Eric Siu: That channel will get, I think across socials last 30 days, 12 million views or so. Google's favoring Quora and Reddit answers more and more. That's another reason why people are looking at Reddit, I think over the next 10 years, who knows what's going to happen with AR VR? I think behaviors are going to change quite a bit and then you add in like something like a neural link, like a brain interface where you can think things out, like what's the display going to look like there?
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail.
Eric Siu: Here's your host, Bushy.
Nathan Bush: Welcome to another episode of Add to Cart. I'm Bushie and I'm joining you from the land of the Turrbal people, otherwise known as Brisbane, Australia on Add to Cart. We welcome everyone to share and listen to e commerce stories. The more diverse the better. I want to especially welcome the traditional owners and the original storytellers of the land that we are on, our indigenous and Torres Strait Islander listeners to join us in our e commerce conversations and our community. We usually have a rule on Add to Cart that our guests should be very much about Australia and Australian e commerce, but today we are breaking that rule. Quite the rebels breaking our own rules. But it is with good reason. My guest today is Eric Hsu. He is the founder of growth marketing agency Single Grain, based in San Francisco United. You might know Eric though, from his hugely successful podcast marketing school and leveling up podcasts which have amassed over 2.1 million downloads every month.
[Voiceover]: I can only dream of those numbers.
Nathan Bush: Eric's podcast with Neil Patel was actually
[Voiceover]: one of the podcasts that first got
Nathan Bush: me hooked in marketing and business podcasts
[Voiceover]: and they've just done such an amazing job over a long time. So I was really excited, a little
Nathan Bush: bit fanboyish to get to have a chat with Eric on my podcast. As you would know, Eric is a hugely practical marketer and today he shares the tools that he uses to get maximum value out of his content. He also tells us the channels which he sees as the ones to watch. We Talk Reddit and YouTube especially, and we break down programmatic SEO where he
[Voiceover]: gives us his take on the future of search.
Nathan Bush: So let's get straight into it. Thanks to our partners Shopify plus and and Deliver in person. Here's our conversation with Eric Hsu, founder of Single Grain.
[Voiceover]: Eric, thanks for joining us on Add to Cart.
Eric Siu: Yeah, thanks for having me, Nathan.
[Voiceover]: It feels weird to Be on this side of the microphone speaking to you after having you in my ears with marketing school for so long.
Eric Siu: You know what's funny? As the countdown was happening, Cause we use Riverside as well. I was getting ready to introduce and then I was like, what am I doing? So. So, yeah, no, but it's. It's good. It's fun nonetheless.
[Voiceover]: You incredible job with marketing school. And you know, I use you guys as a lot of inspiration. Very different format, your shorter, sharper, Very, very practical marketing tips. And if you haven't heard it, go check it out. 100 million downloads. Have I got that number right?
Eric Siu: Yep.
[Voiceover]: 2700 episodes. Huge catalog there of short episodes. I was really interested, doing some research here in that you almost got kicked out of school and now you've got one of the world's biggest podcasts called Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Yeah, the irony of it. So, yeah, I mean, I almost got kicked out of high school because I didn't want to go to this one required class. It was a technicality. And then I almost got kicked out of college because I played too much poker and World of Warcraft. So that one was much, much more serious. But yeah.
[Voiceover]: Are you still obsessed with poker and World of Warcraft?
Eric Siu: I play poker with entrepreneurs, and I'm actually thinking about starting an entrepreneur only poker stream and maybe starting another YouTube channel because I'm looking for new formats. So poker's fun because you can. It's a social thing. But the other things, playing games, I can't because business is the best game to play. So I just play mostly business.
[Voiceover]: I love that. That idea of a streamed poker game with entrepreneurs is fascinating. How people would make decisions and read other people. I love that. Go for that. That's fun. So my question to you, 2,700 episodes, you and Neil working together, your episodes generally around 5 to 15, 20 minutes. How do you come up with so many topics around marketing to keep it fresh and interesting for you guys?
Eric Siu: Yeah. So there's been an evolution of the podcast over the years. So in the Beginning, it was seven episodes per week, five minutes per episode. It was about 10 minutes per episode initially, and then it moved down to five episodes. The problem with sharing your wisdom is after you do it for a year or two, you start to repeat the same things because it's still the fundamental, the same rules. Right. And so we started getting feedback. You know, initially it was like five stars right across the board. That's the average. And then we saw 4.9 stars, 4.8 stars, and you start to see People, they say the same things over and over. All this podcast for beginners, blah, blah, blah. And so recently we changed the format. Instead of seven days per week, it's only every weekday, so Monday through Friday. And what we focus on is 15 minutes. But it's more news related now. It's more. We're reacting to the news, the business cycle, and we're sharing our wisdom as it relates to that. That way, it's timely as well. It performs better on YouTube. So it's more of an interesting conversation because Neil and I are usually recording in person. He lives like half a mile away from me, and it just works a lot better and we have a lot more fun doing it. We're actually even considering Nathan tomorrow when we record in person, we're just like, what if we just tried 90 minutes for one episode? And, you know, that would be a radical change. But we do know our conversation, the quality will be a lot higher and we'll probably get a lot more clips from it. So we're toying around with different formats right now. But I will say at a high level. So I think I answered your question, but at a high level, I think podcast interviews are becoming a little stale and it's time for podcasters to innovate.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. And I love where your thinking is at around changing up the format. Something I think about a lot, because you're right, is like, even here, I don't do a lot of talking on our podcast, but even when I interject with the story, I'm like, we're 400 episodes. I'm like, have I told this story before? It's. You start going, you just need that fresh perspective. So that's great. Do you and Neil, do you often come from the same perspective? Are you still aligned? Given you've done it for so long and you've taken slightly different journeys, do you often find yourself coming to the same conclusions?
Eric Siu: Mostly we're both very practical people. So we took this personality test and we're both pretty maxed out on practical. So we do have similar philosophies, but we're also very different too, because, you know, for him, he's. It's funny because I spoke to Gary V. Last week and we're talking about Neil. And then, you know, Gary made a point. He's like, neil's a math boy. And it's true, because I was talking to Neil on the phone afterwards, I was like, yeah, you're a math boy. He's like, oh, yeah, Yeah, I am. So, for example, one debate that we have is, is it worth creating large audience tabs of total addressable market content? So, versus just talking about marketing, I might talk about dating, I might talk about relationships. Right. A lot more people are gonna listen to that. And so I asked Gary about that actually, and he's like, you know, I want all 8 billion people in the world to know who I am. And it's interesting because Neil, when he creates content, when you look at Twitter, for example, that's where he usually starts. He focuses just on marketing, which is fine. It doesn't get as much reach, though. Whereas the content that I create, I hedge my bets a little bit. So I'm. I'm a. I'm a gambler, right. So I hedge my bets. And so with my leveling up podcast, I talk to people that have a much bigger audiences. That channel will get, I think, across socials, last 30 days, 12 million views or so across socials. And then with marketing school, that's where I go niche, right. So I kind of play both sides. Him, he's just focused on, you know, niching. So that's one example where we disagree, but we kind of agree as well.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And you've done incredible work. You've got a book that you've released and like you said, you've got level leveling up, which is much broader. What's the end game for you with creating all this content? And I know a lot of brands who are listening are going, gosh, there's so much content I could be creating and maybe are creating, but not leveraging it is the end game for you. Leads, Is it community? Is it immediate sales?
Eric Siu: Yeah, I think high level. The long term answer, long, long term is, you know, I just want my tombstone to say, this guy was a good learner and a good teacher. And so I love learning, I love teaching, which is why I create the content. I have great conversations with people and it goes a long way too. Eventually, like those people connect you with other people and that always business ends up happening from all this stuff. And so I'm not desperate for leads or anything like that. I just think I enjoy what I'm doing and I hope other people enjoy and I hope they get some value from it. And some people that are interested, then they'll reach out to the agency and great. Or they'll reach out to one of the other offers that we have. That's what it is.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that makes sense. All falls into the ecosystem. I find that the best conversations that I have with podcasting often happen as soon as you press the stop recording button and people go that was fun. What do you actually do? And then that's where the relationship really happens.
Eric Siu: Yeah, the problem with the interview podcast is sometimes if you have someone really busy, let's use like a, you know, like a Gary for example actually. So he's, he's on the go, right? So it's like how do you actually develop that relationship on podcasts? And that's why I see the interviews are getting stale versus imagine if you were chopping it up on with ideas with the other person. You actually get to know the other person, right. So but you are right, like if they do have time, then you do get to actually build a relationship.
Nathan Bush: How was your last E Commerce delivery experience? Did your order arrive on time and undamaged or did it fail to fulfill expectations? If you are a high value brand, just think about the low value experiences in the last mile affecting your reputation. Delivered in full on time or DYFOT if you're in a hurry is a metric that matters for retailers and customers.
Eric Siu: Why?
Nathan Bush: Because it shows whether deliveries are happening reliably and on time time. Many Aussie retailers are settling for 70 to 80% die FOT scores and dealing with a lot of unhappy customers. However, after partnering with deliver in person experience driven brands like Samsonite, the Party People and July see a consistent 99.6% dye FOT score. Don't settle for less. Make your last mile experience the first thing that customers remember. Learn more@deliverinperson.com
[Voiceover]: so with all this content out there, you've obviously got the pods, plus you've got 130,000 YouTube followers, 56,000 Instagram followers. What are the techniques that you do to ensure that you get maximum value out of the content you create? Are there any tools that you use to distribute that content of efficiently?
Eric Siu: Yeah, so we've tried a lot of these different tools. Like we've tried Opus Pro to chop up. You know, you take this long form and they'll find the different moments. You could certainly use that. But we've just found that still a human in the loop. A human editor with guidance is at this moment a lot better than any AI system. I think that that would change in a couple years. And in terms of I'll give you one tool. Actually we use a tool called metric Cool. So it's metric cool. And we were looking for a cheaper version of social media reporting software. So we're paying like 400 bucks a month for the last one or 500 bucks a month. It was just too much. This one's very cheap. And it's a good way for us to measure how we're doing on social. And now we have a better sense of where we're going and what we should be optimizing.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Okay. And it was interesting that you mentioned there about AI for video editing. Do you use AI in your content production process at all?
Eric Siu: We do so with marketing school. So we do use Riverside. And every time I use Riverside, it pains me because I passed on investing, but that's an insufferable story.
[Voiceover]: But anyway, it is incredible the amount of new features that drop every time that you log into it. The team there are crazy fast.
Eric Siu: It's great. I mean, Israeli team, they're hardcore. That's why I love. Some of my best friends are Israelis. But anyway, so Riverside gives you an AI transcription, which is awesome.
[Voiceover]: So.
Eric Siu: And then our process right now is we take that transcription and we load it into a. You can use a ChatGPT, for example, and you can just say, hey, take this transcript and make it into a blog post and have subheaders and create a catchy headline. And it actually does a pretty good job with it. We'll run it through a duplicate content checker. You can use like Hugging Face or something like that. And then the human will basically take that blog post, fact check it, add context, add links, and add statistics, and then it'll make it into a blog post. And we find that that performs a lot better than a purely AI generated piece. We do do AI as well, just pure AI, like programmatic SEO. But I would say we call that AI assisted content the marketing school example. So that's a really good example that also works with SEO too. And then programmatic SEO, I'm happy to talk about whenever you want to talk about that too.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, let's get into that. But before we do, I want to go back to what you mentioned with Hugging Face. I haven't used that tool. Is that a tool that you use to put all your AI generated content through to make sure it's not duplicated? And that Google seat is unique.
Eric Siu: Yeah, that's what I use. There's a lot of duplicate content checkers. The hugging face one, by the way, it's a GPT2 output detector, so we're on GPT4 right now. And five is probably coming really soon. So we feel like it's already pretty unique because it's taking from a transcript and it's making it to a blog post. So we're like good. We just want to have a little another check and usually what I'll show you at the bottom is how real the post is and usually it's like 96% plus real.
[Voiceover]: One thing I'm playing around with at the moment is taking all the transcripts from from the episodes that we've had and putting them all into GPT like you said, but then creating our own e commerce chatbot where it can spit out advice from all the different types of guests that we had around any kind of topic. Once you start bringing that together from a learning perspective, it becomes so powerful.
Eric Siu: Totally. Yeah. I think tutors are gonna get a lot cheaper and then people are gonna like certain creators, certain teachers and those teachers will do really well.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned programmatic SEO there. Google came out with their new update, I think was last week was pretty clear that they were cracking down on duplicate and low quality content. Reading between the lines, it was AI content. We're also searching very differently these days. Like Google is obviously still number one in terms of the go to for search, but we're seeing TikTok for example come to become a go to. We're seeing Amazon as a go to for search. So it's kind of, it's spreading out further than Google. What do you think SEO will look like in five years time?
Eric Siu: Yeah, so I think we've talked about this one on the podcast where this concept of generative engine optimization, or AI optimization, whatever you want to call it, and you know generative engine would be like a Gemini or would be like a chatgpt, like one of those, those chat interfaces. And so I don't think that's going to take over everything, but I do think it'll take search market share away from Google because I do search for some things using chat GBT sometimes I still do continue to use Google. So I think in the next five years or so Google might lose a little market share, but I still think they're going to be pretty dominant I think over the next 10 years. Who knows what's going to happen with AR VR. I think behaviors are going to change quite a bit. And then you add in like something like a neural link, like a brain interface where you can think things out, like what's the display going to look like there? So I think that's all up in the air right now, but that's a good opportunity for people that are willing to adapt.
[Voiceover]: Do you think neuralink is one of those ideas that seems far fetched now but is actually achievable in five years.
Eric Siu: Totally. It's already working. I mean, the guy can play games, he can play chess, he can play other things, he can type things out. And so it's clear that it's working already. And I do love or hate Elon. I think what he says makes a lot of sense. Computers are just going to be way smarter than human beings in the next couple years. And Ray Kurzweil said, the futurist said 2029. Elon actually thinks it's going to be sooner than that. And yeah, our compute in a human mind isn't as much as like a computer. Right. And so, you know, even Sam Altman from OpenAI is like, you know, compute is going to be the main thing everyone's fighting for in the near future.
[Voiceover]: Amazing. I just want to go back to Google there and there's been lots of talk around. You know, the Google we know and love, the single search bar that's obviously not going to be around forever and that's probably coming up to a big decision point for Google and that will go towards more of a GPT style response with Google owning the output. How far off do you reckon that is before brands have to really think about the way we're investing in SEO today and SEM is going to be totally different. The rules that we've played by for so long are not going to be played by anymore, I think in the
Eric Siu: next three to five years, max. So I was having dinner with the CEO of BrightEdge, which is an enterprise SEO software, last week and he shared some data and he said, look, you know, from what they're seeing, if you want to optimize for sga, which is search generative experience, which is kind of like a little chat interface that pops out when you're searching for things, it's a lot of long tail keywords that people have to optimize for. And so I think the near future people are going to be optimizing for long tail queries and even more so than today. And that's already a pretty significant shift. So we'll see what happens.
[Voiceover]: Amazing. It's going to kind of uproot everything that we know around search marketing. You mentioned programmatic SEO. What did you mean by that?
Eric Siu: Yeah, so programmatic SEO is the easy way to think about this is when you think about TripAdvisor. They create a lot of these pages programmatically fun things to do in Rome, things to eat in Japan, fun attractions in Tokyo, and they have millions of permutations of these keywords. And they rank for 24 million keywords. And they drive over a hundred million visitors per month from SEO alone. And it's because they have all these pages that are programmatically generated. They've been doing this for decades. It's nothing new. But with OpenAI's API, this is now available to people like you and me. And so for example, what would we want to rank for? So could be permutations of consultancies, agencies, whatever it is. Exactly. Or you know, if you are a national laundromat chain, you might want to rank for a lot of laundromat plus city keywords. Right. And that opens up the, that opens up a lot of opportunity for people that have strong websites. So when I, when I say strong website, that means your domain authority or domain rating scored on a scale of 1 to 100, it's probably greater than 75 or so. And I'm generalizing here, but the stronger your website, the more likely it is that whatever you publish is going to tend to rank well. And you don't need to worry as much about being penalized or having your site torched. That Google Update that happened two, three weeks ago, it destroyed a lot of black hat SEO influencers that were bragging about the results on YouTube and on Twitter. And they had it coming because all they were doing was spamming. They weren't adding any value to the Internet. And even the people that got their sites de indexed where it was completely legit content. Someone did an analysis a couple days ago and she said basically she was like, look, even the sites that got hit that were legit, they deserve to get hit because the content wasn't that helpful. And so if you're, as long as you're producing helpful content, even if it's through AI, then that's fine. I think you only really need to worry if you're doing something and if there's any inkling of it feeling sketchy, then you should probably not do it.
[Voiceover]: And if you were putting humans on top of that AI for programmatic SEO, because you obviously still need to invest some time to either train the GPT or correct it at the end, where would you invest your time?
Eric Siu: Yeah, we're constantly fine tuning it and we're always adjusting. And you know, certain pages have different templates, so we need to adjust the prompts for those. And what I would say is when we're launching a brand new page type, we would QA maybe the by hand, maybe the first 25 to 50, just to make sure that they look Good. And then we build something internally that allows us to scan pages at scale. So if we're putting out hundreds or thousands of pages for ourselves or for clients, we'll add in a quality score, and then the quality score will tell us if we should delete the page or not. And also we'll be looking at a page. If after 30 to 60 days or so that page is getting zero traffic, we automatically just delete the page.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, okay. All right, so that's great. You got to still see engagement with your audience to make sure it's viable. Do you think from an SEO perspective, given that content will be easier to create, will the technical side of SEO play a more important role or a less important role? Things like site speed, tags, all that sort of stuff that SEO was kind of built on 10 years ago, is that still going to be important going forward?
Eric Siu: As long as websites are relevant, I think they'll still be relevant because they just want to. Whatever is the medium, they want to make sure it's a good experience for users at the end of the day. Now, if it does change to ar, VR, then, yeah, all bets are off because everything moves over from, like, you know, websites to a new medium. And so I think websites will be around for a while. I mean, they've held their course, I mean, ever since the Internet first came out.
[Voiceover]: And it feels like video is. Well, we know video is, you know, more and more popular, especially as a search tool. People going there for information, learning, obviously, YouTube, TikTok, the rest. Do you have any tips around SEO for video in particular?
Eric Siu: Yeah, totally. Well, I'm going to switch over to YouTube, because that's where my brain's at. I mean, YouTube's the second largest search engine in the world. It's a completely different game. I mean, instead of focusing on optimizing for keywords, you can focus on keywords, but a lot of people are optimizing for intrigue. Right? Because if you have a really good video, it's going to take off. YouTube now is much more about the interest graph versus the social graph. And what I mean by that is the social graph used to be based on the number of followers that you have. Now your number of subscribers doesn't even matter. When I look at my YouTube channel and I look at someone else's, that might have over a million subs, I have 130,000, but I'm getting millions of views a month. And then they're getting maybe like, you know, 50,000 or something like that because they haven't been Active. It's not like they're bad or anything. And so what that means is you have to make really good videos. And this is why Mr. Beast talks about making the best video all the time. Right. So what matters is your thumbnail and your headline because you got to hook them in. Your click through rate matters a lot. So, you know, maybe you're aiming for a 7 to 10% click through rate. That's a pretty good click through rate. And you're constantly testing your A B, testing your headlines, your thumbnails, all the time. Right. If it doesn't do well in the first hour. So there, there's like a, there's a game to that. And then the other thing, like for this interview podcast, for example, if the first 30 seconds is boring, the 30 second retention rate, the video's not gonna do that well because you're dropping off too many people. So you have to do a good job of having a really good introduction. And that's what we do for our long form podcasts. So there's just a lot of nuances there that I would say. And then, you know, sure, like, do your tags matter? Not that much. Like, I've seen channels that there's one channel has one video, I believe, and that video has 12 million views because the video was really well done. And so that's how you could think about, about YouTube at the end of the day. And Obviously if a SERP has a YouTube video on it, I believe the click through rate for that video, I think Neil gave me these numbers last week, is about 61% or something like, like that.
[Voiceover]: That's huge. The thumbnail thing is really interesting on YouTube because I've seen a lot come out about that. Most recently, obviously the Mr. Beast, he just did an article where he kind of unveiled his process behind how many thumbnails he creates. And also Stephen Bartlett, I read the diary of a CEO and he talked about their team creating hundreds of thumbnails per video to test like it's, it's a huge focus for great YouTube audiences.
Eric Siu: Yeah, I think YouTube's the biggest opportunity for the next 10 years or so. So, yeah, go on YouTube.
[Voiceover]: Amazing. Now, we've talked a lot about content in the podcast you're creating. You own an agency called Single Grain, and I am very keen to hear more about that. What was interesting to me when I was doing my research is that you bought single grain for $2. How did that come about?
Eric Siu: Yeah, so the original founder decided that it was, you know, his time was he wanted to Move on from the agency. And I was, I think this is all the way back in 2014. And I said, hey, why don't I give it a shot? And at the time, SEO was gotten a lot harder because of Penguin and Panda. And I still wanted to give it a shot because my logic was if I can turn around this company, I feel like I can do anything. It's going to be a nice MBA at worst or it's going to be unlimited upside at best. And so the way we negotiated a deal was because everything was on the downward trend. The original founder doesn't like when I say this, but it is true in my view. We still talk, right? But I paid $2 out of pocket and I sell or financed the rest. And the rest was like, I don't know, whatever the amount was, right? And I put in a contingency saying that if the company failed, I would owe nothing. And so that's how it was set up and that's how we worked out the deal. And I actually made the company go from bad to worse in the first year because I was like a 26, 27 year old, had no idea how to run a business.
[Voiceover]: What were you doing before this?
Eric Siu: I was running marketing at a startup, this online education startup. But anyway, so what happened here was I made it go from bad to worse. Almost everyone quit. Thankfully, I stuck it out and we were able to hire some amazing people. And it's all props to the amazing people that were able to bring things back.
[Voiceover]: And so when you stepped into that role, into that business, obviously coming through from a marketing perspective, what did you look at agencies and go, actually, I can do this better. Like, I can do this different.
Eric Siu: I mean, honestly, I hated agencies because I came from tech, right? And tech is like, you're too good for agencies. I honestly, I still continue to think that. And then my thinking changed maybe a couple years ago and now I'm like, oh, agencies are actually a great business. And most people don't think that. I think it goes back to the learning and teaching thing again. It's like, can I actually learn how to turn around a business? And you can do it. By the way, here's my experience here. You can certainly do it. I wouldn't recommend it because if something goes down, if a stock goes down 50%, you have to have it go up 100% to break even. It was really painful. So, yeah. But anyway, I mean, what I would say is my angle on the agency was how do you, if you're a world class marketing Agency. How do you build something that is more based on your performance? And I would say we're training in that direction now. But you know, some of the biggest agents, like I have a friend that has an agency, they do like, let's call it, they do $40 million in profit and they have 35 employees. That's a lot for an agency. And it's because they charge on a pay for performance basis. And then there's another one I know they do like they probably do over a billion in revenue a year and it's because it's pay for performance. You can call it affiliate marketing if you want, but that's what it really is.
Nathan Bush: One of my core childhood memories was buying my first Tac Discman. I freaking loved that thing. That is until all my friends got the Sony Discman. Then my old Skipman, well, it didn't seem so good.
[Voiceover]: Cool.
Nathan Bush: And so it is with E commerce platforms. Did you know that well over 100,000 Australian businesses are now on Shopify and they power over 25% of all E commerce here. All the cool kids are there too. JB, hi Fi High Smile, Tiger Lily, LSKD, Patagonia, Princess Polly, July Age Culture Kings. They've got Shopify plus and it's easy to see why. The Shopify plus checkout converts 36% better than other checkouts. It's customizable. It has D2C and B2B capability. It has international expansion stores. And that's just the start. Don't settle for a platform that skips. Check out shopify.com auplus and get in touch with the Aussie Shopify plus team to see how Shopify plus can power your business without missing a beat.
[Voiceover]: The traditional agency model. If I'm skeptical, bringing your senior hitters, you have a handful of senior hitters and a whole bunch of junior team members to do the work. Do you see that changing? Do you see that evolving?
Eric Siu: Yeah, I actually tweeted this the other day. I think the agencies of the future are going to be wildly different. Meaning that in America at least, if Your agency does 100 to $200,000 revenue per employee per year. 100 to 200,000, that's considered pretty good. And I think it's going to go up to a million to $2 million plus at least. Right? I think it's going to go potentially higher than that. And so what I mean is the way I see it is the best agencies out there that might be working on a usage charging on a usage model or performance based model they're not going to need that many people, and they don't need that many clients either. And they can do really well. Imagine if you're driving a thousand leads to a customer per month, and they'll pay you $1,000 per meeting. That qualified meeting that you send to them, that's already $1 million per month on one client. And that could scale up and down. Right. And so I see a lot of people utilizing AI to build these customer acquisition systems or platforms, and you just work with the best of the best. And unfortunately, the people that are B and C players, they get eliminated and they're going to either have to find something else to do, or I think there's going to be some form of universal basic income. And, you know, that probably frees up time for them to do what they want.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that makes total sense. We've got a lot of people listening to this that I know are specialists in their area, especially in E commerce. And they might be toying with the idea of going out and consulting or being in an agency, but have that hesitation of, oh, God, I'm not in the top 1%. You know, I'm not that innovator. I'm not that person who can crack every code. How much of your time do you think you spend with your clients doing the foundational and the basic work to get the foundations right versus doing the really innovative, pointy end work?
Eric Siu: Yeah. So our mission as an agency is to be the most innovative marketing company in the world. That's very aspirational. The most innovative marketing company in the world that drives customers. The last part is very important. And so we do try to push innovation. Our whole thing is if you guys are coming to us with ideas, you probably should fire us. So we do push them there. And the other thing is. But there's a lot of blocking and tackling. There's a lot of foundational work that needs to be done. And so what we do when we meet with these clients every two weeks or so is there's a running document that shows the main key performance indicator front and center. And it says if we're on track or off track, it's red, yellow, green light. Right. And if it's green, great. Yellow. Okay, we should talk about it. Red. Definitely should talk about it. And if it's yellow or red three weeks in a row or three meetings in a row, we know there's a real problem that way. We know internally there's no sandbagging that can happen. There's a running history that's happening and there's a scoreboard right there. That is what helps us do really good foundational work, the blocking and tackling stuff. And also it creates a layer of accountability.
[Voiceover]: And are those metrics, are they unique for each client or do you have a standard marketing benchmark that you look towards?
Eric Siu: It's unique to each client because, you know, it might be different B2C or like an E Commerce client. So I would say, like B2B. Usually they're looking at MRR, but you know, from a marketing standpoint, they're looking at MQLs generated. So it's stuff like that.
[Voiceover]: Can you explain for our listeners? Mrr first mqo.
Eric Siu: Totally. So mrr means monthly recurring revenue. So when you're running a SaaS business, you want that revenue to, you want it to compound because if you have people paying you 30 bucks a month and you have a million of them, then it adds up very quickly. Right. And so you look at your MRR and then, well, a layer below that is how can marketing affect that MRR growth? Well, it's by driving more MQLs, which is more marketing qualified leads. That's what it is.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Makes sense. So you work across B2B and B2C clients. Are there any trends that you're seeing? And this is a question from our community. Ellen o' Donnell actually put it through in our Slack channel yesterday when I said that I was interviewing you and he asked, are there any trends or changes that you're seeing this year where digital strategies are driving the highest ROI for B brands that you work with? So are there any emerging channels that you're seeing really exceptional ROI results with?
Eric Siu: Yeah. Okay, well, let me, I'll tell you the, I'll give you the emerging thing piece. I don't know about the roi, but we are getting a lot more requests for people looking for Reddit management. So Reddit community management, also for YouTube organic management, that's ramping up quite a bit as well. And so we see where the puck is going. There's also people asking for LinkedIn stuff or Discord management, things like that. There's a lot of community management popping up. There's a lot of YouTube popping up. So people know where the attention is going and they're trying to diversify. And so, you know, I can say when it's hard to paint an ROI on any of these things that I'm talking about right now, but people know that's where it's going. And that's the other thing. Here's Another trend, I would say, I would say that we're going to continue to see a trend from people trying to measure everything right now to people going more into the middle saying, okay, some things I can measure, some things I can't measure. Because, you know, back in the day when I first started doing digital marketing, you could measure a lot. Now it's a lot more restrictive and I think people need to wake up. That's the world that we live in now. And stop stressing over these things because you get diminishing returns and you should go focus on higher leverage activities.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and I'm seeing that as well. And I love that you called out Reddit, but with all these emerging channels and we've always had emerging channels, this isn't new, but there's always been emerging channels. I think there's a lot of pressure on brands at the moment to go, oh gosh, I've got to be in Pinterest, I've got to be on TikTok, I've got to do all this stuff. What's your advice to your clients? You go, actually just pick a couple of those channels and do them really well. Or do you like to spread yourself over as many as you can?
Eric Siu: Yeah, I think spreading yourself over, some people really like that. That's just how their personality is. My personality certainly like that as well. But I've just learned over the years with business or marketing, it's better to just stay focused, especially when you're really resource constrained, because entrepreneurship or business is really a resource allocation game. And so if it's about resource allocation, well, then you can't spread yourself then, because how are you going to do everything? Well, so usually if people are going to start creating content, the question is, well, number one, where is your audience hanging out? Number two, what type of content are you actually good at? Then focus on that and then just keep doing it. It's going to probably take two to three years to get something going and that's where most people give up because they're not willing to wait two to three years and they're not willing to be embarrassed. So that's what I would say. It's focus on one, nail it, and then you can scale it across different channels.
[Voiceover]: I'm interested to hear more about your Reddit experience because I've been following them in the last few months. Obviously, as they've geared up for IPO and then gone public, they've changed a lot of their advertising offering, including some offerings where you can Actually post, and it is tiny, tiny, tiny. It says promoted, but it actually looks like an organic post. What's the approach that you like to take with Reddit and joining those communities? Do you go through with organic content? Are you paying for it? How? You know that line between authentic and paid presence?
Eric Siu: So we don't do any paid Reddit right now. Not to my knowledge. But we do more organic. So, for example, we add like a, let's just say like an Airbnb Zillow competitor. They're looking to just be part of the conversation whenever someone's talking about housing. So that's an example.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Great. And this, I think, is such a rich territory, especially with eyeballs. I knew I reached it the other day when sitting on the couch, my wife and we were searching something and she went straight to Reddit. And I'm like, I've been on Reddit for years. When did you join Reddit?
Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean, I was using Reddit yesterday. I told you that. The zero sleep thing, it's like, okay, how do we solve this? Right? But yeah, here's the other thing. I mean, Google's favoring Quora and Reddit answers more and more. That's another reason why people are looking at Reddit.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, absolutely. And obviously TikTok, we're not going to dive into TikTok, but changes coming up around TikTok with legal political ramifications. What's your stance on TikTok for your clients? Are you still bullish on it or are you kind of holding back on it?
Eric Siu: I think with TikTok, it's a little shaky, but the way I see it is continue to utilize TikTok shops, continue to utilize TikTok organic, even paid as well. It works. I mean, it's still around right now, so why not use it? And the other thing is, obviously, if you're posting a TikTok, you're posting to YouTube shorts, you're posting to Instagram reels as well. And so it's not like you're losing everything. The attention will probably get redistributed to the others. And so I think milk it while you can right now, but not too bullish on it in the long term.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, okay, that's interesting. So I'm interested to hear more about you. Obviously, you've got marketing school, podcasts, you've got your own book, you've got the agency. What's your end goal as an entrepreneur? Like, where are you heading?
Eric Siu: So I'm going to give you the boring answer. I mean, I'm in a group called ypo, and we had a dinner a couple weeks ago, and one of the questions, the prompt, it was like a Jeffersonian dinner. And one of the prompts was about, you know, what do you see yourself doing when you're old? Like a hundred years old. And when it came over to me, I just said, I feel like I'm kind of doing it right now. And there's, you know, I could hear some chuckles. And the reality is it goes back to learning and teaching. Like, I am actively learning and teaching right now. I with marketing school, with the Leveling up podcast, even coaching people on the team or experience sharing, like, or throwing events or speaking at local colleges over here, like usc. I feel like I'm doing it, and I just want to continue to do that. And as long as I'm doing that, I'm having fun, which is. I mean, that's what I enjoy doing it. That's where I get energy. Like when I watch tv. Sure, I enjoy some of the shows. Like, Shogun's a great show right now. I don't know if it's. Yeah, it's over there in Australia. Yes.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we're up to episode six right now.
Eric Siu: Oh, yes. Seven's out. So, you know, get ready for that. But point is, like, I enjoy it, but I enjoy watching these. I'm watching the movie. I've never seen Casino before. And I'm watching. I'm like, this is a damn good movie. But I feel kind of like almost sad after I watch these. I'm like, man, I could have created so much more. So that's how I see it. It's just learning and teaching. And part of learning and teaching is actually doing stuff too, so.
[Voiceover]: And the best way to learn is by teaching a lot of the time.
Eric Siu: And what I'll say is, like, to build something generational. And what I've realized this as I get older is it's not one year, it's not three years, it's not five years, it's not even 10 years. It might be 20 to 30 years. And then you could compound it into something that is doing great. But, oh, it's like, okay, well, Eric, you know, why even try to go for something that's like a billion dollar valuation? It's like, well, because it's fun. And, yeah, that's it.
[Voiceover]: I'm getting a feeling that the theme here is, you know, find something that you're passionate about, that you're curious about, but then kind of double down on it. And stick to it and give it time to mature, to make mistakes. Don't just throw it away after three months if you're still passionate about it.
Eric Siu: Yeah, 50% of the game is just to keep going. In fact, as I say that, I'm like, there was literally a Steve Job quote. It's like a lot of it's just sheer perseverance. It's sheer focus and sheer persistence over a long period of time. And then you'll get everything that you want. It's just most people can't do it. It's hard.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, it is hard. And I think too, it depends on the medium you're in. But, you know, in podcasting especially, you sit here in a room talking to a computer and then you put it out into the world and you get some stats, but they're pretty rubbish stats. And you go, God, I hope that's landed. And it's not until you kind of have a few interactions and you're at conferences and all that sort of stuff, and people like, I heard that interview, or I connected with this person after you had that chat, and you're like, ah, it's actually all kind of coming together.
Eric Siu: It is. And it takes a long time to get there. It's first podcast, this is. I started leveling up 11 years ago. First podcast, only nine downloads a day for the first year. You would think I would have given up by then. And in the second year, 30 downloads a day, you would think I would have given up by then, but then, no, you just keep going. And by the way, if I based it on the downloads, I would have quit, but I base it on the learnings instead. And so that's a hack. If those of you that want to grow an audience and if you're doing podcasts, just aim for the learnings.
[Voiceover]: That's exactly why I started this, because I left my corporate job, got went out as a consultant, and then my first consultancy job wanted me in their business four days a week. And I had that problem. I was like, well, if I am in this business, I've essentially bought myself a job and I'm not going to be doing all the learning that I want to do. What's a great way to learn and stay connected? Speak with. Speak to people every week on a podcast. So, yeah, you can't get too hung up on stats if that's your end goal. Last question I've got for you. Where do you go to learn? Because I could imagine that you being so curious and ahead of the game that you need Sources and you've already mentioned some of the connections that you've got. I can imagine you learn a lot through that network. But where do you go to learn and stay cutting edge in marketing but also all the other areas you're interested in?
Eric Siu: Yeah, so I would say I don't call it X, I just call it Twitter. Twitter has been a great source and that's often where I come up with a lot of topics for marketing school because it's more marketing news that we're reacting to. So I would say Twitter is great. You just got to make sure you curate your feed really well. There's just random stats that you'll see. Like I saw one today from a venture capitalist sharing that, you know, his average blog time, you know, from maybe 10 years ago is maybe, you know, a minute and 30 seconds and it decreased to like a minute and now it's 45 seconds, now it's 33 seconds or so. I was like, these are good stats. This is something that's good to react to. So I'll say Twitter for sure. Not any books because by the time a book is published, it's generally outdated when it comes to marketing. Maybe some, you know, Ogilvy on advertising or something just to get the principles. And other than that, I don't listen to marketing podcasts anymore. I just focus on business podcasts and I think I talk about the group that I'm in. But also forming your own little groups too. We do these founder retreats and we get marketing minded founders to come and we share a lot of information with each other and this is stuff that you just wouldn't share on socials. So that's a nice hack.
[Voiceover]: That's all great sources. Thank you, Eric. So wrapping up, you've got a lot of things on the go at the moment. What's next for yourself and Single Grain? What's your focus for the next 12 months? What are you doubling down on?
Eric Siu: Yeah, so for me I'm focused on the agency. If you asked me three, four years ago, I would have said, oh, I have these three, four, five other things going on. So it really is just the agency. It's continuing to create content. It's really anything that feeds the agency. That's what we're working on. Where obviously we're building solutions products for ourselves and we're dog feeding it to ourselves first before we think about maybe productizing it and building that usage based or performance based model for the future. So yeah, it's just focused on that and it's been A nice boon to just feel locked in and not feel like I'm all over the place. So that'll be my key takeaway for everyone. Focus.
[Voiceover]: I love it.
Nathan Bush: Any Australian clients on the cards or trips to Australia?
Eric Siu: Not on the cards. I haven't been. I don't think I've been in Australia for like four or five years or so. But we did have a client in Australia called Siteminder. I remember that. So.
[Voiceover]: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Eric Siu: Okay.
[Voiceover]: All right.
Nathan Bush: All right, well, we'll see what happens.
[Voiceover]: Eric, thank you so much for joining us on Add to Card.
Eric Siu: Thanks for having me, Nathan.
[Voiceover]: There you go.
Nathan Bush: That was a bit of a quick fire episode, but that's exactly what I expected from Eric and I'm just so
[Voiceover]: stoked to be able to have that chat.
Nathan Bush: Here are three things. Out of all those practical ideas, here are three things that I took away. Number one, a couple of specific tools that Eric mentioned that I hadn't used before. So number one was Metric Cool M E T R I C Cool. And that measures performance on social media. So I'm going to go have a play with that. And number two was Hugging Face and that was a duplicate content checkup. Really important. If you are asking AI to generate some copy for you, Hugging Face could
[Voiceover]: be the place to go.
Nathan Bush: Both of those are new to me,
[Voiceover]: so I'm going to go check those out.
Nathan Bush: Number two, focus. Even though Eric has hundreds of podcasts talking over thousands of topics, his advice is don't spread yourself too thin. No one has endless resources and so you need to work out where your audience are hanging out and start there. When you've nailed that, you can scale across different channels. That was really interesting from Eric because he seems to be the kind of person who gets excited about everything, but it's good to know from his perspective when it comes to his business, he tries to master a couple of channels
[Voiceover]: first before expanding out.
Nathan Bush: And number three, form your own groups to connect and share ideas. Eric mentioned founder retreats that he attends and also Jefferson dinners which involve eight to 14 guests, food and a topic
[Voiceover]: picked by the host.
Nathan Bush: You don't have to wait for other people to organize this. You can organize these groups yourself. A trusted circle of friends and peers who can share ideas openly.
[Voiceover]: Don't wait for others to do it.
Nathan Bush: You can go out and do that yourself. Thanks for joining us today on Add to Cart to listen to all our E commerce conversations now in the hundreds. You can head over to addtocart.com there. You can also join up to our free private Slack community to share e commerce ideas, tips and questions with other listeners. You can also subscribe to the Add to Cart weekly newsletter and browse some of the video highlights from our chats. There is a lot there. That's addtocart.com and if I can ask you you one thing before you go. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague who could benefit or leave us a review. It really makes a difference. Thanks again for listening. And until next time, keep those customers adding to cartoon.
