What's up?You're listening to The Long Game, and this is David, co-founder of Omniscient Digital.This week is a Kitchenside episode, where you get a peek behind the scenes into how Alex, Ali, and I think about business and marketing.
In this conversation, we talk about the concept of false consensus bias.We all have it.
It's when you assume that because you have a belief, for example, that you dislike Nickelback, that other people also hold the same belief, that they also dislike Nickelback, which isn't true.
But we all, and especially us marketers, are susceptible to that.And this might get in the way of how well we market to our customers when we project our beliefs onto other people. It also impacts how we relate to other humans in daily life.
We also discussed newish SEO strategies that have taken a hold as AI has gotten more popular.Things like free tools, programmatic SEO, and content localization.
We share some examples of companies we've seen do these things really well and how you might apply them to your own company. And of course, we go on various tangents of debatable relevance because, hey, this is mostly an unfiltered conversation.
So here's this week's Kitchen Side Conversation.
I got halfway through your newsletter to the Comic Sans part, which made me chuckle.
One of my favorite... Well, Andrew Anderson was awesome.He wrote a bunch of guest posts for CXL.He was just such an iconoclast and a contrarian thinker.He was all into removing your own cognitive biases.
He wrote this essay on why your organization is probably going to be against your optimization program.
And he had the best case study of basically doing a site-wide font style test on a massive, huge traffic site where you could actually quantify the impact of something like that.And sure enough, Comic Sans won. So his point was amazing.
He's like, it could just have been called like font variant number five.But because we attach all of these, like this visceral hatred to Comic Sans, you start justifying and making excuses.
You're like, oh, well, like the data suggests blah, blah, blah.And like, maybe the UX is bad.So we couldn't quantify that.And you start doing all of this, like, like exposition around it.But you're like, data says Comic Sans works, right?
Even if you don't like it, seems like people like it.
Yeah, that was surprising.I was I caught myself, once I read that, I was like, I caught myself trying to come up with reasons why it worked and why it shouldn't be used.I'm like, oh God, he's describing me right now.
That was the cool thing about that essay and that idea of false consensus bias is I'm aware of it to the point where I wrote an entire essay about it.Then I put this in the essay too.The other night, Ryan was talking about some idea of
doing a marketing meetup where you go and go to upstate New York and pick apples or something like that.And I was just like, I would never do that.That's too much friction.Get on a bus and spend a whole day with a bunch of marketers.
And then I was like, I'm doing the thing. I've never, I haven't talked to anybody about this idea.Like just because I wouldn't do it doesn't mean other people wouldn't do it.You know what I mean?
We kind of already jumped into this because it's, it's on a list of things we want to talk about.Do you just, I didn't know what this was called before I read your newsletter.So what is it like false consensus bias?
False consensus bias.Yeah.Let's see.This is awesome.Like, ChatGBT is great for definitions, right?I don't even need to Google what is keyword anymore.Hey, you probably get the same answer.False consensus.No, no, no, no.
Because you're going to get a generic answer.But now I can ask ChatGBT to relate it to marketing.Explain false consensus bias to me.Like, I'm 14. and relate it to marketing.
You don't want to do like I'm five and I'll use toys or Legos.
You're in the midst of puberty and here is false consensus bias.
Fourteen is when my emotional and social and cultural development stopped, right?Like Blink-182 released their self-entitled album like a year before that, a self-titled album.And I think Linkin Park was pretty popular around then.
Or wait, 14, that would have been like 2005?Around that time, yeah.2005, yeah.Because I'm 91.Yeah, so 2003 was Blink-182's like self-titled album.Linkin Park, Hybrid Theory was probably 2001-ish. Anyway, I probably capped around that time period.
It's all downhill from here.
So imagine you and your friends all love a particular video game.And because everybody you know likes it, you start thinking that everybody in the world must love this game too.This is an example of false consensus bias.
It's when we believe that our own opinions, preferences, behaviors are more common than they really are because we're surrounded by people who share them. In marketing, this bias can be a problem.
For example, if a marketing team loves a product and assumes everybody else will love it just as much, they might not do enough research to see if people outside their circle feel the same way.
Anyway, you see it all the time because we're in such an echo chamber, especially on LinkedIn.You have all these highly sophisticated buyers and marketers who know how the sausage is made.And you see things like, oh, nobody wants to read ebooks.
Nobody wants to read listicles.Nobody wants boring educational content. And you're like, okay, maybe we don't because we see it all the time.But then there's the other effect, which is you can't even explain your own behavior very well.
Because then I bet if you actually intellectually, honestly go back through your behavior, that you've downloaded an e-book.
I was trying to download one this morning, ironically.I was like, oh, I don't have a PitchBook membership.And I was like, hey, Lisa, you have a membership.Can you get me this PDF download?
That's just the all encompassing language that's annoying, like nobody or everybody.It's like who has the authority to talk with that, that much certainty.
It's just a projection of your own sort of preferences, which are often just a stamp in time too.Because you know how I was doing the
Ali, I was asking you if I should blow up this image that I took in Guatemala, the one with the three people on the summit.I didn't know how to do that.I wanted to make it into a canvas style of sorts.
So I Googled how to make an iPhone photo into a canvas. And it was a blog, like it was a content piece.And I went, I think it was like Frameology or some company like that.And I purchased through them in a single session within 30 minutes, right?
Like, so like last click attribution.I was a person who actually did this.Yeah.
I remember when I think I booked my birthday trip to a blog post over that. I was looking at like, hotels out in the hotel zone in Cancun, or I don't remember the journey, the search journey I went on.
But yeah, booked a resort through a blog post too.Yeah, I feel like it's probably just part if we're talking about LinkedIn, it's got to be part of how folks just like, game the system and try to get engagement, right?
Speaking with larger, like everybody does this, or nobody does this, or my data shows me XYZ, which is usually not data, it's just like glorified opinion.I feel like it's just to game the engagement, get folks.
I don't even think it's intentional.I actually think it's like this deeply embedded human bias that we all have.
And even if you weren't trying to get attention, if you were like saying this to, I think if you were talking to a group of friends, you might have a similar take.Like I,
People just universalize their own experiences because it's very hard to get in the brains of other people, especially when they're not like you.
It's really hard for somebody of a political persuasion to even understand why somebody on the other side of the aisle would believe the things they do.It's not a fundamental disagreement.It's a fundamental, you can't even understand it.
Because it's really hard to do, right?
But it's a conscious choice to take it further and make it part of your like personal brand, or to sit on your like, platform and to make that a part of your, your content, right?Like to take that and then run with it.
I hear you in the bias, though, like mental.Yeah, I have it too.
Well, some of it's probably product marketing, right?Some of it's the whole like, Like, if I'm selling a solution that solves a pain point, I need to dig into that pain point and create an enemy that is like the old way versus the new way.
And in the essay that I wrote, I pulled back from the archives of history, the drift kind of thing where they were like, oh, nobody likes filling out form fields, like forms are dead.And like, forms are fine.
It turns out chatbots were a lot more annoying anyway. But yeah, that's like, you know, those like product demo tools, it's like they say, we don't, you know, want to talk to salespeople, like you want to try the product.
And it's like, that's, you know, it's pretty true for a certain contingent of the market and a certain contingent of people.
So I think the concept of like, I don't like doing this, therefore, like I can solve a problem and create something for others like me, is like a totally valid thing.
But then if you think about the broader market and the heterogeneity of it, it's like there's a certain part of the market, very enterprise, maybe multiple buyer groups where the CIO and CFO has to sit in, where it's like you have to have a salesperson.
You can't just sign up for a product at that scale.
I like talking to salespeople, which is not something I ever thought I would have said, especially the helpful ones.
But I think going back to that false consensus bias, I can recall moments where I had to try to argue against those biases in the past to make the case for an experiment or something. And I didn't have the language.
I didn't know what that bias was, but I was like, man, no matter what data I present, this person will budge.Like they're just kind of digging their heels in even further.
And so I guess if, if you're like a marketer or like an experimentation or whatever, how do you even kind of get someone to see that bias and come around to like, like how did, how did Andrew Anderson convince people like, Hey, we're going to run a test where we just put comic stands all over the whole website.
Unless if he was just like, he had the influence to do that, but like, if you don't.
I know how to answer this already, two ways.First off, do you know the ocean, the five personality traits?No.A lot of these personality tests are not based on any science.
My understanding is that, psychometrically, the only dimensions that have been replicated and have predicted validity and stability across your lifetime are the big five.It's openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
And agreeableness is the one that I want to reference.Because if you're a disagreeable person, you are comfortable with confrontation and saying opinions that others don't have.
And a lot of analysts and a lot of experimentation people, I would say a good contingent of growth people also are highly disagreeable.
Which, you know, makes them sometimes difficult to work with, but they're often willing to put themselves out there and say like, hey, like the data says this, even if you don't agree with this, right?
So I think he is a highly disagreeable person, probably.And then the other thing is experiments.So he had the lens of an experiment that he could run.So a randomized controlled trial.
I used to do this too, this trick where you're never going to get a test through if you're just like, hey, we want to test the current version versus Comic Sans.But if you have enough traffic, you can do an A, B, N test.
So like A, B, C, D, like multiple variants.Not like a multivariate experiment, but like a multiple variant. And you can be like, Hey, let's just throw it in just to throw a challenger in there.You know, why not?Right?
Like there's no, there's no, there's no downside.We're going to cap the experiment after two, three, four weeks anyway.So like throwing comic stands, right.Just for fun.
And I think like, because you have a cap downside and obviously this would like, like this would, you would have to have an organization that was comfortable with AB tests and like the whole process that you would run something that's like,
you know, like a challenger and like you're going to put it through a data mechanism, like you'd have to have that in place too.But because he could do the randomized control trial, he wasn't just saying like, oh, I think Comic Sans is the winner.
In fact, that's the total opposite approach.He was like, let's remove all of our preconceived biases.
And he would talk about having a high beta option pool, which basically means like you have enough variance in the options that like there's probably going to be one.I'm this is such a technical definition.I'm probably getting it wrong.
But essentially, you don't want to like narrow your basket of options.So it's only things that were like preconceived notions and like really highly researched and best practices.
Yeah, you actually want more heterogeneity among the options, because that's going to give you more information and signal.And it's more likely that you're going to have like a winner among them.
So like bigger, I just quote, bigger swings, like more drastic changes than simple, small variations.
And like the widest pool of potential creative differences in like the copy or the messaging or the design or the real estate, et cetera.
What if we move out of the experimentation realm and there's a person who's like, Oh yeah, every company is a media company.We're going to do short form video and only invest in that.
And you're like, what, how do you get them around to be like, you know, maybe you shouldn't put all your eggs in that basket.And there are probably other.
channels and things you should be investing in, but they're like pretty gung-ho about... Because everybody's doing it.
Well, maybe they're right, is the thing.They might be right and we might be wrong because we might also have the false consensus bias that that doesn't work because we don't enjoy short-form video.
Oh God, what is truth anymore?
Well, that's where it's kind of a banal cliche of like, you got to know your customer, right?
Yeah, and I think you can also parameterize experiments.
We talk about this a lot and we do these with our own marketing initiatives, where if we want to try something out, usually we'll have a grain of data or some conjecture, or maybe we just see somebody else doing it and we're like, oh, that seems interesting.
We're obviously not going to bank our business on whatever new crazy, wacky thing that we imagine.So we'll say, alright, we're going to spend X amount of money.We're going to set a 3-month timeline.
And the pass-fail metric that we're looking at is like,
five leads or 10 conversations or a thousand impressions or whatever that thing is where we're like, okay, that's enough signal that we can say if we're to tweak the variables and optimize the copy and the targeting or whatever the parameters are of the campaign that we're running and put more money into it, we believe that this could pay off in a bigger way.
So it's like you sort of parameterize like a minimum viable experiment.Yes.Seems rational.Yeah.Very rational.I don't know.What do you think?You probably had to do a lot of this.Yeah. the PM world?Yeah.
And it was, it was, it was always, Hey, we already have these quotes safer.It all comes back to the bar bill, to be honest, like, Hey, we already have these that are like, not as risky.
We are like going to be optimizing for this metric and all that, but how do we like, I had to pitch this pretty often actually like, Hey, I've already gotten all my main stuff done.Like that's all on track and I'm on top of everything.
I think we should be trying these three or four other things and here's why.And like, it's not going to take that much time.Here's a downside.Here's a potential upside.Like I'm going to do this.And that's, that's how I got by.
And it was kind of making sure that all like the bread and butter stuff was taken care of.And I wasn't. I wasn't just going to shift my entire job to doing these random reckless things, essentially, is what I had to communicate.
It does make sense to do the boring stuff first, so to speak.And I don't know if boring is the right word, but as much as anything can be obvious, if it is obvious, you should probably do it.
You know, I don't think there's any 100% certainty, like product feature you can ship or like campaign you can run or channel you can invest in.But like, there are some things where you're like, it's kind of a no brainer, right?
Yeah.What are transitioning?What are those no brainer things in SEO now?Because I see you have a couple of things on these notes, and I know they've been top of mind for you.What's working?What's working in SEO?
free tools, programmatic content localization?
Oh, yeah.So there were two studies done.And forgive me, I haven't read the methodologies on how they did these studies, but like Ahrefs put out some data on bootstrap companies and how they were doing with SEO.And then Campfire Labs put out one.
And I think they were totally distinct studies.I could be wrong about that.Maybe they partnered.I don't think they did.
But they both found that the biggest levers in the biggest winners in SEO right now are like free tools, interactive tools, programmatic SEO, and then content localization.It seems like that's been like the case for a while, I guess.I don't know.
Doesn't seem like that's like a new thing.
Yeah, it doesn't seem new.I think I think the reason it's interesting for me that it's coming up a lot more now is amongst all the people talking about how SEO is dead.
And at least I'm going to redefine that as they, I think what they're referring to is like dry content that's written for algorithms and sounds very generic is dead.
Like not as doesn't really roll off the tongue as SEO is dead, but I think that's what they're talking about.And now folks are starting to look more at like, okay, well, we're probably going to keep doing that.
But if, if there's a slight chance that that stuff is quote dead, What other things should we be exploring?And looking at it, it does seem like free tools, programmatic and like programmatic can be so many different things.
And then like content localization.I've heard like UGC coming up in some of my sales conversations to folks are just trying to diversify.
And I think there's a it's been a forcing function for them to think more intentionally about what else they're doing for SEO beyond blog content.
I would I would think about it through maybe a different lens than like this versus that within SEO and think about it, maybe even under the same qualification criteria.So what's the upside?
What's the overall opportunity if you hit all the green lights?How big is the opportunity?And then how competitive or how easy is it to replicate?How hard to fake is it?How hard to replicate is it?
Because with these three, you've got big opportunities and they're relatively hard to pull off, at least in the same way that you're doing it.Content localization, I guess you could in a similar way.
If you have a blog, you could theoretically... It could fall under the same challenges that your regular editorial SEO has.
If you're just doing the sort of what is keyword, how to do keyword, and then keyword software, the top funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel.I just think fewer people are doing it. So there's more blue ocean probably in content localization.
And if you think about the opportunity size, it's the whole world.That's a huge opportunity, right?There's a lot of people in the world.That's such an obvious thing.And then free tools, it can't really be replicated by AI summaries.
It can't really be replicated by typing in chat GPT or something like that.You can't get a quick answer if you need, say, whatever, like a retirement calculator or, or, you know, like a re rewrite this paragraph AI tool or something like that.
So like, those are just interactive.They're almost mini products.Yeah.Right.
I don't know if this is the right terminology, like the alpha has like moved.Like, I guess I was listening to a podcast the other day and they're just like, yeah, once the MBAs move in, like there's no alpha anymore.
they're kind of like saturating the space and it's mainstream now.I feel like it's similar in SEO where like the content stuff is pretty straightforward.I think a lot of people could still be investing in the bread and butter there.
But now if you're trying to get like the edge, the alpha is like in building out these free tools and figure out programmatic before your competitors do.
Granted, I think even programmatic is starting to get a bit more like getting adopted a lot more widely in the last year or so, but These things are like, you can't just quote, test it out.
You can't just put in a little bit of effort and think it'll work.You kind of need to really put in time to build out those free tools and do content localization well.
We should talk about programmatic SEO because I think it is maybe a broader bucket than a lot of people imagine.But also, was that a Peter Thiel quote? The NBA's moving in?I think so.
It sounds like a Peter Thiel thing.I think I listened to his interview with Joe Rogan or something.Yeah, yeah, yeah.It sounds like he's very anti-establishment.It's a weird interview.He's such a smart guy, but he's so inarticulate. Yeah.
The podcast was also just like them talking about conspiracy theories.I'm like, why am I still listening to this?Why am I still listening?I cut it off.
I feel like most of the Rogan conversations devolve in that direction.
It's kind of just entertainment.I'm not learning anything. Yeah, yeah.Never been a fan of his stand up.Programmatic is one of those just buzzwords at this point, but it's another thing where I'm like, well, what do we mean when we say that?
And it's like programmatic is like in some way automated.It's in some way templatized. Right.It's in some way dynamically created, which could mean a whole lot of different things.
I think nowadays people think, oh, like, I'm just going to like have a template or an outline and use AI to fill in the editorial context.And I guess like that kind of fits into programmatic, but it's more more.
I would almost consider that like editorial SEO at scale in the same way that you could do the same thing with like a content farm.Right.
That's what most people think of when they think of programmatic.
But it's, it's, it's not really the same as doing something like from a database or like from a public API, like a public data set.
Like if you, I don't know, for top of the fucking dome example, it's so hard to come up with these, but like if you wanted to, for some reason, create like a, a local city page and pull in like weather reports for some reason.
You would be able to find some API from weather.com.And that would be a section on each page.And you would programmatically create them based on the keywords that would be the city name.And you would have Austin local weather or something.
To me, that's a different generative mechanism than saying like, hey, we're going to write the same blog posts, but we're just going to use a tool that can help us do what a human would have done, right?
Like, just because AI is used doesn't, to me, make it programmatic SEO.
I'm glad you made that distinction because, yeah, I had consensus bias of what people define programmatic SEO as.
Well, I think it's changed too, right?But like when I think of programmatic, I think of stuff that comes from the product, usually like Eli Schwartz and his product SEO framework.You know, it's like Zillow.
Zillow is one of the big examples for me where they've got like all the, how do they even get their data from the Uh, MLS is ML.Do they scrape it or is it like estimates or something like that?Like APIs or something?
Yeah.You just create like so many pages, you know, and like New York real estate, this neighborhood real estate, like you get like all these average prices and shit.That's a good example.
I was just looking at, um, I was looking at Panda doc and I, I think their SEO is freaking amazing.I really admire what they've built.Like templates library, I think is what every SAS company wants to build when you think of.
like programmatic, it's like ranks for all the template keywords for like all types of contracts and agreements and presentations, click into it, you see a preview, you click get template puts into a signup form, you sign up, and a templates already like populated for you.
I think that's like the ideal experience that folks should aim for, because it ties the experience down to the conversion point that they want versus, I mean, I think a lot of people
A lot of what I hear for programmatic right now is like, look, we created hundreds of pages in 10 minutes and now we're getting a lot of traffic, but it doesn't talk about the next.We've already beat this horse, this dead horse many times.
It's like decaying at this point.
Like glossary pages.Like you guys talked about that on an episode that I wasn't on.Like I think a lot of people are like, oh, we can easily just create like. 400 glossary pages, but that's totally different than your templates example.Yeah.
Smartsheet has a great templates library too.Anytime I look up any kind of spreadsheet templates, Smartsheet is always an option and it plugs me right into the tool to my chagrin because I don't really want the tool.
I think Canva is really good at that, too.Yeah.I worked on that a little bit at HubSpot.And the way I would describe it was skipping funnel stages.
So if you think bottom funnel keywords, you're either branded or competitor-related or alternatives or best software. And I'm like, well, we can actually skip to the bottom of the funnel with like a wider net of total search volume.
If we have jobs to be done, keywords, examples, keywords, and templates, keywords, and we can flip a part of our product, not totally inside out, but if we can connect it with a key, like, you know, basically like as you hit this CTA for like customer satisfaction survey, as part of the surveys tool, like you get dropped into the customer satisfaction survey as a template.
And that's actually a really cool activation mechanism, too, from like the I guess product management side is like if you come in and you've got this utility, especially I mean, HubSpot's probably a bad example because HubSpot's fairly easy to grok its utility.
But like if you think of a really horizontal, really like creative and complex tool, like Excel would be an example or Google Sheets or probably Smartsheets or something like that, or Clay, right?Clay.com.
something where it takes some level of like, I want to be able to do a thing.And I can do pretty much anything in this product.Like, I don't know, I've signed up for those products before, like with no template.
I'm like, I don't know, where do I start?Right?
Notion.Yeah, like Notion, right?You get a Notion template.
Oh, cool.Like I've got like my, my, my client dashboard or something like that.And it's all set up for you.You're like, okay, now I'm like, now I'm a more sophisticated user upon entry.This is amazing.
I think one of the things that I kind of, I joke about myself in my own head about this, but like, as I'm doing searches and I'm trying to learn something, I'll be like, ah, their SEO is working.Oh yeah.Another result from the same company.Yep.
I'm trusting them more.And over time, like, fuck it.All right.You got me.And I'll sign up for their product or whatever.Like, ah, it works.
It works.You actually actively notice yourself.Like if you see the same logo come up over and over again, you, you have like a, What's that?There's some like a name for this.
More than eight times.Or no, that's like a memory.
Frequency bias or availability bias or something like that.
I mean, that's how it ended up on ClickUp for us.
Yeah, they're all over the place.
They're just all over the place.
That's the whole surround sound SEO concept, too, right?It's like you see a brand name more and more often with positive sentiment in association with keywords and categories you care about.And you're like, wow, that seems ubiquitous, right?
Like somebody likes them.A lot of people like them.Yeah, I'd like them.
Yeah, I have been trying to figure out how to get.It's usually when I speak to folks who are at earlier stage companies, I'm like, hey, look, yes, you should use some basic SEO and get the foundations in place, but
The stuff that's probably going to be more meaningful is like, quote, again, I hate this phrase, but like thought leadership stuff that you can like share on LinkedIn and like put into your paid retargeting ads and like just start showing up a lot more.
But that's not as straightforward as a sell as like. And I'm telling that we can do it for them.I'm just like trying to get them to think about their go to market differently from just pure SEO.
Cause they're like brand new website, 10 domain rating, like in a competitive space, they're not going to rank for any of these keywords.And I'm like, look, think about it like surround sound.
Like if you can't show up and search immediately, what other places can you appear in front of your target audience and all of that?
And I don't know, more and more like those conversations, especially for earlier stage companies, it's, it's kind of around,
brand awareness, which feels very fluffy for me when I'm trying to figure out how to... I'm trying to be helpful, even if they don't work with us.
easier to manage, like from an analog perspective, like ad hoc LinkedIn posts and stuff that the early stage, like leadership team can do without having to worry about scaling it.
And it also challenges them to answer some pretty fundamental questions that would eventually help us do our work.Like, what do you have to say?What does your brand believe?Like, who are you talking to?What is your positioning?
I mean, we're talking to a prospect right now that a little bit later on, but they're, they don't even know what they're saying.They're not aligned on their messaging and their positioning.And it's, causing a lot of disparate activity internally.
And it would make it hard to work with a team like ours, you know, a lot of our work hinges on brand POV, which I think we throw around a lot, but we see it when we start building out roadmaps for clients, like actually, we don't say stuff like that, or we don't
really have an aligned vision on this.So we can't tackle this whole cluster.And we're like, well, this is a huge lever for growth, like get aligned on this so we can move forward.
So if if potential clients aren't able to answer those questions in the sales call, I think that's a good move is encouraging them to not only answer those questions internally, but then practice like posting about that on their LinkedIn, and at least having that established before they work with a team like ours.
That's, I guess, I guess this is why I've been thinking about like SEO versus content marketing, because I'm not telling them, like, don't do content.I'm just saying you are not likely to see results from SEO because you're so early stage.
And like, you don't have anything right now, nor do you have any messaging or positioning, like definitely produce content, perhaps like
make time to write one article a month or something like that and get your thoughts out because that gives whatever agency you work with a lot more to work with in terms of what you're trying to say and how you position your product and everything.
It's almost like a red flag.Because when you're saying this, yeah, do thought leadership.But one thing that came up was a lot of the times people don't have interesting things to say.
And like, it's, it's, I'm starting to think about this, this is just like, in the moment, I haven't really, you know, thought about this idea much.But like, if you're an early stage company, and you don't have anything interesting to say, why not?
Like, why did you start the company?Right?Yeah, isn't it?Like, what don't you don't you start a startup because you've got some new paradigm or like some new, I guess, like, value add that you're building for the world?And like, wouldn't that be
I guess when it's so hard for them to come up with that angle, like what, what channel would work, I guess, is what I'm thinking through now, you know, because even like, you know, we've kind of railed on sort of overly focused on top of the funnel content and SEO strategies.
But I'm thinking of counterexamples, right?If you're a very technical product that's solving a unique problem, and you have a new paradigm on maybe an existing topic slash solution area,
What is can do really well, like what is a data contract with Gable?They're spearheading that movement, they're they're moving upstream on data quality, right?It's a totally new paradigm.
So they've never had to think about like, what do we stand for?And then through all the content, like that is the new angle.That's a new paradigm.
If you're writing about data lineage or data quality, you're like, okay, here's how it's done before, right?Like, you'd still tackle that within SEO.And then you can weave in that POV, it's so important, but
Or it's just, it's such a interesting, like if you don't have anything like that, like what's your company doing?
Right.Well, what is the failure rate for startups?Like 30% by the end of year two or more?
I would, I mean, this is getting into like the philosophy of starting a business, but it's like nowadays, just because you can, doesn't mean you should, especially if you don't have like the fuel to back it up.Because not only does that give,
you're marketing something to work with, but it probably gets you through the tough shit.
If you know why you're building a business in the first place, and you have something to believe in, or a challenge to work on solving or a new way of doing things.
Yeah, affects a lot of things. I guess it probably makes it easier.But now I'm playing devil's advocate with myself.And I'm like, there actually are a lot of very similar products that do really well.
If you think about the email marketing category, you've got MailChimp and HubSpot.HubSpot is obviously a broader suite.But then you actually have a lot of pretty similar companies that are maybe slightly cheaper.And maybe that's their value prop.
Maybe that's what they believe about the world is that it should be cheaper. But they're like 50 million ARR, 70 million ARR.That's not like a failure of a company.No.But they don't have a strong position on how email should be done.
They probably have a pretty clear product market fit or a certain ICP.And then you probably have something to say about that ICP and why they should be using your tool over others.You still have to have opinion.
You can't just generically go through life.Or maybe they don't.
No, but maybe they do.And maybe they just let it rip on SEO and they let it rip on paid marketing.And they just say, Hey, here's an email tool.Some percentage of people sign up.
Some percentage of people tell their friends and they've got a viral loop.And it's not as big as MailChimp.They don't need a billion dollar exit.Maybe they're bootstrapped and maybe they're totally fine running a 50 million ARR company.
And or they and or they've been around for a while and they have the brand recognition to back them up.
Like we're talking about companies that are being founded in the last what three to four years or the last year even like that would be hard to compete if you're getting started.
Maybe it presumes that the market size is big enough that you can take a small piece of the pie and it's still meaningful.Whereas maybe the companies that we're talking about
are trying to build in a new space thus like there's not a lot of search opportunity or it's so competitive that they couldn't even take a small piece of that pie.
So like the email marketing or the CRM space is so massive that if you could just make a CRM for dentists, you're probably going to do okay with just pretty bread and butter playbook.
It makes me think of the whole missionaries versus mercenary things.I think Alex, you're talking about the missionaries who have a vision and a thing they believe in and that they want to get out there into the world.
I don't know if it's a good phrase or not, but there are definitely mercenaries who are just like, there is an opportunity.I'm going to capitalize on this.I'm going to make a lot of money.Honestly, I think about the AI writing tools.
So many of those came up. I struggle to think how passionate one might be about like writing content, like writing sentences with AI, but those folks make a lot of money, make a lot of money with what they did.
And like, we helped, we helped one of them.
Well, maybe they sold at the right time.Well, they're a different, they're, they're a bigger platform.I think they're a lot different than a lot of the other, uh, just masks of open AI.
But like, if you're just like a, a simple UI layer on GPT three, and then like, you didn't evolve past that. You probably didn't do well if you held on.I don't know how well they're doing now.Maybe they sold a year and a half ago and they were fine.
You're talking about Jasper, and Jasper innovated a ton beyond just being an AI writer.
So I was, I was talking about AI writers in general, but Jasper did come to mind.
There are like a very, there's a very long tail of, of these companies.
And I think, I mean, I don't know how well they did like in the long run because open AI essentially replaced the functionality on probably 98% of them and like gave it away for free or for 20 bucks a month.
Yeah, it's definitely struggle city.I was talking to a founder who had a product that was like using AI for data analysis. And then ChatGPT came out with that feature and they're like, yeah, we're, uh, we're probably out of business.
And they're like trying to pivot to something else right now.But that's, uh, that is really rough.Someone's was it Chris that I said is like, oh yeah, I'm into extreme sports.I work in AI.
That's like a new it's like a probably even more extreme version of the classic, like, Google ships like a small baby feature and kills 1000 startups.
It's like they just turn one thing for free, like their calendar scheduling thing, which calendars are winning, but Gemini into Google Docs, Chelsea that
Don't you have to pay for that?
It's a little diamond situation next to your Google Workspace.
Do you find yourself using a lot of, I guess, like AI based interfaces within products?
Sometimes if I'm like stuck in Notion, I'll use the rewriter, but I don't usually write in Notion often.I preferred Chow TBT to Gemini. But I feel like it's probably still the same gist.
I saw one recently.I can't remember what product I was using, but it just felt so bolted on and out of place for what my job to be done was.I can't remember the product.
I do feel like Gemini in Google Docs makes a lot of sense.
Oh, I remember it.It was booking.com.It was booking.com because I was looking for hotels for because I'm going to go to Austin for ACL.And they have all these filters for like, you know, price and rating.
And then they had a box at the top that was like type your criteria and like text text based, right? And I was like, I don't need this.Like, I kind of know my filters.And I can just check the boxes.
Like, I don't need to, like, type it conversation will be like, I want a nice hotel that's dog friendly.
No, no, no, no.It's like a like,
it's like an AI, like you say your preferences, like conversationally instead of just yes versus no, like binary kind of, um, like I would say like, I want a dog friendly hotel in a sentence instead of just clicking dog friendly.
I can see that working if it was on mobile, like I'm walking and I don't want to like filters kind of suck on mobile, but like if they had a box where I can just like,
talk it out, say what I want.
Yeah.I mean, that's what I did when I was looking for campgrounds.I was I just opened up chat GPT and I was like, hey, give me a list of campsites in Vermont.That's next to a waterfall.That's about a 10 mile hike and blah, blah, blah.
And like you gave me a bunch and it's pretty cool.This is a great experience.I don't know what website I would have gone to for this.
Also, yeah, because some filter options are like so robust.You have to keep scrolling to find what you want.
Yeah, it's funny because like the irony of me doing the false consensus effect And then literally saying like, I don't use that feature and I don't need it on booking.com and booking.com.
If y'all don't know, it's like the exam, the case study people talk about when they talk about experimentation, heavy companies, like every product decision is like run through an AB test first.Okay.
Clearly they have better data than Alex Burkett, like looking for a hotel.
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