Growth Strategy in the AI Search Era | Nick Lafferty, Profound

The most effective people internally are the ones who are best at telling their boss that like something is on fire. And then you also tell them, but it's okay. I found this solution. Like here's what we need to do to fix it. Paining that this is a true emergency that we're losing in AI search where our biggest competitor is winning. And then they're like, okay, but then if we go use AI search is changing how people discover brands. Search is no longer just about Google. Visibility isn't just rankings anymore. and attribution is getting messier by the day. Today's guest is right at the center of this. Nick Laferty leads growth marketing at Profound, an AI search tracking platform that is helping huge brands understand how they're showing up in LLMs like Chat GBT, Gemini, and Publexity. Nick has some major experience leading growth at huge companies like Loom and Mail Gun, driving millions of B2B SAS pipelines, and is now in one of the earliest gotomarket teams in what could be the next major marketing channel. Nick, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Charlie. I'm so excited to be here. I am so glad to have you here and I cannot wait to pick your brains today on everything AI search growth and personal growth as well. So, I'd love I'd love to just jump right in. What do you think early adopters of AI search know that most businesses haven't yet realized? You're working with some of the biggest brands, so there's got to be some lessons in there. Yeah. Um, I think the most interesting there's there's two things really. One is that velocity is a moat in in AI search. And kind of what I mean by that is the faster you move, the faster you can update existing content, ship new content, the faster you can see results in AI search in terms of increased visibility, citations, kind of like whatever your metric of measurement is there. Uh, and that's really because uh, answer engines can pick up and site content in a matter of days. I've I've published content for profound that gets cited in two days and that's what kind of like a middle of the road um kind of domain and so imagine if you're like Walmart or Target or Apple uh the speed at which you can publish something if you can get through all the red tape there um can be really advantageous for you and so I think when it comes to more like emergent players coming into like a more legacy industry that uh the faster you move um you can kind of really improve your your rankings in the matter of days or weeks, which is kind of incredible. We've seen the same with some of our clients that um articles we've published both on their site, but also often when we're doing digital PR pieces on other sites being cited within a couple of days, which SEOs who are used to working predominantly with traditional Google search, their their minds are probably thinking like, oh my goodness, like sometimes it can take four weeks to multiple months to actually see content performing well. So the speed at which AI can actually site content is pretty impressive when it comes to that. I can imagine though a lot of big businesses some of them are thinking like wow what an opportunity and others there must be huge trepidation because like you say there's red t tape around like brand teams legal teams positioning of the business all sorts of things that mean it takes time to actually ship content out. Yeah. Exactly. And like it it matters across multiple different industries too. Like I've been playing around with cloud code a lot both like vibe coding things for myself and profound and um one of the interesting things about all these kind of agentic coding tools is that if you ask it to make something it will make decisions about your tech stack for you. It'll be like oh you need uh use superbase for your database or Verscell to host and it'll just make these decisions for you. And like I think that is what's really interesting about AI search too is that if you're a developer um even like Claude Co-work came out for non-developers recently. And so these systems are increasingly making brand and product choices for you. And at that point you have to make a conscious decision to say no I don't want that. I want this other tool. But if you don't know if you don't know like a better database or a better hosting provider you just accept the AI's recommendation. It builds your app for you. And so I think like that's the interesting next layer. Um uh someone at Sequoia, I think her name is Sonia, she coined this as a term called agentled growth. This kind of like the next evolution of productled growth, which I just find really interesting right now. Nick, you are so knowledgeable in this sector. I can tell from just a couple of minutes of speaking to you. But I have to ask you like the personal question about why you returned in-house to work with Profound. What is it about this sector that made you want to come back? Yeah, it's kind of like the perfect combination of what I've done in my career, my interests, and me being at the right like experience level to come in and just drive growth for a business like Profound. Um before this um as you know I spent two years on this consulting journey helping incredible brands like Glean watershed uh Angelist Air um helping them drive growth mostly through like paid ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads. Uh ran a completely solo uh digital marketing agency very purposely did not want to hire anyone. Um just wanted to run my own business, do it my own way. Uh and it was great. I had a great two years. um was very financially rewarding. Uh for a while I ran a newsletter and kind of like blogged about the process of going from zero income to uh up to like 30 $40,000 a month of consulting income as well. Kind of built a little following around that. Uh and it was great. I loved it. And then but I kept doing the same thing over and over again. And so the excitement I founded in my work was kind of decreasing over time. And then that happened at the same time I got introduced to James, the co-founder, CEO of Profound. And a couple conversations later, I literally had an offer letter in my inbox. It was maybe like 10 days from me meeting him to I had which is it was just insane. Like we just clicked. We just got it basically. Um and then yeah, the one advantage of me publicly blogging about my business and my income. So I was like, "Look, man, like here's how much money I made last month and last year. Like this is what you have to compete against is like not my salary, but like the business I run." Um, which helped me really negotiate from a place of strength of like significant strength. Yeah, that is absolutely fantastic. It must have been firstly it when you actually meet someone and you just like click and gel it's one of the best things in your career I think because who you work with makes such a huge difference to actually enjoying your day-to-day role and like putting the hours in every week that that comes with working life. Um, one of the biggest transitions there for you though has to be going from like spending years working essentially by yourself without colleagues, without a team around you to now like leading a team that's rapidly growing. Like I see on your LinkedIn every other week a new person is coming in and they've got the profound cap and they're joining your marketing team which must be an amazing experience in itself but the gap must be so huge. Yes. Yeah. It's it's been it's been quite quite the shift. Um, and yeah, I joined as as the first marketer. We just hired our sixth marketer. She started officially today to run events and experiences for us. And so, uh, being early was something I wanted to I wanted to be the first marketer. Um, I kind of wish it lasted a little longer. Like, Profound has grown so fast. We, uh, had two fundraising rounds last year. I joined at like around 20 employees. Now we're over a hundred. So, we just kind of like sprinted through what is usually my favorite part of a company is like the early stage where you can do everything. Um, and now we're, you know, building systems and hiring specialists and and all of that stuff. But, um, like the problems we get to set to tackle, the opportunities out there just get bigger and bigger. We're planning our next zero click events and we're going to have maybe like 800 people there versus in the one in London, we had 400 people there. like double the capacity, um, bigger venue, more speakers, and so like the challenges just get more fun as you kind of scale up too. It sounds like wild fun, chaos fun all at the same time, growing that rapidly. How does this kind of growth that you're experiencing at Profound, not just experiencing, but driving because you're very much driving a lot of this in your role, compared to when you were leading growth at Loom, which I think was around 2023. Yes. How different does this look? Yeah, it's it's honestly almost everything is different ex except for like the common thread is that Loom and Profound were both like the perfect company positioned at the perfect time. Loom uh when I joined um I joined in 2021 I think and then left in 2023. I left like two months after Chat GPT came out which is kind of an insane insane time in in tech. Uh then I joined kind of right in the middle of of the pandemic and Loom's growth chart was just almost a straight line like off the charts. They had a great product, great brand and just like great timing too. Um and the the same is true for profound of like we were early uh we have good momentum. We have good marketing. We have good brand and so all those things are kind of that's those are the similarities. Um but after that kind of like everything everything stops. Um, Loom grew mostly by like referrals, word of mouth, like product virality. Uh, Profound grows more from uh, sharing original research and content and social and LinkedIn, all those things. Um, the team sizes are different. When I I joined Loom after they raised a series C, uh, they were about 300 people at their kind of like peak size. Uh, Profound is about 100 right now. Um, Loom marketing team at that time was like 20 people and again like our team is six we'll be eight in a couple of days and so I think like I think marketing teams are kind of evolving getting more lean you can do a lot more now compared to then uh and it's been cool to see how teams are adopting AI and using it to kind of just be more efficient overall. Brilliant. What an exciting career you've had. I have to ask off the back of that what does the go to market actually look like for profound now it's like a brand new sector within tech at the same time we've got all of these AI platforms chatbd Gemini perplexity coming into the channel mix like that's both what your product is working with but it's also going to be affecting you where you get your leads and customers from as well. Yeah. Um it it's been really interesting because I think I'd prefer to market a new product in a new sector than market a new product in ex in in an existing sector. Uh mostly because uh to me the go to market motion is much more straightforward. It's educational. It's teaching. It's like what is this thing? Why does it matter? And that's a motion that comes very naturally to me of just like freely educating uh my audience or marketers whether it's like a newsletter or LinkedIn like that just kind of it just clicks in in my brain and then when you're at profound we we just have so much data millions of prompts that we run billions of citations and so like immediately when I joined the road map was basically how do we take our data and insights and then just build systems and processes and plumbing to talk about it and uh that's been kind of the core go to market motion for us is how do we just package up all this information and and share it with folks. Um and so really like by leading with that that was it's almost easier to me than thinking through like okay what about like channel partners or like these other kind of like more traditional things like no it's just like what's the fundamental what's just how do we just like share and tell our story um and for me that that came quite easy. Fantastic. And then how did the events slot into that? Was that something Profound was always going to do? Was it like one of the ideas from the marketing team like how do we share these stories even further? Let's get on stage. Yeah. Um some of the inside baseball of working at at Profound is that every once in a while James will just be like we should do this and it this is always like a radical idea. And so that's what happened with the events in Zero Click specifically. Like it was like one day, one afternoon, we were all just hanging out and James was like, "Hey, we should put on a conference. Let's do it at RAMP's office in New York. We have some connections there. Let's like invite a bunch of people and make it this like exclusive AI search like world's first event." Um, and so it was it was him. It was kind of like his brainchild. And then of course it fell on the marketing team to go execute and make it happen. And then right before we had ZeroClick New York, which was October of last year, I want to say it was like two days before the event, he was like, I want to do it in London in in five weeks again. And like we hadn't even done the first one. And he's already pushing us to plan the second one. And so that's one that's just part of profound. And two, I think that's what makes James a great leader and great CEO is he's one always thinking ahead, but always like encouraging us to think think a lot bigger, too. like objectively planning a second event 5 weeks after your first event um at this like massive venue the outer internet in London is just like kind of an insane thing but we're kind of an insane company who also does insane things and so it just it just kind of like matches yeah I love that that is the ultimate founder CEO personality is the ideas that just come and then let's how do we implement this for the marketing team to actually deal with the mechanics of all of it um and hugely impressive as well because by the time that you did Zero Click London, the size of even just your first event was so much bigger than a lot of marketing conferences that take place over here. So, it was amazing to see how you scaled well the second event within just five weeks honestly. Yeah, it's like you can like my lesson there is like you can do way more than you think you can. Like my only regret about ZeroClick New York is that we didn't do it big enough. Like our weight list was like 1,400 people. We packed RAMP's office. It was like standing room only. The same in London too. And some of that is timing of the space and profound and our momentum and all of that stuff. But um I think yeah companies and brands and marketing teams can aim really high and I think you'd be surprised about what you can pull off especially if it's something novel, something new. You can take a risk. Um, and now ZeroClick is one, it's a brand for us, which is amazing. And then two, we're planning all of them for this year. And so we'll have one in San Francisco uh probably in April, and then we'll repeat New York and London at some point this year, too. And they'll just become uh pillar events for us as a business. That all started because James pushed us to do this big event and do it on a quick timeline. And now that's just like going to be a thing for Profound for maybe ever, which is kind of cool. So excited. I'm looking forward to the events. They're going to be amazing. Also, can I just say three of the best locations you could have picked, I think. Yes, definitely where marketers want to go to conferences. Um, so let's say that we've got other brands listening who want to become market leaders just like Profound has. They want to be on an amazing growth trajectory like this. What would you recommend them when it comes to their marketing strategy? What would the makeup look like? How does AI search play into that? Yeah, I think um to me it comes down to starting with the the makeup of of your team. I think if I am a marketing leader, like the thing I'm doing right now is I'm figuring out like does the team I have do they have the systems attributes in place that match my vision for what I think a modern marketing team looks like? Um my like personal vision for that is that teams are more they become a bit more like generalists who can do many many different things. Um one of um like my favorite people to learn from her name is Emily Kramer. uh she runs a a newsletter and community called NKT1 and she has this concept of a gen marketer or a generative marketer and it's um she calls it someone who's kind of like a pies-shaped marketer of you have experience in like two categories call it like growth or product or growth in content uh and then you find ways to use AI and aentic systems to really scale and enable yourself and so like to give you an example one of the things I'm doing with cloud code right now is that I have a a bunch of great images that I had my design team make and I want to do that thing on LinkedIn where I don't know if you've seen this where you get onetoone targeted ads on LinkedIn. Um, the company who does this really well is called user gems. And you basically get an ad that says, "Hey, profound." Like on the ad, visual ad, your logo is right there front and center. Just like very like onetoone direct ABM play. Um, the downside to running this is that you uh have to make all these ads manually. And so I went into cloud code and I was like, "Hey, can I can I give you a list of companies and you download their logos for me?" And it was like, "Sure." and it just did it, which is crazy. And then I was like, "Okay, I have an image with kind of like a placeholder. Can you go through and make one image for every company and then insert their logo in this exact spot on the image?" And it was like, "Sure, I can do that, too." And so in a couple of hours, I had spit out um like a hundred different variations of this image with all these different, you know, company logos swapped in there and probably saved myself, you know, 10, 20, 30 hours of manual work of like finding the logo, making the ad, all of that stuff. And so I think that like is maybe that's my personal bias of like I I know that's possible. So I look for other people who can do that too. But I think that's the right mindset or thinking of if I'm building a marketing team, like find people who can do that versus defaulting to maybe the old way of let me make a ticket for my designer and I say, "Hey, I need 200 copies of this ad. It would take forever." And so it's like reframing, I think, what's what's possible, like how quickly you can move. And then how do you build your marketing bench with people who can just like do way more things like that at scale? That's awesome. Sounds like you're hiring much more for a mindset almost people who want to maximize the total amount of output they can do in marketing for the biggest impact rather than just like churning tasks. But how how involved are you in the hiring, Nick, of your team? Like how do you actually find people that have that mindset? Yeah. Um, it's that's that's the part you can't automate, unfortunately. Is like the best people I found and hired are either referrals from people I know, my network, that kind of thing, or me just spending a few hours on LinkedIn like trying to find the right people. Um, that's the benefit of like I've been very active and engaged with LinkedIn for years and years and years. And part of like my selfish reason of doing that is I wanted to build my own roster of people who I think are world class and doing it. And uh the people that are they they're doing the thing and they're talking about it instead of like just doing the thing and and not talking about it. And so there are probably many more people out there who have similar attributes to what I just described. But if you don't talk about it, if you don't share your things either like on social, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, whatever, no one knows about it. And so I would like really encourage people just to like start putting themselves out there, start sharing. It's probably the most impactful thing I've done to grow my career is just like be vocal and be present in whatever kind of like community you're in. And do you mean that in terms of like sharing on sites like Reddit and LinkedIn, but also public speaking? How how big a part has that been of your mix? Yeah, I think I think the public speaking kind of follows from the first one of no one's going to invite you to go speak at a conference if they don't know you exist and they find out you exist because you post on LinkedIn. Like you can you can always apply to speak at these things, but if people have seen you and heard you, I think you're much more likely to get approved to to speak. And so I think by starting just like sharing on Reddit or LinkedIn or Twitter, wherever you feel most comfortable, I think that's a good baseline that could lead to speaking opportunities down the road. Um, which is exactly kind of the path I took to. Yeah. Awesome. So when we're thinking about like Profound's Marketing Mitch and and how you've scaled this over time, how has it been with the leadership team getting buying from James to do all of the things that you want to do to expand the team? Has that been like a yeah, let's just go or have you had to actually negotiate a couple of different things to get the strategy you wanted off the ground? Yeah. Um, from a like a strategy perspective, James was was pretty bought in from the the beginning. He's very kind of like socially native. Um, I think the if I could like toot my own horn for a second, I think the biggest win I had early on or profound is when we were interviewing, I was like, you should hire me of course, but then you also need a product marketer. like I you can compound my work if you hire a product marketer. And I kind of outlined exactly how they would work together, how their inputs drive everything I do from competitor like ads, landing pages, keywords, messaging, positioning, all that PMM work drives growth work later. And so I truly had to convince James of what a product marketer is, what they do, how to find a good one. And so, um, I was able to do that and we found our first product marketer, his name's Trevor. And then we've now hired three more. Like, our marketing team is very stacked towards product marketing and now they're kind of specialized into like pre-sales, post sales, customer enablement. Um, which I think is absolutely the right the right move for a team. Like me and on the growth side, I can move very quick. I can be nimble, but we need someone to really specialize and work with like customers and sales and all that stuff. Um, I think product marketing is one of the like most crucial roles in any company right now. Certainly for one like Profound where our industry is very competitive and there's a million other like small versions of Profound out there. Um, and so like convincing him of the value of a product marketer and then once he got it, it was instant. He was like, "Okay, now let's hire pre-sales. Now let's hire post sales." Like every function of the business needs a product marketer, which I think is the dream because that job is so hard to measure. And um yeah, some CEOs and some leaders just don't get it and I'm thankful that James does. That's amazing. Awesome to hear how like the team has been growing so quickly and to also have buyin from the leadership is amazing too. Let's talk a bit about like what Profound actually does. So you're an AI search tracking tool. We work with lots of different businesses, brands across all sorts of industries so that they can measure essentially how they're performing in CHBT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other LLMs, which comes with loads of challenges. One of the first ones being it's such a new concept to a lot of businesses. They first have to wrap their head around why even be measuring that, which is presumably a core challenge of the marketing team, communicating that that situation to them. How involved are you in educating the customers that are coming to you? Yeah. Um I am surprisingly very involved in educating the customers. Um you earlier on I took a side quest and I became a salesperson at Profound for about six weeks. Um it was it was a function of we had too many leads and not enough salespeople to take them. And so I just I I stood up our automat automated lead scheduling routing system ourselves. And so one day I just like put myself in the lead routing queue and just started getting demos booked on my calendar. Uh did that for about six weeks. Took about like 60 demos of profound give or take and um yeah was very involved there. I've since retired, put my sales cap away, but and I still do get brought into to sales sales deals quite often. Um, I was on site with one last week. Um, I've met with like three CMOs last week as part of a sales process. And, um, it's so rewarding and so fun as a marketer to get to work at Profound and then go talk to other marketers who are having these kind of same challenges um, that we are. And I just come from like I think I come from a very authentic place of I'm the subject matter expert who also happens to work at Profound. And so I'm using our accounts to increase our own AI visibility, citations. I'm using our new workflows, products to like automate content creation, content orchestration, things like that. And so when you have someone internally who can kind of talk the lingo of your customer too, it just makes so much sense to deploy them in all of these places. And then I get the dopamine hit of when we close a deal, uh, we have a Slack channel that all the new deals get posted in and the AEES will tag everyone who helped contribute to the deal and my name comes up pretty often. Like that's just a really fun and rewarding thing to be a part of, too. Oh, that's so amazing. You're really closing the gap between uh marketing and sales. I also think working in sales is some of the best customer research that exists. just going back to having conversations with them and understanding what are the challenges they're facing dayto-day and how like how what their need is. How can the business actually help them is some of the most important information that marketers can can get from the customers that you speak with? Do you see that there's like common challenges across different customers? Is it very different for the very big brands compared to the challenger brands that come to you? Yeah, what what I found is it kind of like stair steps up based on company size. And so small companies are just trying to be visible. They just want to be mentioned in the answer at all, like yes or no. And then kind of like midsize companies, they care more about if they're controlling the narrative or not. Meaning, how often is their domain, is their content cited in an answer. And so like that becomes like level two. If level one is just are you mentioned, then level two is like you're mentioned and your domain is cited the most in your space. You're kind of controlling the narrative. Your POV of whatever industry is what's being pulled through more often to AI search. The next layer is sentiment. And so, okay, like we're being cited, but when people ask us like, oh, how do you compare to this brand? Or like, is your brand good? Yes or no? Uh, that's kind of like the next the next level up, too. And so you do visibility, citations, and then overall sentiment. And then the last thing, which we found like our largest largest like Fortune 10, Fortune 100 companies care about is accuracy. And so it's more about like if you know if I'm if I'm Samsung like does and someone asks like what colors does the you know S22 or S23 or whatever one they're on right now come in. What megapixels does the camera have? Yes or no? um they really care about those kind of answers being accurate. And so it kind of like levels up and kind of peing at accuracy. Um and so that's kind of like I think every company can kind of pick, you know, focus on your your thing first and then nail that and then level up from there. I absolutely love that. It's interesting because of course our team uses Profound for the work that we do on our clients as well. And we see similar sorts of challenges at the the smaller challenger businesses who want to show up in the right kind of search results in AI. They want to show up for the the right kind of prompts that are actually going to get to their customers ultimately hopefully lead to a buying journey and have that as a touch point in there if not the final touch point which is for some of our customers very much what what happens. Whereas the bigger businesses, they're thinking so much more about sentiment and just as you were saying there and how the sentiment affects them. One of the clients that we work with, for example, came to us because they were searching themselves in AI and realizing that they were never described as innovative and they work as part of the corporate team who of course have to appeal to investors at that sort of scale of enterprise marketing and communication as well. and they were thinking my goodness if AI doesn't think we're innovative and an investor ever wrote our name into chat GPT to ask information about you know what we've been doing the new research that we put out and it doesn't call us innovative that's ultimately not going to get us the investment that we want long term so it's interesting I think from that that small end of solving the problem of how does a business actually make sales get customers from AI versus even that that corporate scale the communication how are positioned. How are we known in the market? How are we compared to our competitors? Like the challenges that are coming up in AI is so much broader compared to what SEOs know from the old days of how do we just get to the top of Google. Yeah, exactly. And then with sentiment, you can see what pages are being cited. Um, and more often than not, for what I found is in profound, you can filter citations by the sentiment prompts we run or the open-ended prompts like what's the best tax software or whatever. Um, and social platforms, Reddit are like way overindexed on the sentiment side because it's people, you know, probably complaining in some subreddit of like, oh, this price is too high or this thing or I don't think this company is very, you know, innovative and um, it gives you a different lens into like not just like are you mentioned in an AI response, but like what is the context of of that mention, is it positive or negative? And you kind of like drill down and figure out the source too. Love that. So, speaking about some of the world's biggest brands, is there anything you see that they're still not doing enough of that you think smaller challenger brands could be taking advantage of when it comes to AI search? Like when it comes to all of the tool suite that you have, all of the data you have, everything you see about what businesses are actually doing. Yeah, I think the the lowest hanging fruit for any company and it's easy. It's there's more fruit for a big company than a small company here is just adopting FAQs. FAQ content, FAQ schema is the easiest way to kind of serve up answers to an LLM on a silver platter because people are asking it questions and you know they match a question to an answer and you're much more likely to be cited. Uh, Web Flow has seen great success adding FAQs to basically all of their product pages, all of their pages on their site. And kind of why I say big brands can be more effective here is because they have larger footprints, multiple product lines. Uh, they might be a global business instead of like a small US-based startup. And so they have more surface area to kind of add FAQs to. It seems really simple, really easy. It it definitely is, but it's been proven to work. And so if you can get buy in and do it quickly, um I have no doubt that a large company who just starts adding FAQs to all different parts of their website, you know, provided like high quality content, it makes sense, all that stuff. Um I think they they could see amazing results just just doing that for a quarter or ideally less time a month. the uh buyin that you just mentioned there is probably one of the biggest issues that marketers grapple with if they're working at sort of CMO, marketing manager, even marketing VP sometimes or if they're very specifically an SEO lead in the business, getting that buyin from senior stakeholders who might not be fully up to date with what's happening in AI search, might not have experimented in this sector themselves, even if they are and I'm sure they are very familiar with ChachiBT Gemini using those kinds of tools themselves. What kind of advice would you give those people to get that buy in at a higher level? Yeah, I think where like I've managed a bunch of SEOs in in the past both at Loom and Mail Gun and prior gigs and SEOs get so in the weeds and so technical and they want to send their boss a gigantic spreadsheet of all the keywords and impressions that they pulled. um when you know once you get to the director or VP level like they don't really care they care about the problem of like is my hair on fire right now or no um and so I found that like the most effective people internally are the ones who are best at telling their boss that like something is on fire and then you also tell them but it's okay I found this solution and like here's what we need to do to fix it and so it's kind of about painting that that picture um there was like a very large company who was in the profound office last week uh who used more or less the exact same analogy of like we have to go to our team and tell them that like this is a true emergency that we're losing an AI search where our biggest competitor is winning. They had to paint this like true hair on fire moment and then they're like, "Okay, but then if we go use profound, here's what we can do. Here's how quickly we can combat this. Here's like the hiring shifts we need we need to make." Um, and so I think it's definitely it's definitely a skill that you have to learn as you kind of ascend and grow in your career of like not just doing your job, but marketing your job to internal stakeholders and directors and VPs and being able to communicate problems effectively and then not only that, but you've already found the solution and it's X or whatever. Um, which is it's it's a different skill than just learning how to do SEO in the first place. Absolutely. I often think so much of our careers and our jobs is marketing. So so much more of it than we think is marketing, which is kind of an irony for everyone who works in marketing. Then you've also got the personal marketing side, the yeah stakeholder buying side, all of that. And if you manage a team as well, there's the the side of how you get your team also involved and excited about what you're actually doing and the marketing strategies that you're you're pushing forward with as well. There's just so much going on when it comes to that. It doesn't come easy to marketers either. Like we're good at marketing everyone else's thing, but we're not good at turning the mirror back on oursel, which is this really weird problem that we have. Like this is our job to do this, but doing it for ourselves like somehow feels strange. Um, but if you can kind of like dispel yourself of that and start to like market yourself effectively, I think you'll see that compound across your career and internally and all those things. One of my team members gave a great piece of advice the other day that was just assume that cringe doesn't exist. There is no concept of cringe. That is not a thing. And you'll find it so much easier to actually do the personal marketing side of it if you just get rid of that that belief system that concept all together. Yeah. So yeah, Nick, you touched on there a couple of points where a client or some a prospect that you were speaking to has been getting buying by actually showing some of the metrics inside profound. For anyone who's listening that's not familiar with what profound looks like, can you take us through what are the kind of key headline metrics that they might be able to get about their business in profound that would support with their AI search marketing strategy long term? Yeah, there's there's a couple of things. And so it starts, I think, with figuring out what prompts to track um e in profound. And so we have a database. It's now like 1.5 billion real user conversations that we have that you can you can search. And um my favorite example is I was searching Taylor Swift when her and Travis got engaged. And like you can see by week how many people are searching for topics like that. There was this massive spike in Taylor Swift searches. All the Swifties. Yes. Exactly. Everyone everyone wanted to know. And so we'll show you the topics and the actual prompts that people put in. And so you can use those to then inform like what topics do I track, what prompts do I track, and then roughly how many people are searching for these things. That kind of helps you build the priority road map of like, okay, this topic has way more prompt volume than the other one. So we should start here and optimize this one first. And so then in the background, once you configure your prompts, we'll run them across nine different answer engines. uh give you a nice snappy UI to click through and see all the results of what prompt was run in what location. We support like 80, 90, 100 different locations, meaning we'll run the prompt from that location as well. Um, you can toggle and look at your visibility, so how often your brand was mentioned, look at citations, how often your domain was cited, and then uh there's a few other things, but we have basically all of this data that then we now pulled into our new workflows product, which is our content creation, content orchestration suite to where we can say, hey, let's pull in the 10 20 most cited pages for this prompt on chat GPT in the US. We'll analyze them and tell you what what do they do well? What headings do they use? What structure is it? Tables, bullet points, how do they like what words do they use in their headings? Uh and then we'll give you a content outline that says, "Hey, here's what you need to write about. Here's how you structure your post to, you know, rank very highly in, you know, these answers." And then now we're starting to automate that whole process where you can build think like a Zapier kind of like multi-step workflow of like this happens and then this and then maybe we can do perplexity deep research and then like very shortly we're adding CMS integrations. And so then you can go all the way from like analysis to content brief to create the content to now publish it in uh sanity in WordPress in web flow kind of like all end to end. And then uh the last sneak peek is we're adding Slack alerts too. So imagine you build this workflow you get to the end and it says hey your content is done ping Nick or ping Charlie in Slack to approve it. yes or no, you click approve and then it just gets published to your CMS right away. And so that's kind of like the automation suite that we're building and would be core to profound for this year. That's absolutely amazing. Honestly, it's such a powerful tool suite and it sounds like there are plans to make it even more powerful than it already is. Um, anyone who's listening that hasn't checked it out, I highly recommend jumping into Profound and actually having a play and a look at it. just loading a couple of prompts even to start with so that you can see what it looks like and the kind of data you get back. It's well worth it. Nick, I have to ask you, you are doing so much in the business. Like you're running these events, you're running the marketing team, you're hiring people, training them into the team, you're on podcast webinars. I've seen you public speaking as well. How do you have any semblance of personal life around work? Yeah, it's it it's a challenge. I think life life comes in in phases and this is my like, you know, do everything kind of moment right now. Um there's like there's two things I do is uh I wake up early uh and so I wake up at 5 5:30 in the morning. I uh prioritize fitness in my day. And so uh I'm at the gym at 6 6:30 a.m. I've been there quite literally every single day in the month of January when we're recording this so far. Not not every month is like that. this is a special month where I'm trying to just like check every day um for whatever crazy reason. Um and so that's that's all the the pre-work stuff of like, you know, prioritize yourself before I get to work. Um and then once I'm here, I think the thing I do well that other people don't do well is I block my calendar and then I am an aggressive decliner of meetings. Um if you invite me to something and don't give me context, like I will decline and just not show up. Um, and like because I'm I play kind of hard to get and like by doing that like it I I add friction to like how people can come and interact with me, which means that like the stuff that really matters, like the things that really need my involvement or I need to show up for or client meetings or whatever, the person will just come and find me and they'll be like, "Hey, Nick, I have this thing. Here's what I need from you." Because I think like work and people default to kind of like the easiest option. And so if people if people realize they can just add you to calendar meetings and you just show up then like that will just happen. But like by placing some friction in kind of make everyone work for it which means they have to kind of fight and like really convince me that this thing is worth it in person. It's the benefit of me being in person at the profound office all day. Um and like that has helped me prioritize things uh by just adding that little bit of friction into it. What's your personal criteria for the meetings that you do accept? What makes it through? Yeah. Like usually it's really obvious of like the it's the business case is obvious. But like more often than not, what happens is that if I decline a meeting and no one comes and finds me, then like I didn't need to be in that meeting anyway. like if I really needed to be there and they see I'm not going to be there, they will come and find me and be like, Nick, you need to come to this and here's why and like that act of them doing that is the signal for me of like okay I am required to be here. Um otherwise like that's maybe like half of them if if less and so I think like that's like just say no is I think a powerful tactic. Brilliant. I absolutely love that. Just absolute brutal calendar blocking and meeting declining. Yeah, it's your biggest growth hack at work and everyone is so nice. Everyone wants like your default as a human. You want to help. You want to be nice and like that's good, but then your your calendar, your day ends up being crazy and you prioritize other people's events or time over like what you think you should be doing that actually moves the needle. And so, um, yeah, just just say no. Brilliant. Last question. If you could send a text message back to yourself on the day that you started your career, Nick, what growth advice would you send to yourself? What would you say? Oh my gosh, that's a such a good question. Um, I think based on my career and where I have seen the most growth and success, I think the advice I would give me on my first day is ask for forgiveness, not for permission, which is like maybe not the best generic advice, but like I can look back and reflect on my career and like all the big spikes, the big moments, like the my biggest wins often have all come from things that I had strong gut intuition of like I need to go do this. I should I want to go do this thing and then I just go do it and tell my boss about it later. And there's a bunch of like context and like it depends kind of like wrapped all within that. like in general like I think biasing towards action of like doing the thing instead of biasing towards like thinking, asking, planning um and like just the action part has always worked better for me than if I spent like ages mapping something out, planning, asking for permission to do a thing. Um and so I think like the more you can just like go and do it um is that's like every time I've done that I've been more successful. I love that. Sounds like uh you bring the same mindset upwards as well as to your own team as well. Take the action and uh if you need to talk about it later then they will find you. Yes. Exactly. Like again I I just hired someone was like I would just do things like I would rather you do nine thing do 10 things and fail at nine of them than do two things only fail at one of them. like I want you to be trying and and failing and just like moving faster. You'll you'll like get to the right conclusion, the right growth hack, the whatever it is much faster if you just make lots of smaller decisions quicker. Um and so, uh yeah, I truly believe it. Amazing, Nick. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your advice, your marketing strategy thoughts, your personal growth, all of it. If people want to find you, they want to find out more about Profound, where should they go? What should they do? Yeah, if you want to find me, uh, find me on on LinkedIn, um, would love to connect and say hi. And then, um, yeah, go go go look up Profound. Try profound.com. Um, I'm sure you'll see us around on LinkedIn at conferences. We'll be at brighten SEO. Uh, yeah, look out for a big zeroclick announcement for us from us pretty soon, too. Fantastic, Nick. Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks, Charlie.