's just like, they're so much more efficient. You don't need big teams. It's not about just hiring tons of engineers. It's about hiring the best ones and then giving them these tools and letting them go. And the reason I bring up this tangent, I think marketing is going to be somewhat similar. So I'll give you an example between me and my co-founder, Mike Camo. He understands marketing. That's not his specialty.

2:36He's a pretty good marketer. But would you agree he's really good at sales? He's an excellent salesperson. And persuasion and figuring out what to say to convince people? Yes. So sometimes when I'm writing out emails for partnerships and stuff like that, I will send it to Mike because all cold emails still to this day. I don't know if I told you. I probably send at least one cold email a day. It's on my like to-do. Every day I try to send that minimum one cold email. I didn't know that. Or I don't go to sleep. Uh-huh. But most of it's for partnerships or maybe sometimes a deal? No, no. This is for revenue generation.

3:06Okay. So it could be partnering with a company that could drive revenue. Or it could be pitching a company and trying to get them as a customer. Yeah, got it. Those are usually the main two. So I send some of my emails to Mike when they're really important. and I know the person probably has a high likelihood of responding and it's a big company, like let's call it, you know, 20, 30, 50, 100, multiple hundred billion, even trillion. And I know the person who's in charge. I know they're probably going to respond. I'll have them review it and fine tune it. He loves taking everything and running it through AI.

3:41ChatGPT, Grog, you name it. He tries them all. How many times do you think I use his email copy when he modifies mine through AI? Through AI, I don't, you're a really picky person. Maybe 50 % of the time? Close, but in a different way. Okay. I never really use any of his copy. But AI sometimes words things in a different way or adds another point. Yeah. And then I may take that. You'll build on it. I'll build on it. Yeah. So you're really using it to help form or give you ideas. Like you're pulling ideas from it and you're building on those. Yes. The problem with AI that I see right now in marketing and junior level marketers and entry level marketers and maybe some mid-level marketers, what they don't understand on certain things like copywriting, and that's an easy one to use because everyone uses AI for text-based copy or a lot of people do.

4:34It makes crap too wordy. It adds in too many dashes and fluff. it tries to sell you sometimes too hard instead of just being very direct and showing that i'm coming from a place of authority or confidence or people should just want my product and here's why i found that it does a terrible job in copywriting a lot of junior people send me stuff in mid-level and they don't know i'm not talking about people in my company because they've learned their lesson by now i'm talking about from external people and i can tell it's written by ai and they don't know that i know and it's just so obvious for me and i'm like dude this is just crap i do think it'll replace the junior level people really much more easily i don't see ai replacing the high level like people like you and me and i don't see it replacing the good mid-level people i think it just adds to it like you know i think what we should talk about next is you've used ai for a a year, two years heavily?

5:37I would say a year really heavily. Like super heavily, maybe a year. I would say I've been pretty big on it. Yeah, let's just go a year heavily, but pretty heavily already the last two, three years. Okay, so I want to ask you something, and I want you to really describe it. Go and describe your day in detail, not the cold plunges. I get the screenshots from you sometimes in the morning. I don't send screenshots, do you? That's weird. Guys, I posted Instagram stories. Oh, yeah, that's what I said. But it's a sauna, and you'll put like a time on there, like 5 a.m. or 5.05 or whatever. Yeah, I like that stuff.

6:10Okay, which I actually think is really good for you, at least the articles you sent me show it is. Talk about how your life used to be on a daily basis, okay? Like really daily basis as a marketer, not running your company, but what you would do in marketing and now break down what your life is in a daily basis now from a marketing aspect a year later. Not the in-between, but that way we can see the drastic difference. Yeah, okay. So this is good because a year ago we had the fires going on. So that's a nice starting off point. Minus the fires. Eric is not saying the fires were good. I'm just saying I just remember that.

6:44So, and thank you for that. One thing before I answer, Neil. So just to kind of close the loop on how cloud code can replace your marketing team. What we're really saying is high agency people will never be replaced. And what it really comes down to when you say good, my definition of good ultimately comes down to someone who has a bias to action. Because if you think of all the good people you work with, like, you know, in the past you would say execute, actually quick executor, fast executor, right? Everything comes down to bias to action. Mike, strong bias to action, right? Anybody you worked with that you worked with for a while, I would say has had that strong bias to action, correct?

7:15Yes. That's what we really mean by good. And so anybody that has strong bias to action, you're not going to get replaced. You're going to be fine. Why are you smiling? No, it just gives me, I'm actually thinking of a scenario of someone, when you're talking about replacing, I'm actually thinking of someone right now. Okay. All right. Well, anyway. Okay. So let me ask you a question. So a year ago, let me think about this. So when I was using AI a year ago, there was no cloud code. I was mainly using it to, because ChatGP had recently introduced memory. And so I was going through like a relationship thing.

7:49Okay. So I was constantly using it as my therapist at the time because I had memory, right? I was using it for advice. I was using for basic use. Sorry, can we slow back and go back? Because I missed like half of it. Yeah. I didn't understand what you were saying. Okay. You were saying there was no cloud code a year ago and then you started using it for what? Okay, let me back up. So a year ago when I was using AI, let's just call it 2025, Eric, okay? I was using AI mainly to use ChatGPT for therapy. Okay, I was using it to track my diet. I was using it for calorie counts, things like that. Very, I would say rudimentary stuff.

8:21I might use it for copy and things like that. And as the year went by, I started to use it for helping me scan legal documents and things like just to give me the key takeaways and things like that. From a marketing angle, yes, it helped me with copy. But to your point, the copy was very, there's a lot of M dashes. You can just see the very first sentence. It reads like an AI piece of content. It wasn't until, and I'll be very honest, it wasn't until actually four or five weeks ago, Neil, during the holiday break, when Cloud Code actually unlocked everything. right maybe maybe i can hold off a little bit but um it was at that point where i was like oh my god i can build anything now um and that has what changed my workflow completely i would say in the last four or five weeks ago now um i get anxiety if i don't get to use cloud code at least for a little bit for at least two three hours a day one out like you think you're gonna use for 30 minutes and it's up being like three to four hours so so let's go back and let's make this a little bit actionable.

9:17Okay. You do more than marketing, but you do marketing yourself and you have employees who are marketers. What are you expecting from an employee right now? Let's say someone doing SEO. Let's just use that example because that's where we both started. Using SEO, what would you expect them to use AI on a daily basis for specifically? Yeah. I'm going to answer this and then I'm going to give you, because now I'm thinking about specific use cases for me in the last year. So I'll come back to that. But this one I'll answer. So our SEO team right now, they're expected to use ClickFlow, which is our internal SEO tool.

9:53So I was actually sitting in an SEO meeting this week because I wanted to ask them about product feedback. I'm like, okay, guys, you guys are using this how much percent of the time, right? They're like, oh, like 80, 90 % of the time. I'm like, okay, how much time are you saving with this ClickFlow thing? Copywriters, 90 hours a month, okay, per person. And then, so they're using a combination of ClickFlow to help with content with internal linking and things like that. And we're also, they're also using Manus, which is a general agent to help with keyword research. Manus just, you know, did a partnership with SimilarWeb.

10:20Didn't they get bought out by Facebook? They did, but then, you know, China is trying to stop that, right? It was like, well, you didn't quite, you know, divest properly. So we don't know. We're going to have to invest, investigate this. So all that to say, it's really those two things right now. So any keyword research strategy stuff, hey, what's happening with these competitors, that kind of happens with Manus. Obviously, they still need to talk to clients and things like that, too. And then I would say the other piece around content mainly comes from ClickFlow, internal linking and updating, deleting, consolidating.

10:49Yeah. Yeah. But that was very recent, maybe the last couple of months or so. Now, now that I remember some of the things I did last year, do you want me to answer some of those? Yes. OK. So in 2025, I was and Neil pays for all these things, too, I think, even though we're both cheap. So sadly, I do. I see the bills. It makes me cry every month. So we both pay, I'm speaking for you. We both pay$200 a month for ChatGPT, the pro version, just because you can, there's, you pay$200 a month? I don't know how much I pay. I just know it goes on the corporation and I just know it's expensive. Yeah. So$200 a month is the individual plan.

11:26Okay. We both, so I pay, I was already paying, I think$100 a month for Claude for Max. Okay. And I was paying Perplexity$20 a month because the deep research is really good. So I use perplexity for deep research, finding things quickly. I use Gemini for image generation and VO. And then for studying YouTube videos too, right? This was 2025, Eric. And then chat GPD, it's more like general questions. Or let's say if I'm, I use granola. So if I'm arguing with you about something, I might just turn granola on and I will just see who's right. It pisses people off. It pisses in relationships. It really pisses people off.

12:00So I don't try to do it that much. I'm not going to try that one. I'm married. Yeah, yeah. You didn't do that one. That'll get you in trouble no matter what. I'm going to lose either way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, I've just given up on that in relationships. But what I did, by the way, like I used Granola yesterday. Like I was having a debate with someone and like it called out where I was wrong and where they were wrong. And we talked about today and we both apologize for where we were wrong. Right. So it's good for solving problems. Yeah. So because you have like a, you know, an arbiter in there that doesn't really care about you or the other person.

12:26It's just listening. So all that to say, that was last year. Okay. Now, and there's other tools too, but we'll just leave it at that. in the last four weeks or so, I use Cloud Code and all these MCPs where it connects with the tools like HubSpot, Ahrefs, Gong. And I built a deal reviver that will surface deals that we lost maybe 12 months ago or so. It'll show the deal size and it'll show why we lost the deal. And it has an email crafted that looks like it's a very good email. You would open it, right? It's like, hey, Neil, we connected 12 months ago. I just saw the announcement on this funding round.

13:02Congrats. Does it make sense for us to reconnect? Eric, that's not bad, right? It's not 100%, but it's not bad. And so the team now can click in Slack, they can select what they want and they can just hit send email and it'll send the email out and then it'll record it to HubSpot. But that's an MVP, that's a prototype that I built. Just like, sometimes I'll be in line at Sweetgreen, I'll just be building, right? Or I'll be on my couch, I just open my phone, I was building, right? And then sometimes I can't stand watching TV anymore and I'll just go to my computer until it's about time to go to bed.

13:33and like the other day I was gonna watch TV, it was 6 p.m. Then it's, holy shit, it's 9.30 and I was just on Cloud Code the whole time building stuff in parallel. So my point now is the way I use it is to solve problems in my organization which I couldn't do before. It's extremely high leverage and I was asking it. I was like, hey, the work that we did today, how much work did I do as one person? What is it equivalent to? It's like, you did the work of five engineers today, right? I was like, okay, break down the math for me. It's like, well, you know, X, Y, and Z but also I think I broke down to Matthew last time.

14:03How long did it take for you to get a prototype done before, like a working prototype where you can mess around with for software? For me, are you talking about using AI or having my team? Just having your team build it in the past, like a year ago. So working prototype being designed that you can click around or one that actually functions? Because, you know, in the design apps, I forgot what the one we use. Not Envision. Balsamic? Not Balsamic. Is it Envision? The wireframe stuff? No, it's actually a design. You can click around. You're talking Figma. Figma, there you go. So usually I'll see stuff in less than a week.

14:35Okay, so that's for like a Figma? For a Figma. Okay, how about a click around? You can do stuff. Click around and do stuff where you actually see different results. Like if you put in a URL, usually 30 to 60 days, sadly. So let's just say 30 days, okay? Now get this. I'm being, okay, let's say I can get these prototypes out in 20 % of the day. Okay, we can be conservative here. But if 20 % of a day on 30 days, 30 days divided by 0.2 is 150. Okay. So you can say I'm either 150 times faster or you can argue that I'm infinitely faster now because I don't have coding abilities. Right. But you and I do have strategic abilities and we see the entire battlefield with our companies.

15:13And so to me, that working prototype, the deal reviver, the ability to spot client expansion, client churn opportunities and see what exactly they said and why we should be pitching this or whatever, and then sending that to the team and seeing if they take action on it. I built all that. All of that, right? And that's why I'm so excited for you because once I inject you with this drug or you inject yourself with this drug, there's no turning back. You're going to be messaging me. We're just going to be doing this all the time because our mutual friend, we're just doing that every day. And he's like, I feel like a loser right now.

15:41I can't believe I've been in these meetings. I'm like, I can't believe I've been in these meetings too. It's just so fun right now. You know, for the sake of me, and you've known me for a long time, I don't know how many years, but it's well over 10. 15 plus? 15, 16 years. Yeah. Okay. I can't get the life of me to spend more than 30 minutes a day using these tools. I agree they make me more efficient as a marketer, but I find my highest use of time just doing deals more than anything else. So these tools are great and I have my team using them all day long. engineers, marketers, product people, even customer success because we can input all the satisfied people, all the unsatisfied people, learn from it, have AI help with the responses and train our people.

16:34There's a lot that you can end up doing with these products. But I still find my highest use or best leverage for my time is just focusing on closing deals. I don't disagree with you, but I'm willing to bet you a really nice meal. In 12 months or so, you're going to be using this because, and this is, and let me come back to your response too, because I do, I will say Neil typically is, I'm more on the optimistic side, sometimes too optimistic. Sometimes Neil's on the pessimistic side, sometimes too pessimistic. It's a good balance, right? But what I would say is, let's say I agree with you. Your highest leverage thing is doing deals, right?

17:09Whether it's, you know, whether it's an M &A transaction or like a deal, like a business transaction, like a sales transaction or a partnership. I do agree with that. Um, this type, like, let's say that's true. What are all the things that bother you with that process right now that would be able to help you gain even more leverage there? That's how I look at it. How can I gain leverage on all these things? And that's how my friends look at it. I'm like, what are you building right now? Cause arguably he should, he shouldn't be doing what he's doing right now. But I'm like, so what are you building?

17:33He's like, everything's around product right now. And it's, it is, it's going to save him a lot on headcount, but he's like, dude, this is, this is supercharging everything we're going to build. So my team, Kayo, helped build a lot of the automation to scrape, get lists, send first cold emails for M &A. So we've already built a lot of this stuff and we're using AI for a lot of the grunt work that we hated hiring people for, or, you know, that I would just mainly go on LinkedIn and go look for companies. And a lot of that's done. The main way I use AI to make deals happen is I go and do research.

18:12And when I say research is I'll ask chat GPT questions or, you know, AI mode questions or Gemini, whatever you want to end up calling any of these products. and what I found is there are often many cases. So for example, sometimes I'm doing deals where you're structuring them and it involves tax consequences and I was talking to ChatGPT a few days ago about a potential deal and it was just like, oh, it's not gonna be tax favorable for you because with the Trump tax bill, bonus depreciation in 2026 is only 40 % And I'm like, what the heck are they talking about? It's been known for a long time that he renewed the bill and it's now 100 % for bonus depreciation.

18:59Right. And it carried back all the way towards, I think, Jan 20 or something like that, or whenever he got signed into office. But I was like, what the heck is ChatGPT talking about? What I find is these tools produce a lot of inaccurate information. Luckily for me, I'm using them for research on topics that I'm already familiar with, but there's nuances on laws and taxation for states versus federal and every state is different. But I'm able to catch some of this stuff. But other than that, like that's the main thing I want fixed. And I hope that they'll be able to fix this stuff within a matter of a few years.

19:36I find that Google, though, tends to actually be more accurate than chat GPT, believe it or not. All right, guys, we'll catch you later. Goodbye. .