Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
I just sat down with Ross Simmons to talk all about marketing, SaaS, social media, and how you as a brand can stand out online. I really respect Ross, and I followed him online for a long time and have been trying to get him on the podcast for a while. And I'm so glad I did because I learned a ton from this discussion. Just to talk about, you know, conceptually, how are we thinking about marketing today? Because, like, dude, it. It's weird. It's really different than it was even 12 months ago. And so I think for you as a founder, how do you think about navigating brand and positioning and marketing and SEO and content and YouTube in the era of AI, when so many things are different than maybe when any of us got started as business owners and developers and product people?
So Ross has really kind of concrete first principles thinking on this. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation with Ross Simmons.
So I see this stuff from, I think, Andrew Chen, which is like, nothing is working right now.
And, like, transparently like that, that's kind of my experience is like, shit is really hard right now. We're recording this, like, middle of August 2025. Like, I was chatting with a person who I think is like, one of the best marketing people I know today, Mark Thomas.
You know, just. He's helping us some stuff, and it's like, gosh, tough. It's tough, it's tough, it's tough, it's tough. This thing that used to work, like, isn't working anymore. So my question for you is, like, what's working? Like, are you working with clients and seeing shit out in the marketing world and you have visibility to a lot of folks, like, what is working for, like, B2B and SaaS right now?
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's definitely been a shift in the water.
The algorithms across most platforms have changed. Search is 100% changed. The world of just like, let's create a bunch of content and eventually it's going to rank and let's get some links, and then we're going to generate pipeline from that. Like a lot of those. Those playbooks are starting to evolve. If anything, one of the things that we're seeing work really well is empowering sales teams, marketing teams, product teams, even within an org, to talk on social and create content on social. There's a rise of people who are willing to, again, talk to people. This isn't new. This is marketing 101. But the more humans on your team who can act like humans on social and create content, especially video in particular, is standing out that is driving real results in B2B. If you can be consistent and produce assets, that works. If you can build out an army and you have budget to kind of bring in micro influencers who might get paid on the impression level to produce assets and tell stories, that tends to work as well. You do need to understand the fundamentals of like lead generation and the fundamentals of this. And you don't want them to just talk about you and get impressions. But if you can have them create and deploy activities that lead to a lead, an email or a DM or a demo, et cetera, then those things are working really well. When we talk about the sale, some of the other old school methods are working well. And the issue is like, these are hard things. Like you say it's harder than ever 100%, like sending a video, sending a voice note, AI is making those things easier. But like if you can send and deploy a personalized loom or a personalized voice Note in someone's DMs on LinkedIn, those things are working. But they also worked five years ago, 10 years ago. They're just really difficult to scale.
So that's kind of a bit of a snapshot on some of the things that we're seeing work well. And then I'd say the last piece, which has always been true, but is also tends to be hard, is creating ridiculously valuable assets. And I don't mean assets that you feel are cool, but that your audience actually thinks is cool. And it's so cool that it's not something you could just ask ChatGPT to go and create for you. Like, it has to be ridiculously insightful data, proprietary data, or hard to capture and understand insight and information.
And you give that to people and then you chop it up in multiple ways and then you start to repurpose and distribute it. That is still working really well.
And AI makes it easier now to distribute those things and repackage those things. But the hard part is creating content and telling stories that no one else has. And you can't play that game like the game of oh, there's a piece that's the 10 top tools that we should do. Let's do 11, let's do 12. And then it's a race to see who can get to 193 first. That playbook kind of works from a search lens, an LLM optimization lens. But to really have that immediate impact on Pipeline, I think you have to create stories and assets that turn the industry's head and then you Distribute that relentlessly.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: That's a lot. That was a long answer to a short question.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: I need to be like taking notes. There's like four things I want to talk about there. One, Repurposing. I know you're kind of the repurposing guy. We're definitely going to talk about that because I think there's a giant gap between I'll record a YouTube video and stick it into opus and garbage largely and like really good shit. Yeah, so I'll talk about that. I want to talk about, you know, teams and like founder led kind of stuff.
But I want to ask perspective question first. So I'm super old. I'm 45.
[00:05:31] Speaker B: Cool. You're not that old.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: I feel, I feel old sometimes. My son, I have a 13 year old and he's like this tall. He's like, he's like, oh. It's like. But I can still beat him at a pull up contest. So. So we're good.
I have been around long enough to have perspective and I feel really fortunate. Like I have perspective of knowing in the moment kind of where we are in a cycle.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: I feel like.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Like, you know, I think these 25 year olds who like just, you know, grew up with chatgpt have kind of no idea.
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: The question is, do you think. And you're somewhere in between. I think in terms of like age.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: I am.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Do you think that this is the same shit and the same cycle that we always see?
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: And it's just a different flavor of it or is it actually harder this time because of things like AI?
And I mean, to me, entire marketing approaches have been decimated. Right. Content marketing and SEO. Like worthless? Yeah, not worthless, just different. At least maybe, I don't know. So that's the question is like, is it really different or is it the same shit and just a different flavor?
[00:06:38] Speaker B: I think this is a similar cycle, but the cycle is going to last for a very long time. I think the time horizon of the cycle is very different and the overall impact is also different. I think the most similar cycle would have been mobile in that shift. But even then, like the.
I think mobile is the best example. Mobile and the rise of mobile apps, et cetera, the app frenzy that we all went through. That world was a long cycle and it was a fundamental shift in the way that all of us operated and business was done. And I think that's happening again. I think that's the type of massive impact that this will have in terms of it changing things. I think Mobile had a similar impact on a lot of industries.
You're old enough to remember when you got newspapers delivered to your door. Mobile changed that. Mobile absolutely ruined that. Magazines. How many of us had magazine subscriptions growing up where we would get certain magazines delivered and that was our only taste of that niche every month was that deliverable. Phones destroyed that. Because with mobile, I could now subscribe directly to a certain publication. I had the news everywhere I went. I didn't need to bring a newspaper on the bus because I had my phone. I didn't. All of those things changed, right, because of the mobile. And I think AI is going to have a similar impact, especially in B2BN and productivity elements, because you're going to be able to have agents do things while you're sleeping, while you're walking. You don't have to always go to the office and stuff like that. So I think this is a fundamental core human shift that is happening and the way that we operate will forever change because of it, similar to mobile. But I also think that the cycle, as it relates to the hype cycle and the technology and the influence on marketing and comms and the way that we do it is absolutely real. I think. Yeah, tech changes first.
So that's one other thing I think people should note. Our world as tech founders, leaders, marketers, etc, moves first and we've moved, the change is happening. Everyone's freaking out. But if you go into industries like healthcare, if you go into industries like public health, like government, universities, it's 1999. It's 1999. There's no shift in marketing and comms. Like they just realize what SEO is in some of these spaces. So in our world where it's super competitive and everybody's on the edge and there's a lot of innovators, yeah, there's a massive shift happening and we have to think differently and you have to get ahead of it and you're innovating against some of the best, which is wild. Like you can see some of the stuff that people are doing with AI is going to be banned. I think, like, I think a lot of it is going to get banned. I don't think we're going to be allowed.
I think right now we're in a cool spot where everybody can do. It's the wild, wild west. But you fast forward a year and a half, I wouldn't be surprised if there's legislation saying you can't have any of these AI ads that are talking about products that they've never used. You can't have ads running with fake people talking about software that they can't experience.
There's going to be shifts happen because there's a lot of money to be made right now getting AIs to give you product reviews and upload those to YouTube and then put a bunch of money towards it. And you get some people thinking that they're actually listening to someone who reviewed a product when the person doesn't even exist.
Yeah, there's a massive opportunity right now. Is it ethical? Is it actually going to be allowed forever?
No, no, I don't think. Yeah, I don't think.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: No, no, I agree.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Unless the government's isn't on the same page as me, but I don't think it's allowed. There's no way this is gonna be allowed. Maybe, who knows?
[00:10:27] Speaker A: But yeah, I did a. I did like a deep dive on hey jen on my YouTube channel a couple days ago. Like terrifying. Like literally five minutes, like real time five minutes. It was me undistinguishable 95% of the time.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Right.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: And then like everybody says today is the worst that's ever going to be.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Yes, exactly.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: It's only going to get better.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: Only going to get better.
[00:10:48] Speaker A: The funny, funny story, I was visiting some family this past weekend and we started talking about it. And so my sister is an attorney and my mom still works and she's in sales in like academic, like school software.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Neither of them have heard of Claude or perplexity or notebook LM.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: And think that ChatGPT is AI 100.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: And none of them are allowed to use it at their work.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Right. It's.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: They use it on the side, which is terrifying.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Like people do. We're still so early. People don't even realize how. We are still super early in this whole cycle. That's why I said it's going to be a long cycle. It's going to fundamentally change everything. But it's a, it's a long time before mass adoption and understanding of the total impact.
We're years out. We are years out from the mass adoption. I was at an event a few months ago with grocers. So like people who run grocery orgs all across the US and these are top CMOs, C execs, like retailers, some of the best food and beverage companies in the world are there.
And I was asking and listing LLMs and tools and asking people to raise their hand and I was shocked by how few people knew these businesses and knew these companies. And I was like, oh, we're early, really early. And to your listeners, like, if you hear that, that should be inspiring to know.
Like, the opportunity is wild right now. You have so much opportunity right now to build something, get it in front of the right people, sell it, generate revenue, be profitable, ridiculously profitable with the rise of AI. Because now you can be more efficient than the giant who is still thinking, oh, I need headcount. I need headcount. You might not need.
You shouldn't need as much headcount as you would have four years ago. Absolutely not.
It's an amazing time to be a builder, and I think, I hope that people are recognizing that and they're taking this time seriously. Because if you do fast forward to when you're 60, the world's gonna be absolutely, completely different. And my goal right now is to be like, all right, I've got five to 10 years where I have to sprint and secure the bag to make sure that I'm good and my kids are good, because I don't know what their future is even going to look like when they go to school. What jobs are gonna be available, what jobs are gonna be evaporated.
The capital and value that certain industries are gonna have is gonna be completely destroyed. I love the worlds of lawyers, etc. But, like, they're in threat. They have a serious threat with the rise of AI. Sure, legislation and stuff will keep them safe, but the amount of billings that they will have to do from a corporate lens are going to go down because corporations can buy an AI lawyer who can review their contracts and be trained on decades of reports. So it's going to be a fascinating time.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
I say often on this show, I get pretty dark, pessimistic, pretty quick with this stuff, I would say. And this is like you say five years. I think what you mean is your skills and the context of your work now kind of will last five years.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: I think that's probably fair. I'm kind of saying I'm giving myself a personal deadline of 5 to 10 years where I need to be able to capture as much value as I can so I can have confidence that the rest of my life can be okay, and then my kids are okay and I can take care of everybody. That kind of thing.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I 100% agree with that. I'm in the same boat.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: I think there's also another milestone that to me is about 12 months away, where the shit we do now and the opportunity we have now is going to close fair. So they'll be like, we are in reality, two Right now, maybe like, Reality one was pre AI. We're on Reality two right now.
It has a really short time. And then that Reality three will be like.
If you get over Reality two, if you pass through Reality two, it's like a video game and you are on the AI adoption curve and you're helping. Basically, the only jobs you're going to be. Are you helping people adopt AI.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Right. Right.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: And use your skills and tools with AI to do things for businesses. You can then get to level 3 in the video game of life. And then you have that five to ten, whatever that five to ten years.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: I agree.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: That's the way I'm looking at. And I mean, I'll just share. Like, I haven't shared this publicly. It's fundamentally changed, like, how I run my business and how involved I am in, like, current things that were, like, Reality one stuff.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:15:24] Speaker A: Because I just don't. I think it's irresponsible to you and to your business and to your family and the people that rely on you to say, like, hey, the shit that worked in 2020, I'm just going to, like, bulldoze forward and run to the wall a hundred more times.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: Like, it just is not the. Anyways. Okay. So. No, you can be more.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: You can.
If you are doing the same exact. Unless you have made it and you've already had your exit, you're chilling on a bunch of cash and life is good and everything is exactly where you want to be and you don't want to grow any further.
There has to be productivity gains that you've had over the last 12 months. If you have not seen a substantial increase in your own productivity and efficiencies, I don't know what you're doing.
[00:16:08] Speaker A: You're toast.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: You are absolutely toast.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: You are, as the kids would say, you're cooked.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Yeah, you're cooked. Turn off. Like, go figure it out this weekend. Like, now is the time to. To fix that problem. Because productivity gains that I've seen have been night and day. I think I can do double what I've done in the past. Like, it's absolutely insane.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Okay, so we have soapboxed. Thank you. We're. We're aligned there. That was fun.
Okay, so I want to get back to, like, the four things I wanted to talk about from your. Your kind of opening bit.
And that is like, founder brand. I'll call it founder brand, but. But it extends to people on the team.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Adam Robinson has been on this podcast. I think he has One of the, one of the bigger ones, especially on LinkedIn, if I am, if I'm me, which is like representative of a lot of our audience, we have like some presence on Twitter or LinkedIn. Yeah, but, but I would say arguable whether that's driving any real business value.
It's August of 2025.
Is LinkedIn or Twitter still the place to do this or do you go somewhere else?
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Good question. If you are targeting a technical audience, if you are trying to raise a round, if you are trying to break into the ycs in that world, Twitter X still a place where you need to be. It's a great place for attracting technical talent. There's still a lot of engineers there. There's a great world to be involved with on X in that regard. If you are targeting folks who are on the inside of large companies, if you're targeting B2B brands who have marketing directors, growth directors, social media managers, et cetera, LinkedIn is the play.
A lot of people in that world left X over the last like 10 years, not just recently with Elon, but like over the last 10. They've started to move in more of their energy to LinkedIn and that is where you should be. I think LinkedIn has officially put the crown on and has said we are the place to be for B2B and if you're able to tap into it, you can drive results, but you have to play a bit of the algorithm game. And this is what you used to have to do on X, but now you have to do it on LinkedIn, which is you have to understand what LinkedIn's incentives are. And their incentives are to have more people stay on site. And if they have people stay on site, links aren't going to work because they're sending traffic off. So stop sharing links on LinkedIn. It doesn't work like it used to. What does work on LinkedIn is actual native content for the platform. Carousels work well. Video content, especially long form, works well.
The newsletter functionality built directly into LinkedIn works well. If you have capital and you can invest in a professional sales navigator account and do outreach yourself or use an automation tool that can do the outreach for, for you and send the dms, whether you're connecting that through clay or whatever, like all of those things trigafy, like these types of tools to help that gold. It's not marketing, it's like all kind of marketing. That's a whole different debate. But like those things work, that's LinkedIn works and that's where I See both, a lot of prospects, leads, customers coming through for a lot of our clients in our portfolio. And then the other channels are experiments. The other channels are experiments. If you decide that you want to be on Threads or Blue sky or Mastodon, then by all means, power to you. It all comes down to your own capacity to do it. I think the best thing to actually do with those channels though, and again, everyone's different. But I think the best strategy here is to take what you are sharing on a primary channel like LinkedIn or X, and don't worry at this point about the best practices of you have to customize everything for every channel. Screw that, you don't.
Blue Sky, Threads, Mastodon, whatever those channels are that you want on the like peripherals, share the same thing that you would share on LinkedIn on those channels and if there's a character limit, then share what you would have shared on X on those channels and drop your links relentlessly. And don't worry so much about the algorithm because all you're trying to do on those is see if you can start to see a signal that you're generating some referral traffic to your content, to your blog, to your demos, to your signups page. And if you do, then maybe you should invest a little bit more time there. But right now, just play the signal game. So what I would do is I'd go all in on LinkedIn, double down all of my energy unless I have a tech audience that I'm going to do X. But I would go all in on LinkedIn, creating great content, video content, primarily storytelling, native, mix it up, try to keep people on site, get them to click, make sure on your LinkedIn profile there's this little feature where you can add a call to action, make sure that that's there so people can go directly to a contact page or book, a demo page, make sure that functionality is built into your profile. Pay to have the premium LinkedIn account so you have the little official. I think it's a blue end or verified. Get paid for that.
I don't have any data that suggests that it increases your reach, but I would assume it does, especially in the first month and a half after doing it. I think there's something there I haven't studied, but I think when you verify, you get additional reach just because they don't want you to churn and that's your playbook. I would use something like distribution AI Shameless plug to find content that you've produced, whether it's a podcast, a YouTube video or a blog and then write the LinkedIn post that you need to schedule over the course of the next week or two. But then just click in Distribution AI, you can select Mastodon bluesky Threads and it will write the same post on that platform for you. So I would just let those go and just let them be the same message and wait for those signals. So long answer to a short question again, but LinkedIn, I think for B2B SaaS, B2B brands, people selling to other orgs is still the play. Unless you are in tech selling to tech selling to other startups, then I think X is where you want to be with a bit of energy on LinkedIn.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: So I'm going to agree.
And or maybe my personal opinion is YouTube is the best platform on the Internet. Like not even social but, but just like it's better than Reddit, it's better than your own website, it's better than, better than anything.
It's super fucking hard too.
[00:22:48] Speaker B: Right?
[00:22:48] Speaker A: Which is why it's, it's the best. Because like the 22 year old in Peru with a chat gbt account just can't make it happen.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: So I'm in the middle of this thing I call 100 days of AI. I'm doing a video every day about AI and I'm 13 days into it now and it's incredible. Like I'm getting inbound shit like, hey, can you review my AI tool? All this kind of stuff and like I'm, I'm like average, right? I'm pretty average at it.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: But, but the thing, the thing I like about YouTube is it combines discovery and long form engagement in one which you don't get anywhere else really.
And it's evergreen. People find stuff from years ago which like just even on LinkedIn, which I think has the next most kind of like longevity. Like maybe you'll see shit that's a week old.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: Right?
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Right.
So like I'd say YouTube again, depending on your purpose and your industry. Like YouTube doesn't work for Kastos at all because like people aren't just that curious about podcast. Like podcasting is pretty well baked, right. You get on Riverside, you record, use this mic. I think we have the same mic.
You know, it's like, it's pretty well baked but, but like AI content, founder content, sales content, you, you, you don't know if you do it, but you would do really well. Like it's a really good platform.
I think the other one that is a bit of a sleeper is Instagram.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: I think there's what, what I think happens is like, we as, as founders and B2B are like, oh, I'm B2B. My, my audience wears a tie all day. All of this. Right. But like, the reality is your audience, a hundred percent is on Instagram.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: True.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: And they're looking at, you know, you.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: Know, golf trio videos or travel videos or parenting videos, all that stuff.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Yeah, a hundred percent. And so I think if you look at like from a competitiveness perspective. Yeah, it's a barren desert out there. Like, if you're, if you're creating really good B2B content on Instagram, you're the only guy do or girl doing it.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Right.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: It's a total flyer because like, oh, it, like it won't convert and like the impressions I think in the algorithm probably won't like you because so few people are really interested in it. But like, if I was like, I'm going to take a flyer and like, really optimize some shit. Yeah.
The good news is, I think, like we're both saying though, is short form, vertical content is up, can be optimized for all of those channels.
[00:25:25] Speaker B: Yeah. So what I think, where I think the differentiator is, and I think you're right, is the way that I view the best channel is slightly different.
When we're thinking about B2B, I believe I had this thing that I created way back called the distribution framework, which is the audience level of engagements on one axis and then the competitive channel saturation on the other.
And in the top, right, where you have highest audience engagement, but you also have high competitive saturation. That is like a money channel and that's LinkedIn. To me, it's LinkedIn because every B2B brand is there. Every B2B brand can get ROI there and we know all of our audiences are there. However, if you go to high audience but low competitors, then you're talking about what I would call like a rocket ship channel, which is high growth, high opportunity, high potential. I think Instagram is that. I think YouTube is that. And I also would argue that TikTok is that. And I think there's a ton of opportunity because there's low competition and the audiences are there, but the brands and the B2B brands are afraid of it. Reddit's also in there, but like the brands are afraid to go into these channels.
Then we have ghost channels. The ghost channel is like low audience, engagement, low competitor. And that's like question marks like Snapchat. I don't know if anybody's still on Snapchat. I don't know if there's any B2B brand doing Snapchat. Well, they still have a publicly traded company. Are they good? Are they alive? I don't know. It's a ghost. It's a confusing place. Then there's the channels where competitors are still investing a bunch of money into, but the audience doesn't use it. And those are like those review sites, I think. Not to like throw too much shade at them, but I think they're losing a lot of.
But everybody's still buying it. Everybody's still spending a bunch of money with these review sites. But is anyone even seeing them anymore? With the latest algorithm changes, I look at their Ahrefs track if traffic and it's down into the right. But let's keep putting money into these channels that nobody actually uses anymore. So that to me is like in the bottom, bottom right of the. The. The pendulum, so to speak. So I am with you that the audiences are there on YouTube, Instagram, etc. I don't think the competitors are there, which makes it a little bit like high growth opportunity. But who's going to crack it? And this is where it's hard. It's hard because nobody has run a good playbook there.
Who's going to crack it like Mr. Beast did. How do you do, Mr. Beast for B2B?
Right. I don't know. A lot of people are trying, but it's super boring. Everybody's boring, so. But I. I'm with you. I'm with you. Instagram. I have seen a few people do it in the D2C space. Well, like I haven't seen SaaS thrive.
D2C. Consumer products are thriving there.
B2B, though I have yet to see it. There was one. ClickUp's kind of doing it, but they're doing like a humorous Instagram account where it's like ClickUp comedy and they're like making things.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: Oh. Interesting.
[00:28:26] Speaker B: I don't know if that translates into any sales, but yeah, there's a few.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Giving the closest. The closest I think I've probably seen is like Russell Brunson.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: There's quite a bit. Right. On Instagram.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
Promoting. I think a lot of it's paid, probably funnels, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll check it out.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: On Facebook. So I would assume he's using a similar methodology.
Yeah. Cool.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: That'S a good call out.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: So like if you think of even that lane, like between him and Hormozi and those guys, they're in the YouTube world, they're doing interviews, they're doing long form educational webinar style things. But it's ungated on the platform.
Just helping their icp. They do have a broader audience which I think helps with their narrative.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:16] Speaker B: But yeah, that's a good caller. I like that.
[00:29:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:19] Speaker B: But you're right. Super hard.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: Super hard. Super hard. I do like the paid aspect of Instagram.
Like arguably the best kind of paid platform in meta. And that, that, that's part of what draws me to it. But cool. Okay. So talked a little repurposing. We talked a little kind of founder brand stuff. We talked a little AI.
I want to talk about SEO because I know this is something that you like have experience in and talk about on, on Twitter. I'm just always going to call it Twitter. So we'll just.
With my gray hair, we'll just call it Twitter.
Okay. So we just finished up a pretty big series on this podcast about. I'm not calling it Geo AI SEO.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Okay, cool.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: And the consensus was largely right bottom of the funnel, high buyer intent content and write a bunch of it from different perspectives. Because especially ChatGPT has a bunch of context about you Ross, to know that you come from this place. So when you're searching for a podcast hosting platform, they might recommend Kastos versus some of the other jokers out there because of who you are specifically.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Okay. Let's just call like AI SEO kind of like a thing and like we don't really know but. But it's probably a lot of alpha but a ton of risk to your point before. Right. Like nobody knows.
The question I have is more around traditional SEO.
We have about 500 pages on the Kastos blog.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: And we basically have done nothing with it in a year.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: Right. Right.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: And I'm totally cool with that. Yep. Is that reasonable?
[00:30:57] Speaker B: Are those pages driving traffic?
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Yes.
Quite a few of them have gone down.
[00:31:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:31:04] Speaker A: Over the past two years. But they still drive traffic and trials.
[00:31:08] Speaker B: Right.
Keep them up. There's no harm as long as they're not having a negative impact on your like website your overall.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: But worth putting more effort into it to update those and write new pieces and all that kind of stuff or just like let what's there kind of.
[00:31:26] Speaker B: Bake if So I always look at like the Ross high hierarchy of needs and the first need is always revenue. So if there's a page that is driving revenue or drove revenue before and it's no longer doing that, I'm putting energy to it to get it back to where it was. Any page that used to make money should continue to make money. And I will invest to make that asset continue to pay dividends until I have a clear insight into that something fundamental has changed.
That is a core belief of mine. If a page used to drive revenue and it's no longer driving revenue because it's no longer generating as much traffic, then it needs to be optimized and improved because it has potential and you're sleeping on more revenue. If a page has never driven revenue, it's simply driven some traffic and none of the traffic ever converted. I don't care about that page. That page is not important to me. It has no impact on how well I sleep. It's a great thing to have for people getting visibility to the brand. But at the end of the day, cash rules everything around me. So I'm going to focus on the assets that used to work and drive revenue and focus on impress improving those. That's my starting point. Then I look at my overall marketing efforts that I'm doing and I ask myself, okay, if I can get those things fixed, do I have other things that are worth my attention that might be net new pages? If so, yes, let's produce them. If not, then what else can I do with my energy and my budget to drive more, pipe more revenue, more deal opportunity?
[00:32:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:55] Speaker B: So if something used to drive revenue, it should keep driving revenue. That's kind of my. That's my big.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: That's a short version.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: Short version, yeah.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: Cool. Yeah. I think we're not alone in that. Right. I think a lot of folks are like we use especially we're, you know, we're 20 bucks a month. Right. Like the playbooks available to us are limited.
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: Compared to, you know, 500 bucks a month. Or we can do outbound and sales teams, all this kind of stuff.
[00:33:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: I think that is one of the most fundamental shifts. Kind of Getting back to AI in SaaS is like content marketing still works. I'm not going to say it's dead. Used to work really, really, really well.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: Changed a lot.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: It's really different now. Just the. Just the volume of the market there is less. Right, right. Google search is down. What you look at the data, 30, 50% depending on the keyword and the, you know, Persona of the searcher and stuff like that.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: That is not insignificant.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. It's true.
And I think people need to realize is like, where's, where's the clicks going to come from? And this is where it becomes more important to have a presence on other platforms because I think, I think this is a great thing for the content marketing industry in general. I think it's good that Google and the rise of SEO is not the only thing that marketers should be talking about. Because I've been preaching this for a long time.
It's completely broken to think that every discovery starts with Google. Do some, yes, do most, yes. But if I am traveling, I'm never using Google to figure out what restaurant I should go to. It will never happen. I will always go where I think the tastemakers are, which is TikTok and Instagram and I'm going to type in restaurant in San Diego and they're going to tell me this cool spot that all the young cool people are going to and that's where I'm going to book.
I'm going to book. I'm not going to TripAdvisor where my parents are leaving the reviews. Not a chance. That's not happening. I know what I'm going to get there. I know I'm not going to Google to see who has the most five stars. No. I'm going to the source. I might even go to Reddit and put up a post and get local feedback on where I should go and hear directly from the source and, and that is discovery. So the way that we've always thought about search was search means Google when in reality search means YouTube, search means Instagram, search means TikTok, search even means Facebook Marketplace in Amazon if we go into certain like consumer oriented products. And now finally everybody's waking up to it. Yes, LLMs have shaken up the content marketing industry. So maybe you all should realize that it's not just about ranking in Google anymore. It's also about having a presence in these other channels. If I'm trying to find a software for screen recording right now I'm trying to figure out what is the best software to track somebody's most movement on my site. I'm not going to Google. I'm probably not going to Instagram or TikTok, but I probably will put up a post in Reddit. I will probably go to a few WhatsApp groups and Slack groups I'm in and do a search and see if anyone's talking about it. I might put up a post in Discord. I might do a few other things to get the answer. I'm not going to trust Radius or any of those sites.
No shade against the review sites. I think they've had a role in B2B SaaS and Stuff, but that's not where I'm going anymore. So I might even search on X. I might actually go to the search bar on X to see what people are talking about there.
The discovery mechanism and the way we discover things is just different. So for brands, I think we need to think of how can we show up in more channels and be more strategic in having positive and ideal sentiment across these platforms, especially things like Reddit.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: Yeah, we're super bullish on Reddit. We have, we have our own subreddit. We, we are all back, back to like, you know, not just me, but people on the team posting, commenting, engaging there.
It's the thing I'm most excited about from a Castos perspective.
[00:36:45] Speaker B: I think that's cool.
[00:36:46] Speaker A: I think, I think it drives so much.
Cool. I want to go back to AI because it is my. Yeah, it is my love language these days.
I want to hear the thing that you think is most overhyped, the thing you think is most under hyped, and then we'll talk about some other stuff.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Cool. I think the thing that is most under hyped, I'm 100% aligned with you, is Reddit. I think, I don't think people understand the impact that this sight is having on buyers today.
When you look at buying decisions, no matter if you're talking about a small deal or a big deal, people are using Reddit to make decisions. And Google picked this up because they noticed that when people would go to Google, they were starting to add the word Reddit to all of their queries. When they were looking for software, when they were looking for T shirts, running shoes, lamps, et cetera, they were adding the word Reddit because they wanted to hear from other people. So as a result, Google said, Reddit, you are now the second most visited website in the US and yes, Google and Reddit also had a nice, interesting partnership that happened to Rollo right before the ipo and all of those things happened. And I'm not going to assume that they're not being well paid off of that, but something's going on.
But Reddit's generating a ton of traffic for a lot of bottom of funnel queries and keywords. So I think, and at foundation, we've been doing a lot of work on Reddit and working closely with Reddit as well to kind of help organizations start to build up their presence on this channel. And I think it makes sense. I think Reddit is a great platform for organizations to be. You have to play the game. Right? I wrote a book on Reddit back in like 2017. I've been banned from Reddit about eight times. I've been on the front page over 25 times. Like I, I love Reddit as I'm. As a user.
I have a love hate relationship with it.
[00:38:40] Speaker A: It is a fickle, a fickle mistress though.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: It's a good place, but I love it. I love Reddit and I think that we should try to keep it pure as it is.
But that's my one that I think is underhyped. The thing that I think is overhyped would be probably Quora. I have noticed recently more and more people seeing that Quora showing up in the LLMs as a source.
I loved Quora back in the day. Quora was the first site that I used to get picked up by Forbes. Quora was like my jam. I loved it in the early days.
I hate to say it, but Quora is trash. It's a very horrific site to try to build a brand on.
It used to be great, it used to be absolute gold. But now it's flooded with spam, it's flooded with AI generated content. It's flooded with like you remember those like magazines that you weren't allowed to look at when you were in the cash checkout and it was like all kinds of clickbaity stuff. That's what Quora is. It's like a mess, an absolute Mess. But the LLMs are using it. However, from what I have noticed, the LLMs are actually using content from like 6 years ago on Quora to answer questions. So you can play the Quora game. You can try, folks. Everyone try. But your content I don't think is going to be able to stand out amongst any noise. So for any brand that's thinking, oh, we need a Quora strategy because Semrush just announced that this is the third most source site in the LLMs.
Go for it. But if you're on my team, stay away. If I'm your friend, stay away. If you're my competitors, go for it. Go all in. Go all in. Do your thing. I love it.
[00:40:21] Speaker A: I love it.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: That's my thought.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Yeah, cool. Cool. All right.
I, I guess I get mine. Which is like, I think the biggest opportunity is probably YouTube. I think Reddit is right there.
Both really difficult.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Which is part of the opportunity. Again, like it's just not. You can't just flood it with a bunch of shit like you can Instagram or like Den or whatever.
The most over hyped one I think is probably like written content. On your website, which is super unfortunate because that was all we did for five years. Right, Right. So that's, that's a bit of a bummer. Okay, I want to talk about AI tooling. Yeah. Real quick.
So ChatGPT5 launched last third. Oh, a week ago.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: A week ago. It's been a week.
[00:41:06] Speaker A: It's dog.
[00:41:07] Speaker B: Right. Yeah.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: It's completely unusable. They rolled it back and I'm using 4.0 again, which I'm like, thank you, God.
I'll give, I'll get. So. So I think the biggest disappointment I'm gonna get. Biggest disappointment and the thing that I'm most excited about, and I'd love to hear from you, thing I'm most excited about is Manus.
I use the. Out of Manus and it is by far the best tool. LLM, whatever. It's an agent. Right. But. But it's the best thing. It's the best. It's. It's amazing. It's by far the thing that.
The thing that I'm just most disappointed is, and I saw that they announced this yesterday, is Claude having a kind of like eternal memory like Chat GPT has.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: Which would be a total game changer. But it's not going to be all the time. Only when you kind of ask it, like, hey, you remember we talked about this thing.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: Right.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: So I think that's the big difference to be between Claude and Chat GBT is chatgpt knows everything about me all the time. And that's why it's so Good.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:03] Speaker A: Because two months ago, when I told us to write a LinkedIn post like this, it's just going to write a LinkedIn post like that all the time now.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: And it doesn't have to be a project or a GPT or a training or even like a great prompt.
[00:42:13] Speaker B: Yeah. The memory is gold.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: Yeah, the memory is gold. So. So that's my, like, win and like, shortcoming. But I'd love to hear from you.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: I'm obsessed with 11 labs.
[00:42:24] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:42:25] Speaker B: So 11 labs, audio, AI, it's voice. It's like that type of a technology and I'm obsessed with it because I'm sure there's other tools that allow you to do this, but for me, I will use ChatGPT in the evenings to do a deep research and I make it a hard project for it to do and I will ask it to write me up like a McKinsey level report and audit.
And that's good. It's doing its thing. But then I'll take that And I'll upload it to 11 labs. And when I'm going for a run, when I'm going for a walk, when I'm working, I have 11 labs read this entire story and narrative for me so I can consume it passively. So instead of going. And I love podcasts, but I want personalized podcasts. And eleven Labs gives that to me by being able to take these tailored ideas and uploading them, and then I can listen and consume it even in my own voice. I kind of think that's weird, but it's what I do. I like to hear myself saying these things to myself, and it'll break down a strategy, a framework, an idea. It talks about stocks, crypto, whatever I'm interested in learning. And it just puts it in my ears. And I have been obsessed with that for fun. I also use it with my kids and we play games and I'll have random activities where it's like, oh, somebody from Pokemon's calling me. Let's listen. And then they freak out and have a blast.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Oh, that's so cool.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: Stuff like that too.
Thing I would be disappointed in right now, I think I really don't know what I'm disappointed in. I think I'd be most disappointed in Gmail's ability to adapt to the possibilities of AI.
I wish Gmail would wake up and G Suite would wake up. Google clearly has great AI and great people. What are they doing on the email side? I don't know what they're doing. I see a summary kind of cool, but it's like, basic.
I wish they would do something. Like, you see the meme where you're like, poking do something. That's what I feel like I'm doing right now with Gmail. Like, do something. Do something cool for me.
I'm just waiting for that. I wish they would do something cooler. Like, nothing is coming out from Gmail G Suite that I'm like, this is great. This is very impressive. This is. Wow. Yeah, I'm waiting for that.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: So. So on the. On the former for you, like, you gotta check out Manus.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:44:50] Speaker A: So it would take all the. I'm sure you're just like, back and forth with ChatGPT a lot. You just type it in. So Manus is an agent, okay? So you just be like, hey, research microstrategies and give me, like, the breakdown of when I should buy.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: And it just goes away for 10 minutes and it comes back with, like, Mackenzie level shit.
I would then. And this is like, it's not going to be in your voice, but I would use Notebook lm.
[00:45:14] Speaker B: Okay, cool.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: For your podcast stuff, it's not going to be in your voice, but it also would be free, right?
[00:45:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I pay a hefty subscription with 11 lab.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool.
Yeah. And on the Gemini side, the last person we had Paul Zhu on and he kind of said similar thing to you about Gemini and just Google in general is like, they're so disappointing, but I think they might win in the end.
[00:45:41] Speaker B: I think. I agree.
[00:45:42] Speaker A: I think they think they might win. And I think this is like, this is what I said to Paul is like, I think everybody's gonna have their vertical. Right? Like, anthropic, clearly, with developers, ChatGPT is definitely the consumer professional experience.
Meta is going to be commerce and social.
And I think Google will win at work.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. I think Google's gonna also win in discovery. Like, as much as everyone is, like, chatgpt is killing SEO. Perplexity, Claude, all these things are killing SEO. Not a chance.
[00:46:12] Speaker A: You saw where Perplexity wants to buy Chrome.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: I seen that, yeah.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: Like, the. Like, who do they think they are?
[00:46:19] Speaker B: Who do they think they are? It's absolutely impossible. You may be brave, like, try that first.
[00:46:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Google is.
Google has a real strong hold on the Internet with Chrome and with browsing in general. Like, people still Google it and they will Google it forever. And When Google adopted AI mode, it hurt all of the businesses. It hurt SEOs. The writing was on the wall. I tried to tell people during, like, a long time ago, folks, Google's trying to be a destination. Well, this is its hat. This is the gift from AI to make Google the destination it always wanted to be. Google got paid for us to pay for clicks to our websites. Now Google is going to charge us for transactions. They're going to completely rethink their model. And we can complain and cry about, oh, we're not getting our top of funnel traffic anymore. It doesn't matter. Shareholder value.
Shareholder value matters way more in the eyes of Google than whatever any SEO says on Twitter, what any SEO says on LinkedIn, Whatever any website owner says. None of that actually matters to Google. We can cry, we can complain, we can go to conferences and say, Google's bad. I don't actually care that much about it because at the end of the day, we still need to do our jobs and get paid and provide for our family. So let's get over that and just think about reality for a second. The reality is Google sees a threat which is why they rung the bell against AI and all of the LLMs. So what did they do? They took that entire interface and they turned it into their search experience. So now we have AI mode. Now we have a clear outcome that Google is built essentially stolen. Same way that Facebook and Meta took it from Instagram and they stole all of the story ideas from Snapchat. It's the same playbook they're stealing and they're going to win because of it because they already have distribution. I don't think Google can lose to ChatGPT.
I don't think they can lose. I don't think they can lose at discovery to any of these tools. The only one that had a chance and they're blowing it is Apple.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: What has Apple done?
What are they doing?
[00:48:32] Speaker A: I. I think the only. I think the only chance Apple. I think Apple has a chance if they buy Anthropic. I think that would be cool.
[00:48:38] Speaker B: That'd be cool.
[00:48:39] Speaker A: I think that's. I think that's. I called that it. Well, I did. You said that would be cool a couple of years ago.
[00:48:44] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:48:45] Speaker A: I think that still could happen.
[00:48:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:46] Speaker A: Or on device.
[00:48:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Apple needs local.
[00:48:50] Speaker A: They need local private.
[00:48:51] Speaker B: Yeah, they're another one of those poke, like do something kind of right now.
[00:48:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, it's a trip, man. Yeah, it is a trip. Ross, this was awesome, man. Folks who want to connect with you, find out more about what you do, work with you. What. What's the best place?
[00:49:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm on all your favorite platforms. Easiest to find me is on LinkedIn or X. I'm at the coolest school on Linked on X. I'm Ross Simmons on LinkedIn.
You can also go to Rossimmons.com I'm easy to find. Would love to connect with folks. And Craig, kudos to you. What you're building. Big fam from the sidelines and thanks for having me on.
[00:49:22] Speaker A: Awesome, buddy. Thank you.
