Tokenmaxxing is DEAD

0:00Eric Siu:Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business. HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Let me show you how you can save money on token costs, Neil. So this is Cognition. Okay. Cognition Devin. You heard of Devin?

0:31Eric Siu:They bought Windsurf?

0:32Neil Patel:Yeah.

0:33Eric Siu:Okay. So this is a little bar over here. Adaptive. Automatically balances quality and cost of your token outputs, right? So they have all this stuff over here. This is like one of the models that you can select. And I believe a lot of people are going to have this adaptive thing where you can choose between the big ones and the small ones. And they'll show you the output. So I think they came up with a couple of innovating things here. So what this guy said, he works at Cognition. He said, token maxing is dead. Everyone realized that token usage is a horrible way to measure productivity. So where do we go from here?

1:03Eric Siu:So here are some ways they're addressing this at Cognition, Neil. And this will save you money. Watch. Number one, adaptive routing. An intelligent model router that automatically selects the best AI model for each task. Other products are starting to adapt this. Four. You'll like four. They have an AI productivity guarantee. If Dev and AI delivers less engineering value than you're paying for, Cognition will fund your usage until it does up to$10 million for enterprise customers. Okay? You might like that. Now, number three, advanced automations, wiring agent sessions to the events that already cost teams engineering hours, production incidents, and pager duty, failing deploys alerts on a revenue-critical service.

1:39Each triggers maps to work that used to page a human,

1:43Eric Siu:so the value isn't theoretical. Spend attribution as well. So, Neil, you would like all these. Spend attribution, adaptive routing, AI productivity guarantee.

1:50Neil Patel:you guys should check out cognition yeah we could be using it already i don't know what we're using

1:55Eric Siu:or not using bet you that you're not i'll bet you as a spurs bet that you're not that we're not using cognition i don't think you're using cognition you want to find out right now yeah let's find out

2:02Neil Patel:but don't bet me i can actually just ask the team you should you should ask but don't bet me where is it dude i have so many threads on whatsapp let's type in uber suggest

2:19Eric Siu:so as Neil's pulling it up right now I am going to pull up this concept of the forward deployed marketer so jump at any point Neil

2:30Neil Patel:uh yeah you you okay my team will take a while because I just asked them in whatsapp I don't it says two people are online but I don't know if it's the right two people that are online

2:38Eric Siu:that's okay we'll find out so um I think Neil this concept of the forward deployed marketer is going to be the most valuable hire in marketing right now. So, and almost nobody's staffing for it, right? So I think your company and my company, we're going to need to hire smart marketing strategists, okay? That know how to upgrade the scaffolding for these agents. And if you don't, if you're not an AI-pilled marketer right now, you can't do that. You wouldn't know what to do, right? Just because you come with a lot of experience. And so the four-deploy marketer owns the client outcome end-to-end.

3:08Eric Siu:The agents will do the labor underneath. And it's interesting because a lot of the AI-pilled, I talked to a guy today. I'm like, how much do you spend a month on AI? Your own money. I'm like, don't talk about what the company pays. He's like$1 ,500 a month. I was like, fantastic, right? That's 18 grand of his own money a year. I love that, right? And he's like, look, I didn't want to talk to you initially because my friend told me this is an agency. I was like, well, then I showed him everything we're building. He's like, I'm interested now, right? And so if you want to get these people, you have to show them the way of the future is not what you're going to do this agency thing.

3:37Eric Siu:You have to show them the model is you're going to be building and strategizing and you're going to reduce the number of client calls. you're going to reduce the time you spend on reporting and you're going to have a lot of fun building you're going to be a builder right and you have to be able to sell that vision and so to get these forward deploy marketers you you you have to almost convince them to do it because i think a lot of these people don't even know that they're forward deployed marketers now and when i say forward deployed yesterday i got on a demo call um for for a product and he's like the guy was like i'm a forward deployed engineer right and so i'm like he's basically doing like customer support and he's like helping us deploy right i think this is a sense of like the new version of a marketing agency, client services person.

4:14Eric Siu:That's all. It's just a new word.

4:16Neil Patel:Yeah. People are always going to use new words for all this. Growth hacker. Yeah. The way I see it is you're still a marketer. You just got to keep being valuable by adapting. Yeah.

4:25Eric Siu:Yeah. Here's the other thing. You hear people that say, should I focus on the work right now or should I do AI? And I just think that's a fallacy. Yes.

4:38Neil Patel:you should be using AI that helps you with the work and getting you the results. If you're using AI and it doesn't drive any of the main KPIs for the business, then who the heck cares what you're doing, whether it's AI or playing catch or watching TV.

4:52Eric Siu:Yeah. Like I see. So we have a new guy in sales right now, right? And then he actually, because he doesn't come with, he reminds me of your guy who started in paid. So similar situation here, right? And he doesn't come with a lot of the bad habits of a salesperson from the past, like whether it's a good thing or bad thing. And he's very trainable. So he has all these workflows that he's built now that will automatically follow up, that will automatically, you know, if a deal needs reviving or a deal is stalled out or whatever, it's just doing, it's natural to him. It's natural for him to use skills, right?

5:21Eric Siu:But whereas in the past, like there's a salesperson you know that we had that you met before, that person didn't want to do these things, right? And so I don't care how much experience you have. If you're not going to do these things, you're just going to get laughed. And I talked to a guy today, this Matt Van Horn, I think he's part of the Lyft founding team or maybe he founded Lyft, the driving autonomy company, right? So we did like a, because he's created all these skills.

5:43Neil Patel:Oh, and not the Uber competitor.

5:44Eric Siu:The Uber competitor. Oh, okay. Yeah. And so he has all these things now that has like millions of views, right? On AI stuff. And I was like, look, and I want to ask you this question, okay? Neil today with AI versus Neil a year ago. If that Neil from a year ago, it tries to catch up right now. Can he catch Neil today? Same resources.

6:04Neil Patel:me particularly or just generally a person in my company generally yeah generally no it would be too hard because compounding correct right yeah with me specifically the reason i asked that and i know why eric said generally is because i spend most of my time doing deals so ai is cool it is useful extremely useful but it doesn't move the needle as much as relationships for me and what

6:29Eric Siu:neil is saying is the question i ask myself every day and the question you all should be asking yourself and this is the question neil's asked himself every day what is the highest leverage thing i can do with my time today what is where i can put one dollar in where i can get a thousand dollars back with my time yes and that's a different answer for every person depending

6:44Neil Patel:on the stage that you're in right yeah what is it for you i know my order mine's hiring right now

6:49Eric Siu:okay yeah and that changes over time right mine's hiring and then there's it's there's products so it's kind of tied but like it's that's that's what i think about the whole time yeah mine

6:57Neil Patel:in order if I had to pick the four. Number one is deal making, like doing business sales. I'm not talking about closing clients, like partnerships, things like that, that have much higher leverage than just closing a client. My number two is interacting with clients, making sure they're happy, upselling them. That's number two. Number three is conferences and meetings. And when I say meetings, it's kind of like speeches, sometimes smaller rooms, or maybe I just go to a corporation and just give a talk there. But I put conferences and those type of meetings in the same bucket because it's kind of like branding new client development.

7:35Neil Patel:And then my number fourth, I'm blanking on it and I don't know why. Oh, number four was content creation. So just mass cranking out tons of content every single month. And that helps keep the brand out. But those are my four top priorities. AI could be used in a lot of them, but I would say for the role I'm in, it's not as effective as it would be for someone in the trenches more doing the work and you could say oh neil well you can use ai for the scripting for your content team already does everything i just show up and i just read from a teleprompter based on the stuff they already know i talk about from like recordings from conferences or what i'm talking on internal calls and things like that so i already know what i want to talk about and what i don't want to talk about so they're taking a lot of my own content and just turning it into scripts for me.

8:28Neil Patel:So from the aspect of AI, yes, I can use it and we do use it. It's just not as useful as someone maybe coding or running ads 24 seven and using AI to help with creatives or ad copy and stuff like that.

8:41Eric Siu:And again, I just want to emphasize to everyone, it depends on the stage of where you're at right now. So we're not saying what Neil's saying or what I'm saying is like, that's what you should be focusing on right now. It's different. And so I would say for me, I have an acronym for this, TAT. right so tat is tech enabled services is one which ties in with single brain and all the the products that we have a is ai fluency and then t is talent right but those two kind of go hand in hand talent and ai fluency um and then you have c which is content creation so i'm just focused on those areas right now and obviously you know this is a wheel that keeps on spinning now neil is able to say that hey i'm going to focus on doing deals right now one he has a he can he can get a lot of the phone calls or meetings that he needs to get that's one but that's through the content that he's been creating for the last, what, 21, 24 years or so.

9:25Eric Siu:The staff, you have people leverage too. You have like, let's say a thousand people or so, right? So you can have your team and you expect them to do that, right? And so just understand everyone, like if you're starting out right now, but the one thing, the one takeaway is just keep asking yourself, what's the highest leverage thing I can do with my time every day? I guarantee you, if you keep asking that question for the next 10 years, you're going to be in a good spot.

9:44Neil Patel:And it switches depending on the mode you are in for your business, right? When you're in a startup mode, it's very different than if you're you know and growth mode or if you're in a place where your business is already established and growth has slowed down and you're figuring out maybe spending your time on M &A or reinventing your business kind of like not Figma intercom intercom I would say intercom is a better example of really reinventing themselves with Fint and by the way if your business is dying like a newspaper business maybe the highest leverage thing is trying to sell it yeah And I don't mean that enough.

10:20Neil Patel:I'm not like laughing at them, but it is so true. And dude, I talked to so many publishers. Like I was just at Web Summit in Rio because people from all around the world go to the Web Summits. And I meet so many publishers because these journalists interview me. And they're just like, they always ask me questions about journalists getting displaced and things being changed. And I was just like, if you're a journalist, you need to reinvent your business. I'm like, one, you can sell your data. There's so many journalistic sites out there. that have sold their data to these LLMs. Two, you can set up paywalls if you haven't, start charging for information.

10:56Neil Patel:And I've gotten a lot of pushback. Why would people pay? I'm like, if people aren't willing to pay, that means your content isn't that good. If your content is really amazing, it's already been proven out there by newspapers that people will pay for the information. But I think they really struggle to change their business model because a lot of the people don't want to accept that they need to change. and they just wanted to more so go back to the way it was.

11:20Eric Siu:This is why it's never been easier to get ahead because most people don't want to change. And this is unfortunate. I do think the wealth gap is going to get bigger, but that's a side thing. Maybe we can come back to that. Neil, I want to ask you a question because we're on this question of high leverage, okay? So you travel quite a bit. You do this thing, which I think sometimes doesn't make any sense, where you might fly into Hong Kong for like a day and then leave. And so if you were to make the highest leverage use of your time with this travel, what would you do differently?

11:45Neil Patel:If anything. I wouldn't do anything. It's actually very well optimized. You like it. Do I like it or is it optimized for revenue generation? Both. It's optimized for revenue generation. I don't like it. Yeah.

11:58Eric Siu:Because you don't even like I believe I do believe that it's optimized for revenue generation. I don't believe you enjoy it because you didn't even get the time to enjoy like the cool places you're going into for like a day or two. Dude.

12:08Neil Patel:So let's go back. We're recording on a Thursday. So not this Monday, but the previous Monday. Okay. From Monday, I flew out here sometime in the afternoon. I went to London, got there London in the sometime during the day. You flew from LA to London. Uh-huh. Okay. On a Monday, got there on Tuesday. Yeah. Okay. Uh, had to do my calls and meetings, uh, and then a webinar that same day. Cause we usually do webinars early on Tuesday. And then from there, Wednesday morning, I speak, do some interviews, meetings, and then I fly out to jakarta so then london to dubai dubai to jakarta brutal i get there at night time late their time the next morning i go in uh i get a little bit of a rest i'm jet lag too so that was great but in the afternoon i had to go and speak and then interviews then uh dinner with a lot of local businesses great networking as well right trying to generate business yeah so remember i I landed the day before.

13:11Neil Patel:And when I say the day before, I'm talking about like nighttime. By the time I got into my hotel room, it was their version of a Friday.