The Wisdom Wall

“capital is basically a commodity at this point. So the only differentiation is going to be like you being, you know, a cult leader personality.”

“You should not be paying Anthropic. You should not be paying Chad CPT to do an API call. You should be paying them to make the software that uses CPU to do the API call. Why are you paying this tax on tokens every time that you're trying to do this marketing activity? That's ridiculous. Build the software that does the…”

“If you do what I just described, like you get impacts, like literally 24 hours later, right? Um, and it's way different than traditional SEO where it's like, oh, it's this very long buildup.”

“there's actually a newsletter play that I see a lot of people use for local newsletters. Uh, they go to a subreddit, uh, for that, that area. So like Toronto as an example, and they're like, here's 20 things you can do this weekend in Toronto. And then it's like, you want more like this? And then at the bottom of the…”

“A lot of the times you don't need it. It's just bloat. You can just have a very simple, like a very simple solution for these finite problems, right? It doesn't have to be this over complicated or over engineered thing.”

“So on the Facebook ad side, so for, for targeting on Facebook anymore, um, after Andromeda, you don't do interest-based targeting. Historically, how I would probably do this is I would actually go and I would target people who have a WordPress interest on Facebook ads. Um, now you don't need to do that. You just…”

“This is what this turns into is like your job now becomes like, I'm an agent jockey. You're taking your domain knowledge that you have, and you're basically like building this into code and like, I'm not technical. Right. Like I can set this up now. Like the models are smart enough now. We're like a semi-technical…”

“the only thing I've found with, like, Nano Banana is that I, I sometimes have trouble, like, getting it to stay on brand, and if I'm trying to just, like, figure out the messaging variations that I'm trying to go after, This can be a faster way to do that.”

“Like we'll see this all the time, especially with smaller creators that are like 10,000 to 50,000 subs, they don't know what their value is. And so if I reach out to a hundred, say I get 50 to respond, And then of those 50, 10 are going to underprice themselves so dramatically that, like, they're basically a marketing…”

“when they come back with a number, you can negotiate down. Like, I guarantee it. I would cut that in half and, like, work your way up from there.”

“Like if, if search, if organic search is working for you, paid search will work for you. I guarantee it. Most like nine out of 10 times, like very rarely, 99 out of a hundred times it will work. Very rarely does it not work. It's, it's a, it's a skill issue. It's not that you're actually like Like, it's not a channel…”

“Facebook has gotten so good at understanding the person that's most likely to sign up for this thing that you're trying to promote. All that matters is you make good creative now”

“the business composition or the biology of the business for an automation agency is just really hard. Like you have to be really good at getting like top of funnel leads. You have to be really good at sales. Cause it's like typically kind of higher ticket. So it's like you're, you're, you're, you're having to like go…”

“for high ticket stuff, like short form video is never going to sell a high ticket thing. I don't know why people even try. Like, that is the wrong thing to be doing. Like, if you're trying to sell something that's three to five, you know, five, 10 grand plus a month, there's zero percent chance you're going to sell…”

“So why this works is because long tail exact domains still actually work for banking on Google with even all the algorithm changes and updates.”

“if you're funded, you have a ton of money, you have a ton of time and you have a ton of resources. So you, when they ask that question, like, where should I be? It's like everywhere. You should be everywhere. That is why you raise money.”

“It costs so much money to do that. It is so hard. What's way easier is find an idea that people already have. That's common. You attach yourself to it and you cannibalize it and you're going to make it evolve into a new thing. You can always like, you can always morph it into something else, but it's, It's very hard to…”

“Like that's a really brilliant business model, but let's scale that up even further. Let's do that with five channels. Let's do that with 10 different YouTube channels. Same formula. I pick a category business. I take it. I pick a category content marketing. I pick a category email marketing, whatever that is. And all…”

“Reviews are way lower than people think. It's honestly shocking. Um, especially in, uh, like smaller geographies, it really, what's matters is like, is this an exact match for whatever this person is searching?”

“Look for things that are bigger than you that are happening. And then how do you attach yourself to them? It's the classic playbook. Like, especially when you're trying to bootstrap a thing or self-funded, uh, it's the, it's the, it's the only way to do it that I've seen at work. When you try to convince the world of…”

“And honestly, that's all these podcasts are turning into more and more is like, it's just a sales tool. It's just sales in disguise, right?”

“And then you go and you buy like the exact match domain name for that target keyword. You go, you build like. 30 links to it and you'll get it to rank page one. We've like done this already.”

“That you should, you should focus on the thing that you're really good at, and it's way, way more of a commodity to be a good operations person than it is to be somebody that can like take an idea from non-existent and like bend reality so that this thing now exists, right? So focus on that thing that you're good at…”

“And I think that this is like actually where AI is the most effective. It's like taking unstructured data and structuring it. That's when the magic happens, right? Like I don't care about generative AI from like nothing to something.”

“I think this is actually a better way to think about like funnels funnels. I think are broken because that's not actually how people like make purchasing decisions. They don't start here and then like work their way down. That's a very poor visualization. What's actually happening is like they're a comment and they're…”

“the way that we have found that you can stand out is you have to look for signals or triggers that basically show that people are hand raising, um, saying, Hey, I want, I want this thing. I have an interest in this thing, right? And a great way to do this is with these LinkedIn engagements. They're basically, when they…”

“In reality, it's like, there's a handful of outliers within any niche and everybody is engaging with those handful of outliers. If you just monitor those outliers, you're actually going to get, you know, 80% surface area coverage for that entire industry. You don't need more than that.”

“in reality though, gee, like what is a market, like what is a marketing agent? It's, it's code. It's maybe some thinking loop and it's a live data stream, right? That that is really how like this functions.”

“If you look at my Twitter, like posts as an example, or even my LinkedIn, it is the exact same thing. Remix every 90 days, like full stop. That is all that's happening. And that, when you get enough information, like a bigger enough corpus, you have, you basically understand what's already going to go viral. Like I, I…”

“So how you actually use the Facebook ads API Is you use the API only for rights, like only to publish content to the Facebook ads account or to turn off or to, um, uh, uh, basically like promote ads.”

“The problem that happens with this year, and again, I'm going to get into the weeds and talk through a lot of this, you know, in detail, just to share the issues that come up is you have to solve for entropy. So like, what is entropy? It's like, basically the agent gets stuck thinking in the same way. So how do you…”

“The, the, anybody can go and generate as many of these as they want, right? Like it's literally infinite, but identifying those winners, like you're talking about now becomes the challenge that you're going to face with all of this.”

“So like, for example, how I would run this is I would have a test campaign where I'm basically testing new creative constantly. I would have a cron job that's on a daily basis, basically going and turning off the low performers. And then the high performers, they get bumped up into their own ad sets with their own…”

“you're basically making your agent so that, or whatever it is your tooling is so that it fits into any harness. So whether you're working from cloud iOS or chat GPT desktop or cloud code on, you know, in your terminal or like cursor or, you know, even the UI it's unified across that. And people can basically take that…”

“this is best for like social app or sorry, uh, uh, like B to C applications. Right? So like mobile apps, um, this is best for, um, like products that have one killer feature that they're doing. Um, so think about like something like an incogni, right? Where it's like data brokers are selling your emails, right? Like…”

“it's a, it's a one out of 10 that a post has some virality, right? Like we, we know you play this game, like with YouTube, like, or in all of the other content that you do out of all, you know, out of all the content that I publish, one of them will, it will outperform. It'll be the outlier to the rest of them. And so…”

“Um, so you find the winners, pull those out, put ad spend behind them. They're going to, if they work organically, they're also going to work, uh, in a paid setting.”

“The management of the creators is a pain. So that's like one piece. So how people typically combat that is they go and they hire like whoever their best performer is, they make them a manager. Of all the other creators. So they're still having to do their videos per day, but they, they pay them more basically to manage…”

“I think the thing that I, you know, I think about with this is like, it has to be an impulse purchase decision that can happen on a mobile device. Right. So like this works for as well for like e-commerce products where it's like at a price point, that's like say, 29 dollars or something like that.”

“So the three video package, why we're asking for that is we've seen better results than just doing one video. When it's one video, it's like a flash in the pan to their audience. In contrast, when I do that three videos and they do like different like angles, it gets their audience to be like, oh, like this person…”

“One, we want to be able to track the ROI they're producing for us. And then two, it creates this lock in with the creator so that long-term they won't increase their prices on you because they're like, oh shit, I'm making 10 grand a month in affiliate commissions from this company.”

“And of those 10, what you'll find is two to three will actually be like The, uh, 80% of the revenue that's driven from all those people that you worked with.”

“don't hire somebody for this, find somebody that's already doing this and work with them because they've already figured out like the algorithm for that specific category. It is so much harder to train somebody to like understand an algorithm or how, you know, the YouTube algorithm functions rather than finding…”

“the only reason that you should be investing in it is if the product that you're building has a purchasing decision time horizon that's long where people do research to understand what types of products are like are available and like the best for their specific business use cases.”

“what we see is that there's a higher per, like conversion percentage of people that come from chat to the website when they sign up. And the reason for that is they've like gone through the whole buyer journey. Like they've educated themselves and gone through the whole buyer journey so that they're more buyer ready.”

“There's two customer types that I, the data I've seen that like we've seen like have success with this. One is local businesses that are service businesses. So something that you don't make a purchase of often. Um, so think like roofing, think like, um, uh, you know, anything that's like home related, like HVAC, when…”

“How do you actually win in that setting? You have to have surface area and brand mentions is really the specifics here. Surface area within that thousand pages that it's scraped, right? And it loves listicles. It loves like top 10 lists. And so you as a company basically have to get included within that. And the more…”

“if I just turn on ads straight to payment, I'm going to have, uh, uh, not enough conversion events for it to train into that payment action. And so I have to focus on the, the thing that's more up funnel and train it into that, because that is a leading indicator for this, like, you know, this more deeper funnel…”

“and this is really the game anymore, right? Is having more creative variations that you're testing on a faster cadence and then doing broad targeting to Facebook or to Twitter or TikTok ads, et cetera, because, um, like their algorithms are way better at finding what's going to get you the best ROAS.”

“What's going to be way more effective is like you go and you scrape a Reddit forum and you find this random quote, you know, about acne cream and like somebody describes it in this funny way or a different way. And like you extract that using Claude and you're like, oh my God, like that's the hook. Right. And then you…”

“And it's probably a more valuable agency if you're running the ads because you're closer to revenue, right? Like if you show that, hey, our ads that we make are getting five X ROAS versus the stuff that this, you know, somebody else is making, which is only getting three X, you're going to, you're going to have a way…”

“really hard to compete in this category on Google Pinterest, you can actually compete really effectively in it.”

“I think that there's an opportunity to go and basically Create, um, an agency like on top of this AI tooling, because it's easier than ever to like basically build out these dashboards. All you have to do is convert that, that raw data into information and into insights for them. And so I think how you, how I would…”

“everybody's been using building calculators, tools, generators as a way to create link magnet flywheels for, for their, their, their websites.”

“if it's a product that sells to more than 30% of the U S like just global targeting. And you're going to like, it's going to find it faster than you'll ever be able.”

“if you look at short form social right now, this is the game. Like I just got off a call with like a tick tock shop agency owner. And she's like, yeah, like literally all we're thinking about is volume. Like the best affiliates that we're working with, they're doing like, you know, 10 X videos that the, the lower…”

“you, like, you need to have a huge TAM, right? Total, like, you know, huge total addressable market that you can go after. That's the only way that consumer works because you have to make content that is going to be, like, broad enough that, like, a large enough part, like, subset of the population can, uh, basically…”

“What we found is like three to be kind of that sweet spot where it's like their audience starts to trust you enough because you've like talked about it enough. And then you do an affiliate commission with them.”

“that community is basically the inception for what products you should build for that audience. Right. Cause they're going to talk about their problems. They're literally paying you to tell you what product you should build them.”

“long form is winning right now. That's kind of unfiltered, kind of raw, et cetera.”

“why are iconic founders so impactful to brands? It's because people like have a hard time, like thinking about a brand, like in their minds, like in like, you know, think, think about Apple and you're like, okay, maybe the logo, maybe the letters, et cetera. But now think about Steve jobs and like, you can see his face…”

“I know with like a hundred K list, um, we can, you can build those lists in about 12 months, right? To get them to a 100,000 subs.”

“So that does two things. It's like that turns into a profit center for you. Cause you're going to get ads, you know, add dollars off of that. But simultaneously, you're going to also get inbound leads from that. Cause they're going to show people that are in that geography. Like if you lift that in the description,…”

“if you ever see a brand that people are repping, that the product is unrelated, like the clothing is unrelated to the brand, that's when you know that that company is absolutely like going to rip in whatever category it's in. When you, when you, you can't, you can't fabricate that.”

“once you get enough influencers talking about your product in this category, Then you'll start to see that up and coming influencers that are trying to build within that space will also review that product for you for free without paying them. All they're doing is trying to play, do the affiliate game of get that 30%…”

“YouTube is the top of funnel for service businesses. This is like going viral in the SEO community right now with like Julian Goldie and Jackie Chow... all of them are basically doing the same strategy where it's like daily videos talking about whatever, like, Basically it's just doing experiments in public... And…”

“once you get a fan and music, they don't churn, they come back to that back, that back catalog over and over until the day that they die. Right? So that catalog has an intrinsic value that lives on indefinitely, even past your own existence.”

“Like if you could get email subs for under a dollar a piece, like, so say it's a 20,000 person newsletter and like, it's an active newsletter. Like we'll say it's like open rates are averaging, we'll say 50 plus percent. And, uh, you know, CTRs are in the range of, let's say, you know, seven percent or 10%. Like if you…”

“A hundred percent for small tools. Call it what it is. Be as like specific as possible and like what you'll find. And again, it's just like, these are, these are my favorite businesses. Cause like there's no customer service. Like there's no like product scope increase. You have like very, it's, it's very seldom that…”

“And the reasoning behind this is you're, you're starting with what is the cheapest, most accurate, and then moving your way down into the more expensive, uh, uh, validation tools. Um, but from this, you can pull out basically from a list, like, you know, this is the way that you get to, uh, you know, an 80% fine rate,…”

“you basically can put a vision model over the outputs and be like, Hey, does this match brand style guides? So what I'm getting back from Google Nano banana, I can be, I can, you know, basically qualify the, like, is, is the text all readable? Um, you know, does the fonts that are being used actually on brand, et…”

“A lot of people, they will get trapped in like, um, like you'll see this where the ads do really well for the first like 14 days. And then suddenly they start getting all this cheap traffic from like the Philippines or India. And they're like, I don't even know how that's happening. We're not even bidding on it. This…”

“And the reason for this is because you want to do something that neighbors can physically see looks different on the structure next to them because you can use that as a selling, like a leverage point to go sell the whole neighborhood on that thing.”