In short
Marketing School Podcast Episode Notes
Episode Title
The Luxury Era of The Creator Economy Has Arrived
Episode Description In this episode, hosts Neil Patel and Eric Siu discuss the impressive scaling of TBPN to over $10 million in podcast revenue, highlighting the effectiveness of high-CPM monetization strategies and the significance of niche audiences. They also debate the future of AI agents versus SaaS, share insights on investing psychology, and discuss how to craft content that attracts high-paying customers.
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Key Concepts and Discussions
- TBPN Podcast Revenue Breakthrough
- Revenue Details: TBPN achieved over $10 million in podcast revenue.
- CPM Insights: Average cost per thousand (CPM) at $300+ with 20 ads per episode.
- Niche Audience Appeal: Demonstrates how targeted audiences can generate more revenue than broad reach.
- AI Agents vs. SaaS
- Goldman Sachs Prediction: AI agents expected to outpace SaaS in profit pool by 2030.
- Market Dynamics:
- In 2025, TAM (Total Addressable Market) for SaaS and agents projected at $30 billion.
- By 2030, AI agents projected at $50 billion while SaaS drops to $20 billion.
- Outcome vs. Tool Focus: Shift from providing tools to achieving outcomes for customers.
- Investing Psychology
- Investment Mindset:
- Long-term investing emphasized over trading.
- Importance of believing in companies for holding investments during downturns.
- Warren Buffett Principle: "If you’re not going to hold it for 10 years, don’t hold it for 10 seconds."
- Content Strategy and Hiring
- Effective Content Creation: Focus on the problems clients face and how to solve them rather than just trending topics.
- Hiring for Content Clipping:
- Importance of showcasing relevant examples when applying for positions in content creation.
- OpenAI Frontier Platform
- Introduction of Frontier: New platform for enterprises to build and manage AI agents.
- Capabilities:
- Shared context, onboarding, and hands-on learning.
- Enhancements for sales, marketing, and operational efficiency.
- Anthropic vs. OpenAI Ads
- Ad Strategy: Anthropic used humor in ads to position themselves against OpenAI, highlighting that they won't have ads in their products.
- Industry Reactions: Sam Altman's (OpenAI) response reflects competitive tensions in the AI industry.
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Chapters Breakdown
- (00:00) TBPN $10M Podcast Breakdown
- (01:56) AI Agents vs SaaS Debate
- (03:40) Investing Psychology Lessons
- (07:33) Hiring & Content Strategy
- (14:34) OpenAI Frontier Explained
- (17:05) Anthropic vs OpenAI Ads
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Conclusion This episode of Marketing School provides valuable insights into the evolving landscape of digital marketing, especially regarding revenue generation through niche audiences, the potential of AI agents, and effective content strategies. The discussions emphasize the shift towards outcome-oriented services and the importance of strategic investing, offering actionable advice for businesses looking to thrive in the creator economy.
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Key Takeaways
- High-CPM monetization strategies can yield significant revenue through niche audiences.
- The future of software may lean more towards AI agents rather than traditional SaaS models.
- A long-term investment approach can lead to better financial health and decision-making.
- Understanding client needs and crafting solution-oriented content will attract high-value customers.
- New platforms like OpenAI Frontier are reshaping how businesses deploy and manage AI solutions.
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For more tips and insights on digital marketing, tune into daily episodes of Marketing School or check out their YouTube channel.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Value of Effective Data Usage
1:35 to 3:00
Discussion on how utilizing data effectively can enhance business operations.
“unless it's your customers telling you exactly what they need.”
Advertising Strategies in the Creator Economy
3:00 to 6:00
Insights into advertising costs and effectiveness in the context of a small listener base.
“Average sponsored deal over here, and they just do the math.”
Transition to AI Agents in Business
6:00 to 10:00
Analyzing the impact of AI agents on the software industry and business practices.
“I think whoever wrote this should be fired.”
The Psychology of Investment Decisions
10:00 to 13:00
Exploring the mindset of investors and the philosophy behind long-term holding.
“This is some guy who had a lot of followers and I looked at his profile and he has a lot of good clips.”
Creating Content for Business Growth
13:00 to 14:01
Effective strategies for generating content that drives customer engagement and addresses specific issues.
“there's certain issues that maybe not the majority say, but enough people say, and someone's willing to pay you a half a million or a million dollars to solve that problem.”
Understanding Customer Conversations
14:01 to 14:30
Learn how to enhance customer engagement through direct conversations and data analysis.
Leveraging AI for Content Creation
14:31 to 15:40
Discover the role of AI in improving content quality based on customer insights.
“Because we have gong in all of our calls and it declares that it's recording.”
OpenAI Frontier: Transforming Business Operations
15:41 to 16:54
Explore OpenAI's new Frontier platform and its impact on enterprise AI deployment.
“So my point is, I think a lot of this is, this does, again, AI amplifies your nature, right?”
Shared Context in Team Collaboration
16:55 to 18:28
Understand how shared context can enhance collaboration across sales and marketing teams.
“hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries.”
Advertising Dynamics in AI
18:29 to 20:38
Examine the recent advertising strategies and competitive responses within the AI sector.
“which is like they have the scaffolding and then they customize the chatbots for every client, which again, I think that's the future of software.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Did you know that most businesses only use 20 % of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out or paying for coffee that's one fifth full. Point is, you miss a lot unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped in emails, call logs, and transcripts. All that unstructured data that makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And when you get a full cup of coffee, you can do more too, but I digress. Visit HubSpot.com today.
0:35using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com.
1:07Being a know-it-all used to be considered a bad thing, but in business, it's everything. Because right now, most businesses only use 20 % of their data unless you have HubSpot, where data that's buried in emails, call logs, and meeting notes become insights that help you grow your business. Because when you know more, you grow more. See, being a know-it-all isn't so bad. Visit HubSpot.com today to learn more.
1:34Nobody likes a spoiler, unless it's your customers telling you exactly what they need. But too bad most businesses miss out on these signals. The hits dropped in emails, the messages hidden in call logs and chats, all of it trapped in the digital ether. But with HubSpot, you get all this data in one place. Their customer platform brings together the insights you need to grow your business. And spoiler alert, the more you know, the more you grow. Visit hubspot.com to find out how today.
2:07Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler Training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools, to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow.
2:59Sponsored deal is 500 grand, 10 million in revenue. Average sponsored deal over here, and they just do the math. Cost per ad, two grand. Views proposed 6 ,000. CPM is 333. Main thing, again, is they know they don't have heavy volume. They might have like 2 ,000 to 5 ,000 listeners a time, but they know it's really valuable. Yes, because one of their listeners could listen to an ad and then sign a multimillion-dollar contract. Yeah, with Salesforce or something like that. Yeah. Right? I get why people spend it. If you're a big company, too, you just have to end up spending spending money on brand awareness.
3:31Yeah. And that's why a lot of companies do super lots because they just have so much money to spend. You've seen this, right? As you scroll by. So the cool thing is like, and I know one of the co-founders at Ramp, I should reach out. The Ramp is a presenting sponsor. So they put the sticker up there and then they have these like Formula One hats where it's like marketing school and you have all the logos that sponsor you. I'm like, that's pretty cool. Imagine we have like an orange one like McLaren. That'd be pretty cool. See, I don't have time to manage this, nor do you, but it'd be nice if someone would manage it.
3:54Yes. Yeah. Anyway, you can pick another one. All right. Let's go with, let's see. Goldman Sachs, AI agents will overtake SaaS quickly. Oh, did you see this graph? Here, let me show it to you. Uh-uh. Okay. So this, I keep calling it a graph. It's a chart. No, it's a graph. Same thing. Yeah. So, okay. The profit pool in software is expected to shift towards AI agents. So this is a study from Goldman Sachs. So this shows the illustrative shift in total addressable market, TAM, for software as a service SaaS and agents over time. So you see in 2025 over here, then it goes to 2026. Okay, 2025, you have SaaS TAM and agent TAM is relatively the same at 30 billion.
4:36Okay, then you go to 2026, you know, kind of the same. And then you go to 2027 and then agents start to move higher while SaaS starts to go downwards, right? You go all the way to 2030, where the agent TAM is 50 billion, SaaS TAM is down to 20 billion. This is just so confusing because most of the SaaS companies I I think it just becomes this. Yeah, have agents and are creating agents for their customers. I'm like, this is Goldman Sachs. They're just creating a bunch of bullshit. Yeah. So that's exactly what I was going to say, right? Like, wait, this doesn't just disappear. It kind of just becomes this.
5:08Yeah. HubSpot's been big on agents. Didn't Darmesh buy that agent web domain or something? He bought a lot of this. You know, he started an OpenClaw site this week, too. Remember Hubbin talking about OpenClaw and CloudBot? He started that, too. So what we've been saying earlier is that a lot of this stuff is going to shift towards outcomes. Like even SEO software, this is like a shift towards outcomes. People just, people ultimately don't want to do things. They just want things done for them. Yes. Yeah. That's how it is. And so, let me just see. Oh, this OpenAI Frontier thing I got to check out.
5:37Do you see that today? No, but I've been watching crypto prices all day. You have? Oh, you're waiting. I still think there's more room to drop. Oh, me too. Yeah. Not financial advice. Yeah, not financial advice. But you called this a couple months ago. Okay, so let me just, this Goldman Sachs thing and then we can move on. A recent Goldman Sachs research project projects AI agents are set to take over the profit pool in software. Agents are expected to account for 60 % of software economics by 2030. I think whoever wrote this should be fired. That's what I think. Yes. Yeah. Dude, you want to hear something interesting because we were talking about crypto process for a little bit?
6:11Yeah. So I texted someone earlier this morning because they had shares in a crypto company. And I said, happy you liquidated some. I'm like, you can't control prices and why live in stress each day. They're in a place where their shares are worth so much, they could just buy a home free and clear, and that would be life-changing for them. And I told them... Do I know this person? Yeah, you know him. Tall person. Yeah. I'm like, if it goes to zero, you're screwed. If it triples, quadruples, yes, your life gets even better, but going to zero really screws you over. You can't afford to go to zero.
6:46Yeah, you can't afford it. I'm like, you should at least start liquidating. Eventually they started. And I told them like no one can predict when it'll go up or down or any of it. It's all random. So then they text me back while we're recording this podcast. Yeah, it looks like it definitely has hit the bottom though. I have been holding above X price. They're talking about their stock, which is just above the value of their book or whatever it may be that they're claiming based on whatever is public information. You can Google this company and you can actually see all their holdings because they have to report it.
7:22And this person isn't exact where they know all the financials for quarterly earnings or anything like that. And then he's straight upside over text. We've been one of the strongest stocks in the last few days. People are deleveraging, it appears, across the market. And I responded with, no one knows the bottom, sadly. It's all a big guess. because the moment they say they think their stock has hit the bottom and then they're crossing their fingers no one knows any of that yeah and then they respond sure could definitely go lower and trade for free essentially but also why it took some off the table what do you think is going on and no one really knows what's going on whatever happens happens you can never predict the bottom all you can do is invest in companies you believe in and i'm not saying their company is good or bad, but it goes back to the Warren Buffett philosophy.
8:17I wouldn't want to hold their stock for 10 years or 20 years, whether it looks like a buying opportunity or not. I'm not a buyer because I wouldn't hold it. Right. I'm not recommending people buy Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies, but certain things like Bitcoin, I'm a believer that I would still want to hold it five years from now. I don't know if the price is going to be worse five years from now or higher, but when you believe in something, it makes the pill much easier to swallow when things go wrong. And if you're not really, if you don't believe in a company where we're willing to hold it during its down times and just keep pushing through, then don't buy it in the first place.
8:55What did Warren Buffett say again? If you're not going to hold it for 10 years, don't even hold it for 10 seconds, right? It's the same thing here. And so that's, I would say the psyche, maybe those of you that are listening to this are a little younger. You might think trading is the way. You see all these people on YouTube. oh, you look at this red candle over here and this, you know, I think the downside is this and that. And then they draw to like another line and it goes like this. I'm just like, what is this? Oh, dude, and that same person used to be like, oh, after every Bitcoin halving, it goes up like this.
9:18And this is what the stock's going to do. It's the four-year cycle. Yeah, I'm like, dude. People are just talking out of their behind. Yeah, it's like they're trying to just justify something from out of nowhere. So yes, just because something happened in the past doesn't mean it repeats itself again in the future. What do they say? They say history rhymes, but it doesn't repeat. it rhymes but it doesn't repeat so keep that in mind i haven't heard that one a lot of good quotes they see we need some good clips anyway so so by the way i'll speak for neil too we're hiring good clippers um so if you're really good by the way don't don't send me a dm with like how you're good at it show me examples on the work that you did for us and yeah he nailed it when he said for us yeah don't take other random people and show us the clipping yeah show our stuff you don't have to show us a lot just enough where we like sounds good you're hired dude some guy before i show you this open AI Frontier.
10:05This is some guy who had a lot of followers and I looked at his profile and he has a lot of good clips. I was like, if you really want to stand out, I would recommend that doing what he's like. Well, we have a lot of good examples, whatever. I'm like, but yeah, you just look like everybody else. So good luck to you and your business. But let's go back to clipping for Bennett. Didn't you hire a company that was doing all these clips for you and experiments? I'm still doing it. Okay. But what I've realized, so they're good at it. I've realized, so PB Launch, shout out to PB Launch. I've realized that when I'm like, this, I enjoy making the videos and they tend to do better.
10:38Right. The problem is when someone writes the scripts for me, I tend to just let it, I just follow it. And, and I look at the performance and it's just not that good. Right. Don't get me wrong. It's creative. It's like, there's clone videos of me and all this cool stuff. But, um, I like talking about the stuff we talk about. So, so what I found to be super effective, uh, and you can do this with your team, we We go and interview the people who deal with specific things for clients. So someone may only deal with Reddit for clients. We'll have people who only deal with Instagram for clients or meta ads for clients or LinkedIn ads.
11:16And you get the point, email marketing. And we will talk to them about not just what's new and fresh, but more importantly, because I already know most of that stuff. It's more so what are customers continually hitting you up for and what issues do they have and what problems are they trying to address? And we look for enough people saying those, giving them those signals. Then we create a script around those problems and then the solutions we provide. And then we integrate case studies and then we release those videos. You don't get as many views, but you get more customers. Works really well.
11:54I find it very efficient. You're writing notes to do this? I'm going to do this with my little, because it's very doable. So you know what I've done recently, right? So because a lot of our calls are saved, I want to see over time kind of how people, how teams are adopting AI and what the AI score is relatively. Or it can even score you on like, hey, Neil's like trending over time on core values. And it cites actually examples of quotes that you say. And so I tested this recently and it actually said like, oh, like Sean, CTO, for example, right? Like, you know, his AI fluency is like, you know, 8.8 out of 10.
12:27And it shows some examples exactly what he said. I mean, it also shows some other people on the team where it's like, hey, maybe this person's like a little behind. Now I can literally take that framework and use it for what you just mentioned over here for content ideation. And it could just pop up like deal of the day, deal of the day. Yes. But we don't like just using recorded calls. I understand that, especially if you get approval for the recorded calls. The reason we like to talk to the people on our team is a recorded call will tell you what people are asking, but it doesn't tell you what people are willing to pay for it.
12:59So what we find is when you talk to people on your team, there's certain issues that maybe not the majority say, but enough people say, and someone's willing to pay you a half a million or a million dollars to solve that problem. While they could get a Reddit problem that a lot of people are asking you for, but people are willing to spend 10 grand for. Wait, I'm confused. Why would your calls not be recorded? No, no. I'm saying, let's say your calls are recorded. Assuming you're getting permission. If you have recorded calls, potential sales calls, what they're willing to pay for their problems varies a lot.
13:33Yeah, yeah. Versus when you talk to someone, let's say if we're just focusing on Reddit, if you have 100 recorded calls of potential customers talking about their Reddit problems, you can create a video on that. AI can help you with that. But what we found to be more effective is, is because with the recorded calls, like if you use Gong and stuff like that, it's really easy to parse and get the data from. But what we found to be better is when we're talking to our sales reps and our team that works on, let's say Reddit, for example, because we're using Reddit for this case, and they break down what our best customers, the ones who are paying us the most and sticking around the most, are having issues with Reddit and how we solved it.
14:14And we look at all the commonalities and then create content around that versus what just the majority of the recorded calls say, we tend to pick up better customers because it's appealing to our ideal customer profile versus anyone who has a Reddit marketing issue. Wait, but I'm still missing it. It's like, so how do you have that conversation if it's not recorded? Because we have gong in all of our calls and it declares that it's recording. Yes, but I'm talking about, we will go and talk to, let's say Noah here. Let's say he runs Reddit marketing for our corporation. we'll ask him the biggest issues for client related calls we don't recall all our calls so let's say um he has a company uh there's a company x a single brain yeah and he's talking to you and you already signed up the conversations are gonna be different than what they are for i think we're on the same page so i think you might have the the gone calls but i think you you're still talking to people too on the side but you're trying to get whatever data you can so i think this is this is kind of similar to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation this is not the end all be all.
15:13You know what I mean? You still need to have conversations. Yes, but we're finding if we use data from recorded calls, the content quality isn't that good. Yeah. And the reason is we have too much volume and what people are looking for varies drastically. While if we just pull out what our ideal customers are looking for and base it off of that, it's much better content. Not necessarily from the views, but from a conversion from a watcher to becoming a customer. But you can also segment those calls too. You can, yes. So my point is, I think a lot of this is, this does, again, AI amplifies your nature, right?
15:51So hopefully you're someone that thinks a little step, a couple of steps like, hey, don't just take the data for what it is, segment it, but also use that with actual conversations that you're having in person too. So the final thing to call out here is this OpenAI Frontier thing came out today. I just have one business question for you. So you record all calls. Your clients will let you record calls after they become a customer? Yeah. Oh, we can't do that. Yeah, you can't. But like ours, our thing keeps declaring there's a call recorder. And some do ask us to remove it and we do. But yeah, no, no.
16:20Almost all our clients don't want it. The vast majority of our call recorders are in there. Yeah. Yeah. I would say if I have, if we have 10 calls with customers, I'm lucky if one lets us record it. Yeah. You probably have some type of, it's probably these enterprise ones. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So speaking of, enterprise-ish company, OpenAI Today. So they just introduced today, this is breaking news, they introduced Frontier, which is a new platform that helps enterprises build, deploy, and manage AI agents that can do real work. Frontier gives agents the same skills people need to succeed at work.
16:54Shared context, onboarding, hands-on learning with feedback, and clear permissions and boundaries. That's how teams move beyond isolated use cases to AI coworkers that work across the business. So Clay actually just came out. So they're part of this and I want to share this. Varun. So Varun is, so Clay is one of six companies joined OpenAI's new frontier program. Tomorrow's best companies will run on AI across every function. Clay is already a creative tool, powering growth teams at Cursor, Ramp, Figma, and OpenAI itself. Now we're making that same power available for enterprises through OpenAI's new platform.
17:30So here's some ideas of the benefits and we can talk about our reactions to this. So here are some ways Clay and OpenAI help GTM teams use AI to grow together. Number one, RevOps and GDM engineering teams can turn their CRM into a living entity, one that automatically refreshes the dupes and services accounts that are ready to buy. Okay, that's cool. Number two, sales teams can score companies showing buying signals, pull verified contacts, generate personalized messaging, and sync everything to their CRM. Marketing teams can build targeted audiences and ship relevant creative campaigns from ads to landing pages to email.
18:02I think the main thing here is that you have all, imagine your sales team, your marketing team, they're all working within their own context. If you have shared context, you're going to be able to move a lot faster. Yeah. Yeah. So Clay's doing this. Clay's in Sierra. Harvey, which is the lawyer one. Sierra is Brett Taylor, right? Yeah, Brett Taylor, which she, I guess. He's on the board of OpenAI. They make bots, I guess. But I think the Clay one sounds like - I think a lot of Sierra stuff is manual too, right? Is what they're saying? I think they use a Palantir model, which is like they have the scaffolding and then they customize the chatbots for every client, which again, I think that's the future of software.
18:37So anyway, going back to this piece, if you're able, because here's my thing, right? I'm like, okay, I have so many ideas when it comes to sales, GTM, marketing, and you do too, but how do you make sure this stuff is happening? And I remember Dharmesh posted about vectors a long time ago where you want everyone kind of pointing in the same direction. Because if I want to do marketing this way, you want to do marketing this way, we're actually neutral. We're not moving in the right direction. You want everyone moving together and you can actually see now you can onboard people the same way and all that.
19:01So this just came out today. I'm excited about it and maybe I'll go try it when I go home. On a side note, did you see the ads that... Oh yeah. Do you see the one with the workout one? Yeah. The workout one was great. I don't know. I'm blanking on the company. We were just talking about it. Anthropic versus... Anthropic made these ads, Super Bowl ads. Basically, they weren't calling out OpenAI, but they were saying, hey, we will never have ads in our products. Yeah. It was hilarious. Yeah, like it's funny. So we'll just describe it real quick. And I highly recommend you watch. I think they'd have four ads that are coming out.
19:34But one guy's like, you know, I'm trying to, I want to get a six pack. And then there's this one ripped guy. He's like, he's like the AI, right? He's like, perfect. That sounds like a very reasonable plan. Here's how you do it. And the guy's like, amazing, right? And the other guy's like, okay, well, in order to get started, sign up for this brand over here and we'll give you this discount. And the other guy's like, what? He's like, Antropic will never have ads. Cloud will never have ads. Yeah. And then Sam Altman responded. He was pissed. Yeah. So the funny thing about that response is someone who is a very popular VC tweeter, he likes both Cloud and OpenAI.
20:10He's like, dude, the Sam Altman response was, and I can say this, like he seemed like his butt hurt. He's like, you know, just to let you know, the ad was in good jest. I laugh at it, but just so you know, Texas has more ChatGPT users than all of Claude, right? There's like no reason to say that. And it's not like Anthropic was making, Anthropic just wants their users. It wasn't calling out OpenAI. So I thought he was a little butthurt about it. Yeah, I thought that was funny. Yeah, I watched him. I enjoyed him a lot. That's pretty much it. I think we're done. So that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe.
20:44And we will see you tomorrow.
20:49How to be a fan.
From the publisher
Neil and Eric break down how TBPN scaled to $10M+ in podcast revenue with $300+ CPMs, 20 ads per episode, and high-value B2B sponsors, proving niche audiences can outperform massive reach. They debate Goldman Sachs’ AI agents vs SaaS prediction, why outcomes beat tools, and how OpenAI’s new Frontier platform could power enterprise AI agents. Plus, smart investing psychology, why you can’t time the market, Anthropic vs OpenAI Super Bowl ads, and how to create content that attracts high-paying customers instead of just views.
High-CPM podcast monetization strategy revealed
AI agents vs SaaS future explained
Why long-term investing beats trading
Chapters
(00:00) TBPN $10M Podcast Breakdown
(01:56) AI Agents vs SaaS Debate
(03:40) Investing Psychology Lessons
(07:33) Hiring & Content Strategy
(14:34) OpenAI Frontier Explained
(17:05) Anthropic vs OpenAI Ads
