How effective is copying as a marketing strategy? Well, let's look at YouTube Shorts, AirChat, the number 1 factor for a viral video

0:00YouTube copied, uh, YouTube copied Instagram and TikTok, technically TikTok. talk you want to guess how many views they have on a daily basis for their shorts overall yeah a couple billion 70 billion daily views okay i was a little off a couple billion i was off by like 10x a couple billion is a good guess that's a that just shows dude the power of copying right like in marketing everyone talks about like oh you can't copy that's not good ethical yeah it You used to get a lot of crap. Dude, remember when you copied someone else's feature in a tool? Oh yeah. And then I got the crap for it. I'm like, it's not even mine.

0:42I don't, I don't, look, you know when you made Crazy Egg and then like Hotjar came out, like they took a couple of features from you guys. It took a lot. Noah Kagan did the same thing. Like Noah Kagan with Sumo Me versus OptinMonster, right? There's Syed's tool. But then Syed took from other people too. So it's just like, we're all building on the shoulders of Titans. If you look at the largest companies in the world, they copy. HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform. They do CRM. Where do they get the CRM from? They copied Salesforce and then they try to undercut them on pricing by making it free.

1:13If you look at Google, they've countlessly tried to copy other people. Remember, what's a Google Circle thing? Google Plus, their own social network. Microsoft Teams copied Zoom, right? No, Slack. teams teams is also slack and I think it's chat too you are right I don't use the teams chat feature my company does that you guys pay for Microsoft we use the whole Microsoft Outlook suite I mainly use the teams video conferencing makes sense I'm also not on Microsoft from an email perspective you're still on Gmail I was one of the only ones who didn't switch but yeah like copying it happens all the time Facebook copies everyone They copied Snap back in the day.

2:00They copied Foursquare and really crushed them by doing the check-ins. Do you remember that? That really crushed Foursquare as a company. But copying is a great marketing strategy. I don't know why people hate on it. And it's like, if you don't, you're going to just get crushed. I remember Patrick Campbell did this whole thing because Jeff Bezos from Amazon talks about how you should obsess about your customers, not your competitors. And Patrick Campbell was just like, actually, you need to obsess about your customers as well. And if you look at most big companies, if you don't obsess about your competitors and the features that they're doing, and they're gaining a lot of market share, you're going to lose market share eventually if you don't start copying some of their features.

2:44Yeah, well, I think what you're saying too is maybe not obsess over your competitors, but pay attention for sure. Obsess over your business, but pay attention to your competitors. I'm a big believer that you should obsess about your customers and you should obsess about your competitors. You should know the whole market. You can only obsess over one. You can't obsess over multiple. Do you obsess over one person when you're dating or multiple? See, I knew he was going to do that. I knew he was going to do that. Hey, we're moving on topics here. We're moving on topics. Speaking of copying. Touche.

3:12Touche. I'm right. Speaking of copying. When Clubhouse got copied, right? And then everything went to poo-poo, right? But you know who copied Clubhouse? Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, right? But now there's a new Clubhouse. It's not really Clubhouse, but AirChat. And then you had thoughts about AirChat. I started using it last week. I just played around with it. And then Neil didn't even use it. He's like, this is a bunch of crap, right? Yep. Just because it's new. No, I already read enough articles and I already knew it was crap, in my opinion. Did I send you an invite yet? No, but I got like five or six invites outside of you.

3:45Yeah, I'm probably like, look, I think it's novel. I don't think I'm going to use it a lot, but I think it's cool, right? I'll give you an example. You haven't used it, right? I have. Remember, you said invites to AirChat. Oh yeah, I baited you into using it. Long story short, Eric and I were chatting about AirChat over text when I think I was in Brazil or Canada or one of these places. Eric was just like, oh yeah, they stopped signups. Then I'm like, I don't think they stopped signups. I don't know what he's talking about. Why would they when they're getting all this hype and they're ranked in the top 30 on the app store for a social network?

4:24So then I click on one of my invites, I sign up and I'm like, see, I told you. And you're just like, yeah, no, I knew they weren't, they weren't blocking new signups. I just said this so that way you would sign up. And I literally spent five minutes on this and I'm like, this is crap. All it is, is someone reading out a tweet or a message. That's really it. I can consume that content on Twitter faster. If I want someone to read it, Elon, just go add voice. No one cares for that feature. this is going to be one of those other social networks that doesn't gain that much traction and if I had to pick between air air table air chat air chat or threads I would use threads way more than air chat not because I like either of them it's because Facebook is pushing the reach on threads if you put something on there it gets seen and it gets tons of engagement air chat waste of time mark my words give it six months I'm not saying someone won't buy them out or anything like that.

5:22But I'm telling you, it will not be a really popular social network like a TikTok, Instagram, or any of those. You know what's interesting? I had a chat with Heaton on AirChat. So Heaton's worked with Neil on a couple of projects before. And we were just talking about how it's just too early to know anything, right? Do I think it's going to be humongous? No, I don't. And then if it does become humongous, I actually said this on Twitter. I said, you know, look, if it does become humongous, like the other social networks are just going to copy air chat and then you know who liked it naval ravikant liked it and then you know what's gonna happen to air chat once they copy it it's gonna get crushed i don't look at air chat as social network air chats naval ravikant's right yeah yeah so he's just like oh right so and nor guard who lives here brian nor guard yeah i never met him before yeah nice guy i've known him for years but i when i look at air chat air chat isn't a social network to me it's a feature that other social network should have yep that's how i see it too um and this is this to me from that respect is like just like Clubhouse like why don't you just copy the feature.

6:21The thing is to your point it's not sticky enough because it's it takes this is a problem this is why I hate it when people send me voice notes never send me a voice note because it puts more of the work on the reader and that's the problem with it right and so like I don't have that much time to listen everything but I can read a lot faster and then interact that's the problem it is nice to hear people's voice though. Alright real quick I need to tell you about the group that Neil and I created called the Agency Owners Association. And this is a group that's similar to entrepreneurial organizations such as YPO or EO.

6:51By the way, Neil and I are both a YPO, but we thought it'd be really cool if we're able to create a group that's dedicated to agency owners to helping them scale. So you can be at six figures, seven figures, eight figures. We have different groups for different levels. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, that's marketingschool.io slash agency. And you can go there to apply. And I will tell you right now, what we're doing is there's an online community. We do calls every now and then. And there's stuff that we share in there that we don't share publicly. And you can, at least the online community, you can counsel at any time.

7:19So you can go there to learn more about it. And that being said, back to the video. Here's an interesting stat for you. We crawled well over 5 million pieces of content on Instagram and TikTok and all these places that create short form videos. Do you want to know what the number one common factor for a viral video was? A good hook? A good story? Nope. the number one factor, guess again. Something they all had in common. Almost all of them. The retention. Subtitles. So people don't have to turn on the audio. It was literally the number one thing. So how did you measure that? What's number two?

8:00I don't have number two in front of me. I have to find the chart. It's on my Twitter. But we looked at tons of different factors. The most common factor was subtitles. Or text transcript. whatever you want to call it. So that way people don't have to have the audio on. Imagine how many times you have your phone. If someone sends you an audio message, there's a lot of times where you actually can't listen to it, but you can pick up your phone and look at a text and read it. That's the power of these transcription services, right? Like, or just having transcription. When you watch a video or my wife does at night and sometimes I'm sleeping because I sleep earlier than her.

8:36I don't hear it. She's just reading the text on the, on the reels or whatever it is. And it's just going by and she's, that's how she consumes it. You guys are both watching stuff on your bed before you go to bed. I'm typically watching on the TV. Yeah. We typically talk to stuff, but I'm watching on the TV. She's just on the. Here's a good one I got too. No, this is from Jim Quick. No screens 30 minutes before bed and no screens 30 minutes after waking up. And that's been great. 30 minutes before waking up? And then 30 minutes before bed. No screens. Why? So I don't know for you. I don't think this happens to you.

9:11But when I look at my screen for too long, I start to get a lot of anxiety. Because there's so much, like Andrew Huberman said this, right? Like we're not built. When you have like an Instagram, like to have like 50 different contacts at once and just keep swapping around, like your mind starts to get warped. And that's how I feel. So like when I go for a walk in the morning, right? I'm like walking around towards the sun, right? Because that's what you're supposed to do. When I don't have my phone, I feel a lot happier. So, but I don't think it affects you. Like your mind just doesn't work like that.

9:39But for most humans, I do think it affects them. Not one bit, but I do something really interesting. All right. So I'm going to unlock my phone. What icons do you not see on my home screen? I see air chat. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I need to delete that. Okay. But what do you not see? You don't have, it's minimal. Try texting me right now. You don't have notifications. You don't have your messages. I don't have messages or WhatsApp. Try texting me right now. You don't have notifications on. Yeah, text me. You'll see. Me neither. here let me text you um hello so eric's typing and texting me right now yeah nothing it'll buzz once i delete when i get oh see that's annoying i don't even have that for my i don't mind the bus but i don't get distracted by people messaging me if it's really important someone will call me and that's changed my life it makes me just focus more because i don't have to worry about people texting you know but i would say this is not really a but it's it's more of an end neil's train people to call him because he calls everyone.

10:38I don't text. If I need something from Eric, I'll call him. Eric is a texter over calling. And if he doesn't answer, then I'll text him. And then I usually get a response, but I typically am a phone call type of person. You have to train people to do that. Yeah. And the same with like the email. I don't, um, have my emails buzz or notify every time because life would be a little too hectic. I've also learned because I travel often that if I go a day without answering messages, it's not the end of the world. Doesn't it feel good? No, it feels shitty because then I have to get off the plane and then I go through the emails and messages really fast.

11:16And I'm also cheating too because I have a massive team. So the overload on communication isn't that crazy because I'm not the CEO or president or CEO. Yeah, otherwise you'd be overwhelmed. Yes. I think that's the big difference for technology between you and I. I don't have everyone in the company messaging me. Like you're on Slack or is it Teams? Which one do you use? Yeah, I'm not on the company Teams. When I wake up in the morning, it's notifications from everyone. Well, I don't have notifications on, but you can see there's like a message from this person, this group over here. And it's like 15 of them, 20 of them, at least in the morning.

11:54I don't even have a login or username for our company Teams. That's great. So people just message me. I focus on what's important and what's going to move the needle. I still work a lot, but I've learned that you can take yourself out a lot of stuff and it doesn't have that much of an impact. And that was the biggest life lesson I've learned in business in which I thought you need to be involved in everything and do everything. And the key is how you just hire people that are competent or better than you and you have trust in them and you just let them do their thing. I think the right way of doing this, you have two ways of doing this really.

12:26So we talked about Dharmesh Shah and you, how you don't really have any direct reports and you're really just focused on strategy and the things that you're good at and marketing too. Now I talked to Jim Yu today, the Bright Edge CEO. So again, enterprise, he does enterprise SEO software and he's in a chairman role now. I was like, so what happened with this? Cause he didn't, I don't think he had a co-founder before to my knowledge. And so he basically hired a COO five, six years ago. And then that's, he slowly groomed that COO into becoming CEO. And then he became that. I think you can either start with a co-founder like you did and Dharmesh did, or you can slowly groom someone up, up to when you fully trust them.

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15:11Yeah, that's right. Right. And mine was a little bit unique versus Dharmesh, although Dharmesh is in a similar situation now, much bigger company. My co-founder was a CEO, like his was Brian Halligan, who was a CEO. Dharmesh's side. Yeah, on Dharmesh's side. And then Dharmesh, eventually they put in a new CEO and that was recently, but Brian, I think was a CEO for like 15 plus years. Yeah. You know what Dharmesh said? He said, look, I'm not going to have any direct reports. And there's going to be times where this startup needs me to come in and be a CTO or whatever temporarily. I'm not even going to do that.

15:46So I just want you to understand, I don't want any direct reports. Because he had been a CEO two times before. He had two startups before. And his logic is good because it's like, why optimize for something that I'm average at? Why don't I just focus on what I'm good at? Totally agree. Dude, even with my co-founder, he was a CEO, I think, for two to three years, Max. Mike? Uh-huh. And then we put a new CEO. Where was he CEO? Oh, for MP Digital. Yeah, before that he was not a CEO. He wasn't a CEO before. No. But he's always been really good at operations and sales. And even though he didn't have the title, he was running his dad's car dealership.

16:19Yeah. Totally different industry. So he had been a CEO before, technically. Technically, but, and really in this industry, we hired all the people who understood the industry. All Mike had to do was help generate revenue. And that is his best strength as well as hiring. All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about leveling up founders. This is an event slash mastermind for people doing seven, eight, nine figures. These are founders that are doing that amount. And we've been doing this event for a couple of years now. We've had amazing speakers, but more than anything, it's about the people.

16:50What I mean by that is like-minded people want to hang out with like-minded people. And this is the best spot to connect with people of a certain caliber. And we vet every single person that comes through. So if people are, even though they make a lot of money, but their character, we don't really align with that. We're not necessarily going to let them in. We did this event in Beverly Hills and it's happening in the beginning of August. All you have to do to learn more about it is just go to levelingup.com slash founders. Again, it's levelingup.com slash founders. If you want to hang out with amazing people, Neil, my podcast co-host is going to be there.

17:21I'm going to be there. People like Syed Balki, he will be there as well. And again, it's going to be a great time. Levelingup.com slash founders to learn more and we'll see you inside. Dude, I listened to an interview with Sam Altman yesterday and the COO of OpenAI, you know what they said about hiring for experience versus not? Well, so basically, their answers both come down to, if you hire people who are experienced, they're usually not going to come up with the best ideas, but you have a mix of perspective with the younger people. The younger people are going to come up with the ideas, but the people with the experience are going to have perspective and they can kind of hold things in check.

17:57So you need a mix of both. But that's also for their company. I was about to say, I think it really depends per industry because if you look at open AI, they're innovating like crazy. You and I, not to talk trash, but you and I are in old school, saturated industries. You could say new stuff is happening, but the innovation is coming from the open AIs of the world, and they're bringing it into our industry. The executive team for an industry that is 100 plus years old, all you really need is people who have been in it before that can help. I do agree that having young, fresh blood bring a new perspective is great, but it's not like open AI where you're innovating.

18:34You're more so just entering a crowded space and trying to take a slice of the market. Yeah, the answer is it depends again. But that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to join the Agency Owners Association. That's a group Neil and I have to help agency owners grow. And yeah, we'll catch you later.

19:01We'll be right back.