The Death of Clicks? Rand Fishkin on Brand, AI & the Future of Marketing

Ran Fishkin, founder of Moz, founder of Spark Toro, legendary digital marketer. This is your second time on the podcast. Great to have you. Oh my gosh, Ran Rand Fishkin is here. This is crazy. Thanks for having me back, Edward. It's always my pleasure. Uh, I want to start with this question because you've been posting a lot about your book coming out and I think uh I think this is going to be an interesting question to open with. What is something that most SEOs still believe that stopped being true a couple years ago? Uh, great one. How about there's a long list. Links matter more than mentions. I don't think they do. I think mentions matter more than links. If you're still link building, I have great news. You can stop. Like, you don't have to do it's like it's like washing chicken. Like you don't have to do it, man. Just stop. That's huge. Well, have you have you seen data on this? You're deep in in in the data like all the time. So, I'm I'm curious. Yeah, I was hanging out with uh hanging out with like uh Mike King last week in New York and Mike and I were talking about it and you know, he mentioned, hey, just doesn't doesn't seem to matter much. I saw the was it Dr. Pete did some correlation data. Granted, I'll admit I am not hardcore into SEO. Someone who's way more hardcore into SEO probably knows it even more ins and outs, but friends, come on. You can see where this train is going. Like the railway only points one direction mentions. Yep. Mike is coming on the show in a in a few weeks. I'm going to ask him about that. That's really interesting. Um, actually, I made a I made some podcasts about how I don't think links matter as much as they used to. And I've also I think it's because less people are putting up niche blogs than before. More people are posting on YouTube, are posting on Instagram. Yeah, man. I look, I think the the future, tragically, unfortunately, horrifically, is big platforms that control our time and attention and feeds and lives, dominating more and more of what gets surfaced, what's popular, what people think about topics, what people think about products, what people think about brands. And so you have to be present in these places with a message that resonates and with content that gets seen, watched, listened to, read. You know, relying on people to click on a link and come to your website or Google to rank you and then people to click that link and come to your website is a losing game. It It's just, you know, it's a shrinking field. It's like it's like we're back in 2005 and you are putting all your time and energy into television, magazines, radio, billboards cuz you're like, "No, this thing still works." Yeah, it does. I'm not saying it doesn't work. Even today, that stuff still works. But did you completely ignore digital? Are you really going to ignore the big channel that's going to be 80% of people's time and attention? That's weird. Well, so I want to ask you if you were starting a a brand new company today and you had zero audience and you had zero reputation, what would your marketing look like or your first 90 days of marketing look like? What would be your plan? Yeah, the answer to this question is always it depends because I just, you know, I started two companies in the last two years, right? Uh Alert Mouse, what was that five months ago? and I'm a user. I get those I get those updates daily. Thank you for that. Yeah, they're great. They're great. I actually I think I I tried it for you and you're a particularly good use case because when you get mentioned it really surfaces the important ones. Um and then Snack Bar Studio, right? The video game studio. And those two companies, their marketing looks nothing alike, right? Like there's almost nothing I can do to help Snack Bar Studios marketing. I can talk about Alert Mouse on a podcast like this one and say, "Oh, it does all these great things and tracks your mentions, blah blah blah." Great. But if I tell you, hey, there's this great video game on Steam about, you know, foraging in 1960s Italy, that's that's not going to bring anybody to the game, right? You the marketing for it is completely different. So, with the answer of it depends, I will say this, the thing that always would hold true for me and I think is a general rule is I will always pick channels and tactics that do three things. one, they are serving people in the places they pay attention. So, if my audience is on Steam and Twitch and watching YouTube and maybe a little bit of Instagram and Tik Tok for the video game, you you bet your puppy I'm going to be in those places, right? And if it's, you know, alert mouse, it's going to be LinkedIn and podcasts and conferences and events and a little bit of YouTube and threads and some Reddit threads and like those places very very different. Second one, second one is I don't think it is worth your time and energy to do something where you have no personal passion and interest. I'll give you an example for Snack Bar Studio. One of the things we could do is start a Discord channel. like Discord channels are really big in the video game world. A lot of successful indies have done them. I don't I don't think we're going to do it because I don't have personal passion passion and interest there. I don't think we're gonna have the team bandwidth and time. There's no one really on the team to manage that. We'd have to make a full-time hire for it. It it just doesn't add up. The math doesn't add up. Even though the audience is there and and the attention could be there, probably not something we're going to do for the initial launch. But um what's a you know good example of this with Alert Mouse is like Tik Tok is probably a great place for me to be. Like I I know you put some of your stuff on there. You've had success there. Like it really works for you. I have no personal passion and interest in Tik Tok. I just can't I can't do it. It's not my vibe. It's not my scene. I want to let the kids have their dance videos over there. Like I'm out, you know? So So second one is personal passion and interest. And then the third one, the third one is you need something. I would need something where I can provide unique value that nobody else provides. What is something different that I'm doing in this place where my audience pays attention that's going to earn their attention that other people are not doing? You know, I um the SEO space is a great example of this where like everybody is trying to do the same sort of educational slashentertaining content and it is it's tough to stand out like super hard. There's got to be 10,000 people in your LinkedIn feed competing for your attention right now on exactly these same topics like will a ei o geo replace faq seo and it how do you how do you stand out in a place like that? Do you become a maniac and post every day? Yeah. Yeah. Maniac you are all over this unique value, unique style. I haven't seen someone like you in the in my LinkedIn feed. And so when you pop up, I pay attention. I'm like, "Oh, what's what's Edward talking about?" Granted, also helps that you had me on the pod, right? So like I was like, "Oh, I know who this person is. I have familiarity. So I see your face as I'm scrolling and I'm like, I should pay attention." Right. To your point, it's not easy. No, no, it's definitely not easy. But everybody can identify those three things in their market. everyone can identify those three. Yeah, this method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average Compact Keywords landing page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "We spent nearly 18,000 in the last year and a half on marketing and SEO through different agencies locally, and that did nothing. We decided to take the leap on the compact keywords course. We're now getting about 6 to eight calls per day on a good day, which is just unheard of." Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything and you're going to gain a six-figure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. I I something that actually uh really stuck out with me when you came on the first time. You I I asked you about um I forget the question about Moz, but you're like I wouldn't start MA again. You're like I don't like crowded spaces and I started funding uh a new project this year and um I you be you have and we're going to talk about this. you are. I I think um you're I think it's safe to say you're not as much of a fan of SEO as you used to be, but we we yeah, we started um a company where people don't want to vibe code their own SAS. So, they have no interest in using a tool like cursor or replet to make their own software that also has really bad SEO. And so we vibecoded our own SAS and we've just now we're going and dominating all of the SEO in this. And we we picked deliberately picked a space that was not crowded with savvy digital marketers. But the thing is SEO is one of the most difficult spaces to stand out in. I'm not sure Spark Toro is what's how would you describe the space of Spark Toro? Yeah, it's weird. it kind of stands alone. Like I don't know where else you can do audience research with an automated tool. We're almost in the space of competing with like surveys and interviews. I think that's the thing that most people do when they want to figure out, you know, where their audience hangs out and what they what kind of content is popular with them and demographics of that audience, behavioral data, or conceivably you could say we're sort of the low end of the market for clickstream data, right? Right. So like people who do big clickstream buys from a similar web or a datos or um gosh even a com score you know spark toro's audience research is sort of the you know 100 buck a ver a month version of that. Um and it's been weird. It's been weird to me that like Edward I do not understand why the space is so uncrowded. Seems like a good one to me but what do I know? What's it like doing marketing? I mean, you're such a savvy marketer, too. So, it's I mean, it must be a lot of fun to do marketing in a space that's not very crowded. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I And I love I love learning, too. Like, um, you know, the the indie video game space, a lot of people would describe it as crowded. Weirdly, I would not describe it as crowded. that there's a very crowded space just below the segment of funded indie games where we're talking about like, you know, a couple of guys poding in their basement and like building a game themselves. But when you get into the independent studios with, you know, a one to5 million budget, there's, you know, there's maybe 10 of those games come out a month, maybe 20. and a lot of them sell twice, three times, 10 times, 50 times the units they need to make their money back um and make a profit. So when when I looked at that space, I was like that that looks way better than people think it does and it's really biased by that that low low end of the market which a lot of SAS spaces are too, right? So this is I think this is one of the things that as you run businesses and own businesses and sort of working in them, you get savvy to that kind of thing in the same way that you know when I worked in SEO, I'm sure you have this too, Edward, right? Where you you look at the search results in Google and you're like, I know why that's there. I know why that's there. I know that's there. Wait a minute, that fourth one. I don't understand why that fourth one is there. Like I need to dig into that one. But every, you know, everything else you're like, yep, yep, I get it. I get it. I get it. and and you sort of it's almost like you're seeing behind the matrix, right? It's just it's all the all the green characters scrolling down the screen instead of the interface. And I think I think you de develop that eventually over time with picking businesses and picking spaces, too. Yeah, it's the it really is the most fun thing when there's really not very many savvy competitors. And and I looked at SEO in the video game space. Actually, I ranked one for best games to play for YouTube for like 10 years. So, basically, like you're a gaming and then I stopped updating the article because it wasn't relevant to SEO and not really relevant to digital marketing and I'm publishing a lot of stuff about SEO and digital marketing. So, it was bad for my topical authority. So, I just stopped up. Arguably, I probably should have taken the article down, but I don't know. I I like getting that traffic. It was it was very hard to to prune it. Um, but I was looking at SEO in the gaming space and it just there were a lot of keywords that were really open that were people where people I'll tell you um what you did with Moz the SER analysis tool with Moz I still think is one of the greatest greatest tools in SEO because it makes it very easy to see keywords without a lot of competitors because you see the onpage grader scores and the SERs and it when you see how many keywords other people are not targeting. You're like, "Oh my gosh, like all of these niches that I thought were competitive are not really competitive and this is crazy. I can go into any niche." And video games was one of those. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we l we did this analysis when we started Snack Bar. We were like, "Oh, cooking video games overperform. They overperform their sort of statistical average what you would expect. So, if you, you know, if you have this many wish lists, you expect this many conversions. if your game has, you know, this many positive reviews, you expect this many sales. And cooking games really overperformed. So, we um we took that one, we took narrative games, like we we picked a bunch of tags as a strategy at the top end and then went and built a game that fit many of those tags. It wasn't it's not a perfect fit because we also wanted to be artistic and like choose the things we wanted to do. Um but yeah, I think I think it's great to basically say I'm going to optimize my efforts so that I have the highest chance of return. Uh you know, this is every space that you're in, every every company you start, it's risky, it's hard, it's going to be a slog, it's going to take years, it can create a lot of conflict. So So pick something. Pick something at the start that is g give yourself the best chance to win. Yeah. You gota you also have to pick something that you really like because like you said it's going to be a slog and you have to be able to stick with it. When you um when you launched Alert Mouse a couple of months ago, were you using Spark Toro to figure out how to do the marketing for it a little bit? Yeah, a little bit. We did the like analysis of people who are looking for alternatives to Google alerts and you know they tend to be small teams tend to be small agencies and then we we looked through sort of our sources of influence list and I was like oh yeah I know those guys like let's get mentioned here here. I reached out to some people and was like hey would you you know chat about this on LinkedIn or post about this. So that that definitely helped us get our sort of first 5,000 users um which was very fast. Yeah. Wow. How long did it take to get those? Uh, we crossed 5,000 I think just about a hundred days. What made you start it? Because you're you have you have so many businesses going now. Um, yeah. So, my buddy Adam uh Doppel who has done a bunch of startups and and sold them. Him him and his friend Nathan, they've uh done several of these companies together. And they basically came to me and were like, "Hey, we want we really want to start a company like we need something to do, but it has to be really chill because we have lots of other obligations, family complexities, all that kind of stuff." And I was like, "Oh yeah, sounds great. What's what's your idea?" And they were like, "We want you to be the CEO." It's like, "I I have," you know, I told him, I'm like, "Adam, I have two other jobs. I'm writing a book. Like, I do not have time for this." And he's like, "Don't don't worry. Don't worry. it will take very little of your time. Like we I He's like, "An hour a week? That's all we need for you." Like the CEO for an hour a week and he's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I it's more like two or three hours a week, but it is it is pretty chill." And then I said, "Okay, so you know, tell me tell me the idea." And he goes, "Oh, we don't have one. We want you to come up with it." So I just went I went back to my list that Casey and I, my co-founder in Spark Tour, we had kind of a list of things that we sort of wanted to build when we started Sparkour in 2018. One of the ideas on that list was a Google Alerts alternative. So, I pitched that to the guys and they were like, "Yes, they loved it." Uh, there was a few other We went down the rabbit hole of doing some social scoring um stuff like um oh man, what was the popular clout score from a few years ago? You remember them? No. We were looking at like, oh, should we try and build a clout alternative? We decided against that. Um we looked at something like a data thing in the video game space, enterprise data. Not enough buyers. Um, so anyway, yeah, landed on Alert Mouse. It's been so fun and it's so useful. You know what's great is even if the product were only used by me, I think I'd still be willing to sort of pay the tax of working on it because I seriously get so much of my marketing value from seeing places where people talk about whatever zero click marketing or um talk about something Amanda or I said, talk about something with um my buddy Scots like Seattle Ultrasonics Company. Like I track all these things and when I see something interesting, I'll go check it out. A lot of my videos come from alerts that come from Alert Mouse, so it's like a content generation machine for me. Um, yeah, I'd pay for it. What are some What's some content inspiration you got from Alert Mouse that that caused you to make videos or or posts? Yeah. Uh, let's see. A recent Let's see. There was a recent video I did on a study. Uh, I want to say it was from I think it was from Cyrus Shepard actually. He did this study where he looked at uh the correlation of sites that had gained traffic. There was like out of 200,000 sites only 400 had grown their Google search traffic since 2022 or three. And he looked at the factors of them and he mentioned some of our research. I found that article, saw the chart, made a video about it. I don't know, you know, 50,000 views on LinkedIn later. I was like, that was a great find. Wow, that's awesome. you found something people were interested in. Yeah. I think this is this is another like you have this too, right? Like you develop this six sense for what people care about and don't care about. And so over time, it's almost like a um a question of taste where you develop your own sense of what you do well and what people like that you do. And then you start filtering there. There's negative things about this too, right? Like I think a lot of people talk about the epidemic of how social turns teenagers and people in their early 20s into these sort of optimizers of their own image and like um that makes a lot of people feel bad about themselves. Like there negative part. The positive part is as a marketer, if you can learn what works for you, what works for your company, your team, your product, your brand, you can have quite a bit of success uh just fine-tuning that. I I do worry that bosses would look at, you know, people scrolling on Instagram and be like, "Are you working?" And it's like, "Oh, come on, boss. I'm developing my sense of taste." Yeah, I'm working here. I'm not addicted. I'm not doom scrolling. Uh oh, and I Yeah. And I want to I want to say alert mass is so much better than Google alerts because like I mean I I so rarely get Google alerts and I get alert mass every day with new finds that that Google alerts is not picking up. It's really weird because Google obviously knows about them. If you go to Google and you're like change the search to last 24 hours and then like search the brand and click through all the pages, it'll show you that stuff. Like it clearly knows. It just decided not to send a Google alert. Who knows why? I don't understand it. Yeah. Another another free tool or I mean alert mouse. So alert mouse is free for 10 updates a day and a free tool that's also really good is it's called F5bot and it's for yeah for Reddit for tracking Reddit. It's incredible. Yeah, people really like that one. Alert Mouse has Reddit too, but it's sort of more uh it's not as focused and specific, right? like F5bot if you want to see every every mention in any comment you know with minus five up votes right like F5 bot will show you yeah uh I want to ask uh I want to ask your take on I well did you see Google's new post about uh like geo is SEO and they're both the same thing and this was going viral in the SEO world and everybody was talking about this um yeah so I mean there's just like non-stop debate about like SEO versus geo and whether or not getting recommended in AI is really just search engine optimization. Um, so what I'm curious what what's Ran's take on this? I mean, look, it what did you call it when you wanted to appear in a featured snippet before AI overviews or an instant answer? I called it SEO. SEO. I also called online reputation management SEO. Yeah, man. before before AI. Well, I just don't see the difference, right? It's like it's like saying, "Oh, you know what? Because this website uses JavaScript, we're doing JavaScript website instead of like, oh, well, this one uses, you know, whatever. Um, some super old school PHP. And so this is PHP SEO. What? It's just SEO, man. Like, who cares what the technology on the back end is? Is it influencing people's buying decisions? Is it changing their perception of your brand? Sounds like SEO to me. I told you this the first time you came on the show. What made me gravitate towards your whiteboard Fridays and your content so long ago was that you talked about SEO in this very well-rounded way. And it wasn't just ranking. It was about reputation management. It was about entity SEO. It was about getting mentions. It was about public relations and all of this stuff that now is so important for AI, but for me, this has always been part of SEO because that's how I learned SEO. Yeah, man. I I will say, you know, I when I think back on my SEO career, I find I cringe like I read some of these old articles that I wrote or I think about presentations I gave on stages, it was very narrow. Like I had a very narrow view of search and how important it was. And you know, I remember I remember telling crowds of people like, "What are you doing spending $3 million on your Super Bowl ad? Three with $3 million you could dominate these 5,000 keywords in Google." You know what turns out? A lot of companies that dominated 5,000 keywords in Google, they went out of business. A lot of companies that advertised on the Super Bowl, they stuck around. And so I you know what it's been hard it's been hard for me to try and justify this single channel uh tactic and should search marketing be part of your marketing? Hell yes. Should social? Absolutely. Should content almost certainly. Should video? Yeah, man. It should. Should you do some offline marketing? Should you do some podcast? like you should pick those three places, right, that we talked about at the start. I I just don't I just don't see the the world that exists anymore as being a hey, if I just rank for these keywords, I'm good. Like that's my whole marketing stack. Yeah. So, I mean, this brings us to uh the book that you're writing that's coming out in the fall, ZeroClick Marketing. All right. Yeah. Yeah. So, what what made you feel like right now was the right time to write it? um couldn't write it fast enough last year. No, seriously, we we started working on it. What was that? Probably January of 25. Um I think I think it is just about the perfect timing. I would have loved to have hit the window maybe three or four months earlier, but pretty solid. Uh it really is a book about it is not about the end of traffic because I don't think we're going to see traffic completely disappear. It it's going to have a long long tale. Even 10 years from now, Google will send some traffic to your websites. Some people will click some links in social. AI will send some referrals. I'm not I'm not arguing against that. It is not about no traffic. It's about getting value even when there's no click. And that I think is becoming more important than driving traffic. Like we talked about Edward, I think that the um the funnel has completely changed where nowadays the activities that you would have normally expected people to do on your website like learn about your pricing and plans and check out your product features and figure out whether you're a right fit for them and you sort of all the stuff that positioning is supposed to do. figure out your brand, competitors, figure out what space you're in. All of that like researchy stuff that happens in the middle and even the bottom of the funnel right before the conversion that's now happening on YouTube in subreddits in Google's AI overviews and in AI mode on chat GPT in I mean even Facebook and LinkedIn and you know uh Tik Tok like they are taking the whole funnel the entirety of the process and transmitting it over to their platforms. I when I watch, you know, especially young folks, but even even older folks, when I watch them browse on their phone or their computer trying to research something, especially something new, it's all happening offsite. And as a result, marketers need a completely new playbook. They need a new playbook for what to do. They need a new playbook for how to do it, right? how to win across these different channels and how to measure it and report it and get buy in from people who are used to looking at the analytics and determining where to put budget. So, you're saying people are still searching. They're not they're just not going to websites to get the answer or or niche websites more specifically. I mean, I look at my own, you know, like I like to wear, you know, some nice uh men's wear, right? Classic men's wear. This is a this is a you know a vest from Scotland that I I found because I did research everywhere but their website. I never even visited the brand's website. I went to um I went to a store and bought it, right? Like after after doing a bunch of research online because I'm like, "Oh yeah, it's I like the weight of the vest and it's got whatever the British would call it a waste coat." I'm like that there's no there's no analytics trail to follow. This brand will never know, right? It's just an intore sale to them. They don't realize that their digital marketing on Instagram, their digital marketing on Reddit, their digital marketing on style forum.com, which is a popular men'swear site for like classic men's wear stuff. Um, that that all had huge influence on my purchase decision. There's no way they can measure it. But you can invest in those things. You can figure out your in your space. Hey, this forum is very influential. Hey, these subreddits are where I need to play. Yo, I need to be on these Instagrammer's channels or I'm going to lose out. You can determine that, right? You can do the research to figure that out and then you can be present in those places and you can run test campaigns with, you know, timebased or or uh time series or location based things and then see if same store sales lift just like just like Oglev and Mather was testing in 1965, right? But it's a different playbook for the digital age. And we, Amanda and I, felt like a whole bunch of blog posts and some short videos was not the way to convey all of this. We needed a book. So, you're saying it's very, very difficult to actually measure the off-site marketing that you're doing because the goal isn't clicks. It's influencing the understanding that leads people towards your product. And yeah, and I can tell you what Facebook does not want to do, right? what meta there's no way meta wants to do this. YouTube doesn't want to do it either. They don't want to tell you even though they know. They know, hey, you watched this video on YouTube, you visited this subreddit. You watched this Instagram video and then we saw your phone go into that store and spend 15 minutes there. They know they could easily report that back to them. They're not going to they're not going to unless you pay. They're not going to do it unless you pay, right? They're happy to do view through conversions. They're happy to do, hey, this person signed up for your mailing list because they saw these ads and sort of here's here's the full journey. They love giving that detail and they know all of this stuff. They love they also love when you're on that organic journey, they love putting an ad in front of people because they know what you're going to buy. They know because they've seen 10,000 journeys just like yours. So they put your ad in front of uh they put the the store's ad in front of you and then they get to take credit for that sale when it happens, right? And so like you are getting misled by these big tech companies, by your ad spend. Absolutely you are. And they they just have an incentive not to tell you. And so you have to do this work yourself. You've got to be clever and figure out the workarounds. Use the data that you've got um access to. do some of these experimentation focused uh tactics as opposed to trying to attribute everything based on what you can see in your GA. It's just the way. What are some examples of experiments that people can run to measure this? So the the two we talk about the most are time series and location series. Sometimes you can do even more um different kinds of experimentation, but I I'll give you an example of a time series based one. So uh this podcast. Let's imagine that this podcast comes out next week and we talked a bunch about alert mouse. There's all these alert mouse clips. And so I decide, okay, I'm, you know, Edward's going to send me the clips. I'm going to take that alert mouse segment. I'm going to put it on all my socials, whatever. And then we're going to see, you know, we can go into the alert mouse admin section and see, okay, what are the number of signups? And I look and I'm like, oh, okay, well, I see impressions on the videos. I see counts of likes. I see counts of comments. And then I see new people who tried the free version of Alert Mouse. Well, you know what? We didn't do any other marketing that day. So, I'm going to take the average number of signups that we've gotten over the last two weeks, subtract that from the number we got on this day, you know, the next three days. That's how I'm going to say that's the value of appearing on Edward's pod. Is it perfect? No. Does it give us some very good data about where to invest efforts and where not to? Absolutely it does. Absolutely it does. Is it something you could take to your boss, your team, your client, and be like, "Hey, look, this works. Here's how much it works. You tell me, should we do more of this or you want to throw more money at Google Ads?" Right. And the problem is you got to get them to to stop the other marketing to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like people get have a really hard time with getting buyin for this stuff. And so we, you know, our recommendation is really like do these tiny experiments. Location is another one, right? So we could for example say hey I'm going to do a conference in um you know Bolognia Italy next year. You know what we're going to launch an Italian version of alert mouse like Italian language version so you can just switch between the two and it's going to geoarget. So let's see what happens, right? Let's like let's do the launch there. Let's see if Italy is a good market. And the next year I'm going to speak in Paris. I'm going to see if France is a good market for us and we can do a comparison between the two, right? You know, is conferences and events is that a good way to get people aware of alert mouse? It probably is not, right? Like that's that's not that perfect thing, but still, right? Like those kinds of location based tests you can absolutely run. Tons of people on Instagram do this where they're like, "Hey, this person's very influential in this space, in this country, state, city, region. Let's test it." Yeah. I mean, I I love uh I love public relations and appearances actually. Um so, this this new company that I mentioned that I'm funding, one of the things that we're doing is we're using this tool. It's called AI podcastmatcher.com. It just uh connects. It uses AI to connect pod podcast hosts who want guests on their shows with guests who want to go on on shows. And so my operator for this company is my previous editor for this podcast. This 20 20 yearear-old kid and he's shy but he's super hardworking, loves tech, loves marketing. I basically taught him SEO and marketing from editing my podcast. And so he's now going on podcast using a podcastmatcher.com. And in the first week he went on two podcasts. Zero experience going on podcast. Not super charismatic. He's developing that as a skill. And but but like he went cuz it's so important. It's I I personally I think I I think that type of marketing is so so critical. Also podcasts are surfaced like crazy in search and with LLMs. Like crazy. You know what frustrates me a lot? I don't know how you feel about this, Edward, but I see a lot of these analyses uh that folks in in SEO or in AI marketing world do of citations and I I don't think there is a direct uh onetoone correlation and overlap between your brand getting mentioned and your brand being talked about in the ways that you want and which citation sources are listed. And my sense I'm I'm pretty sure of this just from my own like experience but I'm pretty sure that many times when people uh when when you see Spark Toro appear in AI overviews or in chatbt or claude results uh answers that the words and phrases that it uses are things that I've used to describe the brand on podcasts but I never see podcasts listed as a citation source and I think I think there's a mismatch there. I want someone to do this research. Like I, you know, this is not my world. We did a bunch of AI marketing research, you know, earlier this year and and it went um very nicely. It got a lot of play, but you know, it's not really relevant to what Spark Toro does or what Alert Mouse does or whatever. And so I really want to see someone, you know, in your space like pick up this torch and run with it and do that analysis of like how much does citations tell you about the answer and where it's sourced from. You know what's interesting because there's a lot of contradictory data on this like AD week put out uh an article how YouTube is the most cited source in ChachiPT or AI search and that was from Ade. And then you know you've seen like other studies that said oh yeah YouTube actually isn't as cited as people say. Um I can say like anecdotally what I have seen is YouTube is cited like crazy and it's actually kind of scary. So something that that like scammers are doing right now. This is like super frightening is you have review channels that are entirely like just AI AI avatar AI voice. The reviews don't even review the products. They target the keywords brand name plus the word review plus is it legit. And these are anonymous AI videos without actually reviewing the product. All they do is comment on the landing pages like it's an actual review, but they're just commenting on the landing pages and then they present their product. This the basically the the business that's paying for the channel being promoted. Yeah. Yeah. As the as the alternative that you really should be using instead. And and I can tell you that Chhat GPT does not know that these are fake reviews, that this is AI and Chhat GPT is citing it like these are real people actually trying the products and this is working. I have a a rep at YouTube and I and I sent like a bunch of these these uh channels to him and I'm like please like this is becoming a plague on YouTube. Please can we do something about this? And it it it hurts a lot of businesses, but it's worked. It's working because AI does not know the difference, right? Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of those things where, you know, Google is going to say, "Hey, we're able to control for the spam, like blah blah blah, we figured it out." And it's not true, right? But eventually it probably will be. Just like all the all the spam fighting things they said they could do in 2008, they couldn't do all of them until 2018. But did they eventually do them? Yes. Right. It took 10 years. I think it's up to people to choose. Do you want to spam the AIS in the short term and potentially get some short-term wins? How much risk do you want to take? I think it will come cuz the patterns are very obvious. Every single video is brand name plus review. Like the patterns are you you you'd think it would be so easy for them to to kick it out. But I will I will say this too. You know what? AI was built illegally and unethically. It is a technology that if it if it exists, it should be paying the creators who it stole all its content and all its training data from. It should be paying creators to this day, you know, the same way Tik Tok or YouTube does, uh, if not more. They are they violate copyright and trademark laws left and right. No one is holding them to account. I cannot I cannot in good conscience say you shouldn't spam AI tools because it's wrong. I don't think it is. I think you can it's not spamming the AI tools. It's it's hurting the consumers. That's that's the problem. That part that part I and it's hurting it's hurting the the other people who have who have brands as well who who like uh with the fake reviews for example, but it's hurting the consumers. It's hurting some. I I think the you know the like the like ethics professor in me says is that a short-term thing with a long-term win which is people stop trusting AI responses. You could conceivably make that argument to me and I would say oh I see how once I use an AI I get a result that is not good. I buy from a sketchy company. I'm like okay I'm done. No more no more AI trusting from me. That could be a good thing. Like that that could be a net win for the world. Whether whether you game this out far enough and figure out who wins and who loses is hard for me to say, but I I just can't ethically say like don't spam AI tools. What I will say is protect your brand. Do good things for pe good people. Please, if you're going to do marketing, do marketing. Whether it's sketchy marketing or or super wholesome marketing, do it for brands that you know people love that brands that provide a great product, companies that deserve your effort, that's an ethical thing to do. And then if you want to take advantage of some short-term holes in, you know, uh, AI overviews systems and leave a few scammy comments, you know, sketchy comments on YouTube or like put up some Reddit threads with no up votes to influence chatbt, like I'm not going to stop you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I saw I saw your post your post about Google and it's like go like go hard as long as you're not hurting your consumers. Yep. Don't worry. As long as you're not hurting people, you know, hurt hurt Google and Chat GBD's reputation all you want because my god, they they have just shown themselves to be un unworthy of uh anyone's respect. Actually, um I I had this question saved for later on, but while we're on the topic of of Google, I mean maybe hurting pub publishers, um I'm curious, uh if you had a take on why some brands um or or what the reason for some brands to like grow through Google updates is while other brands get wiped out. Yeah, I I mean I will say Edward, that video that we talked about um that I made about Cyrus's report where he analyzed the uh the factors that predicted doing better and better through Google updates versus doing worse, which a bunch of those things are not what you would classically consider SEO tactics. If if my memory is correct, I'm thinking about it right. One of the big ones was do you provide value that cannot be uh replaced in the search result itself. So that that could be information but more often it's a a tool or an input system uh a product a an actual service some sort of human connection um a way to buy something or transact. All of those things you can't do right in Google's results, right? Like no matter how much Google disintermediates, you're always going to need to go to, you know, whatever ticket master to buy your Bruce Springsteen tickets. Like it's not, you know, Google won't sell them directly. You got to go to eBay to get a vintage necktie. You know, that value is one of the things that predicted that you would continue to do well. affiliate sites, publishers who are pure publishers, they do nothing but provide information or news or, you know, sort of content. Those business models are in trouble. I just don't I don't I don't see how it's going to work for you in those worlds. I I think long term if I had to, you know, pull out my crystal ball, Edward, I would guess that 10 years from now, 15 years from now, places like OpenAI and Google are going to be paying content creators to make stuff for their training data the same way that Tik Tok and YouTube pay creators to create for their platform. I I just don't see those business models being able to last in an era of zeroclick disintermediation. What what I talk about this all the time. What publishers need to do is they need to make a SAS. They need to vibe a code assass. They have the market. They can rank and then but the thing is what what a lot of I think newer SEOs do is they target keywords at the top of the funnel. And uh that's where that's where the you're you're not going to get clicked. It's it's the keywords at the top of the funnel. But if you're targeting like if you're like a roofer and you're targeting like uh I don't know what's like a replace by roof replace roofing tiles Dallas that's like somebody who's searching that they want to go to a business. They they want to go to a website or get a phone number. There's no AI overview that can come and replace your roof. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So that's the type of that's the type of SEO that I'm really in favor for. And so I wanted to ask you like um you we we were talking about like okay so Super Bowl you you had companies and they didn't allocate budget for the Super Bowl ad they allocated budget for SEO they got wiped out but the the question that I wanted to ask is was it that they were doing SEO or was it that they were targeting the wrong keywords I am going to guess that most of the time the big problem was a refusal to invest in brand. Like the the problem is not the right keywords, the wrong keywords. It's it's choosing channels, SEO especially, but but even social and some content stuff. It's choosing these channels that are not building your brand in the mind of people where they when they think about the problem that you solve, they immediately think of you first. They like you best. They recommend you to their friends. They talk about you. you do this interesting thing that's unique to them, you speak to their soul or their politics or their the the problem that you know you need solved. And a lot of the companies that I saw who went hard and heavy into pure SEO, good keywords or bad keywords, great rankings or poor ones, their mentality was not about building a lasting brand. And you just can't I don't think you can win long term if you do that. I I completely agree. I think you need a long-term mentality that but but see that's that's like what you were that's what you were preaching on whiteboard Friday. 10 years ago, 12 years ago. That's that's what you've been saying from the start. I mean I like like I it's brand to me was also part of of SEO. If you cuz if you if you have empathy for your searcher, you are going to have pages that have way less pogo sticking, which is a major signal for Google. That's right. Yeah. And and you're going to have people who want to come back to your site. Yep. Yep. And you got to I think there's a it's almost like this this difference in mentality, right? When people approach the problem as I need to build a brand and a product that people know, like and trust, what are the channels that I need to distribute that on to get that knowledge? What are the ways I need to distribute to earn that trust? What are the things the product has to do, you know, to sort of earn these three things? When they when you think about it that way, right? When companies and founders think about it that way, they tend to have much more success. Then folks who say, "Hey, there's a big keyword opportunity in this space. Here's this here's this like spa. How do I rank for these keywords? What information gaps? What do they call it? Like information voids or what, you know, whatever the the SEO term is these days, keyword gap, like how do I fill that? And then uh how do I, you know, make enough content on a regular basis to be able to do it? do I build links to that content? And the business, you know, all the all the how do I get people to know, like, and trust me is well, they're going to come from the search result and then when they get to our site, we're going to offer them the thing that they really want. Oh, I don't know why it is, but this brand focused mentality works and this SEO first mentality tended to not work. The best is when you're able to combine it in my opinion. I mean, Look, people who are great at SEO, I think people who are great at SEO, they are good at this brand stuff and then they hire professionals who think this way, right? And those people execute on this one channel. But the you know the same thing's true for social media marketing or content marketing or email marketing or video marketing or you know offline, right? Like there's still companies who are doing doing great roofers, plenty of roofers who do no digital and they're like nope, you know what I do? I got a flyer campaign. I got a billboard near my aunt Sally's house. And I got a memorable phone number. That's all I need to do. Actually, I I actually love that. See, I find that type of marketing very inspiring. I like I love those types of tactics. And I I have I have experts in those fields on this show because like I like learning from these people. I think it's uh I like I just love marketing in general. Um actually, what are what are some channels that feel massively underpriced right now? newsletters, YouTube podcast, communities, LinkedIn, Reddit, something else. Yeah. Uh I would say influencer marketing among people who don't know that they're influencers is hugely underpriced, right? There's a lot of people who have a popular email newsletter, a niche website, a conference or an event, um series, a a webinar series, um people who who start and have a a big presence on YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok almost never are those people. They they know that they're influencers. They tend to be marketpriced. LinkedIn threads Not so much like threads is bigger than Twitter now. It is it will be approaching the size of the major platforms very soon. There's a lot of opportunity there. I see the crazy engagement that some of the stuff on threads is getting. The algorithm's gotten better, right? Meta's finally figuring out what what people actually want in their feeds and showing it to them. Um I I think those opportunities are great. The other one that I see that a a lot of folks um ignore on B2B is platforms that are consumer focused. There is you you're a great example of this, right? Like you've shown that stuff on Insta, on Tik Tok, on Reddit, on YouTube can do really well even when it's hyper B2B. Um, especially if you're trying to reach an audience that's looking to learn and upgrade and like you can provide some entertainment along with that. That is a that's a it's an owned channel or a rented channel on someone else's property rather than rather than going and distributing. But I you know I think Ross Simmons had the right idea about this, right? That you create once and distribute forever. And I see a lot of people still creating a ton and distributing in the one place they know, you know, whether that's like I distribute on LinkedIn or I put my videos only on Instagram or I only use um YouTube or whatever it is. And I'm like, "Oh man, you know what? I'd take that YouTube video and I'd make a few shorts and I'd put them on Instagram and I'd put them on Tik Tok and I'd put them on threads and I'd put them on LinkedIn and I'd see how those channels are building up for you because there's there's opportunity in those places. Uh yeah, it's it's hard though. It's like I don't want to be Gary Vaynerchuk and tell people to be everywhere. I don't believe in that advice at all. I think you got to pick your battles. Being great at one or two channels is way better than sucking at 10 channels. So, it's it's a balance. Yeah, doubling down, especially when you're bootstrapped, is the smartest thing to do. Doubling down on a channel and focusing on growing that. I agree. No, I have I have some friends who basically are creators and I'm like, "Okay, you're doing great on Insta. Why why are you not going anywhere else? Like, why no other distribution?" And then they're like, "You know what? This is really working for me. Being focused works for me. Figuring this audience out works for me. Once I got a lot of money and like a lot more brand equity, I'll I'll choose a second channel." And they're probably right. Now, if you're a B2B SAS company and you got a marketing team of four or five people or 10 people, you should probably be in those other places. Like, what are you doing? Yeah. Yeah. you you want to you want to expand to um to more channels is can you use Spark Toro uh to figure out the the places that are underpriced for your brand like where your where your audience is hanging out. Definitely you can use it to figure out uh where your audience is hanging out, where they're overweighted. Um but it can't tell you whether those places are underpriced or underinvested. like it, you know, it might say, "Hey, whatever. Uh, men's wear afficionados are super heavy on Instagram and and actually way lighter on Tik Tok for whatever demographic reasons. Does that mean Instagram is going to be underpriced?" Probably not, right? Like it it just doesn't say anything about that because we don't have data on the uh or like the influencers, sorry, for like the influencers who you should be targeting for influenc, right? So like you can look at the list of right you can go to you know you click take action in Spark Toro and then you're like okay tell me the most influential Instagrammers who reach this particular audience it'll be like all right it's these 20 you know there you go like you're off to the races how much will each of them cost or like how approachable are they? That's a you got to do the leg work right so Spctoral will tell you the the where and the who but not the how and how much. Yeah. Uh, how do you decide whether a marketing channel is sustainable or temporarily exploitable? A marketing channel or even like a hack in SEO. Yeah. Yeah. I Okay. So hacks for me are uh the mathematics is essentially what's the risk like do I have reputational risk here? Do I have platform risk? Like could I be thrown off the platform? How likely is that? Uh and then there's the opportunity cost, right? So I kind of weigh those those two things. Opportunity cost obviously includes the what do I think the benefit of being here is. So as an example, if Spark Toro appeared in, you know, a hundred people's AI responses, 100 more people's AI responses every day, what do we think the impact to our business would be? Would it be an extra 100k a year? Is it a million a year? Is it five? Right? And then, you know, I weigh that against our opportunity cost of, hey, you know, should we be what buying some more Google ads? Should we be doing some more LinkedIn? Do we need to product investments actually have turned out to be the biggest thing that has driven a ton of our growth the last six months is just making the product better, easier to use, more kinds of data. Um, now we're we're making a big visual update, like all that kind of stuff. Oh, I was I was watching that video, by the way. It's beautiful. And you and you love you love your design agency. They are fantastic. Oh my god, that that's a big underinvested area for B2B, man. Let me tell you, B2B companies make the ugliest, sameest, copycatist stuff. I don't understand why why don't they realize that just like consumer products that's a brand signal it's a positioning statement in itself visual design is a way to stand out especially when people are using your product to pitch stuff to other people I don't know you were focusing on the graphs that people can put in their presentations yeah man I anyway so opportunity cost and and risk assessment those those are my big to for the math of should I do this short-term exploit. Yeah. I think a lot of people they don't even think through it. They they see some growth hacker on X. They're like, "Wow, that got I I ranked number one for this thing and an hour of work and and and they don't but the growth hacker doesn't share is that it was for a churn and burn website and not for like a money site." And then like these people, they just get caught up. Oh, I got to try this on my money site. And people just they don't even they don't even think through it. Yeah. It's it's rough. I don't know. I almost think I'm not sure if you found this, Edward, but I there it's sort of like this. The United States in particular has a unique group of people who fall for everything. They see they seem to fall for any sort of get-richqu scheme. And I I get that the history of this country is a immigrate here, right? or or immigrate to the United States because you might be able to get rich quick here. Like this is the place to grow your financial status, right? And and like you know certainly uh that's what attracted my grandparents and great-grandparents here and and you know my wife's parents and like yeah economic stuff. So, I understand where it comes from, but that mentality means that there's just a lot of suckers born and they um they fall for a lot of stuff. And I I think you know people like you and I who have voices in this field who have built things that people know, like, trust, respect, like it's our obligation to explain the risks, to be voices of reason, to lift people up in good ways and try and, you know, like things were hard. Things were very hard for me trying to build a career in SEO because people hated SEO. Everyone thought SEO was a lot of people still do. Yeah, plenty of people still do. No, I have people I make SEO videos. I literally have people DM me, strangers. They're like, "Kill yourself. SEO is garbage." Like, or some some guy like I posted some like like u reputation management video the other day. Just random dude DM'd me, you're an idiot. That would never work. Like this literally happens non nons people still hate SEO. Sorry for interrupting. That's no no you but it must have been it must have been even harder for you back when you were doing it. I mean I think that the you know gen pop on social media you you get unfortunately you're going to attract a lot of that in almost every space but you know this is even like pitching corporate clients potential clients in like 03 0405 you know all the way to probably 2013 14. Um, and that uh, yeah, that experience sort of showed me that once you've had success, you you kind of have these two choices. And I think, you know, it infuriates me that so many people with money have chosen to pull the ladder up behind them. And I think our job is to build an escalator, right? it it's like how do I how do I make this easier for the next generation? How do I make it more obvious? How do I make it so you don't fall for, you know, scammy, scummy, crappy stuff? How do I make it so that you invest in tactics that are going to work long time for a long time or that that are shortterm going to work but won't hurt you and hurt your brand? How do I build careers, right, for let let me tell you the best one of the best days of my life followed one of the worst absolute worst days of my life. worst day of my life, close to the worst for sure, was February 28th, 2018. And that's because I I got like walked out of the company that I built, right? Ma, like I you know, here's the door. Here's your box of stuff. Like, let's go. Um, and I what a what an awful experience. You know, this is something I built with my mom, something that I tied so closely to my identity for for two decades. And one of the best days of my life was the next morning. The next morning, I that night, late that night, like midnight, I published a post. I think the post was called my last day at Moz, my first day at Spark Toro, right? I started the company like that evening. Put up the post and the next day my inbox was flooded. It was flooded so bad. I'm fast at email. But it was flooded by thousands thousands of people telling me stories of how, you know, my work at MA had helped them get a job, helped them further their career, helped their business, you know, get customers, and now they were able to send their kids to college even though they had never been. And they were able to afford to marry their partner. And like these beautiful, beautiful stories, incredible stories. And I, you know, I kind of I when I walked away from Oz, I thought I thought I'd never get another dime from them, right? Like I didn't I thought it was over. Um, and those stories made me reflect on like, oh, this was not about money. I I I didn't build Moz for the money. That's not the That's not the reward. The reward is all these people that got helped. That's that's what I think we're here to do, right? People are always like, "Oh, what's the purpose of life?" It seems so obvious to me. You're here to help the next generation. and you're here to help the people around you. What else is there to do? Yeah. I I didn't know that about Moz. I didn't know that you got walked out. I mean, it was not by security, you know, it was like by someone who worked there, but it was Oh, man. Did sucked. Well, your work Well, your work there inspired this podcast and a lot of the things that I do, which has inspired I don't know, tens, hundreds of thousands of people. So, um, thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that. I get those messages all the time, too. And it's the craziest feeling in the world. It's the best. Yeah. It makes it makes all the, you know, all the like blog posts that got 10 visits and all the, "Oh, man, that video didn't work at all and all the, oh, that yeah, that business deal went sideways." It really makes it worth it. And in in response to the first thing that you said about like I think it was like falling for like quick rich uh get get rich quick schemes. The the the problem that I see from everybody and you know I grew up in in New York City and I'm in Brooklyn right now. The the problem that I see from everybody is that they fall for shiny object syndrome. And the easiest way to succeed like I I can't even describe how easy it is. It's hard in the beginning, but like if if you want to get rich quick and actually just make sure that it works. It's just stick with something for years and it's just accept that you're going to be working on it for years because you make a million mistakes and then you learn what not to do and then you don't make those mistakes and you kind of learn what to do and then you double down on what's working. You find the tools that are working, you find what people care about and just don't get distracted by shiny objects syndrome and you that's like you see that non-stop. my compound compound interest, right? It's such a powerful force and if you if you get your flywheel going, we talk about this in the book, right? If you get that flywheel going and you can turn it faster each time or or with less effort each time or with more results each time, you're going to eventually get to a great place. I want to I want to ask uh your opinion on AI because you shared this post. Uh, you said if you think cigarettes, gambling, crypto, or the chemicals industry are hated, wait till you see what people think of AI. Morning Consult had AI as nearly the least trusted and most negatively perceived category they measure. And so I I'm curious um because that's something that I get asked all the time as well. People are like, "Oh, can is AI content okay?" Like, so what have you seen when AI content is acceptable with consumers and when it isn't? I you know what I think it's fine for like an FAQ or if you're writing up your um you know you've got a product specs page and you're like hey can you turn this into a paragraph description from a bulletoint list or the or the inverse it's pretty good at that like not bad if you're reading something or if you're writing something that you want people to not only read but internalize and remember if you want them to read something and experience an emotional response. AI is not the way. And and I hope I hope it never will be. I think there's people who are like, oh, you know, four years ago, people were like, oh, just give it a year. Three years ago, people were like, just give it six months. Two years ago, people just, oh, just give it another month. I I haven't seen it yet. And that's made me made me hopeful. You can see you can see it in the Google data, right? AI writing, AI content, it rarely ranks, not never, but rarely ranks and rarely ranks for long. And that I don't believe that's because Google has the best AI detector in the market. I think that's user signals. It's pogo sticking. What you talked about, Edward, it is people who click, they start scanning and they're like, "What? What kind of like ah this is just generic gibberish, right? It's just I get this answer from ChachiPT. Why am I here?" Yeah, I could I could get this from in my AI tool. Like I'm out of here, right? And that that suggests to me that there is still a world where that stuff is valuable. I think the the biggest challenge is the format like the format just as Tik Tok sort of reduced and reduced and reduced attention spans to this. You know, it's really hard to get a lot of people, especially out of kids, to pay attention for more than 30 seconds to two minutes. The same thing's true for written content, multiple paragraphs, long form content, big reports. I'm less of a believer in them than I ever have been. And I'm more of a believer in the short chunks, a few paragraphs, a nice bullet point list, a couple of graph visuals. You have a huge report to share, break it up, brother. Like, turn it into a bunch of little ones. Make those little three minute videos, right? Like that. That's the way to convey information. And so I I think that AI has a whole bunch of uses. I'm not a denier of its value. Spark Toro uses a bunch of LLM calls for a whole bunch of different things, right? Like we find value in it. Alert Mouse uses it for some filtration stuff. It It can do a great job for the things it's good at. It's certainly helpful in terms of programming productivity. There's no doubt about that. Is it unethical? Yeah. It does that is that going to stop it from existing? No, I don't think so. So, yeah, make use of it where you can, but but stop trying to fill square pegs with AI shaped, you know, holes. Like, that's not that's not it. I think we know the answer to this, but you touched upon it in your post, so I want to ask, do you think businesses will continue to adopt AI even if consumers drift drift away as Morning Consult suggests? Yeah, I think it's a uh I think of AI a lot like the sort of economic po postcoid economic situation in the United States which people describe it as being K-shaped, right? And that the K meaning that you know the line going up is sort of the small 20% maybe 25% of the American population who continues to do well. They tend to invest in the stock market. They they hold a lot of wealth um already. We're not talking about like the 1% or the 0.1. we're talking about like this 20 to 25%. They're the reason that restaurants can raise prices by 50% and still stay in business and then the 80% right like things have actually been kind of going down for them. And so you get this bifurcated society and I see that with AI too when you look at the numbers right from dos for example you see like gosh you know 20% of people use AI so heavily and 80% of the devices in the panel you know maybe one or two visits a month sometimes not even and a lot of those visits they're not even asking the AI anything it's something someone else sent them right it's like a you know you can share a response like like half the chatbt visits that we see are someone sharing a response that that the tool's given and and another device visiting that. So, yeah, I think that I think it's a K-shaped AI use world. I have just a few more questions. Um, thank you. Thank you again for coming on the show. All right, I'm I am going to have to run because I have a an eye appointment that I got to get to, but yeah, let's if you can like power question lightning ground. Uh, we kind of talked about this earlier. What advice would you give to bootstrapped founders that venture-backed companies ignore? Ooh, profitability means you are immortal. Get to profitability. Focus on that. Don't worry about trying to grow big or grow fast or dominate your market or outsmart competitors. In fact, I don't even think about competitors at all except to say what is your unique positioning against them. Otherwise, you can ignore them. Ventureback companies can't. They have to be the winner in the market. I love that. What's one marketing hill you'd still die on despite the industry moving the other way? PR. Oh my god, I am such a PR fan. The industry's been moving away from PR for what, 30 years now. I still think PR is where it is at. I think AI makes PR more valuable than ever. I think mentions makes PR more valuable than ever. You get a great PR person. I don't know if you've ever talked to like Britt Clones who runs the the PR explained podcast, but like you get a great person like that on your team. Do uses her. Oh my god. Oh my god. Like it just it can transform your business. I know Brit. Yeah, I should I should have her on the show. Um it's awesome. We we've emailed before. Uh you know what? Last Okay, last question. This I think this is a good one to end with. Um what skills outside of marketing have helped you the most in your career? teaching for sure. Teaching like being able to learn something about a concept and then make that accessible to other people even complex things. Occasionally I'll try and explain some mathematic or statistics thing to someone um which which then I forget the next day. But that's that's that's fine. But that that ability to like learn something so well that you can teach someone else and explain it in your own words with no references. My god, what a skill. The other one I think is being able to truly pay attention to people when you're engaging with them. This is this is one of those things where I think, you know, the the world of social media and phones has really done a big disservice to a lot of us, myself included. Like even I am more distracted than I've ever been. But that ability to sit down at a table or across from, you know, uh at a conference with someone and truly have curiosity about them, you know, look them in the eye and care about what they're saying and share your experiences back too. Man, there's a lot of people who can't do it. and that yeah just exchange of social kindness and um thoughtfulness and empathy huge skill can't encourage people to learn that enough. Yeah. Uh any any books that you would recommend on that books on how to win friends and influence people? I don't have one but I I want to find it now. That's Have you read how have you read how how to win friends and influence people? Uh Will Reynolds, he he came on the show a few weeks ago and we were talking about book recommendations and I think people really like them. Yeah, I read that I read that in my 20s. I got a slightly Mchavelian vibe from that one. Oh. Oh, did you? I got the I got the opposite. I'm like, "Wow, I'm going to help so many people. I'm going to make people feel good. I'm going to listen to people and they're going to be so happy that I listen to them." Yeah. Yes. And those are those are great things. I think I think the the framing the positioning of the book made it a little bit like you do these things so that you can win. Right. And I was like, "Oh, but I think it's even more powerful when you do these things with no thought of return." It's true. Anyway, Rand, thank you so much, man. Always great to see you, my friend. Please, uh, stay in touch. Your book comes out. Very best. ZeroClick Marketing in the fall. ZeroClick Marketing coming this fall. You can pre-order right now. This is episode 1,50 of the Edward Show. 150 days in a row doing this podcast. No days missed. If you watch us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcast, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.