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[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous Add to Cut guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Here's your host, Bushy.
[Ad]: Today's checkout features Eric Hsu, founder of growth marketing agency Single Grain, based in San Francisco. You will also no doubt know Eric as the host of the hugely successful Marketing School podcast with Neil Patel and Leveling up, which is his own podcast. They've amassed over 2.1 million downloads every month.
Nathan Bush: Eric, thank you so much for joining us on the checkout. We had a great conversation in our main episode where we talked all things around. What's happening in marketing, the trends that you're seeing, Programmatic SEO, AI. But we're here to learn a little bit more about you. I've got five quick questions. Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Eric Siu: I buy a lot of these random monitors. Air filter over here. Portable. I have this carbon monoxide alarm that I don't think I'll ever use. I have these. I forgot what these called.
Nathan Bush: Oh yeah, like a hourglass.
Eric Siu: Hourglass, yeah, that's right. So I have two over here. Here's a five minute one. Here's a 30 minute one. And so these, these I find are more helpful because I can see the
Nathan Bush: time and that's for focus.
Eric Siu: To focus on writing, for example, could be 30 minutes of writing or it could be 5 minutes of writing to keep me locked in. I find it's more helpful to have something physical.
Nathan Bush: That's pretty cool too. And it's also good if, if you work in an office, I suppose if people can see that you've got your hourglass going, it's like, stay the hell away from me until that's done. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Eric Siu: I would say the one that I use the most is probably Amazon. I don't know if you can call them a retailer, but I get all my groceries there, I buy all my stuff that I need there and it's, you know, that's all it is.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, as, as Australia is kind of in the grip of Amazon. You know, it really started slow four or five years ago and is now a really significant share, but nowhere near to the penetration of the US market and how it's just ingrained in the US lives. So I think we're seeing that emerge for us as well. Number three, which E commerce practice do you wish was history?
Eric Siu: I don't know if it's history yet, but last three, four years when a lot of people were putting money into these e commerce companies who were just lighting that VC money on fire and just blasting into paid ads, and now the unit economics don't work anymore. But I think a lot of people are just still continuing to rely on paid ads. It's like this drug. And I'm not saying paid ads doesn't work, they just certainly do. But you got to think beyond that in the new future that we're going into.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, you got to have it from a business context. I love that you mentioned unit economics is something that we've been talking a lot about in the podcast recently. We also talked about in the main episode around black hat SEO practices and how they are being found out as well. So if you haven't listened, go back and check that out. Eric, I know you mentioned in our main episode that you don't read a lot of books these days. You have a massive bookshelf behind you as we're looking at looking at your setup here. But I'm going to ask you, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Eric Siu: Yeah, I do read a lot of books right now. What I meant earlier was I don't read a lot of articles around marketing, so I do read a lot of articles still. I do read a lot of books, but it's more related to general business and investing. So yeah, but one book I would Recommend Is the 30 letters from John D. Rockefeller and the book is about the richest man in the world writing 30 letters to his son. And it's a lot of wisdom that he imparts and it's all raw and so I would recommend everyone pick that up.
Nathan Bush: Great, Great tip. Thank you. And obviously go check out marketing school if you haven't already. Last question. I have for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is still going to be there.
Eric Siu: I mean the future of retail. I mean, the cliche answer would be it's going to be very AI driven. I think it's going to be a lot of AR VR driven. I mean, people are lazy. And yeah, it's going to be exciting. People can buy things with their neuralink as well.
Nathan Bush: Thank you for joining us on the checkout.
Eric Siu: Of course. Thanks for having me.
[Ad]: To hear more from Eric, jump back into episode 404, where Eric shares the tools that he uses to get maximum value out of his content. He tells us the channels he sees as the ones to watch. We talk, especially Reddit and YouTube. And then he breaks down programmatic SEO, giving us his take on on the future of search. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
