Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: All right, welcome back to the hello Gregory Paul Show.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Hey, everyone, I'm Paul.
[00:00:06] Speaker A: I'm Gregory. And we break down the latest in SaaS, startups, AI and whatever the Internet is debating.
We aim for smart takes, but, you know, sometimes we hit on a few dumb ones. Maybe even more than a few.
We like to always think we'll hit on a few scorchers. And of course, we love memes way too much.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Way too much. It's true. We're streaming live on X and LinkedIn every Friday at noon Pacific, that we post the video straight to YouTube. And someday, hopefully very, very soon, we'll get this onto all of the official podcast platforms.
I think the plan is we'll get to it this weekend and we'll be launching on Apple, Spotify and Google.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: Is that the plan this weekend?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the plan.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: I still want to make the intro with all the deep fakes talking about how awesome we are.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: We could, we could.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: That's my favorite. I said to my dad, the Elon one, I mean, it sounds so real where he's like, gregory and Paul are just two dudes making cool stuff. My dad saw that and I had to convince him that it was fake, like, because it was like, just. I'm like, for my dad, he's like, really got Elon to say that about.
Oh, my God. So we have a guest.
Nathan Binford is here.
He is AI enthusiast, marketer there.
Pioneer in the jungle, perhaps. Right. Where. Where are you based? In Mexico?
[00:01:41] Speaker C: Yeah, a little south of Cancun, out in the jungle.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: And he's someone that I know, I've actually chatted with for a while on X. I know Paul's had some conversations with Nathan as well. So welcome to the Gregory Paul Show.
[00:01:57] Speaker C: Thank you very much for having me.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: And so, you know, I thought to kick this off and have our conversation with you, Nathan, I'd pull up the X post that we both commented on that Paul and I commented on. Yeah, that kicked this off that. I read it and I said, let's get.
Let's get Nathan on the show. So let me pull that up real quick.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: I thought it was a really well written, quick expulse.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: And so, yeah. Okay, so Nathan, you wrote, most marketers today are platform experts and marketing novices.
Algorithm changes can cripple their strategy, but they'll miss opportunities left and right because edge cases aren't covered by their favorite industry influencers. And I just wrote, there's just so much to say about this Paul. Let's get this guy on the show.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:59] Speaker C: Awesome. Well, thank you for, for boosting the post first of all. Definitely appreciate that it's only got 100 views.
We can do better, I feel.
Yeah. So I come from like a more traditional marketing background. I became a digital marketer and so I've seen, you know, we've advertised on billboards and I've handed out flyers in parking lots, more or less legally. I've done all kinds of marketing that's like guerrilla all the way to, you know, platform specific hacks and tricks and stuff. And those are really cool. And sometimes if you have a focus in that area already and you're doing well already, those kind of hacks can, you know, 10x your outcome from that particular strategy, which is awesome when you can do that. But they can be verified by night. It's not like you can rely on those hacks to live up to their, you know, to maintain that steam over and over and over again for a really long period of time. And so you just kind of have to recycle them and either jump to a new platform and dive deep into it and get good on it, or you have to sell into whatever the platform is trying their, their monetization scheme, which Google is my favorite example of Google Ads just get more and more and more expensive and usually it's the PPC specialists. They're like, there's nothing that we can do. You just got to pay more to Google. Like that's true in a sense. Like if you want to be dominant in that space, that's true. But I like to have a variety of strategies more like the Swiss army knife style of marketing. That is just where I came from.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: I guess so. So I agree and I think that's what you're trying to say, that like people are way too focused on the channel of the platform. Right.
And that maybe was a criticism I heard going all the way back when digital kind of first emerged that like when I started in marketing and advertising and worked in like an old school agency, which was just as fun as you'd imagine, we were heavily focused on the message and that's what we thought was the most important piece. And channels were just a way to disseminate that message. And then digital emerged and like for perhaps good reasons, the platforms and the channels became the focus. Right. And people actually had a. I was talking with a buddy the other day about how like I remember the term content emerged and you know, that was not how people on the east coast and New York and if you're disciple of David Ogilvy, how you had thought about it, that's like blasphemy, right? It's just content.
That's cool how they saw it like just this pipe, it's there. We have all these pipes and we're, we love like fooling with them and fiddling with them and making them and optimizing them. Let's just throw some content in there. And I think that that is why we are where we're at today, right? Where people are perhaps too knowledgeable on the channel and not as knowledgeable on the, on the marketing.
[00:05:44] Speaker C: I think there's a little bit of incentive to that. I mean, certainly from the platforms, whatever, like they boost you, they give you that, that first hit for free and then it slowly degrades over time or whatever. But also from, from above because you get the ROI effect. I mean, when they get a taste of that sweet direct response, you know, I pay a dollar, I get eight of them back. It's really hard to talk them out of that one to eight strategy to go for like fluffy brand awareness kind of stuff. And there. It's so much harder to attribute any real numerical value in a spreadsheet somewhere to exactly what branding strategy that you've employed that actually worked compared to Google, which will lie to you with perfectly ordered details. Right. It gives you lots of completely crap information that you would, you know, perhaps not want to listen to. So that's the thing is like if, if there was something in the brand world that fluffed us up as good as the Google Ads platform or meta or whatever does, you, you. It's like when Elon talks about the, the X improvements over the last six months. The six months or whatever.
It always looks amazing, right? Same with his Grok books. You're like, oh, that is incredible. And you usually like, that's not my personal experience with it. And I think there's a little bit of we'll go with hype involved in all those things and definitely in the back end of Google Ads. Plus just like the labyrinthian ways that these platforms represent their data and then indoctrinate you by getting you to speak about their data the way that they speak about their data. Instead of it being like, how much revenue did I make and what was my cost per acquisition? These are less tangible things in the platform and it kind of separates people so that from, from that idea and then they just become metrics chasers. Right? And that's what you do need to do to be very good at one of those platforms is be able to speak the language and think about those metrics, but how those metrics line up with the real world metrics is where the boardroom and the, you know, the specialists never end up aligning.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh my God.
It's interesting when you really dive in to the data and then for me, like, it all becomes alchemy. So, and a lot of this is because, like, I remember when a lot of these things emerged and you could compare systems accurately or you could compare systems and see how inaccurate they were.
Now most people's experience is like using something like Google Analytics and it never even occurred to them, but it wasn't accurate. So they use that as like their source of truth. And everything else that doesn't jive with that, they just would tell you that it's wrong. But the reality is that's not what's going on.
And I only know this because, like, when we had like multiple data streams from multiple platforms, we tore our hair out one weekend trying to get everything to match. And we uncovered all kinds of very nuanced and complex discrepancies. Like some servers are set on Pacific time, some servers are set on GMT, then the data in that 24 hour period won't line up. Right. Things like that. To the point where I was like, oh my God, dude, this is like an impossible problem. Like, when I discovered the server thing, I did this by emailing different people at different platforms and it was very complicated. And I discovered that we gave up. I remember I came back to the team and I was like, someone at Apple just told me that they actually operate on west coast time because we had assumed that everything was on gmt, which is pretty common. And after that we gave up. We're like, oh my God, we don't even know what time the servers are set. So when it says 12 o' clock in the sheet that they send us, like, what time is that actually? Right.
[00:09:23] Speaker C: That's crazy.
[00:09:24] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Fascinating.
What do you mean by like, algorithm changes can cripple their strategy and they're missing things left to right that aren't. Aren't covered by their favorite industry influencers.
[00:09:40] Speaker C: Yeah. So I think it's like a forest for the trees kind of.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:44] Speaker C: So I hate to pick on Google Ads, but it's just, it's such a beast right now. It's a, it's an easy target, it's a wide target to hit. But right now you could go meta or Google on this one, the duopoly, but they're changing their platform so that there's less that the average media buyer marketer can do. It's less levers to. To push or ever get listened to anyway. You can do some stuff, but whether or not it actually ends up happening, your campaign is, you know, less specific than we would tell our clients.
And by robbing us of that, it gives all the control to the most biased player in the game. Right.
So what comes next? If you can control the product, the supply, and there is an infinite amount of demand, like, inevitably they're going to raise the price on it. And that's what we're seeing right now. I mean, my clicks, my cost per click this month is just through the roof.
So as they do that, and then they can also control search and drive more people to have to see ads and so forth, they really control all of the pieces on the board. And it puts you at a disadvantage. And if you've been in the marketing game for any amount of time, you'll notice that, like, the best wins are where everyone is not. And there was a time at which, I mean, Paul, I think you're probably living in this margin right now. Like, your enthusiasm with Reddit is well timed, right? That's the. That's the wild west of digital marketing right now is happening on Reddit. But there was a point in which it was like Facebook posts were organically huge. And that's so hard to conceive of at this point. Like, there's no reason to even do it, doesn't do anything. But there was a time that was it. We had MySpace pages that made money. You know, there's. There's a time and a day for everything. There's a golden day for each of these things. And then once the gold rush is over, everybody is still buying shovels, but that's not where the gold is anymore. And so that's mostly what I mean about missing these opportunities.
It's hard to say because you have to be experimenting with things that might not work or with platforms that aren't fully developed and working in those margins. But if you have an obsession, a deep obsession with the platform in order to become a specialist, and hats off to the people.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: Oh, did we lose him?
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Yeah, he froze up. I guess his jungle Internet connection is on the. On the fritz.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Look at it in a second.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: We'll get them back.
I guess there is no software that solves this, huh? We have the same issue on the X base, but at least on that on here, we can always reboot, I guess. I don't know.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll give them a second. But this is a super interesting topic. I think it's something that we've talked about multiple times. As in, yeah, once, once people realize a platform is, is good, they will just rush in and that channel will close.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: There you are.
[00:12:33] Speaker B: Welcome back.
[00:12:34] Speaker C: Sorry.
Talking about living in the fringes. This is, this is what it's like to be in the jungle sometimes. Love Starlink.
Imperfect science.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: So far you're using Starlink.
[00:12:44] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Cool. Okay.
[00:12:46] Speaker C: My entire way of life at this point, without it, I am way out of touch. But the long and short of what I was saying is you find the best wins in the fringes and in the experimental kinds of stuff. And you can't be deep in everything the way that you can be deep in one platform. So you just kind of have to pick. Are you a generalist specialist? And then when the sun is no longer shining on your field, like what do you do as somebody who is committed or potentially over committed to one channel?
[00:13:14] Speaker A: What are you telling people with like, you know, cost going up. Right. I mean that's where like everybody is saying this. And I don't even think it's unique to like Google SEM.
[00:13:25] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: Like it's happening everywhere. Right. Like just there's, there's less emails that get through. Right. Because spam filters.
There's more competition in organic. Right. Like on Twitter and on X and they have like essentially instituted system where you kind of need to boost your post if you want to guarantee any reach. You can still get things to go viral and it still works, but it's not like, like it was. Right. So in theory the costs are just going up everywhere.
What are you telling your customers? What do you think about that?
[00:13:56] Speaker C: Well, so I don't necessarily get in too deep with the customers. I have a lot of lead gen customers. And so one way or the other, it's my job to drive leads. And so most of this is my problem. Right.
They don't care too much about all this stuff. But when I'm talking to fellow marketers and we're analyzing the state of the industry, like what I would say is everything is in a state of constant change in this industry and there is not necessarily any guarantee that this is where organic comes from in the future. You know, if we go all the way back to the beginning of the Internet, it was like the free web. It's not the free web anymore. You gotta pay to be anywhere, anywhere on online. And so the fact that the costs are increasing, I'm like, well show me a cost Somewhere that's not increasing. Right. Marketing is not cheap.
I think it's shockingly expensive to everybody who runs a business. And it's a super old conversation for all of us in the marketing world to have to justify that. Like, yeah, it's supposed to be like 5 or 10% of your revenue that you, you, as your revenue increases, you spend more on marketing, and then those costs go up over time. It makes sense to us, but it's also when you get the bill, like, you know, building my own company, I can appreciate the cost of marketing being quite high, but that kind of is what it is. You know, you have to raise your prices to offset your marketing cost.
And that doesn't always happen, like, neatly. And this being a great year to talk about this, I have some clients that are deeply affected by the tariffs. And we went from talking about, you know, like a 5 to $10,000 a month kind of a deal to a 1 to $3,000 a month kind of deal pretty quickly when the news came out that they weren't gonna, that China wasn't just going to capitulate or whatever. So, yes, that's the thing. That's the thing that happens in the world. Sorry, guys. That's mostly what I say is if you want to keep making that sweet, sweet roi, we're going to have to bump it occasionally, and it's usually not to me.
I don't necessarily bump my prices when Google Ads, cost goes up because then it would just be a lot at one time.
Marketers have to be very clever about how they find their margin. And I think we're moving into a world where you're going to have to do more outcome rather than.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Effect.
[00:16:00] Speaker C: Right. A lot of us work especially in the brand category. I mean, as important as branding is, a lot of us have a hard time with attribution and proving the revenue impact of our work. And that I think will be unforgivingly worse as we move forward. Just like everything else in marketing is getting harder.
It's not for the meek.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:20] Speaker C: This is not the right time to be getting.
If you wanted it to be easy, it's the other way around.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's gonna be a big challenge for, like, CMOs and marketing teams going forward. Right. Their costs are just gonna go up. And I don't think that, like, the executive management, like, or the customers, like, I don't think they fully understand, like, what's gonna. What's happening. Right.
And I don't know what the answer is other than like it's just going to cost more. And that's why I was like so vocal about promoting Andrew Chen's article that everything in marketing sucks because like he, he had, he had a version that many years ago too that said a similar thing. And like over the longest period of time you could just see that the, the Internet created this big like low cost arbitrage opportunity and we basically have arbitraged it. It's gone, right? And it's like, it's almost like it's typical of markets, you know, which, so I still at a high level think it's, you have to see it from like a market perspective that like there's demand out there for marketing and, and like across the entire universe and then people buy it and the people who are the strongest in terms of like the most efficient, have the most money, have the best team, like they win in that type of environment, right, where there's just like a fixed pie and if you're able to like grab as much of the pie because you could just pay more, you win. And that's how like marketing was, I guess, like in the 80s with like television commercials, like when that was the primary driver and televisions were finite, right? Like you could count exactly how many minutes there was in total to buy in TV ads, right? So, and so if someone came in and said, and people did this, they came in calculated, like, I have X dollars, I could buy all of this, right? And if you bought all the ads, you forced everyone out, right? And that's where the logic comes from. And just one really nerdy tidbit I'll throw in here.
I worked for an agency called Cara, which is like a French conglomerate. They're one of the largest media agencies in the world. That company basically invented this model in the turn of the century. And that was exactly the innovation of the founder. He figured out that he could buy all the ad space and all the newspapers around France and he, he just could resell it. That was the entire advertising business emerged. People were buying directly and he went, what if I buy all of these? And he literally bought all of them. He owned all advertising media in France. They had to create like special laws and stuff to like to stop the monopolization of it, right? So it's a tried and true methodology that goes back for a long time. And we go through these like up and down cycles where the media and whatever it requires to do outreach gets expensive.
Some innovation happens which can be a lot of different Things. Right. And then the costs go down and then people figure it out and it goes back up. And now we're at this cost going up curve, I think right now.
[00:19:21] Speaker C: So. Yeah, yeah. Along with a lot of market consolidation too. I mean, I think those two things go hand in hand. Is Google is in this example, buying up all of the attention.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Correct. They own. They have a monopoly on attention for the most part, at least right now.
[00:19:36] Speaker C: Yeah. And. And therefore a monopoly level decision making capability over who gets to be a business and who doesn't, at least in terms of within that sphere. And so this is. I'm a bit of a pirate.
I'm always broke up a little bit there for the next.
And I said I'm a bit of a pirate when it comes to marketing. I like to find the way around and mostly because I think I've worked with low budget clients for a long time and he just really had to be kind of clever in order to make it work. Some of them being very scrappy and worth the effort, other ones, you know, not so much. But learning how to climb up from the bottom is something that I don't think all marketers necessarily get because you work for a big brand or a big agency that has big brands working with it and you get to sort of throw your weight around at the problem. And that's fun. It's really fun when you get to do that because your campaigns look a little bit more Coca Cola, a little bit less guy on the side of the banner, whatever. But if you want to survive the coming time and you don't work for a big agency, I think that scrappy is the right way to look at it because there's a, there's just a limit at which the smaller players in the market that will work with, especially independents, are not going to have the budget to continue to pay Google to just, you know, put them over the barrel and they're going to be willing to do something different, you know, to try some new things. And somewhere in that it's going to be a bloodbath. But whatever the, the winners out of that gladiatorial combat that's coming are going to be, you know, the people who figured out to how to push the buttons on Reddit or how to, I mean right now cold outreach actually is doing some amazing things, but it's the stuff that people are kind of not paying attention to. And that's what I'm reevaluating right now. In the absence of Google killing it for my customers, it's Working, but I'm, I'm like, all right, well what am I teeing up like the dj, I'm like, got the next record? What am I. What are we about to have to switch over to? Because it's, you can tell the time has run out for the mid to small market in some of these.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: What are things you're looking into?
You mentioned Reddit, you mentioned cold outreach, email, right?
[00:21:42] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I'm practicing with that. I've got a client who's doing some experimentation with that. I think take like nibbling in different platforms in ways that you can get really, really cheap impressions is still going to be a viable strategy. So dumping a load of money at displays crazy pants right now, but retargeting campaigns or custom audience campaigns, if it's part of a multichannel strategy, that's actually amazing. And you could almost pick any channel as long as it's got some warm bodies for you to show impressions to and spread it out enough of them. So like, if you have a visual thing, even Pinterest would be very interesting to me. But repurposing wise, anywhere I can take a video. So like meta is an example. You can make a video that works on meta that will also work as content. What they say to do now is like once you get it working as content, spend it as a video and just, you know, add some promotional layering to it. And so there's some stuff like that to play with. But I think what I'm. And I'm mostly in the B2B space rather than B2C, so I think this applies more directly there, but maybe not exclusively having zero and first party data as your starting point. I think it's a bring your own data to the party kind of thing, where if you're paying for someone else's data, those prices are going to be extraordinarily high. But you can bring data onto those platforms and it cuts it by 75% or 90% or something in your overall cost, then you can throw a lot more impressions without really needing any kind of special targeting because you already know that every one of them is landing on a viable candidate. So if you, for example, start with an email list, even an old dead one, I just did a project where I scraped all of the domains in the emails in their old dead list and then used that inside of seamless AI to extract new campaigns for all of the companies. And so we took 2000 company, 2000 email list and turned it into 1400 companies that were now scraping for new contacts. Well, we get those contacts, social hash data as well, so we can retarget them on Facebook.
You can loop that into a strategy where you're driving people back to landing pages, which there's a tool called Bullseye which can show you like person level data.
And then you might have that dump into a CRM where you can do more highly personalized and targeted outreach. So rather than replacing a platform, what I'm thinking about is more trying to make myself and my clients obviously more resilient against the sort of platform mentality where it's not about finding a new daddy. It's more like how do I tap into, how do I get just the best value out of this and that at just the right time so that they're kind of irrelevant if I needed to move them to wherever the eyes are. It's just a matter of sliding budget and addressing.
[00:24:20] Speaker A: So you're using an old email list to like identify the companies and then taking the company list and then trying to find fresh contacts.
That's smart.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: That's very sad.
[00:24:31] Speaker C: And then getting data in so that you can then go find them.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Sift data was on the show that Amram Patel, he has a de anonymization tool. There are a couple of products out there that you can de anonymize for landing pages in your website. There is a host of tools out there that if you get good at using them, they can be effective. But it takes a. Like we had a guy at one place where we call him the plumber. He was able to like always just link up all these little weird tools. And there's constantly ways to hack all this stuff together, like your idea. Right. Take an old list, find the companies, find that. That's a great. That's a great example of like finding like a nice new way to refresh something that worked in the past.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Yeah. And the technical capacity, I think is sort of not necessarily underappreciated. Certainly I would say underpaid. It's underpaid in the marketing area that I say that with a certain amount of bias. But there's a lot of. We'll go with lip service and favor paid toward the idea of brand level, big idea marketing. And a little bit less, we'll say at the board level or whatever, appreciation for all the nerdy stuff that it takes to actually make the campaign work.
But behind every good campaign, there's somebody who's up on Friday night making sure that the Yahoo pipes still connect to the whatever, you know, whatever it is we're doing. Today and there will always be a space for those people in the sphere of marketing somewhere. What we end up, and I think this is kind of my jibe at the influencers is there is often a very surface level understanding of the technicals behind some of these hacks and strategies and so forth. And they're a lot less copy paste. I have a really hard time coming up with my own content because I'm like, I can't really sell anything that I do up until like, oh, you could just do this. Like, well, there's actually a lot of stuff that I did specific for this example that I would do a little bit differently next time.
And that nuance I think is lost and therefore the effectiveness of the strategy doesn't carry over the way that it's supposed to. If you, you know, reply like, and you know, tag awesome in your post, he shares your, your secret strategy with you. Right. Well, that secret strategy has to be like adapted to your exact situation. And that's, you know, your, your mileage will vary greatly. So if you don't already know how to do those things, in which case, you know, what are you actually gaining from giving up your, your engagement to that engagement mate? Right. I found, I tried a lot of these things and I'm like, they don't really have any secrets. It's. It's like elbow grease. You get a halfway there with your idea and then you're like, how do I make this thing work? And therein lie the, the technicals that I'm referring to. Right. You still. That's a thing that will always be there. Even if we're not doing as much direct response marketing. It's really a question of how people like me. I'll just, I'll go there. How we adapt now that we're clearly moving out of a direct response world and we're moving into this attribution list kind of space where it's much fuzzier and people are just going to judge you based on how much more money they made.
That's cool. How do I express what I do as a way to influence that is on the marketer?
[00:27:38] Speaker A: I realized one day that like, I didn't write a lot about or share about how I do things. I kind of feel like it's like explaining how the sausage gets made.
And so I tend to avoid. I'll kind of mention it here and there, but I don't like to go into too much detail about like how I de. Anonymize this and then flip that and then did this and, and like, because some of it is like secret sauce that took me like a lot of effort to figure out. And then, and, and like, if too many people do it, then it won't work anymore. Right. So there is value in, in like figuring those types of things out. And the minute someone hears that, like, oh, this is what everyone's doing, they're all like, rush to it and then it won't work anymore. Right.
And it changes so fast. So the things that I was doing like a year ago that like, I don't do anymore, a really easy example would be like, X. So we all met on X and we still love X and spend time on there. But like, it doesn't work. Like, it's basically useless from like a business perspective. I mean, because I have a network and I have followers and I've been on there a while. Like, I kind of drop in and say hi to my friends, but like, I'm not scaling my business anymore on there.
And like, it's, it's just not this what it. What it once was. Right. I think there's tons of examples like that.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. What do you.
[00:29:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I think more now a networking tool like x is what LinkedIn used to be. It's funny because we're kind of flipping it around. LinkedIn is where the cool videos go and like your Rolodex or something.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it made, it made LinkedIn more tolerable, I'll say that much. I go in there, I'm like, oh, this is actually kind of clever and funny and like, people understand that I like to make a lot of jokes and stuff. And it's actually, I guess a bunch of people that typically don't know me on X, they found me on LinkedIn and they're like, I could see, they're like, wow, this is so refreshing because, like, I just do the same thing. I was like, making all these jokes, like, posting funny content and they were like, they might. This the guy I'm doing, I'm speaking to speaking engagement this weekend.
And he was like, laughing at all this. I guess he never followed me before. He was like, this sounds really funny. He's like sending all these messages and stuff. I'm like, it's interesting. Like, so it's made, it's made LinkedIn much better. Wherein before I felt like it was so humorless to the point where, like, if you did point a joke, people either didn't get it or they were like, offended that you posted a joke.
The offended by the jokes is the Worst is the worst part.
Well, awesome. Should we jump into some of our news items? Paul, what do you think?
[00:30:15] Speaker B: I love it. I love this conversation by the way.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: I know this is really interesting, but we did pull. We always talk about the nerdiest news of the week and we have to do our Reddit thread of the week.
But we have you here. So Nathan, you can kind of chime in and give your perspective on some of these things.
And I think this first one we're going to do the backdoor acquisition one, right?
[00:30:42] Speaker B: Correct. Yeah.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: So this is super interesting. I'm sure Nathan, you'll have a perspective on it. I pulled this thread actually from ChatGPT, which did a good job at summarizing. Oh you have the cognition. Yeah, ChatGPT did a good job of summarizing all the, what I'm going to call the backdoor acquisitions that's been happening in the AI space. So instead of just acquiring the companies like they used to, now there's this new technique where they seem to always hire the CEO and then they either pull the entire team or they hand pick a group of the team to go and work at the company who is the backdoor acquirer like a Microsoft or Google. And then they put in a licensing deal with the existing startup to license the technology. And I believe they're all non exclusive so theoretically people can still license the technology from that company.
And so Paul and I were chatting about this yesterday and I was like, he's like oh there's just like Windsurf and Inflection AI. But I looked it up, there's actually a ton of examples. So I was at Inflection AI on Monday to speak to the co founder of a startup that I worked at. He had a new startup that got acquired cause the entire team was hired away from Inflection and they still have money and they're still operating and they want to continue to support their product. And so they needed a team. And so he's now working there, heading up an AI team working on engineering platform. So Inflection is one example. Then you have character AI which Google did the same thing. They licensed the technology, onboarded its researchers and the co founders put them into the DeepMind team. There was this other deal with Adept AI and Amazon actually hadn't heard of this one but Adepts. So Amazon built a new AI team by hiring most of adept staff and paying 330 million for a tech license.
Startup remains afloat in a reduced form and then scale AI which everybody on X heard about he's got wonderful hair. Founder Alexander. I love it. So Meta took a 49 stake in Scale AI for 15 billion. They brought him on to leave the super intelligence lab.
And then we had Windsurf Cognition, which was like, originally going to be acquired by OpenAI. You'll fell through. And so I don't even know who acquired this.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Did.
[00:33:15] Speaker A: Did. Did Google end up acquiring it?
[00:33:18] Speaker B: No, there were. There were many players.
What happened was OpenAI was initially interested, that deal fell through.
[00:33:26] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: And then I believe Google jumped in, acquired just the original Windserf CEO.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Just the CEO, Right.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:33:35] Speaker A: Oh, my God, I need a flowchart for this one.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: Correct. And then they left the shell of the company to be run by rest of the employees.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:47] Speaker B: All right, so this Cognition acquisition is the shell. Well, what's left of the company without the original Windserf CEO. Ver.
[00:33:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a wild one. And so it's interesting, in this thread that I did with ChatGPT, I even asked, like. Like, why are they doing this? Right? And it's like there's multiple reasons. So obviously there's some regulatory scrutiny under the Biden administration in particular. They were not kind to tech.
[00:34:18] Speaker C: Right.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Acquisitions. A lot of surprising ones got blocked, ones that. That seem to not make any sense, at least. At least to me or people in the industry. Like, why were they blocking all these things?
The other answer that Chad P gave, which is interesting, is that it's faster. I thought that was like, might actually be quite important. Like these AI companies.
Yeah, what is it? Like, they weren't even.
That's what it was. There was a Gartner magic square that came out, like, I don't know, six months ago, and like, basically none of these companies are even on it. Like, yeah, it's quite funny, right? The leaders in the space emerged and so quickly that analysts can't even keep up. And so if it's moving that fast, like, it might just be faster to be like, dude, you come work here, bring the team, let's go, and we'll just license it rather than worry about going through this acquisition.
So. Fascinating turn events. Nathan, what do you think about all this?
[00:35:14] Speaker C: I think. I think the speed thing is probably the right take. I mean, it just looks like a bloodbath.
Everything in AI is just for. For keeps. It's for all the marbles. And so I don't think anybody's playing by the rules. They're making new rules, they're moving fast and breaking things.
And it seems like a little bit more celebrity than most other, let's say, tech evolutions or whatever. Like, it's not like Zuckerberg was put on a pedestal until long after Facebook had been a thing.
And maybe Jack. Jack had personality, he had some kind of aura around him, but he sort of cultivated that. He built a platform so that he could cultivate that. But generally speaking, you know, we haven't had these, like, random researchers, some nerds who have been offered, first of all, hundreds of millions of dollars or whatever. And then secondly, like this, like, front of the stage, on the world stage kind of attention that's just new and unprecedented and it's not built to last. I think everybody, like, in any new environment, you have some extreme edge cases that show where the mean should maybe be. So maybe we shouldn't be doing things that are like this. There's going to be some cautionary tales that come out of this. If you remember, like, when all of the football players were getting in trouble at the same time because, like, the sports, they, like, uncapped what you could pay people. So just got like higher and higher and higher and a hundred million dollars to someone who's good at, like, sliding into first base or something, and then. And then they're like, they're not the most responsible person with it. Like, well, that's a shocker. I mean, they didn't exactly get that kind of like, formal holistic training. They just got shot up to this level that no human has achieved before. So I. I have that kind of sense about what's happening now. It's like, well, we're just doing crazy stuff and the chips will fall and we'll see what we learn from it. I doubt this is a sustainable kind of strategy as we move forward. But what I think your point makes, well, is that speed is the key to everything with AI. The hype cycle of AI has to come before the actual model release, which maybe comes, maybe doesn't come, but you have to be first to market with your bs, if not your product.
And I think we're seeing that kind of in every part of society. And everything we go very fast and loose. Like, the whole time you were talking about all these different companies, I'm like, this is what the cluey guy is praying for. He is praying that they don't actually have to roll out any kind of a product and they should just hype it so much that he gets his own acquisition. He's like, peace. Have fun running whatever this company is supposed to do into the ground in, like, six months.
But the volume of money that's available to do it with is staggering. So it's like there's some momentum behind it and that doesn't seem to be slowing. So there is more crazy train on the horizon than there is behind us. I think we're only seeing the beginning of the insanity of the bubble that's ahead. But there will never be a bigger bubble in human history than the AI bubble.
We keep bubbling bigger and bigger each time we do these things. And so I think the hype of AI is enormous. The bubble of AI is going to be enormous. Yeah.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: You said something I think really important that maybe doesn't get talked about.
There actually is more money than ever and that's a big driver and there's more savings than ever. So Bernanke used to talk about this when he was the Federal Reserve president during the ZIRP era. And his explanation for it was that there's more. Say there's a savings glut, there's more money than ever that people are saving that's available for investment and that's driving down the cost of capital.
You know, I don't know if that explained zero interest rates, but I do think that he was correct that there is a phenomenon where there's too much money seeking return. And we didn't have that 100 years ago. We've never had that until this era. And I even think that like probably the dot com boom is where there's a huge amount of like let's value was created and was, I think correctly measured and, and you know, like that would be the right term that like it's, it's not fake. Like the innovations that we've had over the past 20 years absolutely deserve the total compensation received overall. Like the Internet. AI These things are incredible. They're unlike anything that ever happened. And that did they generate that kind of like wealth and value for the world? Absolutely right. So that money is real. Like if you believe in capitalism, how it works, like a free market and you can like grow the pie, which I believe and I think is really important to understand, which I'm spending time to explain it. Growing the pie. They created all this money and like it's not evilly distributed. Right. It's distributed in a few places, which is, that's just how it works. But it's all out there sloshing around trying to find opportunities because that's what people do in capitalism. They take capital to make more of it. And so now I've got this phenomenon where there's just like this Rush of like money that just goes from like bubble to bubble to bubble. And I think it's inevitable that we'll just continue to see that they'll all be bigger, they'll all be more of them, they'll be in different areas because there's just tons of investment. Everyone's like looking for the next big opportunity. And so once it's kind of like we're talking about marketing, it's the same concept, like someone uncovers something and everyone rushes to it and like they over invest in the space. Right. And even this piece has been studied for a long time. Like areas that receive all this over investment over time though, those areas generally perform pretty well. Like people are correct that that's a great area to go and the over investment is valuable and does create a bunch of value for people.
So yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon. And like look, I think like if you're like Zuckerberg or Larry at Oracle, the rewards here are pretty substantial and there's gonna be one winner. I think ultimately like that's what Larry believes. I think he's correct. Like the person who does crack the nut in terms of like some kind of super intelligence, they have the potential to like really own the market. Right. And so that's why I've got everyone chasing this. Like they don't want to be left out. They've got a business to protect, they're really worried about it. And so I know it's exciting. I got my popcorn out.
[00:41:38] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. I mean you definitely got that there's, this is the time when things happen. We are, we're not living through boring times.
Very, very interesting times, for better or for worse or whatever. I hope that capitalism continues to save us from ourselves in terms of not allowing there to be only one solution. I mean as we see with Google and you know, any of the, any of the one player kind of scenarios, it gets pretty dark pretty quickly when there's only one way to be. But then right out of that there's a new fringe. Like I think there's always going to be this back look.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: I think, excellent point and I think, I think, I would say the merge of Chat GPT proves the market works. So ChatGPT is a real competitor to Google. They're the only one out there that's actually competitor. Like if you look at the scale and that hadn't existed for a while but it eventually emerged. Right. And now you got, now we have real competition. And so I guess like to be optimistic too in terms of marketing. They're going to run ads on ChatGPT. I assume that they'll find a way to like, make the optimization of your content easier. Like, I started getting traffic from ChatGPT the other day and I actually found that I'm listed in there. I was like, that's kind of cool. Right, I saw that. So, yeah. And so I think it's obviously to their advantage to provide tools for markers to use that platform. Right. So I think like, the, the market always has a way of like correcting itself when people are frustrated with, let's call it a monopolist.
Eventually there's enough frustration that, that it gets solved.
[00:43:09] Speaker C: Absolutely. There is that little period of time in between. And so for the last couple of years, I've been saying this sort of in my little internal circles that I don't think that we're looking at the market that we'll have in a couple of years for marketing, that there's. We're experiencing something of a culling. Right. The people who thought that it was easy and jumped in and did the tricks and the hacks, and then when they don't work, they don't really know how to go out and find the next thing. Well, there was going to become a lot less marketers as we make this transition. And this has happened a number of times. I've sat through, I was, I was part of, I got my start really in the dot com boom. And then there was a point where like, making websites did not make money anymore. And I was like, I'm jump off this train and go do something else. And in this space, there's no way to sit still. I discovered over the last year that everything that I've ever known and done is completely useless in about six months from now. So I gotta, like, get going for the world that's coming. And if you are not the kind of person that finds that exciting, then this is not the role for you for sure.
[00:44:05] Speaker A: Oh, my God. I have my own flashbacks. And we're like, 1990. 99. Yeah, I remember like a web agency could get paid a quarter million dollars for like six templates and like.
Yeah, in $1999.
[00:44:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:44:24] Speaker C: Right? It doesn't usually work like that. No, I mean, it's this stuff. It just becomes. Everything in technology becomes more commoditized over time and everything in marketing is now technology. So that's just the way it is.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: Yeah. All right, next up, we've got our Reddit segment.
And I love to. I love the title of this segment. You know how we doom scroll Reddit so you don't have to. And rather than.
[00:44:50] Speaker C: Yeah, you like that?
[00:44:51] Speaker A: And rather. Yeah, because like, sometimes you go on there and you're like, dude, it's too much.
[00:44:55] Speaker C: No, thank you for your service.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: What I want to chat about was like actually a series of DMS I got from somebody rather than a thread. And I will. I will obfuscate and protect the names of the innocent so that we can have a nice conversation about it publicly. So there was a guy who posted something and we were kind of chatting over dms and he sent me a. He sent me a message that was like, I'd love your help. I'm working on this thing. I need some marketing support. I'm like, great, like, I'd love to help you. Like, tell me what you're working on. And so he sent his thing and it was like business to consumer, which I typically don't do. And I, and I gen. And I generally recommend too, if you're a startup, like, you should not, not focus on business, the consumer. In fact, I was joking at event I did this week where put up your hands if you're independently wealthy and have a net worth of over $5 million, put up your hands. If you have more than a million followers on Instagram, okay, anyone with their hand up, you can start a B2C company.
Everybody else, I don't recommend it, right? So it's pretty funny. He had this thing and he wanted to dislike kind of like a sports matching thing, which is funny because, like, I actually advised some kids that had the same concept or a similar idea a couple years ago. The idea is that. And I see these sports matching apps a lot. So there's a lot of sports that you need someone else to play.
So tennis or squash or like all the racket sports, basically, right? Baseball, any team, soccer, right? So there's people that were like, oh, I'll create this app that tries to like, find people who want to play this sport with me. I think Djokovic even invested in a tennis matching app, right? This guy had some like, sports matching happened. I was like, I was like, bro, I've like actually advised people on this. Like, this is impossible. Like, this category is. Is like, is super tough. And so he got really defensive and was like, hey, like Tinder and all these B2C companies have made it and blah, blah. And so I just thought it was a funny anecdote. Like, and, and I double down on like that. If you're not independently wealthy, don't have a million followers on social media platform that you should not work on a B2C idea. They're really, really difficult. They take enormous amounts of investment. And I've just seen so many people go through just pain and heartache trying to make it work. And the last thing I'll just add is that for the most part, you can find a way to turn this idea into a B2B idea. So example I have and I use all the time is I met a woman who had these like compostable plates that were made out of like palm leaves or something. They're very cool. They're like these kind of brown plates and stuff. And rather than go B2C, she just like sells them kind of door to door to cafes and coffee shops, hotel groups and like. So it's B2B, but it's like at a really small scale where someone can like manage it. It takes a lot of sales just to get out there and sell like, you know, 50 plates at a time.
[00:47:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:47:49] Speaker A: To people. But people love, love the product and. So, Nathan, what's your perspective on B2C? B2B startups? Did I give the guy the right advice or.
[00:47:59] Speaker C: So I've done both in terms of places that I've worked and so forth. But the.
I think B2B gets not being as exciting or fun when B2C is annoying in some cases because they're to hold the attention of the general public is very difficult to hold the attention of people who have the thing that you are trying to accomplish. If you're solving problems for them, then it's. They're going to be a lot more interested in what you're saying and selling. And so you don't do as much attention to make it work. So I actually find it to be much more fulfilling. I'm. I'm helping somebody make money. I find it to be equally as fulfilling as a marketer to be in the B2B space. So with, with that in mind, I think you're absolutely right. When you're doing something in B2C, you typically have to align with something that's much louder than you. Like you got to go to Shark Tank or you got to get like the Kardashians to hold your product in front of a camera or something. But you have to do this whole world of stuff that I just find super gross and uninteresting. And so I don't have any personal interest in doing anything in B2B or B2C space. I can make a whole lot more money in B2B doing something, any, a whole lot more things that have tangible returns. And then I can talk in, in a manner that makes sense to me. Instead of Riz or Ora, I can talk about like talk about your, your revenue impact and how you're going to feed your kids and stuff.
So I'm driven by a system of value that doesn't place a lot on consumerism anyway. So I'm a super biased person to answer this, but B2C makes just no sense to me in the first place. I don't like to buy stuff. I like to solve problems and build things. And if you're looking for an opportunity in marketing, and I would say especially as a smaller player, as an independent player, as a freelancer or something like that, working with B2C companies at the level you're going to be able to get in with them means they're going to be cash strapped. And if they're huge, they're going to work with a much larger entity than you. Whereas with a B kind of company you can be dealing with tens of millions of dollars and still have like 20 people in the company and they have, you know, a back of the warehouse kind of office and they're not very presumptuous and like they don't know and they need your help. There's a lot of opportunity in that space. So I think just as a marketer, I think there is more opportunity in B2B than in B2C. It's cool to work for Coca Cola and to, you know, have marketing meetings about polar bears and stuff, but I think the real meat on the bone is on the other side of the fence.
[00:50:29] Speaker A: I think his point about like Tinder is an interesting one that doesn't get discussed enough that there was a window of opportunity where a bunch of consumer Internet companies got created.
Facebook obviously, Instagram, Tinder is one.
But when I think about what's happening like the last five years, I can't come up with any examples. The only one I can think of that's like a at scale consumer company that's new is Tick Tock and Tick Tock.
I mean, I don't know, they seem to have a nation state backing them. It's not even like they've got billionaires. They literally have like the one of the wealthiest countries in the world supporting it. So that's what it takes I think now to, to break through. Unless there's an example. Some come up with like a major like at scale consumer product that was a success. Like I Can only think of like, like you mentioned things that have celebrity tie ins or there's some, there's some angle that I don't think matches to my definition of startup. It's like two dudes on the Internet having a chat like we are. Right? Yeah. That just like limited resources, coding things in their basements, working out their garage.
I struggle to come up with the one that, that was a huge consumer.
[00:51:45] Speaker C: Hit last five years. I can't think of any right now. There will be some again. But I think at this particular phase that we're in and maybe, maybe slightly moving out of it has been so much more what you see in front of you. So go with like TikTok shops and stuff like that. Those kind of products can be spun up over nothing. And a lot of them are either affiliate or like a small twist on something by a relatively small shop. And I mean they're making money like good for them. They're making money. It's a business, but it's not in the same sense. You mean like a startup that has some kind of like potential for growth over a decade or more? They're not gonna be around that long. And I think a lot of businesses that are spun up these days are not necessarily built to last.
The Internet isn't very kind to building a brand. You have to have, whether it's B2B or B2C, you have to have a lot of money to throw at it. I mean even in the like local SMB players kind of market space, say Dallas is where I have those players.
To be a small person and get enough attention to build a multi million dollar business. A few years ago is was easier than it is now. And it's not a lack of demand, but it's how much supply has moved in to occupy that space. So that's the same thing that we keep talking about is like once everybody flocks into it, it's not cool and unique and different. There was something cool and unique and different about Tinder. I mean horrifying in my mind but it was definitely unique and different. Right. There will never be another only fans. There will never be another one of a kind kind of thing like that. And so you have to move into a space and potentially now with AI a medium as well, like the next hot app is not going to be like a thing that you push buttons and play Candy Crush on your phone. It's going to be something that you talk to or it's going to be something you wear or whatever. Those things are being created now and they're going to be standout products in the next, you know, 5 to 10 years that develop into 20 year long kind of stories and narratives. But all the smaller players are better off implementing like there's nothing wrong with wrapping something around Chat GPT and making a million bucks this year and being gone next year. But it doesn't make for like a real startup or something like that. I mean, no, you gotta, you have to have the big guns in, in a world where everyone is trying to do that. You just, you have to.
[00:53:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I think you mentioned the one that, that only Fans is actually the.
They're not the biggest consumer, they're not Vulture, they're not venture backed. Yeah, it's definitely a successful consumer company. I would give them that.
Awesome.
[00:54:03] Speaker C: There's a strategy there, I suppose.
[00:54:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: Paul, do you want to do this OpenAI agent?
[00:54:10] Speaker B: Yeah, let me pull that up.
It's one of the biggest news I think this week in terms of marketing, AI marketing ideas.
Okay, so actually this ties up to earlier how we talked about Windsurf and A month later ChatGPT or OpenAI introduces ChatGPT agents, which from me looking at this, it's exactly the same as Windsurf. Right. It's basically LLM driven AI agents.
It is now.
You can now essentially connect ChatGPT to third party applications like your calendar, your Gmail, to whatever program they want to automate. I think this is super cool. It means that the agent war is heating up.
Instead of adopting the MCP servers, OpenAI is now implementing their own AI agent. And I think the rumor is that they are launching their own browser as well. That's a, that's big.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: Does it use its own protocol? Like it doesn't support mcp?
[00:55:23] Speaker B: I, I don't know. I think it's their proprietary only and it's not plugged into MCP at all. Not made.
[00:55:32] Speaker A: I mean if I was, then that's exactly what I would do. It totally makes sense. Right. Like they're the market leader for sure. And then if they build their own system, like they don't, they don't want or need to make it compatible with like an open source or open protocol perhaps is better.
[00:55:49] Speaker B: Correct. So like there's still room to be, to compete. MCP is not the winner, especially after this ChatGPT agent coming out. So I'll be very, very curious to see where it all goes.
[00:56:06] Speaker A: Have you tried this at all?
[00:56:07] Speaker B: I've not tried this yet.
[00:56:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I wanted to get. Because like Claude just announced the Ability to, like, integrate with tons of apps. Right. I was able to connect, like, my email, my calendar, a bunch of stuff. Stuff. And now you can connect all kinds of applications to it.
[00:56:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
Cloud's putting their bet behind the mcp.
[00:56:29] Speaker C: Right.
[00:56:29] Speaker A: The prologue.
[00:56:32] Speaker B: So whoever wants to connect into the cloud ecosystem, they could just build a MCP server.
But this ChatGPT thing, that seems like it's OpenAI rejecting MCP protocol.
[00:56:46] Speaker A: Wild. All right, should we do our meme of the week and try to wrap up here?
[00:56:50] Speaker B: Let's do.
[00:56:51] Speaker A: All right.
[00:56:54] Speaker B: It's. This week's meme is going to be kind of awesome.
Let me pull this up.
[00:57:04] Speaker A: Yeah, you can share it.
[00:57:08] Speaker B: Is it this one?
[00:57:09] Speaker A: Yeah, this is. This is the one. This is for sure. The.
[00:57:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:14] Speaker C: Play the video. Play the video.
[00:57:17] Speaker A: Oh, my God. Have you seen this, Nathan?
[00:57:20] Speaker C: I've seen the original. I'm not sure about the meme.
[00:57:26] Speaker A: Oh, well, there's a ton of memes around it, but, like, my wife discovered this last night. She's like, oh, my God, they're having an affair. And I was like, yeah, this is.
This one's almost too cringe for me.
[00:57:36] Speaker B: Like.
[00:57:37] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:57:37] Speaker A: And like, I kind of don't laugh.
[00:57:41] Speaker C: No. Mostly I'm just like, those jumbotron guys, man. They have it out for you. Everybody on the kiss cam is like, no regretful of it. Brutal.
[00:57:50] Speaker A: Paul's a fan.
[00:57:54] Speaker C: It's.
[00:57:54] Speaker B: Yeah. This is blowing up everywhere.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: Oh, my God. I know.
[00:57:57] Speaker C: It's everywhere for sure.
I've seen them where their. Their faces were cut out and they were put over like other people. They've got the whole, like, second and third generation memes of this already rolling strong. I think this will be around for a minute. We're gonna see this one pop up again in the future.
[00:58:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Hold on, Let me pull up somebody in my stream. Got a ton of views playing off of. Off of this.
[00:58:22] Speaker A: Oh, did they do that? Okay.
[00:58:24] Speaker B: I think this post got 17 million views.
[00:58:26] Speaker C: Yeah, that was a good.
[00:58:31] Speaker A: Actually, that was. That was my first inclination, was to do a meme just like this. Right? The hot mom had. We get so rich. I love this. I love this mom how to get so rich meme.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: This is hilarious.
So good. 17 million views. That's how you go viral, guys.
[00:58:46] Speaker C: Yeah, that's exactly how you go viral, actually.
[00:58:48] Speaker A: Brody. Yeah, he's funny. I talk to him all the time.
[00:58:51] Speaker B: So funny.
[00:58:52] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
Yeah, this one was.
[00:58:55] Speaker B: I, I.
[00:58:55] Speaker A: This one was a hard one. I was like, oh, it's just, like, I just feel bad for, like, you know, the kid, like just. It's disruptive, you know, it's just so disruptive. It's just like. It's a cringe, cringe moment.
[00:59:07] Speaker C: I keep looking at the face of the intern who is stuck on the Jumbotron too. Like, this is also her 15 minutes of fame. And like.
[00:59:15] Speaker A: Intern. There's a kid who's like all excited, like, oh my God.
[00:59:19] Speaker B: No, no, it's. It's their friend, right? You're talking about their friend. I.
[00:59:23] Speaker C: What I heard was this was another person from the same company.
[00:59:27] Speaker B: Like, oh, I see. As I know there's a friend here that's the friend. Friend or anger. We don't know who this is. But she's.
[00:59:37] Speaker A: Yeah, everyone knows that. She knew.
[00:59:39] Speaker C: Yeah, that's maybe even worse. Like that's you for life.
[00:59:46] Speaker B: Oh my God. That's. That's amazing.
Amazing.
[00:59:51] Speaker A: All right.
[00:59:53] Speaker C: That was like having a great time though. They know they're famous.
[00:59:57] Speaker B: 15 minute of fame.
[00:59:58] Speaker A: All right. I want to plug my events.
[01:00:00] Speaker B: Go for it.
[01:00:02] Speaker A: I'm doing so many speaking engagements.
I spoke at Climate Week this week, did my workshop on how to monetize your climate startup. Went super well.
I had a great time. It was a beautiful day. 90 degrees in Seattle. That never happens.
Couldn't had a better day. And then this weekend I'll be out in Bellevue. There. Right there. My coffee cup Saturday for Venture Saturday at Venture Mechanics. And I am on at 10:30.
So I'm doing my every marketing channel sucks and what founders can do about it.
[01:00:40] Speaker B: Love it.
[01:00:41] Speaker A: And then. Paul, let me share.
We're doing some other stuff. Oh, is this here? Let me do.
I know how to. I know how to introduce this one.
[01:00:52] Speaker B: There you go.
[01:00:54] Speaker A: So.
So my Seattle Tech week talk from zero to a million dollars in AR over is completely over subscribed. I've got 230 people now on the wait list. I think this thing's gonna hit like 500 people. It's going to be one of the most popular events at Seattle Tech Week, which is cool.
I had no idea. I just actually got myself a speaking engagement at the last minute. I was like, I want to do this and like threw this up there and lo and behold, people were excited about it.
So given the success with that.
Paul, I'm coming to see you.
[01:01:33] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:01:33] Speaker A: In Toronto. Right.
[01:01:35] Speaker B: It's amazing when.
[01:01:36] Speaker A: And so there we go for Elevate, which is a tech conference that happens in Toronto. Is it annually?
[01:01:45] Speaker B: Yes. Been running for the past few years.
Usually happens in October.
[01:01:52] Speaker A: So the idea is to take this talk on the road. I was doing my vibe your sass west coast tour. Now I think I'm doing the North America tour.
And I'll do this with Paul and we'll find a location in Toronto the night before Elevate starts. It looks like It's a Monday, October 6th. So, hey, if you're in the Toronto area, we'd love to meet you and sign up.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: Come join us.
[01:02:21] Speaker A: Events are back. Events and real. And that's. That's the marketing hack I think for 2025 is in person events. I think that's why so many people are signing up for these things. Everyone's just like, tired of working from home.
[01:02:31] Speaker B: Zoom calls, Zoom Calls and Zoom Workshops.
[01:02:36] Speaker A: Great. Nathan, do you have a good time?
[01:02:38] Speaker C: Yes, I did. It's a lot of fun. Thanks, guys.
[01:02:40] Speaker A: Yeah, what's fun, Paul? You're quiet.
[01:02:43] Speaker B: Thank you for coming on. No, I. I've been just. You guys be having such a good conversation and just good to listen, absorb.
[01:02:52] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, hey, thanks everyone for tuning in and we'll see you next week.
[01:02:56] Speaker B: Awesome. Viper.
