Lessons From A Private Founder's Retreat

0:00Eric Siu:Did you know that most businesses only use 20 % of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. Or paying for coffee that's one-fifth full. Point is, you miss a lot. Unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped in emails, call logs, and transcripts. All that unstructured data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And when you get a full cup of coffee, you can do more too. But I digress.

0:28Neil Patel:Visit HubSpot.com today.

0:35Eric Siu:Using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com.

1:07Eric Siu:Being a know-it-all used to be considered a bad thing, but in business, it's everything. Because right now, most businesses only use 20 % of their data unless you have HubSpot, where data that's buried in emails, call logs, and meeting notes become insights that help you grow your business. because when you know more, you grow more. See, being a know-it-all isn't so bad. Visit HubSpot.com today to learn more.

1:34Eric Siu:Nobody likes a spoiler unless it's your customers telling you exactly what they need. But too bad most businesses miss out on these signals. The hits dropped in emails, the messages hidden in call logs and chats, all of it trapped in the digital ether. But with HubSpot, you get all this data in one place. Their customer platform brings together are the insights you need to grow your business. And spoiler alert, the more you know, the more you grow. Visit hubspot.com to find out how today.

2:07Eric Siu:Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools, to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. All right, guys, we're going live. It's another episode of Marketing School. It's 4 a.m. where Neil is. It is 7 a.m. where I am in Florida. And I'm here in Florida for a founder's retreat.

2:46Eric Siu:We're in Palm Beach right now, actually, Neil. The hotel I'm in, let's just say, it is a rip-off for what it is. I'm not going to name the hotel, but it's a nice hotel.

2:56Neil Patel:You're in the Surfside? Is that what it's called?

2:58Eric Siu:No, no, no, no. I'm in Palm Beach. Surfside is where Surfside is. That's north of Miami. But we're here for a retreat. Some of our mutual friends are here, like Sia, Geneve, a couple other people. Al Doan, quilt guy. And so, yeah, it's David Hensel. I think you met him as well. So yeah, it's a good group of people. We've been doing this retreat since 2018 or so. So we actually did a fun reflection. So actually, Syed was the one that planned this out. So it's been amazing. And he had us do a YPO exercise, actually. And I'll kind of talk about the retreat. You can ask questions around it. We'll talk about AI as well.

3:40Eric Siu:We'll talk about marketing. I'll reveal what I can without revealing any confidential information. And we could talk about the retreat first. There's some other stuff to talk about this week, but let's first go to the exercise that

3:53Neil Patel:Syed had you guys do.

3:54Eric Siu:So the exercise was, and this will be fun if you do it. You're not the type of person to do this, but it'll be fun if you do it. Okay. So, and I don't think he was actually the type of person to do this exercise before either. So it's called then, now and later. So you basically reflect on 10 years ago. And then, so 10 years ago, like, what were you doing? Where were you in your life? Like, how are things going overall? Am I making sense so far?

4:18Neil Patel:Yeah.

4:18Eric Siu:okay when you look at now it's like okay how are things going up like you're you're 40 i'm 39 years old we're around the same age like you know is our life did it turn out the way we expected it to be how's it going now you're married we were with kids right and all that then you do 10 years out like what's going to be happening in 10 years right are you doing like two billion dollars in revenue three billion dollars in revenue whatever right um and so it was really interesting because um you know some people shared a lot of pictures and i realized mine didn't have any pictures in And so everyone had reflected on their pictures because you just look at your Apple photos, right?

4:51Eric Siu:And I looked at mine. You know what's interesting, Neil? Ten years ago, you, Yaniv, and I were speaking at his conference. And at the time, you know, yeah, there's a lot of things that were going really well. I think in all our lives, but I think things were going really well at that time. I'm not going to go into details, whether it's on the personal side, whether it's on the business side as well. I think we're all on the very right track. and we just never knew where what life would take us right I'll just leave it at that right now without revealing anything so I thought that was a great exercise because people really got to reflect and the one thing I'll share with you and then we can talk more about the retreat itself because you know literally I'm supposed to be playing tennis right now but you know we're recording podcasts so that's how committed we are to you guys so you know Walter who's a really smart marketer very good with copyright I don't think you've ever met him before um but you know he has you know an amazing family amazing kids and this is public already so this i can reveal um he did uh he's been recording these short form clips and posting on the instagram one of them got uh 21 million views i gotta send it to you one one's really funny um and the other ones were like he's playing his kid basketball and his kid ends up beating him right like this is where like the the son surpasses the father um but he always makes sure to integrate his family and everything with everything and like faith is first family is second right that that type of stuff um and so anyway it just proves to you that you know despite you being like 40 years old 45 years old or whatever it is exactly um you can still play whatever game you want to play and he proved to his kids that daddy can get lots of social media views and they're like calling him like oh you don't know anything about this you need to have a good hook he's like bro like are you serious like i'm a marketer right so i thought that was really fun and then a lot of a lot of nba players a lot of basketball players actually reached out to him after he put up that video everyone's like man that really brought me back and so all that to say is like that i think the lesson for everyone here is like the then the uh then now later um it's a fun exercise the other piece is if you can somehow if you have kids if you can do social media and really participate in your kids lives and try to bring them along with you um i think that's the ultimate reward and i can see that with him so yeah i've never done the

7:05Neil Patel:uh what is it called then now later later but i've done something similar and i actually do something similar not every single day but multiple times a week where i think about all the mistakes i've made from 24 years ago when i started as an entrepreneur to even 10 years ago or five years ago, and I break down what I would do differently to be much further off 10, 15 years from now. Okay.

7:39Eric Siu:So do you want to reveal anything? Sure.

7:42Neil Patel:So some of the big lessons that I've learned over the years, and I'll start really broad and then I'll get really specific. The first big lesson that I learned was from an investor named Tony Conrad. And Tony Conrad was one of my early investors. I think he was on the board of WordPress, which is automatic, right? The parent company is automatic. He sold a company, I believe, to Yahoo. He sold a company to AOL. He is an investor, but he's done well as an investor. I think he's been like Uber, Peloton, Blue Bottle Coffee, and the list goes on and on and on. And I remember Tony Conrad used to always tell me, you need a big TAM.

8:31Neil Patel:You need a big TAM. And we would just shove it down our throat. Okay. And I remember some of my earlier companies, I believe were companies, like for example, when we started Crazy Egg, it was a heat map tool. And it would just show you where people click, where they don't. and Tony would always say, you know, like, hey, you need a big TAM. You don't want to just build a feature or two. And when you look at that product, at least the original version, it was just a feature. It wasn't pure web analytics. And back then there was a lot of detailed web analytics companies out there, including Googlebot Urchin.

9:10Neil Patel:Urchin ended up turning into Google Analytics and they ended up making it free. But one little feature isn't a product. And the bigger the market you go after. For example, when you think about market, most people think about quantity of people that it's applicable to. That's one version of TAM. Example of that is toilet paper. Another example is CRM and being Salesforce. It's not applicable to everyone, but the people who it is applicable to can spend a lot of money on it and it's worth a lot of money firm. So from a dollar perspective, both toilet paper and CRM are big markets. And you can make billions and billions of dollars doing anything that's big.

9:55Neil Patel:If you go after a niche, it's really hard to make money because the riches are not in niches. They're after really small markets. No matter how much energy you spend marketing, it's roughly the same effort. And I remember speaking on a panel with Rich Barton, the the Zillow founder, Expedia founder. I don't know what else he did. I think Glassdoor was his as well. And I remember Rich saying, if you're going to, you know, whatever market you go after, it's pretty much the same effort, right? So if you're going after a niche versus a really big, broad market, it's pretty much the same effort from a marketing perspective.

10:37Neil Patel:And the analogy that he used is the energy it takes, and this is a baseball analogy, the energy it takes to hit a single versus a double or triple or a home run is the same energy. You're still going up to the plate. You're still swinging and giving it your all. So might as well go for a home run each and every single time. And I personally agreed with it. And that taught me to stop building businesses in niches because all marketers are like, riches are in the niches. And it's just a big misconception. So that was the first big lesson that I learned, but it took me probably 12, 13 years to really understand and figure that out a little bit too long.

11:16Eric Siu:So what Neil's saying in business is absolutely right. The same energy goes into a business. You might as well go for a home run, but in physics, in actual baseball, it does take a little more energy to hit a home run than a single. Yes. Just wanted to flag that, but you know what's interesting, Neil? So I guess I'll reveal where I'm staying because there are some lessons around where I'm staying right now. I think from a marketing standpoint and the supply and demand standpoint so we're staying at the breakers hotel in palm beach so you know famous hotel been around for a while this is this um a flagger flagler family i think owns a lot of the properties around here um it's not a cheap hotel so why why is it that the hotels are wait what's not cheap what's the cost so i mean it's public but um it's so for the room that i'm in right now i'll tell you the room i'm in and then i'll tell you the cost i think that this is like a 300 square feet room okay like look don't get me wrong it's it's it's a you know that's nice room like look they put icelandic water in here and like you did they put like they give you these pellagrino water right for free or do you gotta pay for the water it's free it's free you know coco floss the 15 dollar floss that i use the really yeah so they they have that in there they give you like nice things and all that it's 2200 a night night for this room okay for like 300 square feet water you can get no water view dude i have like i can see like the courtyard okay um so that is expensive right yes and i thought i would get like a four season surfside view where it's like water view it's huge it's super modern and all that no i'm like okay guys like why is it so expensive right and it's it's because it's a very legendary it's it's the brand like you know you look at the people walking through it's very have you seen palm royale on apple tv it's all about

12:54Neil Patel:palm beach have you seen it i only saw like 10 minutes of it and yeah so it is literally palm

12:59Eric Siu:royale where it's like people are wearing like you know those really nice sweaters you know draped over them and then like everyone's dressed really nicely it's totally that like you and even i were talking about like dude this this is so palm royale right now let me tell you this the tennis court that we go to we're like the membership pre-covid for the tennis court was 200 you pay 250 grand for the privilege, okay, of paying 35 grand a year. So you don't even pay 250 grand for the membership where you can sell it later. You're not buying equity, okay, for the privilege. Now, how much do you think that membership is post-COVID?

13:32Neil Patel:500.

13:34Eric Siu:700 grand. You're paying 700 grand for the privilege. And don't get me wrong, it's a really nice tennis court, but that's a whole supply and demand thing because, you know, with breakers, people want to be associated with the brand it's legendary and all that right and then the tennis court because the supply is is so low now everyone wants to play tennis they want to play pickleball and all this that's how much it costs now right it's no different than the la uh country club that that you and i have talked about right the prices for these things because they're scarce just keep going up but the difference is in la you can sell it you kind of get to buy equity there i didn't know that you could sell it at la country club i don't know about la but um the la tennis club my friend bought in for like 8 000 like pre-COVID and then now it's worth like 50 grand and he could sell it.

14:15Neil Patel:Oh, that's good.

14:16Eric Siu:Yeah. So anyway, all that to say, I thought that was interesting. But, you know, there's I think the we did do like a lot of presentations where people were talking about their business. So usually the agenda for these things, just so everyone knows, because I think live events, we've been talking quite a bit about live events. I think this is the type of live event that people should be considering, because I think it's, you know, if you're whether you're in business or like you're you're working for someone it's good to have a peer group right and so our agenda for this one is like tennis like you know I'll tell you the agenda today I'll just make it simple so it's seven to nine is like you know solo activity so typically I'm playing tennis with you need even and Walter and we have a tennis coach right ended at nine we typically start nine to twelve we do exploration so Neil you might be presenting on like a business problem and we maybe we go for an hour or so and we kind of go around and sharing you know our experiences in the room.

15:10Eric Siu:So everyone gets a problem to solve, right? And then we have lunch and then we go back and we do AI shares for about an hour or so. And then we play either pickleball, basketball, or today we're playing cricket, which is, I guess, you know, your country plays that quite a bit, right? So we're playing cricket today at Syed's house, right? And then we're going to have dinner. And then we're basically done at 7pm every day and you get alone time. Today, it's a little more leisure, like, you know, we'll go, like, we'll hang out. But today we do some massages, we go to Syed's house. but that's how it's structured and it's like a three-day thing and then we try to go to like a different place every year but I highly recommend that everyone like if you've never done events before you want to know how to do events you should start something like this because this is when I did the then now later exercise this group was started basically 10 years ago or so and eight years let's call it and it's day consistent and it's really fun to see how people have grown over the years so I'll just leave it at that and I'm happy to share around the AI stuff too, but yeah.

16:08Neil Patel:But before we go back to you and I discussing some of the marketing lessons we've learned over the years, when you did your then, now, later, what are some things that you reflected on for the last 10 years that you did that you may have would have done differently from a marketing aspect or business aspect?

16:27Eric Siu:I'll give you one for the personal aspect first. There was a lunch we were having. It was your now wife, myself. You know, there was a gal with me. should have married her more like 4 p.m 5 p.m in arizona yes yes and then yuneev was there too so at least one of my personal lessons should have just married her right for me um that's one um i think um lessons wise also i mean obviously i learned to focus a lot better right i think that that's a big one i think um had had you know i shall just leave it on me had i stayed focused I think things would be different. I'm still happy with the outcome in terms of what I've learned over time.

17:09Eric Siu:And I think it's really those two things that stuck out to me. And then also, I will say, I had a lot of pictures of the office that we got back then. Having people in person, it's very difficult to beat that, especially with some of the topics that we'll talk about today with AI and all that. We did have a fun discussion. So that's the den. But Neil, I'll throw you something that maybe we could come back to. um so i had brought about we had a debate point around this on one universal basic income is going to happen um for the majority of the population how far do you think that is um away neil extremely

17:43Neil Patel:far because we can't afford it we have issues getting budget approval for anything right now

17:49Eric Siu:pick pick pick like a range like three to five years five to ten uh 15 plus 20 plus what do you think it is i don't think it's going to happen okay is this zero percent chance i'm not i i don't

18:00Neil Patel:know for certain, but if I had to pick a number, I would say it's not going to happen at all.

18:04Eric Siu:Okay. It's really, it's really interesting because everyone across the board had different answers. And then obviously some people are way more opinionated than other people. So they'll like put their opinion down way harder. But it's interesting. Like I can see that answer coming from you and you know, we'll see what happens overall. But even when I put a poll up on Twitter yesterday, it's like all over the place. Like nobody really knows. My guess is five to 10 years. um science is 15 which is actually pretty fast still um and everyone else was actually some people were actually more aggressive than i was like three to five years i don't know about that yeah yeah your need was actually three to five years so oh wow yeah i i look at ai as more of

18:44Neil Patel:the change we had from things like agriculture manufacturing and humans in general yes a lot of them lost jobs, but then we adapted and there was new jobs that were created. I look at AI as the same thing in which and I'm a big believer in Peter Thiel's camp and Thiel talks about how a lot of people talk about AI and all the stuff it's going to do. And then you got the doomspeople that talk about how it's not going to affect anything. He's somewhere in the middle. I'm with him. I'm not saying he's right or wrong. I love his viewpoint because he is an investor in a lot of these AI companies. So for him, he actually makes more money if it succeeds.

19:24Neil Patel:But for him to state that a lot of it's overblown from a job perspective, and I do believe it. Like when Heineken says, we cut off 9 ,000 employees because of AI. I'm not saying AI can't impact employees. I doubt Heineken actually cut 9 ,000 employees because of AI. From a marketing perspective, that's a great narrative to pitch to the market. If you pitch the narrative of, hey, we had all these employees, we weren't able to perform, and we weren't doing well, so we had to terminate them, that's probably going to make your stock tank because people are like, you're not doing as well. Using the AI narrative is much more advantageous.

20:07Neil Patel:And I remember CNBC was at a conference or there was a big AI conference or a tech conference. CNBC, Bloomberg was all there. And they're interviewing a lot of these founders, both the Perplexity founder and the Anthropic founder. And both of them said, most of these job losses have nothing to do with AI. Everyone's just using AI as a scapegoat. That doesn't mean AI won't impact jobs in the future. but as of now when people are like, yeah, we're at Heineken, we're in manufacturing and we have all these people in the back office. These big organizations move really, really slow. I don't know if you've seen any organizations the size of Microsoft or Heineken or Coca-Cola move extremely fast like a startup, Eric.