Learning Is Actually Struggling, Is It Better To Be Elon Musk or Bernard Arnault? Red Flags About Starbucks New CEO, What Is Step Positioning? The New 10 Commandments Of Marketing

0:00Neil partnered with Heaton on a couple products, CrazyAid, Kissmetrics, Kissinsights, a lot of different things, webposting. so Heaton said this and this is interesting because you and I have talked about this before so Heaton says you think you're learning, you're not watching reading and listening feels like progress they're not, I'm just talking like him right now he would talk like this, they're not real learning happens when you wrestle with ideas apply them and struggle, if it feels easy, you're just collecting information and this actually comes from I think Andre Karpathy from OpenAI2, he said this too.

0:37It should feel like, when you're working out, for example, it doesn't feel pleasant. It feels like you're struggling. When you're actually learning, you're in the middle of doing, you feel like you're struggling, right? But look, I'm a big fan of podcasts. I'm a big fan of reading and everything. The fact that you guys are listening to this or watching this, we're very grateful for that. But at a certain point, you have to understand that most of your learning actually comes from doing. And other than that, we have a mutual friend, J-Cron. I remember we were working on this course where Tony Robbins was in there.

1:04This is a Jim Rohn course for success, right? And he said this about learning. He's like, you know, most people like to buy courses because of this. Sorry, J-Cron. I actually agree with you here. Most people like to buy courses because of this. Not because of progress, but because of perceived progress. And I was like, oh, shit. Yeah, he's right. Because it feels good to buy the course. It feels good to listen to this stuff. It feels good to read, right? But when it feels good, you're probably not learning as much as you could. Yes, it feels good to say I completed this course and check out my certificate.

1:36Yeah. Oh, look at me. I have this diploma. I don't even know where my diploma is. Implement it. Implement whatever you learn. And then they get stuck. Dude, I don't know where my diploma is either. I don't even know if I got one. Yeah, you definitely did get one. But like what he said over here, like knowledge is not the bottleneck. Execution is. And he's totally right here. If you've been an entrepreneur for a while and he says this, you don't need more advice. You need to just apply what you already know. And he's right. Look, if you're a starting entrepreneur, if you're in your early 20s or so, I think you should spend some time learning.

2:06But I think if you're like in your mid-30s plus, probably more implementing. This is a problem with entrepreneurs at all stages. People believe, oh, look at how many books I read. Look at how many podcasts I listen to. Don't get me wrong. Reading, listening to some extent is needed and you should do it to keep up with latest strategies, what people are talking about. but people spend way too much time doing that instead of focusing on execution. You know, when people watch my background, you know my background is a bunch of books and it has like a Warren Buffett bust and a Charlie Munger bust, right?

2:39How many books have you read? Don't ask me such a stupid question. How many books have you read? That's the wrong question to ask. The right question is when you look at it, I look at my library as a reference point. So if Noah here and Neil recommend a book, this is Syed's rule actually. If two people recommend, I'm buying it. It's like$10,$20 per book. Why would I not buy it? This is from the greatest investors in the world. I have tombs of essays from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger or whatever, or other great investment books or other great business books. I will pull on them when I need to or other copywriting books or books on meditation, whatever.

3:13It's a vanity metric. Oh, how many blog posts did you write? How many books did you read? It's such a stupid question. When you look at someone's bookshelf, that's not the right question to ask. It's more so what are you interested in and what have you actually implemented in? Yes. And did your revenue grow from it? because if it didn't grow from it, who cares? Yeah, yeah. And so I don't, anyway, I'll just leave it at that. I think it was a good point. Here's another, here, let me throw this one at you. Do you think it's better to be Bernard Arnault or Elon Musk? Neither, depends on your personality type.

3:49Would you rather be Bernard Arnault or Elon Musk? i'm not as good as either of them but i am more down the path of bernard than elon elon is an innovator i'm more of a purchaser purchase fix grow okay now where i'm going with this is i'd rather be bernard or as well and i think elon's the greatest entrepreneur of our lifetime his life is just way harder you have people no matter what good you do for the world there's people trying to kill you. Um, and like literally trying to kill you. Right. I'd rather be Bernard where you're kind of under the radar and you've, you, you have all these great companies.

4:27And, um, I think it's overall, it's better to be anonymous and wealthy rather than famous and wealthy because you just more, you just have so many problems and that's what Elon has right now. Um, so that's, that's what I would say. I think, uh, Elon's life is very hard. He even did publicly state how things are really tough for him right now. I was watching, what is that called? Masterclass? Yeah. Howard Schultz. Yeah. And it was during one of his interviews and it really hit me. And he was talking about some entrepreneurs love to innovate. And if you look at Elon, he's a great example of someone who wants to innovate.

5:07And Howard Schultz breaks down this one of the hardest things to do. You're trying to create something new and convince people to buy it. It's tough. an easier approach is to go after a market that already exists create something that's just a little bit better than everyone else and even if you're not the leader it's a big enough market where you make money and when i watched that master class interview it made me understand how i was different than uh my co-founder heathen shaw technically my brother-in-law as well as not even technically actually yeah he's actually my brother-in-law because he loves innovating and creating new things that other people haven't i just prefer creating something that already exists and just being like all right it's already a large market it's already proven out let me just go buy something fix it grow it scale it and our specialties are just different also what he does or other people do like elon who innovate it's it's hard it's just not my cup of tea yeah and that's okay and guys i think what we should talk about too is if you want to succeed you have to find a way to understand human nature.

6:14And so men have lust. Women desire beauty. Okay. Poor people desire to get rich quick. Okay. And rich people fear of loss, right? You want to protect what you have already. You want to protect wealth protection, right? For children, you're going to spend anything and everything on education. Okay. And with elderly people, you care more about health than anything, right? And so all these things are all human desires. and that's how you should think about selling. And it's actually easier if you choose to just build around that versus trying to innovate something from scratch because not everyone wants to go to Mars.

6:50Dude, speaking about education and children, I was looking at the numbers. I spend so much on education. If you just take it at a bare minimum and start reducing donations and things like that, each kid is at least$700 ,000. For your lifetime? No, no, no. For a year? Before they even go to college, okay? $700 ,000. I was like, huh, if I just put this in the market, I could turn it into around 3.3. Would they rather have a$700 ,000 education? Not even college. This is before college. Or three plus million dollars and just send them to public school. And I was like, if it was me, I would prefer the$3 million.

7:28But that's your wife's choice. Yeah, it's not my choice. Yeah. I think you would send it because we went to public school, right? Yeah, we will. Yeah, I went to public school. She did too. Oh, yeah. I don't have any issues with it. Yeah. Yeah, but I'm also cheap. I'm really cheap. I was texting Anand. You know him. Yeah. Right? He's in YPO as well. He's like, dude, you can do both. He's like, this is not a relevant question. Or, yeah, you can technically do both. Yeah, I know. But I was just like, well, you know, I like counting my pennies. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, so, okay, this is I want to talk about some red flags about this new Starbucks CEO.

8:07This came from Jason Lemkin. So obviously this new Starbucks CEO has a pedigree. I mean, he came from Chipotle and I think also Taco Bell. I believe so, yeah. Okay. He did really well with those two organizations. So he takes a picture over here and then this is the Starbucks CEO. I can see this. So can you describe this picture for those that are listening? Guy sitting in a nice office with a desk by himself. You're just like an AI. But so Jason Lemkin. And he's dressed up too. He's dressed up. But here's what Jason Lemkin says. So many things in the desk of the new Starbucks CEO are borderline triggering.

8:43No external monitor. Impossible to reach laptop. Terrible cable management. Very concerned about video quality on Zoom. Needs secret labs chair, which I assume is a very expensive chair. He may not be a very hands-on keyboard kind of CEO. And so I think this picture is very much a how you do anything is how you do everything. Now, do I necessarily agree with all these things? Are they important? I don't know because I've never run like a coffee company before. But what do you think? I look at his track record. If the guy has done really well in the past and other similar types of companies twice, there's probably a good chance he can do it a third time.

9:20And he himself does not have to do it. He just has to build a team who can do it. Don't care if he gets his hands dirty or he hires the people who get the hands dirty. And as long as it gets done, no one really cares. Starbucks is such a big organization. they can pay him and many, many more times over, especially if he fixes the business, it's all a rounding error. Yep. Okay. Guys, we're going to switch into some, some marketing school classics in the middle. And I'm curious to actually get some feedback from you all. If you can just message me on Instagram or message me on X, because message me, because Neil never responds, message me.

9:54So someone messaged us and let me read you this feedback over here. I'm keen to understand if this feedback is relevant, but he basically said, That he says bro. Okay, bro bro. I know you might not care. This guy's Chinese Okay, so bro, I know you might not care but the new podcast format sucks The reason why it doesn't work is because people and marketing or creatives are cooked We're so busy and every minute counts your previous format was short segments that made it feel your words were worth More value straight shooter type of pod. That was a sick moat it was like receiving mba level experience and knowledge in the span of a long tiktok or running into you guys on my way downstairs for coffee i hope you guys go back so we're gonna throw in some classics here what do you feel about that um you like that feedback you like this one you like this format you like the old feedback or the old format i'm talking to noah over here yeah we can mix it up we're gonna mix it up okay so um i don't know what your name is um Shitty Human Bean.

10:56That's his name. Shitty Human Bean. Oh, Shitty Human Bean. I was like, are you trying to make fun of this person? No, no. That's seriously his name. Okay. So thank you for that. So we're going to talk about what vibe marketing is. Now, have you heard of vibe coding? No. Okay. So vibe coding is from, again, Andre Carpathy from OpenAI, one of the founding team members. And he said, guys, there's this new thing called vibe coding. And basically, that's using one of these AI code editors and coding something from scratch. like the report I was talking about or the Mario Minecraft game that I made, right?

11:28While you were at the gym. Yeah, while I was at the gym. So I made this Mario game while I was at the gym. But so one of the co-founders of Morning Brew, Alex Lieberman, says vibe marketing is greater than vibe coding. I was like, of course someone's going to code or come up with a vibe marketing phrase. So here's what it is. So he's like, everyone's talking about vibe coding. Excuse me. No one is talking about vibe marketing. it's as if not more important so for example elon vibe market spacex launches and x product improvements brett adcock vibe markets figures roadmap what they do the robots what do they mean by vibe like elon vibe you mean he just shares it well let's get to this okay so levels vibe markets his flying game to photo ai remember we talked about that guy with 74 million impressions so basically he's like finally vibe market only gets more important as customers expect immediacy and as AI lets businesses shorten the distance between customer and idea and implementation.

12:23I think he's just talking about reading the vibes of your audience, building a company in a way that prioritizes audience vibes, publicly share all updates with your customer. I really just think it's number three over here. You're publicly sharing things and you're getting feedback from people. And I think this is just - So he's just using marketable moments? I think this is just marketable moments again. I think this is just the same to me as incrementality testing. You mean A-B testing? Yeah. So there's no need, guys. I'm sorry, Alex. There's no need to come up with a new phrase for every damn thing.

12:53Okay. Maybe we're becoming more senile on this podcast and senile old men, but we really don't need to, right? I think new people just like to code. People like to come up with new things. Dude, this morning someone tells me, hey, we ran this crazy multivariant test. I'm like, show me. I'm like, so you ran an ABC split test? Because multivariant testing is you're taking a landing page and you're testing. Multivariants. Yes. Tons of things like, oh we're going to use 10 different images and two call to actions and change of colors four times and you're running it all at the same time which we i don't know if we i'm not a supporter of multivariate no i'm not either yeah i'm a i'm a big believer in ab testing i don't like multivariate explain why um i've run a lot of multivariate testing tests over the years for some reason when you have a winner and you end up rolling it out it usually doesn't perform the way the test that it was going to perform compared to ab test yep so okay now let's do another classic over here.

13:47Guys, let me tell you. So Neil, do you know what step positioning is? Step positioning? Yeah. No. Okay. So a lot of people like to talk about positioning when it comes to marketing. You have to position your product the right way. You know, we're this or we're that, right? But I think if you're a startup, you have to do step positioning. And what I mean by that is let's use carrot, for example. So step one of our positioning right now, because we're very resource constrained and we can't do everything we want to do. Don't yawn. So step one is LinkedIn ABM ads made simple. That's our initial positioning.

14:15Once we start to get more traction, things go well, we, and we, we, the team grows, we have more resources. We can move on to step two positioning. Step two positioning is ABM ads made simple. Okay. Now we can grow into, to, to meta. We can grow into Google more platforms. Correct. And then, so now after we figured out the ABM ads piece, now we can move on to step three, which is just ABM made simple, which is way broader. Right. And then step four is B2B marketing made simple, which is a$20 trillion market, right? But you cannot move. You can't just say, you know, exactly what you are at the very beginning.

14:44You have to slowly step your way into figuring this out just like how Nvidia did or a easier way for people to think about it is to do well in business and marketing. You need to go after a big time, but when you're starting off, go after a subset of that large time and continually expand into that larger time. Exactly. See, there's a classic for you guys. Let us know what you think about that all right do you want to pick one or i have another one here let's go over the 10 new marketing commandments ah yes okay guys this episode this type of episode format has done well for us in the past it's the 10 commandments of marketing but now we've never done one around the 10 new commandments of marketing okay so we're totally just coming up with this from scratch here's number one number one you want to go first all right AI and marketing will not do well unless you combine it with a human you can't have AI just go and do everything in marketing for you without humans humans won't perform better in marketing than AI humans aren't better AI is not better the ideal combination is you take both of them and they work together that is going to create the optimal marketing output number two for one of the 10 new commandments of marketing is you can't just be a top 1 % learner.

16:07You have to be a top 0.1 % learner, meaning that all the stuff that people talk about with AI that they're trying, you're not, even if you bookmark these posts and you listen to these posts and you put them on notebook LM and you're learning as much as you can, that's not learning at a top 0.1 % level. It means you actually have to be out there implementing. It means you actually have to be out there experimenting and doing, and that's how you're going to have value in the workforce in the future. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale.

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17:56It was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click, so your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter.

18:26Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Number three, your only moat in marketing is your brand. People can copy tactics, strategies, products, services. They can even rip off your design that Eric experienced this weekend from some random person in Europe. But your brand is something that people can't just copy. And a great example of this is Air Jordans. Michael Jordan shoes do well.

19:07If Eric and I wanted to create a shoe business with enough money and given a year's worth of time, we can figure out how to make a shoe that's just as comfortable and aerodynamic or Waze light or whatever it may be. I don't think that's the hardest thing to do, but we wouldn't generate a fraction of sales, not even 0.1 % of the sales as Air Jordans because we don't have that brand. This is number four. So number four, I believe that when it comes to moats around the future, I think there are two moats. I'm going to give the first one right now. The first mode is around data. So if you have a data mode, you think about all these LLMs, they're trained off of data around the internet, right?

19:51So if you have a lot of interesting data, you can pull. So Neil, for example, has UberSuggest, he has Scout, and he has Answer to Public, and I think he has a fourth one. But there's a lot of interesting data that he can pull that he can share to either get more distribution that way, or he can figure out how to take that data and make it more useful for his customers. I think data is going to become increasingly more valuable. And I don't think we're ever going to run short on data. The world's always gaining more and more information every day. And that would be number four. Yeah. Number five, don't waste your time marketing something unless you're willing to do it for 10 years.

20:28It takes 10 solid years for a brand to really start getting known and gaining traction within that industry. So whatever space you're in, it'll take at least 10 years to really gain traction. If you really plan on doing something for a year or two or three, you're wasting your time, go do something else. Number six, the better your offer, the better your conversion rates. And this will always be a commandment of marketing. and so if your offer is download my pdf and we will give you the 10 commandments of marketing versus if the offer was get on a call with neil and eric for one hour the second one is more valuable now a better one would just be have eric and neil give you a million dollars that would be a great offer right and so the better your offer is the higher conversion rates you're going to have and most people don't think about that number seven uh the new seo is search everywhere optimization people no longer just search on google they're searching everywhere ai platforms social media sites uh even booking.com and hotels.com have a version of a search engine airbnb the list goes on and on you need to optimize for search on all platforms if you create content on Instagram, when someone types in handbag, why doesn't your purse show up?

21:49Or when someone types in, you know, marketing tools, or, you know, why isn't your tool showing up, you got to optimize for all the platforms out there, because you don't know where people are going to be looking for your product or service. All right, number eight, I think number eight is you have to learn how to play the game natively. And what I mean by that is for search everywhere optimization, Neil and I are on a lot of different channels, I won't say we're the best at all these channels, right? In fact, at least for me, I'll just speak for myself. I think I'm pretty decent at some and I suck at some.

22:21And so what I mean by that is if you're on YouTube, for example, you have to understand that the meta, the most optimal way of playing is optimizing your thumbnail, your headline, the 30 second retention, or if you're doing shorts, you know, the scroll stopping, all these things, right? If you don't think about the meta for each channel that you're on, and you think you can just play the same for all of them, you're going to lose. And that's why I'll get to my my number 10 that leads into my number 10 but you have to know how to play the game natively i mean even noah here has a youtube channel which i um am i allowed to speak to it okay i can't speak to it but it's a youtube channel that generates many many many views and um you know he is he knows how to play the game natively and he knows how to pull the strings of his viewers yeah uh number nine if you're gonna do marketing it has to be global marketing from day one you need to think about how can you get your content not just on all platforms but in all major languages and there's a lot of tools out there like the hey gens of the world that can help you do this um you know recently forever 21 they announced that they expect to close all u.s stores and they blame i don't know how to pronounce these names she in and i know the next one the next one is timu for their downfall and these are asian brands that are disrupting the United States ecosystem and they're taking over and generating a lot of customers.

23:46My mom is another example. She tells me all the time, she's like, why do you buy from Amazon? She's like, I buy everything from Timu, it's cheaper. How does my mom, who is barely tech savvy, know to go to Timu to go buy stuff? That's global marketing. If you don't do global marketing, someone else is and they're gonna take your customers for you. number 10 carrying over from number eight you have to understand one if you're to play the game natively and if you're resource constrained in the beginning or just resource constrained period go for one channel first the problem with a lot of marketers is they try to attack multiple channels at once when they don't have the resources for it and that strips them of the ability to figure out how to play the game natively for one channel and they end up playing the game at a very poor level at all of them and they end up getting no distribution and they end up just blaming the channel or they say they're shadow banned or some stupid excuse so those are the 10 commandments of marketing how's that one guys um all right so you have another one yes did you see how meta wants its advertisers to connect to google analytics no yeah why meta is offering advertisers early access to ad system updates in return for integrating google analytics with their ad accounts and they're saying that people are getting that data yeah they're saying that people are getting i think like five ten percent it's i think it was five percent better lift when they do that let's see wait five five percent increase in conversions wow meta says setting up uh the connection just takes five to ten minutes advertisers with high quality integration saw additional five percent increasing conversions according to internal meta data so this is interesting because one of the things i wanted to say in the commandments is um your moats are really data and distribution in the long term and they're getting they already have the distribution they're just trying to get more more data because you think about it llama is open source ai well why would they do that why would they spend billions and billions of dollars because they know that's where the money's at they can also afford the only way i really believe for someone to go after open ai and chat gpt is you give away everything they have that's just as good or close enough but for free yeah i really do believe that's the only way to compete at this point yep and the thing is llama i mean i think it would just get better over that people like oh it's not that good right now sure but that's Maybe we haven't seen their endgame yet.

25:58Anyway, that's it guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. It helps us grow and we will see you later.