Ryan Trahan’s Bike Boom, AI’s Winners & Losers, and the SEO Comeback

0:28Ryan Trahan, do you know who that is? that you ride this bike and it's in your videos, we're gonna give you an extra 10 grand. So I think that maybe they gave 50 grand initially and then it was like 10 grand each time, right? And they knew he had 50 more videos to make. And he kept riding that bike as like an electric bike. And what happened was these videos were getting some of them 50 million views or whatever. A lot of views, right? And so I think what happened to this company was that they exploded their revenue. And I don't have exact numbers here, but if you are smart and you know if someone's gonna do this trip and you know you can smartly insert yourself in and then almost incentivize this influencer, you're getting a ton of ad impressions for your product all the time.

1:07People start to associate, oh, I need an electric bike. Okay, I'm gonna go with that one. I'm gonna go with that one. So that's what they did. And I think you have to be lucky in this case, right? You have to be opportunistic to get your product in there at the right time and then be smart about how you incentivize this influencer because this influencer is trying to raise money. Okay, we'll give you 10 grand each time in every video. Who else is doing that? Not enough people are doing that. Yeah, I've seen some of them on Instagram, but companies don't seize the opportunity. I think it would be wise for them.

1:33For example, I saw a gentleman who is overweight and he was saying for every thousand followers, he'll walk a mile. It was something like that. So his follower count started going up. I started liking his content and I was like, good for you. And he's starting to lose weight. And this is early on in the journey where I've seen it. Fast forward to now, it's probably been seven, eight months later. He's lost a lot of weight. But a company should have went and sponsored it like a Subway or a healthy food company. It could be anything, right? That is just all about like health and wellness, maybe a nutrition company.

2:08Yeah. And I think they would have done very well. Dude, if Chipotle sponsored Ryan Trahan every day, we're going to feed you Chipotle or even Sweetgreen, right? Hey, you know, you're going to do it. You're going to travel to every single state. You're going to try to make a video. We need you to eat healthy to be a beacon of like a role model to Americans, right? All over the world. So you saw their stock today, right? Sweetgreen. They just tanked. Did they? 26%. Why did they tank? Earnings. Oh, wow. Sweetgreen shares dropped 25 % after Salad Chain cuts Outlook for the second time in two quarters.

2:40I wasn't laughing at them. I was trying to hold in a cough. But yeah, it kind of sucks. But the market's hard right now. Do you know what RPI means? Revenue per... The first thing you think about is revenue. Okay. So it's restaurant performance index. Restaurant performance index? Okay. One of our, I don't know if you've ever met George, I think you probably met George Gammon, but he actually watches this. He's great with macroeconomics, right? He has a YouTube channel. So I was watching one of his videos yesterday and he talks about like, sure, you look at inflation data, you look at job reports data, but all that can be manipulated pretty easily by the government, right?

3:15Yeah. But when you look at restaurant performance index, you can see when there's weakness, like every time it drops below a certain amount, every session happens. Right. And because that shows like how weak the consumer is. If they're not going out to eat that much and sweet green dropping and I go to sweet green like I just had it yesterday. That means the consumer is backing off a little bit. And so it's actually negative point one right now or something like that. So it's worth looking at that. And Warren Buffett likes looking at the railroad data. If you have less railroads transferring stuff, that's also weakness in the economy.

3:47So I don't know how that looks right now, but it's worth taking a look at because who knows how we're doing right now. I have no idea if the economy is getting worse or better. I just know for our company, the last few months we're starting to see signals. And I shared some of that data earlier in the podcast. And I want people to keep one thing in mind. Forget railroads. Forget restaurant indexes. when things get bad, what's the first thing that gets cut? Your spend? Your, what do you call it? Disposable spending. No. When things get bad for corporations, what's the first thing? Oh, marketing.

4:23Yes. Yeah, yeah. And when things start looking better, what's the first thing they add back? Marketing. That's right. Because it's the easiest thing to adjust. If you already have inventory and you're sending stuff on a train, that's booked in advance. Marketing spend, you can just turn up and down like a knob. mm-hmm but they do but hey meta and google continue to do good yeah so by the way if you look at his videos over here like each one of these is like 2.4 million 3.2 million 2.7 of it you can see the bike over here i've never seen this guy so he did a collab with mr beast um where he traveled the u.s he's like i'm gonna try to survive on one penny and he made it happen at the very end of it mr beast appeared in a video and they gave him like a giant penny or something like that um but so how do you survive with it's like the guy who traded a red paper clip for a house or something like that i don't i he kept i think he he traded a penny to somebody else and got like a dollar and he kept like compounding it and then um you know it became something he could survive on that i think that's how it worked yeah but no there was you saw the red paper clip right no back in the day no uh red paper clip when's back in or uh this guy's really young so it's called one red paper clip one red paper clip is a website by canadian blogger kyle mcdonnell who traded his way from a single red paper clip to a house in a series of 14 online trades over a course of a year dude this just so that's like a wide tam idea right these are wide tam ideas so you look at how many days can i double one dollar and that one got 18 million views and i tested one star hotels 15 million views i visited 50 states in 50 days 10 million views right and then you can see it starts with a lot of views and it kind of tapers off over time but But it just goes to show you the idea matters a lot.

6:02And I was talking to my brand team about this recently. I was like, guys, if there's one thing I can impact right now, what do you think it is that's going to impact it? It's like everyone's giving all these answers. I was like, guys, it's just the idea. And I haven't spent enough time on ideation. And I haven't spent enough time on approvals, right? I kind of just let things go. And so I'm like, if we want to do better here, I'm going to spend more time on ideation. I'm going to be a bottleneck. I'm going to help with approvals. But there's also design approvals as well. There's also the writing of the content.

6:27there's actually a lot that goes into the funnel of this stuff. And what we just talked about, sometimes you just have to focus on what works well, and then you kind of have to ignore the other stuff. And for example, when you post to LinkedIn, you're not thinking about, oh, how does the LinkedIn algorithm work? You're just reposting stuff, right? So largely you should just focus on one channel that works well, and the other ones you're okay maybe letting it slide a little bit. Yes, but Eric's not saying ignore the other channels and not leverage them. He's saying use the other channels, but you may not get as good of results and that is okay depending on your business and the ROI for some of those channels.

7:03If a channel is extremely powerful and you can generate a lot of profit from it, you don't want to let those slide. But if some of those are secondary channels where you know you're not going to drive as much revenue, it's okay. But speaking of focus, dude, I've been focusing on redoing our site. Oh, that's like the third or fourth time you've changed it in the last month or two. Yeah, so I changed it to, it hasn't launched yet. We make sure customers find you everywhere from Google to ChatGPT. And the subtext is, we help you show up everywhere customers are searching, swiping. That's a good headline.

7:34Yeah, but the subheadline is better. We help you show up everywhere customers are searching, swiping, scrolling, streaming, and shopping. That's good. Who came up with that? Colin from my team. It was already on our website. Is it a copywriter? No. No? He's a marketer. He's a really good marketer. That's really good for both of them. The headline was Gajon from Spiralize. I think he's the one who came up with the headline. Yeah. It was a variation of mind. Yeah. See, that's another thing. Your relationship with Gajan, sometimes it's, not sometimes, all the time, this is why it's good to network.

8:03This is why it's good to make relationships. Because that thing, you just, hey, just get on a call. It's okay. You don't have to pay anything for that. Dude, no. I think you're going to refer customers to him too. I refer customers because his work is good and he's made me millions of dollars. That's the real reason I refer. Because if I refer him and he does shit work, then I'm going to - That makes you look bad. Yeah, it makes me look bad. But we were planning on redoing our site. And I'm like, man, I don't like our site. It has too much messaging, has stuff about our values. I'm like, no one cares about this.

8:31No one cares for careers on our homepage. I want to type this up and I want to do CRO or optimize for conversions and not just how it looks. So I was talking with my team and the way this idea came about is I had this idea and one of Gajon's former employees hit me up like a month or two prior and he was looking for a job. And we couldn't come to alignment on salary. This person was based in India and I'm like, I cannot pay someone in India these kind of wages. I'm like, this is more than what I would pay someone for this job in America. They're great at what they do. I just didn't want to pay it.

9:07I'm not saying that's right or wrong. That was just the reality. So then I called Gujan and I was like, dude, I want to redo the homepage. I'm looking for someone cheap who can do it because I don't want to do it myself. and I just I really just did not want to do it and Gajan's like dude you already know what you want right and I'm like yeah I already know what I want and I break down to him like this is exactly what I want and I gave him six numbers and I put them in order on how I want to change it and I already had a lot of the copy written I myself am not a designer but I didn't want to pull my designers from my uber suggest project we're releasing all the AI stuff to go help with this and Gajan's like dude why don't I just do it for you I'll just do it for free I have a ton of staff I was like thanks dude sounds good so then he turned my idea into vision he also added his own flair and what was unique about him is he scrapes the internet for every single a b test no joke literally every single a b test so if you have a b testing code on your website he's looking at what test you're running and which one ended up becoming the default.

10:12So he knows what wins and what does. What does. Yeah. So when he took my copy, took my ideas, added in some of his own elements, showcased the homepage, and he's like, here's how many times we run a similar test, here's how many times it's one, and here's the average conversion lift that you should expect before we even run it. And I'm like, we're not going to run a test. He's like, you don't want to run an A-B test? He's like, you're a conversion guy, Neil. You wouldn't want to run an A-B test? I'm like no I don't like my current website I'm not optimizing for leads I'm actually optimizing for RFPs because if you look at how many RFPs we get on a monthly basis it's not enough volume to run an A-B test and I'm changing things like you know one thing Gajan has to do is you know right where it says stop right hire us the button he'll add a button that says RFPs it doesn't mean someone's going to add us to RFP because of it it's more so when people visit the website they'll know that we deal with RFPs and maybe in the future we'll include it more.

11:07Yeah. So, but yeah, it just goes down to what you're talking about, like focus and just getting in. I'm like, I want this done. And I was a little bit lazy because I don't have design skills and I didn't want to use AI to design it for me. So he helped me out. Plus he came up with a lot of good ideas. Even if you get a couple more RFPs a year from that, it's worth it, right? And the other thing is, Gajon doing this, it's one, we're talking about on this podcast, hopefully it gets another couple of leads or whatever. But the other thing too is you'll remember that. Like, especially if you drive a lot more RPs, there's no way you're not going to remember that.

11:40And the first person that's going to come to mind is him, right? Because marketing, especially with marketing services, just business in general, it is whoever comes to mind, top of mind first, because 99 % of people are never in market or not in market to buy right now, but it changes. You just have to be top of mind. This is why you run, you just spend the 50 grand a month on these ads, right? You just got to be top of mind. But no, the cool part about me doing the homepage is, is I have my own opinions on what's going to convert the best and my team does but i love the approach we scrape the whole internet and b2b and here are all the tests that want yeah here's what's most likely to win for you for a service-based company i'm like sounds good give it to me by the way like that if you want to stand out especially in this world now you have to go the extra mile and he's going a couple extra miles to do that and to have that data that that stands out versus the vast majority of cro companies remember that cro company you're trying to buy i'm pretty sure they're not doing something like this uh no but i tried to buy his company first oh you did i'm talking about the one i introduced you yeah that one didn't work out yeah then my other buddy um sean introduced me to another cro company based in canada uh they didn't want to sell either yeah but zero out of the three and then gajon's company and that was too big for me to buy yeah so they do well and that's all they focus on dude he's grown like a hockey stick over the last few years they just focus on cro that's it only cro he won't do other service lines and get into other stuff he's like this works i can build uh but he gets paid on outcomes too it's base fee and outcome uh no it depends a lot of it is just outcome outcome based yeah so when you by the way there's no i'm saying no base fee there is pure outcome yeah i forgot he kind of explained it to me and i want to reveal his pricing structure to everyone but like when you charge on performance you do well you look at center field right yeah So it makes more money.

13:29No, and I'll be honest. You may hate me for saying this, but I'll be transferring. You can call them and find out yourself. Three models. You charge monthly retainer, which you and I do. And he has that model as well. The other model is you can do a smaller fee monthly and then a percentage of the lift. And then the third model is pure percentage of the lift. And he'll collect a tail for that too. that model is the most lucrative. I love that model. We can't get large companies to sign off on that model. It's too risky for them. Too risky. It's not projected out in their numbers. They don't like it.

14:07They rather just say, we're paying you a fee and this is it. And if you knocked it out of the park, we're not paying you any extra. Yeah, procurement likes simplicity. Uh-huh. And then they're like, if you fail and you don't produce good results, we're cutting you off. Technically, you can do this with a smaller SMB division, but the numbers don't map out there. I think you have to have the mid part work. He has mid-market. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what's working out really well. Because I know some of his clients, when it's enterprise, they don't do performance-based fees. Which is fair. He'll take the larger retainer, and that's fine because he's good with that.

14:36Yes, but because I was talking about his pricing model. I think he takes 25 % of the lift or 30%. I don't know what it is, actually. No, it's not a set fee like that. It's depending on the size of the company, the volume, and the margins. because let's say if you're selling protein powder, your margins aren't as good as let's say if you're selling software. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So by the way, that's another thing. When you get on a sales call and you don't just talk about your solution, you start talking about what their business challenges are and how their business works, it becomes a totally different conversation and you can price differently according to that because now they respect you more because you're talking about their business versus just trying to sell them on like your software or your service.

15:15Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I have this one over here. i actually think so i've been nerding out on this i've been showing you i think but i think the future marketing is going to look like online poker so remember i talked about this other day we're on a podcast together um with hubspot again and the guy like showed up in and out like the last time we did a podcast with hubspot but that's that's a side no no knock on hubspot no no hubspot's great yeah so um basically i think the future of marketing is going to look like online poker. So I used to play 16 tables at once, right? I had one large screen and then each like section had four screens.

15:52So I was playing a lot and I had a heads up display showing me how aggressive each player was, how loose a player was, right? And what the win rate was, all this stuff, right? So I could see it for each player. And so to me, it was like playing a video game. I'm working more and more in a terminal, meaning I use cursor and I use cloud code and I use MCPs. And I have a WordPress connector, I have a HubSpot connector, I have an Ahrefs connector, a Google Analytics connector, a GSC connector, and I can query whatever I want, and I'll get responses very quickly. Okay, what's the LTV of this? Can I make a landing page over here?

16:19Can I make a thumbnail that looks like what we have over here? Can I quickly get trending keyword data on what we should be targeting based on how my keywords have converted? What's cannibalizing? What should we be updating? What hasn't been updated for a while? I don't need to wait anymore. And so I think what's gonna happen eventually is I'm just gonna have a lot of these sub-agents in cloud code that you can set up. You just prompt it, it creates a sub-agent for you. this is the worst it'll ever be. And I'm telling you, like, I'm way more efficient now. And I just think not even just the future marketing, but the future business will be multi-instance because someone like you and me, we're just going to have it open and you don't want to wait.

16:53I don't want to wait. No. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's just done. Like, oh, this is done over here. Okay, here's the results. Okay, boom. Okay, you should do this over here based on these results. Okay, boom. And I'm just like running all these things. And it's like that, the guy, this online poker player, he used to play StarCraft Elkie. He had like 48 tables open. And he's like looking at it, right? That's a picture of him doing that. So I think that's what's going to happen. I do think that's the future. In my office that my wife is designing, I was thinking about having a multi-monitor setup, like 16-ish or something like that, whatever ends up creating a nice screen.

17:27And each one was big enough, but they're all connected. And each one having different reports that is being worked on right now. Because I'm like, man, with AI, a lot of things are moving faster in my organization. I'm like, I want to see real-time data, but I want to see, you know, data in real time and have tons of different screens all open at once. And I can just be in my office and look like what's working and what's improving every single hour or day and be like, cool, this one needs more work. This one doesn't. This one's doing fine on a side. Which is what you're doing right now anyway.

17:56You're just like hitting whack-a-mole everywhere in the company. That's what you're doing. Yes. That's the highest leverage thing we can do is to find a high leverage problems. That's how you do it, right? And so I've been posting about this and I've probably introduced like eight different people to my tutor. So he's good. Oh, you're a. Yeah. I'm like, what do you need a tutor for? Dude, because main thing for me is I'm not technical. He helps me set things up, right? I get that. When he tries to teach you, I'm like, don't teach me. I like just like whatever I'm blocked, like let's just unblock me.

18:26And then I just open up my Zoom, give him remote control and I go watch TV. Yeah. But when you think tutor, I think of school. like in school. Yeah. So when he starts teaching, I'm like, damn it, don't teach me. Let me figure it out on my own. But it's, it's been good. It's, that's a super high leverage use of my time. Our mutual friend, Yaneve uses him. So yeah. Oh, cool. Yeah. How about what big companies are saying about AI and SEO? I'm curious. What are they saying? Okay. From Glenn Osop, here's what he said about public companies that are talking about AI and SEO right now. So if I can sum up the hours or transcripts I've listened to, Oh, he listened to a bunch of transcripts.

19:01I could read over the past few weeks. It would be this search traffic. is down we see opportunities in getting traffic from ai answer platforms and we're preparing for that traffic from those sources is small but converting better which is what we've been saying right where we can we're making deals with platforms to enhance our visibility and that of our customers we're relevant we want to reduce our reliance on search by creating better relationships with our audience growing on social media and utilizing email and events but we're by no means giving up on it which is actually going to lead into your other topic that you have we've had traffic challenges in the past, and this is no different.

19:33We also see AI as an opportunity to improve our processes and operations. And so this is a tough topic to comment on because on one hand, I feel ready and excited for marketing challenges going forward and all the opportunities that will be for those being proactive. So if you look at this over here, this chart, you can see Airbnb sentiments. They said that a lot of travel switching from desktop to mobile and from Google search to social media. But you look at the sentiment, most of it's red, right? Red means bad. Green means positive, right? So only three companies in here are green. New York Times, Red, Vimeo Red, Wayfair Red, Wix Red.

20:06Like all these are heavily dependent on SEO. BigCommerce and Chegg have been hit pretty hard, I guess. But that's how it is. 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. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style.

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22:28We were in this period for, I would call it six months this year, where a lot of companies are still doing SEO, but they're just like, I don't know. I want to see what happens with AI. And they're starting to slowly accept that you still have to keep doing traditional SEO because A, it helps with AI SEO. A lot of the factors are the same. But B, a lot of the companies we talk to, they're like, I don't know. We think it's going to be drastically impacted by AI and it's not worth doing. And these are large corporations that have, the ones I'm thinking of, I'm thinking of three particularly, that have market caps over 10 billion.

23:04No joke, two out of the three came back in the last 45-ish days. talking about, hey, it makes up too much of our revenue. We still need to focus on it. We can't ignore it. And we need to start getting back into it. And how do we make up for lost time? I believe the third one will come back. But we're also seeing this on the S &B side where people before AI SEO was a shiny object, and I still believe it is. But now they're willing to also come back and reinvest in traditional SEO because it's profitable. It drives a lot of revenue if you do it right. Yeah, and we've been saying this. Traditional SEO, it's a cigar butt thing.

23:39It's not going to die overnight. It's going to slowly decline overnight, but it's still very useful right now. And it's good to have our original skill still be useful. I don't know if it's going to die fully. I don't think it's going to die fully. Yeah, I think it could shrink. And, you know, case in point was Mercedes. You saw all their ads that they did with the G-Wagon Electric. Yeah. And remember how you introduced me to one of your friends to get a G-Wagon Electric? Yeah. Because he owns a Mercedes dealership. Yeah. Does he? Yeah, he owns a Mercedes dealership. I didn't know that. Yeah, that's what you introduced me to.

24:12Yeah, yeah. And you even asked, should you buy it? Yeah. Because I saw one at the retreat I went to earlier this year. Yeah. What's happening with Mercedes sales with G-Wagon electric? It's nothing. It's tanking. Yeah, and their marketing was, you saw the 360 degree videos where they literally had a Mercedes G-Wagon electric. Yeah. And it can make a 360 degree turn without turning. So if you put it in a circle, it can stay in that circle and all four wheels just move and it just does donuts. But it's stationary. Like think of like a can and just trolling it in your hands. It's stationary. That's what the G-Wagon Electric can do, at least in those videos.

24:52Even with all that marketing hype and it making it look really cool and a lot of people want to get one, it's not doing well. Why? They forgot one thing when they're doing their cool marketing. Do you want to guess what it was? I couldn't tell you. A lot of people buy G-Wagon because they like the way it sounds. The rumbling, the roaring. A lot of people buy it for that. You don't get that with electric. That's interesting. I don't know how true or false that is, but I will say... No, no. I talked with a lot of people at the Mercedes dealerships, like at Fletcher Jones. That's what they say? Yeah.

25:26They're saying a lot of people buy the gas because they want the noise. Yeah. I just don't know. I would say with my car. so when i had the tesla before electric obviously um i like that it was quiet right but then my my porsche now it has a noise it's it there's a noise right they manufacture them yeah but i like it it's like oh this is cool so maybe they forgot the noise or maybe the noise wasn't good enough g-wagon electric occurring to the guy was talking who's high up at that dealership he's like that's what's hurting the sales for that car interesting so in his opinion he doesn't get a massive discount for it because they might not even make it anymore who knows i know they're making a baby g now and i don't think that'll do well it's not selling well in europe but you may be too late for the rebates because they're doing massive rebates before uh the government in the u.s uh went away with them for electric oh well but you asked should you switch and i was like no don't switch your porsches in my opinion is better but that's a problem with marketing people want to focus on what's new and novel and sometimes they forget what's important to the customer and if you have something that's new and novel and you keep what's important to the customer you can do well but if you look at the g-wagon and you forget what's important to the customer based on the g-wagon electric sales you will not do well you know and mercedes still claims that they do fine with the g-wagon electric but they bundle it in all together and if you look at mercedes electric vehicles the secondhand market for them, they depreciate way faster.