Stop Shipping Everything: Why supermemory Killed Its Viral Product

0:00Eric Siu:You know that feeling when the strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is you, and it's due tomorrow. Breeze Assistant can help. It works right inside HubSpot. Drafting campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice. All grounded in your actual customer data. So you don't just create content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

0:31Neil Patel:Yeah, and for anyone listening, if you're getting pitched by people who are telling you how to succeed and their version of telling you how to succeed is them creating content on how to succeed, they usually haven't done anything in the past and they usually haven't made any significant money. So you can listen to them if you want. This is why, and I know it's controversial, I don't care for coaches. I just think most coaches are a waste. On the flip side, if someone is truly really successful and they have a lot of money, I've seen almost in all cases those people willing to give advice for free.

1:07Neil Patel:If they don't want to give the advice for free, they won't give it even if you pay them. So it's either they give it for free or they're not going to give it at all. I haven't seen really too many successful people being like, I will charge you for advice and this is what I do for a living.

1:21Eric Siu:I would say there's two types of coaches in my mind, Neil. So you have the coaches that coach like Steve Jobs, that coach like, you know, the founders of like Intuit or like, you know, like these tech coaches like Bill, Bill Campbell was his name, I think. Right. So that's like a coach that everyone knows in Silicon Valley. Right. And that's someone that has kind of kind of been there, done that and is coaching those founders up. Then you have coaches that are selling things. Right. Which you see quite a bit on on like Instagram, for example. Right. They put you through a funnel and all that. And actually, funny enough, I had talked to someone that yesterday worked for someone that we know in the coaching space, right?

1:57Eric Siu:Very, very successful YouTube video. We'll just call it that, right? Back in the day, okay? Has even done business with, you know, people that I know very closely and has not paid those people, right? So anyway, all that to say is like that is an example of a coach, but that's like the coaching used for almost like just to try to extract maximum value from a monetary standpoint. What Neil's talking about is you do have these Silicon Valley type coaches like a Bill Campbell who didn't actually really collect money. He was just out there paying it forward, right? So I think there's two types of coaches.

2:29Eric Siu:And I think some people can, anything can be weaponized for maybe trying to extract too much money.

2:35Neil Patel:Yeah, and I'm just a believer that the people who are good at what they do, do what they do. They don't go coach on it. you could get people who you want to pay for something very specific and maybe it'll help you out majority of the coaches that i'm talking about online that i just despise are the ones who are just going to teach you how to get rich yes or yes or versions of that like i'm going to teach you how to become popular and grow blow up your personal brand or i'm going to teach you how to do marketing get a million views on instagram like but that doesn't equate to revenue it's just they're they're pushing hocus pocus because they don't know how to drive real revenue

3:13Eric Siu:So let me talk about, so we talked about these two coaches, right? You have the legendary Silicon Valley coach, Bill Campbell, who actually there's a book I read called The Trillion Dollar Coach. That's a good one, right? Because he helped form all these companies. So he actually coached, he mentored, so he used to be the CEO of Intuit and he used to coach football at Columbia University, right? So he actually ended up mentoring Steve Jobs from Apple. He mentored Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin from both of the co-founders from Google. Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Twitter, now X, co-founder Jack Dorsey.

3:47Eric Siu:Matt Moshari, this is the one that I talked about. This is also a great book as well. But the great CEO within. He's known as a coach, but he coached the CEOs of Reddit. So Steve Huffman, Coinbase, OpenAid, and Flexport. And he, to my knowledge, he does actually charge for coaching. So these are the coaches that I think are worth their while. And so when Neil and I had talked about this a couple years ago, the coach that I had actually had founded companies before and was a VC before and had worked with some of these legendary VCs. And so to me, he was a founder and investor. That, to me, was worth it.

4:19Eric Siu:But I have never really gone through kind of these other, you know, what Neil's talking about. And we have seen more scams than not.

4:26Neil Patel:Dude, so I get pitched. I'm going to cover the person's name so you can't see it. Okay. I get pitched a lot. The message says, hey, Neil, hope all is well. Love the content. I had a crazy idea. If you'd be down to hear it, stay safe. And I respect this dude for his hustle. And I said, what's the idea? Okay. So what do we reach out, one? Because I love your content. I find it very valuable. And two, I feel like you're leaving a lot of money on the table. To give an example, I'm CEO of takecultivation.com. And last year alone, with one single content creator, you're able to cash back to over$1.1 million.

4:55Neil Patel:dollars. And look, the industry that you're in, the type of value you're giving to your audience, and the type of content you're making, there's no reason you can't be doing that, if not more. Would you be open to hopping on a quick 10-minute call later today or first thing tomorrow, just to see if I can even help? If not, at least give you the blueprint to scale what's there and fix that bio. Stay safe. I'll talk to you soon. Awesome. What did you reach out, brother? So he sent that, and then he responded with, you there, brother, because I didn't respond back. And my response...

5:23Eric Siu:What did you say? We are in that kind of biz. We wouldn't care for that extra million revenue. Oh, did he even see it?

5:30Neil Patel:I don't know. He didn't respond back to it.

5:32Eric Siu:He didn't see it. He didn't see it. But.

5:35Neil Patel:No, but none of my other messages show red from him. So I'm guessing he did see it.

5:40Eric Siu:I don't know. I don't know.

5:41Neil Patel:Because none of the other messages say delivered or red or anything.

5:45Eric Siu:Let me tell you what's wrong with the message that he sent to you. So I don't know who that guy is, right? So let me just say this. So this guy reaches out to Neil and he's like, hey, you know, hey, brother, you know, So first of all, I don't know if you say, hey, brother, but when you talk like that, hey, brother, and you're wearing a tank top, if you're trying to do a business deal, at least look a little bit presentable. At least wear a t-shirt or something like that, right? The second thing is this. Hey, brother, you're leaving so much money on the table. So that kind of makes me feel like an idiot, right?

6:09Eric Siu:The third thing is, I'm going to help you make an extra million dollars. So basically, you did no research on me, right? So you did no research on me. You don't know how big my business is. You don't even know what I do. And you're just sending these out. and you're trying to be personal, but people can see right through that, right? And so when you act like that, how you do anything is how you do everything. So if you're like that already, that's how it's gonna be working with you.

6:31Neil Patel:Dude, you nailed it. If someone doesn't put in the time and the research before they talk to you, imagine what's gonna happen once you hire that person. You're screwed. People typically try the hardest to get your money. Once they have your money, it's usually much worse. And dude, you experienced this. You recently hired someone for, I think it was content ideas. And they were so irrelevant. You gave them feedback on why they did things wrong. And it's not even relevant for your business. And what did they come back to you with? Sure, but that's not included in our scope. We can fix it. We just want more money.

7:06Eric Siu:Yep, which doesn't make any sense to me. Like you're clearly early in your career and you're trying to learn. And then you're like, you're only looking at the monetary gain, which is not a good thing too. Like sure, Neil and I talk about revenue and all that. but there's a time to learn and there's also a time to earn.

7:21Neil Patel:Yes, but dude, you nailed it. I think that's a very valuable lesson for anyone who's listening. If someone doesn't put in the effort before they get your check, what happens after you give them the check? It's usually much worse, not better.

7:34Eric Siu:So one final thing on the coaches piece, and then we have a few other things that we can cover here, but Neil, I actually did some research here with Gemini, right? So the most famous Silicon Valley coaches did not charge their core founder clients for money. Instead, they structured their compensation through equity donations or provided completely free of charge. So Bill Campbell, the most legendary one that I was talking about. So he never accepted a single dollar for his executive coaching. When coaching founders like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, he routinely refused salaries or fees. If a company insists on paying him, he would demand they donate the entire amount to his charitable foundation or local community causes.

8:11Eric Siu:He believed that accepting a paycheck would create a conflict of interest, stating that he wanted his advice to remain entirely objective, but he was already massively wealthy, right? Now, Matt Moshari is the next one, right? So he built his reputation on coaching the top tech CEOs entirely for free. Inspired by the idea from OpenAI's Sam Altman, Moshari decided he only wanted to spend time doing things he would naturally do for free. By offering world-class guidance to elite tech founders like Naval Ravikant and Brian Armstrong at no cost, He built unparalleled trust at Insider Access, but he now charges people.

8:46Eric Siu:So he does selective coaching now, but he has an agency now that does the coaching. It's$10 ,000 to$12 ,500 per month for regular executive and team-wide coaching. So he made it into a business eventually.

8:56Neil Patel:He made it into a business, but he has a proven track record, right? So when someone has a proven track record and has done well, that's a little bit different and he's not promising you that he's going to get rich. I'm not saying, nor is Eric saying that all coaches are bad. it's the coaches that are trying to charge you money to make you rich are really bad or a version of that like make you popular, right? Or anything ancillary that can lead to making money online.

9:20Eric Siu:Yeah, I'll say one more thing because this actually does tie in with marketing, right? Because this is what actually gives marketing a bad rap. The people in the, I would say, the majority of people in the coaching space, I think there are some good players in the coaching space, but the majority, right? It's a lot of short-termism. It's a lot of, hey, get rich quick. I'm gonna help you make money fast. But what ends up happening is anything that comes quick ends up going away quickly and it ends up leaving a poor taste in most people's mouths, which is why that industry is more despised than other industries.

9:48Eric Siu:So I'll just leave it at that. I want to come to this next topic over here and get your feedback. So my conclusion now with everything around, if you're building an e-commerce brand, you should check out DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas on the HubSpot Podcast Network. They speak with founders, marketers, creators, agencies, and platform experts about what it actually takes to grow a direct-to-consumer business from paid ads and influencer marketing to conversion, email, brand building, and consumer trends. I particularly enjoyed their conversations around scaling a brand without losing what made customers care in the first place.

10:21Eric Siu:Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, is that? All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil's agency called MP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side. Unshipping is actually more important than shipping today. So let me explain. So when you ship, you can build anything. You can build any product. You can build any CRM today. You can build any voicing.

10:55Eric Siu:You can build any SEO tool. You can do whatever you want, right? The world is your oyster. The problem with that is that when you start to ship everything, kind of similar to trying to create content for everything, you become known for nothing. And so this company over here known as Super Memory, They started doing this one thing. So let me share my screen with you real quick. So this guy, how do you pronounce his name, Neil? This is your people.

11:18Eric Siu:Dravaia Shah. Dravaia Shah. Okay, thank you for that. So they launched this company brain because a lot of people are talking about these company brains, right? It's like, hey, you know, this company brain can, you know, reach attachments, read attachments. It can read Slack deep links and all this stuff. They basically put the entire company on this, right? Like people loved it, da, da, da. And then they realized that after putting in all these resources, it was taking it away from their core business, which is pushing the frontier of memory and continual learning for agents, right? It was taking away from their core business.

11:49Eric Siu:And so even though you see companies like, you know, Coinbase shipping more than ever right now, you see Robinhood shipping more products than ever right now, right? You see Google shipping more products than ever. When you're a startup, you can't actually do that. Even though you can ship anything, because you have very limited resources, we've talked about the concept of bullets versus, you know, barrels versus ammunition, right? So ammunition, you might have a lot of ammunition, but you only have so many barrels that you can fire initiatives through. When you're a startup, you have less barrels than a large company.

12:16Eric Siu:And so you have to be even more focused than before. And you have to focus on unshipping things and shutting things down quicker because we're in a world now where you can ship anything.

12:25Neil Patel:Dude, that's true. And we're also seeing people just ship too much stuff that just makes products harder to use. That company that had the valuation of 10-ish billion dollars that Eric was talking about, the reason I think they're doing well and they're getting a lot of hype is because it's just over SMS and they just kept it simple. It's, you want to build more, but you want to build more without people, A, having to see it, and B, having to interact with it. In essence, how can you just help people solve their problem and do more on your end versus just showcasing everything to a user and just giving them tons of interfaces that just make their life harder.

12:59Eric Siu:And this resonated with me because recently we had consolidated a few of our products and our initiatives just to focus in even more. And so this is interesting because he said this, hey, we have many, many developers, startups and enterprises who already use our memory engine in production. So they're using their core product, right? And so what ended up happening was that this company brain thing that they were building ended up having a conflict of interest with larger companies that they work with, like Cognition or Notion, which are hot startups right now, right? And so you don't want to have conflict of interest with these clients because eventually they're going to stop paying you.

13:30Eric Siu:So he said this, shipping is important, but unshipping is even more important for us. We want to make sure that everything we do, we're doing, we're the best at doing. Using some other company brain products and agent harnesses made me realize that putting 100 % of your time in something can lead to great results. And since we are not able to do that, our product was average, not out of the ordinary. So if you want to be extraordinary, you have to do extraordinary things, which means unshipping.

13:53Neil Patel:Yeah, dude, I think it's spot on. But that's the kind of content, by the way, that I think performs extremely well on X, will do really well on LinkedIn, will do terrible on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, I don't know, hit or miss, but that content would do very well on X and LinkedIn.

14:12Eric Siu:The best mid-market and enterprise-type leads for me this year came from X, right? And it wasn't even AI content, it's content that I wrote myself, right? And the AI content, sure, it performs, it gets a lot of views. But when it's my content written by myself with the point of view on it, that's what gets people interested. And so speaking of X, Neil, I have one more for you to react to over here. Your brother-in-law, Heaton Shaw, shared this. Okay. So brand as software. So this guy, I was going to say kimchi. This guy's Paul. So his profile has kimchi in it. I thought his name was kimchi. So he leads brand at Ramp.

14:50Eric Siu:So Ramp's a pretty hot company right now. 284 ,000 views on this one. So he writes a very long article over here. And it talks about this concept known as brand and software. So it's a very long article, Neil. A very long article. Oh, wow. But so let me just do this, Neil. Let me just make it easy for us. Let's just hit the Grok button over here and just see what it says, okay? So it says, I call the opportunity brand and software. Software that carries a company's point of view, values, and constraints into the work itself. Highly skilled designers spend their time reproducing decisions already made while the brand dies by a thousand paper cuts.