If I Wanted Enterprise Leads From Podcasts I’d Sponsor These

0:00So we talked about enterprise leads for a second and I had this topic here. if we wanted to generate enterprise leads from podcasts, which podcast would you sponsor? I have some answers and I know you don't listen to podcasts. So this would be - For marketing? Give me some ideas. Yeah, yeah. None. So let me tell you which, if I wanted to sponsor a podcast, which ones I'd sponsor and why? And then we can debate this. So you know the, have you ever listened to the Founders Podcast? I send you some episodes sometimes, right? Okay, so Founders Podcast, like you have like Michael Dell listening to it, the Dyson guy, Sam Zell, billionaire, right?

0:34Like you have a lot of, I think people from the Trump family listen to it as well. And so, you know, he has an episode that just came out this week, how Rockefeller works recently, how Elon Musk works, right? And like, he has all these like, just super in-depth reviews on these biographies and things like that. So all he does is read biographies. And I think that's a very valuable audience. Too bad, invest like the best. Like they took that over, right? They basically bought him out, I think. You have acquired, which for, I think for, if you want a mid-roll for a quarter, it's like two million bucks, right?

1:03So they don't necessarily have the most downloads. I think it's like, you know, a million a month or something. It's like a hundred thousand for an episode. But they have a, that's a very, you have very, it's a very wealthy audience that listens in. Right. And then you have invest like the best, which you have some of the best, the smartest, you know, private equity VC people listen to that one. And so my, my whole take on this is not necessarily like you're going to have all the enterprise, like leaders listening, but you're going to have a lot of the decision makers and the strongest people at organizations listening.

1:31and I want the mind share from these people. So you're going to advertise on them? I'm thinking about it. You should. I'm thinking about it. And then I'll let you know how it goes. You should. It's already going to fail. I already know it's going to fail. For enterprise, what do you consider enterprise? Actually, that's a better question before I tell you. Yeah, well, we have different definitions of enterprise. Yeah. So there's, in my mind, there's lower market enterprise, right? So some of our logos that we have for Carrot, for example, are not exactly like the Microsoft of the world or whatever, but they're still publicly traded.

1:57They do well, right? Right. And so that's what I consider enterprise. Like maybe they're doing, maybe they have, you know, a couple thousand employees are doing a couple hundred million a year in revenue. That's what we consider enterprise. For you, it's different. Yeah. We define enterprise of a company that's doing at least a billion in revenue a year minimum. Ideally, at least a few billion in revenue. And there's a lot of them. People just don't realize because there's a lot of non-publicly traded companies that sell things like flooring and roofing material that you would have never imagined that make billions in revenue.

2:31Like seriously, like windows and doors. Like we work with companies that sell parts for gas stations and it's a multi-billion dollar organization just in revenue. Enterprise for you is revenue and employees. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's that because you have a lot of like you work with furniture companies or manufacturing and all that, right? Mainly revenue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. more over employees because some are more efficient. And when I say revenue, I'm not talking about like pass-through revenue. Oh, we manage the ads for the... Yeah, not like eBay being like, well, people listed a billion dollars worth of products and we make 10%.

3:06So we made 1 billion in revenue because it was a billion dollars plus the 10 % is a 1.1. We would consider that model as you made$100 million in revenue, not a billion. I'm giving the hypothetical. I know eBay makes way more than a billion a year in revenue. But for us, what we found is if I go and I sponsor that podcast episode, some of the ones that you're talking about, the companies of the size that I'm discussing are almost always procurement driven processes where procurement and internal teams are picking and you're going through a process. We do not see any of those coming from, we haven't tried the podcast advertising, but the audiences that you're describing, they're not the people who are sending out those RFPs for what we consider enterprise.

3:54You know what's funny? Speaking of RFPs, so I think I told you, so Procter & Gamble came to us recently and then Hugo Boss came to us recently too. And then you look at the titles of these people, strategic sourcing managers. And I'm like, so we got ahold of these people. It's like, how did you first hear about us? they're Googling and they're searching AI. And then one of them was like, oh yeah, we looked at, you appeared on AI everywhere and you appeared on, you're just a very well-known health and wellness agency. That's definitely not us, right? But the fact that it's showing up on a lot of different services, it's interesting that these sourcing managers are going around there, right?

4:33But this is an example of how you are able to get some of these. It's not the way, but it is a way. It is a way. You want to know another amazing way to get some of these? You're talking about the events? No, not the events. So when you do award submissions for work - That actually gets you? No, the award submissions do not get us. Who's judging the awards though? The people. The people who potentially can include you in our field. So that's why you do the awards. Has nothing to do with winning the awards. That's so funny. Has everything to do with who's judging the awards. But years and years ago when we did a podcast, you're like, God, the awards are so stupid.

5:07Why are we doing the awards? Now you're like, it actually does something. Yeah, because a lot of those people end up moving around to different companies and they reviewed your work and they like something and they hit you up. It's not a high percentage, but you have to keep in mind, we don't get a lot of RFPs, but the RFPs we do get, a lot of them are worth a ton of money dollar wise. And a lot we lose. Like if anyone's like, we win 50 % of our RFPs, I'm like, bull, no one's winning 50%. It's like 15 %? If you're 15%, I don't know if that's good. we're closer to the 30 % mark for win rate. But it's expensive to pitch for these.

5:43And what we found is we get a lot of them because we did good work for a company. People move around to another corporation and then they include us in future work. I would say that's the number one way we get RFPs. But the shitty part about that is you need scale for that to work and it's expensive to try to manufacture the scale. Yeah, I think you mentioned this on this podcast before. You're spending like half a million to a million sometimes. right? To manufacture? Not to manufacture, but to go RFP. To pitch? Yeah. No, it never cost us a half a million for one pitch. Didn't you say a couple hundred thousand?

6:17You can spend over a hundred thousand on a pitch, but not a half a million dollars on a pitch. Maybe some people are, but we're not pitching big enough RFPs to spend a half a million bucks. Yeah, I don't know where the half a million came from. But dude, speaking of... If you aggregate it all per year, we probably spend more than a million dollars pitching RFPs. Yeah, but it's worth it. It's worth it. I don't know how many RFPs we get because we're in so many regions at this point, but it's well over a hundred. I don't know if it's 200, 300, because I haven't added up each and every single country, but still with it, it is worth it.

6:50And what I found with, if you're trying to generate enterprise leads, the thing that people forget in marketing, time helps more than anything else. And being in business 10 years is one of the biggest metrics. We haven't been in business for 10 years. You have, but I have two more years to get there. That's what I'm really looking forward to. Yeah. And did you see which software is selling today for$1.9 billion? Yeah, CM Rush sold to Adobe. Yeah. Well, in agreement, right? So we'll see what happens. No, I think we'll go through. I saw the number is 1.9. The number is 1.9. Yeah. I'm not saying I don't disagree, but that's what Adobe tweeted, right?

7:30Which I think is interesting because if I'm SEMrush, this is a good time to sell. I think it's a bad deal for them. Really? I'm happy for the SEMrush founders. So I look at stocks quite a bit, at least in our space. No, no, you look at stocks everywhere, every day. Yeah, I do. One quick note for everyone. If you're looking at stocks and you're using AI, it is off so much. So for example, you know S-O-L-T, the Solana ETF that's leveraged, so it's 2X. So when it goes up in theory, it goes 2X. When it goes down, it goes in theory down 2X. But there's a decay factor and it resets every night. So when it goes down, you can go down more.

8:17So I did an interesting exercise where I had ChatGBT and Grok analyze the last 30 days of S-O-L-T, the price per day, and the percentage is up or down and put it in a table comparison with the price of Solana each day and the percentage of it going up or down. And dude, both of them were so off because at the end, I asked him what's the current price of Solana. Grok told me 240. We know Solana right now is trading on 130 something, 636, 38, 30, whatever it is. Oh, you're really looking at it. Right. And I've been watching Solana really heavily over the last, I don't know. It's going to rip. Okay.

9:00So then - This is not financial advice, guys. No, it's not financial advice. But it's telling me the percentage gain up and down. If it's using the wrong price, the data is irrelevant. It's like a useless exercise. And then I had Chad GB2 and it said the current price of Salon is$190 something in its analysis, which is not$190. I'm paying for this stuff like$200 a month. This is why I want to set a new rule at my company. When you're walking in, this is what I was kind of dictating on my phone. I was like, guys, like, you can't just rely on whatever AI study and then share it with your CEO or whatever.

9:30You need to actually verify and then rewrite it and edit it in your own terms. Because if you don't do that, like, you're wasting my time. And, like, I can see the way people are doing job descriptions. Oh, yeah, I chat GPT this job description over here. Like, no, dude, you haven't even thought about what outcome you want from this role and what the mission is of the role. And you're just going to throw a chat GPT thing over to, like, our HR team. Like, fuck that, dude. What is wrong with you? Yeah, so when I was looking at it, and then I had them redo it, I'm like, your pricing is wrong. And they're like, oh, you're right.

9:59The price we use for wrong for both. But it's always like, you're right. Absolutely. Oh, great catch. Yeah, and it pisses me off. And Grok redid it, and it was off again the second time. Chat GPD did it. Some of the data points were off because they started just double checking. And I'm like, man, how can you guys just mess up on this and be a$500 billion company, right? So I'm just getting really irritated. I'm not saying they're not worth a lot of money, but I'm just getting really irritated because I'm now doing everything manual when I'm paying$200 a month for this, right? Dude, finish your thought.

10:31Okay, so going back to SEMrush. So I've been watching their stock for a long time. Did you know earlier this year around February, it was a$3 billion market cap company? I wasn't looking at it. Okay. Do you know what made it tank? All the AI stuff? They announced a new CEO. They announced a new CEO, boom, the stock tanks. Literally, the stock tanked. It tanked hard. The public markets hate companies like theirs. Marketing companies tend not to do well. SimilarWeb also doesn't do well. HubSpot, I don't consider a marketing company. Marketo didn't do that well back then, right? Marketo got gobbled up by Adobe.

11:09HubSpot makes a pitch that we're a CRM company and we're going after Salesforce. Very different play and market than we are a marketing software company. Which marketing software company does well in the public markets? Most have never done well. I can't recall one. SEM rush is going 20 % a year. They don't have a ton of debt. They're slightly profitable. They could run that business at way higher margins if they wanted to. And they do call it around$105,$120 million a quarter. Let's call it$105 or something like that. They do over$400 million a year, less than$450 million. selling for 1.9 when they have net negative churn and the customers stay it's a good deal for adobe that company should be a three plus billion dollar company when the market turns around they're just getting clobbered by the public markets because they don't like their story when it is an amazing company great execution um i think they should have just cut costs potentially taking it private i don't know how many shares the founders own uh and i would have just kept running it because they've done well adapting and people could say, oh, it's a dead company.

12:24A dead company that's growing 20 % a year. How dead is it really at their scale? It's interesting. You look at Ahrefs, so they say that I think it's like 140 or something like that. And then you look at BrightEdge, nine figure company as well. And then SEMrush. It's like they've all kind of done it in their own different ways. And so there's no right or wrong way. Out of those companies, which would be your favorite? I'll tell you mine. I think I like BrightEdge. I would go with Ahrefs. Why do you like Ahrefs? Bootstrap, no outside investors. I believe owned by one person. I've never met the founder.

12:56I know Tim decently well, probably not as well as you, but I love Tim. Tim's great. Tim's great. I don't know what Tim runs. I know he's in marketing, but my guess is he runs more than marketing, but I love Tim. I think we need to find it. So are you saying, would you rather own the company or what would you say? How it's run. So forget the software. How it's run. The ownership structure and how it's run. Well, those are different. No, I think to me it goes hand in hand because the ownership structure of Ahrefs is owned by one person in theory. I can't verify that data, but that's my assumption.

13:34Yeah. I know they've never taken outside investors based on what I've read online and what Tim's told me. I think you're right, yeah. So they can run the company as a lifestyle business. They can run it as a growth business. they can do whatever they want. They can do projects like a search engine that they did. I forgot what it was called. Was it Hey or something like that? No, that's Basecamp. Basecamp had an email thing called Hey. What was Ahrefs' email? The fact that we don't remember. Yeah, okay, but I'm not trying to hate on them. No, no, no, not at all. Some things are going to not work out and some things will.

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15:13And I think that's a great way to run a business with optionality. And I love that over someone dictating how you should run your own company. So, okay, here, I'm going to give my answer. Maybe it's a little complicated. So I see where you're coming from. I think from a pure freedom aspect, A-Trust wins, hands down, at the end of the day, right? Now, where I think there's a little bit of a struggle, like, and he can fix this, by the way. I think there's a little lack of focus problem, right? There's the search engine stuff. And I've had some other conversations. It's like, it's very easy to get distracted when you have so much optionality, right?

15:42Now, I like the discipline around BrightEdge. So you and I have met Jim, right? Jim's a very disciplined founder. He was out a little bit. He came back into the business. He does have investors. The investors force discipline. He sells only to the enterprise. And I think he has less, in my mind, you have a different set of headaches to deal with, right? When you're not selling all the SMBs, like you have less customers to deal with, right? You can argue that they're easier to deal with, whatever. But I think I just like that element of around how it's ran because we're talking about that piece, right?

16:13Now, if it were for me personally, I prefer Ahrefs. But if we're talking about how it's run, I like Bright Edge. The ideal structure, the reason I picked Ahrefs is because there's no investors. And I think his name is Dimitri. Is that the founder's name? I'll look it up. You keep going. Let's go with Tim. Let's call Tim the founder. I know he's not the founder, but we love Tim. So let's say Tim's running the show there. I'm giving a hypothetical. Dimitro. Sorry, Demetro, for messing up your name. So let's say Demetro's running that business, right, as a CEO. What I love about the business is he's in control of his own destiny.

16:45He can do whatever he wants. If I had to pick, it would be his ownership structure and freedom and speed of execution combined with Bright Edge's customer base of pure enterprise. That would be the sweetheart combo because I hate the SMB type of business. higher churn, they have much more unrealistic expectations, and your multiple on trading a business is actually much worse when it's SMB versus enterprise. Yep, 100%. Anyway, guys, that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.