$30B Founder: How To Rank #1 In ChatGPT

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/7d9aec4159e32968

All right, so we had Darmesh Shah on the podcast today. Darmesh is interesting. One, he's probably the most listened to and viewed guest that we've ever had.
And two, the reason he is that way is because Darmesh runs HubSpot, which is a twenty five or thirty billion dollar company that makes billions and billions in revenue, and he's a billionaire. He also is sort of like a hacker. So he launches little projects all of the time. Sometimes they work, sometimes they fail, sometimes they make five thousand dollars a month. And so he's probably the only person on earth that has this perspective of both being
A big thinker and launching new projects. Yeah, and on this episode we wanted to talk to him about
The early days
Like how did you actually get Hub Swit off the ground? You had no money.
You didn't have any connections and he figured out
A new model of marketing around blogging and SEO.
And we wanted to talk about what did what did that look like then, because today with AI and ChatGPT
Seems like there's a new opportunity. And I have like
More energy than I started with because he's got this kinda
I don't know, there's like playful builder like
Get after it energy, that's pretty contagious.
Alright, give it a listen, let us know what you think in the YouTube comments.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my law in it like my day song. Do well. Uh
Back from a
Busy but fun week at uh Inbound in San Francisco.
Did you guys get together in uh in SF?
Yeah, we did.
Darmesh is like you know, this was his coachella.
He's there. He's the guy.
So Sam, I go to San Francisco and basically like
The street is shut down for the they take over that that area, the Moscone Center.
And they have this thing called inbound and so
Dharmist is like, Hey, after your talk, let's go hang out. So we go hang out.
And my first question was like
Dude, so what
What is this? Cause I'm i you know, I know it's a I know it's a conference or like sort of this event. I'm not like confused about that.
But I'm looking at it and there's these giant you know, like they make those block letters.
And it just says inbound. It doesn't even say hub spots. First thing is like it says inbound.
And then there's all these people walking around
And I'm just thinking, why are they here? What is this all about? And he actually told an interesting story about like
the origin of this that that I think is kind of a s like a pretty interesting business
Strategy.
Darmesh, tell the story. You you were you told me something, you go
I was talking to Brian and he was talking he was telling about these uh very f well funded companies that were had CMOs that were trying to get website like traffic to their website.
And here's Dormes just blogging for fun at home.
And he's getting like way more traffic. And then and they kinda looked at that, they're like
They have a chief marketing officer. They have a ad budget. They have like
All this stuff, how are you getting 10 times more visitors to your website? Like people come into your store.
Th they are. There's something here, right? Like wasn't that the story?
Yeah, that that's exactly the story.
Yeah, the I I was still in grad school finishing up writing my writing my thesis. Uh
Brian graduate a year ahead of me, but we would still get together like once a week.
And chat about ideas, right? It's like okay, well you know, because we had kinda considered the possibility of
starting a company together.
And while we were doing that, he was working as a venture partner at one of the V C firms here in the in the Boston area and his sort of job
His role was to
help these startups go from Rinky Dinky little startups and and get scale, right? It was just to help them with their go to marketing sales, you know, how do you get customers?
And so we've been meeting, um and as part of my thesis work
called on startups, the patterns and practices of modern software entrepreneurs. Cause I'm a I'm a software guy.
And my thesis advisor, uh, who's one of the tougher advisors
Um but like three quarters of the way through it's Darmesh like you've got a lot of words here.
But there's not a lot of data. This is not like Darmesh's opinion. This is supposed to be a thesis. This is, you know, you have to have some like research and things.
And this is you guys know me well enough now. So my immediate thought was
Well, what he's asking for is going to involve like interacting with humans. Uh, and that sounds awfully unpleasant. That's not what I signed up for. So I thought that like them blogging was a new thing at the time. I'm like
Well, maybe I can like write you know write a blog and maybe I can get comments on the blog and I can use that as
like the citation of the research, like oh well, you know, in my blog article I said this and some people said this or whatever. So that's that's what I did. I start a blog
And in order to come up with a name for the vlog, um, I just took the first two words of the title of the thesis, which was on startups.
Stuck the words together and put a dot com at the end of it. And this was yeah, um in the early days, so that was available.
Still registered it for fifteen dollars or whatever it was.
And anyway, so that like how do I get people other than my mom and and you know two friends to read it, right? Like what's what do I do?
And so then I kinda dig in. It's like, oh, well, there's you know this thing called Google. Um they got two types of traffic. You can pay your way in, or you can do what's called search engine optimization, can get organic traffic. There's social media sites like Dig and Reddit at the time.
It's like here are the things you do in order to get people to your website, right? That was uh a collection of things. And so those are all the things that I
sort of dug into obsessively and learned about we can
Talk some of those because uh I think that's a good topic.
Even for today as as things evolve.
And so Brian's watching me do this now when we're meeting is like
Darmesh, how's that blog going? It's like Ah it's going pretty well. Here's the traffic. He's like
How the heck are you doing that? I'm like, Oh, well, there's this thing called SEO and there's this, you know, like here are all the things that you do.
He's like, Well
Yeah, like
My portfolio companies like they can't get a hundredth of that traffic.
They should be doing this, not whatever it is they're doing. Like stop the madness in terms of spending this budget on
Things are just not you know d not driving any engagement. Um
And so that was the kind of genesis of the kinda idea of inbound marketing. It's like okay, well everybody was doing it wrong.
They needed to be doing it, like let's pull people into your website that are
kinda curious, how do you educate them, how do you put value out there? Our kind of catchphrase of the time was
You know, uh try to add value to your prospective customers before you try to extract it.
Like all other marketing was forms of how do I extract value from you, how do I interrupt you at dinner, how do I
uh get you in uh
And we were the opposite of that.
And so now back to the conference, so when we did that, we're like, Okay
Well, we didn't have a product yet, right? We're like, Okay, well, here's the things that we're doing. I was using stuff that was you know, the common things like Google Analytics and
You know, blogging software and things like that. Um
So
Two things we decided. One was that
The reason so many people weren't doing it is not that it didn't work. It was that it was just too hard to put all those two two pieces together, all the pieces that you needed to do.
Anyway, we'll put that aside. So we're like, okay, well
There's lots of nodding of heads in terms of the idea being right of this kinda inbound marketing thing. Um and so we decided
Amongst other things to say, okay, well let's start blogging about that. Let's see what the market has to say about it. Let's start getting up on stages when we can get up on stages.
And then part of that, we're like, Okay, well let's
have people that are like minded that believe in this this kind of new way
Let's get them together. So the first conference was at a Marriott that was across the street from the office. It was like two hundred people.
In a ballroom with a Marriott.
And we made the decision when we started the conference that's like this is not intended to be a company conference.
The idea here is there's this thing called inbound marketing, which we think is a better way.
And all this is really doing is we're acting as a hosts.
to kinda bring this community together to talk about these things. In fact, we actually forbade
I don't think I've ever used the word forbade before, but uh
It's it's like
You're not allowed to pitch up spot from stage.
If not if you're up spotted an employee not allowed to pitch any of your companies from all the speakers that we had. It was just all of us internally at the time.
Uh and so we sort of kept that up. That's why the conference was never named HubSpot.
Uh, you know, this is the seventeenth year that we've been yeah doing that event uh on an annual basis.
And
We it was a
Convening of the community, not a tech conference, the classic sense where you see
The CEOs get up there and pitch their book and like here's what we're doing.
Uh that's
That proved to be good. There's a few th smart things that I did that I would rec in that
Everyone should go off and try to do this, but
A few things that work. If you're really looking to kinda start a movement, uh start a category, um
We did not trademark the term inbound marketing, even though we had coined it.
Right.
And we were starting a company, right? So it's like okay, well, if this thing is actually gonna be a thing
We want everyone to use it. We want people to put it in their job titles and their job postings. It's like we want it to be a thing and the way to be make it a thing.
is to make it accessible to everyone make the event accessible to everyone. So
Even in the early years, we had direct competitors
That would send.
Like half a dozen people that would send their entire team to the inbound conference, even though
You know, Hubspot uh was a competitor. So that was it was a yeah, it was an industry event, not a conference.
I've seen this happen many times, so
I I was part of the early blogging community. Uh first as like a reader. Like I was really passionate about all bunch of blogs. And then I had my own small blog. And then I somehow became friends with a bunch of the people who I I read their blogs about, uh read on the blog. And it was like from oh eight to like
fourteen or something was like a really magical period for blogging.
And back then
We felt like freaks.
where we there was a very few of us and we were kinda weirdos. We're basically all nerds.
And we loved like
other meeting other nerds.
Then when I lived in S F with Sean
There were startups, but then there was like crypto.
And crypto was like the same thing where it was a very, very small and very passionate group of people. And it was the same thing. They were freaks, they were weirdos. If you told someone what Bitcoin was
I was one of those guys where I laughed at it and I'm like, This is a joke. What are you guys talking about? And I my takeaway from hearing you tell this story is that I've seen this happen so many times where there's niche communities or, you know, uh also with like early YouTubers. We knew early YouTubers and it really became a thing.
We have seen this happen so many times for a small a small group of really like unique or
Odd kinda odd people. But it's very tiny.
It's crazy how the signal is like how passionate they are.
Who's that now?
I think AI is already it's our that's that's past.
Uh so like that's not it. But I think that like Peter Lovels has done that with like the indie hacker. That was really cool. But what do you what is it uh uh Brian Johnson was that two years ago, like the body hacker. Uh it's obviously easy for me to say what is past. Uh but that it it's a hard question. I don't I don't actually know. What what do you think it is now?
W well I was thinking about first the
the strategy that the HubSpot thing did with the category creation when you make it.
About a movement.
And a a way of doing things instead of like a starting with your company and your product.
Um
And so I was thinking, who's done that well? And I thought of two just like little examples just while he was talking. And w the first one was Brian Johnson, I think
When Brian started, he didn't have a product to sell.
And so he basically was like
He just made this like this way of
Biohacking, longevity, let's call it the and then he named it the don't die movement. Like it's like if you believe what I believe and then you think the way is to like
Use science and um be like
Yeah, a little weird about how you're gonna yeah, yeah, I'm gonna sleep at this time. Yeah, I'm gonna put this mask on my face. Yes, I'm gonna
You know, I'm gonna get this test done every six weeks. Yeah, I'm gonna do all these weird things because I believe in this way of living.
Um, I thought he did an incredible job of that and he created that that movement of
You know, the longevity movement really.
Um, along with Huberman and others, of course, the e not one person or one company ever owns these things.
Um
And so
So I thought that was one example. And then another example that's a little bit s you know, just smaller and more niche.
I thought um
Yeah, I was thinking about okay, so HubSpot basically had
This
Th the people who believed in doing this new form of marketing
And then HubSwap became like a tool you would use naturally if you were gonna do that. Like it built the tool for that community.
I was like, and who else did that?
And
I think one is um
What Russell Brunson did with click funnels. Yeah.
So first the idea just the rebranding of
Kind of like
the funnel, the the word funnel. So it's like oh yeah, like we already had websites, we had landing pages.
Yeah, we had growth.
We had all these other words, but then to like own a word like inbound marketing of like
Funnel.
And then I think they have like funnel hacking.
competitions and conferences
And it's not called the click funnels like if like the click funnels meetup, you know. It's
for people who are great at funnel hacking and funnel building and have generated lots of sales and they make them feel like stars and they give them a huge plaque for how many sales they've driven through their funnels.
And of course, if you're gonna build funnels
You should use. Yeah, Cliff that's like the natural, like the secondary thing underneath it. So I th I thought Brunson did a great job of like
popularizing like a way of marketing and then selling
The way to do that well.
All right guys, if you're liking this interview with Jarmesh, you might want a little gift from him.
So Darmesh has put together
A bunch of AI prompts that you can use.
To help your brand grow.
on AI. So the old way of getting discovered was people would Google and then you want to be at the top of Google. Well the new thing everybody's doing is using chat GPT or Perplexity or all these different tools that are AI tools.
And they're asking questions and they're searching for stuff. So how do you get
found there. How do you get discovered
And AI. Well, you gotta make content.
That
AI likes. You got to make content that the AI knows how to read. Well, how do you do that?
That's something that Darmash has put together. He's got a bunch of prompts, a bunch of things you can go put into chat GPT.
And it will give you ideas for content writing that will help your brand get discovered by AI. So if you want to get the prompts.
go to Darmesh's um site. It's a here's a QR code. There's a link in the description as well.
And there's a hundred of them. You can literally just copy paste them and start using them for your company. Check it out. It's pretty cool.
Alright, back to this episode.
So one kind of category of ideas that I've been obsessed with for thirty years.
which I think is a really great category, like broadly defined category of ideas.
Is making um
Inefficient markets efficient.
Right. And so the kind of macro level definition of an efficient market
Is that every
transaction that should occur.
Does it be.
Right? It's like oh an efficient market is like oh someone wants to sell X and someone wants to buy X
that transaction happens if it's an efficient market. So a good example is like the public stock market. Someone's willing to share, sell shares at wide price, someone's willing to buy shares at wide price. And so that transaction, when it needs to occur, does occur.
And so then the question is like what makes markets inefficient, right? Uh thing number one is
The buyer and seller don't know each other, so there's just no way to connect the dots. Thing number two is the buyer and seller know each other, but they can't.
come to some objective way to kind of determine price.
Buy number three, they can come up with a price, but there's not enough trust.
for the actual transaction to clear. So there's all these things that make markets inefficient.
And if you look across kind of the span of history
Um, some of the most money that's ever been made.
Or when someone took an efficient market to which there was what I think of as like latent economic value that was just being wasted as a result of these transactions that happening.
They essentially took some of that inefficiency out. Um so eBay was an efficient market for these niche market
Product goods like uh like PES dispensers and things like that. It's like, oh, I've got this thing that I'm obsessed with, or I'm selling, and here's the buyer. Google, in a way, was creating an efficient market.
for niche information that says I'm writing a blog post about how to
Build fences for lamas.
Here's someone that's looking for that content that's for and Google is the market maker for niche market content for the viewers of that content across a really, really long tail, right? That's
That's what they did. Um and so
This idea of a community is really a form of from a business perspective is a form of creating an efficient market.
These are people that would enjoy knowing each other, maybe transacting, maybe they do business, maybe they hire each other, depending on what the community is.
But just the act of pulling those people together, you're moving removing some market inefficiency. And as a result of removing market inefficiency, you get to participate in some of that economic lead and economic value that you uncovered. And that's how communities make money. And when they do well,
They do really, really well just on a kind of
profit margin basis because they're relatively cheap to kind of get started, almost self-sustaining if you can sort of kind of get the people together and you get to critical mass.
It's actually got lots of other
positive effects versus just uh blogging or something like content creation is because
you have these kind of network effects. So wherever the community is already aggregated, it's sort of hard to disrupt that once the good community gets going.
So
One of the other things we talked about when we were hanging out was
You were telling me this story about like
Hey, like early on I was blogging, it was getting this
kind of crazy amount of traffic and then we realize like oh
There's gonna be other people who wanna do this and then we built a tool and that was like one era of marketing was like when that was like
You know,
early to like as it matured and HubSpot became like a huge beneficiary.
And then I started thinking about we I think we talked about like a few other eras of marketing. It's like okay
When
Facebook launched its ad marketplace, which I think was something like two thousand ten ish range, but like paid ads across Google and Facebook became like a dominant way to market your product and a bunch of people did that. Cool. Then I was like, you know, there was one other one that I was like, I told you I was I I thought I was
Late to even though it was right in front of my face.
Which is what I call algo jacking.
And uh there's two people that I met that I think have done this incredibly well.
And they even told me about it specifically to my faith. They told me the secret.
I was too dumb to like
Acknowledge it.
And um the first was actually Steve Bartlett. So I hired Steve Bartlett when he was probably, I don't know, eighteen, nineteen years old. He came work for me and
Steve had this one skill that was like really interesting to me, which was he had he was building up all of these social media pages.
Random themed accounts.
And he could grow them very fast. They were run by like a single nineteen, twenty one year old.

And they got like ten times more engagement than my corporate accounts.
What's an example page?
So he had one like freshman problems.
Okay. And he would just post something and then like all the college kids would laugh at like the memes and the freshman problems. But guess what? Once you get the attention and trust.
of every college kid through your, you know, freshman problems, you know, uni problems. He would create these pages like that.
Then he would then just shove in a product.
And Spotify and others and Nike would come and pay him a hundred thousand dollars.
to reach that audience through his accounts. And so he had this like method.
I guess like
In the same way, Dharmesh, that you were like just a guy blogging in his bedroom and you were like basically outpacing these venture funded startups with CMOs and budgets and marketing professionals who couldn't get one tenth of the traffic. The same thing was happening. And he literally was in my office. He was sleeping in my office at the time. And he was telling me, he's like
Yeah, you gotta think about, you know, Jenny in her bedroom. She's just scrolling.
And like what's gonna make Jenny in her bedroom care? She's not gonna care that you launched your app.
And like how do you get it how do you pay attention to that? And he started thinking about
Just work backwards. What does the algorithm want?
Give it that.
And then find a way to slip your product in, giving it the same things. And now if you look at
One of the most important things.
successful podcast in the world, Diary of CEO. The reason one of the one of the most successful podcasts in the world is because
He figured out how to algo jack YouTube and Instagram. Like look at the engagement they get on social there.
It's I don't know, a thousand times.
Bigger than what we get on our podcast.
And if you think about like
You know, he he out he but worked backwards from the outgoing. So what we do, for example, is we have our product and then we try to share it.
And it might may work, it may not work. What he did was he changed his product completely.
To be what the algorithm wanted. So it started as
The diary of a CEO is his personal diary.
Okay, not that many people wanted that.
Then he started interviewing other CEOs about CEO stuff.
Yeah, some business people wanted that.
If you go look at his feed today, it's like
Seth Rogan.
Health, sex, conspiracies, you know, like whatever. And it's basically like the mass mainstream thing, mostly in the format of
They've lied to you about carbs. They're lying to you about this. And like
But guess what? That's what the algorithm wants. And when I s when I say the algorithm, really it's like
what people like to click on when they're bored Jenny in her bedroom's bored with scrolling on on on her phone.
Mr Beast did the same thing. Like if you go talk to Mr Beast about a great video, what's a great video? One that gets a lot of views.
You're like, Well, by that definition, but is McDonald's the best
Okay.
And he's like
Well, yeah, it sells the most burgers, so it's the best burger. So I what are you talking about? And I'm like, Well uh we have different definitions, but his thing has always been like
I want to make the videos that get views. So I work backwards from what's going to get a view. I work backwards from how do I get views. The algorithm is
Basically, what is
What does YouTube want to show a billion people and I'm gonna try to make that video.
And
Even though I saw that that trend, that sort of algo jacking trend.
Um you know, I didn't really understand it.
And I think to long story short, Darmesh, today you see a new trend.
What do you see today as like the next thing?
Yeah. So let's talk about because I think there's a real value in some um some history here. So the thing that I was doing back when uh HubSpot got started.
And we made a brief reference to this. It was called
Um search engine optimizations, SEO, and the kind of practice of stuff and there's an entire industry now that was uh has been about
search engine optimization, which is how do you increase the odds
that your webpage, your website will rank in Google
organically, organically being you're not paying uh you know add dollars or whatever, it's for free.
Um how you know, how do you kind of rise in the rankings? And there was an entire discipline around how to do that. Um and kind of
Pulling on your thread Sean around
um kinda algo hacking, uh the way I'm uh
positive uh
Kind of guys like
It's really optimization, right? It's not a hacking in the sense that you're sort of what you're really doing is just saying, Okay, knowing what I know.
about let's say in this case Google is looking for, right?
Here's what I'm going to do in order to kind of um have my website dr uh go up the rankings.
And there's actually uh layers to the game, and the first layer is always
More of the hacking, like how can I trick the Google algorithm into ranking my website versus uh uh somebody else's website? And there were lots of
uh practices um that were kind of later labeled as being kind of black hat.
Because like oh
Uh it really likes when it sees a ki the keyword that someone's searching on on the webpage.
It's like okay well
I'll just put the keyword on the webpage five hundred times, right?
in white font on white under uh at the bottom of the page. Exactly. And that was level two. It's like oh well Google got too smart about that. It's because because that would actually like
show up poorly and in other results and I'll do it on in a tiny font or a white font on a white back. And so it was just this game that was constantly being played.
To try and trick the Google algorithm.
Google would do an update every uh year. I don't remember whatever. And then like you all like they do the update and then six months later, you see an article.
this company lays off five hundred people. Or like so it's sort of like so like you you see, I remember uh we have uh we I'm friends with the Nerdwallet uh guys. The Nerdwallet is a company that like writes articles about the best uh credit cards.
And I was with them and they were
Doing not well.
And then after three years
Google made an update.
And they became number one if you Google best credit card. And overnight, literally overnight, they went from making zero dollars the third year, I think they made thirty million in revenue.
And it was like
Google rewarded us because they changed their algorithm and we did things, the best practices, and all these other people got wiped out and it worked out. And so that's what you're kind of you're describing of of all these hacks and then doing the right way. Exactly right. And so and I really like really um as I tend to do, I went deep down the rabbit hole on SEO kind of back in the day. It's like okay.
But what is this? Um how does it work?
And there were a couple of key insights that I think are still applicable today, um, that I think
made us money would make other people money because I think it's it's a successful strategy.
Which is going back to kinda Sean's point is
The first thing you have to figure out
Is
That
There are lots of smart people at Google whose sole job it is
It's to deliver high quality резуols.
to the end user.
Okay.
So if you say that, that means if every black hat
Tactic you're trying. It may work right now, but you've got an army of really smart people whose sole job it is to make what you're doing not work. So it's just a matter of time. So that's kind of thing number one, right? It's like, okay, well.
Are there other things I could do that would act make those people's jobs easier?
It's like oh yeah, well, you know, they really like it when you structure a web page so they're a crawler has an easier time crawling it.
It's like well they will reward
Mm.
Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, just
What we will call like good behavior. Make your site clean, make it load fast, make it do the make the content actually useful.
So the you know I got I got up on stages and and wrote about SEO all the time, uh back in the day.
And my one thing I would tell small business owners, that's my kind of primary audience was is that
Whatever term you want to search for.
Type it into Google right now. Let's go.
D'aller in.
And it's like, okay, well, here are the people that are coming up right now. Do you have a web page on your website right now that deserves to rank?
higher than the ones that are showing up right now.
And be honest with yourself.
Not serving weight.
If you were searching, if you were the actual human, typing this keyword in, would you want to find your website versus the what the ones Google are showing right now?
If the answer to that is no
Job one is to create the content that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are ranking right now because Google is imperfect.
And
All those battles are winnable. It's like ah I see them.
The top two or three are pretty good, but if I were really searching, here's what I would actually want, then produce that web page that the actual end user would want.
And
Nine out of ten, ninety five out of a hundred times. It was just a matter of time.
Because you got a lot of smart people that want to find that webpage if it's actually truly better for the end user than that, right? And there's a bunch of things you can do.
Yeah, write good content, write timeless content, but
You know, I have content that I wrote for HubSpot nineteen years ago.
That still drives traffic to hubspot.com, that still generates leads, that still generates gr you know revenue 19 years later. And this is one of the big things about SEO, and we'll talk about AEO.
kinda successor to that, which is
This is one of those things that when you're doing clay Google AdWords and then you do those things, right? It's like as a marketer, you need to have a a repertoire of of things that you do to reach customers.
The issue with uh like Google Advertising, um
or any kind of advertising is you're effectively
uh renting someone else's stage or renting someone else's microphone and you pay them to do that, right? It's like, oh put me on the page
And I will pay you X dollars and there's a nice efficient uh
auctioning mechanism for the price, but
It's like yeah, but the day you turn that off.
The traffic turns off.
Your link does not show up in the Google search results anymore, so you're basically renting.
And you don't control the rent.
You don't control what the prices are because that's a market dynamic thing. So it's like it may cost
five dollars a click right now may cost fifteen dollars a click literally tomorrow.
based on what the supply and demand is. So now you are at the kind of vagaries of the market.
The nice thing about
SEO and doing this content focused thing, it's like building
Your own property on your own land.
That compounds value over so as land prices go up, the value of the thing you built actually goes up, not down, and it's under your control.
If someone comes along and says, Oh, I'm gonna produce a better blog article, it's not gonna be an instantaneous they take all your traffic overnight. You will see them come up the rankings. It's very, very rare that overnight some brilliant piece of content that Google finds it trusted enough to put in the number one spot instead of you. So you will see.
Uh, your competitors come off if someone's doing and you can do something about it. I mean, so there's all this positiveness.
to investing in SEO um versus you know paid uh paid channels. And I I was gonna ask you this, you know, one of the painful lessons I've learned.
Is
This one phrase called
Intensity is the strategy. So I'm the type of guy that always like to read the the next blog, the next tweet, the next book. Cause I was always looking for like what's the better answer. And'cause I in my head, life was a you know a game of chess. And if you just knew the right moves, you would win.
And chess is like the wrong analogy for life. It's a lot more just like taking a chess piece and just battering the other guy uh as many times as you can in different ways and picking up different pieces and just keep hammering on.
And I've learned that like, you know.
from most of the things in my life, I knew the strategy.
I knew the answer. And the difference between success and failure was the level of intensity I took to the strategy. I think dieting dieting is the easiest example. Like we all know what to do.
Um, this is a question of like how intensely you do it or not. But like a lot of things in life are this way. I ask you I bring this up because
I can kinda tell.
And I want you to confirm or deny this, maybe I'm wrong.
But your volume
was a lot higher than what was normal in those days. So it wasn't even that you were the best writer or you were
the smartest at SEO necessarily, but like
I'm guessing.
What you guys did as normal was completely abnormal in terms of volume. Did you basically like was volume or intensity of uh of the marketing the strategy more so than like
coming up with the perfect, you know.
The perfect strategies.
Totally. This is my has been my
personal belief for my I think my entire life as far back as I can remember.
Is that um I'm
Never like the smartest person um out there, or even in any given room that I'm in. So you can outthink me. I think that's relatively um easy to do. Uh you will not outgrind me to you will not outwork me because that's under my control. Um and so I've always believed
that the kind of quality of the outcomes
is almost directly always directly proportional to number of iterations.
And that's it. So if you can squeeze out more iterations uh compared to the the next person or whatever.
Over the fullness of time, you win.
That like the universe says ah.
You win, right? It's like and and you just have to have a conviction, like the the problem is that
The universe has a kind of a slower feedback loop, especially in the early years. It's like okay, when you're first blogging.
four people will read the blog post and then you have it's like then you like pour your heart and soul into it.
And then it goes to six.
Many part your part and then it goes to five, right? Goes down. It's like okay, well what the hell is going on here? But you sort of have to
Have the conviction to say
I know it's just a matter of and I d I don't work out, but uh it's just a matter of putting the reps in. Like it's
It's meaningful, thoughtful
And they don't have to be perfect reps, right? They just have to be incrementally better.
Each time.
One of the things I wanted to do was um i for some reason HubSpot ch you guys changed your blog where I used to be able to go to Darmas Shah or uh Brian Halligan your blog your author page and I could sort by recent and then just go in reverse and see your early blog posts. And it was pretty cool because like Brian was very casual. You're like
This doesn't this guy doesn't sound like a
thirty billion dollar company. And it kinda like gives anyone inspiration because it's it's pretty great. But if you go to onstartups.com, which is your personal blog.
And you can um
kinda rigged where you like sort by recent and you gotta change the URL a little bit, but you can go and look at some of your old blog posts from two thousand and six.
And a few things. One, the headlines.
Or
are evergreen. They're fantastic. Raising capital, friends, family, and fools.
Another one is revenue early, revenue often.
The other one is uh the danger of solving venture capitalists' biggest problem.
Like really good.
uh headlines for one. And two
There's days like there was
A day in November where you posted five articles
In a day.
And then for the most part in two thousand and six, two thousand seven, two thousand eight, when I imagine HubSpot, I I don't know when HubSpot started, but I think two thousand six. So you are running a company uh or an early stage company that probably takes up your whole life. And and I think uh I don't know if you had a family at that time, but I'm sure you're very busy, but your personal blog
Is posting something like
Three to five articles a week. Not even your
company's blog, your personal blog. Pretty crazy.
Reps work, my friend. That's the one thing and this this is you know, um we've talked about this
In terms of as you pick an idea um to work on, you know, as an entrepreneur, whatever it happens to be.
One of the most important
kind of filters and criteria should be
Is this something
That I at least enjoy enough.
then I will be able to put the reps in. Because if you you can't make yourself do something you hate.
for that long, for that many times over an extended number of years, it's just not going to work. So
Pick a market you like, pick a category you like, pick a
kind of business that you like. It's like if you like e commerce, if you like selling whatever it is.
then do that, right? Just because something else has higher margins or you know, Susie down the road was able to create a billion dollar outcome or whatever.
It just won't matter because if you just give up along the way, it's like do not pass go to not collect two hundred dollars kinda thing, right? So funny. Listen, it in April of two thousand six, he wrote an article saying
Less is sometimes less.
And it's an article written about how a lot of people say less is more, and he's like, No, I disagree with that. I think more is more is more in terms of effort. It's pretty funny. You you've been saying the same stuff now for twenty years. Did you guys see this uh video that's going semi viral of the YouTube founders?
Early on. Have you seen this? What's this? No.
So this is twenty years ago.
And this is Chad and Steve from YouTube and they're just in their office talking. But
Basically it's the guy saying like
Th they're just been t they're just sitting around there's like I was kinda depressed last week. Like we have forty videos on the site.
And you know, if I came to the site, I wouldn't find I'd be gone. I wouldn't and they're just like, Yeah, this sucks. And this is YouTube. This is the founders of YouTube. And you were talking about like in early days blogging, it's like, Yeah, I got six visitors. I got eight the next week and um
You know, being able to persist.
through you know, through that time and then and then the volume, right? Like you just don't have enough videos. It's not that YouTube doesn't work.
It's that YouTube with forty videos doesn't work. It's not that blogging doesn't work. It's your blogg once every two weeks doesn't work.
Um right. Like I think that's one of the big lessons here.
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We didn't close the loop though, Darmesh. So you the new wave, we talked a lot about SEO and like that's good because history doesn't repeat but it rhymes.
What's the new wave?
Clone Wave, um and I think just like SEO created uh an opportunity for uh SEO consultants, SEO agencies and businesses driving direct traffic organically.
I think we have a a new thing now. So a couple of things are happening. One is
And lots of marketers have uh been hit um
hit by the AI stick in a way, which is organic traffic that used to come through SEO very, very predictably, including to folks like CubSpot. We are very good at the SEO game.
Have played it for a long time.
Has gone down.
literally by about twenty to forty percent based on which industry you are in. And the reason it has gone down
is that uh historically the practice of search uh is that
We would go to Google, we would type something in, we would get ten blue links, right? That's the that's the whole game.
Uh, as it turns out, there's this new thing, uh, called AI and a new app called ChatGPT, which has eight hundred million weekly active users.
And what people are doing now is not going to Google and getting ten blue links or like
Going to chat GPT and just asking a question, getting an answer.
And that and that's it, right? It's like okay, well
There's no quick through, there's no reason for someone that's like, Oh, just tell me the answer.
Instead of me having to go through and read the articles from those ten blue links and then figuring out my own answers, so like just do it for me.
And so that's happening already. Uh you can see it in the actual kind of data, uh as we've seen.
Um and so what's happening now is there's this new emerging discipline
That says in the same way we had search engine optimization, we have uh what we're calling AEO, which is AI or answer engine optimization. It's like okay, well peop before people were going to Google doing a search for my product, my service, my industry, my category.
Uh, and my job was to be one of those ten blue links.
Hopefully the higher the better because it's a power law curve.
Now it's like okay, well people are looking for products in my category, services in my category.
They're looking in chat GPT, let's just say that's the number one, uh number one app right now.
How do I show up?
as an answer or part of the answer when they do that. So that's the emerging discipline of of AEO.
And uh there's a few things that are
Uh distinctive about it. One is
Uh the click through rate in terms of web traffic to your site through AEO
Is going to be down because if they just get the answer, there's no reason to come read your blog post about X, where you stole the virtues of how whatever your approach is.
And also lists way less more uh way less. So if you say like what's a good clothing company or whatever, like you only get like four options, whereas on Google I can click next, next, next. And you get next yes.
Which which ne no one ever, by the way, did that there was a running joke in the SEO world is uh if you ever had to hide a a dead body, hide it on the second page of Google search results because no one ever went there.
All they would do is they would just rewrite the query.
click next, they would just rephrase their queries like I must have asked this
You know, suboptimally or wrongly, I'm just gonna rephrase my question instead of going to second page. But at least I get ten. Like a lot of uh when I I noticed when I asked to be D stu it's like they give me like two or three.
I I agree, yes. So it's even more important, uh
And and that's a
what engineers and math people would call like a binary outcome. So it's like either you show up
Or you don't, right? If you're not in the actual citations in the answer that was given
You might as well not have played the game because there is no difference, right? So you're actually literally zero, um, in terms of the the traction you're gonna get. Okay, so then the question is
How different is it? What should people be doing? Uh what should we be doing now in order to start getting that? Um
And so the number one thing is that so when Google
Uh crawls your website. Back in the old Google days, they have a Google crawler and it
calls websites and you can kinda control that and there were
Things you do to make it easier for the Google crawler to crawl uh make your site faster, make it more structured, all those things. All of those things still actually apply.
Uh the difference now is there's a um
Kind of a
O AI
It's called OAI Search Bot is the name of the bot.
Um that's doing the search thing. There's another one called GPT bot.
that does for the model training and things like that. So there's those are two different ones. So number one
On the off chance that you're blocking uh unknown
uh crawler bots, which some companies do. It's like, oh, I only want Bing and Google or whatever to crawl. I don't want random people just crawling my website because it costs me resources or whatever.
Um, even if you're doing that, if you're blocking it, explicitly go in
And turn on the ability for uh OAI search bot and GPT bot to to crawl your website. Because if you don't get indexed.
Then you're not even in the game, let alone uh you know, you have no chance of winning because you can't be in the results. Okay, so that's thing one, for sure. Yeah. Thing two is that
Uh.
And this was nice of them is that uh they do report. Uh so Amy, when you look at your uh Google Analytics or HubSpot web traffic, whatever analytics tool you use.
It now r self reports.
uh when something comes from uh from one of those bots from the AI. So you can it's a UTM source parameter on the for those of us that
uh do analytics. It's like
So now start and HubSpot has this in in the product now. So we will tell you what percentage of your track, just like we used to tell you
Oh, here's how much you're getting from paid, here's how much you're getting from organic. Now here's how much you're getting from AI referrals, you know, broadly defined.
So take a look at what traffic you're getting now.
So as you do things you'll know whether you're not better or worse. You can sort of uh like anything else, you you know, have to sort of measure it in order to improve it.
Uh so start looking at that traffic, see where the baseline is uh today and then and start tracking it.
Uh number three, um, and this is a a tactical
Tip.
reframe your content, either rewrite it or put new content out there.
That is closer to a structured question answer form.
Right. So this is less about the kind of pros and narrative writing and hooks and things like that, because you're not trying to hook a human like you were back when you're writing blog posts because that's when humans were reading it. They were like clicking on the link. So you need a great page title that would actually get the click.
Then you needed actual really good content to kind of get to the lead conversion, right? Those are things you did and you were solving effectively for humans.
And Google was just a proxy for the humans, but effectively you were st solving for the humans.
Now you're solving for that that AI crawler.
And the AI crawler is trying to get to a good answer to a question that the user is asking.
And it's easier it's like if the question is
Or the top
Uh CRMs for small business and startups.
There should be a webpage on the UpSpot website that says
Here are the primary factors that kinda influence what what you would pick or whatever, and here's why the seven reasons why HubSpot is the the top you know thing, whatever it's like.
Make it easy for them. Like reduce the friction for the AI
to get the thing that's trying to look for and the thing it's trying to look for is the best possible answer to the question the user is asking.
Number three is all the things you used to do in classic SEO la
Most of them still work. You still want page authority because
Uh ChatTPT specifically, when it goes off and does things, what it does is you type a question, what's the best CRM for small business?
It will take what you type into chat GPT and it will convert that
into search queries. It will paralyze it. So it's gonna do a bunch of Bing queries. Bing is what it happens to use, but doesn't really matter. Uh so most of the search engines are
Roughly equivalent, uh, technology wise.
So all the things you use to kinda rank a webpage
Will still help you because when Bing goes out and gets asked by Chad GPT it says, Hey
The user is asking this question about small business and CRM, they may rephrase the query, but it's still gonna do a a Bing search.
It will come back with a list of pages. Those pages go back to ChatGPT. Chat GPT puts it through the LM and comes up with the answer that's the again that show the end user. So
So you know, getting high authority links, showing up in Bing, doing all the kind of classic good practice white hat SEO stuff.
Uh still applies.
Sean, are you are you getting have you noticed that you're getting traffic and sales for your for your stuff from AI?
Um, I don't pay attention to it at that level of detail, but we've uh and and it's not that big for us, but we've looked at a few of these tools because now there's some new like
You know, the way like with SEO, you'd have either you know HubSpot or you have like Moz or whatever, you'd have these tools.
There's a few startups that have come out and been funded for this, and they're basically like, Hey, we can help you track this and get you into the top.
you know, the top the top answer box for um f for this.
And so we're trying those now, but I think it's like early still to see if
If we're getting any results from it.
I said, I'm a small business owner and I think I need some kind of place to keep track of customers and prospective deals. What should I be using?
All right. Hub Sop was the second answer in the thing. It said, uh, you know, here's here's the top. You need the if he goes, you need a CRM. Here's what a CRM does. And then it's like, here's the top CRMs for small business twenty twenty five.
But it looks like in this case
It literally just
Every the ranking is just pulled straight from s Tech Radar's article.
Um, like Tech Radar has some article. I've tested thirteen of the best CRMs at twenty twenty five.
And it just like
Pull that exact list.
And it put a comparison table in there, like you said, and like
It just gave me that as the answer. Whatever Tech Writer said is the is the answer here. So that that seems a little
Tricky. We've for Hampton, we've got we've got a we've got a lot of business. It's it's it's crazy how much is happening.
What are people looking for, Sam, that they're finding Hampton?
So so sometimes it's just like I want like what's like an entrepreneurial group that I can refer to or or I can I can look into. So that's like one, that's major one. But then sometimes people will be asking questions to ChatGPT as if they're an executive coach, like saying like I'm struggling with this problem.
And it will say like you might need a have you considered a an executive coaching group or an executive like peer network, something like that. And then we get shown. And what's crazy is we don't try. Like I was shocked by this. I started seeing leads and customers come in and it would say, I uh we use HubSpot, uh
And HubStop would be like, Yeah, this lead or this new customer came from chat GPT.
And it honestly shocked me. And I remember the first time we got that, like eight or ten months ago.
And it was you ha Sean, you asked Dharmesh, when was the time that you like the light bulb went off?
I felt a little bit of that light bulb. The problem is that
Maybe it's not the problem. I think
The best way to
make it work is you just do the same things that you're doing to rank on Google.
No, but he had some good nuances, right? Like
The fact that you know on Google you would structure your page a certain way'cause it's like that's
It's like if a a guest comes over for a dinner party and you're like, Oh, he really likes
You know, to discuss books and current events. All right, cool, that's what I'll give you.
This other guy really loves to debate and it's like
Chat GPT loves question and answer.
And so format your qu your content as question and answer is like a simple nuance of like the new the new way of doing things, right? But in general
Like it's sign like it's kinda like just do what you think a customer wants. And the last thing is
Uh even early on Google had what what was called a keyword. What do they have? A key tool.
Yeah, they used to call it one thing and then they changed it. So like in the early blogging days, you could type in like a certain word and it would tell you ballpark how many people are searching for it and you're like and then it would also tell you how much uh competition there is. And so I could just like replicate that. I don't think that it exists for chat GPT, does it, Damesh?
It does not yet, no. Um and it's
The other thing that doesn't exist
yet is that we don't really get so back in the early years of Google, as part of the data that would come through in your traffic analytics, you would see which keywords people were searching for. It would show up in HubSpot, it would show up in Google Analytics.
Uh, Google s has subsequently kind of
uh control that so they don't pass that kind of granular what we think of as like intent data, what was the user actually searching for.
Uh but yeah, I I think
Things will evolve. So the coup a couple of more kind of tactical tips that I think are applicable today. Sean for you.
Uh and this may be happening automatically uh based on being on a Shopify platform, but one of the things that ChatGPT and the AI engines really like.
Is structured product catalogs, right?
As you would expect. It's like oh here's a here's the standard semantic web way of describing the product catalog, which is size, color, all those things. And then another key thing is inventory.
It's like is it in stock or not? Uh in the can it be shipped or something, delivery time, those kinds of things, if you put those in the website, that's going to influence as you as you would expect it to. Like if I'm searching for I wanna buy this kind of a musical synthesizer or something like that.
I wanna find a site that actually happens to have it, right? Uh that's why
you know, Amazon gets uh you know so much love generally. But anyway, so that's one thing to look at. Uh and for you, Sam, the other thing that the AEOs um of the answer engines kinda optimize for um is more
kind of human based stuff. Uh so if you look at the review sites at G2 and things like that for product oriented companies.
But also um it I won't say over indexes because that's a relative term.
But it highly indexes on things like Reddit.
Especially if there's like active lots of back and forth or whatever. And if even if there's one comment in there that says, Oh
Here's the thing that definitively asks and you will find that the the the citations that you see um that show up in chat, and you could just do this through personal anecdote and just experimentation.
Um you will find that the the reddit threads it picks up are the ones where the original post was asking a question.
And that question sort of matches the question the user's asking, like, Oh, what's the best, you know, uh CRM for small business? If there's happens to be a Reddit post.
that loosely kinda translates the exact same meaning
That read post if there's a comment in there where someone definitively says
Yeah, it's HubSpot, and here are the five reasons why. And that
Common gets a bunch of upvotes because they have access to that data.
That has a very, very high likelihood of being a cited source This is gonna be the biggest company in the world. Imagine if Google had a subscription. So Google is already the third or seventh largest company in the world. Now imagine every customer is also paying ten dollars a month, or you know what I mean? Three episodes ago, uh we were talking about open AI. Um
It's like oh if you could you know if we have to predict as to which what's gonna be the uh the next trillion dollar company. This is before uh I only I don't think any company had reached trillion dollars at the time we did that episode, but one was about to. Um
It it's crazy how much
Like Chat GPT, for it to be a eight hundred like there are
Essentially the new operating system uh for this current generation. I I had a buddy and I I maybe mentioned it on the pod years ago, but he was deciding between two very promising companies. One of them was OpenAI.
And this was before ChatGPT was launched, and I think they were already worth thirty billion dollars.
And we were talking and he was like, Man, I think like I don't know if this equity can grow anymore. Like I I just don't think it can work.
And he ended up taking the job anyway, and he made already uh something like
uh thirty million dollars or so from his stock. And he sold a portion of it so he could like be very comfortable. And then we were talking, he's like, what should I do with the rest? And I was like, man,
There's definitely a world where it could tan
Or twenty X or more again. Who knows? And it's just crazy to say that out loud. That what's it worth now? One trillion or eight hundred I don't even know. Five hundred billion is the current
Publicly disclosed round that's happening uh currently.
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Can can we do like some rapid fire questions? Um we have this document. This is for listening. We have this document where we were like preparing different ideas and Sean had uh Sean ha said he wants to know your process from zero to one and how do you get ideas? Do you do research? What do you do to move the ball forward? And you replied something interesting. You you said two things. You said this gives me a good chance to talk about algebra, and I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And the second
thing you said was um iteration. It's all about iteration. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
Yeah, uh so a couple of things. One is I don't have um I don't do deep research on ideas. I don't look at the market like an MBA would or should.
Most of the things I end up pursuing are
I threw personal itches, I need the thing myself, or someone close to me, either my business needs it, my wife needs it, or something like that that should exist but doesn't.
And these are all all the things I pursue tend to end up being software. That's the only thing I know actually how to produce.
If I was a carpenter or musician, it would uh be be something different.
Uh and my kind of
Running thesis has been and this is uh the reference to algebra um I was making is around mathematical induction.
And so mathematical induction is a s very simple principle that says
As long as it's true for n equals one.
And it's also true that if it's equal true for N, that it's also true for N plus one.
Then it's gonna be true for everything, all along the way for until infinity, for all positive numbers. Anyway, I'll simplify this.
Distilledell what that means is
If you start
That's condition one.
And
If you can always take the next step, make the next iteration.
It will work. That's some for some definition of work, right? It's like you just have to
Just kinda keep at it.
Stubbornly pursue the exact same idea that you started with. That does not work, right? You do have to sort of an iteration is truly taking kind of market feedback and doing a true.
A true loop, right? An an informative loop that says, Oh, I'm gonna do it or at least try to do it better the next iteration, the next iteration, the next iteration.
But that's my approach. It's like find an idea that I can um
Like and then just get started. Like often it'll be
Like can I write code tonight? Uh so right now I've got three projects in flight. Um
that are these kind of stra scratch my own H A I projects, um
And
I'm almost tempted to tell you what the three are because that'll force me to launch them before this episode goes live. Uh make'em
Give a one liner, maybe, for like one or two of'em.
Yeah, so one is around um
It's like a
Like a visual designer as an agent. So there's l lots of great image generation tools. There's you know chat GP uh ChatGPT has one, there's Nano Banana, that's now from Google.
But what's what I've always found lacking is the actual process I go through as a non designer
as a business person, um
Like if I'm doing a social media post or doing a blog post or something like that, it's like
Like I have a process like okay, I want to come up with like visual ideas, what would represent this? Then I wanna see 10 possible examples, then I wanna iterate, then I wanna say, Okay, I wanna pick these five and I want to
create my own personal brand, my own style, then I want to apply that style to the kind of it's like
There's this this kind of workflow that I go through.
And like that's just
painful and I'm too impatient like I have access to designers. It's this is not a matter of saving money.
But it's like
If I have an idea at two o'clock in the morning and I want to get the idea out there with a visual
Well that goes along with it.
So that's the thing I'm building is to that goes through my entire flow.
Um as as an agent tech process. You have a name for it? I know you like to do names with the idea. I do. If it's c and I'll put it out there. Let's um because it's it's close to launchable. It's called uh image gen.ai.
So generation.
And is this gonna be I like one of your first or second times on on M FM, Wordle was popular and you said that you made a Wordle alternative. So for those listening, if you don't know what Wordle is, it's I don't know, a game like Scrabble, whatever.
And your side project, where you just launched us, I think with your son, was making eighty thousand dollars per month at the time. I have no idea where it's at now.
Do you have some type of uh ambitions or guesses as to where uh
This is gonna be in six months.
Um I don't know actually.
So be a part of it.
We talked about this a little bit um
last couple of episodes, you know, so I've been working as kind of part of my

agent.ai platform, which is basically a a marketplace for agents. You can build agents, find agents, hire agents to do these kinds of things.
So in the back of my I'm gonna build this thing, but I'm building it as an agent that will be on the agent.ai platform.
And the hope that is if the utility is high enough
I will cause a bunch of users.
Um to be added to agent.ei, which is now up to two million users, which is awesome.
Uh or you know, I have
Thoughts about
agents on the platform being monetized someday and this is like okay
For me, it passes a litmus test. Like if this thing already existed, would I pay five dollars a month for it or ten dollars a month for it? And the answer is yes.
It's like okay, well if I can sort of and I actually uh post it on LinkedIn
exactly c sort of the product roadmap for this thing was yesterday. I'm like, Okay, here's the thing I'm building. I didn't r uh disclose a name. Um
But here's the thing I'm building, here's what it's gonna do.
Like and it's like stupid simple things right now. For instance, when you do an image generation thing right now that has text, which a lot of um kind of business um images that you create will have like a headliner or some sort of text in it.
The image models have gotten better at text, uh still not perfect.
But one of the things I want to do is like, okay, well if you generate an image with text, I can pass the generated image back through AI.
And say, Tell me the text that's on this image.
So if there's a typo in it.
Just rerun it. Don't like waste my time giving me things that have typo in than me just like, Oh, by the way, you got you misspelled this or whatever, you have a typo in that.
So by the time it makes it to me, it's already done, right? It's like having uh an intern going off and doing this stuff in the background.
And then I show up and it's got ten options for me, I can pick and I can run it'll do it in my style.
without typos, um which sounds like a minor thing, but
It's useful.
Sean, do you want to ask him some of these other questions? You had some pretty good ones, like the request for startup or his chat GPT history.
Yeah, well I'll do the chat GPT history one. I'm just curious. So you um you run a m huge company. You are also kind of like a scratch your own itch guy, you're
Uh investor. You do you have many hats. I'm just curious how you use chat GPT. If I if you were to pull up your chat GPT and like
Looked at the last five
to seven searches that you did or or questions and answers that you did. Well what are you talking to Chad GPT about?
I'm a huge catch fan, don't get me wrong, and I've uh
Even if I were an investor in open AI, but my my
The way I consume Chat GPT is not through the app.
The way I consume chat GPT is through their API. So I have my own kind of command line thing that I put in. And th there's a reason I do this. Um
So the the next big uh advancement we're gonna see in in AI apps generally.
Is this notion of memory.
that they remember and you'll see um as as you've been using chat GPT you will find
that it's going to remember more and more things about you, even though you talked about them a week ago, a month ago, right? Like it's it's the best out there in terms of being able to retain that memory, which is awesome.
Uh the non awesome part of it is that that
memory is locked into chat GPT. So if you ever go to Claude or if you ever go to Gemini or something else.
those things don't have that memory of you. And that's a very frustrating thing, which is great for open AI because it makes it very, very sticky.
Well, wait. So so your personal version that you're running in your command line has better memory than chat GPT? Why? Why does that how'd you do that?
Oh, because it's it it has infinite memory.
And what what makes it the better memory is because it's
under my control is my memory. For instance, I can go off and say
I'm going I wanna go back through and I have this for my email as well, which I think is just another form of memory. I'll email archive and I have like two and a half million emails in in my quote unquote memory.
I can go back and say through my chat GPT history, here's the thing I'm actually trying to kind of get to.
And then I can combine that with other things. I can take that memory. It's like now I want to pass that to Google Gemini, or I wanna intersect it with Google Gemini, which does video analysis a lot better than ChatGPT does, which doesn't do video analysis yet.
It's it's the openness of it, right? That that's the the motivation for it. It's not that I can do memory better. It's the fact that I can do more things with it because I can intersect it with other apps.
But why isn't this the product?'Cause I think everybody would want this, right?
Yeah, give me that. Because it violates okay I have um
I have three rules of business.
Rule number one.
Never own.
A piece of a restaurant, never be a shareholder in a restaurant. Rule number two never be a landlord.
because I don't even want to re maintain my own properties, let alone properties on behalf of other people.
And number three, never compete with Sam Altman from Open AI.
Those are my three rule. That would violate the third rule, uh, which is I don't want to create a chat GPT competitor. But we'll where will this this will manifest, right, is that
HubSpot's building kind of memory into uh our breeze assistant.
um you know our I I AI product. And so that that's going to happen.
So localized memory in terms of you know for use case specifics, I but I don't want to create a consumer app
that tries to solve this kind of for the broad horizontal um group of people, but
I think over time the industry will evolve where
There will be some form of like federated memory, I think. Um
That says oh you can plug into this
Similar to how we
plug into Google Docs and Gmail and things like that. It's like open AI may not own like
absolutely everything, but right now someone needed to do the memory. I think they did the right thing. It was not
Yeah, diabolically plan to to be that way. It's just like
Oh, it would this would be a better product if it had memory.
So they added memory.
Right. Okay, but but you okay, so it but you didn't answer my full my full question. So you said I don't use the Chad T app, I use it through API on my own little
thing you've created which has better memory.
Okay, but what do you use it for? Like what's like the last few things you've used it for?
Uh so I I do it a lot for kind of research. If I'm researching like ideas, uh
And I use it a lot for domain names, as it turns out. So I have a thing uh
that can actually look at Google trends. So I can say, Oh
Like I've I've come across this idea for a domain name or whatever. Here's a price, I can look that up in the marketplace right now. Um
I can look up the transaction history as the has this domain been sold before what was the last purchase price just like Zillow for for domains. Um
one of the agents I'm also working on that we'll launch actually this week. Um
But I want so what I wanna do is to say okay, uh vibe coding is a good example. It's like ah
Once uh Andrew Carpathi th I was actually part of that, but sometimes I'm a little bit later if the game's like, Oh, I see this trend kinda picking up.
Uh, like what is that? I wanna know who coined the term. I wanna know what it is, I wanna know what domains are available, what's the price, are they any of them listed or not? Are anyone's just free and clear? Like no one's as as it turns out Vive coding I was
Early, but late enough where someone had already kind of purchased the dot com domain. By the way, vibe coding would fit your inbound framework. Like if I'm repli
Or one of these companies right now, I'm creating the vibe coding you know movement and the the community and the events.
And the blog and all that. And then like I have the tool underneath that you could use, but you could use many others, right? Or maybe I'm super base or one of these other companies, like
Putting it behind that the way you've done with inbound marketing, I think would be smart right now.
I'll tell you one of my and I'll I will I will sacrifice this idea. Um not not for free, but and the idea here and this was the original idea behind uh so I paid six figures for that for that domain. Uh that's um
Uh I think I've vibe coding.com or what'd you get? Vibecoding.com. Uh really? And oh my god. And the idea is I vlogged hundreds of hours doing what peop uh some would call vibe coding, and there's other terms like agentic coding, I think is is a more accurate thing, but it doesn't have the same vibe as vibe coding. Uh that doesn't exactly roll off the tip of the tongue. It doesn't. Yep.
Uh and I and just in case I own that one too, but that's the different story. Okay, so vibe coding.com. I think it's a great idea. It lowers the bar, a lot allows lots of non developers to kinda get into the kind of product building game.
The problem is and I would
But
Lots of money on this is that
Almost everyone that is not a developer by trade.
We'll do vibe coding. If they're trying to build a real so there's a class of problems, um
that vibe coding is really, really good at. It's like if you're building software for yourself.
If it's got a short lifespan that says I'm building this, I need it right now, or whatever, it's like disposable software.
Um, or if you're just bullying it for your team, I only have to make it work for three people and if it stops working, no big deal.
But as as you start violating some of those criteria
Um, I wanna build a production product. I build a billion dollar software company around that's going to be long during and I'm gonna be
maintaining this product going uh a year, three years, five years, ten years down the road.
Ven Vibing invariably right now.
Even with
Uh
Invariably.
non developers will paint themselves into a corner.
That they will hit some bug, something won't work, something will break. It will. It's just a matter of time, based on how ambitious the thing is that you're doing.
When that happens
It's
Entirely possible that you actually have an economically viable idea.
But you have an unviable code base.
Because you have no idea what's happening inside that black box.
When that happens, not an if when that happens
What if there were a community in a marketplace called vibecoding.com where a bunch of engineers hang out and what they do is to say, hey, I'll help I'll answer questions for you, like minor questions, but also for five hundred dollars an hour, I will jump into your GitHub repo, figure out your problem and fix it in cause and set up unit tests for you and help and help you get through.
this corner that you've uh pined yourself into. So I think that's gonna be a massive market. So
You listed I think
So you probably own
Between five hundred and a thousand.
It's between five hundred and thousand, yeah.
Okay, so I could collect f if I were you know um
had unlimited money and I I could
probably collect five hundred over ten years. Uh you go to you just have an idea and you just

What's crazy is
A lot of these domains that you have, they actually have projects on them. So I'm looking at pitchcraft.com, open graph dot com.
Prompt.com
Dadjoke. Speedround.com
And it's like speedrun.com. It's an investment firm, a check or a no in twenty four hours. Dad dad joke.ai, a dad joke generator uh that's works, but not that well. And you said you have three other projects that you want to launch, but you said uh I need this podcast to go out and then I'm gonna go and get it out.
So I'm setting this up. Sean came up with the idea of being generative. This is the most generative I've ever seen someone, which is how do you have enough time to actually do all this?
Well, just and just to be clear, the the list of domains I put in, I don't have sites launched on them right now. So the thing I was kinda trying to share, and I may just put this up publicly.
It's like here are my top twenty domains for which I have ideas.
But I don't have the calories to actually pursue them.
Make me an offer. If you're uh but you have to have like street cred, some something that gives me evidence that you would actually be able to kinda pursue this idea and I'll
kind of contribute the domain and maybe some capital to kind of kick the idea off. Um
But

question bluntly, Sam. Uh
My hours have not changed in
the thirty plus years I've been uh you know doing this as a as a entrepreneur.
I still think of myself as an entrepreneur despite being uh part of a
Thirty.
twenty five billion dollar company.
For all intents and purposes, uh, and I mean this in the most positive
way I can possibly put it. I live in the matrix.
That's basically what I'm doing, right? It's like it's
Like as long as like oh, are we in a simulation or whatever? I personally is like, okay.
My window into the world is like, okay, I've got little talking character people that sometimes show up on this other screen that I have up here in my office or whatever, is like
And I'm just trying to play the game. And this is and I in the same way people play video games, uh and do it obsessively.
This is my version of a video game. Uh and I I did play video games a lot back when I was younger too. Um but
I really enjoy it. I I like it because
If if I were a writer, uh you know the I my favorite writers are the ones uh that spend a lot of time on world building and character building, right? It's like they create this entire like especially the sci-fi and fantasy writers, they create this entire thing, that a world that could exist, that's got its own physical laws, and here's
uh the the species that live on the powers they have and the and all of it.
And it's this entire world that they fabricate out of thin air, uh they do it in words.
I'm trying to in my own small way create a version of the universe that exists that solves all of the problems that I have or people that I love that and that I can sort of
Yeah.
kind of poke around at the agments and make a version of the universe that I think is a V one point one of the universe that exists.
Does your house work like that in your in your physical life? Like in on your day to day life, do you
Is your uh home life set up to where you've built like your own
Like is everything about your life exactly in your very particular way of of going about it? Is it set up that way?
No, and and um I'm actually probably drawing the wrong visual picture. So my life is if you just looked at how I live.
It's more like the absent minded professor or my desk is completely messy. So it's not like I have it like an engineer's scientist kind of thing where like it's a lab you know, white lab coat, clean desk, and everything's kinda pristine. It's the exact opposite of that, right? It's uh
It's that's just not how I I I I work. Uh and so
I'm not that methodical about it. Um I'm analytical in some ways, um but
I actually play things actually very loose. Like I'll have a random idea and I'll drop the thing I'm working on. I'll go play with something else for a day or two or whatever, and then I'll
drop the fact that I'm doing image gen.ai in the next few days or whatever is like and and now I'll I'll finish it and get it to some
Some semblance of kind of working, but um I I've said this before, but it bears repeating. It's uh it's it's a really good piece of like personal advice.
Is that
You know, when uh if a musician were out
playing music and practicing when they're not doing like for twelve hours a day sixteen hours a day which
People do that.
If an if an athlete if a basketball area like the if they're off, you know, practicing eight hours a day and then even between games and it's like
We never question that. We never ever question we're like, oh well, that's what it takes to be kinda top of that particular game music.
sports or whatever, for some reason
There's a stigma attached to work.
Yeah.
And there's some stigma attached to if you just happen to make money at the thing you happen to be doing.
I was like, Well, I was like all the money, why would you keep doing this for money? Like, I'm not doing it for money at all. Like I don't care about money at all. Um
But I do enjoy
The the craft and the practice and the actual
Process of building. Yeah.
You you um have you ever heard of the the famous clause that Michael Jordan put in his contract when he signed uh his big deal with the bulls?
So he they added a claim. And I don't know if this was Nike marketing or if this was genuine, but at the time
If you were an NBA player, you signed the max contract, they would have all these rules like, Hey, can't ride motorcycles, like you know, things that would jeopardize you as an asset to them.
And one of them was like you can't just go play like random pick up basketball games on concrete with strangers, right? Like you might get hurt.
And that's on you know, now you can't put play on company time.
And he had this famous clause that he put in called the
The for the love of the game clause.
And it was that Jordan was allowed to play basketball any time he wanted for the love of the game. And I think that that's like a clause that
We all
Just one in our
our own mental contract of how we do things. Like you had this great
Tweet what you said.
If money doesn't let you do the things you love doing, why else would you want it?
And I thought that's so good because
Oftentimes I know I have to talk to my mom or my sister
And I'll tell them about you and
Uh my my buddy Furcon is like this. Uh Furcon was my co founder of a last company and then
But the company built before that, App Loven, is now like a hundred billion dollar company.
And so like Furcon's got all the money he'll ever need, right? And they're like, Oh, what's Furcon up to? I'm like, Oh yeah, he built this.
lab called Founders Inc. in Fort Mason and he's in there and he's there till eleven PM and he's you know he's grinding and he's
He's got a new startup and they're like, Oh my God, if I had the money, I would never do that.
And you know, part of it is like
Well, because you wouldn't he's not doing it for the money. He's doing it because he wants to do it. That's why he got the money. So first of all, like you have it reversed. The money came because he is this way, not
Uh yeah, he's not it he didn't become this way because of the money.
And also like
You're right that
whether it's athletes, musicians, w you know, we find it like noble when they do it.
But if you're a business person, you're greedy or you're a workaholic. When your mom says that you're like, Have a seat, Mom, pull up a chair.
You see, LeBron James. Subsection three seeds for the love of the game club. She's like, Oh, I just wanted to know if he has kids yet or not. She's like actually operating at a completely different level than me.
Yeah.
Oh man. D uh Darmesh, we uh we love hanging out with you. Uh you uh
I I always leave
Better than I came in.
I wish we could do this for for many more hours,'cause there's just so many different things about life and business that we can learn from you. We had Howard Marks on recently.
And w at the end it was the same thing.
Where it was like um
I was like, man, you you you came to talk about investing, but you're really just talking about how to live a good life. And you're that guy. You kinda do the same thing.
They they go they they bring this philosophical energy of like
Almost like patience and like like observe the world.
Stay calm.
Yeah, you know, stay calm and carry on or whatever. And like
Darmesh and like some of the builders have like a slightly different energy. It's still philosophical.
But it's kind of like a let's make it happen energy. Like let's build it. Why not? We could do this. Let's try this. It's okay if it doesn't work. And it's a totally different playful.
builder energy that I think is is dope to be around.
Yeah. Well I have a tweet.
I almost sent yesterday, but I wanted to get my image generator working so I could
Attached to this tweet.
Uh and it's two lines I'm gonna share with you is it's a nice uh warm kind of closing, which is
Uh dance like no one's watching.
Build like everyone's waiting.
Nice.
Yeah.
We uh and I we have to do a quick plug. Uh this one of the ways this episode came about was the marketing team at HubSpot was like, We need you to promote this thing and they told us to promote this thing and we're like, Yeah.
Let's just have Darmesh on the pod and uh maybe he'll like plug it because that's way better. But it what is it, loop marketing?
Loop marketing.
By the way, loop marketing is the new inbound marketing.
That's that's your prediction.
Look up loop marketing.
Loop marketing.
Dot com you own that one too, I guess. Yeah, we promised we would say it seven times. So loop marketing, loop marketing, loop marketing. Boom. They were like can you guys read this ad or talk about it? The white font on white background at the end of the pod. You didn't even plug it. By the way, when we asked, what is the new inbound marketing?
That's true.
Thank you, that's it, that's a pod. I feel like I could rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.
I'll put my law in it like my day's off on the road, less travel, never looking back. Alright, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot Podcast Network, but we're not the only ones. There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you like them. Maybe you should check them out.
One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you can make, the new habits you could do, the the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference, that's what that podcast is all about.
Check it out. It's called Nudge.
And you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.