The New Startup Playbook, CEOs Are Choosing More AI. Less Jobs.

0:04And most engineers don't want to learn marketing. it's most people don't but god it's so fun i don't know i don't know what else to say but but like speaking of marketing we should talk about the new startup playbook so greg eisenberg who spoke at my event thank you greg he tweeted that the new startup playbook looks nothing like the old one i'm just going to read off a couple things here and we can kind of have a discussion so most of your team will be part-time contractors creators and ai agents don't know about that but then your first one million will come from niching down your next 10 million will come from tastefully scaling out.

0:38Another one would be one agent spins out 50 long tail SEO pages from transcripts, support tickets or user reviews. And onboarding will feel like texting a friend. Static forums are dead. So he's basically saying like a lot of these things like outbound or agent scraping, qualifying, writing personalized intros 24-7. A lot of this stuff is happening. He's saying venture capital is optional. We'll see more tiny empires, one founder, one audience and a constellation of tools that they own. He's basically talking about the future. So what do we think about this? So let's go. Some of them I totally agree with and I'm not saying I'm right.

1:10The venture capital, I think for most businesses, they don't need it. I think venture capital should be used for scale, not for creation, unless you're creating something that's just crazy expensive. You want to create a nuclear power plant? You need a lot of money. Sorry, there's just a lot of CapEx in that kind of business. You want to create a SaaS app that helps you analyze keywords? Don't think you need venture capital for that kind of stuff. Like BrightEdge, good business. If you're creating a BrightEdge in today's world, you do not need the capital that they raised back then. Keep in mind, his last round was 2013.

1:46That was the last round, not the first round. The world is very different, not just two, three years ago, very different 12 years ago, right? You needed a lot more capital back then. If you're high agency, you can figure this stuff out. And you can, if you, if you needed to raise money, you can raise it later. If you've really nailed something, if you've got something like you're going for calling a, call it a land grab, right? Like a Facebook back in the day or Instagram back in the day or YouTube, like absolutely you need to raise money, but 99 % of things out there, you don't need to raise money for.

2:15And you can just kind of vibe code these things now or vibe market these things now, right? He put in one that's interesting here that I really like. IRL in real life matters. Founders become event planners. Oh, oh, you did that. I've done that subconsciously, right? Like in my mind, I'm like, it's always been an important thing. I think in real life is really important. I don't know if you have to actually be an event planner. I think that's going further than required, but I agree with the in-person. Some of the ones I don't agree with i'll start off with the most obvious one and you already know i'm going to disagree with this i don't think people are going to be using ai to create 50 000 long tail pages maybe i got the number wrong uh 50 50 50 long tail pages 50 yeah i actually agree with that i thought for some reason i thought you said 50 000 yeah but but 50 i mean we're kind of doing that already and i'm sure you're doing the same thing but a lot of these seo products again we talk about one click marketing we're just going to see a lot of that happen very quickly oh we found these issues in your site.

3:14Why don't you just fix it? Okay, boom, fixed. Right? Same thing. Oh, we found these long tail opportunities over here. And we can write it based on your writer guidelines. And we'll make sure it's ultra high quality. Okay, boom, done. Yeah, generally speaking, I agree with Greg in which there is adjustment to the startup playbook. But, and this is a big but, there's a lot of edge cases. And there's edge cases for a lot of different industries. So for example, we've done outbound many times, we still do outbound. doing outbound to close an enterprise deal that pays seven figures, I would not have AI in today's world write that outbound email.

3:52I'm not saying that won't be the future a year or two from now, but in today's world, I would not have AI craft an email to send to someone that I'm trying to close a seven-figure deal, but I would have AI help me do research faster and then review the research and then craft an email and maybe have AI help me adjust the email if the tone or if someone sucks at writing or copywriting. But other than that, I do see a world where AI is involved in most aspects of running a startup or a business. Let me tell you something about one of my AI Saturdays. So I use lindy.ai and I use that to it basically like you can make these workflows, right?

4:29And it I said, hey, help me find SEO managers that have a history of at least two promotions and companies have to be larger than 200 employees, right? 201 ,000, call it that. it made an entire list of these people and it showed the number of promotions that they had and everything. And it actually handled the outreach. So it's like, I'll take a look at their LinkedIn and their latest post or whatever. And like it personalizes it. That's lower stakes. And so I'm willing to risk it there. If it's a higher stakes when you want to make a good impression, you probably maybe not right now. But I think the fact that it can find exactly what I'm looking for and then send the email outreach out.

5:03And then I have it doing a lot of these autonomous thing, like enriching leads that we have coming in. You know, those are all things that can be done by developer but now that i have lindy i can just within it just ask an llm and then repeat all these loops and um it does a good job i think you nailed it by saying is lower stakes so we use like ai to do outreach to buy businesses and sending even the first and it works like a charm it works like a charm but there's a lot of people that get off put in the emails don't work well um because of the quality of the email and we've tested out many many different versions and prompts and all this kind of stuff but again we're emailing out so many agencies we're okay if some people just want to ignore us if it's something that was really important to us we'll take the time to do it manually because you don't want to burn a relationship over ai messing up an email and they do mess up um and the easiest way for everyone to understand how they mess up when you see a company on linkedin what it says it's in size like employee count people know it can be really off or really accurate it's it's actually somewhat accurate or really off it's usually not like perfectly accurate um example in the marketing world is an agency may show linkedin may show 300 employees but it could be owned by a holding company that has a hundred thousand employees oh we've seen that we've seen that right they're one of your clients right now.

6:29So then you just have to be really careful because the last thing you want to do is have the AI reach out to someone based on the data it's getting. But in many cases, there's edge cases where it's analyzing the data in a wrong way, where a human would be, well, it shows 300 employees, but it's not really 300 employees. It's a subdivision of 100 ,000 employee company. You can't just email them up. And this is an example of my buddy wanting to buy a domain name. And he's like, oh, I think I'm just message them. They look like they barely have any employees. I'm like, dude, it's a subdivision of this publicly traded company that has a market cap of almost$20 billion.

7:07And they bought that company and that domain was part of that acquisition. And they spent, call it four or$500 million on it. They're not just getting to use that domain name for a million dollars. It's not going to happen. That's like a fart in the wind. There's a couple other things here and we can work towards wrapping, but I like some of these other points. So you won't sell software. You'll sell outcomes, transformations, identity upgrades. I think that's the world that we're going into. And I think I like that because that's more accountability. And most people don't like accountability.

7:37I think that's the world we've been in for a long time. Even when we're selling Kissmetrics, we're getting sales trainings from our VCs because like True Ventures at the time would have people come in. They would always tell you, don't sell software. Don't sell whatever you're selling. You're selling outcomes. And I think we're going to see more of it, not even just with software, but I think just a lot of agencies, they sell deliverables, right? We're going to continue to come out in that world. So the more of the world, it's going to be based on outcomes. Go ahead. Even agencies, most don't sell deliverables.

8:03They sell outcomes. Deliverables are part of the contract. So that way people can back out to make sure you're doing work to pay you. I would say in your world, I'm really talking about smaller agencies, people starting out, right? And more people. So he says default alive is low burn, small team, owned audience, high leverage systems. And I think that that's the key thing at the very end, high leverage system. So if you have a data advantage, you have a data advantage. If you have a distribution advantage, you have one. That's going to be, you're not going to necessarily need to raise a bunch of capital in the future.

8:33And I do believe what he said about tiny empires, one founder. I think we are going to see one founder doing a billion in revenue in the next decade or so. Yeah, I agree with that. I think we'll see at least one within the next, you know, I don't know. You say five years or 10 years? I would say 10 years. Okay. I don't think we're on 10 years. I wouldn't say five. Yeah, but I think in five years, we're going to see teams of maybe 10 doing a billion in revenue. Right. So maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Yeah, I have no idea. That's my guess. Yeah. But Greg overall with this playbook, I think he's spot on with startups having to adapt and change to this new world.

9:08And if they don't, you're not going to succeed. And in the startup world right now, what we're seeing is people are still getting venture funding at the early stages. But they're expecting you to scale. So where it's really dried up is the later stages because there's not many IPOs and there's not that much M &A activity that's happening. 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.

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11:24Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. By the way, one final thing here. So this actually dovetails well into this LinkedIn post. So Paul Rootser, he has the AI podcast, AI Institute. He says, my belief is that quiet AI layoffs have been happening for the last six to 12 months, mass under a return to work policy, and they are accelerating. Companies have been replacing staff with AI or at a minimum not hiring new staff due to AI, but they don't want to admit it because it's bad PR.

12:05This article from The Information confirms that. executives at more than half a dozen companies said AI is affecting their hiring plans, though we're more careful to avoid saying AI was effectively replacing existing employees. I think the key takeaway in my mind here is you have to learn this stuff on your own. And if you're going to let this wave pass you by, then you're going to be way behind as a founder, right? And even as an employee too, I can tell who on my team is really into this stuff and it's constantly testing new things all the time. You can bet your butt that whoever your manager is or however your boss is, they're noticing this too.

12:39And so I think just to get ahead, like this is in fact happening because you and I know a lot of founder friends where they're talking about, Hey, how can I replace this doing AI? I'm on a rampage right now. You hear that? I'm on a rampage right now. I want to fire this entire team. In fact, when the marketing event started, I sat next to this gal. She's like, Eric, my marketing team sucks. Can I replace all of them with AI? So this is happening behind the scenes and most people won't talk about it because it's You don't want to talk about this stuff. It is bad PR. But we are here to tell you that this stuff is actually happening.

13:08But the way in front of it is just to be a lifelong learner. And if you're improving and obsessed, then you are going to be fine. That's all. But that's the crazy part. I don't understand why people just don't say, hey, someone is here. I'm going to leverage it. I'm going to learn. And I'm going to do the best in this new environment instead of just shying away and just being against it. Because most people don't want to learn. most people just want life to happen to them yeah they no no it's not even that they let life happen to them and then at the very end they're just like what happened so don't be an npc guys but that is it for what's an npc an npc is a non-player character did i explain this to you last week oh no i explained it to you neve so he's like what's an npc so okay npc is like a character in a game that stays static they never move but why would you have a player in a game that's static that means they're not going to do anything no so a player character is like you and me you can move around your character gets stronger over time it rises in levels you get new gear and things like that right now you play diablo no you didn't so diablo monopoly okay no monopoly doesn't count okay so so in diablo you know you have these people in the town that you can talk to her but they're always there the whole time they never advance or anything they're the same character the whole time that's an npc so gamers have carried that over into real life and an npc is someone that just doesn't get better but then why play the game in the first place npcs are characters that you engage with they're just computers right oh it's not like you they're static characters yeah your character can advance can get stronger over time but there's static computer characters that just stay like that oh it's like the game diablo puts in a fake character for you to communicate to being like yeah you communicate oh oh let's go on a quest right like like this is how you buy can yeah or you can buy a hotel you can go to a blacksmith and then buy gear and sell gear to the blacksmith you can identify items right that deckard cane you don't know who that is either but my point is um you want to make sure that in life you're constantly advancing your player character but most people in life you and i know we've seen this over and over non-player characters right people very close to us they got to the very end of life and the phrase i hear from one of my my close loved ones is you know eric um i uh i just couldn't overcome life and uh you know like life life overcame me and you don't want to do that no so anyway that's it for today guys please don't forget to rate me and subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow dreams.