The Genius ManusAI Waitlist Strategy, How To Know If You Have Product Market Fit (You Likely Don’t), The Perils Of Programmatic SEO

0:00Manus in seven days they collected 2 million people on their waitlist and people are paying 20 grand for each Wow. Yeah. And so they're huge. And if you look, if I look at Manus' Twitter now, when they first started, it was like, I don't know, like 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 followers. Now it's 150 ,000 followers on Twitter. And they raised like 3 million bucks or something, right? I don't know how much money they raised. Was it very little? But the way they do marketing on Twitter is they just keep showing what other people are building. That's the move to get distribution, right? And the fact that like you and I keep talking about it, I will say this is the closest thing I've seen to an agent so far.

0:34And the crazy thing is it's only going to get better. Dude, yeah, I'm a side note, speaking of AI, someone sent me this new AI application and they said it's more accurate than ChatGPT and Google and they're pointing to article on one of these tech review sites that are popular, I don't know which one's like a TechCrunch or a CNET or something like that. So the first thing I type in, and they're just like, check it out. I'm like, the first thing I type in because they wanted an introduction to me was, what's the fastest animal? And it said, cheetah is the fastest animal. I'm like, oh, this thing is wrong.

1:07I'm like, cool. People claim their solutions are so good. And you and I have been in the search game for a long time. It's really easy when you put in edge cases to find things that are just off because there's birds that fly above 200 miles an hour, which is technically an animal that's faster. There's sea animals that are extremely fast. And of course there's land animals. If you ask Google that question or chat GPT, I have a Nash Chat GPT, but Google clarifies saying, well, what kind of animal? If it's a land animal, this is the fastest. If it's an animal that flies, this one's the fastest.

1:44If it's one that's in the water that swims, this is the fastest. And people think that they can just build these amazing companies and they forget about all these edge cases. Like that's how you build something that's really big. You think about all the edge cases and you try to solve as many of them as possible because more likely than not people will experience edge cases on a regular basis maybe not that individual user but if you have a lot of users there's tons of edge cases that people experience on a daily basis yep i think that's good by the way i mean because we're talking about ai and products right now we should talk about how to know if you actually have product market fit and there's actually a great post over here you probably haven't used this app before but You remember Anchor?

2:24They sold to Spotify. Okay. So this guy, Michael Mignano, he tweeted this. He says, you probably don't have PMF, which is product market fit. Product market fit means basically people are actually demanding to use your product, right? Yeah, like Slack in the early days. Right. You're an inflection point now. You're in a good spot, right? And you can lose product market fit as well. Like Skype in its early days had product market fit. They stopped innovating. Yeah, they're dying. Everyone's like, oh, you used to, but other people have better products now. So he says this, you probably don't have PMF, product market fit.

2:59At some point, nearly every founder prematurely believes they have PMF before they actually do. This happens at least once in every startup. Almost after the post link below, some of you asked what PMF actually looks like and how we had it at Anchor. So I'm not going to read everything here, but Anchor, the problem with it was that they were spending a ton on marketing. and the moment they stopped pushing on marketing, their DAU, their daily active users started ticking down, right? And so what happened was that they were not feature complete. The moment they became more feature complete, so they had mobile first, they had a free podcasting platform, everything turned around.

3:38But I remember in the very beginning, it was very like, it was cool, but it wasn't, there's no reason for me to keep logging in, right? So the initial graph that they had with no PMF on the left side, do you want to describe that? yeah so with no pmf they went up and down and up and down and the reason for the ups and downs is no product market fit is probably related more towards to when they were spending money on marketing right yeah so you can see this this bump over here in the very beginning on the left side this is marketing spend most likely and then they went down maybe they're like oh we got to turn it back on again yeah but the problem is they did again it doesn't come down to just marketing because if you if you market it a leaky bucket this is what's going to happen right and then it's going to go downwards.

4:17But when they had PMF, when they built in, they started talking to their customers more and they built in the right products and they built in the right features, it just started moving up gradually over time. Right. Now, the other thing too, is you can see the cohort retentions or the retention numbers. Right. So on the left side, this is like a bad YouTube video. Right. People just turn out really quickly in the first, like, you know, beginning. That's almost every YouTube video. Yeah. Right. But a good YouTube video is on the right side where you have some drop-off in the beginning, but then it evens out, and that's how you want it to look.

4:47No, that's an amazing YouTube video. This is an amazing YouTube video, yeah. So it's not, like, by the way, this is a good way for you to, you look at your YouTube videos as a product, and that's how you should optimize it. Now, if Neil and I were full-time YouTubers, we'd probably be optimizing hardcore for this, but that's not our job. So at least my videos look a little more, okay, maybe like in between these. I don't know about yours. I haven't checked, but. Yours have gotten better, though, with the editing. Uh-huh, and I just increase production and spent more money oh so now starting april i'll record eight long form videos which means by may i'll be publishing eight videos that's cool so you're upping your your spend with them i'm upping my spend wow okay great so look i mean what this guy says here um you want you want to hear the kicker yeah so for everyone listening i pay someone to help me edit my youtube videos i pay a company so I pay him for four videos a month pay him a good amount of money for four more they wanted more money of course and I expect that it's more work so the guy I talked to him on the phone I'm like what's the price so we're just negotiating and he's like no I can't do it for that price I need a little bit more it cost me thousands of dollars per video so I need x more I was like all right so we negotiate get to a price point and then all of a sudden did you get him to a satisfying price point no i wasn't satisfied with the cost so then all of a sudden i get a call back in a few hours and he's like cool i just want to go over stuff you know instead of producing eight videos a month on marketing let's do like six entrepreneur videos or four entrepreneur videos and four mark i'm like no no no no needs to be at least six marketing videos and keep in mind i'm doing this script what's an entrepreneur video like your story i don't know how to make money how to get rich all that kind of stuff which i hate um and it's not directly like how to get rich maybe some of it really is um but some of it is like my story as an entrepreneur which i don't like either so then we negotiated on six and two because he's like no look it'll open up the algorithms like yeah i don't care but this is how i actually make money with my business i need to go target my core market.

6:58And I was like, you know what? We can do it your way for a month. And then I can change it after because I want to see what the topics are. So then he's like, okay. And then he's going over more things. He's like, look, I know you only want your videos 10 minutes. I'm like, yeah, I don't care. I only want them 10 minutes. He's like, why? I'm like, I want to put them on all platforms. LinkedIn has a 10 minute cap. I don't want more than 10 minutes. Is it 15 now? Yeah. Is it really 15 minutes? So it's not 10 anymore. Here, I'll ask on Grok right now. My favorite is, hey, dude, don't do it. You keep talking.

7:30Okay, you Google. Yeah. So then he goes over a lot of stuff, and then at the very end, he's just like, hey, I actually need to charge you this much, so we're going to charge at this price. Did it go up? Yeah, so he wanted even more than what he agreed to me a few hours before. And I was like, no, that won't work. I'm like, I wish you would have just told me that at the beginning of the call because we wasted around 40 minutes on this phone call going over just a lot of random stuff. I think it was actually 30 minutes. The call ended up being 40 minutes. And he's like, look, I got opportunity costs.

8:00So if I take you on, I can't take other people. I'm like, look, I know how much you make in your business because I know how much editors cost. And this is just convenient for me. I have a whole team internally. I can have them do stuff. I just don't have the resources right now. And the way you need to look at it is, yes, this is opportunity cost, but you told me you want to build a big business. you're gonna only build a big business if you take on all the clients that are profitable with healthy margins instead of saying oh i can only pick and choose because i can have so many clients and then i'm like two how long do your other clients last they're like i don't know like a year i'm like yeah that's terrible churn and i'm like look at the contractors i've paid a lot have been with me for five six years really yeah i don't really change them out so i'm like so you want a short-term client that pays a few thousand dollars more a month that will stay with you maybe a year when i'm more likely to stay with you for five years and you have consistent profitable income this is how we looked at this this uh recording too yeah this is how we looked at our podcast the person wanted more money and we we spent a good amount we spend uh call it around 24 25 000 a year i'm rounding it somewhere i'd say at least 2 000 a month we don't really make money on this podcast no we don't make any money on this podcast right now but when you look at the numbers the person's like same thing i have opportunity costs set up all this i'm like wait you'll record once a week look you'll get a big start and maybe they'll pay you a little more for like a month or two and then they're gone correct and we've been with them for years and this is like it was two years yeah so it's like so you're changing for something that can just be temporarily and your clients churn a lot well we had consistent income now that person's not going to have the consistent client once they start churning some of those we're not the celebrity clients where we cause any issues no entrepreneurs first than anything so it's actually easier to work with us we show up pretty much on time i say pretty much because i'm a little bit bad yeah and it's by the way we're at neil's place right now and i still show up late but i usually show up late like a few minutes yeah i have to go down the elevator um it's not an excuse that was terrible i'm usually pretty good at showing up on time um but for this for some reason i'm not um but yeah it's just like I just don't understand.

10:14Some people just don't think about things in a very logical way, and they get greedy. And the dude, the guy on the phone started using these quote-unquote sales tactics. Oh, yeah. When he pulled that shit on me, I was like, come on. Come on, man. He's just like, you know, I can only start on this date, so if you want to start earlier, it's going to cost more. I'm like, dude, this is just the stupidest thing to pitch to people. It just becomes really sleazy, and it's the worst way of selling. And you know we can all sense it too. Yes. Like if you're a seasoned entrepreneur, you know what's going on.

10:46So what he did with me is like, yeah, you know, we just upped our prices by like 50 % and, you know, I'm not doing a sales tactic, which you totally are. Yes. And then I was just like, that just makes me not want to convert. Yes. Yeah. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first, no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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12:59Go to shopify.com slash marketing school, shopify.com slash marketing school but anyway you're upping it i'm keen to see what happens in the next couple months or so um and if you guys haven't seen neil's new videos i actually really like the the editing they i think they're doing a good job i think they do an amazing job with the editing um they come up with topic ideas the the thing that i really believe that makes the videos much better is a the edit or i would give the editing as b but i think the a thing is I spend up to 30 minutes recording voice notes and sometimes video like screen sharing and I break down everything I want to talk about in the video and if I'm talking about tools I show the tools the reports all that kind of stuff I have stats and data and I present that all in that screen recording I then give it to them and they turn it into an organized script which I think is worth a lot by the way if people are willing to do that for us at a good price we're always willing to listen because i think that saves a ton of time here's the thing i think that will be replaced in a couple years yes but the part that wouldn't work out is if they went to just go create a video based on the topic that i approve it wouldn't do well if i did not create this script i think that's huge i think that's a big takeaway and i didn't know you were doing this the fact that you spend the 30 minutes on it helping and it's a screen share as well makes your video 10 times better like the idea matters a lot but also the content it matters a lot versus when I'm recording like you know there's the idea and then we have a lot of different packaging but I'm usually just riffing off bullet points but when you spend more time preparing it like people can tell dude I spent two hours just on four videos every single month I've just screen recording and being like this is what I want to talk about here's why this is what's wrong because they give notes and I'm like this is wrong in your notes it doesn't work this way and I correct everything and I'm like these are the main points people care about and this is what's actually going to drive people results by the way it is 15 minutes so if you upload from mobile it's only 10 minutes if you upload from desktop it's 15 minutes huh i didn't know that now you know i'm going to tell them right now there you go see i just saved your life um all right we got we got one more in us over here so you know i want to talk about the uh the perils of programmatic seo okay so okay this is from um i remember gaitano had tweeted this a while back but i forgot what this guy tweets this programmatic seo is so hot right now but it needs to be approached carefully so basically on one site we work with was leveraging programmatic plus ugc and it drove a ton of traffic as that section of the site grew it got further and further away from the core focus of the company they started ranking for irrelevant terms and some spam started getting added to the mix as well due to anyone being able to create a new page and add content.

15:55After a lot of analysis, we determined the programmatic pages didn't even create a single deal over several years, and the spam started becoming problematic. After a lot of convincing, we nuked the pages, and about 30 days later, all the content we worked on together that was actually relevant to the business and just never ranked that well started ranking much, much better. And now those pages are actually driving leads that fit ICP criteria. For this company, SEO was hamstrung for several quarters, all because they wanted to get massive amounts of SEO traffic on autopilot. If only the channel was that easy.

16:26And this is from J.H. Shirk. Oh. Yeah. But I mean, this is standard SEO. Like if you start to put a bunch of gunk on your site, it ends up taking up your crawl budget. Yes. And it doesn't know. It's just like the YouTube algorithm. It doesn't know what you're trying to rank for. And then you end up getting no traffic at all. and um or less and less over time and then you shouldn't be surprised that when you actually delete the irrelevant pages that your traffic goes up because you make it easier for search engines yep it's irrelevant pages it's about having also creating multiple pages around the same keywords because that creates cannibalization and they don't know where to rank you but a lot of people have these issues the older the site the more issues you have and in seo we call a lot of this prune crop and merge yeah by the way this is similar to my YouTube channel.

17:16So there's a, there's a YouTube consultant that tweeted this the other day. He's like, Oh, I'm going to, you know, drop a link to your profile and I'll give you feedback. Right. This guy's name is Leroy to Brock. I might've butchered it, but I said, what's wrong with my channel? So here's what I did. I asked on, on, on Twitter. Right. And so he says, you have too many formats, focus on one or two that work experiment with one wild card every three to five uploads. And that makes maximum from interviews to AI marketing, to health longevity. It's just too much. If you want to build momentum, be predictable.

17:47And I'm looking at Noah right now. And back when our YouTube channel used to get three, four, 500 ,000 views per video, all I talked about was marketing. It was just that like all marketing. Right. And so what I did with this is I took his feedback. I hit the grok button, the XAI button, and then I uploaded all of my recent screenshots on videos. I'm like, Hey, what video should I focus on? And what did it say? You should just focus on AI and marketing. And that's it. And so I'm like, yeah, this is pretty good. how much better is this going to get in the next couple years? I like it. Crazy, crazy better.

18:17Anyway, that's it, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, and subscribe. It helps us grow. And we will see you later.