Software Is Becoming Marketing

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So I want to talk about this new concept that software is becoming marketing. So really, the question is, what if your product is your best ad?

0:35Eric Siu:So this isn't necessarily anything new, but I think with the proliferation of anything that you can vibe code now, almost your software becomes the lead magnet. So it used to be back in the day, your lead magnet could be your, it could be like a email opt-in, like a PDF, right? It could be a PDF. It could be something like a quiz or something like that. But now you actually get software. So when I look at Neo software, Uber suggests I look at that as a software that's kind of becoming marketing in its own right. Same thing with Answer to Public. With ClickFlow, with Carrot, we kind of look at the same on our end.

1:08Eric Siu:And the cool thing is within each piece of software, every time you have an interesting feature that you launch, each feature becomes a marketable moment. So like Clay, they're launching like every week, I think they're doing like a launch of a new feature with their product. And it's something that people are asking for, but they're putting a lot of fanfare around it. And so we actually have a mutual friend. He was always launching one marketable moment per month. I think now you can probably launch one marketable moment per week. and so I think software now is becoming marketing and I think the job of someone like Anil or myself is we can prototype something and get it 60-70 % there but then you can hand it off and then go from there and then if you do have a product out there and there's a repo you can just submit a bunch of pull requests and then your developers can decide if whatever you're building is garbage or not

1:59Neil Patel:yeah no look I'm with you I think you can end up creating a lot of marketing just through products. I started doing this back in the day, maybe around seven, eight years ago with NP Digital. And the whole premise was we're going to release software. At that time, it was Ubersess. We bought it for, I think it was like$120 ,000 plus or minus, but somewhere around there. I spent millions of the product over years after, so not instantly. that was of choice because it was gaining traction keep in mind everything is way cheaper now because of ai and we didn't just release marketable moments we release product for free when our competitors were charging for it that made it much more marketable because everyone wanted to share something that was free whether it's better whether it's worse whether it's the same free goes a very long way and i think doing that with product is super effective as long as it's pretty much free.

3:00Neil Patel:If you release a marketable moment every single week, that's a new feature, but people had to pay more for it. It doesn't mean that you can't still use it and generate buzz around it. We just see it not working as well. Yeah. I think, I mean, back in the day,

3:14Eric Siu:and back in the day was not that long ago, but in SaaS, you caught a product led growth, right? Where you have a freemium feature and then you can upsell, cross sell and grow accounts. So if you don't have a free version into your product, it's not going to be that helpful because there's too much friction to get people in the door. And so when I look at ClickFlow, our version of ClickFlow right now, we have an API and an MCP for it. There's a free version people can opt in for and the agents can find it, right? But more importantly, we just launched something and we kind of look at this as like a new AEO SEO autopilot system of 2026.

3:45Eric Siu:And so what it does is like, let's use this podcast as an example. It will ingest the spikes from this podcast. It'll also use some skills and I'll look at what's happening in my topic, for example. We can look at even some of my competitors as well, look at what they're putting out. And then it'll combine with our ClickFlow API MCP. It can also pull in your Google Analytics. It can pull in a lot of these different connectors. And then what happens is it just starts to draft things. Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. But that's something that we give away for free. And so, but because it's free, like it becomes interesting, right?

4:12Eric Siu:So literally clickflow.com, you can pick that up if you want to. But that's how we look at this stuff. And I'm sure that's how you look at Ubersuggest too.

4:21Neil Patel:Yeah. And I believe it works really well. although I don't think it works as well as it used to because so many people build product now it is very competitive it is much harder to get traction and noise than it used to be well there's

4:37Eric Siu:a lot of noise now in terms of just overall marketing what I would say is is there are people on x that do a good job with their marketing and then some of their marketing like these little uh anthropic does a good job for example obviously they have a lot of reach cloud like whenever they launch a new frontier model obviously there's going to be a lot of reach um but I saw this uh so I interviewed this guy, Matt Van Horn, just to talk about loops. And he launched a video talking about one of his new, one of his new products. And it's like a, this, it's called something, it helps you make CLIs basically like command line interfaces.

5:09Eric Siu:And that video got, it got two or 3 million views or so. And so I think if you do it well on Twitter, because Twitter doesn't penalize you for posting too much, you know, it can be really good for you. And especially if it's the right audience hanging out there so um i think it's it's fine i think it it's also if your product is novel it tends to kind of help itself as well again when you look at open ai and

5:33Neil Patel:anthropic yeah um question for you is what products are you creating this year that you'll end up using to leverage for marketing if any or like from a free perspective or the one i just mentioned

5:45Eric Siu:so it'll be free yeah it's free and and it's free and then obviously if you want to use it a lot more

5:49Neil Patel:there's going to be usage-based pricing so yeah cool yeah you by the way you uh we're not actually releasing any more product for free i think we spend more time on doing organic marketing when i say organic marketing like press you know getting awards stuff like that paying sponsoring events um and the other thing that we're still focusing a lot of time and energy on is just M &A because it's a great way to grow by just adding revenue.

6:18Eric Siu:Yeah, it might be a little, I think where things are trending for me is everything's more AI implementation when people are reaching out right now. So it's AI implementation as it relates to marketing and revenue growth. So what works for me right now is it's dinners. It's definitely content. So it's dinners, events, content. And I would say those are kind of the main drivers of our leads right now. And what's happening for all of our single grain clients that want marketing, we forced them into single brain. We're saying, this is how we work now. If you don't want to work this way, that's okay.

6:48Eric Siu:You can go to another agency. We'll introduce you. So what that means is we're not going to get on calls with you all the time. We're more so, hey, here's single brain. You can talk to this agent whenever you want, and you can get your data pools, your reports, and you're actually going to work a lot faster. And they even said themselves, they're like, we actually don't want to talk to you that much. If the work is good, then we don't need to talk to you that much. So we have a lot of these workflows. You're saying the customers are saying that? Yeah.

7:12Neil Patel:I'm assuming more mid-market?

7:14Eric Siu:mid-market some some enterprise too some enterprise yeah and so we just say like this is the way we work and then like we you actually end up getting better results anyway and they're like well we like this this is different right so that's how we work now um but to your to your point it is still mostly for me you just mentioned for you it's like events awards what else events

7:34Neil Patel:awards uh and events sponsoring events and speaking at them uh as well as holding our own small events yeah uh creating content like we're doing here podcasting uh other interviews getting our team to speak more so we're pushing hard on that um partnerships that's a huge one for us so just hiring more people to ink out more partnerships um what else am i missing i'm missing a few of them but those are the big ones i would say and there yeah there's a lot of little things that we can do be like oh let's go release more features in uber sets and answer the public and release more for free and market it but if i had to look at what really moves the needle if i had to pick one thing it's probably conferences i think that moves the needle

8:21Eric Siu:for us more than anything else because with a conference you get actually a couple like not even a two for one you get like a three for one and four for one you know you know why one you get to speak you get to sponsor you also get to throw little side events as well right so it's

8:34Neil Patel:like a three for one um and then and it's amazing branding so even if you don't pick up revenue a lot of people hear your corporate brand and we found out to do well the problem that we found with events is it's a really really slow payback period like you do not make we do not make our money back in year one after spending the money are you speaking at hubspot this year uh me neither we

8:57Eric Siu:got cut i'm like oh dude we're on your podcast network and we got cut they're like oh and uh

9:03Neil Patel:We can do a panel. I'm like, I'm good. They change the format. Yeah. What do you mean they change the format? Not change the format. They change the whole concept. It went from inbound to unbound. So we're inbound, but we're not unbound.

9:15Eric Siu:I think so. Okay. All right. But you know what I think? I think throwing your own conferences goes along with you. Go ahead.

9:25Neil Patel:And if you look at the speakers, they're very different. It's a lot of celebrities. Yes. Or well-known people. Like famous people.

9:30Eric Siu:Yeah. Usually they only have one. Okay. We should talk about this. Usually they have like one anchor celebrity or two anchor celebrities. This time it's like six or seven or eight.

9:39Neil Patel:I'm loading it up right now. Let's see if I can, let's see if I can find the celebrities. Tom Brady. Tom Brady. Okay. Cynthia Erivo. I don't know who that is. Sunita Williams. Yeah. Astronaut. TBN. Uh-huh. And the list goes on and on and on of just well-known people globally. it's of just really big companies i would say or quite a few of them are big companies but if i look at the majority of the speakers compared to previous years it is a lot of their own team members which is cool we should talk about this that's actually cool i think that is more effective in the long run than bringing outside speakers if you're trying to actually generate revenue yeah

10:22Eric Siu:i think this whole concept of employee generated content which is actually nothing new because i've been i we've when i first took over single grain we were doing that in the very beginning 14 years ago we were doing that right everyone was kind of posting and we're all engaging on each other's things um clay does this really well right now so clay does i think zapier kind of does this a little bit too where everyone's kind of engaging with each other on linkedin and they're all kind of growing at the same time okay um i think it's good that if you throw an event and then you also have that happening there too like who cares if you help someone build a brand and like if they move on fine but at the same time if you're you're you're reaping the rewards of that um like and you win a couple deals from it like it's it's it's a good deal at the end of the day and uh you know people remember you for that so yeah like they have like the cmo of jp morgan uh and quite a few other heavy hitters yeah but we can do a panel if you want no i'm good yeah

11:12Neil Patel:exactly so not that there's i just i don't think there's anything wrong there's nothing wrong with

11:17Eric Siu:it it's just it doesn't drive it doesn't drive revenue exactly that's why i say it's not for me because the thing is with the panel is like you don't get remembered you just blend into the crowd And you're just answering other people's questions.

11:27Neil Patel:Like, I just find that there's no point in speaking unless you can figure out how to drive revenue, whether it's direct or indirect. And I hate to be, you know, not, I wouldn't say a prick about it, but like, I don't know, stuck out, picky.

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12:00Neil Patel:But I care for revenue. And like they have great speakers like CMO of Zoom, right? Like they have a lot of amazing speakers. And, you know, being honest, I'm okay not speaking every year. I haven't, you know, I spoke there for quite a few years before that. There was a lot of time. Yeah, it was four in a row. And for us, and I've talked about this on previous podcasts, the number one reason I spoke, you want to guess why? For branding. For branding, that's correct. Because we weren't picking up enterprise business from it. I still think it's worth it though for branding because the stage in the audience is large.

12:35Eric Siu:We didn't pick up enterprise business from it, but we did pick up a few clients that still are with us today from something I spoke at two years ago at Inbound. So that's what I can call out. Not enterprise though.

12:45Neil Patel:I have not picked up customers from it.

12:47Eric Siu:They're probably too small for you to even remember.

12:51Neil Patel:that's true we could have picked up customers but i would say great branding and i think it's worth it for branding there's uh another event that i would speak at for many many years uhrd station oh yeah yeah yeah it's like 7 000 people listening to your speech yeah i think it's great branding

13:06Eric Siu:that's when i first started this is funny when i first started speaking and then they put me in front of 5 000 people and i was so nervous remember i bombed it and neil looked at me afterwards it was just a funny time because it i didn't get invited after that so dude one of the

13:22Neil Patel:times i spoke and i believe i'm pretty sure it was already stationed great company but um i spoke and you get to remember in brazil most people don't speak english at least in that audience but i'm pretty sure most people in brazil don't speak english because i've been there so many times the audio went out oh the translators that's what you're saying no the audio like the speakers. Oh, the whole thing. The whole thing. And the PowerPoint was still showing. The clicker still worked. People couldn't hear me, even in English. So not only could they not hear me in English, I had a yell. So that way the translators, people could hear the translators.

14:03Neil Patel:And you're talking about like 5 ,000 to 7 ,000 people. My voice went out literally right after that.