MrBeast's New Flywheel Is INSANE

0:00Eric Siu:So this tweet is from Ashnee Christ. So Ashnee says, this is a new creation media stack. So the new creation media stack, I call it the VSC flywheel. MrBeast uses it. So basically V stands for produce video that drives traffic to S. Okay, what is S? S is a stream, a consistent live show that becomes C. Well, what is C? C is clips, brand awareness generation tactic to drive traffic back to V. In a reality where everyone is a media company and competing for the same eyeballs, community is defensibility. And the VSC flywheel is how you build it. So they're also talking about like a 24-7 community hub, like a Discord, Telegram, school, et cetera.

0:41Eric Siu:By the way, if Neil and I were younger right now, I would say, Neil, if you and I were in our 20s doing this show, we'd probably have a school group. We'd probably be doing this. We'd probably go hard on clipping and all that. But we have a primary business. And so as much as time we'd like to put into this, we have other things that are higher leverage. So you just got to decide what's highest leverage for you. Don't just listen to whatever we're talking about. Because if we're younger, we'd be doing this for sure.

1:02Neil Patel:Yes, but our older selves have learned that the money is in the boring and the ugly, not the cool and the sexy. The majority of the biggest companies in the world are companies you've never heard of. Dude, so at the end of this year, it'll be the ninth year that I've been running NP Digital. I think you've been at how many years for Single Grain now, 12?

1:23Eric Siu:I joined single grain 2013, I want to say. So 13 years.

1:30Neil Patel:This is 13. Okay. So this will be my nine. This will be your, I think, 13 or 14. I don't know which year you're going to end up on. And the amount of companies we get head up by on an annual basis is a big number. The amount of companies we work with is much smaller. And a lot of it's dependent on can we A, produce results? because sometimes people have unrealistic expectations. And two, they don't always have the budget for their expectations or unrealistic expectations. And even if they have the budget and it's unrealistic, we'll tell them that it's not worth doing because they're not going to get the results that they want.

2:05Neil Patel:Because sometimes it's their CEO or CFO who puts it on them. They're like, I got to quadruple the business. And I'm like, you're a 50-year-old business. You're not going to quadruple your leads with the same amount of money or cutting back on money. And we've seen situations where people have less budget and they want way more leads. But every year, if I look at the majority of the companies we sign, I would say probably 40 % to 50 % of them I've never heard of. I'm talking about publicly traded companies or large enterprises. I've never heard of them. And I'm like, huh, oh, look at them. I never knew they were a$16 billion company.

2:41Neil Patel:There's just so many companies that make a crap load of money that most people have never heard of. And it just goes to show literally the money is in the boring and ugly.

2:53Eric Siu:You know what? The money is really in the boring and the ugly, but also the money is really in sticking with something for a long time.

2:59Neil Patel:That's true. But the boring and ugly typically has massive TAMs and just people don't want to do it because it's not cool. Both.

3:05Eric Siu:You need both. Like if I have a poo-poo shoveling company, which is important, you need fertilizer, right? Poo-poo. Yes. And you do a lot with poo-poo, right? And so, but my point is you do it for a variety. Or even trash, for example, you look at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, right? It took a very long time for them to grow. You have to be willing to go through the rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. So that's what it is.

3:25Neil Patel:And if you look at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, you know what they've done really well from a marketing perspective? They've outspent their competition. Hands down, if you look at their marketing, I've analyzed it quite a bit. They really do outspend their competition. And they want to make sure that they're top of mind. Now, you can't just go from a marketing perspective and be like, we're just going to spend more money and it's going to work. Your marketing has to be good. your product has to be good um you know your funnel has to be good in which the way you convert people it'll be pretty efficient as well but assuming you can fine-tune those other things

3:55Eric Siu:outspending does work there you go and we've i mean you and i used to go to this this um this this mastermind where uh i think it was ryan dice i always would like to say talk about like you

4:06Neil Patel:have to outspend your competitors remember that oh war room yeah yeah war room yeah okay by the

4:11Eric Siu:way this and this andrew chen tweet over here caught my eye and i i wanted us to to react to this one. So check this out.

4:17Neil Patel:So Andrew Chen, that recent Horowitz guy?

4:20Eric Siu:Correct. So hot take, the biggest and most productive people in the AI era are the folks who are already good at their jobs. AI as a multiplier, not an equalizer, democratizer. So basically, this is saying that this actually increases inequality.

4:36Neil Patel:I do. I agree with that. You and I have been talking about this for ages. I think the amazing marketers and the amazing people in the organization are going to come even better. And the crappy people, it's going to be really obvious that they're crappy and you're going to need less of them. Again, I think the workforce is going to look like a diamond. So typically people talk about a workforce as a pyramid. If you're on video, you can see me creating a pyramid. And when I say diamond, take a pyramid and then take another pyramid and flip it upside down. And then so you have a pointy top, a wide middle and a pointy bottom.

5:11Neil Patel:In other words, like if you look at a marketing department, you'll need your eight players at the top. You'll have a good group of people who are senior, mid-level and you won't need as many people at the bottom.

5:23Eric Siu:You know, what I've been finding, Neil, because I'm ground floor in terms of, I'm really in the trenches when it comes to bringing my team to AI Fluency because I naively believe that I can get everyone there because I think I can change people still, but you really can't, guys. This is me talking to myself. You believe you can change people, you can't. But anyway, I still believe I can. So all that to say is that it's very easy to see who's got it and who doesn't. And so the people that, you know, one person built, you know, an ad creative tool that can crank out ads. And then that's combining with our agents that we use inside of Slack.

5:54Eric Siu:So you can go inside of Slack and say, hey, we want to crank out more ad creatives here. Or on the sales side, literally I see, you know, someone from my sales team, he is cranking out all these different sequences and then finding new leads, enriching them, and then putting them into instantly. and then constantly refreshing them and adding more scaffolding to that. And so you can quickly see the ones that are hitting it head on versus the ones that are kind of shying away from it, right? And so what I want to say that I've been saying to the team is it's not an AI versus your work. It's not versus, it's and.

6:27Eric Siu:So people are like, oh, Eric, I don't have the time to learn AI right now. If I learn AI, then something's going to have to suffer. I'm like, no, like, did you need time to learn the internet first? No, like you need to do both right now. Like, are you like, and I'll say this too, Neil, the most joy I get, like there's people on my team that are working till 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. I'm like, hey, don't work so hard. Like, and I wasn't telling them to work till 1 or 2. I'm like, why are you working so much? Like, it's because I want to, Eric, because I'm having so much fun. I'm like, okay, that's great.

6:55Eric Siu:But still, you need more sleep, right? All that is, and so like, people are working so hard right now because it's so fun and there's not enough time in the day. So when I'm on the, I'm helping, when I'm working with people who are AI enabled, it's such a joy to do that right when i have the unfortunately when there's people that are resisting it's very hard and so i would just tell you that companies can't hold on that much longer when it comes to that um and you have to learn this stuff that's all i'll leave it at yeah but

7:21Neil Patel:you you do need to get good sleep and eric and i have seen this as entrepreneurs in which if you're not sleeping like ideally you want a solid eight hours like really try to get into deep sleep for as much of those eight hours as possible, you'll actually be much more productive and you'll perform way better, whether it's in marketing or business. Sleep is really huge and people take it for granted. Yeah.

7:43Eric Siu:And Neil, here's what I'll say too. I'm realizing something now. I'm like, if there's any big trade-off right now with the AI stuff, I'm like, guys, because you love to work so much, because work is so fun now, I'm realizing that there's more, like I used to kind of, you know, people are like, okay, you need a mental health policy. I'm like, This time, you probably do need a mental health take a break policy because if you don't put the brakes on your team, they're going to keep working so hard and they're going to burn out. I've seen so many people burn out before. You and I haven't really burnt out.

8:10Eric Siu:I don't think I have, at least. I don't think you have either. But there has to be some type of rest policy to stop from the AI psychosis.

8:17Neil Patel:Yeah. And the reason most people burn out is because they don't see progress. That's what I really think. We've talked about this in a past episode. It's just like if you can see progress, it doesn't necessarily mean revenue has to be going up or traffic has to be going up. But if you can see that you're going in the right direction, it's a good feeling. If you keep trying and you can't find any progress, we find that's when people tend to get burnt out the most.

8:38Eric Siu:Real quick, if acquiring customers has been a struggle for you and you are trying to figure out how AEO works, answer engine optimization or the new version of SEO, how paid works, how all this AI stuff is going to play into your customer acquisition strategy, then check out my ad agency, Single Grain. It's singlegrain.com. And if it looks like it's a good fit, we'll help you with a free marketing plan. So again, go to singlebrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Dude, you want to give me, you want to give me, let me give you, give you something else. I don't think I talked to you about this, Neil.

9:05Eric Siu:So I've been talking to a lot of these agency hold co people to potentially join the company. One of them, I don't, I don't think I told you about this, but he helped one agency exit for, you know, a couple hundred million or so was the president at this company. And I talked to a handful of these companies. So one thing is for sure. If you're working at like a, you know, like Omnicom or a Dentsu or something like that, all these people are looking to get out. I'm like, why are you looking to get out? Oh, it's a sinking ship. Our labor, our recharge model doesn't work anymore. I can't just hire people offshore and like, it works like that.

9:33Eric Siu:It doesn't work like that anymore. I'm like, okay, great. So tell me, what does your AI fluency look like right now? Like, what are you paying for AI per month? Oh, you know, I just paid a 20 bucks a month for chat GPT. I paid for Gemini. I'm like, okay, so what workflows are you? Oh, you know, I haven't gotten that far yet. I'm really interested in it though. I'm like, okay. So in my mind, I'm like, you want to jump ship, you want to be saved, but then you don't want to save yourself. And it's just funny how the world works, right? You want, like everybody wants to win. Nobody wants to prepare.

10:00Eric Siu:Dude, I was talking to a marketer

10:03Neil Patel:that I was interviewing the other day. And I was talking about what are some unique use cases that you've used AI for. And they're just like, and they're like, look, you can tell me anything. I'm like, what are you doing with AI? And they're giving me some examples of what they're doing with social media, crawling the latest news. from there seeing what's trending from there coming up with variations to posts that are text-based on LinkedIn and X and then from there it writes in their tone of voice adjusts it, shows it to them if they approve, it then just gets posted and I was like, cool, can you show me an example of what you've built with an agent that's up and running right now because they had access to the computer and all that kind of stuff they showed me They showed me them taking a DMV test, you know, like a traffic school online.

10:55Neil Patel:And they were saying how there's a minimum number of hours, how it acts like a human, goes through it, then clicks the next button. And then for the quiz, for each section, it copies and paces it in chat GPT, gets the right answer, plugs it in, answers it. and they're like this is how i'm gonna pass my speeding or pass my traffic school for a speeding ticket or whatever it's called i was cracking up i'm like well you should probably actually take it for this reason because you're doing something and you broke the law but i was just cracking up i'm like oh this is pretty creative i was like how long did it take you to do this and they're just like i did it in less than uh 40 minutes uh and i was like oh that's not that bad wouldn't it take you wouldn't just be faster to just zip through it and they're like no because with these traffic school systems that are online, they were telling me that you have to do like a minimum of, I don't know what it was, like three or four or 500 hours.

11:51Neil Patel:So they're like, it's just easier to build an agent to do it for you. I was like, oh, okay.

11:55Eric Siu:So are you moving him along the process or her? Yeah, actually I am.

11:59Neil Patel:But I did tell them, my recommendation was that they do traffic school actually themselves and not use the agent for it. Because I do think some things can be harmful. There's a reason why they're doing Travis School. And they said, oh, no, you're making a good point. They said they are going to do it manually. I don't know if that's true or not. But the reason I liked them was the creativity.

12:26Eric Siu:Here's what I'll say. And I think you're doing the same thing too. When I'm talking to people during interviews, all I want is an exceptional conversation. And usually an exceptional conversation revolves around AI because AI covers all four of our core values because it all the things right and so all I want is I want to feel energized after I leave the conversation I want them to show me examples as well I want them to be able to riff with me because that shows how it is in real life and one thing I learned about Elon Neil is when Elon hired people when he hired the president of Tesla he just literally brought him and and up to like the factory office or something and say hey let's work on this problem together and after the interview the guy's like where you going to go now?

13:04Eric Siu:He's like, I'm going to go down to the factor and go solve the same problem we've been talking about. And so he's literally testing you at different levels to see how far you can go. And I think that's how it has to be now. Because you really, if you don't do that, what ends up happening? Because hiring, it was Gary Vee that said this, hiring is guessing, firing is knowing. I'd rather have a very well-educated guess, especially nowadays, because you can't afford not to.

13:30Neil Patel:Yeah. But even if you have a really well-educated guess, The amount of people I've hired in marketing, and I know marketing well, and I would say Eric, you know, same level, he knows marketing really well. And I would say, and we're not trying to be arrogant. Eric and I know marketing better than most people. Even then, when you hire, you're not going to hit 100%. I don't care what you're an expert in. You can never be 100%. But we both learned over the years, don't just jump in and hire. Take your time. You still do need to fire fast. Eric knows this. I'm great at the firing fast part. Remember Mustache Man?

14:05Neil Patel:But the thing I made there, I hired Mustache Man way too fast. And the reason I'm calling him that is he had a really cool mustache, hired him too quickly, didn't work out, fired him really fast. But now we're much more picky on our hiring process. But even then, no matter how picky you are, how much you test people, you'll find that either A, some people are just great at interviewing or going through the processes, but they actually suck when you work with them. B, some people are amazing, but they're amazing for the time you needed them. And as a company changes, sometimes you need new people for your new problems and the old people can't adapt.

14:41Neil Patel:But those are the two biggest things that I've seen when it's coming to hiring and it just not.