AI Revenue Loop

This is Trung, and welcome back to AI revenue loop where we interview founders and marketing leaders and sales leader on their journey and how they, ping and adopt AI. So here we have Ishan.

Ishan is the founder of Spear Growth. And, Ishan, do you wanna just share with the listener a little bit about yourself? Since the last almost four years now, I've been running my agency. It's Spear Growth. We do two things.

We do ads and SEO for b to b SaaS companies in particular. Now in since we're an agency and we look or we get to speak with a lot of marketing managers, we get to see their journey. We get to see what's their marketing stack look like.

What's working? What's not working at any point of time? So that's also put me in this unique position where I can I actually have a good sense of what works in different companies just because of the conversations I've had?

Apart from that, I have my own podcast which in that is where like every week we're talking with someone and understanding what's working for them.

So I like learning and that's what I've been doing for years, either through the company or through the podcast or my content or just conversations. Yeah. That's a little bit about me.

That's amazing. So the, the desire to learn, I read from your your, post a long time ago that this is why you chose this plan, to go on a entrepreneurial journey. Right? So your journey into marketing is a little bit unconventional.

I read that you left a great role, at The US in 2020 with no plan, at all. Can you, can you tell us a little bit more about that? Oh, yeah. I I went through this phase. Right?

So I'm a computer science engineer. Right and so I used to code I won a couple of hackathons. I was a full stack like I was a dev, full stack dev, built things then I remember a freelance project and I realized I I I don't like coding.

I especially don't like like debugging that just I just couldn't bear it so completely pivot like so now I'm I'm at a place where I didn't know what to do so I started doing every random thing and yeah if we figure then we will talk about some of the random things but a lot of random things and the conclusion was hey I like this business and marketing side of things because everything every project I picked up I had to market it.

I enjoyed that so I think I only sat for two companies in my placement or I decided to set for two companies but I got lucky and got selected by the first one and the backup plan was struggling and trying to figure out my own start up for you know as a kid, essentially.

Got into high radius, which is a fintech unicorn. It's in the accounts receivable space. Got lucky a couple of times there. And and when I joined, I what I fully had intentions of leaving.

I literally wanted to yeah. I I joined knowing that, hey. If I'm when I'm there, I just want to know what larger companies do, how they work, and then I'm gonna use that information somehow and build my own startup.

That those were my intentions joined in, and I realized, oh, I don't know a lot. I thought I knew a lot more than I knew. I realized that there, I had an amazing like, the that company, at least by the time I was at, just been amazing.

Like, the team was amazing. The mentors I got were amazing. It was great. Got lucky a couple of times. I got to quickly lead the SEO team, completely so I had the entire channel under me.

I did that for another two years or so and then I sort of you know I couldn't see myself like the pace of learning really slowed down and while the pay was great the position was great I had access to the CMO and like you know like for as my like as a starting of my career right that was a great place to be but my pace of learning has slowed down and one thing I've always maintained is that hey if what you're doing now if I I knew that if I continue doing what I wanted or what I was doing at that point of time I would definitely not hit my, like, my growth targets.

Like, I had some I wanted to have us maintain a certain pace and then knew if I continued the role I want and if I left it and I did anything else, there's a small chance I might be able to learn faster.

So I would rather it wasn't a big risk. It was like hey there's 0% chance of learning faster fast enough versus there's a small percent chance.

I just left it. Yeah. That was the story about me just leaving the job. Left it and just started doing freelancing for a while where I thought what should I even do with my life at that point.

But yeah. I continue learning. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's amazing because I'm not sure if I I don't know exactly who say this, but some some very famous person say that, 20 in your 20, you wanna optimize for learning.

And then in your 30 and 40, that's when you wanna optimize for earning. If you optimize for earning too soon, your growth stall out.

I think, I think you basically following that advice to the T. Oh, yeah. To to the T. Yeah. A %. That's I'm 28 now. I have two more years to go. Two two more years of learning.

No. I I think it's it's a a continuous learning, continuous journey. When you start out, when you left the the unicorn, you actually said that you didn't want to start business because you you want freedom.

Right? But here you are four years later, you you start your own business. You have employee that report to you. Can you share more with us?

Like, what make the the change of heart? Oh, yeah. So every year I have this, I don't have it in my wall because I just moved houses but then otherwise wherever I work next to my wall I have the vision for the year.

Every year I said like one word. My word for the year when I started my company was freedom.

Okay. Okay. And And that change the word change every year? Yeah. The word changes every single year. So Oh, okay. I have this one focus for every year. That year's word was freedom and I was like, this is just Feb.

Right? So I'm just into the year, month two. I'm like, yeah. You know, I'll optimize for freedom. I was doing I was freelancing back then. I was I have never made as much money.

Even till date, I haven't made the amount of money as to make as a freelancer. So I would work. I didn't. There wasn't like. I didn't. I didn't have to put a lot of time in. I would make enough money to sustain myself for every.

A year every month while hardly working every week. But then I I could take all the time that I had remaining. I went into these communities and I could learn from like, I I found this com this is this community called peak.

And peak community was a community of CMOs and v p's of marketing and the day I left my job and this might sound like I'm making it up but let's say I had put in my resignation I had no I served my notice period with a couple of months because I was involved in a lot of different things so it was hard to just replace me immediately so I served I think about three months after resigning.

Imagine if tomorrow is the last day and I still am but I really was a night all back then so I had nothing to do the night before.

I usually used to work at night but that night I had nothing to do. The next day was going to be my last day at the company and I get this email from Samram Vajray.

You might have seen him. He's like the founder of a couple of different companies in both SaaS and also now he's running a services GTM consultancy.

So I got an email from him. It was an end mass email. I have no idea how he got that and it was an invitation to a webinar.

The webinar was being taken by this person James Gilbert and his profile he had written three times CMO and I really wanted all like I wanted to be a CMO. Right? So I'm like great.

Both these folks seem very very you know I look up to both of them so I should probably go and I was arrogant at this point of time right like prop like I was arrogant I was arrogant that I hadn't watched a video which which you know where I hadn't where I could learn something.

You know, like, it was like, I already know all of this in marketing and I cannot find more videos where I could learn.

So I go to this, call. It was in U I was in India. This call was in The US. So it was like 1AM my time. I go on this call and this was a zoom call and every other person on the call was either a VP or a CMO and somehow I got the invite.

Okay. And James Gilbert comes up with a thirty minute call and he just like opens a couple of slides and he's like hey you all know these companies and they were like 30 logos on that.

I started looking through them one by one and he just presses next. And then he just shows very complex user journey. Like okay This is a typical user journey and he points to two.

I'm still trying to analyze the journey. I remember this very clearly because it shattered me. I just kept I I couldn't even figure out the journey and he had talked through three points through it and he pressed next again.

And that was the entire presentation. I couldn't keep up. Right? And so that was the moment where, you know, because I was overconfident.

Like, I was way too confident and on that meeting it was like if there was one guy. It was Zoom meeting. So I could see the other participants who had the cameras on. And they were all nodding. Like, they understood.

And I was so in my head, I'm the only guy on this call who doesn't couldn't even keep up. You know, like Maybe you know the guy couldn't keep up keep up either. Who knows? Most probably they could. But I I was just shattered.

And next, I remember I went to office and they were cutting the cake, congratulating me for being brave and leaving. And I genuinely just like, you know, my confidence had dropped overnight and then next day cutting the cake.

Like the night before leaving. Wow. Yeah. It was Truly, like, amazing timing. He had started a community, joined there. I asked every single dumb question you can think.

I remember there was this call where there was three CMOs discussing their campaign strategy for the year. And the question I had asked, like, fifteen minutes into the call was hey what is a campaign?

I remember asking them this. They all looked at me like why is a kid on this call and they were nice enough to still explain it to me and I realized that no one really knew what a campaign is.

Like everyone defined it in a different way. The question wasn't really dumb but then it was very nerve wracking to ask those questions.

So there was one CMO showed his entire company's years marketing plan and other CMOs were like talking about it and I remember the one thing there was nothing I couldn't understand at that point, but I couldn't see with the same conviction that, hey.

This is what the company should do that others had.

The the like the best amongst the group. Like, obviously, there's a lot of folks there that weren't as great, but the best of the best in that group, they could say with a level of conviction and speed that I couldn't that hit.

This is a strategy to take. In this time where I had left my job, I was freelancing a lot of free time. I learnt how to design. I brushed up on copywriting.

All the basics of marketing. I wrapped all of that up then I had all this access to CMOs doing strategies. I got access to strategic thinking and I there was still this gap. I couldn't figure out what the gap was.

So this was I think about five months into me being or like four five months of me being into the community learning from everyone and then James Gilbert, the person who did the presentation that company broke my confidence.

He agreed to get on a call with me and in that call he was he was everything I thought he was.

He's still he's just amazing and and he said the sentence to me like hey you know a CMO is not a marketer. A CMO is just a business person that happens to specialize in marketing.

Everything that you are learning is marketing and you don't know business. You'll never be a CMO. He didn't say it in these words like his advice of but that's what I heard.

I heard that you'll never be a CMO if you don't learn business. So in my head I had two options go to college so I can go to business school or start my company.

In my head for some reason you know like starting company was easier. So the week late and the next week I started spear growth. Yeah. Oh, wow. Was it easier? Well, you didn't go to business school, so you don't need to hire it.

I had sleepless nights in year one because I didn't know how to hire and that was so stressful then I actually resigned for firing like if people is always been the toughest part then I almost shut down the the company almost shut down in month eight or nine because the the structure I had set up wasn't great.

So I I doubt it's going to be, like, emotionally as hard.

Like, I doubt business could be emotionally as hard as this, but it's it's been fun. It's been worth it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I think, like, starting a business is is not fully faint apart.

And and if you especially for for b two b SaaS, you work with a lot of them. Right? If you if you know the, success the art of success, and if you are a critical thinker, no one would in the right mind start a business.

So only the the naivety food things I how how hard can it be? Here we are. I agree. I absolutely agree.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did that a few times and, soon no regret. I said I I don't think I, I when every time I join a company, I know, like, yeah, I can can only be here for one or two years, and and I only wanna do my own thing.

So totally, on the same boat with you. So let's let's talk a little bit about spear growth.

So you are y'all are focusing on b to b SaaS marketing. Right? Just like SEO and PPC, but you also been, weaving AI into your services. In fact, like, I heard you even brought on AI developers to build our AI capability at the agencies.

What prompted that investment in in AI? How are you integrating AI into your client work? Yeah. I remember using ChargeGPT for the first time and just completely being blown.

Because before that I I wasn't a believer. I was like there's no way LMS can do this and that and I remember the first time I used it like this like in my head everything should have been if and else statement.

If this happens do that. If this happens do that and that's all technology can get to. I was sure. And when I used ChargeGPT and I asked it complex questions apart from math it could do everything.

Like this is like only ChargeGPT. It could do so many things. It was a little off but was not very off. Like this is again version one. Yeah. Right?

2022 late of of November. I looked at it then and I was like it won't ever get better and then I looked at it again and I think 2020 just last year. 2024 was when I looked at it again. Oh okay. It was just mind blowing. Right. So. Yeah.

That was a time like hey you know this is going to change things and my hypothesis was like like so I'm not an expert in this but this is going to change things but I'm not an expert so I need to am I just overreacting or is it really gonna change things?

So I set up calls with a lot of VCs, with a lot of SaaS founders, and AI developers.

Everyone I knew I could find or, like, someone's friends friends I set up. I think about a good I had about fourteen hours of conversations in that one week trying to figure out how should I think about this.

Right? Because I'm not the expert for sure. I wasn't planned still I'm not but definitely wasn't back then. So how do I even think about that? So I asked for help.

A lot of folks told me things and I understood a couple of things. Right? One of the things I understood was let's take SAS. SAS only needs a user interface because SaaS the way it was could only automate less than 70% of something.

Right? You still and that remainder of the 30% was distributed across the process. Now with AI, with LLM specifically, for not everything, but for a lot of things, you'll you'll be able to automate a lot of that remaining 30%.

So the example I take is, hey. Would I want to hire an accountant or an accounting software Or would I just want one red, a big button that I press and I forget about accounting forever.

And I would definitely press the red button. One of the realizing was AI might enable red button software as, you know, like as I call them.

Just like, hey. Just like one button and just forget about it. It doesn't exist. You're paying with money, but everything's happening. You don't even have to check.

You just know it's happening, and it it's not never making a mistake. Like, that's going to change quite a few things. And I also understood a lot of things that couldn't be automated before an agency now could be.

Lot of the work that people were doing could be automated and I know that it's going to change what work looks like, what meetings look like.

I'm a visionary thrown through. I could imagine very clearly what meetings would look like. I could imagine we can I give you a couple of examples of things we are building towards now?

I could imagine how they would be structured, what people would be doing, what days would look like. It was basically like, it is going to be a big deal.

So then I I made a plan, spoke with a few like really really senior devs to see if they would hop on board and help me just figure out this AI thing, automate a few things that spare growth.

Got very lucky. Harsh joined the team. Harsh is basically great track record, great guy, culture fit, amazing human being and a badass developer.

Right. So got him on board to lead the entire all of the efforts and my role was, hey, I'm going to allocate this entire budget from our profits.

So we take our profits, we put it into, an account and so for larger initiatives I just take money out of the profits so I allocated an x amount of money for the year that hey I'm going to spend this amount of money on this entire AI dev thing over a year.

And if by the end of, let's say, three months, I see nothing.

If I see even little bit happening, it's a success. If I see nothing, I'm gonna scrap the project. And I was very clear about all of those things. In month in q one with only Harsh, no other developers, we do SEO and sprints.

So our clients basically, we pick one thing to do in SEO and we are able to generate m q's within the quarter of us working. We don't even do long term contracts for SEO.

So for our most popular sprint, Harsh on his own increased the team productive by good 40% in the first quarter. Oh, wow. 4040% in the first quarter. Forty percent. And as a super activity of your team?

For for my SEO team, we've we don't we don't have login systems and security systems. And, we we didn't build out, like, you know, because if you do have to do it for yourself, it's a locally hosted and stuff.

You don't have to build like the payment portal and stuff. Right? So you if you remove user management and all of that stuff, if you just build build the core functionality, that's what he did.

He didn't build SaaS. He build it like an internal tool for us removing every other bell and whistle that, you know, if you had to try and sell it, you would need.

We were able to reduce our, like, time working on something with 40%. That was, like, more than enough for me to know. I need to double down on this.

40 is a lot like we I can like every team member could literally take on the time. 20% work. Yeah. Yeah. We could either take on more work or we could take that, the time saved, put in the same clients and charge them more.

That was a direct revenue impact in Q1, which is blew my mind. So since then, we've hired two more developers. And we are now a third developer is joining this, the fourth developer essentially is going to join this week.

So we are going all in and we will be automating a bunch of stuff across different job functions at spear growth. I can go into depth of anything.

Yeah. Yeah. So what what would be the your favorite, or most impactful automation that, maybe is the first one that you mentioned saving 40% within just first quarter or anything else come to mind? Right? Anything that you can share?

We're an open book. So I can share most things. One of my favorite pieces is definitely how well LMS can categorize things. Because what LMS all they enable so writing content stuff is a horrible use case for a l m at least for now.

Yeah. But, they're really good at categorizing things, summarizing things, and doing contextual search. Those are the, three things LLMs are good at. So if you look at that, the categorization part like so yeah.

Like these core capabilities are great. For example, the context the the grouping aspect of it right now. I've been able to slice and dice data in ways that we just couldn't before. Like, just couldn't do it.

And now that we have this entire system built out, our SEO insights are better. It's faster. We're able to sort of go to different websites, categorize them, and use it for, let's say, every aspect of, let's say, in in SEO.

Our, we've made an executive dashboard. We sell it for like $23 a month. It's just an executive report on SEO.

It's the simplest. Just $23 a month. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it's an executive report which basically, shows like hey what is the least amount of information you want to look at to take a decision for SEO at any point of time.

It's meant for at least like if you've been doing SEO for at least a year then then you can use it but we couldn't have done it like we couldn't have sold for two free earlier because to do it manually it used to take us like a week to just pull in all the data summarize it like it was a lot of work.

With AI, we've been able to reduce the time enough to be able to actually make it a viable product to sell. That's, like, I think a huge use case, like, just reporting and lot of that stuff.

But, yeah, like, the categorization aspect is probably my favorite yet. It might change as we build the more things. Contextual search and stuff might and summarization might take over.

But right now, we are about two quarters in. At this point of time, categorization as a function is probably the best use case, my favorite use case for AI. K. So, any concrete example on what do you categorize?

So so I hear you mentioned website. Right? So do you crowd the website and then you categorize them? And how does that help? Let's take since you're talking about SEO, right, let's take the SEO example.

Let's take the executive report. Right? No one, like, if you're doing any other marketing channel, you respect that channel enough. Are the people person running the channel enough?

Do you say, hey. You are responsible lead. How many leads did I get? How many skills did I get? You doc you discuss that. But with SEO just because of how the industry is placed everyone ask like how many backlinks did I get?

No one cares about backlinks. How many tags should I resolve? No one cares about that but even CMOs have I just say they've given up. They've basically given up on SEO as a channel because they know it works.

They know they have to focus on it. They don't know how and ought to figure it out. So they ask questions on the execution side and they don't know whether it's ever going to it really has a strong correlation to results or not.

It's basically a black box. But I would like people to have real conversations. Like, conversation like, hey, you know, my how are we doing for this product?

And what could we do like no one I've never seen someone say that hey you know for this product treat treat like a different channel for this product I need to increase our pipeline from SEO by x percent How would you help me do that?

That's not a question I've I've hardly ever been asked that on on a sales call. But as I get asked it all the time.

So for SEO, like, how do you enable that? For example, we can take the entire website, let's say 6,000 pages, categorize them by product. And then we sort of do a little bit more segmentation. And now we have an it's it's very simple.

It's the most obvious thing to do. But now, you know, by product, how many leads are getting? How many escrows are coming? How much traffic is coming? How many backlinks going to which product segment of yours?

I'd like other topics. You analyze so many other things where you can sort of figure it all. When I talk to and you can also look at a page and say, okay, this page talks to this ICP of mine and that other page talks to a different ICP.

So you can literally look through business segments and have SEO discussions. Right? Like that wasn't possible earlier.

That makes so much sense. So this is for your client website. You would be able to categorize thousands of pages and then have, a business unit level discussion. Yes. In term of SEO. Didn't happen earlier.

It's never happened. We can then talk about, hey, you know, in this industry, if you sort of start extending that to your competitors, you can actually have a like, these are questions that I wish people would ask.

And now I've made the report that people can ask those questions. For example, another question I like is that, hey.

You know, in this amongst our competitors who has a higher share of voice, people have been asking that but then why? How do we increase ours? What about this product? Like, you know, like that's the good discussion you need to have.

Like okay what about on if I only look at bottom funnel keywords and clicks, what percentage do we own? That has a direct correlation with the revenue that each company is generating from.

Because if you just look at who's ranking where or who has how much share of voice for bot and funnel keywords, you know how much revenue which which of your competitors making from SEO.

If I talk about revenue, people always wanted to know that, but no one knew how to correlate, how to understand who's like, you literally can spy on your competitors exactly, like, close to revenue figures and know how ahead or behind they are of you.

Because Wow. There there's a direct correlation. To on the topic of of marketing and s and AI, like, for many marketers, AI can feel a little, intimidating or too technical.

Right? And then Yeah. Let's not forget the fact that, a lot of them adopting about AI from the point of fear. Like, will AI take my jobs? Will AI replace me?

You actually host a show called Hack a Sack, where you break down marketing tech for people. Right? How do you, personally introduce AI to marketer in a way that isn't overwhelming and empowering instead of, intimidating?

That's a very good question. So big part about integrating AI into an organization as deeply as we have is managing emotions.

Especially as an agency, how do you even manage people fearing it and say hey like why should I help you build something that's gonna take my job.

Right? And what I've seen is amongst at least in our team right? There are three teams that are automating it the most and the fourth team that uses a lot of it but not as much automation.

The three teams are our SEO team, our copy team and our paid media team. We we started with automating a lot of their work.

The paid media team doesn't care. They're like hey automate everything. I want to look at strategy. I want to talk to people. They're like, just I don't want to do anything I'm doing today.

Automate away. They I don't love it. Their feedback has been, oh, great. I get to use this new fund tool and that no one has, and they feel proud about it. And this won the tools.

Right? And then there was a little bit of fear but not that much because then we had to basically switch their training to more advanced, more strategic things. And when they saw that, they were like, you know what?

Let it do all the grunt work. I'll do the most strategic things. The problem was with the copy or the design teams because those teams and those mark just like if you look at marketers, they are the more creative.

If you can summarize that those two teams like copy and design, they are the creators. They are the creative team. Like my work is an art.

Not everyone but lot of folks in the team and I don't I think it's just ethically or morally wrong to automate it or try to automate it and I get where they're coming from because we've all seen charge GPT content and it sucks.

We've all seen it. We've all seen it try to do a lot of different things that are just bad.

But at the same time we've also we've changed how it will work. Right? So we aren't generating any copy at the moment but we will and we've had this discussion with the team.

When we do it won't just it. So there's two ways you can do copy and then human in loop. Right? So either you generate something and the human comes and reviews it. That's the lazy way to do it.

And that's the common way to do it. The other way to do it is as the generation is happening you put check stops and and like in the middle where it asks you questions that hey which direction should I go to?

What should I prioritize here? You get options and you get to direct how it's happening. So for example for copy instead of saying that hey here's the copy for this ad. What a copywriter needs to be able to do is say that hey you know.

This ad is going to go to this audience that and I assume this thing about their audience when they see this is probably what they're gonna do in the day and then this was happening in their world.

This is what's happening outside with their competitors.

They're probably thinking about this. So to address this audience, I need an ad that talks about this, this and this and showcases that pain point. Do we agree on that? I haven't shown you that. Are we aligned on all those options? Yes.

Great. Here's the ad that aligns with all of it. Got it. And the copywriter gets to direct the entire direction of the copy, the design, all of that stuff to get to the direction and you sort of like so that is a different skill set.

You have to be surely good at copy to be able to have that level of a conversation, which I think most copywriters are not just cannot do it.

So summarizing if you're mediocre, yes. Your jobs are at stake. So don't be mediocre. So what happens to folks who just starting out? You'll probably get, like, there will be, like, for example, adspea growth.

So Kruti, who's our head of copy, she's sort of taken it upon upon herself to then because, okay, you have to care about the industry when you're doing things like this.

Right? You have to sort of think about things like that. So what we're doing is we're sort of creating an entire program slowly as we build it for ourselves that hey.

How do you get someone from hey. I I'm just starting cooperating to a point that is needed quickly. What is everything needed? And then you can think of this as almost like a lawyer type of job.

It changing it to a lawyer type of job or doctor type of job that hey, when you are in the learning stage, you do a lot of grant work, you have to learn heavily, there are long hours, it is hard but the moment you actually become a copywriter, in this case someone who can actually do the direction of all of that, you make bank, you make a lot of money and your skills are just next level.

So that's, I think, going to change for a lot of the roles. Yeah. Yeah. Because then now AI can help you achieve a lot more in such a short period of time.

Right? Combined with your skills, your your own process, skill sets. There are different type of marketers, like, the more technical one, like PPC or or SEO.

They they they like work to be automated way because they do a lot with datas, and and they want to graduate to advanced thinking, strategic thinking.

So Yes. Then there are more art oriented marketing, right, where they Yes. Where they Yes. Think that their their job is is more like an art and it's unethical to automate that, or they think that, hey.

I cannot do that. What's your advice for them is graduate to a next level of strategic thinking where instead of doing the groundwork, you would steer the AI in generating the output that Yes.

They desire, and then have AI as a copilot that will brainstorms or do the first draft, that that kind of things.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I think that's that's a good framework to, to go by. In recent podcast, you made a bold prediction. Basically, you say that large team large marketing team are no longer necessary.

Like, that really caught my attention. Can you unpack that a little bit? Do you think that there will be a period where small craft scrappy marketing team can can out compete, like, large resource, fully staffed marketing teams.

Well, I love the amount of research you've done. That's very, very impressive. I don't remember the exact context in which I said this. I think even with or without AI, these things remain true.

I know enough examples of companies that even without AI have like a five ten person marketing team and are just crushing it right and they are like out they're just like outperforming and have higher revenues than huge teams.

It's absolutely you that you have a 50% marketing team being completely crushed by a 5% marketing team.

That's happening all the time And, I think even before AI and all of that stuff, I know that that it was team but just like taking a step back.

All marketing and b2b SaaS and that's all I know. I don't know other industries but I know b2b SaaS.

I've always felt that all marketing in b2b SaaS should be better. Better is more profitable, more scalable, more predictable. Because if you look at any other department in a company, right, you look at the finance department.

You never question that if I have a finance department, will my books be done? Okay. You might be inefficient, but it will be done. You know? Even even a sales department. Right? Like, hey. Like, you know something will close.

Maybe a closer should be lower, but it will close. But a master's doing work for a marketer. Oh my god. Open the Pandora box. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but in a marketing department, you hire an entire department.

You might not you might not get anything out of it. And that's a very real I spoke with someone today. They make at least 50,000,000 revenue year on year in SaaS and their marketing team was doing nothing.

It's a % sales led. The marketing team barely knows what to do. They're doing these random things and it's obviously hurting the company.

Right? So I take that personal. And I like it. That shouldn't happen. So if you see a lot of the work that we do, it's just it's it's built in these first principles.

What's the most obvious simple way to get the results and while I have been able to figure out or the team and I have been able to figure a lot of things for SEO and ads and a few other things here and there where we you know tried a lot of other really good marketers have figured that out for social and for other things which I'm not an expert at and partnerships.

Now so when you take a marketer who truly understands these simple obvious first principles playbooks and you get them to a level where they know that hey this is my like this is what our goal with our own marketing with is that hey I don't want the more efficient way.

I don't want to do everything everything. So would I at my team leads all growth which is both sales and marketing and where he's trying to get to is that I don't care if it is the most efficient way to do it.

I don't care if this is there's a better way. I know that this is my way and it works.

Right. Like if I do these things I have enough understanding that I will get to the results no matter what because its mine. I know the nuances and I can get there. I think that's what we need as marketers.

You need people like obviously like slightly more senior marketers to have their methods and they need to know how to get there and then AI basically will not force them into a pure people management role.

Which means you like with the because when you take someone with a genius and you say okay now just manage fights between team members and like politics and other.

They lose their touch. Right. So but then if there are fewer like smaller teams or like I don't want like fewer people in organisation.

I'm saying a smaller team doing per activity. There's lesser loss of information. The quote unquote genius or thought leader who's owning the strategy is able to focus on the strategy and get results.

I think that to those two things have to sort of combine. Like people have to figure out how it really works without over complicating it.

Like for SEO. Right? Like again because we've discussed SEO a lot of times. Current playbook is get a bunch of backlinks, publish two blogs a week and I don't know what.

Right? So like this is such a weird playbook like who thinks like because you think about like any other marketing channel like these activities have no correlation with revenue.

Right you're telling me that hey if I write about 24 predictions in 2024 I'll suddenly someone reading that is going to someday pick up and buy from me.

If I just say it like that, now that strategy doesn't make sense. But do you want to rank for that or prank ideas for it?

I don't know like firing template for HR team. How how will someone read that and then suddenly buy for your HRMS. Like that makes no sense and when I just say it like that when I make it human it makes obvious sense.

So then we've just figured out things that make obvious sense both for ads and for SEO And that's our strategy. So if you can just find people like that, give them small teams, automate enough, and then just, you know, run it.

That's why I said maybe smaller teams would do better or would be able to do more without a lot of the, you know, larger teams slowing them down.

Yeah. So yeah. So so marketer, that thing in first principle that really honed that craft on on one channel. Right? You think those would be, the one that that be able to thrive in in this new world.

On on that topic of SEO, did you did you just throw away all the, the try the Doc Mart in SEO because, like, that's totally where it was coming from when I talked to you yesterday.

Two blog posts I mean, one blog post a week or get a bunch of backlink and then Google over or give us some traffic and then because you you don't seem to believe that at all.

Yeah. Like, so if if you just look through again first principles, okay. You want revenue. To get revenue, you want SQL. To get SQL, you need leads.

Now who's going to become a lead? And again okay. Let me not say that you need demo calls. Right? You need demo calls. So now to get a demo call, who in the world could schedule would schedule a demo with you.

Right? If someone is looking for something in your category and you just show up and say that hey. You know like you're looking for that I am that.

That's it. Now you can use your USB. You can use your creativity to have a higher sense of them to share the call with you. But then from an SEO perspective, just just show up for when people say I want this, show up with the answer.

That's it. That's what an SEO job is. So which means it's all about the keywords. It was never about the blogs. It was never about the backlinks like hey start from the keywords safe and that's just the most obvious things.

Right? Whether you know as you don't know as that's obvious. If I rank for the right keywords, I'll get money. Right? Like that's simple. Okay. So then the entire question is what's the best way to rank for keywords?

And if you answer that if you follow the trail against it, if you do the example we're taking care is like producing content. Okay. Find the keyword first and then the second question should always be we have the keyword.

Now you ask can I rank for this and how can I rank for this? So now that may not require a blog. That may or may not require backlinks. That may or may not require a new page.

So whatever it requires then you do that. But you start with the keyword. It just is the simplest way to think about it but just because it's unconventional it gives like oh everyone just feels like oh I didn't understand this.

You know I do and now Oishan is great because, you know, like, what it is generally the most simple thing to ever think through.

Like, hey, I want keywords. What do I need to rank? Great. I need a team to tell me what is needed to rank for a keyword and if I help me find those keywords I can actually rank for.

Great that's what we do and when you've done that we've been able to see like cut through all the bullshit like hey SEO takes time and all.

No like you have to keep doing SEO to see results is something I've recently heard a couple of times that just really pisses me off That makes no sense but like it takes time or if you go to our website you'll see a lot of examples of people starting SEO and then getting results quickly like you do.

I think one company very similar to you since we're speaking right now would be cash flow.

Cash flow I remember they started they're in they sell to sales teams just like you they started their their SEO project with us by week four they close $50,000 in revenue.

Oh wow from SEO? From Google traffic? From net new traffic from SEO.

Not existing traffic. I'm talking about revenue closed. Oh, wow. Right. And so and others are like SEO takes at least a year. You have to produce blogs. And then something like, what happens after you produce the blogs?

Like, what do you think will happen? Like, just like talk to me about, you know, like what is a person doing reading a random blog? And what happens then in their in their life, in their daily?

How do they even get to buying from you? They don't. You're you're playing probabilities. Right? It's like, don't. Yeah. Alright. So you suggesting, like, focusing on bottom of the funnel keyword. That makes sense. Yeah.

I heard I heard some some someone advised, like, quite the the bottom of the funnel keyword, of course, like, it's a obvious place to start, but then usually if you're in a in a competitive space, that the price will be pretty high.

Like, it will be pretty hard to rank for those keyword. Or if you do PPC, it will also be pretty difficult, pretty expensive.

Yeah. So then that's why people kinda go middle of the funnel or top of the funnel content. Right? Yeah. What do you think about what do you think about that? I'll try to summarize this.

But this is, this is probably the toughest training my team goes through. It's me. They all hate me for that. This is for me. No. It's The answer is get better at finding keywords. Right? So I'm not saying one file doesn't run out.

Sure. But then I'll give you an example. So let's see if selling SEO services. Right? So you know the first step to finding new keywords is to figure out, okay, if someone is selling SEO services, let's not say someone.

Let's define a person. And this is an activity that I've never talked about. This is a really fun. Okay. So define a very specific person, define their lives. And you can get something like, hey.

We said to B2B has companies that have raised some money usually, you know, are spending, you know, at least have, like so when we're sending SEO, they will be to be those companies, even if it's like late seed stage or see the ABC, we can work with them.

Great. Now what's something specific about them? Okay. Let's say that let's pick a problem in their life. So bottom of funnel, they prioritize your industry. When you it's not button funnel.

They basically not have are not thinking about SEO right now. They're not thinking about SEO, but they are in our ICP and they need it. You cannot generate a need. They need to need SEO. So how can I find a signal of needing SEO?

Maybe they're running ads and the ads are too expensive so I can say hey you know use SEO reduce ads cost Great. For someone whose ads are too expensive, what might they be doing? Let's take a similar example. Right?

You get a lot of spam traffic, for example. Right? So they're using one of those, spammy click reduction softwares. They just do use just rank for that. And then you say that, hey. You know, spam clicks are usually not even a concern.

If you're doing targeting right, just make up an offer. Right? That, hey. You know, you can do that. And then you can do an SEO pitch that, hey. You know, in the long term and the cost will still go up.

And then you need SEO for that. If you wanna talk to someone about SEO and we can then make a damn good offer, we still if you're running ads and it's working at all, we'll do SEO and reduce the CAC by this much within this time.

Speak with us to see if you qualify. So now you're talking ranking for a keyword of reducing spammy clicks and you're selling SEO. But because it is your ICP and you know they have a need.

Oh. And they have a need and they have ICP. So now how can you run out of, like, this bottom of the funnel? Let me be clear. This is not this is not so this is not bottom of the funnel. Being very clear, this is middle of the funnel.

But then you can sell in middle of the funnel. Sure. Conversion rates will be lower. Sure. Not everyone will get convinced that I need SEO looking at ads. Okay. But it's going to be higher than just oh.

Let's just whatever people call middle of the funnel. Right? This is our like what's called middle of the funnel is this. You can still sell. So if you're working with us, we're selling everywhere.

Every single page, we're selling something. So we get two revenues. If you sell, you make money. So, okay, let's keep selling. Right? That the most obvious things are usually the best insights.

Okay. So what I'm hearing is that get better at at finding keywords. You give an example of really, really deep deep into the pain and and try to try to imagine, like, what they're going what they are doing in their life.

Trying to Yes. Come up with the the the keyword that they might possibly search for. Yeah. And then try to rank for them those keywords even though that may not be directly related to the service that you provided.

But because the pain is so clear and then you can connect the two, right, your offer and how it can solve indirectly solving their pain.

Yeah. That make perfect sense. I I I sucks at finding, like, really, really, beep beep and finding that pain.

But, yeah, hearing hearing you is like, oh, it's eye opening. One question on the other SEO topic in AI. Right? What does Google call it, AI suggested answer or Yeah.

AI overview, AIO is a new term. Right? So if AIO take over on the keyword, it doesn't your full site ad on the right side of the page doesn't get even doesn't get a chance to run anyway.

So what do you recommend SEO, marketers? How do they how do they deal with that? How how should they think about it?

Yeah. The AI overviews, I I just think don't try to predict it with it. Do good SEO. I'm pretty sure you're sort of missing stuff there. Just show up more often and then think about the overviews for now.

But then there are stuff that you can do there. Right? For example you know that ranking on chat GPT is a different game. Ranking on public is a different game. They just do that for now.

Do good as you do that. Don't think about AIO. I think it's going to take care of itself honestly. Like I think you wait for a year and then there will be enough clarity because right now there's too much interest.

I have a couple of friends at Google and I keep asking them as well that hey you know what's this and that and they they aren't sure about what they're really doing.

So I was like no one knows what's happening. Just wait a year. Don't look at that.

But right now, if you want to do something, I think something that's very, very and it's a great opportunity to do something in the AI search space is try to rank for Charge GPT. Alright. That's fine. Without going into sorry.

Yeah? Yeah. Let's let's let's talk about that. Because because I actually good segue. How do you how how should Morgan even think about it? How do they start on ranking for test GPT? We've, for flexibility. Okay.

This probably wouldn't be the first time I talk about publicly, but we are making a tool to help you figure out all the analytics for it. We haven't named it or anything. I own, by the way, AIsearchoptimization is a domain that I own.

So we have been working yeah. Oh, I see. We've been working this for a while. We've been working on this for a while. We'll probably just call it AIsearchoptimization. com. We just like that might just be the company name eventually.

We're just waiting to see what term stabilized. I own a couple of SEO for LLMs something I own. So I'm just like waiting for, okay, what do people call it? And then I'll name the company. That's smart.

But, Okay. So you you clearly ahead of the the the crowd here. So tell tell me more, like, what practical practical stuff that I can do to help my company rank on JetGPT if someone asks about revenue acceleration or something like that.

The things that you don't have, let's start there. Right? So the things you don't have is you will probably never get analytics. Like, chat GPT and those will never tell you what keywords people are searching for.

They might tell you topics but they will never tell you keywords because people have been like we did this survey and we are still doing a lot of research right now it's not ready yet but if anyone listening if you want to know exactly what to do we're making an entire report I can pitch right?

Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Of course. Okay. Great. So if if anyone listening and you want this, it's still in the works.

We'll probably be done by the end of Feb twenty twenty five with this. We want to report on exactly how to think about it, what keywords to go after, what topics to publish, exactly everything for your company.

We'll tell you that all of that for like $500. Right? Like in a in one place. That's all. Like and like we and I'll tell you like how we're doing it.

It's all very simple. So again stuff that isn't public yet but will be fun. So for example, we did the survey and we looked at what kind of searches are people doing on Google versus chat GPD and it's a qualitative survey.

So we spoke with a lot of folks who are decision makers and we're trying to figure out what are they doing and it hasn't finished yet.

We are still in the middle of this but most probably like the earliest insights suggest that the patterns we have seen is like if people have been doing it for a while.

I've been using Charge GBD for a while and they're tech savvy, which is either most decision makers today or it will be in a year because they will probably be using Charge GBD for a while if they're using Charge GBD to take decisions.

If they're not, they use the Google search. The way you search in Google is they they mimic that in Charge GPT. But as you start using it for longer and longer, we've seen people start getting very very specific about what they search.

For example, the search that I've seen is, hey, I am, I'm a CFO at a fintech company based in Europe. Our ERP is x.

Whatever what HRM or whatever like financial reporting software should I use. This is the search. The thing is you can never predict someone who searched this. Like there is no way of optimizing for this question. Right? You cannot.

So what do you even optimize for? So what we figured out is we've made a way to understand what are the parameters people would ask add And then we sort of figure out a way to search through the Internet and we just say, okay.

You know, you don't have let's say, you need integrations. You need compliance. You need all of that stuff. Right? So you need pricing. Someone might tell you the budget. Okay.

Great. Now what which of this information is available on the Internet? So we scar the Internet for that. Then we sort of tell you that, hey. This information is not missing. How this helps is, for example, look at the question I asked.

I'm a VP of finance at a company that's this big. Okay. Is it written anywhere that you are good for enterprises? I have a budget of x. Okay. Is your pricing mentioned anywhere?

Oh, I am based in Europe. Have you spoken about g d p r compliance anywhere? I have this e r p. Have you talked about integrations anywhere? If you have spoken about all of those things, you could be recommended.

If it has missing information about half of these things, even if you are a good friend, you won't be recommended. It's as simple as that. How do you recommend something with missing information?

You don't. So you just find everything the last time we were looking for in your industry for your type of things and then use make sure information is available on the internet about you.

It could be a page on your website, could be somewhere else.

Just make sure it's available. That's one. The other modules are basically misinformation as a module That, hey, you know, you're actually this. Like, I spoke to a few folks at Deloitte, and, they didn't really care about this.

They're like, hey. We'll show up everywhere. They're like, hey. We'll show up everywhere. They're Deloitte. But then they really got pissed when in one of the searches, it says that Accenture is more premium than them.

Or anything, I forgot the company. But it said in the word, they took that personally. If you listen to this, hey, sorry I said that. But, that that's when they really cared. They're like, I cannot let that happen.

We're building a model for misinformation. Right? Or whatever. Detect this type of misinformation and Yeah. It's it's or unfair unfair evaluation. Yeah. That's going to be the second model we're building.

And then so what information is missing is model one second is what information is missing. So what's what's wrong? Information here. Yeah. That what's wrong. And, there was a third one.

I generally forgot what the third module is. I'm in the middle of doing interviews with different people trying to build this out. There are three modules we're building right now and it's all very simple stuff.

It's extremely simple. Oh yeah. The third module is what are the sources ChargeGPT is using to show up for very bottom the funnel keywords like the obvious ones.

Right? Here top 10 agencies. Right. So what are the sources it used? Is it different from Google? And then how do you show up in the sources? That's the third module we are making.

So now if you just do these three activities, add the right information on the internet, check for misinformation and correct right the information on the internet and then show up in everywhere that it uses as a data source.

That's all you need to do and it's very it's not competitive at all right now.

It is not competitive at all like in the slightest but in a year it will be and my my understanding of how competitive or how much of a difference is going to make to someone is was much my estimates are much lower.

And then Rand Fishkin, who was the founder of Moz, he came up with some estimate which are much higher than mine. I have to relook at the numbers because of him.

I thought it's not going to be major till I think five years but according to him the like Chad GPT and LLM's are gonna take a majority share of a lot of the searches like it's going to be a significant channel much faster.

So I'll have to look at the numbers that I like, I thought it would be much smaller than I saw Rand and I'm like, okay.

I trust that guy. I will look at how he did his estimates. Yeah. That's fascinating. How how can you tell what source CheshBT use if you don't you don't know? Yeah. That's the one thing I won't I won't tell you.

Like, that's mean that that was the toughest thing to figure out. It's it's that's why it took so long to build it. That one piece, it's it is such a pain in the ass to figure out. It was so hard because there's no analytics, no tools.

It's yeah. Like that's the one that's like, okay. I'm going to give that one secret. It took us, I think, a good two months of testing and seeing and then we still, like, we've I've had a few keywords.

We aren't ranking for a question we are ranking for. And then we're testing by actually showing up there and then seeing if you rank for it before we can make a claim that our software works.

But, yeah, we've already started ranking for a few of those things. Like, showing up in a few of those answers is more accurate. What is the best, b to b SaaS, the best Oh, best b to b SaaS, b b c agency is something that we tried.

We're like going after right now. Yeah. Like that's one that we did best B2B SaaS PPC agency is the one we're trying going after right now. So if you listen to this later on, I hope in a month or two, we are on that list.

Alright. I'll try it after the call. And see if you if you rank foot. Well, this is fascinating. Thank you so much for Yeah. Taking the time to to answer all those questions.

So how can other marketer how can they learn about you? Where can they find you on the Internet? Yes. You can find me on you can connect to me on link with me on LinkedIn. Ishaan, I s h double a n, shakunt, s h a k u n t, on LinkedIn.

Other than that, if you ever if you're looking for an agency that just is, like, cuts to the bullshit, does the work, owns numbers, you know, takes care of like just the basics and also making sure you get results.

We do two things. We do ads and we do SEO. So if you can share a look all with me, my team on speargrowth.

Com which is speargr0wth. com and yeah, like I I said, if you're interested in the SEO for the lens things or the a I s or whatever we end up calling it, that report, yeah, hit me up.

Do you think you can give some like a free lead magnet for the listener on, on this particular thing? Cause I think this is top of my for a lot of folks. We'll love to, we'll love to share that. We have an entire book.

We've written like the SEO thing that we discussed today which is like different from others do. We wrote everything. It's ungared. It's on our website. You know, there's a in the navigation bar there's a section called books.

We're writing everything we do for ads and SEO for free ungated on our website. You can literally go there, click on a link, check it out, and literally just it's it's there.

So everything I told you about how we like, even advanced stuff for ads, like, how do you build a list better than everyone else? What should the funnels be? All of that is going to be there for free.

I think the next lead magnet we're posting on on LinkedIn. And again, we're going heavy on this is people aren't able to crack LinkedIn ads. We have and we've sort of figured out how to think about it.

When to do which funnel. We've made an entire decision tree where you answer questions, you get to a funnel, you click on the funnel, then you go to this place where everything is documented.

There's diagrams, how to look at it. Everything like we we don't hold back because you know, like if in information is your US care doing something wrong.

So we're going to give everything away apart from how does it unless if unless if I ask, what source should be except what height?

Maybe in a year. Maybe maybe in six months, I'll tell people how we did not, but Alright. Awesome. Amazing. Thanks a lot, Ishan. It's, very nice talking to you today.

Yes. Likewise. I I really enjoyed this. I I I really appreciate how deeply you had done your research before you asked any question. That that's that never happens. Yeah. Oh, yeah? Alright. Thank you so much.