Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: All right, we're live.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: We're live.
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Awesome. All right, well, welcome back to the Gregory and Paul Show. I'm Gregory.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: I'm Paul.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: And you know, on our live stream, we break down the latest in SaaS, startups, AI, whatever the Internet is discussing this week. Always like to throw in a few memes for fun, and we like to have guests every once in a while. And I'm so excited today to announce that we have Ross Simmons as our special guest. Wanna say hello, Ross?
[00:00:34] Speaker C: What's up, everybody? Super excited to be here. Paul, Captain Cappuccino, thanks for having me on.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: We're gonna have a nice conversation about marketing, you know, and I figure, like, for our audience, they tend to be technical founders, maybe vibe marketers. Not everyone has a background perhaps in marketing, didn't work at an agency, didn't maybe get a marketing degree. And so I wanted to introduce you all to Ross Simmons, who I've been following for a long time on Twitter. I was at a startup and someone introduced me to.
To you. Cool. And I jumped into it. I was like, this is awesome. Like, it's one of the few people I could really relate to in the sense that you came from a very creative perspective of how you thought about content marketing. And we're doing it in the context of SaaS and B2B, which I think is fairly unique and something that has always been kind of my niche. And so I really related to the content and work that you were doing, and I think that's how Paul stumbled into you. Is that correct, Paul?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah. I loved your content on.
Followed you on LinkedIn as well. Your right one's distribution message just really hit home a couple years ago when I first started posting on the Internet.
[00:01:56] Speaker C: So appreciate it. And likewise, like, I love what you guys are doing for the Internet.
We're all here right now, since we're all coming together.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Yeah, so. So it's gonna be a fun, friendly conversation. And. And given that, I think most people who follow the show perhaps don't know that much about Ross. Like, Ross, I wanted you to kind of tell us the origin story. There's a fantastic background story about how you got started in content marketing. And so I'd love for people to. To hear that.
[00:02:22] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. So, Ross Simmons, I'm an entrepreneur. Been an entrepreneur my whole life. Sold do rags out of my locker when I was in high school. That was the first taste of capitalism, and I was like, I'm hooked. I want to keep doing this. So I sold do rags all through high School was able to pay for poutine and all of that good stuff. Then I get into university and I started a little blog called Just dedicated to two things. One, I had a blog on the Sims, which was a video game that at that point was starting to blow up. And me and my sister ran this community for Sims. 2 and we were creating a bunch of like modifications of different Sims, giving them like braids and stuff like that. We were selling them all over the Internet and people were loving that.
Then from there I started a fantasy football blog. So I started to write about fantasy sports. Paid for my tuition on the back of that site. So I had set up some very early affiliate deals selling everything from jerseys and swag from various brands like it was cool.
And then my marks just tanked and my mom was like, you need to start writing about what you're learning in school. So I started to write about marketing and I started to like create content on that topic. And the first eye opener was Bacardi. They sent me a DM and they were like, hey, we want to fly you down to Miami to come and speak to our C suite about how to do marketing with Gen Y. And I told my parents because I was living in their basement at the time and they thought I was going to get killed by somebody on the Internet.
But I took my dad's suit, I jumped on a plane, went to Miami, did that. That was great.
Got a glimpse into the world of marketing and how big this could be. And just living in my parents basement in Nova Scotia, I was like, this Internet thing is going to be crazy. So I doubled down, kept writing about marketing, fell in love with this thing called SaaS and it was just like software. Started to read a bunch of VC blogs back in the day, started to write content about what I would do if I was working at these different SaaS companies.
The founders of different SaaS companies started to reach out. I started to work with one company that eventually got sold to Salesforce. Then after that took place, I was fractional CMO for like 8 companies at one time.
And I was like, this is getting crazy. So I think I need to like start hiring, built up a team at the same time. I ran a startup called Crate and Dreamer. So I had two different startups at the time. I had an E commerce business called Hustle and Grind, which sold coffees, hence the name.
I started a cleaning company, which was great until Covid.
I got a lot of stuff going and now I run foundation, I run distribution, AI, which is a AI Tool for like marketers.
Um, I'm a keynote speaker and author of a book. Dad of three, Entrepreneur, investor in a lot of startups. Love life, love business. That's me.
Amazing.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: True renaissance man.
[00:05:12] Speaker C: Appreciate it. I try, I try.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a whole bunch of things thrown in there that I wasn't aware of. Like cleaning company.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: Cleaning company.
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I know, I know. I get bored. So I always have this book. I didn't always have this belief, but probably in my 30s, I decided that it was time to diversify. I was very heavy in tech. Every business, everything. I did all tech, my entire portfolio, tech investments, tech. And then 30s, I was like, okay, let's diversify this a bit and start doing some things that are like boring and got into cleaning companies. So I started that with a bunch of my cousins. I really wanted to like help set up some folks in my family and be able to like say like, let's go build something and created that. And that's been cool.
Wild.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Wild.
[00:05:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: What a great story.
Amazing. And then I want to understand a little bit more about the origin of your current agency, foundation, and just tell us about like what you guys are doing over there even. Even today.
[00:06:13] Speaker C: Yeah. So foundation started again just kind of like in my parents basement as RossSimmons.com so I was a one person show. I had a vision in this path that I wanted to kind of like be able to build an agency in a small place like Nova Scotia and work with some of the global brands. And I just started to like create content online. So RossSimmons.com was like its launching pad. Brought on a team of two. I hired some folks that were fresh out of school.
And then after that I continued to have this hypothesis that if you can add value to the Internet, the Internet will give you ridiculous amounts of value back. So I was really putting my heart and soul in every single piece that I would create online with the hope that I would get like 10x that amount of value back. And it pretty much worked. Like I would go into communities back in the day, like growthhackers.com, inbound.org, and I would spend an hour creating like a response to a CMO who's asking questions like how do you scale a software company from X to Z or A to B, whatever. And I would drop these like huge knowledge bombs is what I would call them, and on people with screenshots, with graphics, with frameworks and just leave it. And then I would come back to Upvotes and emails and prospects and leads. And I was like, it's true. If you add value to the Internet, you will get it back. So fast forward.
As I continued to believe in that belief and that approach, we started to get bigger and bigger companies coming into our door. The first publicly traded company we got after a conference I spoke at in Seattle called Moscon. This was probably eight to nine years ago now, maybe 10. I spoke out at this event.
CMO comes up to me afterwards, he's like, here's my card, blah, blah, blah. Get back, we're talking and then we close this deal. And now you fast forward. We've worked with tons of publicly traded companies every day. And like the vast, like a good chunk of our clients are some of the biggest in software and in tech.
And what we do is help them scale with content. So we have deep expertise in SEO.
We're big users of Reddit. I wrote a book on Reddit back in 2017 called the Reddit Guide. You read that?
Totally did that book way back in the day. And Redditors yelled at me, oh man. It launched on product hunt and someone from Reddit like lost their mind that I was encouraging marketers to do marketing. There's. It's funny because like you fast.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: It's funny.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: And I like partner with Reddit and I'm flying out to SF to collaborate with Reddit. We're talking, I'm talking to Reddit all the time. Like we're friendlies. But at that time I was public enemy number one.
But it's today. Foundation services, brands, we help them with Reddit marketing, we help them with LinkedIn, content creation, blogging, LLM optimization, SEO content.
We're full service marketing firm and it's a global team. Everybody's remote. The vast majority I'd say is up north, so in Canada, but we've got folks spread all over.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: I know, it's such a great story.
And what I love about the story, it's like, you know, I was in San Francisco and Silicon valley, like spent 20 years there, right. And you don't hear as many stories about people like outside of that ecosystem doing something that you did and then staying in Canada and working remotely and continue to build what you build.
[00:09:33] Speaker C: It's hard to really have the cold. Yeah, the cold is rough.
I already looked at the agenda for Monday and I'm like, I need to block off time to go and blow snow. Like I need my snowblower out on Monday.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Totally.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: It's not gonna Be fun.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Dark. You gotta have sweaters.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: You have to have a sweater game. That's.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Why do you have the strongest sweater game ever? I was telling Paul that, like, whenever I see you online, if you're wearing a sweater, I'll always just comment on the sweater on purpose.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: That's it. That's it.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: That's it. Like, that's what matters. Like, marketing. Like, dude, the sweater is.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like Jensen with his leather jacket.
[00:10:12] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: That's. He's got the leather jacket.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: It's way better than that.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: It's way better than that.
[00:10:19] Speaker C: I appreciate, Appreciate it.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: Okay, awesome. So. So I love the story.
A couple other things I want to touch on. There's a couple stories that I've heard you tell me about some of your early content marketing success. Yeah. So let's hear a bit about that. You had a couple things that went viral. I think those stories are really entertaining and interesting for people. So just tell us a little more about some of those.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't know where to start. There's been a lot I've had hits over.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: There's the Rihanna one. I like that one. And there's some football ones.
[00:10:48] Speaker C: One that I really liked was we created this one post where it was. It's the Rihanna one. And it was like, how can you create a headline that always works, works, works, works, works. And it was like it was at a stage in the Internet where, like, marketers were so boring. Like, marketers weren't trying to have fun. Like, everybody was just so stiff and trying to be Don Draper. So I just came in and I was like, I'm gonna create a bunch of like hip hop style headlines. And those pieces just went nuts all over the Internet every single time.
And then one of the other pieces that we created, it was like, we created one piece that talked about. This was for Hustle and Grind. It was about. We looked at a handful of different peer reviewed scientific journals and on two concepts, one, music and two, coffee. And we created this piece that talked about how if you listen to hip hop and you drink coffee, you will be more productive than anyone else in the world.
And we wrote this piece and it went wild. Front page of Reddit. We had celebrities retweeting it, sharing it on their accounts.
There was like professional athletes putting it on their story on Instagram. For someone who's just like a content geek and loves the idea that content can influence culture, it was one of the coolest things to see, again, someone living in Nova Scotia doing Some research bringing to life this piece of content, pressing publish, and then it just going wild. And we've done it time and time again. Like, I've been on the front page of Reddit so many times for assets that we've produced.
Because at the end of the day, I do think there's a code to what people care about online. If you can create content that educates, engages, entertains, or empowers people, that's it.
The content will spread. But a lot of people think people care about stuff that no one actually cares about, and they'll create stories and produce assets on things that aren't novel, that are boring, and they just fall flat. And I think the best place for inspiration when it comes to stories is actually to look into the past, because in reality, humans have stayed fundamentally the same, but stories have been told since the beginning of time, all like humankind. So if you can go back and look at, in 1994, what was the most popular story published by People magazine, I guarantee you that you could take a spin of that People magazine story, apply it to someone today, and it will. It will be a hit. Like, the humans still react to content the same way. We still have the same type of psychological breakdowns that we do now. It's the same reason why Pocahontas, mcbel, Death, Shakespeare, Lion King, all of these stories all sound the same. It just like you swap out characters from the 1800s with lions, and then everyone thinks that this is a new story. Pocahontas and Avatar, same exact story. Like, what are we talking about?
That's the. That's the coolness of the story. So those are some examples.
But yeah, that was a long answer to a short question.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: No, no, I love it. I love it. Like, I think, like, I think you really broke through at a time when the way you described it as, like, I would use a term like conservative. Right. So like, you've got these corporate marketing teams, they've got a lot of money behind them. There's a lot of pressure and so to take a risk from their perspective and like, Right. Tie in some pop culture thing to it or whatever. They're just like, really nervous. Right. You kind of like, really change the game. And I remember, like, debates around about that, like, whole era where, yeah, I would, I would describe it as like meme culture and Reddit culture kind of breaking out into the mainstream. And there's like a. I remember people
[00:14:44] Speaker C: debating whether or not you should use emojis in email.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:49] Speaker C: If you use an emoji in Your subject line. Ooh. Like, that's. That's risky. What? Like, it's crazy.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. There's, like, this very conservative older group of, like, business people, so I'm like. Like, I'm. Dude, I'm almost. I'll be 50 this year. Right.
[00:15:04] Speaker C: I love it.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: And so I'm right at, like, that stage where, like, I didn't grow up with the Internet and people were further ahead than me.
All the stuff is just, like, alien to them, and they don't really. They don't really care. They didn't really get it. And so that's why it was, like, really hard for them.
[00:15:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Because they didn't get it or think it was appropriate. But now we're in a world where. I was just posting about this. So the oldest millennials are, like, 45 years old.
So who've grown up with all this stuff.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: So there's been a huge change in what's considered professional and how people communicate and stuff. And I think, like, you know, you're at the forefront of, like, helping that kind of transition happen. Like, there was a. There was a. There was a moment in time where there was a real catalyst, I think, and a couple of people, like, really broke through that door. Yeah. And I think you're, like, one of the people who, like, really enabled that, and I think it was really cool. And now we're in a world where, like, everyone, like, eventually, I would say at the highest level, like, if you're not doing something interesting like that, you just don't get any attention.
[00:16:03] Speaker C: You don't. You blend in now.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:04] Speaker C: Like, I think more and more people are starting to wake up to the fact that, like, you should have personality even if you're in B2B. Like, you look at some of the work coming out of the folks from Ramp and, like, their storytelling and bringing in the folks from, I think, the office.
Like, no one ripped my head off. I never watched the show, but it seems. Seems like it's something that is impactful for folks. Is like, Dwayne or someone. I don't know, some guy. They keep bringing them back, and everybody goes crazy over. It's like, that's the stuff that people want to see.
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Absolutely. Why don't we. Why don't we change the subject and move into what I think is maybe the hottest topic that we can address.
So the.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: The.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: I would. I would. Let me frame it this way. The world is shifting now from, like, SEO.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: To let's call it. Yeah, Geo.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: Buckle up. There's an argument.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
And there's a lot of ways to interpret this, discuss it and like what is your perspective on it? Are you even using the term geo or using aeo? Like I'm curious, what's the proper term? Yeah, there's a lot to talk about in there. Yeah. So let's, let's kick, there's a lot in there.
[00:17:08] Speaker C: So the, let's take folks back so they get a sense of what has happened. So for the vast majority of businesses, if you log into Google search console, probably about this time last year, you would have noticed a separation between clicks and impressions, which means Google continued to show your website on the search engine results page, but you might have gotten fewer and fewer clicks. You will have also seen new websites showing up as being a high refers of traffic. Google's Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude Grok, you name it, becoming a source of referral traffic now with all of this has become a bit of a SEO nightmare for many where they've screamed at the top of their lungs, SEO is dead. Like, what does that mean? Like, we're no longer getting as much traffic as we used to from organic. Like, woe is me, it's all over.
And then on the flip side, you have SEOs who are saying, good, now we have to think a little bit differently. Now we have to think a little bit strategically. We have to navigate this new era. I'm in the camp that whether you want to call it geo, aeo, LLM, SEO, eieio, I don't care, I really don't care what acronym you want to use, all I care is that we're optimizing our marketing efforts to increase our visibility in discovery on LLM platforms, search platforms, social media platforms. Let's just start showing up everywhere we could.
If we embrace that and we are in alignment that that is what we want to do, then there are elements of SEO that are still ridiculously important.
You still need to have a technically sound site. You should still understand search intent, meaning what are the queries that people would look for when they are trying to find your business in SaaS, for example, it kills me, it actually kills me when I go on a software site and I don't see them having feature pages, or I don't see them having industry pages, or I don't see any comparison pages, any alternative pages or migration pages. These are things that someone who has commercial intent would look for. So you should have those pages. You should have a page if you're a CRM, because it's Easy. If you're a CRM that targets electricians, plumbers and H vac professionals, you need individual landing pages that speak to each of them. Because if someone goes to Google and They type in CRMs for electricians and you only have a landing page that says CRM, guess what? You're never going to rank for that word unless you're salesforce or HubSpot like you're or pipedrive or close like one of the top guys. You're never going to get there. So why don't you niche down your pages so you can show up in search. Now when you do that, something beautiful happens because you have started to use variables associated with me as an individual, the user, the person you're trying to sell to, when I'm trying to think through who should I buy as a CRM. Consumer behavior has changed. Now they're going to grok and they're saying what is the best CRM for an electrician? And because you're saying for an electrician, they are combining CRM and electrician, they're scraping the web, they're doing a fan out query which is essentially multiple searches at once and they're going to look for the best electrician CRMs, the top electrician CRMs, the top rated electrician CRMs. They're going to do multiple queries at once and then they're going to scrape all of that content into a ranking system to figure out which one is the best and then it's going to make that recommendation to the user.
What you'll have to realize is that the places that that AI is going includes things like Reddit, includes YouTube, it includes G2Capterra, softwareadvice.com RossSimmons.com, paul.com, Gregory.com, captain Cappuccino, softwareadvice.com, it includes all of those sites. So what you now need to do as an SEO and as a marketer is think we need a Reddit strategy, we need a YouTube strategy, we need a digital PR strategy, we need to have a relationship with Paul so we can have him write a blog post about us and include us as one of the top electrician CRMs directly on his site. You have to scale it outside of your sole website.
For over a decade, SEOs just cared for the most part about their own website. We have to make sure that our landing pages, our website is optimized, is technically sound, we have good author pages, that we have expertise, experience, authority and trust dripping all over our site. But now they finally are starting to realize that you have to be on Reddit, you have to be on YouTube, you have to be on other sites too, and not just care about getting a bunch of backlinks. You actually have to have contextual content and stories on these platforms too. So that's the shift that is happening. So again, long answer to a short question.
I call it geo.
I'm good with anybody calling it anything else. I'll change it. If I hear someone say aeo, I'll just switch it and be like, okay, let's call it AEO in this conversation. But I don't think SEO is done. I think it's very much alive. And I hope that SEOs, if they want to have a job five years from now, are starting to realize that they need to think outside of the box.
Wow.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: So for, for some of our listeners, let's say they're a founder with a small startup, like exactly like you said, now you have to be everywhere, not just their blogs, you have to be on Reddit, Pinterest, wherever, all of these YouTube.
How do you manage this as a one of, let's say five people, you were startup.
Can you get tactical with it?
[00:22:48] Speaker C: Yeah. So it depends on the makeup of your team. If you as the founder are marketing and the rest of the team is engineering, then my recommendation, let's get scrappy is to like set up a cloud account, get in there, upload a bunch of best practice content, start to get it to inspire you on what type of content you should be producing and developing. Like, let's start at the basics. Let's start with your website. So I'm going to go back to say like, do you have the foundational landing pages on your site? Do you have industry pages? Do you have target audience pages? Do you have migration pages, comparison pages, alternative pages? Are your titles all ranking or speaking to your target audience? Here's a mistake that a lot of founders make. They start to put titles and names around their product that no one actually uses yet. Like if no one is actually going to Google and looking for an agentic psychoanalysis platform for radioactive technology or something, insert all kinds of words that no one looks for. Stop putting that on your site. No one's looking for it yet. Change the narrative, change the category. After you steal from the existing use case that you are competing with, steal from the channel that you're trying to disrupt. If you have this new world of personalized CRM and blah, blah, blah, call it that, just call it a personalized CRM because there's probably people looking for that. So let's call it what it is. If you are trying to replace an ERP system, let's just call yourself an ERP powered by AI or something. Use the words that your customer would use to replace the thing that you're trying to displace. And then on your website you're going to not just say ERP, you're going to say ERP for electricians, for SMBs, you're going to label and name it based off of those different queries. You can use Claude to do that for you. In like, what would you say, Paul? Maybe a day? 30 minutes?
[00:24:48] Speaker B: 40, 30 minutes?
[00:24:50] Speaker C: It's not long, so that's an afternoon, right? And if you're Captain Cappuccino, you might get through it even faster because you're caffeinated, right? So you get through that quickly. Then the next step is to think about things like YouTube. So for me, I'm going back to Claude and I'm like, I'm probably taking a transcript of the Paul and Gregory show, like this episode. I'm going to transcribe it, I'm gonna upload it to Cloud and say, listen to them. Talk to this guy named Ross and give me some recommendations on what I should do on YouTube and what type of content I should create. He mentioned this thing about educate, engage, entertain, empower. Give me some ideas based off of what you know about me, around what videos I should create. It's going to give you some ideas and then you set up a camera and you record some of those videos into your camera.
However, some of you might not want to be on camera. You're just like, no, that's not me. Cool. Go sign up for hey Gen. Create a fake version of yourself, Create a AI synthetic you and then upload your scripts to hey Gen so it talks for you on your behalf. And then you don't have to get sweaty because now you have an AI talking for you at scale. Great, do that. And if you still just don't want even your Persona there, hire an AI ad actor to create the content that goes on YouTube. You rooted in those keywords that you're targeting, then you start to distribute that content. So ideally you're also writing, pressing, publish on blog posts, use cloud again to support you with that or hire an agency that can support you with this stuff if you have budget to do. So that would be also a smart play as long as the agency is AI powered and they're not like forcing you to pay for Slow hands on keyboards, like the old school way. Like, if you're dropping 10k on a blog post, then something's broken. So let's like fix that and go with a different firm. But you should create that content and just, like, start producing it now. I'm not a big believer in just like spamming the Internet like I want. I do understand and believe truly that the best time to be creative is right now, because content is so abundant. It is so easy to create content now, but it is not easy to create good content. Good content comes from, like, actual nuance and understanding of storytelling and psychology of humans. And I think these tools can help you. But it's kind of like going to a doctor. I wouldn't go to one of you and say, oh, Paul has AI so he can help diagnose my symptoms. I'd rather go to a doctor who has AI than a marketer with AI to diagnose my symptoms. So I think it's kind of in that regard as well. Like, go find a great marketer to help you as well. Like, don't, don't be afraid of that.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: You've mentioned lots of things, right? Like, so many things.
[00:27:31] Speaker C: I do that so much.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: But this is, this is, this is awesome. Because this. I have so many questions.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I got it. I got a million.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: You have. First, Paul, do you think this is the trend that we're going to, hiring AI avatars like hey Gen, to do a lot of the heavy lifting, producing content?
Yeah, we saw a little bit of that in 2025. It's only going to get bigger. Right now we have cloudbot that is having conversations on their own social media channels, figuring things out wild, automating things for us.
Where. Where do you think this will end up at the end of 2026?
[00:28:08] Speaker C: Let's say we're going to see more of it. We're going to see AI video content all over the Internet. We already do. Most people just.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: We already.
[00:28:14] Speaker C: We see. I. I can't log into Facebook without seeing people comment on cute baby pictures and the baby has six fingers. And I'm like, that's AI. What are we talking about? Like, every single day, there's shares of these videos that people think are real and they're not real.
We are going to just see more of it. The cat's out of the bag. Let's just accept it. We need to teach people about how to understand what is AI, which is also very hard. But I think we need to, like, teach people how to know if something is AI or not, which is hard, really, really hard to do. However, I think for brands, for businesses, now is an amazing time to capture more attention, more eyeballs, get more reach and tap into the fact that if you are trying to win right now, you have one of the most unfair advantages if you use AI to do it. I don't care if you work for someone, if you are self employed, everybody in the world who has wi fi should be tapping in to this stuff to do more, faster, more efficiently. And if you are trying to be a capitalist, if you're not, then cool, just be, have fun.
That's cool too. But if you're in the game and you're like, I'm trying to make money, there's never been a better time. And I think, Paul, to your point, it's not ideal because people can't see it.
But there's gonna be a lot of fake AI videos, there's gonna be a lot of tutorials that are created by an AI that's not a real human. We're going to see a lot of people.
It's like Peter Parker's Uncle Ben. With great power comes great responsibility.
Like marketers, I believe we have, we don't have like a Hippocratic oath in the marketing world. I wish we did. I wish we did because there's gonna be some sketchy stuff done. There's gonna be a lot of stuff done.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: Yeah. How do you, how do you think? I was curious exactly that, like, because I, like, where does the. It's almost like there's a spectrum between like content creation and spam.
[00:30:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: And I'm curious like, how you think about that. Right. And, and the thing I want to bring up is that I've been reading a lot of these posts recently where people have these, like, there's, there's like almost like a genre of this thing where they, they don't tell you what they're marketing. They just talk about like, I generated 9 billion impressions by like generating all of this, like Python scripts that are creating automated videos and everything. Like, see this all the, all the time. Right. And so particularly people that are like, you know, older than me or people who are not in marketing, they read that stuff and like this just sounds like garbage. Like, this is like spam. Like they're creating just thousands of like videos on the fly. Like, they don't get it.
[00:31:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: At all. So I'm just curious like, what you think about, like the spectrum, right. Of like, you need to create content, but then there's also people that are just like flooding these streams with all kinds of tons, tons of stuff, let alone stuff that's just totally fake.
[00:31:16] Speaker C: Right?
[00:31:16] Speaker A: Like you just.
[00:31:17] Speaker C: Like it is fake.
[00:31:18] Speaker A: Like it's bad.
[00:31:18] Speaker C: I think it's a.
I think there's two things going on. Three things going on. One thing that's going on is that there's a lot of people pretending that they can create 900,000 videos in 20 minutes that are good and they're putting it out there to the world with these cool frameworks that connect N8N to this, to that, to this, to that, to this, to that. And, and they are telling you that they made $9 million in the last quarter when in reality they're going to make money off of them selling the framework that they created that didn't actually achieve any of those goals. And it's a great FOMO activity for them to generate leads. I think that's one thing that's going on. On the flip side, I think there is a scaled down version of this that is taking place where people are flooding the Internet with AI driven videos and, and some of them are complete slob. They're mediocre, they're trash, they're not good, they're getting a couple views, no one's engaging with it. But some people understand what people want. They understand the psychology of humans. They might have worked for some of the biggest brands in the world over the years and they know the nuances and they know the game of E commerce and they're selling teas, they're creating tons of UGC content with AIs and, and they are actually making bank, they're making a lot of money, they're doing really, really well on the back of it.
That is not really any different in terms of like the way in which the Internet existed than five years ago, except now it's at a bigger scale. So there's more mediocre, there's more bad content being created by bad marketers, but there's more good content being created by good marketers too. Is it synthetic people? Yes. Is that an ethical question? Yes. Do we have to like figure that out? Yes. But the amount of good to bad is still proportionate to what it was, except like you just see more of it because there's more good and there's more bad. Now the third thing that I think is happening in this lane is is that everyone is kind of uncertain how they should approach it and there's some brand threat fear that we all have. Like, even for myself, I think to myself I've got enough online content where, with ease, I could have a bunch of deepfakes running all the time of me talking about whatever is trending in SaaS and B2B in the SEO and Reddit, based off of a Claude script that is trained on my voice, my tone, my style, that automatically sends that over to hey, Gen creates the deepfake. Maybe I have a rotation of five different videos of me in a different sweater and I just talk. I have images above my head that rotate from screenshots that the AI can grab for me from the headlines of articles and just push them out there.
But do I want that? I think that's the question.
I don't know. Maybe. Maybe.
Would you guys do it? Are you guys doing it? I'd be curious. Like, I don't know. I'll run the experiment. I'll try something. I've done a few, but I haven't, like, pretended that they're not me.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So one thing I'd bring up is Clulee. Right. I think that's a really interesting case study in a SaaS company.
Yeah. They went just full on in, like, let's just get as many impressions as possible and used every kind of trick in a book. And I have, like, mixed feelings about it. I was even thinking about it last night in the context of, like, I think comes down to what kind of brand you're trying to build.
[00:35:01] Speaker C: Mmm.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: And so Paul and I have talked with this, and that's why. That's why I think this. This, for me is really important. Like, like, and then they. They had this brand that was cheat on everything. Is this crazy, like, edgy tool. Some people really upset about it. Some people thought was cool.
And I already look at this very, like, anthropo. Anthropologically, like, doesn't matter what I think about it. Like, that's what they were.
[00:35:22] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: And then they kind of pivoted to more legit products. It was a huge mistake. I think if they went down this.
We're gonna create all this content. We're gonna kind of spam people, we're gonna trick people. They should have found a product that aligned with that, right? Like crypto or a gambling app or something that. That's just more consumer driven and people are more willing to accept. Like, let's call it edgy marketing.
[00:35:43] Speaker C: Right.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: So I think some of this comes down to, like, how you want to be represented in the world. Like, I think of Banquet and created a bunch of fake content, and it was just doing all the stuff you Described like, I'd be like, I don't know if I want to put my. My money there. Right.
[00:35:55] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:56] Speaker A: But if it was some kind of, like, goofy gambling app where I could bet on everything, like, seems completely appropriate to me. So that's my kind of one thought about this.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: But then the counterpoint we mentioned Ramp, or if Ramp does something like this, it would be considered cool, wouldn't it?
You know?
[00:36:16] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:17] Speaker B: They're doing so much cool things with Office. It's not fake, but their latest ad with Kevin from the Office, it's obviously AI generated.
It looks cool.
[00:36:30] Speaker C: Is it AI generated?
[00:36:32] Speaker B: AI generated or cgi? It's definitely.
[00:36:35] Speaker C: That's cool. I don't know. I. I have to check it out. But if it is, I didn't actually
[00:36:39] Speaker A: know it was AI generated either. Yeah.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: So if the problem with two weeks
[00:36:46] Speaker C: away from Super Bowl. Let's see how many of those are going to be AI generated ads. Like, there's. I made a prediction, like, three years ago. I was way too early. I was like, someone's going to run a Super bowl ad with AI. No one did.
It was like, okay, that sucked.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: But now maybe now the Coke Christmas ad. Right. That was all.
[00:37:07] Speaker C: Yeah, that was one. That was all AI generated. And I don't think people care. Like, that's the other thing. I don't think too many. I think creative care a lot.
I think creatives care a lot, but I don't think the average person cares. If they look at it and they're like, that was created with AI. No. First of all, they're not even going there. They're not going to know that it's created with AI. So they don't have the ability to react negatively to something because they're like, cool. That was a cool story.
Yeah. That person looked like they were real. Oh, it's a deep fake of Gregory.
They don't know that it's a deep fake. They won't care. They care. Yeah.
[00:37:49] Speaker B: It doesn't matter.
[00:37:50] Speaker C: If they get the value, they won't care.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: I think his point is really important.
Who was I talking with? So I. I think, like, let's call it synthetic content, the Internet. I think for the most part, the average person doesn't care.
[00:38:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: They desperately want people to like, like and click and comment on their social media content. And if that's AI doing it, I think they'll love it. For the most part.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:38:12] Speaker A: For like. For like the average person, there's a group of people, like, you know, who are like, insiders, like, Us or something and we're trying to do something very different. But yeah, I'm with you that the average person like the average person actually totally fine with it.
[00:38:24] Speaker C: It's one thing is they do care if it's a fake person giving a recommendation.
So I think they would care if it's a fake person saying oh I just lost £20 taking this, drinking this tea and then they realize that that person drinking the tea is fake.
That would I think blow up in a brand space if you are saying oh I just, I was just able to get my 4 year old to finally sleep and the reason why I was able to do that was by using this cream.
Who if that's AI, I'm not running that risk. Those are things that I think are like really?
[00:39:10] Speaker A: I think there's going to be a phase where there'll be a lot of AI influencers and people get to the point where they just accept it. That's what I, that's going to actually I think it'll take a couple 12 years.
[00:39:21] Speaker C: I agree.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: I think people just accept it like oh, it's an AI influencer and it's recommending cream and true. I that's what I actually think will happen. I don't I personally it's not what I want to have happen or the kind of way I would buy a product.
[00:39:33] Speaker C: I won't follow them but I think you're right.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: I, I that's what I think I've seen already. There's a, the AI influencers are all over. Right.
[00:39:40] Speaker B: So what's the purpose of the AI influencer if they're not doing that?
[00:39:44] Speaker C: I Entertainment I think you know like what's, yeah, I think like this is one other thing that we all kind of everyone's different in terms of this understanding of like cultural interests but like I can't wrap my heads around kids watching other people play video games. I don't get it. Why would you want to consume someone else playing a game when you can get the game and play the game? The fun is in the game.
This is kind of the same but
[00:40:14] Speaker A: that's like a massive category, right? Yeah and I think massive be like
[00:40:20] Speaker C: similar like I get at the highest level. Oh if you can kind of get it. But yeah, yeah but when it comes to this AI influencer stuff I think it's going to be similar. I think some people are just going to love the idea of a parasocial relationship with something and they can probably convince themselves that it's real.
Like you can like right now there's tons of this in dating apps. Like, there's AI.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:46] Speaker C: Subscriptions. You can have a partner who's AI, who people are chatting with. And in their mind, I don't know what's going on, but they're building a relationship with an AI. So if that's what people are able to do with their, like, deepest, most intimate relationships, there's no question they'd be.
[00:41:04] Speaker B: No question.
[00:41:05] Speaker C: Follow.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: Exactly. If this AI says, hey, let's go on a cruise, here's the link to book a cruise.
[00:41:11] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:41:12] Speaker B: People will do it.
[00:41:13] Speaker C: People will do it.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I agree.
All right, let's, let's, let's change gears here. I think we've talked about this a lot. So, so let's talk about, like, what do you think is the most overrated thing in marketing? Platform trend.
And then, of course, like, I'd love to hear what you think is underrated, but. So what do you think? Like, everyone's focusing on, but you don't really think it's going to have a lot of impact or value.
[00:41:39] Speaker C: This one might get me in trouble, so.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: Oh, no.
[00:41:43] Speaker C: I was one of the top writers on this site called Quora for a very long time.
[00:41:48] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:41:49] Speaker C: And it recently started to get a little bit more love because it's showing up in the LLMs.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah.
[00:41:58] Speaker C: It's.
It's a dumpster fire. Like, I don't know what people see that I don't see, but I wouldn't touch it with a 29 and a half foot pole. Like, it is the last place that I'm willing to put my investment of time and energy right now. I don't see how.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: Or what. What do you not like about it?
[00:42:24] Speaker C: It's filled with spam to, like, a level that is uncontrollable.
And it's not just spam because, oh, it started to be cited in the LLMs. The place has been filled with spam for, like, eight years straight. Like, the reason why I stopped contributing was because it was filled with spam. And now it's just like, even more like, Reddit has great filters against spam. It tracks everything. It tracks ip, it tracks whether or not you use EM dashes. It's tracking how long it takes you to write a response. It's doing all it can. It's one of the most sophisticated spam fighting sites that I've seen.
Quora is, like a chaotic mess. So I think it's massively overrated and people are getting all excited about it. And hey, if you crack the code on it. Slide my DMs. I want to hear from you. I want to be told I'm wrong. Please show me the way.
Used to love the platform. Like loved it. I spoke to like some of the, some of my idols through that platform back in the day. So if folks can crack it, I want to hear from you.
I wrote a piece for Quora way back about lessons from Jay Z and it got featured in Forbes on the back of this thing that I wrote on Quora and I got like journalists writing about it and stuff. So I have a lot of love for Quora and what it was.
I just don't buy into the hype that I'm starting to see with people because it's starting to be cited in the LLMs.
In terms of underrated video.
I don't think people have an ad, have a clue how big of an impact YouTube and video is going to have on search, discovery markets, LLMs, everything.
You go to Google today and you type in best CRM for small businesses.
99% sure if you've opted into AI mode, you're going to see a YouTube video at the top of your SERP.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: Yeah, you do.
[00:44:21] Speaker C: And then you might see a Reddit thread, but at the top of your SERP you're going to see probably an AI summary and then a YouTube video.
It's. Why? Why would that happen?
Maybe because Google owns YouTube.
Maybe because if you watch a YouTube video, you might watch another YouTube video and videos have a higher cost per click than a PPC ad. And maybe they realize that advertisers are willing to invest more in a video ad than a little ad that says click here, Maybe follow the money. Follow the money. Video content is, it's so basic. But holy smokes, massively underestimated today is video.
And then when you take that one video asset and then you repurpose it for LinkedIn, for X, for Reddit, for Threads, for Quora. If you really want to get risky, like you can do it for all these different platforms and you start to increase your visibility, I think it's a no brainer. And then you embed your YouTube video into your own website. Where do you think Google's going to send somebody a blog post that has a YouTube video or a blog post that has another video player that shall not be named here embedded. Gotta send them to the YouTube video because it's YouTube. That's how they get paid.
So yeah, underrated YouTube, overrated Quora for LLMs.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: I remember when Quora came out. I was like really big into it too and then it kind of just fell off.
[00:45:48] Speaker C: Yeah. It was so good in the early days, like you literally could ask any question and get some of the brightest minds in business to answer you. Like you could ask questions from like some of the like the goats of the industry were on there answering questions. It was so good.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And then, and then I, I agree. I, I went on, have been on recently, but I, maybe I was maybe a year or two ago and I, I saw it all. It all just looks synthetic to me. Yeah. I couldn't figure out like what was being AI generated, what was a real post. It just was like, it just like the sea of like content.
[00:46:22] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:46:23] Speaker A: It was very odd experience.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: Like the UI is just all over the place. Yeah.
[00:46:27] Speaker A: It was it like summarizing everything in Quora. Like it was really weird.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:46:31] Speaker C: It's crazy.
[00:46:32] Speaker A: And now the YouTube point. I mean I heard recently that YouTube is now the number one most cited website in AI. Right.
[00:46:41] Speaker C: Yeah. I don't think in chat GPT because they're beefing, but everyone else. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: So I think you're, you're correct that like you know, and the beat and
[00:46:50] Speaker C: that won't go back. Right. Like folks, it can't go back. If you think about Google, Alphabet owns YouTube. Where do you think they want people to go? To their own properties, their own platforms. It makes sense. So I don't think you can, I don't think that's ever going to change. And now that the like AI today can transcribe a video, it can listen to a video, it can take visuals from a video and know like what's going on in this scene. All of those things just make video so much more impactful. Like pretty soon you're gonna be able to go to Google and be like, hey, if you guys uploaded this YouTube video, uploaded this video to YouTube, they. Someone could say there's a guy with a coogee sweater on with the Gregory and Paul show. Can you guys go find that? And it will find the episode. Like it'll look exactly the image and find it. That's crazy.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: And take the transcript, make it into expert quotations, into blog content. And now LLMs thinks that you got direct quotes from an expert talking about the subject.
[00:47:48] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:47:49] Speaker B: It gets indexed right away.
[00:47:50] Speaker C: It's true.
[00:47:51] Speaker A: Awesome. Let's keep going. Let's give you a few more questions because we've got like maybe 10 more minutes here.
[00:47:55] Speaker C: Let's do it.
[00:47:57] Speaker A: What marketing tactic do you think is no longer Effective. So maybe something you recommended, maybe something you didn't recommend, but something that was definitely popular that you think is like, look, it doesn't really work anymore.
[00:48:08] Speaker C: Ooh, good one.
I don't know if this is true, but I have a gut instinct that one of the things that I did probably like four years ago now doesn't still work are in depth breakdowns on X of companies and how they grew and how they scaled or at least in the thread format. Maybe it would work in the articles format. But back in the day, like I wrote a thread on Canva's backlink empire and I think we had like 2 million impressions on that thing where we broke down like canvas go to market with backlink outreach and we pulled screenshots from how they were doing outreach. All this stuff drove crazy Reach one of the like most pivotal pieces that we wrote and it took off.
And I have a feeling that that style and that format, like I used to call them, like these are million dollar pieces because we generated millions on the back of them. And I was like, folks, if you go create these, you will generate millions. I don't know today if they would because the tools and that type of approach is so easily accessible. And I think like the blueprint has now been out there and replicated by so many now that it's not as novel as it used to be. But I'm going to hold myself accountable to try and let's see what happens. I'll give it a go again and see what happens. I've only thought about that for the first time now. Like I haven't done them in a while, but I'll try it. Let's see if they still work. I don't think they will, but let's see.
[00:49:41] Speaker B: Do you. Is there any tactic that used to work, went out of fashion or it stopped working that you think is coming back?
[00:49:49] Speaker C: Coming back?
I think, I think just good old. So there was a moment on LinkedIn where it was all carousels. There was a moment on LinkedIn where it was all video.
But pre 2000 and I'd say 23, maybe 20, 22, if you just put up a good image with a framework, it went wild, then they died.
But I think they're back. I think if you put up frameworks, complex concepts and break it down on LinkedIn, people will love it. They'll eat it up. Highly, highly educational, in depth infographics, style content with just an image and then text, I think will work well again.
[00:50:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I've seen those on accent LinkedIn where, you know, you're creating really cool infographics. It's AI created, but you put a thought process behind it.
[00:50:52] Speaker C: Yeah, right.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: You're actually condensing information.
[00:50:54] Speaker C: Very cool. I think they're. I think they're back in a real way. And it's interesting. Like, when you're in the industry long enough, like, you start to see these cycles, like, infographics have had so many waves over the years.
So I think that's one that's really starting to take off.
[00:51:10] Speaker A: Nice. Awesome. Awesome answer. Okay, let's keep going.
What do you recommend to founders who want to get educated about marketing? What should they do? Where should they go? What should they read?
[00:51:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I'd say so there's a. I would join marketing communities. Like, that would be my biggest piece. Like, go find marketing communities and immerse yourself in there.
[00:51:31] Speaker A: And.
[00:51:32] Speaker C: And don't be afraid to ask silly questions. Like, there's communities like Exit 5, there's Super Path, there's Ton on X. Like, different X communities that you can get into. I'm sure there's discords where people are talking about things like clipping.
Go find a school. School with a K.
That seems legit. Like, you don't want to get stuck into one that's not legit. So try to find that.
If you are founder and you're running the marketing engine. I'd start to invest some time in reading Dave Gerhardt's book, Founder, Brand. I'd read that my own book, Create Once, Distribute Forever, Shameless, Plug. I'd read that there's a book called Traction. Not the EOS version, but the book by the guy who found DuckDuckGo that I would encourage folks to check out. Gets very tactical with different growth strategies.
Is there? I feel like I can visualize this book and I read it at some point. It's called the Growth Handbook. You guys know what I'm talking about. I think it was published by stripe. I think it's called the Growth Handbook.
I would read that book too. And that's pretty much it. Like, after you read a few things, folks just go ship. Just start building things, launching things. Let the market tell you when you're wrong and then go from there. But I would say that's a good start, starting point for folks. But if you are really into marketing, then I'd say go into the wonderful world of, like, Seth Godin. He was early for, like, influencing, like, my fundamentals and beliefs around marketing. Check out his stuff.
Yeah, that would be weird. Oh, copy hackers. So if you need to understand copy.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: Oh yeah.
[00:53:11] Speaker C: Her entire empire and world filled with massive, beautiful insights, especially around copy. She was one of the best in SaaS early on.
April Dunford for like positioning. If you're trying to understand how to position your brand, I would check out some of her stuff and then the last one that I would recommend would be if you're trying to like do marketing in a hacky way, like just get on X and start following people. Like, X will give you all kinds of clues around ways to win.
Yeah, that would be my reckless.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: Awesome. I'll clip this and make it the official Ross reading list. I love it.
[00:53:49] Speaker C: I love it.
[00:53:49] Speaker A: This is an awesome suggestion.
[00:53:50] Speaker C: Love it.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: Awesome suggestion. Okay, we got, we got one more, One more question. Oh, we're gonna.
[00:53:55] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:53:55] Speaker A: So what do you think is the number one worst mistake founders make when they try to market their SaaS startups?
[00:54:04] Speaker C: The number one worst mistake that marketers make when, when it comes to marketing their startup is over. Complicating the story of what they have built.
They think so deeply about this project and I get it. Like, I'm a founder, I've launched startups, been advisor for startups, built them, been involved with the sale of them, investor in them.
Folks, when you are immersed in something, you can't see reality as well as everyone else.
I think you need to invite other people into your bubble and ask them for guidance on, like, what don't I see when I'm describing what we do? Like what?
Ask your customers, why did you sign up? Like, what did you think you were going to get? And then use that language back to them. Don't like, go into a dark room and just like come up with all of these things on your own.
Be connected to the actual pain that customers are saying you solve and then articulate that back to them. Or if I can give you one cheat code, think about who you're trying to displace.
Go to Claude, go to ChatGPT, scrape all of the reviews for those products. You're going to look at the negative reviews in particular and you're going to look at the positive reviews. You're going to do an export. Back in the day, we used to do an engram analysis. You're going to just upload a dirty database of reviews and say, tell me what are the negatives about these products and list them. It's going to tell you all the bad things. Make sure your product doesn't have those. Then you're going to ask what are the best things? What are the good things. Then ask yourself if your product does those. Ask for it to identify which good thing came up the most in reviews. And then use that as your message in your website. Talk about the fact that what people will love about your product is the most powerful thing that they liked about those other companies. And then make sure on your landing page you're speaking to how you don't have any of those problems. So if this is a problem, we don't have it. Oh, this is a problem. We don't have it. And guess why they come to you? Because you don't have the problem that their current provider has. And that's how you win.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:56:17] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:56:18] Speaker A: I can't imagine a better way to finish off the show than that.
[00:56:21] Speaker C: Thank you guys for having me on. I appreciate it. I've always had a blast chatting with both of you. Appreciate what you guys do for the industry and the market at large and your clients. Your customers. Keep adding value to the Internet, Gus, and it's going to keep giving you value back. I appreciate you both.
[00:56:37] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:56:38] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
[00:56:39] Speaker B: Thank you.
