Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Some agencies win clients by inviting decision makers to Formula One boxes, but Neil prefers the way banks play the wine and dining game. Bank of America sent his CFO to a World Cup game with the hotel paid, and Wells Fargo offers suites and seats after the deal is done, just to say thanks. Then a competing bank tried to match Wells Fargo's refinance offer at the last minute, after months of saying no. Eric shares a group text pitch dressed up as comparing notes, and Neil tells the worst pitch he's heard: a financial advisor chasing a friend's $25M house sale and eight-figure profit with one cherry-picked account and a stock that barely moves down. A blunt episode on relationships and selling. Key takeaways ◾Thank-you tickets with no pitch keep clients around ◾Match the offer early, because last-minute fixes come too late ◾Be direct when you sell, and show all your numbers Chapters 00:00 The wine and dining game 00:47 Competitors win clients with Formula One boxes 01:30 Bank of America sent our CFO to the…

Eric built thumbnail, editing and posting skills, and his long-form YouTube videos went from about 500 views to 15,000 to 25,000. Some of the team wouldn't use them, so they had to let people go, and the one person who stepped up is now fixing the Marketing School channel's trends, thumbnails and 30-second retention. Neil says AI optimizes for average, which still beats a below-average team, but you need humans in the loop. They cover Bain's 94% stat, why Neil would rather hire great marketers and teach them AI, and a senior SEO candidate who read straight off a Claude template. Then Neil's Zappos story, how Uber outspent Lyft, why AI rewards whoever raises billions, and Neil's Muse outreach to M&A advisors. An honest episode on AI skills and hiring. Key takeaways ◾Skills only work when someone spends real time tuning them ◾Hire people who stay curious and put their best foot forward ◾Small touches like Zappos' overnight shoes build loyalty Chapters 00:00 We got more views by firing 00:51 Skills took Eric's…

Someone added $500K in ARR in a week by putting their app in ChatGPT plugins, and Eric wants Carrot, Answer the Public and Ubersuggest in there too. Neil says that at scale, plugins help retention more than revenue. He's also seeing clients arrive with business problems instead of asks, like revenue down 6% and leads down 32%, and Eric says that grows the market for agencies. Then customer service as marketing: a SpaceX growth lead fixing Grokbot before a webinar, On refunding an order without telling Eric, and Neil's Marriott check-in. They compare the Ritz-Carlton's budget to go beyond policy with Airbnb's 9-star idea, then trade travel tips on room service, compression bags and Sterling Pacific luggage. A practical episode on plugins and service. Key takeaways ◾ChatGPT plugins are a distribution channel worth building for ◾Pitch the fix for the client's business problem, whatever the channel ◾Bending policy to fix a mistake earns word of mouth Chapters 00:00 Plugins add $500K in ARR 01:13 Neil: plugins…

It's Q4, so Eric and Neil run through their business and marketing highlights and lowlights for the year. Eric's win was hiring AI-native people after learning he couldn't train everyone, and Neil's was the lowest churn in a long time. Neil explains bankruptcy clawbacks, where the lawyers always win, with FTX legal fees near $700M, and how tariffs and war cut client budgets. Eric's team now makes and manages bots, including one that shortlists recruits every day. On marketing, YouTube is bringing enterprise leads, Neil found out he did 12.7M views in 30 days, and Gavin Baker reports 80% of token spend has flipped to open-weight models. Eric covers outbound, wedges and Higgsfield's weekly launches, and Neil explains why he wants the chill life. A candid look back at the year. Key takeaways ◾Hire adaptable, AI-native people instead of trying to train everyone ◾Let bots handle evaluation work like recruiting shortlists ◾Test lots of ideas cheaply, then back the ones with traction Chapters 00:00 Q4 business…

How to grow a YouTube channel with AI, win clients with the wine and dining game, and use ChatGPT plugins for growth. Eric's AI skills for thumbnails, editing and posting took his long-form views from about 500 to 15,000 to 25,000, and the people who wouldn't use them had to go. Neil says AI optimizes for average, and they cover hiring and why AI rewards whoever raises billions. Then the wine and dining game: Formula One boxes, Bank of America and Wells Fargo tickets, and a financial advisor's pitch after a friend's $25M house sale. Next, ChatGPT plugins adding $500K in ARR, clients arriving with leads down 32%, and service stories from Grokbot, On and Marriott. They finish with Q4 highlights and lowlights, from recruiting bots to Neil's 12.7M views in 30 days. The whole conversation in one place. Key takeaways ◾Skills only work when someone spends real time tuning them ◾Thank-you tickets with no pitch keep clients around ◾Pitch the fix for the client's business problem, whatever the channel Chapters 00:00…

Why versus pages are your secret SEO weapon. Noah Kagan shipped 19 SEO pages from a $20 Mac app and got six sales in three days, and Eric breaks down the two page types every product needs: versus pages and best-for guides. Neil adds two fixes, getting other sites to publish them and comparing the brands ChatGPT and Claude already recommend, and says comparison pages drive more revenue than listicles. Then Instinct: 10% daily growth, 40% of users adding a card, and why Neil would sell it to Apple. Sam Lessin says there is no moat in AI agents, Neil's Muse test turns hundreds of drafts into three sent emails, and Outrank's data shows sites with 400+ links got 115% more Google clicks. A practical episode on SEO and AI agents. Key takeaways ◾Build versus and alternative pages for the competitors AI already cites ◾AI agents have little loyalty, so the product has to keep earning it ◾Linkable assets still move Google clicks Chapters 00:00 Noah Kagan's 19 SEO pages and 6 sales 01:16 Neil: get other sites to…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil's team won a $6M, three-year SEO contract without talking about SEO: they pitched the business problem, the board's numbers and the ROI. Eric reads the September jobs report, 29,000 jobs against a 90,000 forecast, and they agree that without AI growth the economy would be in recession. Neil shares a grocery bill and a moment at Target, and his plan to stop taxing people under $100K. Then agents: Latin America's biggest retailer, optimizing for LLMs to choose you, and Eric's Meta agent haggling 40% off an order from On. Eric covers OpenAI's Dots and its new distribution channels to 1 billion monthly users, and they close on X Money's 6% offer. A grounded episode on selling in hard times. Key takeaways◾Pitch the business outcome, not rankings or links◾Optimize for AI agents to choose…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire AI labs are paying millions of dollars for company data through third parties, so should you sell yours? Neil says it depends on the business model, and Eric warns the labs will use that data to compete with you. Then a Bain study: only 6% of marketers say AI has had a significant impact on performance. Eric explains why that matches the top slice of any company, Neil shares the three places AI is actually winning for clients, and an a16z chart shows just 2.2% of households pay for AI. They explain why they stopped hiring clippers after YouTube's originality update, why niche videos bring qualified leads, and how Neil now picks topics from his sales pipeline. An honest episode on data and content. Key takeaways◾Do not sell data that lets the labs compete with you◾AI only pays when it is…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Instinct, the AI agent that lives in iMessage, is growing 10% a day, and Eric says its 23-year-old founder proves you do not need a personal brand to win. Neil explains why personal brands worked five years ago, why Neil Patel Digital became NP Digital to cut key man risk, and why shoppers now switch brands on a dime. Eric shares DHH's talk on all the things his team no longer does, and the OpenRouter chart where agents use 7.5 trillion tokens against 1 trillion for humans. Then the bill arrives: finance teams pushing back on AI spend, a friend burning $14K a day on tokens, and Hormozi's memo capping his team's AI budget. They close on hiring AI-native people who can keep up. A sharp episode on brand and AI spend. Key takeaways◾People buy the product now, not the founder's personal…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric shares how Cody Schneider works as an AI-native marketer, and Neil talks about his interview on Cole Gordon's show and why research is what separates a good interview. Then Neil says out loud that his personal brand is dying, judged by fewer photo requests at events, and Eric explains it with the four burners theory and the shift from social media to interest media. They talk about the content an experienced operator should make, why Neil keeps playing the game, and Eric's travel stats. The close covers why brand takes ten years or more, YouTube's coming thumbnail tests by audience segment, and Clay's CEO on why brand has to start with the founder, not the CMO. An honest episode about brand, time and attention. Key takeaways◾Interest media rewards the post, not the follower count◾A…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric shows the Jev use cases he is running for his teams, from classifying every Instagram follower to scoring hooks and offers across competitors for a few dollars. Neil explains how his Muse agent now writes the follow-ups on M&A deals he first discussed two or three years ago, and why he gives Meta access he would never give the AI labs. Eric predicts Google and Apple will each ship their own Muse, and they compare it with OpenClaw. Then the story of an AI answer nobody checked and why Neil told them he would fire the person, followed by the core idea: AI is leverage, and leverage on a bad position just loses you money faster. They close on an $80M real estate pitch Neil walked away from. A practical episode on putting AI agents to work. Key takeaways◾Classification at scale now costs…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric brings Peter Diamandis's take that Nvidia's greatest moat, CUDA, is leaking now that AI can port code to any chip, and why Jensen bought Mellanox years ago to own the interconnect instead. They debate the three moats that survive: speed of reinvention, capital velocity and brand. Neil keeps brand, drops capital after Harry Stebbings' three rounds in three weeks, and adds talent density, showing six of the top ten companies come from the Bay Area. Then Meta Muse: the $14B Scale bet Neil admits he would never have made, Eric's bot Doodoo picking his wardrobe, and Muse plus Jev sorting 116,000 followers for $3.30. It ends on the personality test that explains the show. A sharp episode on what still protects a business. Key takeaways◾Your moat lasts until the next one; speed of…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Shopify's Tobi Lutke has a name for AI work nobody reviewed: a slop grenade. Eric explains how it lands on your desk and blows up your day, and Neil says AI simply reveals who is lazy and who is great. At his conferences almost everyone uses AI, but fewer than 5% edit what it writes, which is why so much marketing now looks the same. They build a policy on air: an emailed warning, then a write-up, then termination, and Eric argues growth only comes from discomfort, from SpaceX to training to failure. The episode closes on a 64-year-old SEO who spent $40K on his own AI rigs because nobody had to tell him to. A blunt episode on standards in the AI era. Key takeaways◾AI amplifies what is already there, good work and lazy work alike◾Fewer than 5% of people edit AI output; that is why it all…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil explains why he despises coaches who sell how to get rich, and Eric separates them from the Bill Campbells and Matt Mocharys who coached Apple, Google, Coinbase and OpenAI without charging founders. Neil reads a cold pitch promising him an extra million a year and Eric dissects why it fails before the first reply. Then the two ideas Eric wants every operator to react to: supermemory killed its viral company brain to protect its core, because unshipping matters more than shipping when anyone can build anything, and Paul Jun of Ramp's brand as software, where a design file carries the brand into every asset so designers do the new work. Neil's take on ChatGPT agent ads, and BugBasher, the Devin agent Ramp gave a card and a phone that made $75 selling pest-control leads in four weeks. A…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eight Sleep's co-founder says the company does close to $100 million in email marketing with a team of zero after his co-founder built the bots in three days. Neil calls spades spades: email is harvesting demand that other channels paid for, and one person plus AI would beat both. Eric's version is the agent manager, the job he now interviews for. They scroll Harry Stebbings' Instagram, built on tech's most controversial stories, and debate whether that brings a VC the right deal flow. Eric demos Instinct, the $10 billion iMessage agent that planned his travel and got him onto a waitlist that morning, and the pair take apart Roy Lee's Cluely content and the cold TikTok bio a fan made of Neil. The close: Elon, Buffett and Rockefeller became brands by doing the work. A candid episode on…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric opens with Bryan Johnson's team telling creators to forget the content calendar and iterate, and how he now rewrites and reposts flopped posts by voice on the walk to the gym. Neil's newest test asks viewers to comment for a free audit, and the pairing metric he wants on every social hire is leads, not views. Then enterprise specifics: a three-year contract that grew out of work in one region, why only two to three percent of NP Digital's enterprise revenue traces back to Neil's personal brand, and how ten-person search agencies quietly decide the biggest marketing contracts. Eric opens his Leveling Up channel to show the wide-TAM experiment, 8.9 million views on one short and interviews that got praise from entrepreneurs' spouses but no leads, before Neil explains the acquisition…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric and Neil open on Meta Muse, Meta's new autonomous agent, and Neil explains why he trusts Meta with it more than OpenAI or Anthropic: Meta has held everyone's data for years and people already live inside its products. Eric shows what his own Muse did in minutes, pulling Ryan Deiss's best Instagram formats and rewriting them for his channel, and argues that formats are now the job. Then the real debate: Neil says almost all of their content is still too broad, that specific content for a specific buyer drives revenue even at a fifth of the views, and that a room of enterprise marketers in Ecuador proved it when two or three percent knew he ran an agency. They land on a secondary hook, one line that says who you are and what your company does, placed wherever it sounds natural. A…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire It took 64 clicks to buy a Tesla online, 30 of them signing loan documents. Eric explains the five-step algorithm from the book of the same name (question, delete, simplify, speed up, automate) and how it 20x'd Tesla's website sales. Then the data: AI-generated ads are beating human creative on completion rate (92% vs 90% on connected TV), Shopify's Q2 shows $116 billion in GMV and a platform built for AI agents, and Neil's case that SEO and GEO are merging into one thing, brand. Eric on the new agents he is testing, Instinct and Meta Muse, and the week's grand finale: Rohan Nayak's post on how Pocket FM went from zero to $500 million in ARR with an AI ad machine that makes 17,500 ads a month. Key takeaways◾Question, delete, simplify, speed up, then automate; most people automate first…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric and Neil open up their own marketing week. Eric's $250 test assignment that turned into a $2,000 quote, the GrokBots he built in his free time (a call bot that phoned a spa and confirmed a booking, a haggle bot renegotiating every software bill, and a speed-to-lead bot that calls every form fill within 60 seconds), and the 2x2 he uses to decide which agency work becomes a reusable workflow and which gets killed. Neil on speed to learning, why wins on one channel take too long to reach the rest of the company, and how he finds agencies that stopped growing and buys the ones losing deals only because they are too small. Then the social tests: Neil's new screen-share format and LinkedIn engagement scraping, Eric's comment-to-DM flow with Lead Shark and Goji Berry, and the YouTube video…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Nike's market cap peaked at $280 billion in 2021 and has lost $223 billion since. Eric walks through Trung Phan's breakdown of how it happened: McKinsey advised Nike to eliminate its running, basketball and soccer categories, the marketing budget moved from brand advertising to programmatic retargeting, and hundreds of wholesale partners were cut for a direct-to-consumer bet that collapsed when shoppers went back to stores. Neil on why consultants who never ran a business should not be running yours, and why a kid asking for Nikes is what good brand advertising looks like. Then LeBron James' Polymarket partnership and why both hosts call it brand eroding, and the shirtless YouTuber Eric calls the Sam Sulek of e-commerce. Key takeaways◾Nike cut what worked (categories, brand ads, retail…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive says agency owners are dishonest about how business is really going, and that most have been flat for three or four years. Eric reads the post and Neil agrees the downturn started around 2022 and is the longest he has seen, then explains why NP Digital kept growing anyway. Eric's take: the agencies dying are the ones still doing what they did five years ago, and tough markets are exactly when adaptable founders win the deals against the holding companies. The episode closes on the part of being a founder nobody talks about: watching the people you trained go on to build their own companies, why mindset separates the people who survive the downs, and why a business win feels the way it does. Key takeaways◾Be honest about how business is going; it keeps…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric asks Neil to finally explain digital PR and how it helps with AEO and SEO. Neil gets there via a Huawei phone with a screen on the back, how ByteDance ran AI inside Lark two years before the rest of us, where America really ranks in K-12 education (34th, per Google AI Mode), what China mandates instead, and the FOMO playbook behind Alpha School's marketing. Then the answer: digital PR is the new link building, you're optimizing for the mention, not the link, and you want your product included everywhere the models read. They close on the only marketing advantage that compounds: consistency. Key takeaways◾Digital PR is optimizing for the mention, not the link. That's what the models read◾America ranks 34th in K-12; China mandates 9 years and tracks 40% into vocational…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire New Ramp data says 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise revenue comes from 1% of their customers, a concentration risk unseen in any other software category. Eric and Neil dig into what that means for the AI trade and for every company betting on it. Then Tomasz Tunguz's five-year writing data: AI didn't reduce his editing, it raised the quality floor, and the weakest posts gained twice as much as the strongest. Plus ICONIQ's headcount report (the 100%+ growers added 133% more headcount while the 50-100% band cut hiring almost in half), YC's product-market-fit data on user conversations, and a detour into foldable phones. Key takeaways◾1% of customers drive 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise revenue. That's the risk◾AI raises the floor of your work, it doesn't shrink the…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric introduces the new AEO: Autonomous Engine Optimization, the AI harness Nick Eubanks used to grow a 12-week-old website, and why every sales call and customer conversation inside your company is a page waiting to be published. Then the self-improving product has arrived: Amplitude's Wave agent found its own problems and shipped fixes worth +160% engagement and a 6% to 9% onboarding lift. Eric and Neil also pick apart OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra launch, the five things that took Andrew Warner's new YouTube channel to 937,000 views in a month, how B2B buyers now find agencies through Claude, and why the best salespeople sell like doctors. Key takeaways◾AEO now means autonomous: content creates, drafts and ships itself with a human in the loop◾Self-improving products are live: Wave found and…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric came back from a founder retreat with a hard truth: the AI hackathons and training programs everyone planned in January didn't work, and the companies pulling ahead just raised the talent bar. He walks through the GitHub leaderboard that shows who's actually shipping, why one 200-engineer company is keeping only its top 40, and Neil's long-held view that you can't train mindset. Then the sycophancy trap: why ChatGPT agrees with whatever you feed it, what Neil found when he ran a real recommendation test across an accounting firm, and why most executives still don't understand how these models work. Key takeaways◾You can't train mindset. Raise the bar and hire people who already have it◾A public shipping leaderboard exposes who's really working in about a week◾AI is a sycophant.…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire What do you actually do when things get really tough in business? Neil and Eric share their worst moments — 2020 included — and the playbook for surviving them: eating the elephant a day at a time, buying time with cash, and choosing stability over growth when it counts. Then the reveal that hot AI startups like Cursor quietly run thousands of ads at a time, and a five-star massage-studio case study on referrals, grandfathered pricing, and service details that carry over into any business. Key takeaways◾Tough seasons are survived a day at a time — systems over panic◾The hottest AI startups test thousands of ads, not two◾Great service businesses engineer referrals on purpose Chapters00:00 When things get really tough09:14 Stability vs growth15:56 The 6,400-ads reveal17:10 The…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric brings the DHH question — outspend or outteach? — and the hosts take sides on the cheapest marketing that almost nobody has the patience to do. Then it gets personal: why Bezos Expeditions invested in Basecamp, whether pressure makes winners, the hairy reality of agency M&A (data rooms, earn-outs, and numbers that never survive diligence), a tale of two agency contractors, and why revenue beats views every single time. A candid operator's episode on teaching, buying, and building agencies. Key takeaways◾Outteaching compounds — it's the free marketing nobody commits to◾In agency M&A, the seller's numbers never survive the data room◾Optimize for revenue, not reach Chapters00:00 Outspend vs outteach: the DHH question01:12 Bezos and Basecamp02:21 Pressure makes winners05:48 The agency…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric react to the report that Chinese institutions turned 171 million public X posts into a million-account digital twin of the American electorate — and are testing political messages on it. They unpack the marketing angle behind cognitive-domain warfare, why the data asymmetry between open and closed internets matters, the Paul Graham chart showing LinkedIn users adding AI and deleting DEI from their profiles, and why following trends is usually the losing move. A sobering look at what happens when audience modeling gets weaponized. Key takeaways◾Audience modeling at nation-state scale is here — and it's a marketing system◾Open platforms hand their behavioral data to anyone, including adversaries◾Profile trends follow incentives: AI in, DEI out Chapters00:00 China's AI models…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric dig into the two lessons Silicon Valley keeps relearning every decade, straight from Ben Thompson's conversation with Patrick O'Shaughnessy: consumers don't want to pay for software, and they don't care about being productive. They trace the pattern from Dropbox's forced pivot to B2B through to OpenAI replaying the same story at 100x scale, why advertising was always the endgame for ChatGPT, whether the SaaSpocalypse is real, and what the future of marketing looks like when AI knows your smartest moments. A sharp episode on where the money in software actually comes from. Key takeaways◾Consumers won't pay for software — advertising is the consumer endgame◾SaaS isn't dying, it's consolidating into B2B◾The next marketing frontier is reaching people in their smart moments…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire It starts with a message Eric got about a team member's wife being hit by a car, and turns into the clearest thing either of them has said about keeping good people. Neil lays out how he thinks about founder retention after an acquisition, they debate what Single Brain should actually be, and Eric closes with the GrokBot marketing playbook. Key takeaways◾How you behave in someone's worst week is the retention strategy. Everything else is a policy document.◾Brand recognition you already have is worth more than the product name you are attached to.◾Multifaceted marketing wins now: shipping fast, engaging in public, DMing influencers and bundling. Chapters00:00 Looking After Your People02:20 Founder Retention Matters05:31 Building Single Brain08:56 GrokBot Marketing Playbook

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil asks Eric to name the two things he is actually doing for the rest of 2026, and the answer is less about tools than you would expect. Along the way they share their own survey of 100 companies on AI agent adoption, and the numbers are far below the hype. Neil also gives away the specific tactic he is using to get cited by ChatGPT and Gemini. Key takeaways◾Of 100 companies surveyed, only 17 use AI agents in marketing at all, and just 3.5% of their marketing staff.◾The fastest route into AI answers is getting into the same articles that already cite your competitors.◾Shipping constantly beats one big launch. Staying top of mind is the strategy. Chapters00:00 Marketing and Hiring Priorities02:55 What Counts as an Agent06:20 2026 Focus Areas10:43 Europe and Service Expansion

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Reddit's citations in ChatGPT have collapsed to almost nothing, and so have the review sites. Eric pulls up the PromptWatch data live and Neil reads what it means for anyone who built a strategy on those placements. Then they turn to the money side: how to underwrite a deal, what a creative agency is really worth, and what Sequoia's 'services are the new software' thesis does to agency valuations. Key takeaways◾Reddit and the big review sites have been almost entirely cut out of ChatGPT's citations.◾The marketer's job is shifting from ranking pages to being the source an AI quotes.◾Founder retention is not one structure. Name which model each founder is actually in before you buy. Chapters00:00 Reddit’s Decline01:57 The Marketer’s Shift04:14 Deal Underwriting Logic07:36 Valuing Creative…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric and Neil open on Travis Kalanick's take on founders, and end up somewhere much less comfortable: the research says the people pushed hardest early on are rarely the ones who end up best. They get into what founder drive actually is, why the two of them handle being crossed differently, how first-principles thinking changes a deal, and the Four Seasons founder's brutal one-line definition of excellence. Key takeaways ◾Being a founder is about pushing, not driving. The title on the org chart is not what makes it work. ◾Across 34,000 top performers, early standouts and eventual world-class performers are almost never the same people. ◾Excellence, per the Four Seasons founder, is the capacity to take pain. Suffering is built into the job. Chapters 00:00 Founder Drive 04:20 Seasons of…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire A cafe in San Francisco lets startups pay to brand the drinks, so you can order an ElevenLatte or a MongoDB Greens. Eric thinks it is genius and cheap. Then the segment everyone will argue about: an Instagram reel showing a brand that does not exist ranked number one on ChatGPT for a real query. Neil and Eric take apart how it was done, why AEO is still SEO underneath, what Kimi's download and DAU curve says about Chinese model adoption, and why the Philippines back office grew instead of collapsing after ChatGPT. Key takeaways◾Brand in the places your buyer already stands, not just the feed◾If you can game it, it is a ranking system, and ranking systems are SEO◾AI made offshore work more valuable, employment is up 20% and revenue up 30% Chapters00:00 Intro Etiquette Matters00:07…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire China is releasing models that are not as good and are good enough, at a fraction of the cost, and getting real penetration in the United States. Neil and Eric work through what that does to pricing, then get to WD-40, which used Amazon's generative video ads to triple daily unit volume with an 86% new-to-brand rate and a 45% higher click-through rate. Eric's answer to every founder asking whether this kills agencies is the same question back: who is going to maintain it. He had that exact conversation with a multi-billion dollar hospitality company this week. Key takeaways◾Good enough at a tenth of the price is a pricing event, not a quality debate◾AI ad production collapses cost per asset, it does not manage the account◾Every founder building agents for each team member is telling you…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Clay Collins predicts the indie hacker is about to get crushed by the direct response marketer who learned to ship software, and Neil and Eric react as two people who have straddled both sides. Their generation sold ebooks and courses because that was the only thing you could build without engineers, and the wall was never talent, it was operational. That wall is gone. They also cover the SBA loan changes worth watching, and then the harder question underneath all of it: if AI does the thinking, what happens to the people who stop wanting to think. Key takeaways◾The engineering advantage evaporated, the marketing advantage did not◾Twenty years of learning how to make strangers care now ships in a weekend◾Cognitive polarization is the real risk, not job replacement Chapters00:00 Content,…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Most SEO starts with keyword research. Neil and Eric start somewhere else entirely: the customer. Neil breaks down audience-first SEO, the approach Single Grain's Nicky Lamb wrote up and the one they have been quietly running for clients. Take wealth management: 2.7 million monthly searches in the US, and almost none of them are one audience. Someone trying to understand the term, someone saving for retirement, a business owner preparing for a sale and an ultra high net worth family are four different buyers behind the same keyword. Then Eric walks through the company brain he is rolling into ClickFlow, and what Atlassian's numbers say about where a SaaS moat actually sits. Key takeaways ◾Start with the ICP, not the keyword list, and the queries sort themselves ◾One high-volume term…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Vercel's Guillermo Rauch says agent-led growth replaces product-led growth: let agents adopt your product first, take meetings only if you have to, and treat months of meetings as the signal that this was never your customer. Eric runs it against the Higgsfield playbook, zero to $400M ARR in fourteen months on daily X launches and thousands of creators posting every day. It closes on Leopold's LP letter, Charlie Munger's three ways to go broke, and what four turns of leverage does to a 20% drawdown. Key takeaways◾If an agent cannot discover, read, and use your product, you are invisible to the next buyer◾Distribution at Higgsfield's pace is a daily habit, not a campaign◾Leverage turns a recoverable drawdown into an unrecoverable one Chapters00:00 From PLG to ALG02:48 AI Distribution…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire A Procter & Gamble study shows every single role is now part marketing and part engineering, whatever the job title says. Eric maps it to the Coinbase pot-of-one idea and admits he builds more than he used to. From there: how Palantir landed and expanded on the cheap with forward-deployed engineers, why today's wow is tomorrow's average, and a long practical walkthrough of running ChatGPT Voice as a hands-free agent that controls the other agents on his machine. Key takeaways◾Every role is converging on part marketer, part builder, regardless of title◾Forward-deployed engineering is a sales motion, not an engineering one◾Voice is the interface that makes an agent stack usable while you do other things Chapters00:00 Everyone Becomes a Builder07:50 AI Changes Workflows12:47 Voice Agents at…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Would you burn an entire year of profit, walk away from your core customer, and bet the company on unproven technology that falls flat for its first twelve months? That is the decision NVIDIA actually made, and Eric walks through it from Thinking Machine. Neil answers honestly. The back half turns personal: Neil is recording from Legoland mid-vacation, and the two get into what it took to actually take the time off, being alone with his kids for the first time, and what that trade looks like when you run a company. Key takeaways◾The bets that look reckless in year one are the ones with no competition in year five◾Founder control is what makes an unpopular decade-long bet survivable◾Time off is an operating decision, not a reward you earn later Chapters00:00 Nvidia's Big Bet04:18 The Sega…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Airtable sold to Bending Spoons for $1.25B in cash, and the internet immediately called it a down round. Eric pulls up Jason Lemkin's numbers and the actual purchase agreement to show what really happened: 3.1x ARR growth since 2021, $900M sitting in the bank, and a reorganization that carved the HyperAgent business out into its own entity before the deal closed. Then Alfred Lin's Empire State Building versus Millennium Tower piece on why speed is the core operating value, and why Jensen Huang has never fired anyone. Key takeaways◾A headline acquisition price tells you almost nothing until you read the reorg clause◾Speed is not a nice-to-have operating value, it is the one that compounds◾Public, brutal feedback can retain people better than quiet firing does Chapters00:00 Airtable Deal…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric listens to two people argue organic content versus paid ads and calls the whole debate stupid, because the answer is both. From there into the ROI of podcasting after nearly ten years of doing this one, using the Forbes highest-paid list as a reality check, and finally why recruiting is higher leverage than managing when you are small. Key takeaways ◾ Content versus paid is a false binary, and the answer is both ◾ Buying growth can beat building it, if you know what you are buying ◾ Recruit better people and you spend less time managing them Chapters 00:00 Content vs paid ads 05:53 The ROI of podcasting 07:53 Sponsor break 10:51 Recruiting beats managing

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire A full, honest audit of their own social strategy. They set a 2025 plan to ramp volume, raise quality and lean more personal, and here they grade it. Neil puts social at two to three percent of attributable revenue, explains why it works for mid-market and SMB but not for enterprise, and makes the point that an enterprise logo on a five thousand dollar contract is not an enterprise deal. Eric breaks down the webinar formats that convert and why he copies proven ones rather than inventing his own. Key takeaways ◾ Social is 2 to 3% of attributable revenue, and still worth doing ◾ Social opens enterprise doors but rarely closes enterprise contracts ◾ Copy the formats that already convert instead of building from scratch Chapters 00:00 Our 2025 social plan vs mid-2026 reality 07:46 Sponsor…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil spends 60 to 70% of his time reaching out to companies to buy, and explains when he wants founders to stay and when he does not, plus where global agency RFPs actually come from. Eric makes the case for open weights in marketing, where models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi K3 cut costs 25 to 100x on high-volume creative work. They then get into what nobody in his AI executive group could answer: how you actually measure the ROI of AI, why token usage is a terrible metric, and why revenue per employee is a better one. Closes on Jensen Huang's first post and Anthropic's MCP release finally being practical for non-technical marketers. Key takeaways ◾ Open weights cut 25 to 100x on high-volume creative, and that is the marketing case ◾ Measure AI on revenue per employee, not on token spend ◾ The…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric open on Google going negative on free cash flow to win the AI race, and ask whether it is a reckless bet or the only move a company with that much distribution can make. They use Naval's point about cheap software pushing value toward vertically integrated businesses to explain why agencies are turning into “brains”, including what the Google Ads team told Eric about traditional agencies this week, and finish on ChatGPT Voice as a genuine daily operating tool rather than a novelty. Key takeaways ◾ Google is spending free cash flow, not spare cash, to win AI ◾ Cheap software moves the value to vertically integrated, opinionated businesses ◾ Voice is turning AI from a tool you open into a system you run the day on Chapters 00:00 Google's AI cash bet 03:40 Naval: cheap…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric ran Sol 5.6 against Fable 5 on real marketing work: an Amazon investment analysis, one-shot website builds, YouTube thumbnails that hit 6-7% CTR, and clip selection with hooks. His verdict: Sol finishes jobs with less back and forth. Neil's rule: never marry one model. Then why 62% direct traffic means brand is working, the AI-native org structure Eric's team published, and both hosts' hiring anti-pitch: passion, standards, and moving fast on people. Key takeaways ◾Judge models on finished jobs, not clever answers ◾Direct traffic is the scoreboard for brand strength ◾Hire people who tell you what to do, and move quickly when it's not working Chapters 00:00 Testing AI Models for Marketing 07:09 Brand Power Drives Direct Traffic 09:29 Building AI-Native Teams 21:04 Hiring, Standards,…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire A VC asked Eric the classic question about SingleBrain: if anyone can build it, what's the moat? His answer: maintenance, optimization, and upgrades are the real business. Then Ben Affleck sells InterPositive to Netflix for $587M in cash: a 16-person team that taught AI how real films are made. Chamath's warning on restricting Chinese AI models, and a full masterclass on networks: the double opt-in, Neil's box-derby story that led to a Hearst introduction, and why you build a network by not trying to. Key takeaways ◾Industry craft is the moat: vertical tools built by people who know the work win ◾Target buyers who pay for outcomes, not tech teams who build in-house ◾Networks compound through genuine relationships, not business cards Chapters 00:00 Netflix Buys AI Startup 07:08 AI Tools…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric shares Sahil Lavingia's chart: June 2026 was the first month Gumroad spent as much on AI tokens as on human payroll. They debate what that means at scale, then dig into Elon's Economist interview: AI timelines, universal income, fear marketing, and why 87% of Chinese respondents are net positive on AI while most Americans are afraid. Eric closes on open-source models catching the frontier and why regulation can't put the genie back. Key takeaways ◾AI spend matching payroll is coming for more companies; the only question is speed ◾Fear is a marketing choice: how leaders talk about AI shapes adoption ◾Open-source models catching up changes the whole regulatory debate Chapters 00:00 Gumroad's AI Payroll Shift 01:59 Elon's AI Future Debate 07:48 Free Markets vs Regulation 08:33 Home…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric brings marketing lessons from Lake Como: a fourth-generation craftsman selling $1,000-quality shoes for $150, and why a couple of grand a month on a hotel display case beats most ad spend. Then the World Cup: Haaland won the brand game, and Beckham proves popularity is not the same thing as profit. Neil shows ChatGPT at 77 on Google Trends vs Claude at 19, while Anthropic wins on revenue. They close on Junior Bridgman's quiet path from NBA bench to $1.4 billion and IM8's billion from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. Key takeaways ◾The best-known brand is not automatically the most profitable business ◾Compounding beats stardom: interest plus time wins ◾Sometimes the right move is not scaling Chapters 00:00 Marketing Lessons from a Lake Como Conference 03:10 World Cup Brand…

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric tested GPT Sol 5.6 against Claude Fable 5 on real marketing jobs: websites, thumbnails, clips, recruiting, and growth analysis. Final score: Sol 4, Fable 0 - even though Fable had better ideas and design. They also unpack Anthropic and Blackstone's $1.5B bet that implementation is the next trillion-dollar AI business, model wars, valuations, and why marketing pressure is finally easing. Key takeaways ◾The new model benchmark is finishing jobs, not sounding smart ◾Implementation, not models, is the next AI gold rush ◾Expectations are normalizing: marketing pressure is easing Chapters 00:00 Sol 5.6 vs Fable 5 and the model wars 08:24 Chips, bottlenecks, and AI demand 09:41 Valuations, PE, and services 18:19 Marketing pressure is easing 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟 Welcome to Marketing School,…