The Two Main Factors That Drive Business Success

0:00I'm going to ask you a question. So Peter Drucker, the business executive, thinks that there's only two major things that are important for a business. What do you think those two things are? if you were to discuss just randomly. The two major things? Yeah, the two main things for business. I can name a few. Profitability is one, like your revenue and overall how profitable are you to your financials. If your financials suck, then who cares? And then I would say another thing, if you're just looking at the business metrics, not like the team, because if you have a shitty team, you're not gonna have a good business, right?

0:29But if looking at other good metrics is how loyal are your customers? Can you keep them? Are they evangelizing? Do they keep paying over time? Are they bringing in more customers? Or do you have a churn and burn style business? Yeah. Okay. So Michael here in the comments actually got it, right? So good job, Michael. Peter Drucker said marketing and innovation. And so these things kind of come downstream, like the things that you mentioned, right? If you're bringing in leads and you're innovating, that means hopefully that you're not just innovating on bullshit, right? You're actually serving your customer.

0:57If you keep these flywheels going, you're going to be fine, right? And then when you first started MP Digital, the thing that was the most important that even Mike, your co-founder agrees with you on is the leads were the main thing, right? The other things you can figure out over time, because if you got the leads, like you, you've kind of solved half the problem already. And then in an innovation piece, like we are forced, like your business or my business, like what you're doing with, um, what you're doing with Uber suggests right now, answer to public, what we're doing with ClickFlow and carrot, we're constantly talking to customers and figuring out how we can innovate and do better.

1:28Because if you like, if you're not, if you're not delivering a great product, what happens then it's, it's a bunch of smoke and mirrors. Right. Which is unfortunately, I think that's what happened for the Cluely, at least the first launch of their product. And the last thing I'll say around this, can you see my screen? Yeah. So this guy, Kerry, basically summarizes TLDR. So Roy Lee, the founder of Cluely, was explaining the Cluely pivot and a brief history, right? So nine months, I built an interview coder, an undetectable translucent desktop, blah, blah, blah. So this guy's like, okay, TLDR, too long, didn't read.

2:00We see ourselves as a viral marketing company, not a product company. So that goes back to what you were just saying. Having a good product that can sustain or service that can sustain the test of time, that's what matters a lot more versus a kind of like a quick like PR bump. So the one thing I would disagree with that Peter Drucker guy, and I used to have a Masterclass subscription back in the day. I think you did too probably at one time. Yeah. Well, our mutual friend maybe bought it for us. I never, yeah. I don't know who ended up giving it to me, but someone gave it to me as a gift. I only used it for that time where I had the free masterclass.

2:36I think it was one year or something like that. And one of the interviews that I remember and it really stuck with me was a Howard Schultz interview. And he was talking about innovation. Innovation is really hard. And I look at my previous co-founder, my brother-in-law, Heathen Shah. He always likes doing companies that are in new spaces and trying to do new products that no one's ever seen. And Howard Schultz breaks down like innovation is really tough. It's a big hit or miss. you get really bloody being the first going through the door and it's hard like most people fail at it elon musk does a really great job at innovation but most people don't and he goes on to saying like i rather be the entrepreneur or i'm paraphrasing here but he's like i rather not be the innovator i rather just go into a big massive space and just do something a little bit better now that could be kind of a form of innovation it's probably not a true form of innovation.

3:33Yeah, a little bit, but not really. There's different types, but like, hey, we're going to provide better customer service or put your name on a cup. All those little things do matter. And what I ended up learning through this company at NP Digital, because it was one of the first companies where I started and I truly didn't innovate much when we started. I was entering a massive crowded marketplace where most of the things were determined. And what we felt in this space was clients were really under service. And what I learned from private equity going through the process when we were thinking about selling and we decided not to was private equity was just like, oh yeah, you don't have to create a new company.

4:14You just have to go after big spaces. We tend to just invest into companies that are in existing spaces that are just massive. And it's okay if they're just, you know, another, you know, look like company, the space is big enough, everyone can get drunk and make money. Yeah. That's something you learned a little. I mean, it's good. I think we're still relatively young, but I think it took us too long to learn about total addressable market and how that affects everything. But I would go back and like a couple of months ago, we did a pod where we talked about how when it comes to innovation, let's say we're invading like a beachfront, right?

4:48You're not going to be the first, you're not going to be in the first boat. Typically you're like parachuting in on like a plane. You're like, you're not even the first or your second or third wave. You're like the fourth, fifth or sixth wave, right? Once something is proven out. Now for me, I like to come in on like the probably second or third wave. Um, but I don't like to be at the first, I don't want to be like at the forefront of it. Cause there's, there's a lot of risk that's tied in with that. Right. But there's different forms of innovation is what we're trying to say. So. Yeah, there's, there's different forms and same with marketing.

5:13I hear people constantly telling me because Eric and I are marketers, Hey, you need to do more social media. Oh, you can edit your YouTube videos this way, or, Oh, you can end up doing this with your SEO and getting more traffic. Look, I get it all. I found what the marketing that works best for my own company is me and my team. And we don't always have to do it together. They do it independently as well. Host events in different parts of the world because we're in so many countries at this point. And we invite really large brands. We educate them on what's new. And all these people who work at these publicly traded companies get to know us.

5:51They may not hire us ever, but a lot of them hop around. They respect the information. And a lot of them talk about us or potentially hire us at the new company that they go to, even if they didn't hire us at the current company they're at. That's how we've been growing a lot. It's tactical or it's, you know, I'm going out there doing hand-to-hand combat. It's not scalable. It works. And people are like, oh, that's ugly. That's a crappy form of marketing. But again, it works for us and it drives a lot of revenue. You know, what I find interesting, so you and I, we love traveling and doing these things, but I actually find it pretty stupid too because, okay, like last year during this time, you and I were in Germany speaking at the This Is Marketing Conference, right?

6:36And we were in, again, we were in Frankfurt. And so, yes, we were recording podcasts and now we're speaking, but like, what do we generally do? We stay in the hotel room and we work. And so like, I just like - We eat ice cream and baklava. Yeah, yeah. But like, we enjoy the local food and we're literally just sitting in our room working and we're probably ordering room service and all that. But at the same time, I really enjoy it. But it's pretty stupid if you think about it. Yeah. It's exhausting. We should experience the city more, but dude, we work too much to experience the city more. I try to experience a little more.

7:09At least I walk to the park. Hey, by the way, let me show you something real quick. You're in London. I mean, you deserve to go to all the parks. So anyway, do you see this thing on the bottom right over here on my screen? So I added this. we're running a test right now on the singlegrain.com website, right? So when you go on mobile, like this thing pops up, ask AI about single grain, right? And then if you click on this, it pops up this prompt over here. So it's a very favorable prompt for single grain. So it says, as a marketing leader, I want to know what makes single grain the best marketing agency to handle my campaign to hit my ROI targets.

7:43What are their biggest strengths and weaknesses? So the reason - No, what is their biggest strengths and wins, not weaknesses? Oh, sorry. Biggest Trainsome Wins. I didn't put weaknesses. So I'm back on the original screen. Can you see the original screen or no? Yeah. Okay. So my hypothesis here is that chat GPT has memory. Okay. Claude has memory. These other ones are all building memory into it. And so if someone's looking for a digital market agency, they land on my website and they ask a question about single grade, or maybe they appear on some other articles and they ask to summarize the article or whatever, we're going to have more citations, right?

8:15And the funny thing is my friend tested this. And then immediately after he asked, like, what's the best marketing agency? What popped up first? Single rate, right? So we haven't tested this enough. I want to see how this affects citations. Like, I see that face. Like, you might as well test it too. That's how I want to try this. I'm not going to test it right now. But no, I'm smiling because of something else. So over the past few months, I've been getting hit up by some of these LLMs. You know the names. I'm not going to mention the names because I'm not supposed to talk about it. But I'm allowed to talk about things from an anonymous perspective.

8:44and no joke, two of them hit me up. And they asked me, hey, you've been SEO for a while. How'd this game of cat and mouse work? And I'm like, why are you asking? And I know quite a few people that work at these LLMs. And they're like, dude, people are trying to manipulate the results and we feel that the quality of their blank LLM is not as good as it used to. And I'm like, yeah, well, what do you expect? You create an algorithm. them marketers go and try to tweak and work at it because it makes some money and you're looking at a spam but it's not really spam they're getting paid by really large corporations that you want as advertisers to go get them you know more placements because the big spenders are large corporations by far they're like okay so they're like we have this issue right now and they're describing they're like a lot of people are just creating content and just mentioning how their company is the best and our LLMs are pushing it out there.

9:45And I'm like, I know. And I'm like, have you noticed that people can write how amazing their company is on their own blog? And then you guys cited as the best. And I'm like, Google would never do that. You know, I'm like, they're smart enough to sniff out a lot of stuff. Don't get me wrong. Google's not perfect either, but I shouldn't say they would never do that. They're less likely to do that because their algorithms are much more sophisticated. I'm like, I can go take an article on Joe, the plumber, I'm making up a site and talk about how amazing NP digitalism marketing and you'll cite it and i'm like you guys aren't looking at enough metrics around the authority of the person who wrote it the domain uh giving a domain a rating and a score they're not of course telling me their algorithm in full or anything like that they're kind of giving me some uh sprinkles here and there and i have to try to piece things together uh and that was a purpose of meeting because i wanted to learn where they're going and the direction but they're like yeah, you know, a lot of them are looking at hiring engineers from Google and these other places that have dealt with this to try to make it more sophisticated.

10:44And I was like, it's not about fighting SEOs or marketers or business owners. You got to just think logically. If a random site talks positive about someone is probably not worth as much as if, you know, a really popular industry website talks about how amazing that company is. And it's not sponsored. It's not paid. It's not written as a guest post. It's written by a journalist who has credibility within that space. So like, yeah, good point. And this is stuff that they'll naturally progress to, whether it's now or whether it's six months or two years, I don't know. But they're already moving in that direction.

11:21And I think all the quick manipulable ways to get mentioned more on ChatGPT, more power to anyone who wants to do them. But I think it's going to be short-lived. Of course. Same with perplexity and all the other ones out there. This game, I mean, this is, I mean, this goes all the way back to the yellow pages or even before that. I don't even know what people used before, like maybe in the stone ages or whatever, like how people gamed it. Right. But I would just say that, you know, it's, this is why we've talked about chat GPT apps as well. Like, okay, when there's a new app store that comes out, like that, that is like, you're just trying to be first, but that that's part of the game.

11:54Right. So as they continue to improve their product, like these things will be patched up. And so I think even Google in the early days, like you think about the even when I came into the space in 2010 or so, there was still a lot of spam happening. Right. And so but now they've gotten a lot better. So Google, especially, it's much harder to game. So play the game, but play for the long term. By the way, because we're talking about content, did you see the pod that he did with? So Elon did a podcast with Joe Rogan, and he basically said that all content will become AI content. What do you think about that?

12:29I disagree with Elon, but that's just his take. I know he's the world's most richest person, but he's been wrong in many cases. Yeah. So what percent of content do you think is going to be AI content in the next like five to 10 years? Oh, the majority. When I say majority, more than 90%. Yeah. So 90 to 95%, maybe more than that, right? So the question that I had, so on the drive over to Capital Camp, one of the guys in the car was asking, he was like, Eric, so if you think most content is going to be AI content, which is what I believe. But you said all, right? Or is it most? He said all. He said all.

13:01But I think for me, I think it's going to be 90, 95%. So, okay. The question is, and we should talk about this. It's how do we stand out in a world where the majority of content is AI content? You want to go first or I can go? I think we both know the answer is it's simple. You do human generated content. We always say it. You zig when they zag. You talk about your own experiences. You talk about new stuff that's not regurgitated. You be authentic, personal. You do all these other things that it's harder for AI to replicate. Yes, they could try to be authentic and show empathy and all this kind of stuff with a fake AI avatar.

13:35But if people know it's AI and they had to start disclosing it, I don't think it's going to do as well. And I bet you laws are going to come out where they're going to start disclosing what's AI and what's not AI content. I guarantee you someone's doing some form of identity verification using the blockchain and they're going to make a lot of money doing it. I don't have time for that idea right now, but it's a great idea. So, and I'm sure someone's working on it. But my take on it is in a world with 90, 95 % AI content, the way you stand out is one, you tell really good stories. Okay. You get really good stories by doing interesting things and you're able to tell interesting things.

14:08Or you could do what the founder's guy does, like David Senra. You tell good stories about other founders. You can certainly do that as well. Strategy goes a long way too. And so, you know, we've kind of talked about this, but when this is in the context of B2B, but whenever we're talking in a video or at a conference, whenever we go tactics, that doesn't do as well for pipeline generation as it does versus strategy versus talking about something that's overarching, right? That's more related to B2B. But the other thing I'll say, too, is proprietary data. So you actually do a good job of this.

14:39other players in the space like SimilarWeb, for example, they do a lot of good job with explaining data in a very interesting way. It's simple, easy to read, like visualizations, right? And so I think having proprietary data, having interesting products and telling stories about that product or stories in your space, that's going to go a long way. But that also goes all the way back to storytelling. And then the final thing I'll say is we always talk about this. So right now, guys, this is a live event. Okay. This is also content creation, but this is a live event. but doing live events in person.

15:10So Neil just did a couple of live events this week. I did a live event as well. And throwing your own live events too. And so the more, I think human-led stuff is going to go a long way. And even Sam Altman himself has said that human-led experiences are going to become worth a lot more. And at this event too, I had a couple of people come up to me. He's like, hey, Eric, when are you going to do leveling up again? Which is the event, right? When are you going to do it? And I'm like, I don't know. They're a pain in the ass, but I do enjoy them. It's not like they're a moneymaker, by the way. Like when you do these events, they're not a moneymaker in the short term.

15:37So, yep. So, yeah, no, look, here's a question for you, okay? You, I would say you're a startup still. I wouldn't classify us as a startup. I don't mean that in a bad way or a positive way. I'm just saying, I would say you're more of a startup. I would say we're a startup. You guys are like a mid-sized company, right? Yeah. Do you agree with that? And you guys move faster than us, right? You have less people, less bureaucracy. The list goes on and on. we already know ai is changing marketing we already know ai is changing business as a startup what are you doing to ensure that your content your marketing is adapting super fast and is staying ahead like you you just did that tweak on single rain right it would take me longer to do that tweak than probably your team to do it because again too much bureaucracy and then i got to do it in many languages and all this other crap that just takes longer What are you doing right now to ensure that you guys stay ahead?

16:40And then I can tell you what we're doing as a midsize business. So I think we should set the tone here. So our definition of startup is we have 60 people. OK, Neil has like a thousand plus. OK. And that's how and that's that's what I refer to as midsize and startup. So that's the vernacular. and the things that we're doing you earlier i just showed it already like we're we're testing um that little you know the little marker at the bottom where it's like ask chat gpt about ask single ask chat gpt about single grain or whatever right so the thought there is like okay is is injecting ourselves into the conversation from our website into chat gpt or these other llms is that going to help us right so we're going to be testing that and then we'll run it through like these llm trackers in a couple weeks to see how that goes right um that's one element But the other element I would say is we use our internal product.

17:30I think you guys have something like this too, but we use ClickFlow to help us with updating, deleting, consolidating content, with finding the right internal links as well, finding the right Reddit threads to engage with, and also creating net new content for us too. We're talking production-grade content, not just AI-generated slop. And I would also say that in terms of, I mean, webinars are, we're just talking purely marketing right now, right? For our companies that we're talking about. Okay. So you and I both do webinars. That's a big piece of it. But the other thing I would say is we're trying to ingest more content from our gong, our sales intelligence tool, to give us more content ideas.

18:11Because when people are talking to sales, for example, those are the real pressing points that people have versus us just kind of olden days. You just look at keyword research, right? Now we're looking for real problems from real people to create content around. So that's at least a starting point. And I'm sure I have more that will pop up. Yeah. So on our end, the way we're trying to use AI to go faster as a mid-sized company, because again, we have bureaucracy, we found that presentations work really well. So we try to do a ton of presentations, but we're using, I think my team said Mantis, but I could be wrong.

18:47Mantis? M-A-N-U-S. It's something like that. It's Mantis. I know it starts with man and it helps them make the decks way faster, although it can go rogue. It's madness. So I know we're using that to crank out presentations at a much faster pace. The other thing that we're doing is we have such large data sets. We're using AI to analyze our data sets per industry and aggregate and try to find opportunities. And that allows us to figure out where to spend our time faster versus us doing a lot of trial and error. The other thing that we're doing is we're scraping the web. This isn't really AI on the third one, but we're scraping a lot of the web and we're looking for businesses that are constantly experimenting.

19:29And then from there, we're trying to track all the experimenting that they're doing. We then dump the changes into AI and then AI ends up showing us what patterns are similar across all the data sets in the industries. And it ends up giving us ideas on what is probably going to end up becoming, what's probably going to end up working if we make those changes like the probability of success um i jacked that one from gajon's playbook from spiralize um the other thing that i say that we're doing because there's a lot of bureaucracy on what tools we can or can't use because some of them won't update their terms of service uh to make them compatible to all the countries we're in and their laws we encourage our team members personally and on their own time to experiment with these tools not with clients on their own personal PCs, not with company laptops or anything like that, to go experiment with them and figure out what's valuable or not.

20:26And that's helping us understand which ones we need to double down on and call and figure out how we can get customized contracts and negotiate because it just takes us a while to go through the hoops from the legal aspect. So it's easier to have our team on their personal time with their personal computers, non-client data, non-client work, just test out these tools and figure out which ones the company should be using. Cool. I have a few more from my end, then we can move on to the next topic. By the way, we've done well with not actually pulling from the topics today. It's much more free-flowing.

20:57So one, we've done something internally where we call it the AI contest. And so recently, we had everyone make a Lindy workflow. So that's just like an agentic workflow. It's no different than or very similar to like Zapier, N8N, make.com. And basically, winner got money. Second place also got money too. Third place also got money. And we kind of celebrated this. And everyone was required to make a loom explaining what their product solved. I would say the overall engagement rate we had with this in terms of completion was about 52%. So we want to get that higher. But the reason we're teaching everyone how to build these agentic workflows right now is so when we build other software, because ChatGPT chat kit's going to allow us to create these workflows and connect them with our products.

21:39We're trying to get everyone ready for that. So people that are actually in the trenches working on these problems already, they're trying to make their lives simpler. And I've seen some pretty interesting, some interesting workflows, like very easy ones on like, hey, we're actually over budget on this client over here. Oh, we should do something about this, right? Or like making sure that, you know, every single client request gets responded to or something like that, right? Some are fairly basic. Some are a little more complex. And some will build like an entire like sales dashboard that follows up with people.

22:06So that's one piece of it. The other piece, I've been telling a lot of people about this. I'm pretty sure I told you too, But Juicebox.ai, which raised like 36 million bucks from Sequoia recently, it is amazing at finding the two promotions at two different jobs. And we not only want to find people from a recruiting standpoint with two promotions from two different jobs, which I stole from Neil, but we want them to have an average tenure of three years. And their current tenure also needs to be three years as well. And so literally, you can recalibrate the agent, but it just keeps working on that.

22:38And each agent costs like$150. And so that's a pretty damn good savings in terms of like paying like a contingency based recruiter. And that helps our recruiting team a lot. So that's been good. Stanley, I talked about earlier, Stanley with Stan, it created those two posts that generate a lot of views. And then obviously you guys have heard me talk about MCPs quite a bit. I still use MCPs quite a bit in terms of helping me find pages that are doing well for us and from our analytics. and then using Ahrefs to find other keywords we should be going after and then drafting blog posts based on our writer guidelines into our WordPress that we can review.

23:15And so those are just a handful of things that we play around with. So I know this isn't necessarily marketing, but you want me to break down how we really try to recruit these days for like positions that make us money. We used to do the model that I was talking about with you on LinkedIn. We still do it to some extent. But even when you do that, it really is hit or miss. there's some people that don't work out. So we look in our organization on who are our best performers. Because usually best performers, and this only works once you already - Can I guess what you're gonna say? Can I guess what you're gonna say?

23:48Okay. You do referral recruiting where you go to that person and say, hey, who are the best people on your list over here that we should be hiring? Something like that? It is referral, but it's not kind of like that. I'll give you a real example. When I was in Spain or Madrid a few days ago. so we're looking for someone to head up sales so our head of uh our managing director who manages emia i think his name is mark i think it's emia or you know europe i don't know what his title is so he we have him because we trust him we know he's good we look for our best players they go reach out to their networks for the person we're looking for so whether it's a head of seo or a had a paid or a head of sales and I'll give you the sales example uh because I had personal interaction with them they'll be like all right let me go reach out to my network and say who'd you work with that was the best salesperson ever in Spain or Madrid all right we don't pay any fees or anything like that and they'll tell us who they ended up working with and we'll ask a few people and then when they give us the name we look to who we know that's mutual connections because we ideally try to pull from within our industry and then we ask them about them and they'll tell them like oh so and so they're amazing they worked with me for five years and they always hit their number they never once miss so we're looking for cues like that so then now we know they're good we've of course already interviewed them at this point because we reached out you know got an introduction then let's say if it was a sales role like i was in madrid or in spain but i was in Madrid.

25:22I was doing an event. They were there. They were invited. And then people on our team watch how they work the room. They're not working for us. Yes. Who are they interacting with? Do other people know them? Are they well connected? Right. Are they known in the industry? Because if they're in sales, if they have the relationships, existing relationships, they're going to probably generate more revenue versus if they have no relationships. Yeah. How are they doing in conversation? How are people interacting with them? Like, does it look positive from far away? Does it look like people just want to bounce away?