What Part Of Your Company Would You Rebuild From Scratch With AI?

0:00Eric Siu:What part of the company would you rebuild from scratch if AI were native from day one? And almost everybody gave the same answer. What do you think the answer is, Neil?

0:08Neil Patel:My guess is customer support or engineering. It's one of those two.

0:12Eric Siu:IT. IT. Everyone would cut their IT team because their IT teams are the ones that are non-AI native right now that are blocking a lot. So they're kind of digging in and you're kind of seeing a version of that with engineering. But whether it's IT or in a sense, it's whoever's non-AI pilled on the IT side, even on the product side as well, because we have a mutual friend where the interns are running circles around the product team. The product, I think they fired their product leader and then another one of them quit. And so the product team is in flux right now. And then you have the younger people right now running circles around them.

0:46Eric Siu:He's actually doing it from scratch right now.

0:49Neil Patel:Yeah, with a lot of those departments, you have to end up rebuilding. We let go of some of our product people because they were just slowing things down and they had a different viewpoint on how things should be done. And I'm like, this isn't going to work out. And we made changes and you know what? Product's gotten better, it moves way faster. And I'm not saying product's bad if they're just not willing to adapt and they want to do things in an old school way when everyone else is changing, it's either adapt or die. I hate to say it, but that's reality.

1:18Eric Siu:So another one is actually the recruiting team, the talent team, you can call it the people team, the HR team. So someone had hired this super senior person and built out a talent team. He sacked the entire team. I said, so what are you doing now? And he's like, oh, dude. So what I'm doing is we are, let's say Neil's an A player. I want to hire Neil to my company. So usually what would have to happen is I would have to reach out to Neil. Neil would respond. We'd get on a phone call. Those screenings take a long time, right? But the difference now is I would research Neil. I'd say, oh, okay, I sent a message to Neil Patel.

1:51Eric Siu:Neil Patel responds. Okay, hey, Neil, I made a custom landing page for you. It shows all the people that you'd be working with, all the projects that you'd be working on. And then instead of forcing you to go through a screen, which takes up a lot of time, they'll say, hey, here's just a couple of questions I have for you. Because you went the extra mile to make that landing page. and then therefore now you feel a little obliged to maybe send a couple of responses, right? So he's trying that right now to save a lot more time on the sourcing piece because they can't hire fast enough. And so I thought that was interesting and I think recruiting itself is going to change because the screens take forever.

2:28Neil Patel:It's not just recruiting. We use the same tech or AI in this case for also corp dev. and we're trying to do a deal right now in the americas i don't know if it'll close or not um that'll help us uh expand and have more uh depth in the americas uh for specific service items and then i'm trying to do uh four more deals in um you know in europe all right so So if you look at Europe specifically, we have Claude creating lists of agencies that have a certain amount of employees, certain amount of revenue, certain amount of profitability. And here's the kicker. Instead of having a human do this and paying for some random software, a lot of these countries require companies to report revenue and profitability publicly.

3:23Neil Patel:So then it's just scraping all the data. we're then using the data to then figure out the right agencies or contact information sending out emails and then boom we're going from there and doing outreach and then instead of having a massive corp dev team you know fielding all the calls we're having ai field a lot of this stuff sending out the emails it then goes to my co-founder and i because we believe we're going to have a better luck pitching the companies we want if him and i pitch it doesn't mean our team is bad but we think founder to founder just works better and then pass it over to our team once we get interested parties for them to do the diligence.

3:58Neil Patel:But like I'm trying to acquire five businesses or five types of businesses right now that are on our list that we're trying to get done, ideally within a year and a half, two years at the latest. But we're just using AI. Before, we used to use Corp Dev people and they're some of the most expensive employees.

4:19Eric Siu:You should tell people what you're looking for on this podcast because someone might know someone and someone might know another person

4:25Neil Patel:i'm looking for agencies in spain italy france and germany that do performance marketing and ideally at scale the smallest we're looking for is like three four five million in revenue um that would be on the small end ideally we're looking for agencies that are doing at least 10 million in revenue. And when I say revenue, we're not looking for revenue to include media. So if you subtract that out, what is your real revenue? Ideally, we're looking for 10 million or more. If you don't have 10 million, we'll take smaller. And we're looking for ones with enterprise logos. So working with big brands that are massive, that are global, because the model here is if i buy a france agency that has tons of logos and i buy a italian agency and you get the point and keep doing this across all the major regions i can then just cross sell the clients right and it just makes it easier and easier to grow faster yep so by the way just merge their agencies with ours and we would have a bigger agency within that region yeah so by the way um

5:34Eric Siu:Before we move on to the Moz piece, Neil, I came up with a new analogy this week. I quite like it, so I'm going to keep using it for a while. So Neil, when's the last time you went to the dentist?

5:44Neil Patel:All right.

5:45Eric Siu:So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host, Neil's agency called MP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more. And we'll see you on the other side.

6:04Neil Patel:Two weeks ago, maybe.

6:06Eric Siu:Okay. Who did you spend the most time with at the dentist?

6:10Neil Patel:The lady cleaning my teeth.

6:12Eric Siu:The dental hygienist, correct? Yes. Okay. I don't know what her title is, but yeah. That's exactly the dental hygienist. And how long did you see the dentist for?

6:22Neil Patel:I didn't see the dentist at all. It was just a regular cleanup. I get a cleanup roughly once every three months. I see the dentist probably once to twice a year.

6:32Eric Siu:Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay. So my point is, I think a lot of the work that's happening right now, when you look at agency side, is you're going to want to have people and you don't want most people doing dental hygienist work. It's very important work, right? It needs to be done. But a lot of this stuff can be handled by robots with a human oversight, right? Now, the other thing is, when Neil sees a dentist or when I see the dentist, for example, the dentist might come in. The dentist is very strategic. Look at your x-rays. She'll look at your x-rays, right? Oh, okay, do x, y, and z.

7:02Eric Siu:Oh, you need this over here. Do this over here. okay, bye, see you next time, right? They might not see you for another six months or something like that, right? And so, but they're very busy, right? There's a lot of work to do. And so I think the future of agency work, you're gonna have, it's gonna be kind of like that model where you're gonna have more and more people that are strategic that can be like the dentists and you still have, you know, maybe there's some hygienists that are maybe, you know, humans, but most of the hygienist work is gonna be done by robots. It's no, it's kind of similar to when you look at a chef in a kitchen.

7:31Eric Siu:I don't know if you've seen that movie, Ratatouille, Disney. where the chef is just going around like sprinkling salt and like tasting this and moving around. And I think that is a taste and judgment that a lot of people are talking about. And so that's what I think. It's a dentist model that's gonna we're gonna see more of. Yep.

7:48Neil Patel:Dude, I totally agree with you on that. But going specifically with a dental hygienist one, I don't know if I want a robot cleaning my teeth. Me neither. Not for right now. Yeah, but here's the thing. Not for right now. I'm open to it, you know, years from now

8:01Eric Siu:just not right now. When it's there like if you're if you're like william for example maybe if that's all you do you do for a

8:09Neil Patel:robot to clean your teeth bye bye i love you enjoy your day of school oh look at that neil has a

8:16Eric Siu:heart um all right so so but to neil's point you wouldn't want to be the first wave of the robots cleaning but maybe in five ten years once the accidents have all gotten over like yeah you

8:29Neil Patel:nailed it. I'm like, oh, when does the accidents are over and when is it better than a human and then I'm down.

8:36Eric Siu:So, okay, going to Moz. So Moz, just so everyone knows, Moz, they're still a big brand when it comes to SEO and they were like the pioneers. They competed with SEMrush back in the day and then Ahrefs came out. And so I didn't even know that they still had a conference. My AI actually reached out to Moz and was like, oh yeah, you're welcome to speak. I happen to be in New York at the same time. So they had about 400 people there, which is a good chunk. And their marquee sponsor was this company over here. By the way, there's a lot to say about Profound because they raised a lot of money from Sequoia.

9:11Eric Siu:And they go heavy when it comes to sponsorships, sponsoring events and having speakers there. They're having a big presence there. So if they're not sponsoring MozCon, you know what they did? When I spoke at Ahrefs, they sponsored trucks driving around telling people to stop using Ahrefs. right so anyway that that's that's something that's interesting so what do you want to know

9:31Neil Patel:about Moz uh what did they mainly discuss have they adapted or is it just mainly SEO software

9:37Eric Siu:stuff so here's what I'll say I was at the din like um it was like more of a happy hour the night before the conference um and there's there's people that attended but many people aren't actually using Moz so one of the the sales people came up to me and say do you use Moz I'm like nope and then he went to the person next to me. So do you use Moz? And she's like, nope, right? And so I think he's like, you know, I was like, so what's unique about Moz right now? He's like, oh, we have a very strong brand. I was like, okay, but like, what about your product? Nobody gives a poo-poo about your brand if your product ain't good, right?

10:07Eric Siu:So apparently I think they're doing more local stuff right now. And I think they're probably partnered up with Profound a little bit on the data side, but they have a very strong GM. I met their GM, Willow, who's great. Their team's pretty awesome as well. So I trust that they'll figure it out on the product side because they were acquired by Ziff Davis and they have about 200 employees right now.

10:28Neil Patel:Okay. Yeah.

10:30Eric Siu:So we'll see. I think time will tell. I will just say this. It's not even just a Moz thing. I feel like the SEO space in general is kind of lagging behind when it comes to product development. Again, I haven't used Moz for a while, so I don't know. Someone can prove me wrong here. But even looking at the other products that are out there, even the ones that have raised a lot of money, I'm just like, you look at what people are building on X right now and you look at kind of the SEO space and I feel like the SEO space is kind of lagging. Yeah.

10:55Neil Patel:Yeah, they have AI visibility dashboards. So unless they have a partnership with Profound, I'm not sure why they would let them sponsor.

11:05Eric Siu:I don't know. It's a good question. But they were a marquee sponsor.

11:09Neil Patel:Yeah, because I was looking at this. Most popular,$179 a month. All SEO features plus AI and GEO features. Two AI visibility dashboards, 100-track prompts, three-tracked AI models, So I'm confused why they're a competitor. I think it's local, Neil.

11:24Eric Siu:I think the larger contract sizes that they're doing right now are just companies buying a bunch of, could be local listings. But I think those are the ones that are adding up for them right now.

11:38Neil Patel:I just Googled Moz and Profound Partnership. There is no direct software partnership or business merger between Moz and Profound. This could be off, but I think someone made a mistake to accept the sponsorship. That's just my two cents.