The Two Things We're Doing For The Rest Of 2026

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

0:34Neil Patel:for the remainder of 2026, what are they going to be? And then the second question I have for you is, are you ever going to fix how your company is just founded by you and bring in someone else?

0:48Eric Siu:So is your question tied to marketing or business? Both. Okay, let's talk about marketing first. What I'm going to do for the two things for the rest of 2026.

0:58Neil Patel:and then do the business side and then the the third one which was about the founding partner or co-founder that is more business side but i'm curious on all three i think so i'll start with

1:09Eric Siu:marketing first so we're and i'm sure you guys are doing this too but it's not even just about marketable moments it's really about how can you ship stuff and stay top of mind right and you look at when nikita beer the former product lead at x he left pretty quickly but he launched a lot very quick. I was going to fall asleep. So anyway, Nikita Beer was like, look, it's not about just like one big launch video or whatever. It's like constantly shipping all the time. So you're top of mind. Right. And there's so much stuff we're shipping around, like the single brain gateway. We have the ambient agent.

1:39Eric Siu:There's all these things that we have where the engineers now were like, they're all learning how to do marketable moments. And so we want to get, we want to push that very hard. But to answer your question directly, it's also the agent led growth piece, right? How do you set up the MD files? How do you make it easy for agents to purchase and setting up APIs and MCPs? I think, you know, it's that agent-like growth piece. We want to solidify that foundation and marketable moments ties in with that. So that's maybe two things. And the third thing is I'm paying a lot more attention now to how we're doing organic social.

2:09Eric Siu:So we just had a new contractor start on organic social. First post, he puts out like 500 comments on LinkedIn. And then it's like, he's just responding to people and stuff. I'm like, this is pretty good, right? So I'm going to hit on that more. But how this relates to also the business as well is I have now all these workflows sourcing for all the people. And I stole your two promotions at two different companies in average 10 years, three years. It's just sourcing everything every single day. And it's also sending them very specific questions too, which we can talk about later. So that's the three things on the marketing side.

2:39Eric Siu:And related to that, on the business side is the recruiting piece, right? We have these workflows reaching out to people. Hey, Neil, saw that you're working on this and that. You know, we're building these revenue company brains at Single Grain. Would you be interested? We're looking for AI, very AI forward people, right? So recruiting is a big one. Second thing is related to that. There's some executives that we're bringing in. To answer your question directly, would I be open to a strategic investor? Like, yeah, I would be. And we do have a new executive that's coming in that's gonna free up a lot of my time.

3:12Eric Siu:We'll see. where I can focus more on product, marketing, and recruiting.

3:18Neil Patel:Before I ask you a question about the single brain side. Well, then you have to answer the question too. No, before I ask you a question. Okay, but then you have to answer the question after. Go ahead. Okay. Dude, this is how many people actually use agents in the marketing world. Yeah, I'm curious how it looks in a year. Yeah, so -

3:34Eric Siu:So Neil, you should read to the -

3:36Neil Patel:Sure, so how popular agents in the marketing world. Open AI says users are using agents when it comes to their platform, 1.1 % of the time only, which is really tiny. We interviewed companies, 100 companies. The total employee count in marketing was 1 ,416. Numbers are rounded for clarity here. Not the one for companies using agents because that's a straight number out of 100. But only 17 of those companies were using agents in marketing. And when you dive in a little bit deeper, majority of the companies aren't actually using agents. And when you actually look at how many employees, it's only roughly 3.5 % of employees are using agents in marketing.

4:17Neil Patel:I don't know about the other departments. It's hard for us to survey that due to the fact that we don't have access to a lot of engineers or product people. Is that a dog? It's a dog. It's a dog barking. But yeah, it's very tiny. Everyone talks about agents and how they're using them, but I don't think actually most people use them.

4:34Eric Siu:Let's test this real quick. So Noah, how would you define what an agent is? and I'll repeat it in here.

4:41Eric Siu:A program that's going to run things for you and manage all of your AI. Okay. What do you define an agent as?

4:47Neil Patel:I look at it as an agent as something that is software that's going out there and doing things for you and actually executing and getting it done and reporting back what it did.

4:58Eric Siu:Yeah. So Noah and Neil said the same thing. And I actually agree with you guys. To me, an agent is just code. You define something that you want, the agent thinks in the middle, and then you get an output, right? And so I just don't think that, I don't think most people, like agent is such a weird, like I even hate using the word agent, right? Like it sounds so like, oh, look at me, I'm using agent. Look at me, I have a six pack, right? Like you don't even need to say that. It's just like, I'm just having this do it for me, right? So I just don't think most people know, but I would suspect that that number goes up a lot.

5:26Eric Siu:Once we were just like, okay, that's what I use. But in my mind, I'm just like, I'm just using AI, right? So, yeah.

5:32Neil Patel:Spot on. I think what will happen is in the future, the number will go up. people will be using Gemini or ChatGPT and it'll do stuff for them, but they'll look at it as like, oh, just Gemini, they won't call it an agent. They'll just be like, hey, help me get it done.

5:46Eric Siu:It's not like I've logged onto the internet and used TCP IP protocol today. You know what I mean? And so like all the flows that I have working, like are those agents? Yeah, they are. But like, it feels so icky for me to say agent. I don't know why. But I think a lot of the flows and everything will change drastically in the future. Probably. But you know what? I was reading, I don't know if you saw this, but I'm reading this other NVIDIA book, right? And one of the senior engineers who's still there today, I think he's been there for 20 plus years. He's like, dude, if you think about it, like people are like, oh, AI is going to destroy the world.

6:13Eric Siu:Like, no, AI is not going to destroy the world. You know why? Because AI is not going to think in human terms, like zero sum where we're trying to kill each other all the time, right? AI is going to be thinking about, oh, we need data centers. Oh, okay, let's put them underground because there's a lot of space underground. So we don't have to disrupt the humans. But humans are territorial, right? Like if I'm competing with you, you're competing with me, I'm competing with you. Like we're a little terrified, like we want to compete with each other, right? AI's like, no. He's like, dude, AI moves at the speed of light.

6:36Eric Siu:AI doesn't have to be on this planet. It can be in space. It could just be moving around. And so it's going to think way beyond this. And so the way we're even talking about it right now, you look back on this in maybe two or three years, it's like, look at these dumb humans talking about us. They're going to think way beyond how we think right now. Yeah. So what's your answer to the three and three?

6:55Neil Patel:Three and three. So three things that are focusing on from marketing till the end of the year, and then three things that are business for the end of the year. marketing one, I am trying to get a list of conferences that I should speak at that are, have our ideal customer profile. We're trying to move more and more upstream to larger companies, even on the S and B side, because you can be an S and B, but you could be part of a franchise and there could be 300 of your locations. So we would consider that S and B, but it really is starting to become enterprise because it could be multimillion dollar accounts.

7:25Neil Patel:And I believe you're going to get a lot of those relationships from conferences. The second thing that I'm working on heavily towards now and the end of the year is GEO and getting ranking specifically through one simple obvious tactic. So I am typing in all the queries that we ideally want to rank for or be mentioned globally on these LLMs. And I'm looking at the sources they're citing, and I'm trying to convince the people that are citing my competitors to also mentioned me within their articles. Because I found that that's the quickest way to get AI to cite you. You know how everyone's like, you need to create listicles.

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8:44Eric Siu:That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan.

8:52Neil Patel:If you just look at the articles that they're only pulling your competitors from, because it lists out and you get included in those same exact articles. It's the fastest way to get mentioned on Gemini, ChatGPT, any LLM by far. So I'm manually myself emailing the people and building relationships and trying to get included in every single one. And my team's helping me out because I don't speak all the languages and my team also doesn't English. Dude, this is where you would

9:18Eric Siu:set up a grok pot for this, just for fun.

9:20Neil Patel:Yeah, so those are the two things I'm marketing. If I had to pick a third thing for marketing right now,

9:26Eric Siu:By the way, that's digital PR.

9:28Neil Patel:Yeah. The third thing is ramping up content even more. So 2 p.m. today, I'm starting to film 30-minute-to-hour long-form videos that I'll publish. But I want to see, this will be my first one that I've done in a long time. I want to see if I can do two of those per week. So I'm already producing a lot of content, right? I do two shorts a day, a chart a day. sometimes we miss a chart, but let's call it three pieces of content. I also produce a long form video, one a week. That's usually around 10, 15 minutes. I'm now trying to produce two longer form articles per, uh, or longer form video content pieces per week.

10:11Neil Patel:That would be 30 plus minutes. And, uh, this does not include tech space. And then of course we do the podcast and stuff like that.

10:18Eric Siu:My guess, if you stop doing the long forms is because you get bored because there's so long. The long 45 minutes to 60 minutes, unless I'm doing a webinar where you can kind of just be yourself, it's really hard to do those. It is.

10:29Neil Patel:It's more screen sharing than it is of me talking and going line for line.

10:35Eric Siu:You know what I've learned? And I want to come back to your answers, but when I do a webinar for 60 minutes and I'm just sharing screen and I'm kind of just talking, it's actually very enjoyable, right? It's not enjoyable when you have a script for me, at least in front of you, and you're very stiff and you're like, yeah, we're going to do the 10 things on this and that and then it's like you just have to like it's a slog like remember that one time we went to record that course for you for that one company and that took the entire day

11:01Neil Patel:and then like that that was painful yeah dude the way i do my recording these days is i record in my house for hour and then the crew that's helping record i will go and either eat lunch with them in my house. So like Uber eat something or whatever's in the fridge, or depending on the time of the recording, I will just go into the theater room and we'll watch a TV show for 30 minutes to hours. So you just get a mental break and then go back to recording.

11:31Eric Siu:Yeah. That's good. That's good. Yeah. Neil and I, we're a little older now. We're in our forties now. So we need, we need a mental break. We need to take, we need to take naps sometimes too, you know? So yeah, but continue. Did you, you covered the three marketing and the three business already? No, I covered the three marketing.

11:46Neil Patel:Business is find more companies to buy in Europe this year. I already found the one in Latin America that I want to buy. So I'm not really focusing on Latin America anymore. It's not done yet. I look at it as once they sign an LOI and then once we really know. German one's too early. But yeah, so I want to focus on Europe and that'll set us up for a much better next year. I want to start infilling services. When I say services, what do we lack? Because one way to grow is you just buy in regions. The other way to grow is you add in the services that you're not offering. We offer, for example, marketplaces and TikTok shop marketing.

12:34Neil Patel:We've been doing that for a while. We're not known for that. There's other companies out there that are better than we are at it, just being very blunt because that's all they specialize in. So either go and recruit those people from those organizations and bring them over or if I can't do that, just go buy a competitor who just does that. So I think what that's two and then the third thing that I'm trying to do on the business end is this sounds really cheesy. I need to push my team, especially my executive team to create a much better work-life balance. When you try to recruit amazing people, they die for the company and they'll do whatever and continually work.

13:20Neil Patel:But just like how I'm getting older, my team's getting older. And it's just like someone the other day is joining our call when one of their immediate family members pass. I'm like, well, what are you doing? This is not acceptable. Dude. I can't say that. I had to be there, but I'm like, hey, dude, we're going to reschedule this call. I can't say directly on the call, like, what are you doing?