The Exchanges

Q What do you tell them to do? How do you solve that problem for them?

A The first thing is, is they need to understand what actually moves the needle from a business from a revenue standpoint. So you take all the marketing things that you guys are doing. Is it pay-per-click advertising? Is it SEO? Is it GEO like ranking on chat GPT? Is it social media marketing? Is your ads? Is it your emails? The list goes on and on. Once you can figure out what's actually driving revenue, Then you can figure out, alright, what out of that Arsenal that we're using to drive revenue isn't doing well. And what do we think we can improve upon the most? And you have to look at both what isn't doing well and what you think you can improve upon the most, because if something isn't doing well, like tick tock and I'm Boeing, I'm just using a hypothetical here and I'm selling airplanes. Well, no matter how good at tick tock marketing I get, I don't think tick tock is going to help me sell more hundred to two hundred million dollar airplanes, right?

AI assessment note: “The first thing is, is they need to understand what actually moves the needle”

Q But you start from scratch, writing out your post, and then they edit?

A I, okay, so the process goes is I write, I come up with a topic or a reader wrote email saying can you write on this topic. I'll write the post. After I write the post, someone goes, takes my screenshots that I did because most of my posts have screenshots. They'll add, they'll go to Fotolia, add in a generic image at the top, right? They'll go and format the content I wrote into WordPress. Then an editor goes in at the end and corrects it all because there's a lot of grammar and spelling errors even though I write in Word. And then the third blog post a week is an infographic. The infographic, I have someone who works for me. I pay him five or six grand a month. They do the research. Then they go find designers from Dribbble. We pay the designers. They create the infographic. I just add a quick intro paragraph and a conclusion, then the editor edits it. But the infographic post literally takes me 20 minutes to post. The blog post takes me around like four hours to write each one.

AI assessment note: “I'll write the post... Then an editor goes in at the end and corrects it”

Q Hey, ah, so, Noah asks a good question. Do you write your own content on Quick Sprout?

A So I do, I write, there's a caveat to it. Um, I publish three posts a week. Out of the three posts, two of them are blog posts, which I write myself. Uh, I do have an editor. I have terrible grammar and English, and without that, the post just, people used to always complain, like, most of my comments used to be, hey, you spelled this wrong, or you did this wrong, and then I also have someone who takes my post, because I write in Word. I can't write in WordPress. I write in Word, and I can take screenshots of images, and they'll go put it up and make it look pretty, right, and they'll format it, so I don't have to do that, because that was taking me around 30 to 45 minutes.

AI assessment note: “So I do, I write, there's a caveat to it.”

Q Oh, oh, ok, so they're actively trying to get revenue from it and not, and it's because they're getting into shiny object syndrome. What are they doing that's trying, but really not getting any revenue?

A Sure. So a lot of people are using it for content creation, which it just produces mediocre content. A lot of them use it for, uh, adjusting creatives for their advertising. But if you don't have strategy behind it, AI can create a thousand variations of a creative. But again, if there's no strategy behind it, it doesn't mean that the numbers are going to work for you from a ROI perspective, just because AI helped you create, you know, a thousand creatives, you have to give it direction and you have to tell it, What you're looking for. Or another example of this is most organizations SMB or large have data in different places. You have data on Facebook, you have data in Google analytics, you have data in Google data studios, you have data on your own servers, right? You have data in your own CRM or your CMS. Um, and the list just goes on and on, but the data is fragmented. So AI can help you gather the data, put it in one place and analyze it. But if you're not sure what to analyze, you don't tell it what you're looking for. You don't know what changes to make based on it. Then what happens? Nothing. And what was if the data is not even accurate, which is a bigger issue because they're pulling them from all different places and different sources. Facebook will kind of conversion differently than you may see on your end. So when you start sending it multiple data points, like he…

AI assessment note: “a lot of people are using it for content creation, which it just produces mediocre content”

Q asked me not to reveal. Okay. Get the contact information of the, of the people you're going after. Create an email that looks customized and actually has a broader understanding of how you've helped other businesses like them. And then you have this whole automation that includes voice, text, email, whatever it is that's involved. We're going to look at the whole thing. How effective is it for your business?

A It's, it's effective, but it doesn't drive the majority of revenue, but every little bit adds up. I don't want to tell people that they can just do one thing and it's going to change your business overnight. We did a lot of our revenue from large publicly traded enterprises through RFPs. You're not going to get those from sending these kinds of emails, but the point I'm getting at is people are looking for a silver bullet in business and in marketing. That's the wrong way to think about it. Every little bit adds up and then it starts compounding and that's what really grows a business. It's just doing and grinding a lot of things out, and over time it adds up, but I will tell you this, if you're going to use this strategy, make sure you talk to counsel. We have in-house counsel. There's different, uh, laws on what you can do in different countries, and the U.S. is a little bit different because it's a state by state, and everyone has their own rules, so you just got to make sure with your lawyers on what countries or, I mean, what countries or states you can send messages to, which ones you can't, and just follow all those so that way you don't get sued.

AI assessment note: “It's, it's effective, but it doesn't drive the majority of revenue”

Q And you just ask a chat, uh, and then get the, get the results, and then you also have a dashboard. How could he lean into this?

A Yeah, sure. So the biggest problem with that tool is it's a dashboard shows you all the data in one place, which is cool, but most businesses don't know what to do with it. So the solution of asking a chat questions is helpful because it hopes to uncover things that they can change or improve within their business. But most people don't know what to ask or what to do. So what you need to start doing is based on the data that they're plugging in, Come up with predefined prompts or questions people should ask to help them cover insights, and then tell them what to do with that data. So yes, you can still have it where they can ask whatever they want, but you should have some pre-configured prompts that you know they should ask based on the data sources they passed in, and even suggesting what they should do with that data based on the results that it's showing.

AI assessment note: “Come up with predefined prompts or questions people should ask to help them cover insights”

Q You do this internally. Salo from your team is about to show us how he does it, how you all do it at your company. Can you describe what it is that you're doing to get customers using this AI automation process that we're going to go through?

A Think about your ideal customers. Let's say it's home services. Cause we were talking about that. Imagine scraping yellow pages and their website. Cause sometimes the data is off getting all the home services companies, uh, gathering their email information and phone numbers, shooting them off that email with something that's value add. Um, let's say if we're pitching marketing, we can give them a whole content calendar, maybe even create some of the content with AI. It's not going to be the best or perfect, but it gets someone interested. And then saying, look at what we've done for other home services companies within your space. Love to talk to you. Let's get on the phone and schedule something.

AI assessment note: “scraping yellow pages and their website... gathering their email information and phone numbers”

Q Uh, you know what? I'm about to have Drew Houston on, of Dropbox. I'm curious what you'd want to learn from him about how he built up Dropbox.

A Sure. The number one thing I would like to learn from him is any results they've So, Dropbox has grown in many cases from the referral program, right? Tweet it out, get more storage space, etc. Is there something they've learned for the B to B market? Because a lot of theirs is consumers, right? Like people who don't own businesses. And the second thing I would like to know is, is there any specific A-B tests they've done in the past that have increased that referral percentage, right? Because if you look at Dropbox growth percentage from the referral program, it's much more superior percentage-wise than most referral programs. The B-to-B space is much more difficult because, right, if you do a tweet, there's a lot of consumers that will see it. But I'm curious, because I know they are trying to go after the business crowd as well, if they've figured out any tweaks to it or tests for the referral program that has helped with Attracting more businesses and not those consumers.

AI assessment note: “The number one thing I would like to learn from him is”

Q Okay, you gave me a search to put in, and so I'm putting it in right now on ChatGPT. It's best CRM for small business. The top result is HubSpot CRM. Did you lead HubSpot CRM to be that top result, or did you just know this?

A I didn't do anything, but when I was speaking at Inbound, the HubSpot event, I was with Kip. And Kip is the CMO of HubSpot. Um, he ended up, uh, talking about how roughly 13% of their signups come from Uh, these LLM platforms, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, et cetera. Okay. And I know what HubSpot's been doing, cause they've talked about it publicly. We've been doing similar stuff for our customers. We've been doing similar stuff for ourselves. And when there's articles around the web that break you down in a structured way, think of like a table format, breaking down the data between you Versus a competitor. And that article, I believe it's what Tech Radar, one of those websites.

AI assessment note: “I didn't do anything, but when I was speaking at Inbound”

Q go in an AI or business, and it's doing really well for them. On the other hand, to me as a customer, I can't ever imagine hiring someone to just look at the whole business for AI. Can we just pick a spot and, and focus? Why do you think these agencies are not picking a spot, and do you think it makes sense to build an agency like this?

A Uh, it makes sense because there's a lot of money to be made. Um, I wouldn't necessarily pick a spot and maybe we're saying the same thing, but I would verticalize. So if I was a company, I'd be like, we help your home services business. Uh, you know, adapt with AI, you know, meeting up with the architect next week, one of the most well-known architects globally. And you know, um, I know him for a few years now and he's like, Hey, can I pick your brain? My mother-in-law was watching TV and she accidentally clicked on something about AI and I heard your voice, so I watched it. And he's just like, I want to figure out how to get our architect company to be more, uh, go, you know, adapt with the future. And the point I'm getting at here is, There's a lot of organizations that just need help and you can generate revenue from helping any type of business leverage AI and cut costs. Cause a lot of people have just tons of employees and they're not, uh, technologically advanced. And what I mean by that is look how many corporations are still not on the cloud. It's actually a big number, right? We meet up with so many large corporations that are worth billions of dollars that still have divisions that aren't on the cloud and they need to eventually move them on the cloud. And we would all assume everyone's on the cloud, but not fully. And what we're seeing is there's good revenue opport…

AI assessment note: “it makes sense because there's a lot of money to be made.”

Q Okay, so my question for you is going to be, this post that ChatGPT is citing is on TechRadar. Would HubSpot go to other sites, not just their own blog, and have them write these types of reviews and comparisons so that ChatGPT has a third-party resource to draw on?

A So I can't speak for them, but in general, if you're doing marketing as a company, you'd want to do outreach and give me, if someone has an article on CRM, you would want them to include you and break down why you're better and give them the pros and cons and show them the ratings and reviews. That's one way to get cited more. Um, you would want to create your own articles. You can guest post and disclose that it is a guest post as well. Right. But those are some ways that you can end up encouraging Or having more sites talk about you, which then helps you keep in mind. These platforms also scour the social web. How good are they at really dissecting video is yet to be seen per LLM platform, but I would also have comparison videos breaking down you versus the competition because you know, like those SRT files or transcripts, a lot of it's done through AI and it's pretty accurate. You bet they can, uh, decipher a video and know exactly what it's about and show you that timeframe. Depending on the platform you're on, I've seen them when I ask a question, just pull up a video, but it starts at the time where it's talking about that versus showing me the whole thing, right? These are all examples of ways you can get your business more cited.

AI assessment note: “if you're doing marketing as a company, you'd want to do outreach”

Q but here's the thing that I'm getting at. When we were talking in private, you said, Andrew, the two things that really will get AI to not just be played with, but for companies to pay for it and use it and continue to use it is Save the money or make the money. And you said of the two, I would pick which one? Actually first, why those two?

A Ok, so, uh, let's go back actually a little bit. So, if you have an AI software, no matter if you help people save money or make money, you still need to do things like influencer marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, the list goes on and on. If you're not leveraging the normal marketing channels, it's hard to reach people. Now, when you go back to your software solution, or whatever product you created with AI that you're now selling to everyone, if you can't help people save money, Why should they pay you? If you can't help them make money, why should they pay you? Because what we see is, if you can't help with those two things, you can still get signups, but your churn tends to be higher. So if you look at the softwares, um, we use a really popular one. I don't know why I'm blanking on this name. Our engineers use it to help us code. It's the most popular one out there.

AI assessment note: “if you can't help people save money, Why should they pay you?”