$30B Founder: How To Rank #1 In ChatGPT

22:41And it worked out. And so that's what you're kind of you're describing of all these hacks and then doing it right away. Exactly right. And I really, like really, as I tend to do, I went deep down the rabbit hole on SEO kind of back in the day. It's like, okay, well, what is this? How does it work? And there were a couple of key insights that I think are still applicable today that I think made us money would make other people money. because I think it's a successful strategy, which is going back to kind of Sean's point is the first thing you have to figure out is that there are lots of smart people at Google whose sole job it is is to deliver high quality results to the end user.

23:17Okay, so if you say that, that means that every black hat tactic you're trying, it may work right now, but you've got an army of really smart people whose sole job it is to make what you're doing not work. So it's just a matter of time. So that's kind of thing number one, right? It's like, okay, well, are there other things I could do that would make those people's jobs easier? It's like, oh, yeah, well, you know, they really like it when you structure a webpage so their crawler has an easier time crawling it. It's like, well, they will reward, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, just what we will call good behavior.

23:48Make your site clean, make it load fast, make the content actually useful. So I got up on stages and wrote about SEO all the time back in the day. and my one thing I would tell small business owners, that's when my kind of primary audience was, is that whatever term you want to search for, type it into Google right now, let's go. Don't type it in and it's like, okay, well, here are the people that are coming up right now. Do you have a webpage on your website right now that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are showing up right now? And be honest with yourself. Not in a self-serving way, if you were searching, if you were the actual human typing this keyword in, would you want to find your website versus what the ones Google are showing right now?

24:26If the answer to that is no, job one is to create the content that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are ranking right now. Because Google is imperfect and all those battles are winnable. It's like, ah, I see them. The top two or three are pretty good. But if I were really searching, here's what I would actually want. Then produce that web page that the actual end user would want. And 9 out of 10, 95 out of 100 times, it was just a matter of time. Because you've got a lot of smart people that want to find that web page if it's actually truly better for the end user than that. And there's a bunch of things you can do, write good content, write timeless content.

25:00But I have content that I wrote for HubSpot 19 years ago that still drives traffic to HubSpot.com, that still generates leads, that still generates revenue 19 years later. And this is one of the big things about SEO, and we'll talk about AEO, kind of the successor to that, which is this is one of those things that when you're doing Google AdWords, and then you do those things, right? It's like as a marketer, you need to have a repertoire of things that you do to reach customers. the issue with like Google advertising or any kind of advertising is you're effectively renting someone else's stage or renting someone else's microphone and you pay them to do that, right?

25:34It's like, oh, put me on the page and I will pay you X dollars and there's a nice efficient auctioning mechanism for the price. But it's like, yeah, but the day you turn that off, the traffic turns off. Your link does not show up in the Google search results anymore. So you're basically renting and you don't control the rent. You don't control what the prices are because that's a market dynamic thing. So it's like it may cost$5 a click right now, it may cost$15 a click literally tomorrow based on what the supply and demand is. So now you are at the kind of vagaries of the market. The nice thing about SEO and doing this content-focused thing, it's like building your own property on your own land.

26:09That compounds value over. So as land prices go up, the value of the thing you built actually goes up, not down, and it's under your control. If someone comes along and says, oh, I'm going to produce a better blog article, it's not going to be an instantaneous they take all your traffic overnight. you will see them come up the rankings. It's very, very rare that overnight some brilliant piece of content that Google finds it trusted enough to put it in the number one spot instead of you. So you will see your competitors come up if someone's doing it. And you can do something about it. So there's all this positiveness to investing in SEO versus paid channels.

26:40And I was going to ask you this. You know, one of the painful lessons I've learned is this one phrase called intensity is the strategy. So I'm the type of guy that always liked to read the next blog, the next tweet, the next book. Because I was always looking for like, what's the better answer? Because in my head, life was a, you know, a game of chess. And if you just knew the right moves, you would win. And chess is like the wrong analogy for life. It's a lot more just like taking a chess piece and just battering the other guy as many times as you can in different ways and picking up different pieces and just keep hammering on.

27:14And I've learned that like, you know, for most of the things in my life, I knew the strategy. I knew the answer. And the difference between success and failure was the level of intensity I took to the strategy. I think dieting is the easiest example. Like we all know what to do. This is a question of like how intensely you do it or not. But like a lot of things in life are this way. I ask you, I bring this up because I can kind of tell, and I want you to confirm or deny this, maybe I'm wrong, but your volume was a lot higher than what was normal in those days. So it wasn't even that you were the best writer or you were the smartest at SEO necessarily.

27:50But like, I'm guessing what you guys did as normal was completely abnormal in terms of volume. Did you basically like was volume or intensity of the marketing, the strategy more so than like, coming up with the perfect, you know, the perfect strategies? Totally. This is my has been my personal belief for my I think my entire life as far back as I can remember is that I'm never like the smartest person out there or even in any given room that I'm in. So you can outthink me. And I think that's relatively easy to do. You will not outgrind me. You will not outwork me because that's under my control.

28:26And so I've always believed that the kind of quality of the outcomes is almost directly, always directly proportional to the number of iterations. And that's it. So if you can squeeze out more iterations compared to the next person or whatever, over the fullness of time, you win. That like the universe says, ah, you win, right? And you just have to have the conviction. Like the problem is that the universe has a kind of a slower feedback loop, especially in the early years. It's like, okay, when you're first blogging, four people will read the blog post. And then you have, it's like, then you like pour your heart and soul into it.

28:58And then it goes to six. And then you part your heart, and then it goes to five, right? It goes down. It's like, okay, well, what the hell is going on here? But you sort of have to have the conviction to say, I know it's just a matter of, and I don't work out, but it's just a matter of putting the reps in. Like it's meaningful, thoughtful, and they don't have to be perfect reps, right? These have to be incrementally better each time. One of the things I wanted to do was, for some reason, HubSpot, you guys changed your blog where I used to be able to go to Dharmesh Shah or Brian Halligan, your author page, and I could sort by recent and then just go in reverse and see your early blog posts.

29:33And it was pretty cool because like Brian was very casual. you're like, this guy doesn't sound like a$30 billion company. And it kind of like gives anyone inspiration because it's pretty great. But if you go to on startups.com, which is your personal blog, and you can kind of rig it where you like sort by recent and you got to change the URL a little bit, but you can go and look at some of your old blog posts from 2006. And a few things one, the headlines are evergreen. They're fantastic. Raising capital, friends, family and fools. Another one is revenue early, revenue often. The other one is the danger of solving venture capitalists' biggest problem.

30:10Like really good headlines for one. And two, there's days like there was a day in November where you posted five articles in a day. And then for the most part, in 2006, 2007, 2008, when I imagine HubSpot, I don't know when HubSpot started, but I think 2006. So you are running a company or an early stage company that probably takes up your whole life. And I think I don't know if you had a family at that time, but I'm sure you're very busy. But your personal blog is posting something like three to five articles a week. Not even your company's blog, your personal blog. Pretty crazy. Reps work, my friend.

30:49That's the one thing. And this is, you know, we've talked about this in terms of as you pick an idea to work on, you know, as an entrepreneur, whatever it happens to be. one of the most important kind of filters and criteria should be, is this something that I at least enjoy enough that I will be able to put the reps in? Because if you can't make yourself do something you hate for that long, for that many times over an extended number of years, it's just not going to work. So pick a market you like, pick a category you like, pick a kind of business that you like. It's like if you like e-commerce, if you like selling, whatever it is, then do that, right?

31:23Just because something else has higher margins or, you know, Susie down the road was able to create a billion dollar outcome, whatever it just won't matter because if you just give up along the way it's like do not pass go do not collect two hundred dollars kind of thing it's so funny listen in april of 2006 he wrote an article saying less is sometimes less and it's an article written about how a lot of people say less is more and he's like no i disagree with that i think more is more is more in terms of effort it's pretty funny you've been saying the same stuff now for 20 years did you guys see this video that's going semi-viral of the YouTube founders early on.

31:59Have you seen this? What's this? No. So this is 20 years ago. And this is Chad and Steve from YouTube. And they're just in their office talking. But basically, it's the guys saying like, they're just sitting around. They're like, I was kind of depressed last week. Like we have 40 videos on the site. And if I came to the site, I wouldn't find it. I'd be gone. And they're just like, yeah, this sucks. And this is YouTube. as the founders of YouTube. And you were talking about like, you know, early days blogging. It's like, yeah, I got six visitors and I got eight the next week. And, you know, being able to persist through, you know, through that time and then the volume, right?

32:35Like you just don't have enough videos. It's not that YouTube doesn't work. It's that YouTube with 40 videos doesn't work. It's not that blogging doesn't work. It's your blogging once every two weeks doesn't work, right? Like I think that's one of the big lessons here. Listen up. The old playbook is slowing you down. AI broke the funnel. Loop marketing fixes it. It's a new era for marketers. AI is capturing search traffic, channels are fragmented, and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before. HubSpot's loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption.

33:07It's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster, connect deeper, and grow smarter. The modern growth playbook for the AI era. Built by HubSpot, designed for today's marketer. Get the Loop Marketing Playbook at hubspot.com slash loop-marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind. All right, back to the pod. We didn't close the loop though, Darmesh. So the new wave, we talked a lot about SEO and like, that's good because history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. What's the new wave? So the new wave, and I think just like SEO created an opportunity for SEO consultants, SEO agencies and businesses driving direct traffic organically, I think we have a new thing now.

33:47So a couple of things are happening. One is, and lots of marketers have been hit by the AI stick in a way, which is organic traffic that used to come through SEO very, very predictably, including to folks like HubSpot. We are very good at the SEO game, have played it for a long time, has gone down literally by about 20 to 40 % based on which industry you are in. And the reason it has gone down is that historically the practice of search is that we would go to Google, we would type something in, we would get 10 blue links, right? That's the whole game. As it turns out, there's this new thing called AI and a new app called ChatGPT, which has 800 million weekly active users.

34:26And what people are doing now is not going to Google and getting 10 blue links or like going to ChatGPT and just asking a question, getting an answer. And that's it, right? It's like, okay, well, there's no click through. There's no reason for someone's like, oh, just tell me the answer. Instead of me having to go through and read the articles from those 10 blue links and then figuring out my own answer. So like, just do it for me. And so that's happening already. And you can see it in the actual kind of data as we've seen. And so what's happening now is there's this new emerging discipline that says in the same way we had search engine optimization, we have what we're calling AEO, which is AI or answer engine optimization.

35:03It's like, okay, well, before people were going to Google, doing a search for my product, my service, my industry, my category. and my job was to be one of those 10 blue links, hopefully the higher the better because it's a power law curve. Now it's like, okay, well, people are looking for products in my category, services in my category. They're looking in chat GPT. Let's just say that's the number one app right now. How do I show up as an answer or part of the answer when they do that? So that's the emerging discipline of AEO. And there's a few things that are distinctive about it. One is the click-through rate in terms of web traffic to your site through AEO is going to be down because if they just get the answer, there's no reason to come read your blog post about X where you stole the virtues of how whatever your approach is.

35:48And it also lists way less. So if you say like, what's a good clothing company or whatever, like you only get like four options, whereas on Google, I can click next, next, next. And you get correct, yes. Which no one ever, by the way, did. There was a running joke in the SEO world is if you ever had to hide a dead body, hide it on the second page of Google search results because no one ever went there. All they would do is they would just rewrite the query. They would not click next. They would just rephrase their queries. Like, I must have asked this suboptimally or wrongly. I'm just going to rephrase my question instead of going to second page.

36:20But at least I get 10. Like a lot of what I noticed when I asked, it's like they give me like two or three. I agree. Yes. So it's even more important. And that's what engineers and math people would call like a binary outcome. So it's like either you show up or you don't, right? If you're not in the actual citations in the answer that was given, you might as well not have played the game because there is no difference, right? So you're actually literally zero in terms of the traction you're going to get. Okay, so then the question is, how different is it? What should people be doing? What should we be doing now in order to start getting that?

36:52And so the number one thing is that, so when Google crawls your website, back in the old Google days, they have a Google crawler and it crawls websites and you can kind of control that. And there were things you do to make it easier for the Google crawler to crawl, make your site faster, make it more structured, all those things. All of those things still actually apply. The difference now is there's a kind of a OAI. It's called OAI SearchBot is the name of the bot that's doing the search thing. There's another one called GPTBot that does for the model training and things like that. So those are two different ones.

37:24So number one, on the off chance that you're blocking unknown crawler bots, which some companies do, it's like, oh, I only want Bing and Google or whatever to crawl. I don't want random people just crawling my website because it costs me resources or whatever. Even if you're doing that, if you're blocking it, explicitly go in and turn on the ability for OAI search bot and GPT bot to crawl your website. Because if you don't get indexed, then you're not even in the game, let alone you have no chance of winning because you can't be in the results. Okay, so that's thing one. For sure, yeah. I pick no one.

37:55Thing two is that, and this was nice of them, is that they do report. So when you look at your Google Analytics or HubSpot web traffic, whatever analytics tool you use, it now self-reports when something comes from one of those bots, from the AI. So it's a UTM source parameter for those of us that do analytics. It's like, so now, and HubSpot has this in the product now. So we will tell you what percentage of your traffic, just like we used to tell you, here's how much you're getting from paid, here's how much you're getting from organic, Now, here's how much you're getting from AI referrals, you know, broadly defined.

38:27So take a look at what traffic you're getting now. So as you do things, you'll know whether you're not better or worse. You can sort of, like anything else, you have to sort of measure it in order to improve it. So start looking at that traffic, see wherever the baseline is today, and then start tracking it. Number three, and this is a tactical tip, reframe your content, either rewrite it or put new content out there that is closer to a structured question-answer form. right? So this is less about the kind of prose and narrative writing and hooks and things like that, because you're not trying to hook a human like you were back when you're writing blog posts, because that's when humans are reading it.

39:02They were like clicking on the link. So you need a great page title that would actually get the click. Then you needed actual really good content to kind of get to the lead conversion, right? Those are things you did. And you were solving effectively for humans. And Google was just a proxy for the humans, but effectively you were solving for the humans. Now you're solving for that AI crawler. And the AI crawler is trying to get to a good answer to a question that the user is asking. And it's easier. It's like, if the question is, what are the top CRMs for small business and startups? There should be a webpage on the HubSpot website that says, here are the primary factors that kind of influence what you would pick or whatever.

39:38And here's why the seven reasons why HubSpot is the top thing, whatever. It's like, make it easy for them, like reduce the friction for the AI to get the thing that's trying to look for. And the thing it's trying to look for is the best possible answer to a question the user is asking. Number three is all the things you used to do in classic SEO, most of them still work, you still want page authority, because chat GPT specifically, when it goes off and does things, what it does is you type a question, what's the best CRM for small business, it will take what you type into chat GPT, and it will convert that into search queries, it will paralyze it.

40:11So it's going to do a bunch of bing queries, bing is what it happens to use, but doesn't really matter. Most of the search engines are roughly equivalent technology wise. So all the things you use to kind of rank a webpage will still help you because when Bing goes out and gets asked by ChatGPT, it says, hey, the user is asking this question about small business and CRM. They may rephrase the query, but it's still going to do a Bing search. It will come back with a list of pages. Those pages go back to ChatGPT. ChatGPT puts it through the LM and comes up with the answer that's going to show the end user.

40:39So, you know, getting high authority links, showing up in Bing, doing all the kind of classic good practice white hat SEO stuff still applies. Sean, have you noticed that you're getting traffic and sales for your stuff from AI? I don't pay attention to it at that level of detail, and it's not that big for us, but we've looked at a few of these tools because now there's some new, like, you know, the way like with SEO, you'd have either, you know, HubSpot or you'd have like Moz or whatever, you'd have these tools. There's a few startups that have come out and been funded for this. And they're basically like, hey, we can help you track this and get you into the top, you know, the top answer box for this.

41:18And so we're trying those now. But I think it's like early still to see if we're getting any results from it. By the way, I just typed, I said, I'm a small business owner. And I think I need some kind of place to keep track of customers and prospective deals. What should I be using? All right. HubSpot was the second answer in the thing. It said, you know, here's the top. You need, he goes, you need a CRM. here's what a crm does and then it's like here's the top crms for small business 2025 but it looks like in this case it literally just every the ranking is just pulled straight from tech radar's article um like tech radar has some article i've tested 13 of the best crms in 2025 and it just like pulled that exact list and it put a comparison table in there like you said and like it just gave me that as the answer whatever tech radar said is the answer here So that seems a little tricky.

42:04For Hampton, we've gotten a lot of business. It's crazy how much is happening. What are people looking for, Sam, that they're finding Hampton? So sometimes it's just like, what's an entrepreneurial group that I can refer to or I can look into? So that's one. That's a major one. But then sometimes people will be asking questions to ChatGPT as if they're an executive coach, like saying, I'm struggling with this problem. and it will say like you might need a have you considered a an executive coaching group or an executive like peer network something like that and then we get shown and what's crazy is we don't try like i was shocked by this i started seeing leads and customers come in and it would say i we use hubspot uh and hubspot would be like yeah this lead or this new customer came from chat gpt and it honestly shocked me and i remember the first time we got that like eight or ten months ago.

42:55And it was you, Sean, you asked Darmesh, when was the time that you like the light bulb went off? I felt a little bit of that light bulb. The problem is that maybe it's not the problem. I think the best way to make it work is you just do the same things that you're doing to rank on Google. No, but he had some good nuances, right? Like the fact that on Google, you would structure your page a certain way. Cause it's like, that's, it's like a guest comes over for a dinner party and you're like, oh, he really likes to discuss books and current events. All right, cool, that's what I'm going to give you.

43:25This other guy really loves to debate and it's like ChatGPT loves question and answer. And so format your content as question and answer is like a simple nuance of like the new way of doing things, right? But in general, it's kind of like just do what you think a customer wants. And the last thing is even early on, Google had what was called a keyword. What do they have? A tool? Yeah, they used to call it one thing and they changed it. So like in the early blogging days, you could type in like a certain word and it would tell you ballpark how many people are searching for it. And you're like, and then it would also tell you how much competition there is.

44:01And so I could just like replicate that. I don't think that it exists for ChatGPT, does it, Darmesh? It does not yet, no. And it's the other thing that doesn't exist yet is that we don't really get, so back in the early years of Google, as part of the data that would come through in your traffic analytics, you would see which keywords people were searching for. It would show up in HubSpot. It would show up in Google Analytics. Google has subsequently kind of curtailed that so they don't pass that kind of granular, what we think of as like intent data, what was the user actually searching for. But yeah, I think things will evolve.

44:31So a couple of more kind of tactical tips that I think are applicable today. Sean, for you, and this may be happening automatically based on being on the Shopify platform, but one of the things that ChatGPT and the AI engines really like is structured product catalogs, right? Because as you would expect, it's like, oh, here's a here's the standard semantic web way of describing the product catalog, which is size, color, all those things. And then another key thing is inventory. It's like, is it in stock or not? Can it be shipped or something? Delivery time, those kinds of things. If you put those in the website, that's going to influence as you as you would expect it to.

45:02Like if I'm searching for I want to buy this kind of musical synthesizer or something like that, I want to find a site that actually happens to have it. Right. That's why Amazon gets so much love generally. But anyway, so that's one thing to look at. And for you, Sam, the other thing that the AEOs, the answer engines kind of optimize for is more kind of human based stuff. So if you look at the review sites, G2 and things like that for product oriented companies, but also it I won't say over indexes because that's a relative term, but it highly indexes on things like Reddit, especially if there's like active lots of back and forth or whatever.

45:36And even if there's one comment in there that says, oh, here's the thing that definitively asks. And you will find that the citations that you see that show up in chat, and you can just do this through personal anecdote and just experimentation. You will find that the Reddit threads it picks up are the ones where the original post was actually a question. And that question sort of matches the question the user is asking. Like, oh, what's the best, you know, CRM for small business? if there happens to be a Reddit post that loosely kind of translates to the exact same meaning, that Reddit post, if there's a comment in there where someone definitively says, yeah, it's HubSpot and here are the five reasons why, and that comment gets a bunch of upvotes because they have access to that data, that has a very, very high likelihood of being a cited source.

46:17This is going to be the biggest company in the world. Imagine if Google had a subscription. So Google is already the third or something largest company in the world. Now imagine every customer is also paying$10 a month, or you know what I mean? three episodes ago uh we were talking about open ai um it's like oh if you could you know if we have to predict as to which what's going to be the uh the next trillion dollar company this is before uh i don't think any company had reached trillion dollars at the time we did that episode but one was about to um it's crazy how much like chat gpt for it to be 800 like they're essentially the new operating system uh for this current generation i i had a buddy and i i maybe mentioned it on the pod years ago, but he was deciding between two very promising companies, one of them was OpenAI.

47:01And this was before ChatGPT was launched. And I think they were already worth$30 billion. And we were talking and he was like, man, I think like, I don't know if this equity can grow anymore. Like, I just don't think it can work. And he ended up taking the job anyway. And he made already something like$30 million or so from his stock. And he sold a portion of it so he could like be very comfortable. And then we were talking, he's like, what should I do with the rest? And I was like, man, there's definitely a world where it could 10 or 20x or more again, who knows. And it's just crazy to say that out loud that what's it worth now?

47:371 trillion or 800? I don't even know. 500 billion is the current publicly disclosed round that's happening currently. All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of. And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful.

48:10It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder. It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great.

48:35Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show. For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details. Can we do like some rapid fire questions? We have this document. This is for the listener. We have this document where we were like preparing different ideas. And Sean had, Sean said he wants to know your process from zero to one. And how do you get ideas? Do you do research? What do you do to move the ball forward? And you replied something interesting. You said two things. You said, this gives me a good chance to talk about algebra.

49:03And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And the second thing you said was iteration. It's all about iteration. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah. So a couple of things. One is I don't have, I don't do deep research on ideas. I don't look at the market like an MBA would or should. Most of the things I end up pursuing are either personal itches, I need the thing myself, or someone close to me, either my business needs it, my wife needs it, or something like that that should exist but doesn't. And these are all the things I pursue tend to end up being software as the only thing I know actually how to produce.

49:32If I was a carpenter or musician, it would be something different. and my kind of running thesis has been and this is the reference Albrecht I was making is around mathematical induction and so mathematical induction is this very simple principle that says as long as it's true for n equals 1 and it's also true that if it's true for n that it's also true for n plus 1 then it's going to be true for everything all along the way until infinity for all positive numbers anyway I'll simplify this distilled down what that means is if you start that's condition 1 and if you can always take the next step, make the next iteration, it will work.

50:10That's for some definition of work, right? It's like you just have to just kind of keep at it. And I'm not saying stubbornly pursue the exact same idea that you started with. That does not work, right? You do have to sort of, an iteration is truly taking kind of market feedback and doing a true loop, right? An informative loop that says, oh, I'm going to do it or at least try to do it better the next iteration, the next iteration, next iteration. But that's my approach. It's like find an idea that I can, and then just get started. It's like often it'll be, like, can I write code tonight? So right now I've got three projects in flight that are these kind of scratch my own itch AI projects.

50:46And I'm almost tempted to tell you what the three are because that'll force me to launch them before this episode goes live. They can give a one-liner maybe for like one or two of them. Yeah, so one is around, it's like a visual designer as an agent. so there's lots of great image generation tools there's you know chat gpt has one there's nano banana that's now from google but what's what i've always found lacking is the actual process i go through as a non-designer as a business person um like if i'm doing a social media post or doing a blog post or something like that it's like like i have a process like okay i want to come up with like visual ideas what would represent this then i want to see 10 possible examples then i want to iterate then i want to say okay i want to pick these five and i want to create my own personal brand, my own style, then I want to apply that style to the kind of, it's like, there's this kind of workflow that I go through, and like, that's just painful, and I'm too impatient, like I have access to designers, this is not a matter of saving money, but it's like, if I have an idea at two o 'clock in the morning, and I want to get the idea out there with a visual that goes along with it, so that's the thing I'm building, is that it goes through my entire flow as an agentic process.

51:51Do you have a name for it? I know you like to do names with the ideas. I do, and I'll put it out there, because it's close to launchable. It's called imagegen.ai. So imagegeneration.ai. And is this going to be, like one of your first or second times on MFM, Wordle was popular. And you said that you made a Wordle alternative. So for those listening, if you don't know what Wordle is, it's, I don't know, a game like Scrabble, whatever. And your side project where you just launched this, I think with your son, was making$80 ,000 per month at the time. I have no idea where it's at now. do you have some type of ambitions or guesses as to where this is going to be in six months?

52:31I don't know, actually. So part of it, we talked about this a little bit last couple episodes, so I've been working as kind of part of my HubSpot hat now is the agent.ai platform, which is basically a marketplace for agents. You can build agents, find agents, hire agents to do these kinds of things. So in the back of my mind, I'm going to build this thing, but I'm building it as an agent that will be on the agent.ai platform. And the hope that is that the utility is high enough, either it will cause a bunch of users to be added to agent.ai, which is now up to 2 million users, which is awesome.

53:04Or, you know, I have thoughts about agents on the platform being monetized someday. And this is like, okay, for me, it passes a litmus test. Like if this thing already existed, would I pay$5 a month for it or$10 a month for it? And the answer is yes. It's like, okay, if I can sort of, and I actually posted on LinkedIn exactly sort of the product roadmap for this thing was yesterday. I'm like, okay, here's the thing I'm building. I didn't disclose a name, but here's the thing I'm building. Here's what it's going to do. And it's like stupid, simple things right now. For instance, when you do an image generation thing right now that has text, which a lot of kind of business images that you create will have like a headliner or some sort of text in it.

53:40The image models have gotten better at text, still not perfect. But one of the things I wanted to do is like, okay, well, if you generate an image with text, I can pass the generated image back through AI and say, tell me the text that's on this image. So if there's a typo in it, just rerun it. Don't waste my time giving me things that have typo in it. And then me, it's like, oh, by the way, you misspelled this or whatever, you have a typo in that. So by the time it makes it to me, it's already done, right? It's like having an intern going off and doing this stuff in the background. And then I show up and it's got 10 options for me.

54:08I can pick and I can run and it'll do it in my style without typos, which sounds like a minor thing, but it's useful. Sean, do you want to ask him some of these other questions? You had some pretty good ones, like the request for startup or his chat GPT, history. Yeah, well, I'll do the ChatGPT history one. I'm just curious. So you run a huge company. You are also kind of like a scratch your own niche guy. You're an investor. You have many hats. I'm just curious how you use ChatGPT. If you were to pull up your ChatGPT and looked at the last five to seven searches that you did or questions and answers that you did, what are you talking to ChatGPT about?

54:44I'm a huge ChatGPT fan. Don't get me wrong. Even if I weren't an investor in OpenAI, But the way I consume ChatGPT is not through the app. The way I consume ChatGPT is through their API. So I have my own kind of command line thing that I put in. And there's a reason I do this. So the next big advancement we're going to see in AI apps generally is this notion of memory that they remember. And you'll see, as you've been using ChatGPT, you will find that it's going to remember more and more things about you, even though you talked about them a week ago, a month ago, right? Like it's the best out there in terms of being able to retain that memory, which is awesome.

55:22The non-awesome part of it is that that memory is locked into ChatGPT. So if you ever go to Claude or if you ever go to Gemini or something else, those things don't have that memory of you. And that's a very frustrating thing, which is great for OpenAI because it makes it very, very sticky. Well, wait, so your personal version that you're running in your command line has better memory than ChatGPT? Why? Why does that? How'd you do that? Oh, because it has infinite memory. and what makes it the better memory is because it's under my control. It's my memory. For instance, I can go off and say, I'm going, I want to go back through and I have this for my email as well, which I think is just another form of memory.

55:58All the email archive and I have like two and a half million emails in my quote unquote memory. I can go back and say through my chat GPT history, here's the thing I'm actually trying to kind of get to and then I can combine that with other things. I can take that memory. It's like now I want to pass that to Google Gemini or I want to intersect it with Google Gemini, which does video analysis a lot better than ChatGPT does, which doesn't do video analysis yet. It's the openness of it, right? That's the motivation for it. It's not that I can do memory better. It's the fact that I can do more things with it because I can intersect it with other apps.

56:26But why isn't this the product? Because I think everybody would want this, right? Yeah, give me that. Because it violates, okay, I have three rules of business. Rule number one, never own a piece of a restaurant, never be a shareholder in a restaurant. Rule number two, never be a landlord because I don't even want to maintain my own properties, let alone properties on behalf of other people. And number three, never compete with Sam Altman from OpenAI. Those are my three rules. That would violate the third rule, which is I don't want to create a chat GPT competitor. But where this will manifest, right, is that HubSpot's building kind of memory into our Breeze assistant, you know, our AI product.

57:04And so that's going to happen. So localized memory in terms of, you know, for use case specifics, but I don't want to create a consumer app that tries to solve this kind of for the broad horizontal group of people. But I think over time, the industry will evolve where there'll be some form of like federated memory, I think, that says, oh, you can plug into this, similar to how we plug into Google Docs and Gmail and things like that. It's like OpenAI may not own like absolutely everything, but right now someone needed to do the memory. I think they did the right thing. It was not, you know, diabolically planned to be that way.

57:35It's just like, oh, this would be a better product if it had memory. So they added memory. Right. Okay, but you didn't answer my full question. So you said, I don't use the Chats TV app. I use it through API on my own little thing you've created, which has better memory. Okay, but what do you use it for? Like, what's like the last few things you've used it for? So I do it a lot for kind of research. So I'm researching like ideas. And I use it a lot for domain names, as it turns out. So I have a thing that can actually look at Google Trends. So I can say, oh, like I've come across this idea for a domain name or whatever.

58:08Here's a price. I can look that up in the marketplace right now. I can look up the transaction history. Has this domain been sold before? What was the last purchase price? It's like Zillow for domains. One of the agents I'm also working on that we'll launch actually this week. But what I want to do is to say, okay, Vibe Coding is a good example. It's like, ah, once Andrew Karpathy, I was actually part of that, but sometimes I'm a little bit later at the game. It's like, oh, I see this trend kind of picking up. Like, what is that? I want to know who coined the term. I want to know what it is. I want to know what domains are available.

58:36What's the price? Are any of them listed or not? Are anyone's just free and clear? Like no one's, as it turns out, vibe coding. I was early, but late enough where someone had already kind of purchased the.com domain. By the way, vibe coding would fit your inbound framework. Like if I'm Replit or one of these companies right now, I'm creating the vibe coding movement and the community and the events and the blog and all that. And then like, I have the tool underneath that you could use, but you could use many others, right? Or maybe I'm Superbase or one of these other companies, like putting it behind that, the way you've done with inbound marketing, I think would be smart right now.

59:09I'll tell you what am I, and I will sacrifice this idea. Not for free, but in the idea here, and this was the original idea behind, so I paid six figures for that domain. That's on, I think I've - What, vibecoding.com or what'd you get? Vibecoding.com. Really? And the idea, I've logged hundreds of hours doing what some would call vibe coding. And there's other terms like agentic coding, I think is a more accurate thing, but it doesn't have the same vibe as vibe coding. that doesn't exactly roll off the tip of the tongue it doesn't, yep and just in case, I own that one too, but that's okay, so vibecoding.com, I think it's a great idea, it lowers the bar allows lots of non-developers to kind of get into the kind of product building game the problem is, and I would bet lots of money on this, is that almost everyone that is not a developer by trade will do vibecoding, if they're trying to build a real so there's a class of problems that vibecoding is really, really good at It's like if you're building software for yourself, if it's got a short lifespan that says I'm building this, I need it right now or whatever, it's like disposable software.

1:00:12Or if you're just building it for your team, I only have to make it work for three people. And if it stops working, no big deal. But as you start violating some of those criteria, it's like, no, I want to build a production product. I build a billion dollar software company around that's going to be long during. And I'm going to be maintaining this product going a year, three years, five years, 10 years down the road. then Vibe coding invariably right now, even with invariably non-developers will paint themselves into a corner. That they will hit some bug, something won't work, something will break.

1:00:41It will. It's just a matter of time based on how ambitious the thing is you're doing. When that happens, it's entirely possible that you actually have an economically viable idea, but you have an unviable code base because you have no idea what's happening inside that black box. When that happens, not an if, when that happens, what if there were a community in a marketplace called vibecoding.com where a bunch of engineers hang out. And what they do is to say, hey, I'll answer questions for you, like my number questions. But also for$500 an hour, I will jump into your GitHub repo, figure out your problem and fix it and cause it and set up a unit test for you and help you get through this corner that you've painted yourself into.

1:01:17So I think that's going to be a massive market. So you listed, I think, so you probably own between 500 and 1 ,000? It's between 500 and 1 ,000, yeah. Okay, so I could collect, if I had unlimited money in, I could probably collect 500 over 10 years. You just have an idea and you just buy it. But what's crazy is a lot of these domains that you have, they actually have projects on them. So I'm looking at pitchcraft.com, opengraph.com, prompt.com, dadjoke.ai, speedround.com. And it's like speedround.com. It's an investment firm, a check or no in 24 hours. dad joke.ai, a dad joke generator that works, but not that well.

1:02:00And you said you have three other projects that you want to launch, but you said, I need this podcast to go out and then I'm going to go and get it out. So I'm setting this up. Sean came up with the idea of being generative. This is the most generative I've ever seen someone, which is how do you have enough time to actually do all this? Well, just to be clear, the list of domains I put in, I don't have sites launched on them right now. So the thing I was kind of trying to share, and I may just put this up publicly. It's like, here are my top 20 domains for which I have ideas, but I don't have the calories to actually pursue them.

1:02:31Make me an offer. But you have to have like street cred, something that gives me evidence that you would actually be able to kind of pursue this idea. And I'll kind of contribute the domain and maybe some capital to kind of kick the idea off. But to answer your kind of question bluntly, Sam, my hours have not changed in the 30 plus years I've been doing this as an entrepreneur. I still think of myself as an entrepreneur, despite being part of a$30,$25 billion company. For all intents and purposes, and I mean this in the most positive way I can possibly put it, I live in the matrix. That's basically what I'm doing, right?

1:03:08It's like, it's like, it's not like, oh, are we in a simulation or whatever? I personally is like, okay, my window into the world is like, okay, I've got a little talking character of people that sometimes show up on this other screen that I have up here in my office or whatever. It's like, And I'm just trying to play the game. And this is, in the same way people play video games and do it obsessively, this is my version of a video game. And I did play video games a lot back when I was younger too. But I really enjoy it. I like it because if I were a writer, my favorite writers are the ones that spend a lot of time on world building and character building, right?

1:03:42It's like they create this entire, like especially the sci-fi and fantasy writers, they create this entire thing, a world that could exist, that's got its own physical laws. and here's the species that live on it, the powers they have and all of it. And it's this entire world that they fabricate out of thin air. They do it in words. I'm trying to, in my little small way, create a version of the universe that exists that solves all of the problems that I have or people that I love that, and that I can sort of, you know, kind of poke around at the eggnons and make a version of the universe that I think is a V1.1 of the universe that exists.

1:04:13Does your house work like that in your physical life? Like on your day-to-day life, Do you, is your home life set up to where you've built like your own, like, is everything about your life exactly in your very particular way of going about it? Is it set up that way? No, and I'm actually probably drawing the wrong visual picture. So my life is, if you just looked at how I live, it's more like the absent-minded professor. My desk is completely messy. So it's not like I have like an engineer's scientist kind of thing where like it's a lab, you know, white lab coat, clean desk, and everything's kind of pristine.

1:04:46It's the exact opposite of that, right? It's just not how I work. And so I'm not that methodical about it. I'm analytical in some ways, but I actually play things actually very loose. Like I'll have a random idea and I'll drop the thing I'm working on. I'll go play with something else for a day or two or whatever. And then I'll drop the fact that I'm doing image gen.ai in the next few days or whatever. And now I'll finish it and get it to some semblance of kind of working. But I've said this before, but it bears repeating it. It's a really good piece of personal advice is that if a musician were out playing music and practicing when they're not doing it for 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day, which people do that, if an athlete, if a basketball player, if they're off practicing eight hours a day and then even between games, we never question that.

1:05:38We never ever question. We're like, oh, well, that's what it takes to be kind of top of that particular game, music, sports, or whatever. for some reason, there's a stigma attached to work. Yeah. And there's some stigma attached to if you just happen to make money at the thing you happen to be doing. Like, well, it's like, he has all the money. Why would he keep doing this for money? Like, I'm not doing it for money at all. Like, I don't care about money at all. But I do enjoy the craft and the practice and the actual process of building stuff. It's more of business, yeah. Have you ever heard of the famous clause that Michael Jordan put in his contract when he signed his big deal with the Bulls?

1:06:19So they added a clause. And I don't know if this was Nike marketing or if this was genuine. But at the time, if you were an NBA player, you signed the max contract. They would have all these rules like, hey, you can't ride motorcycles, like things that would jeopardize you as an asset to them. And one of them was like, you can't just go play like random pickup basketball games on concrete with strangers, right? You might get hurt. And now you can't play on company time. And he had this famous clause that he put in called the for the love of the game clause. And it was that Jordan was allowed to play basketball anytime he wanted for the love of the game.

1:06:53And I think that that's like a clause that we all just want in our own mental contract of how we do things. Like you had this great tweet where you said, if money doesn't let you do the things you love doing, why else would you want it? And I thought that's so good because oftentimes I know I have to talk to my mom or my sister and I'll tell them about you. And my buddy Furkan is like this. Furkan was my co-founder of our last company. And then, but the company built before that, Applovin, is now like a hundred billion dollar company. And so like Furkan's got all the money he'll ever need, right?

1:07:24And they're like, oh, what's Furkan up to? I'm like, oh yeah, he built this lab called Founders Inc. in Fort Mason. And he's in there and he's there till 11 p.m. and he's grinding and he's got a new startup. And they're like, oh my God, if I had the money, I would never do that. And part of it is like, well, because you wouldn't, he's not doing it for the money. He's doing it because he wants to do it. That's why he got the money. So first of all, you have it reversed. The money came because he is this way. He didn't become this way because of the money. And also like, you're right that whether it's athletes, musicians, we find it like noble when they do it.

1:08:00But if you're a business person, you're greedy. Or you're a workaholic. When your mom says that, you're like, have a seat, mom. Pull up a chair. You see LeBron James. Are you familiar with Jordan's contract in 96? Subsection three seeds for the love of the game. She's like, oh, I just wanted to know if he has kids yet or not. She's like actually operating at a completely different level than me.

1:08:27Oh, man. Darmesh, we love hanging out with you. I always leave better than I came in. I wish we could do this for many more hours because there's just so many different things about life and business that we can learn from you. We had Howard Marks on recently. And at the end, it was the same thing where it was like, I was like, man, you came to talk about investing, but you're really just talking about how to live a good life. And you're that guy. You kind of do the same thing. But it's kind of funny, right? Like the kind of legend investors we have, They bring this philosophical energy of like, almost like patience and like observe the world, stay calm, you know, stay calm and carry on or whatever.

1:09:12And like Dharmesh and like some of the builders have like a slightly different energy. It's still philosophical, but it's kind of like a let's make it happen energy. Like let's build it. Why not? We could do this. Let's try this. It's okay if it doesn't work. It is a totally different playful builder energy that I think is dope to be around. Yeah. Well, I have a tweet I almost sent yesterday, but I wanted to get my image generator working so I could attach it to this tweet. And it's two lines I'm going to share with you. It's a nice, warm kind of closing, which is, dance like no one's watching, build like everyone's waiting.

1:09:48Nice. We have to do a quick plug. One of the ways this episode came about was the marketing team at HubSpot was like, we need you to promote this thing and they told us to promote this thing and we're like yeah let's just have darmesh on the pod and uh maybe he'll like plug it because that's way better but what is it loop marketing loop marketing by the way loop marketing is a new inbound marketing that's all right is that your prediction learn about how to do marketing well in the modern age of ai look up loop marketing loop marketing.com you own that one too i guess yeah we promised we would say it seven times so loop marketing loop marketing and loop marketing boom quote a hit Let's go.

1:10:27They were like, can you guys read this ad? We did the white font on white background at the end of the pod. You didn't even plug it, by the way. We asked, what is the new inbound marketing? You called it AEO.

1:10:44That's true. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod.

1:10:57All right, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot Podcast Network, but we're not the only ones. There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you liked them. Maybe you should check them out. One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make, the new habits you could do, the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference, that's what that podcast is all about. Check it out. It's called Nudge, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.