Will This Be The Info Marketer's Decade In Software?

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. Breeze 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.

0:26Neil Patel:Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

0:56Eric Siu:But second, I didn't know you could listen to podcasts and DM people on Instagram in prison. So I don't know how real that is. But I think the fact of the matter is this, right? Like my key takeaway from that is like Neil's been making content for a long time. I've been making content for a long time. And throughout from content, I met some of my best friends, right? I've traveled a place I never would have imagined traveled to before. Obviously, you've got to win business deals too. There's so many things that happen from the content creation piece. But the part I enjoy the most is when you see other people learning and other people starting businesses.

1:27Eric Siu:Because there's people that listen to this podcast that have businesses doing nine figures, or operating 10-figure companies a year. And I think Neil and I have always loved learning in public. And that's why I think if you're on any type of journey where you feel like you're getting to do what you want to do, and you're blessed to be able to do that every day, I feel like you're shortchanging yourself if you're not creating content. As much as Neil and I complain, or myself, complain about having to make content, it's still beneficial.

1:55Neil Patel:It is. And we do a lot of it. I do. I recorded earlier this morning. I did three long form videos. I am recording tomorrow because I was gone for roughly two weeks where I couldn't record as much content. And I would say I'm actually starting next week creating two long form, releasing two long form videos each week instead of just doing one. So I'm ramping up production even more. That's good.

2:27Eric Siu:And so how many hours do you think you spend per week on content right now, yourself? Including the podcasts? Uh-huh.

2:35Neil Patel:Yeah, so this is actually really easy for me to answer. So let's say this is 75 minutes. All right. Long-form, short-form videos. Five times, seven, 30. So 35 minutes there. long form 50 let's actually call it 20 I'm adding in a new one which is call it 60 charge another 60 another 30, 280 minutes a week okay and when I break it down like that I'm going to give one caveat here it's not always 280 minutes a week Some weeks or more, some weeks or less because I record in batches. So I'm counting, when I say 280, that's the amount of time I spent on content for content that is posted on a weekly basis.

3:31Neil Patel:So for me to produce next week's worth of content, it takes me roughly 280 minutes. Now my team spends a lot more than 280 minutes, but that's how much time it takes out of my day, which is a little bit less than five hours, which isn't bad.

3:45Eric Siu:Yeah, so if we do the math on this one, it's 18.66 hours per month, right? You multiply that by 12, that's 223 hours, right? 224, that's nine days of content, nine days spending a recording content, 9.33 days. That's just on the outside. A year. Yeah, a year. And so anyway, we've talked about this before, like, oh, should you do organic or paid? And the answer is both. If you can afford to do both, you do both, right? And then you try to figure out one at a time. Don't try to do everything under the sun because that's a nice way to dilute yourself. But interesting enough, I was going to show something on the screen.

4:23Eric Siu:And before I go into that, I saw someone posting about how there's an SBA overhaul. So I remember Neil was on the School of Hard Knocks and he was getting interviewed. And the guy asked him, if you were starting from scratch today, what would you do? And Neil, what did you say?

4:39Neil Patel:I would just go and buy a struggling business and get an SBA loan. I know people say like, oh, you need to put down payment and all this. You can do some seller-based financing and they can help you out there. So then that way you can still qualify.

4:53Eric Siu:Yeah. So here, get this. So SBA loan, so small business administration, we're talking about the United States here. So the old rule was that you can borrow at a total cumulative limit. And by the way, this is not financial advice of$5 million across both the 7A and 504 loan programs combined. So they have these two different loan programs, right? So the idea is if you max out the 7A loan, you cannot get a 504 loan. The new update is that the SBA has decoupled these two programs. So you can now completely stack them, allowing for up to$5 million for a 7A loan, an additional$5 million for a 504 loan, doubling the total maximum financing limit to$10 million.

5:28Eric Siu:This is designed to let businesses buy a company using a 7A, while simultaneously financing the commercial real estate through a 504 loan. So I guess that's a real estate one. So anyway, this stuff is changing all the time. I just saw that. So those of you, if we were starting from scratch today, if we knew about this, we would definitely take advantage of this. And by the way, like if you look into the 7A more, I think you can, the down payment you need to put down, that might have changed a little bit, but you can put down like, I don't know, 5 or 10 % or something like that. Again, you need to do your own research because my information might be dated.

6:00Eric Siu:So I wanted to throw that at you guys. But Neil, I saw Ryan Dice tweet this morning and I wanted to share our reaction to this one. So check this out. So Clay Collins, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think he founded Leadpages, correct? I believe he did. Yeah, okay. So, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, co-founder of Leadpages and Nomics. Okay, so this is going to be the info marketer's decade in software. Here's my prediction. The indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. So those that don't know, an indie hacker is someone that might have been like a solo developer back in the day, right?

6:33Eric Siu:You know, like Levels is actually a good example of like an indie hacker. He's built a lot of stuff and he's kind of marketed on his own type of deal. So he's saying that the indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software. And I think this is interesting for you and I both to react to this, Neil, because we've kind of straddled the line between both, I would say. So when I came up, direct response marketer sold ebooks and courses, not because we loved it, but because it was the only thing that you could build without engineers. Okay, we all wanted to be in software.

7:00Eric Siu:That's where the leverage was. The wall was never talent, it was operational. So hire engineers, manage engineers, retain engineers, and become a real company. So the best marketers of my generation stayed put. The wall is now gone. Now a guy who spent 20 years learning how to make strangers care can ship a product in a weekend. You cannot compete with that person on offers, on hooks, on positioning. AI does not hand those to you in a tab. The engineering advantage evaporated, the marketing advantage didn't. For 20 years, marketers wanted what engineers had. Now they have it. Okay, I have a lot to say about this, but you can go first if you want to.

7:35Neil Patel:Yeah, dude, I agree with you. Marketers now have the ability to do many more things because of AI. I don't believe it is easy due to AI to just go and start a business from a customer acquisition perspective, to be very clear, that specific side. I think AI has made it where more people are creating businesses and it's actually becoming more competitive to get the attention of people out there. And marketing is becoming harder, not easier, even though you have more tools as a marketer. But from a technical standpoint, there's more things that you can do. This is just creating more competition.

8:16Neil Patel:And I think there's just so much noise out there that it's harder than ever as a marketer. Yeah.

8:21Eric Siu:So I don't think this is the info marketer's decade in software. Let me tell you who the decade is for now. The decade is for somebody who wants to work on hard problems. And what I mean by that is engineers aren't going away. It's not like the engineering advantage evaporated. And by the way, if you look at content creation, we'll use that as an example. Neil, back in the day, TikTok was very easy early days, right? YouTube was very easy early days. Whatever I publish on YouTube, at least 50 ,000 views back in the day, right? Long form, right? Same thing for Neil too. But it gets more and more competitive.

8:55Eric Siu:Now it's like, how do you think about the jump cuts? How do you think about the 30 second retention? Or if you're doing a reel, what does a three second retention look like? And you gotta run trial reels. You gotta do all this stuff, right? All these kids are doing right now. And then you gotta study like 50 hook packs and things like that. It just gets more and more complex, okay? So I think it's going to get more competitive. And to Neil's point, more and more people are creating content. In fact, we've seen human-generated content be overtaken by AI-generated content. And this was a few months ago or so, right?

9:22Eric Siu:And that's going to keep scrolling up or growing. So I do think the best direct response marketers, they are going to take advantage because what does it mean for them to be the best? It means that they're not just studying direct response marketing. And in fact, when Neil and I have been to these conferences, these masterminds in the past, the best people, and by the way, I actually have a group that I meet with every single year. These were the best of the best. Was it because they were only direct response marketers? No. In fact, the people that I met at the masterminds that were the best, were the direct response marketers that were only money motivated, those were the ones that never thought about product retention.

9:58Eric Siu:They never thought about churn, okay? They never thought about talking to their customers. They just thought about making money and they always ask you, how much money are you making? How much money? It was always this, right? But when I think about the group that we have where we meet once a year, it's like some of these people have a holding company with multiple different businesses and they've gone deep in that area. They enjoy systems thinking. They enjoy hiring. They enjoy sitting in the tough problems. And so it's not any info marketers decade in software. It's always been the people who work hard and like hard problems, those are the people that are gonna compound even more.

10:29Eric Siu:Those people are gonna get even stronger over time. And so I wouldn't even say it's something about the info marketer's decade. I just think, I don't agree with that.

10:37Neil Patel:So Neil, go ahead.

10:38Eric Siu:If you're building an e-commerce brand, you should check out DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas on the HubSpot Podcast Network. They speak with founders, marketers, creators, agencies, and platform experts about what it actually takes to grow a direct-to-consumer business from paid ads and influencer marketing to conversion, email, brand building, and consumer trends. I particularly enjoyed their conversations around scaling a brand without losing what made customers care in the first place. Listen to DTC Pod wherever you get your podcasts.

11:08Neil Patel:Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster

11:10Eric Siu:and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. 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.

11:25Neil Patel:One minute, baby. So dude, I'm with you. I remember I flew to Austin to meet Ryan Dice for the very first time. And years ago when I met him, this was 10 plus years ago, I remember him telling me that, hey, you shouldn't try to do what direct response marketers do or get into their type of businesses. you should take a lot of their strategies and tactics and apply it to legitimate businesses I'm like wait what do you mean he's like a lot of these direct response marketers just try to get rich get rich quick they don't try to solve real problems build real businesses so they don't last you see them making a ton of money for a month or six months or a year or even two three years and then it dies down and no one talks about them and his whole philosophy was is you have real businesses that solve real problems for other businesses you should take a lot of these marketing tactics and apply them to legitimate businesses and putting that in air quotes.

12:19Neil Patel:And he's like, you would find much more growth and be much more successful. And I was like, oh, that's a very smart way to look at it. So anyone who's watching on video, Eric's copying her poses.

12:32Eric Siu:So let me read this to let me read this. Maybe this will be more entertaining for Emma. So so this this article here, it's really long. OK, in fact, she will definitely be bored. Emma, you're going to be bored for sure. Okay. So the, you know, this is related. The guiding emerging principle of AI is this, right? So intelligence is plentiful. Volition is valuable. And I've been reading this quite a few times to my team this week because this article was so good. And by the way, actually, no, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I was going to give people a tip on how you can actually remove the paywall.

13:05Eric Siu:I'll just leave it at that. If you just type in remove the paywall, you guys don't have to pay for things like this, right? So, so the guiding principle of emerging AI is this. When intelligence is plentiful, Emma's the new Neil, when intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. So the people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They're the ones who will seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more, more, Emma. So in other words, what will differentiate people is not how smart you are, Emma, but your relationship to mental effort.

13:40Eric Siu:So how many books you read, how much you like studying things, right? How much you like learning. So right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games. Okay, if Emma, you're still in the room, play difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, these are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity to not do it. Neil, we've talked about these lazy people that we know. You know who I'm talking about. in the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition.

14:11Eric Siu:They will put in the effort when they really need to care about something, but they don't intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence, but it's not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don't like to work hard. So let me tell you where I'm going with this, Neil. So my favorite passage from this one is this. What do you think is bad, Neil? Do you think, let me just ask you this. What's bad? Economic inequality. So economic polarization or political polarization? Which one do you think is worse than of the two? Political polarization. What's the other one?

14:43Eric Siu:Economic polarization. So wealth inequality.

14:47Neil Patel:I would say wealth inequality is worse.

14:50Eric Siu:Now, what do you think is worse than wealth inequality? Do you think cognitive polarization is worse than wealth inequality?

14:59Neil Patel:I think a lot of these things are bad, but with wealth inequality, you just have a lot of people at the bottom who are just struggling and they can't figure it out. And it's affecting their lives in a very negative way. Some are extremely hard workers and trying. They just can't figure it out. Some are lazy. And I think that you have that on all ends of the spectrum. I know really rich people who got rich by luck and they're lazy. And I know really rich people who work really hard. And it doesn't matter how much money they have. They just can't stop.

15:27Eric Siu:So let me read this to you, Neil. And then I want to get your reaction, okay? So you may have noticed that the future I'm describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. So the high need for cognition people, so these are people who work hard, they enjoy heart problems, right? They will get more and more productive, happier and happier.

16:01Eric Siu:The rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass. So I actually think what this is, Neil, is I think this cognitive polarization piece is it's going to increase the wealth gap. That's what I think is going to happen. And so that's why I've had this kind of anxiety and excitement in the beginning of the year. Because I know for sure yourself, like I know we like to, I'm not going to say we're the smartest people in the world, right? But I'm going to say we enjoy working hard. We enjoy working on hard problems. I think we'll be just fine if we use these things, right? So, you know, we'll get more and more productive, happier and happier.

16:29Eric Siu:But what I don't want to see is this. And I think like judging on how the team has grown over the years, like the people that have chosen and taken upon themselves to learn, that is what is, this all kind of comes together, right? We're talking about this, info marketers are going to have this advantage and this and that. I think the people that are going to have the advantage, Neil, is this high need for cognition people.