How To Create Data Discipline In Your Organization, Why Freemium Doesn't Work As Well Anymore, Marketing Today Vs Marketing Tomorrow, How AI Helps Create 'New Work' That Was Previously Impossible, Anti Elon Ad Backfires

0:03The fact that you can pull out your phone and you have all this data already, you must have so much data on your phone and so many people texting you about all this different data, right? So I kind of want to know from your end, how do you create a culture of data discipline in your organization? Because if the founders don't enforce this, it quickly falls apart. And I think you've kept it locked in since the beginning. Dude, so check this out. Okay, data, revenue, lead channels. This is just text. This is just different threads, okay? I'm just going to go images. Let's see. You know you can click on that person and just go to images.

0:37Well, this is a group chat. Searches by sources, what people are using in our channels. uh every single day that caused uh every date that they made a change to our applications traffic over time by day so then that way we can correlate what did it cause it what caused the decrease in traffic um but like even like with charts so are these automatic every day or you ask for them some i ask for a lot our majority are just shared within the team like here's another one. It looks per month, organic leads, organic traffic. It's total organic traffic, total new organic leads, DC scheduled, DC's happening pitches, contracts, deals, MRR, and it compares it for the last month, the last three months.

1:22And this is for our SMB division. I don't know what country, cause that's cut off, but it's for a specific country. You already saw this one. I'm assuming you ask for it 30, 40 % of the time because you ask for a lot of things. They're sending me a lot of charts and data and they're like, here's our do you want pretty yeah oh okay this goes to content creation too this is content creation too but they're just sending me like data and they're just saying like do you want us to make these pretty or not yeah um but yeah dude my team just shares data like you but you still probably ask 30 40 percent of the time or is it 20 percent of the time because you like these things all the time i probably ask like 50 60 percent wow okay see see see my team is sharing data constantly but the problem with data is marketing teams love just giving data dumps.

2:10Like, look at all this cool stuff. And what I go back at them with is, but the data is irrelevant. What's the data that matters? Great example, I was talking to Kyle Beleza. He runs operations for us. And I forgot the multiple that he used. It was like, Neil, a paid consulting client is worth like 500 times or 1 ,000 times. more than a paid answer the public user and i was saying okay 500 000 no like 500 times or a thousand times i don't know what the multiple is but it's large yeah because you could buy answer the public subscription call it for a few hundred bucks per year lifetime or whatever it is but it's cheap let's go 200 i don't know what the latest pricing is or let's go to 100 and something So he's saying, Hey dude, consulting clients pay.

3:00Let's make it up at, um, a hundred thousand dollars. I'm just making up the number to keep them simple. And he's saying, uh, answer the public users worth a hundred dollars. I'm using clear, easy numbers. So it's just easy to think about the numbers. When you look at from that comparison, that's a thousand times difference. And I said, so he's like, we should just focus on getting more customers because one of those customers makes up for a thousand answer the public customers and i said kind of and i'm like what do you mean and i'm like well you're talking about revenue our expenses and consulting is high a new customer every additional customer we get to answer the public is almost pure profit yeah you're really just paying credit card processing because you have a lot of fixed costs i already have enough support people technology helps reduce support costs only need so many engineers only paying for data so many times.

3:53Yeah. Your gross margin gets better. Exactly. I'm like every consulting client I get, it doesn't. So he's like showing me this data. He's like, dude, this is why we just need more consulting clients. And I was like, the numbers don't make sense. Or when you're looking at data that's skewed. So I told him, Hey dude, you're looking at data in the wrong way. And my team sends me tons of data like that. And I'm like, that's with a really skewed lens. It's also easier for me to sell something for a hundred bucks a year than it is to sell something for a hundred thousand dollars a year. There's a big difference.

4:26So my team sends data like that instead of data like, Hey, we made these changes and our traffic went down or our traffic went up. Like the traffic drop that I showed you, these are from brand queries. It's specifically for people typing in our name. This has nothing to do with algorithms. So I said, brand queries are going down, which means you made changes to the product to keep causing the usage to drop. When you look at the graph over time, it's a steadily decline, but there's cliffs. And the cliffs, why would something just drop off all of a sudden during one week? It's not a competition doing anything.

5:01We go back and look at the dates. It's because my team implemented something. And it's typically they implemented something a week to a month before, and then eventually took time for it to hit and then it dropped off and it keeps going down and then it stabilizes. And then they keep making changes and that causes a drop. So for me, when I ask them for data, I'm asking them for data that helps me solve specific problems while they just look at a lot of random data and they don't necessarily know what to do or they'll make informed decisions. The best example of this is, and this is what's causing the traffic drop, like Neil, did you know we get a lot of paid signups by blocking data for CPC and volume data with keywords?

5:40So instead of giving people like five keywords of data. We're just going to give them one and then force more people to log in or force more people to sign up. They do that. The conversion rate goes from someone seeing to signing up. But then what they don't look at is the whole story in which, oh, over time that caused usage drop and traffic drop because there wasn't enough for free. And that caused total revenue decline and traffic drop. So having a lower conversion rate, but more traffic still made more money than having a higher conversion rate and less traffic. This goes back to one of my favorite quotes.

6:14There are no trade-offs, sorry, there are no solutions, only trade-offs, right? And I think the key thing here is one, you have to be adaptable to, you have to have a culture of experimentation and you have to be willing to change on a dime. But the third thing that most people ignore is if you're a founder of the company, you can't ignore, you actually have to keep the pressure on in terms of asking a lot of questions about data because a lot oftentimes people, when you start to start to address them a little bit, you start to ask them questions. They oftentimes will just kind of blankly look at you and then they won't know, right?

6:42And so nobody's going to care as much as you as the founder, if you're listening. And even if you're an executive, you should ask deeper questions on this stuff. And that's why I asked you this question because most companies don't have a culture of data discipline because even if you try to implement this stuff, they'll still stare at you blankly. And then if you stop appearing in these meetings and you stop driving the intensity, it will quickly fall apart. Yes. And you can see here, I asked them earlier, any idea when the limit rollbacks go out for ATP and Uber? So they're giving timelines.

7:11Answer the public was May 14th. My text, all capital, wow. They already knew I was pissed at that point. Like, sorry, sorry. This is to make a change back. This is to make a change back. Wait, how long was it? They're saying May 14th. So next week on Wednesday. And what did you ask that? Yesterday. So I wanted it done today. Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. So as a founder, this is also your job too as a founder. is or as a leader you have to constantly ask hey how can this be done faster how come it can't be done faster because the default is oh yeah i'll do it in two weeks yeah i'll do it in three weeks the if you don't give like a wow or more is more more like a f that people are going to get too comfortable yes mine was wow next one was why so long on atp uber says was two days your wow was f that yeah and then i'm like and does may 14th include the new lead change i wanted as well and then they said i can't confirm that it does so then i was already even more pissed uh and then it just kept going from there and then my text just kept going and going and going and then i had this is all in a matter of like an hour you kept you kept pushing them until they finally gave you the answer you wanted yes it wasn't like the the good thing too is you didn't exactly dictate what you wanted exactly you pushed the you teased the answer out and that takes longer but that's almost that actually it's a form of coaching neil even though you don't like coaching that's a form of coaching i just spit really far but anyway yeah but it helps teach him or it helps uh it's coaching it helps yeah it helps train them and get them used to what i am willing to accept and what i'm not yeah neil patella coach yeah oh by the way funny funny thing there's a internet marketer that we both know and he's he was very popular before and today i just decided to open one of his emails um maybe i'll let you guess who this is but you can tell me afterwards but um the guy still sends vsls still still selling the same courses at the end of the day still selling the same type of offers he's just wrapping it around ai and things like that now i don't think there's any i think in my mind it's you can keep doing the same thing or you can evolve but this goes back to the same thing again we just talked about evolving you and i have evolved as digital marketers over the years i'm not saying we're better than anybody i'm just saying that if you want to go far because everyone has these big demands of themselves you're going to have to adapt.

9:22Otherwise you end up doing the same thing. And then those people end up complaining about how everyone is supposedly surpassing them. Right. Can I ask you a question before I guess? Yeah. Did this person own a conference before? Maybe this person started a marketing agency with another influencer. You can guess where this person lives. Try that. Florida or Texas. The influencer is in Florida. The influencer is in Florida. The other person's in guess, Texas? California? Yes. I know him well. Yeah? I don't know who it is. I'll tell you after. Am I following him on Instagram? Probably not. I don't think so.

10:03You don't follow many people on Instagram. A hundred and something maybe? You might. You might. You might follow them. But my point of saying this is, again, it's, we've seen the same, the reason why info marketers get a bad rap is because they sell a promise that they can't fulfill. With the influencers in Florida. Yeah. The influencers that he partnered with. it's a girl no he's no the influencer is a girl no guy oh the guy yeah okay anyway point is that by the way we were giving information out for free right now right we used to actually be in the education game if i used to work in online education i think what internet marketer info marketers cause is they they sold they do such a good job of selling but when it comes to fulfillment they can't fulfill for crap right but then what ends up happening is they keep wrapping different offers and they keep they know human psychology so they bring people in and then what happens is okay these vsls convert but then what they burned the the list out um and then they have to move into a new offer and then they have to keep repackaging courses is it franker um well i have to tell you afterwards i can't we're not doing names remember okay so yeah yeah you said i can guess i'm guessing you can guess i'll tell you after so you won't confirm this franker i can't I can't confirm or deny because he has some of the best copy I've ever seen when it comes Frank's an amazing copywriter did you remember his the best sales video I ever saw in the marketing industry was his and it was him comparing a Rolls-Royce with the BMW I believe it was and he pulls out of his garage uh I don't know which car he pulled out first but one was a Rolls-Royce and then another one's a BMW and I believe those are the two cars and he's comparing them he's like you know the difference and he's breaking down and he's like did you know that they're owned by the same company and he's talking about the little things that made a difference and what you're paying for like a logo or something like that but um yeah the model worked out really well one of his best converting videos one of the first videos i when i was learning internet marketing was from frank kerns so um anyway but we're not doing any names for this one um that's what i'll say by the way you have this before we move on from this one did you want to touch upon why freemium doesn't work as well anymore?

12:10With AI, the cost to run software companies is just so much lower. You may not believe me, but I'm just telling you real data. If you go out there and look at when I first created Crazy Egg with Heathen back in the day, dude, we had to go buy servers and go put that in a place to get our costs down. And we had people having to connect them and program them. Software was expensive. Then the cloud came out. Cloud is so much cheaper these days than it was two, three, four years ago. Like my hosting costs are continually going down and down each and every single year, just because data costs are going down.

12:46Secondly, AI makes it more efficient to run software companies because of things like design, coding, cursors. V0 for prototyping, replet. Exactly. Design, all this kind of stuff. Support. So when you look at AI, it's making things more efficient where you can get stuff out faster and cheaper. And the cloud costs are just going drastically down. And because of that, the barrier to entry is lower. You don't really need much to do. You don't need much money to start. And freemium is a great way to get people to sell. But the biggest thing that's increased over time is actually marketing cost. It's not the creation of software.

13:31So if you just give away the software for free, it's cheaper from what we calculated for most industries than it would be to pay for the marketing dollars. Like if you look at software for free as a marketing expense, it's more effective than paying for the traffic. Yeah, it makes sense. 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.

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16:19And it says function first, siloed, and slow. Now, marketing tomorrow at the very top, it's just an outcome, a goal that you're aiming for. So grow traffic by 20 % might be the goal. And then you have these other sub goals over here, improve conversion rate by 7 % and increase awareness by 2%. The point of this one, the marketing tomorrow is going to be mission first, AI powered and fast. I think we're going to be looking for, Hey, I just want this outcome. And then you're going to have one click, boom, it's doing it for you. And that's going to be the future. A lot of this stuff is just like, it's slower and it's clunkier.

16:53Yeah. And if I look at the left side of marketing today, I, I struggled to run my business like that. I've run my business like marking tomorrow for a very long time, where it's just give me the data points. Give me what's slowing down the business. And what do I need to fix to grow it? And then you just have numbers. And then you just go and focus on hitting those numbers and you dissect why those numbers aren't the way you want we're just not going to wait anymore i think if you're a leader executive founder whatever you're just not going to wait your tolerance is even lower now for slowness um and if someone says oh i'm going to make a prd which is a product requirements document i'm just like why don't you just prototype it right or people still do that yeah people still create prds um i'm just guys there's no need for prds just if you're serious about this go prototype this using v0 make a mock-up yeah because that takes like you and i can just it took it'll take us five minutes to make a mock-up that we like.

17:40Whereas in the past, we would have to maybe balsamic, right? And then like wireframe it and then send it to a designer and they go back and forth to design or take you like three, four weeks to do it. Now you get it done in five minutes. So I had one of my team members sit next to me and we were prototyping when I was in a Brazil web summit. It did not, I was prototyping a new report that I wanted to end up creating. It did not take me five minutes, sadly, but I got it to a really good place where I sent it to my team to like figure out coding it up and getting it. We had to make a little bit of tweaks, but coding it up and making it work and integrate it within our tool and our backend and everything.

18:15I was able to get it there within like an hour and 20 ish minutes. That's not bad, but you're also very detail oriented. So you're going to put a lot more into it versus I'm 6 % detail oriented. So five minutes I'm done. But even after hour 20 minutes, if I look at what have it taken a team to do that in the past, you're talking about back and forth for probably a week. Yeah. So you're decreasing the cost by 99%, right? So sorry, not the cost that the time to get it, the time to value is a lot faster now. Also that the cost is a lot cheaper now. When you think about blog posts, 25 ,000 words for free, that's kind of an insane offer.

18:48Agencies are charging like five, 10 grand for that, right? But now it's like, oh, just okay, that's the leading offer now. So a lot of this stuff is going to be deflated. Well, the easiest way to look at it is what I just told you I'm able to do within an hour and 20 minutes. When I said a week, you're talking about 40 hours of team time. and it was just me and one person doing it well technically if it were taking a week it would have just been one person as well but still 40 hours versus an hour and 20 that's a big difference well and let's say you're billing i'm just making numbers up right now let's say your billable time is 250 an hour for your team across the team right so let's just call that 10 grand right and you can make up whatever numbers you want but this stuff is good and actually let me let's say to get it done in an hour and 20 i spent five hundred dollars or actually two people uh uh yeah let's call it 500 because i'd pay for the tool so 95 yeah savings yeah it's an amazing deal let me give you give you some examples here you'll actually like this i think this will this will this will entertain you but i don't think you'll do this um so this is how ai helps create new work that was previously impossible so we have this thing where we have people like noah for example might say okay, here are the top three things I got done yesterday.

19:59And then here's the number one highest leverage thing that I'm working on today. Now, if you have to police that, it would take you forever. You have to check, oh, like, is Noah actually putting in the highest leverage thing? You could say, oh, I'm working on a job description today, right? That could be the highest leverage thing. So now I use lindy.ai. And then what Lindy does is it will look at all the standup responses. And if it's that, literally someone put job description, right? I'll say, hey, Noah, I think the job description is nice, but can you be more specific here? because we want you to work on the highest leverage things.

20:29Can you, and if it's not that, like if you're not hiring for some type of executive, this might not be the one, right? And then there's a leaderboard at the end of the month showing how everyone has scored and how consistent people have been with filling it out. But my point of saying this is that this is new work that was previously not feasible to do because it was previously impossible because it's too much work. Nobody has the time to do this and it was too costly. But now, even if you look at Flexport, they're a logistics company. they have an AI call all of their truckers and say, hey, this gig is now available now, or in a region say, this gig is available.

21:01Do you want to take it? So I think AI is going to be creating a lot more new work that was previously impossible while making a lot of the work that we were doing previously a lot cheaper too. Yep. No, dude, I'm with you. You can do more. You can do stuff that you weren't even able to do in the past and you can do it all cheaper and faster. Yep. Did you see that anti-Elon ad? No. Okay. So this ad over here, I'm going to show you real quick. those of you that can't see it on the screen, we'll probably pull it up on the... That's a tank versus... That's a tank versus Tesla. So we're going to pull it up.

21:34This guy served in World War II. He's 98 years old. So he's going to blow up a Tesla? He's going to drive the tank. So he's going to drive it over the Tesla? He's in World War II. He's like, you know, this is a Sherman tank that he used to drive, right? And he's seen enough. He's seen enough fascism, right? That's what he's saying here. He's like, it's coming back. I don't want it to come back. You know, Elon is backing fascists, whatever, right? And Neil and I were not saying we support either side. So he's like, I'm assuming this is in Europe. This is in Europe. Yeah. So the European license, but it's fascism.

22:04And this is a Tesla that he's about to run over. We've crushed fascism before and we will crush it again. So that's what he's saying, right? So let's go, shall we? So he's pulling it up. Oh yeah, it's crushing the car. the tank is riding over to tesla right now now the the tank must be extremely heavy the tank is heavy here's the thing though the tesla does pretty well that's the thing the tesla actually holds up it does it doesn't get fully crushed by a super heavy tank right so this is not a smart thing for them to advertise and then look at the very end it'll say it made by whatever um so this is actually a positive ad for Tesla.

22:49But at the very end of this, check out what it says. You can read it out. It's coming up. The ad's going to backfire on them. I think some people will get enjoyment, but a lot of people will be like, wow, Tesla's a really strong car. Yeah. So, Led by Donkeys. That's the company. Led by Donkeys. It says Led by Donkeys created it. Yeah. So, that's not a smart name either. No. I thought they were making fun of Elon or someone. But whoever, you guys are kind of saying you guys made this ad and it kind of proves that you guys are donkeys for doing this and so not all these things are are smart at the end of the day it's an anti-elon stunt that turned into an accidental ad that shows that tesla's a pretty good car so dude that's crazy anyway that's it for today guys we'll see you tomorrow