This Pool Builder Uses AI To Actually Close Deals (Whilst Sleeping)

0:00Eric Siu:When a buyer asks AI for a solution like yours, does your business come up? Most companies have no idea. And by the time they find out, they've already lost the deal to someone who did. HubSpot AEO helps you show up in those moments with the right answers buyers are looking for. Before the first click, before the first form fill. That's the moment HubSpot AEO is built for. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Neil, did you see this guy that builds pools? Okay, so he basically closes these$50 ,000 pool deals. I'm going to show you over here. He uses OpenClaw.

0:36Eric Siu:Like a swimming pool? Yeah, swimming pool. Swimming pool. Okay, thank you for that. So, okay. Neil, this OpenClaw bot finds$500 ,000 to$1.2 million homes without pools. It renders a pool in their backyard and mails the owner a postcard showing the before and after on autopilot. Here's how pool builders can close 50k deals with this system. Okay. So it scans the satellite imagery. It filters by lot size. It does all this stuff over here and then check this out. So this guy's marking tactic, comment pool, and I'll show you the full breakdown. And so he gets 1.2 million views on this. I think this is genius, right?

1:07Eric Siu:You can see the rendering. I'll make it a little bigger. You can see that. So you can see lots scanned over here, lots scanned in Tampa, pool rendered, and literally they get a postcard. So I think this is pretty cool because now you have an agent that can end to end handle this and look at all the homes and it'll create the postcard. It'll create the rendering. And this is a nice way to get people's attention when it comes to outbound. But what's funny to me, Neil, is when you look at what this guy has, if I can come off of this real quick, he gets 1.2 million views on this. And then at the very bottom, he's like, DM me if you want a custom open claw for your system.

1:37Eric Siu:So open claw system for your business. Okay. So he's calling this out as a case study. That's cool. But you know what's funnier, Neil? Manus comes in. So this employee from Manus, you can see, go to Barkin at Manus. Oh, look, another homie, Neil. but he's like, hey, I saw this and I just had to try it with Manus AI. Delivered all of these in one session, personalized to your name and need. This is hyper-personalized sales at its best. So it's like marketing on marketing on marketing.

2:04Neil Patel:Did I tell you I got hit up by Manus? Have they hit you up for social bills? Videos? Yeah. They hit you up? The Manus team?

2:11Eric Siu:Uh-huh.

2:12Neil Patel:Okay. If you ever need to be connected to more people there on that team, let me know. How come you didn't do a deal?

2:18Eric Siu:Hey, how come they don't sponsor this podcast? This would be the perfect podcast for them to sponsor. We love Mattis.

2:26Neil Patel:Mattis.

2:27Eric Siu:Okay, Neil's doing it right now. I can see Neil's in the middle of it. Neil's like, oh, good idea. Okay, thank you, Neil. But I made a video for them, by the way, when they first came out. That video got like 200 ,000 views on it, on long form. So they got some conversions out of that. Okay, and I called it out as a big winner last year, even though the AI said I was sensationalist. Okay. So I'm going to move over as Neil pulls that up. Neil, I want to talk about Sequoia's$1 trillion thesis. Okay. Have you heard of this? Uh-uh. Okay. So Silicon Valley is finally waking up to this$1 trillion thesis by Sequoia.

3:02Eric Siu:So Sequoia Capital, they are a popular venture firm. They funded some of the most iconic companies. I think they funded Apple back in the day. So Sequoia's thesis that the next$1 trillion company will sell work, not software is the most important reframe in AI right now. So the argument is if you sell a copilot, you're competing with every new model release. But if you sell the outcomes of books closed, contracts claimed, customers driven, for example, claims handled, every AI improvement makes your margins better, not your product obsolete. So the key insight most people are missing for every dollar spent on software,$6 is spent on services.

3:36Eric Siu:Thank God, Neil, that we have a services business for both of us, right? So don't think about AI for accountants. You want AI for lawyers, but the AI law firm. So you look at this over here. What they're basically saying is that this team, we just published a paper on how to measure these economic outcomes. We call them outcome primitives. We track 1 ,300 agents over 21 days, creating $32 million of economic value. So securing jobs, winning$200K grants, and shipping e-commerce shops. If your AI product is a co-pilot, you're competing on software margins, losing the big AI labs. If you're an AI product that delivers the primitive, you're competing on services margins, transforming outdated, inefficient industries.

4:18Eric Siu:So choose your battles wisely. I don't even know how to read this chart over here. All I'll just say is that services as a software, it's become the sexy thing. And thank God we stuck around, Neil. You could have sold out, but you didn't.

4:32Neil Patel:That's right. On a side note, I just did an introduction to the Manus team and told them how your past videos drove a lot of views and they should work with you. Good luck. us. Work with us for this podcast.

4:43Eric Siu:I just said to you. I don't want to do a one-off video. That's annoying. I just sponsored this podcast. We have HubSpot. They're a great sponsor. We're taking one more.

4:54Neil Patel:Cool.

4:55Eric Siu:Try reading this real quick, Neil.

4:57Neil Patel:I can't see it. The text color and writing is too hard for me.

5:01Eric Siu:I'm going to try to understand this real quick. Outcome magnitude, human effort equivalent. For AP asset production, Okay. Decision support, interpersonal navigation, health optimization. Okay. Let's look at this. I don't understand this. All we need to know, Neil, is there's a$1 trillion thesis by Sequoia. And that's why you have YC, you have companies like Sequoia talking about backing more services companies. But this is outcome-based. So you're selling outcomes. They say it's$1 trillion. Which is what we've been doing anyway. You're selling outcomes where you're going to do it more efficiently.

5:36Neil Patel:But this isn't the same thing as software as a service, is it? I don't know. It doesn't sound like it.

5:40Eric Siu:I think, I mean, this Sequoia one over here where you see this picture, I don't know who this is, but services as a software, YC was talking about, I think Sequoia is also talking about it too. So the next trillion dollar company will sell work, not software, is the most important reframe in AI right now. And I tend to believe that, which is why we're not trying to. Yeah.

5:57Neil Patel:I think they say service as a software is like a$15 trillion industry.

6:01Eric Siu:It is because way more people spend money on services than software. like six to one every dollar spent on software six dollars is spent on services

6:11Neil Patel:global software as a service market with estimated value I mean you're going to go to town

6:17Eric Siu:with MPXL that's what I'll say

6:21Neil Patel:time will end up telling but yeah we'll try I can't find where the rank is let me just actually use AI let's see what it says industry size what are you looking for

6:32Eric Siu:can you share your screen sure uh okay so what do we got here so service has a software it focuses on software as a service

6:42Neil Patel:oh it failed yeah i tried it with chad gpt the other day too and it failed as well it feels you

6:50Eric Siu:know these things fail quite often now that i speak to the agents all day it fails a lot like but it's still worth the trade-off because the the gains you get from it are still worth it so i'll take like you and i are not perfect we fail a lot every single day yeah so i'll tell you i have a

7:05Neil Patel:friend who works at a public traded company and they did an experiment with different divisions and canning employees for ai small divisions okay so like uh they ended up canning quite a bit of people on marketing and they wanted to see what could be done automatically and a few other divisions so they tried marketing sales you get the point right and they didn't pick the big divisions that are making billions of dollars, they picked the smaller ones where they could afford to lose some money. And what they found was the ones where they cut people and they couldn't cut everyone, but they cut a lot of people or percentage wise, it wasn't a big head count numbers.

7:41Neil Patel:It wasn't big announcements. The results weren't great. And what they found was the biggest issue AI had was with strategy, especially in marketing. And it was doing a lot a subpar mediocre work, but here was a bigger thing. Some of the divisions they have are regulated and one of them made a mistake that cost them$6 million. So at that point, they're just like, this stuff is cool. We want to pair it with humans. This is costing us too much money, both on the revenue front and on the penalty front.

8:16Eric Siu:Quick break for SaaS founders listening. You know how content marketing works. You know how AI SEO works. And you've been seeing competitors ranking for your keywords all day long. But you don't have the time to write and hiring a content team feels premature or just out of the budget. That's exactly why we built ClickFlow. It helps create AI SEO content that actually sounds like your brand. We're talking thought leadership, we're talking product content, comparison pages, without having to add more headcount. It also helps you do things such as building FAQs, internal linking, and telling you which old posts are hurting your domain.

8:46Eric Siu:One user reported saving 90 hours per month, and that was a part-time employee. You can get a 14-day free trial at clickflow.com.

8:53Neil Patel:Scale your content without scaling your team. Back to the show.

8:57Eric Siu:You know what I think? I mean, so I'll tell you what. The good news is our marketing school, YouTube, is growing faster now. And so I want to give Jan credit. But also at the same time, I was speaking to him. So he helps us with the YouTube strategy. And so he made a statement. I was just talking to him about it yesterday. And I'll just make it public. He's like, yeah, I don't tend to trust AI when it comes to titles and strategy and all that. It's like, no, it's not AI or human. It's AI and human. When you do AI and human and you use something like YouTube API, you're going to get better results ultimately because it's going to spot patterns that you wouldn't have spotted on your own.

9:32Eric Siu:And so I think that's what people need to get right. It's not or, it's and.

9:39Neil Patel:Yeah, watch this, everyone. And Eric, be honest. Do you think I'm a... If you had to rate my skills for writing copy, what would you rate me on a one to 10? Be honest.

9:48Eric Siu:at least a marketing copy like for stuff probably 8.5 to 9 okay what what would you rank me if i

9:56Neil Patel:had to write marketing copy for a marketing company like marketing software marketing agency probably like a four or five out of 10 yeah like writing copy for my own website for okay writing

10:10Eric Siu:copy for your own stuff like when i think about like quick sprout for example like i think 8.59 nine out of ten. I think if you're writing for an agency, actually, no, you have written for your agency. I think, no, I think you do do a good job with, yeah. So I would say probably around the same range. But I don't know why I think you, what area do you suck in? I clearly think you suck in one area. What is it?