All right, so we had Dharmesh Shah on the podcast today.
Dharmesh 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 Dharmesh runs HubSpot, which is a 25 or 30 billion company that makes 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 $5,000 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, on this episode, we wanted to talk to him about the early days.
Like, how did you actually get HubSpot 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 that look like then?
Because today with AI and ChatGPT, it seems like there's a new opportunity.
And I have like more energy than I started with, because he's got this kind of I don't know, there's like playful builder, like get after it energy.
That's pretty contagious.
All right.
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 could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off.
What's going on?
How are you?
Doing well.
Back from a busy but fun week at Inbound in San Francisco.
Did you guys get together in SF?
Yeah, we did.
Dharmesh 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 area, the Moscone Center, and they have this thing called Inbound.
And so Dharmesh 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 is this?
Because 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 HubSpot.
The first thing is like it says inbound.
And 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 I think is kind of like a pretty interesting business strategy.
Yeah.
Darmesh, tell the story.
You told me something.
You go.
I was talking to Brian and he was telling about these very well-funded companies that had CMOs, that were trying to get traffic to their website.
And here's Darmesh just blogging for fun at home, and he's getting way more traffic.
And they kind of looked at that.
They're like...
They have a chief marketing officer.
They have an 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 than they are.
There's something here, right?
Like, wasn't that the story?
Yeah, that's exactly the story.
So the...
I was still in grad school finishing up writing my thesis.
Brian graduated a year ahead of me, but we would still get together once a week and chat about ideas.
Because we had 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 VC firms here in the Boston area.
And his sort of job.
His role was to help these startups go from rinky-dinkal startups and get scale right.
It was just to help them with their go-to-market marketing sales.
You know, how do you get customers?
And so we'd be meeting and, as part of my thesis work called Un-Startups, the Patterns and Practices of Modern Software Entrepreneurs, because I'm a software guy.
And my thesis advisor, who's one of the tougher advisors Um, but like three quarters of the way through, is Dharmesh.
Like you've got a lot of words here, but there's not a lot of data.
This is not like Dharmesh'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.
And so I thought that like blogging was a new thing at the time.
I'm like Well, maybe I can write a blog and maybe I can get comments on the blog and I can use that as the citation of the resource.
Like, oh, well, in my blog article, I said this, and some people said this, or whatever.
So that's what I did.
I started a blog.
And in order to come up with a name for the blog, I just took the first two words of the title of the thesis, which was on startups, stuck the words together and put a com at the end of it.
And this was in the early days, so that was available.
So I registered it for $15 or whatever it was.
And anyway, so that like, how do I get people other than my mom and, you know, two friends to read it right?
Like, what do I do?
And so then I kind of dig in.
It's like, oh, well, there's, you know, this thing called Google.
They've 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 a collection of things.
And so those are all the things that I sort of dug into obsessively and learned about.
And we can talk about some of those, because I think that's a good topic even for today, as things evolve.
And so Brian's watching me do this now when we're meeting is like, Dharmesh, 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, my portfolio company is like, they can't get a hundredth of that traffic.
They should be doing this, not whatever it is they're doing.
Stop the madness in terms of spending this budget on things that are just not driving any engagement.
That was the genesis of the idea of inbound marketing.
It's like okay, while everybody was doing it wrong, they needed to be doing it.
Like, let's pull people into your website that are kind of curious.
How do you educate them?
How do you put value out there?
And our kind of catchphrase at the time was you know, 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 get you in?
And we were the opposite of that.
And so now back to the conference.
So when we did that, we're like okay, 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 pieces together, all the pieces that you needed to do, and 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 kind of inbound marketing thing.
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 200 people in a ballroom at the Marriott.
And we made the decision when we started the conference.
It was 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 host to kind of 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...
It's like you're not allowed to pitch HubSpot from stage.
If not, if you're HubSpot employee, you're 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.
And so we sort of kept that up.
That's why the conference was never named HubSpot.
You know, this is the 17th year that we've been doing that event on an annual basis.
And 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.
And that's that proved to be good.
There's a few smart things that I did that I would recommend that everyone should go off and try to do this.
But a few things that work if you're really looking to kind of start a movement, start a category.
Yeah.
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 going to 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 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.
They would send their entire team to the inbound conference, even though HubSpot was a competitor.
So it was an industry event, not a conference.
I've seen this happen many times.
So I was part of the early blogging community.
First as like a reader, like I was really passionate about a 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 read their blogs about.
Read on the blog.
And it was like from 08 to like 14 or something was like a really magical period for blogging.
And back then, we felt like freaks, where there was a very few of us, and we were kind of weirdos.
We were basically all nerds, and we loved meeting other nerds.
Then when I lived in SF with Sean, there were startups, but then there was crypto.
And crypto was 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 my takeaway from hearing you tell this story is that I've seen this happen so many times where there's niche communities or also with early YouTubers.
We knew early YouTubers and it really became a thing.
We've seen this happen so many times where a small group of really like unique or odd kind of 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.
So like, that's not it.
But I think that like Peter levels has done that with like the indie hacker.
That was really cool.
But what do you what is it?
Brian Johnson was that two years ago, like the body hacker?
It's obviously easy for me to say what is past.
But it's a hard question.
I don't I don't actually know.
What do you think it is now?
Well, I was thinking about first the strategy that the HubSpot thing did with the category creation, when you make it about a movement and a way of doing things instead of like starting with your company and your product.
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 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.
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 be like yeah, a little weird about how you're going to – yeah, I'm going to sleep at this time.
Yeah, I'm going to put this mask on my face.
Yes, I'm going to get this test done every six weeks.
Yeah, I'm going to do all these weird things because I believe in this way of living.
I thought he did an incredible job of that and he created that movement of the longevity movement, really along with Huberman and others.
Of course, not one person or one company ever owns these things.
And so I thought that was one example.
And then another example that's a little bit, you know, just smaller, more niche.
I thought you know I was thinking about.
Okay, so HubSpot basically had the people who believed in doing this new form of marketing, and then HubSpot became like a tool you would use naturally, if you were going to do that.
I could build the tool for that community.
I was thinking, who else did that?
And I think one is what Russell Brunson did with ClickFunnels.
Yeah.
So first the idea, just a rebranding of kind of like the funnel, 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 ClickFunnels like the ClickFunnels 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 going to build funnels, you should use, you know, ClickFunnels.
That's like the natural, like the secondary thing underneath it.
All right guys, if you're liking this interview with Dharmesh, you might want a little gift from him.
So Dharmesh 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 in AI?
Well, you got to 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 Dharmesh has put together.
He's got a bunch of prompts, a bunch of things you can go put into ChatGPT 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 Dharmesh's site.
Here's the QR code.
There's a link in the description as well.
And there's 100 of them.
You can literally just copy-paste them and start using them for your company.
Check it out.
It's pretty cool.
All right, back to this episode.
So one kind of category of ideas that I've been obsessed with for 30 years which I think is a really great category, like broadly defined category of ideas is making inefficient markets efficient.
And so the kind of macro level definition of an efficient market is that every transaction that should occur does.
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 Y price.
Someone's willing to buy shares at Y price.
And so that transaction, when it needs to occur, does occur.
And so then the question is like, what makes markets inefficient, right?
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.
By 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, some of the most money that's ever been made are 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 not happening.
They essentially took some of that inefficiency out.
So eBay was an efficient market for these niche market product goods like Pez 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 llamas.
Here's someone that's looking for that content.
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 what they did.
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 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 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 realized like, oh, there's going to be other people who want to do this.
And then we built a tool.
And I 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, 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 2010 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 thought I was late to, even though it was right in front of my face, which is what I call algo jacking.
And 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 face.
They told me the secret.
I was too dumb to like acknowledge it.
And the first was actually Steve Bartlett.
So I hired Steve Bartlett when he was probably, I don't know, 18, 19 years old.
He came to 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 19 21 year old And they got like 10 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 on 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 100000 to reach that audience through his accounts.
And so he had this like method.
I guess like...
In the same way Darmesta, 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 got to think about, you know, Jenny in her bedroom.
She's just scrolling.
And what's going to make Jenny in her bedroom care?
She's not going to care that you launched your app.
And 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 successful podcasts in the world, Diary of a CEO.
The reason one of the most successful podcasts in the world is because he figured out how to algojack 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 worked backwards from the algorithm.
So what we do, for example, is we have our product and then we try to share it, and it 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, his personal diary.
Okay, not that many people wanted that.
Then he started interviewing other CEOs about CEO stuff.
Some business people wanted that.
If you go look at his feed today, it's like 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 they're like, But guess what?
That's what the algorithm wants.
And 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, scrolling 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, is McDonald's the best burger?
And he's like, well, yeah, it sells the most burgers.
So it's the best burger.
It's like, what are you talking about?
And I'm like, well, we have different definitions of best.
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 going to try to make that video.
And even though I saw that that trend, that sort of algo jacking trend, you know, I didn't really understand it.
And I think long story short, Dharmesh, 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 real value in some history here.
So the thing that I was doing back when HubSpot got started and we made a brief reference to this, it was called search engine optimizations.
SEO and the kind of practice of and there's an entire industry now that 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 ad dollars or whatever.
It's for free.
How do you kind of rise in the rankings?
And there was an entire discipline around how to do that.
And kind of pulling on your thread Sean around, kind of algo hacking.
The way I'm a positive kind of guy, it's 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 have my website go up the rankings.
And there's actually 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 somebody else's website?
And there were lots of practices that were kind of later labeled as being kind of black hat, because like oh, it really likes when it sees the keyword that someone's searching on on the web page.
It's like, okay, well, I'll just put the keyword on the web page 500 times, right?
In white font on white at the bottom of the page.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And that was level two.
It's like, oh, well, Google got too smart about that.
It's because that would actually show up poorly in other results.
And I'll do it 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 year.
I don't remember.
Whatever.
And then they do the update.
And then six months later, you see an article.
This company lays off 500 people.
I remember I'm friends with the NerdWallet guys.
NerdWallet is a company that writes articles about the best 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 0 the third year I think they made 30 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 kind of you're describing of all these hacks and then doing the right way.
Exactly right.
And I really like really, as I tend to do, I went deep down the rabbit hole on SEO kind of back in the day.
It's like, OK, well, what is this?
How does it work?
And there were a couple of key insights that I think are still applicable today that I think made us money, would make other people money, because I think it's a successful strategy which is going back to, kind of 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 is to deliver high quality results to the end user.
Okay.
So if you say that, that means that 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 make those people's jobs easier?
It's like oh yeah well, you know, they really like it when you structure a webpage so their crawler has an easier time crawling it.
It's like.
Well, they will reward sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally just what we will call good behavior.
Make your site clean, make it load fast, make the content actually useful.
So I got up on stages and wrote about SEO all the time back in the day.
And my one thing I would tell small business owners that's what my primary audience was is that Whatever term you want to search for, type it into Google right now.
Let's go.
Don't type it in.
And it's like, okay, well, here are the people that are coming up right now.
Do you have a webpage on your website right now that deserves to rank higher than the ones that are showing up right now?
And be honest with yourself, like not in a self-serving way.
If you were searching, if you were the actual human typing this keyword in, would you want to find your website, versus 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 9 out of 10, 95 out of 100 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, write good content, write timeless content.
But I have content that I wrote for HubSpot 19 years ago that still drives traffic to HubSpotcom, that still generates leads, that still generates revenue 19 years later.
And this is one of the big things about SEO and we'll talk about AEO, kind of the successor to that, which is.
It's like as a marketer, you need to have a repertoire of things that you do to reach customers.
The issue with Google advertising, or any kind of advertising, is you're effectively 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 auctioning mechanism for the price.
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 5 a click right now.
It may cost 15 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 going to produce a better blog article, it's not going to 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 Your competitors come up if someone's doing it.
And you can do something about it.
So there's all this positiveness to investing in SEO versus paid channels.
And I was going to ask you this.
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 liked to read the next blog, the next tweet, the next book, because I was always looking for like, what's the better answer?
Because in my head, life was 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 as many times as you can in different ways and picking up different pieces and just keep hammering on.
And I've learned that for 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 is the easiest example.
We all know what to do.
This is a question of how intensely you do it or not.
But a lot of things in life are this way.
I bring this up because...
I can kind of 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 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 of the marketing the strategy, more so than like coming up with the perfect you know the perfect strategies?
Totally.
This has been my personal belief for, I think, my entire life.
As far back as I can remember is that I'm never the smartest person out there, or even in any given room that I'm in.
So you can outthink me, and I think that's relatively easy to do.
You will not outgrind me and you will not outwork me because that's under my control.
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 compared to the next person or whatever, over the fullness of time, you win.
The universe says, ah, you win, right?
And you just have to have the conviction.
The problem is that... the universe has 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 pour your heart and soul into it, and then it goes to six.
And then it goes to five, right?
It 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 don't work out, but it's just a matter of putting the reps in.
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, for some reason HubSpot, you guys changed your blog, where I used to be able to go to Dharmesh Shah or 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 guy doesn't sound like a 30 billion company.
And it kind of like gives anyone inspiration because it's pretty great.
But if you go to on startupscom, which is your personal blog and you can kind of rig it where you like, sort by recent, and you got to change the URL a little bit.
But you can go and look at some of your old blog posts from 2006.
And a few things.
One, the headlines are evergreen.
They're fantastic.
Raising capital, friends, family, and fools.
Another one is revenue early, revenue often.
The other one is the danger of solving venture capitalists' biggest problem.
Like really good 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 2006 2007 2008, when I imagine HubSpot.
I don't know when HubSpot started, but I think 2006.
So you are running a company. or an early stage company that probably takes up your whole life.
And I think, 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 is.
You know, we've talked about this in terms of, as you pick an idea 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 that I will be able to put the reps in?
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 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, do not collect 200, kind of thing.
It's so funny.
Listen, in April of 2006, 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 in terms of effort.
It's pretty funny.
You've been saying the same stuff now for 20 years.
Did you guys see this video that's going semi-viral of the YouTube founders early on?
Have you seen this?
What's this?
No.
So this is 20 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, they're just sitting around.
They're like, I was kind of depressed last week.
Like we have 40 videos on the site.
And, you know, if I came to the site, I wouldn't find – I'd be gone.
And they're just like, yeah, this sucks.
And this is YouTube.
This is the founders of YouTube.
And you were talking about, like, you know, early days blogging.
It's like, yeah, I got six visitors.
And I got eight the next week.
And, you know, being able to persist – through that time 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 40 videos doesn't work.
It's not that blogging doesn't work.
It's your blogging once every two weeks doesn't work, right?
Like I think that's one of the big lessons here.
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All right, back to the podcast.
We didn't close the loop, though, Dharmesh.
So the new wave.
We talked a lot about SEO, and that's good, because history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.
What's the new wave?
So the new wave and I think, just like SEO, created an opportunity for SEO consultants, SEO agencies and businesses driving direct traffic organically.
I think we have a new thing now.
So a couple of things are happening.
One is...
And lots of marketers have been 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 HubSpot.
We are very good at the SEO game have played it for a long time has gone down dramatically, literally by about 20 to 40, based on which industry you are in.
And the reason it has gone down is that historically, the practice of search is that we would go to Google, we would type something in, we would get 10 blue links, right.
That's the whole game.
As it turns out, there's this new thing called AI and a new app called ChatGPT, which has 800 million weekly active users.
And what people are doing now is not going to Google and getting 10 blue links, or like going to ChatGPT and just asking a question, getting an answer.
And that's it, right?
It's like, okay, well, there's no click through.
There's no reason for someone who's like oh, just tell me the answer, instead of me having to go through and read the articles from those 10 blue links and then figuring out my own answer.
So like, just do it for me.
And so that's happening. already and you can see it in the actual kind of data as we've seen.
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 what we're calling AEO, which is AI, or answer engine optimization.
It's like okay well, before people were going to Google doing a search for my product, my service, my industry, my category and my job was to be one of those 10 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 ChatGPT.
Let's just say that's the 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 AEO.
And there's a few things that are distinctive about it.
One is the click through rate in terms of web traffic to your site through a EO is going to be down, because if they just get the answer, there's no reason to come read your blog posts about X, where you stole the virtues of how.
Whatever your approach is.
And it 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 back.
Yes. which no one ever, by the way, did.
There was a running joke in the SEO world is if you ever had to hide 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.
They would not click next.
They would just rephrase their queries.
Like, I must have asked this suboptimally or wrongly.
I'm just going to rephrase my question instead of going to second page.
But at least I get 10.
That's true.
They give me like two or three.
I agree.
Yes.
So it's even more important.
And that's 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 in terms of the traction you're going to get.
Okay.
So then the question is, How different is it?
What should people be doing?
What should we be doing now in order to start getting that?
And so the number one thing is that so when Google crawls your website, back in the old Google days, they have a Google crawler and it crawls websites and you can kind of control that.
And there were things you do to make it easier for the Google crawler to crawl, make your site faster, make it more structured, all those things.
All of those things still actually apply.
The difference now is there's a kind of a OAI.
It's called OAI search bot is the name of the bot 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 are two different ones.
So number one, on the off chance that you're blocking unknown caller 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.
Even if you're doing that, if you're blocking it explicitly, go in and turn on the ability for OAI search bot and GPT bot to crawl your website.
Because if you don't get indexed, then you're not even in the game, let alone you have no chance of winning because you can't be in the results.
Okay, so that's thing one, for sure.
Thing two is that, and this was nice of them, is that they do report.
So when you look at your Google Analytics or HubSpot web traffic, whatever analytics tool you use, it now self-reports when something comes from one of those bots, from the AI.
So it's a UTM source parameter for those of us that do analytics.
It's like, so now HubSpot has this in the product now.
So we will tell you what percentage of your traffic, just like we used to tell you 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, 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.
Like anything else, you have to sort of measure it in order to improve it.
So start looking at that traffic, see where the baseline is today, and then start tracking it.
Number three, and this is 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 prose 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 are reading it.
They were like clicking on the link.
So you need a great page title that would actually get the click.
Then you need an 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 solving for the humans.
Now you're solving for 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 what are the top CRMs for small business and startups.
There should be a webpage on the HubSpot website that says Here are the primary factors that kind of influence what you would pick or whatever.
And here's why, the seven reasons why HubSpot is the top thing, whatever.
It's like, make it easy for them.
Like, reduce the friction for the AI to get the thing that it'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, most of them still work.
You still want page authority because...
ChatGPT specifically what 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 ChatGPT and it will convert that into search queries.
It will parallelize it.
So it's gonna do a bunch of Bing queries.
Bing is what it happens to use, but it doesn't really matter.
Most of the search engines are roughly equivalent technology-wise.
So all the things you use to kind of rank a webpage will still help you, because when Bing goes out and gets asked by ChatGPT, it says hey, the user is asking this question about small business and CRM.
It may rephrase the query, but it's still going to do a Bing search.
It will come back with a list of pages.
Those pages go back to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT puts it through the LLM and comes up with the answer that's going to 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 still applies.
Sean, are you getting?
Have you noticed that you're getting traffic and sales for your stuff from AI?
Um, I don't pay attention to it at that level of detail, but we've 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'd 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 answer box for this.
And so we're trying those now, but I think it's like early still to see if we're getting any results from it.
By the way I just typed, 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, HubSpot was the second answer in the thing.
It said, here's the top.
It goes, you need a CRM.
Here's what a CRM does.
And then it's like, here's the top CRMs for small business 2025.
But it looks like in this case it literally just every the ranking is just pulled straight from TechRadar's article.
Like TechRadar has some article, I've tested 13 of the best CRMs at 2025.
And it just like pulled that exact list and it put a comparison table in there, like you said, and it just gave me that as the answer.
Whatever tech writer said is the answer here.
So that seems a little tricky.
For Hampton, we've got a lot of business.
It's crazy how much is happening.
What are people looking for, Sam, that they're finding Hampton?
So sometimes it's just like I want like what's like an entrepreneurial group that I can refer to or 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 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, we use HubSpot.
And HubSpot would be like, yeah, this lead or this new customer came from ChatGPT.
And it honestly shocked me.
And I remember the first time we got that like eight or 10 months ago.
And it was you, 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 on Google, you would structure your page a certain way because it's like that's.
It's like if 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'm going to give you.
This other guy really loves to debate.
And it's like ChatGPT loves question and answer.
And so format your content as question and answer is like a simple nuance of like the new format, new way of doing things right, but in general, like it's silent, like it's kind of like just do what you think a customer wants.
And the last thing is even early on, google had what was called a keyword.
What do they have?
A tool?
Yeah, they used to call it one thing and 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 competition there is.
And so I could just like replicate that.
I don't think that exists for ChatGPT, does it, Dharmesh?
It does not yet, no.
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.
Google has subsequently kind of curtailed that so they don't pass that kind of granular what we think of as intent data.
What was the user actually searching for?
But yeah, I think... things will evolve.
So a couple of more kind of tactical tips that I think are applicable today.
Sean, for you, and this may be happening automatically based on being on the Shopify platform, but one of the things that ChatGPT and the AI engines really like is structured product catalogs, right.
Because... as you would expect.
It's like oh, 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?
Can it be shipped or something?
Delivery time, those kinds of things.
If you put those on the website, that's going to influence as you would expect it to.
Like, if I'm searching for, I want to buy this kind of a musical synthesizer or something like that, I want to find a site that actually happens to have it right.
That's why, you know, Amazon gets, you know, so much love generally.
But anyway, so that's one thing to look at.
And for you Sam, the other thing that the AEOs, the answer engines, kind of optimize for is more kind of human-based stuff.
So if you look at the review sites of G2 and things like that for product-oriented companies, but also 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 even if there's one comment in there that says oh, Here's the thing that definitively asks, and you will find that the citations that you see that show up in chat and you can just do this through personal anecdote and just experimentation you will find that 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 is asking like oh, what's the best CRM for small business?
If there happens to be a Reddit post, that loosely kind of translates to the exact same meaning.
That thread 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 comment 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 going to be the biggest company in the world.
Imagine if Google had a subscription.
It's going to be huge.
So Google is already the third or something largest company in the world.
Now imagine every customer is also paying $10 a month or you know what I mean?
Three episodes ago, we were talking about open AI.
It's like, oh, if we have to predict as to what's going to be the next trillion dollar company.
This is before.
I don't think any company had reached trillion dollars at the time we did that episode, but one was about to.
It's crazy how much like ChatGPT for it to be 800 like they're essentially the new operating system for this current generation.
I had a buddy and 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 $30 billion.
And we were talking and he was like, man, I think like, I don't know this equity can grow anymore.
Like, I just don't think it can work.
And he ended up taking the job anyway.
And he made already something like $30 million or so from his stock.
And he sold a portion of it so he could be very comfortable.
And then we were talking.
He was like, what should I do with the rest?
And I was like, man, there's definitely a world where it could 10 or 20x or more again.
Who knows?
And it's just crazy to say that out loud.
What's it worth now?
$1 trillion or $800?
I don't even know.
$500 billion is the current publicly disclosed round that's happening currently.
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Can we do like some rapid fire questions?
We have this document.
This is for the listener.
We have this document where we were like preparing different ideas.
And Sean 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 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 iteration.
It's all about iteration.
Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
Yeah, so a couple of things.
One is 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...
Either 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 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 be something different.
And my kind of running thesis has been and this is referenced algebra I was making is around mathematical induction.
And so mathematical induction is this very simple principle that says as long as it's true for n equals 1, and it's also true that if it's true for n, that it's also true for n plus 1, then it's going to be true for everything all along the way until infinity, for all positive numbers.
Anyway, I'll simplify this.
Distilled down, 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 for some definition of work, right?
It's like you just have to just kind of keep at it.
And I'm not saying 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 informative loop that says oh, I'm going to 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, and then just get started.
It's like often it'll be, Can I write code tonight?
So right now I've got three projects in flight that are these kind of scratch my own itch AI projects.
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.
Give a one-liner maybe for like one or two of them.
Yeah, so one is around... it's like a visual designer as an agent.
So there's lots of great image generation tools.
There's, you know, ChatGPT has one.
There's NanoBanana.
That's now from Google.
But what I've always found lacking is the actual process I go through as a non-designer, as a business person, like if I'm doing a social media post or doing a blog post or something like that.
Like, I have a process.
Like, okay, I want to come up with, like, visual ideas.
What would represent this?
Then I want to see 10 possible examples.
Then I want to iterate.
Then I want to say okay, I want to 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 kind of workflow that I go through and like that's just painful and I'm too impatient.
Like, I have access to designers.
This is not a matter of saving money, but it's like...
If I have an idea at 2 o'clock in the morning and I want to get the idea out there with a visual that goes along with it, so that's the thing I'm building.
That goes through my entire flow as an agentic process.
You have a name for it?
I know you like to do names with the ideas.
I do.
And I'll put it out there because it's close to launchable.
It's called imagegen.ai.
So image generation.ai.
And is this going to be like one of your first or second times on MFM Wordle was popular.
And you said that you made a Wordle alternative.
So for those listening, if you don't know, 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 80000 per month at the time.
I have no idea where it's at now.
Do you have some type of ambitions or guesses as to where this is going to be in six months?
I don't know actually.
So part of it we talked about this a little bit last couple episodes, you know.
So I've been working as kind of part of my kind of HubSpot hat now is the agentai platform, which is basically a marketplace for agents.
You can build agents, find agents, hire agents to do these kinds of things.
So in the background I'm going to build this thing, but I'm building it as an agent that will be on the agentai platform.
And the hope, that is, that the utility is high enough either.
It will cause a bunch of users to be added to agentai, which is now up to 2 million users, which is awesome.
Or, you know, I have thoughts about agents on the platform being monetized someday.
And this is like, okay, for me, it passes the litmus test.
Like if this thing already existed, would I pay $5 a month for it or $10 a month for it?
And the answer is yes.
It's like okay, if I can sort of And I actually posted on LinkedIn exactly sort of the product roadmap for this thing was yesterday.
I'm like, okay, here's the thing I'm building.
I didn't disclose the name, but here's the thing I'm building.
Here's what it's going to do.
And it's like...
Like stupid simple things right now.
For instance, when you do an image generation thing right now that has text which a lot of kind of business images that you create will have like a headliner or some sort of text in it.
The image models have gotten better at text, still not perfect.
But one of the things I wanted 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 waste my time giving me things that have typo in them.
It's like, oh, by the way, 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 an intern going off and doing this stuff in the background.
And then I show up and it's got 10 options for me.
I can pick and I can run, and it'll do it in my style, without typos, 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 ChatGPT history one.
I'm just curious.
So you run a huge company.
You are also kind of like a scratch your own itch guy.
You're an investor.
You have many hats.
I'm just curious how you use ChatGPT.
If you were to pull up your ChatGPT and looked at the last five to seven searches that you did or questions and answers that you did.
What are you talking to ChatGPT about?
I'm a huge ChatGPT fan, don't get me wrong, even if I were an investor in OpenAI.
But the way I consume ChatGPT is not through the app.
The way I consume ChatGPT is through their API.
So I have my own kind of command line thing that I put in.
And there's a reason I do this.
So the next big advancement we're going to see in AI apps generally is this notion of memory that they remember.
And you'll see, as you've been using ChatGPT, 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 the best out there in terms of being able to retain that memory, which is awesome.
The non-awesome part of it is that that memory is locked into ChatGPT.
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 OpenAI because it makes it very, very sticky.
Well wait, so your personal version that you're running in your command line has better memory than ChatGPT.
Why does that, how'd you do that?
Oh, because it has infinite memory.
And what makes it the better memory is because it's under my control, it's my memory.
For instance, I can go off and say I'm going, I want to go back through, and I have this for my email as well, which I think is just another form of memory.
All the email archive and I have like two and a half million emails 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 and or I want to intersect it with Google Gemini, which does video analysis a lot better than ChatGPT does, which doesn't do video analysis yet.
It's the openness of it, right?
That's 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?
Because I think everybody would want this, right?
Yeah, give me that.
Because it violates, okay, 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 maintain my own properties, let alone properties on behalf of other people.
And number three, never compete with Sam Altman from OpenAI.
Those are my three rules.
That would violate the third rule, which is I don't want to create a chat GPT competitor.
But where this will manifest is that HubSpot's building kind of memory into our Breeze assistant, our AI product, and so that's going to happen.
So localized memory in terms of for use case specifics, but I don't want to create a consumer app that tries to solve this kind of for the broad horizontal group of people.
But I think over time the industry will evolve where there'll be some form of like federated memory.
I think 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 OpenAI 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... you know, diabolically planned to be that way.
It's just like, oh, this would be a better product if it had memory.
So they added memory.
Right.
Okay.
But you didn't answer my full question.
So you said, I don't use the Chats TV 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?
So I do it a lot for kind of research.
If I'm researching, like, ideas, and I use it a lot for domain names, as it turns out.
So I have a thing that can actually look at Google Trends.
So I can say, oh, like, 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.
I can look up the transaction history.
Has this domain been sold before?
What was the last purchase price?
It's like Zillow for domains.
One of the agents I'm also working on that will launch actually this week.
So what I want to do is to say, okay, vibe coding is a good example.
It's like ah Once, Andrew Karpoff, I was actually part of that, but sometimes I'm a little bit later for games.
Like, oh, I see this trend kind of picking up.
Like, what is that?
I want to know who coined the term.
I want to know what it is.
I want to know what domains are available.
What's the price?
Are any of them listed or not?
Are any ones just free and clear?
Like, no one's, as it turns out, vibe coding.
I was early but late enough where someone had already kind of purchased the .com domain.
By the way...
Vibe coding would fit your inbound framework.
If I'm Replit or one of these companies.
Right now I'm creating the vibe coding movement and the community and the events and the blog and all that.
And then I have the tool underneath that you could use, but you could use many others.
Or maybe I'm Supabase or one of these other companies.
Putting it behind that the way you've done with inbound marketing, I think would be smart right now.
So I'll tell you what am I, and I will, I will sacrifice this idea.
Not not for free, but in the idea here, and this was the original idea behind.
So I paid six figures for that, for that domain.
That's on, I think.
Vodcoding.com or what'd you get? vibecoding.com.
Really?
Oh my gosh.
And the idea, I've logged hundreds of hours doing what some would call vibe coding.
And there's other terms like agentic coding.
I think is a more accurate thing, but it doesn't have the same vibe as vibe coding.
That doesn't exactly roll off the tip of the tongue.
It doesn't.
Yep.
And just in case, I own that one too, but that's a different story.
Okay, so vibecoding.com.
I think it's a great idea.
It lowers the bar, allows lots of non-developers to kind of get into the kind of product building game.
The problem is and I would bet lots of money on this is that almost everyone that is not a developer by trade will do vibe coding.
There's a class of problems that vibe coding is 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.
Or if you're just building it for your team, as I only have to make it work for three people and if it stops working, no big deal.
But as you start violating some of those criteria, if it's like no, 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 a year, three years, five years, 10 years down the road, then vibe coding invariably right now, even with 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 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 vibecodingcom where a bunch of engineers hang out and what they do is to say hey, I'll answer questions for you, like my number of questions, but also for 500 an hour I will jump into your GitHub repo, figure out your problem and fix it and set up a unit test for you and help you get through this corner that you've painted yourself into.
So I think that's going to be a massive market.
So you listed, I think, so you probably own Between 500 and 1000?
It's between 500 and 1000.
Yeah.
Okay, so I could collect if I were, you know, had unlimited money and I could probably collect 500 over 10 years.
You go to, you just have an idea and you just buy it.
But 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, opengraph.com, prompt.com, dadjoke.ai, speedround.com.
And it's like speedround.com.
It's an investment firm.
A check or no in 24 hours?
Dadjokeai, a dad joke generator.
That works, but not that well.
And you said you have three other projects that you want to launch, but you said I need this podcast to go out and then I'm going to 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 to be clear, the list of domains I put in, I don't have sites launched on them right now.
So the thing I was kind of trying to share, and I may just put this up publicly.
It's like here are my top 20 domains for which I have ideas, but I don't have the calories to actually pursue them.
Make me an offer.
But you have to have like street cred, something that gives me evidence that you would actually be able to kind of pursue this idea, and I'll kind of contribute the domain and maybe some capital to kind of kick the idea off.
But to answer your kind of Question bluntly, Sam.
My hours have not changed in the 30 plus years I've been doing this as an entrepreneur.
I still think of myself as an entrepreneur despite being part of a $30, $25 billion company.
For all intents and purposes 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, it sounds 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.
It's like, and I'm just trying to play the game.
And this is in the same way.
People play video games and do it obsessively.
This is my version of a video game.
And I did play video games a lot back when I was younger, too.
But I really enjoy it.
I like it because if I were a writer, you know my favorite writers are the ones 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 a world that could exist, that's got its own physical laws.
And here's the species that live on, the powers they have, and all of it.
And it's this entire world that they fabricate out of thin air.
They do it in words.
I'm trying to, in my little small way, create a version of the universe that exists that solves all of the problems that I have or people that I love, and I can, sort of you know, kind of poke around at the magnets and make a virtual universe that I think is a V11 of the universe that exists.
Does your house work like that in your physical life?
Like on your day-to-day life, do you?
Is your 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 going about it.
Is it set up that way?
No, and 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.
My desk is completely messy.
So it's not like I have an engineer's scientist kind of thing where it's a white lab coat, clean desk and everything's kind of pristine.
It's the exact opposite of that, right?
It's...
It's just not how I work.
And so I'm not that methodical about it.
I'm analytical in some ways, 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 ImageGen.ai in the next few days or whatever.
And now I'll finish it and get it to some semblance of kind of working.
But yeah.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating.
It's a really good piece of personal advice.
If a musician were out playing music and practicing when they're not doing it for 12 hours a day, 16 hours a day?
Which people do that?
We never questioned that.
We never, ever questioned.
We're like, oh well, that's what it takes to be kind of 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.
Like, well, he has all the money.
Why would he keep doing this for money?
Like, I'm not doing it for money at all.
Like, I don't care about money at all.
But I do enjoy... the craft and the practice and the actual process of building stuff.
It's more of a business, yeah.
Have you ever heard of the famous clause that Michael Jordan put in his contract when he signed his big deal with the Bulls?
So they added a clause.
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, you can't ride motorcycles, things that would jeopardize you as an asset to them.
And one of them was like you can't just go play like random pickup basketball games on concrete with strangers, right?
Like you might get hurt.
And that's on, you know, now you can't play on company time.
And he had this famous clause that he put in called the for the love of the game clause.
And it was that Jordan was allowed to play basketball anytime he wanted for the love of the game.
And I think that that's like a clause that we all just want in our own mental contract of how we do things.
Like you had this great tweet where 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 don't have to talk to my mom or my sister.
And I'll tell them about you.
And my buddy Furcon is like this.
Furcon was my co-founder of the last company.
And then, but the company built before that, Applovin, 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 11 p.m.
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, you know, he's not, it didn't become this way because of the money.
And also like You're right that, whether it's athletes musicians, 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.
Are you familiar with Jordan's contract in 96?
Subsection three seeds for the love of the game.
She's like, oh, I just wanted to know if he has kids yet or not.
She's actually operating at a completely different level than me.
Oh, man.
Dharmesh, we love hanging out with you.
I always leave better than i came in.
I wish we could do this for for many more hours, because there's just so many different things about life and business that we can learn from you.
We had howard marks on recently and at the end it was the same thing, where it was like um, I was like man, 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 kind of do the same thing.
But it's kind of funny, right?
The kind of legend investors we have.
They bring this philosophical energy of like, almost like patience and like like observe the world, stay calm, you know, stay calm and carry on, or whatever.
And like Dharmesh and like kind 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.
It is 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 attach it to this tweet.
And it's two lines I'm going to share with you.
It's a nice, warm kind of closing which is dance like no one's watching, build like everyone's waiting.
Nice 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 promote this thing.
And we're like yeah, let's just have dar mesh on the pod and uh, maybe he'll like plug it because that's way better.
But what is it?
Loop marketing?
Loop marketing, by the way, loop marketing is a new inbound marketing.
That's what it is.
Is that your prediction?
If you're looking to learn about how to do marketing well in the modern age of AI, look up Loop Marketing.
Loopmarketing.com.
You own that one too, I guess.
Yeah, we promised we would say it seven times.
So Loop Marketing, Loop Marketing, and Loop Marketing.
Boom.
Quote a hit.
Let's go.
They were like, can you guys read this ad?
We did the white font on white background at the end of the pod.
You didn't even plug it, by the way.
We asked, what is the new inbound marketing?
You called it AEO.
That's true.
Thank you.
That's it.
That's a pod.
All right, 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 liked 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 could make, the new habits you could do, 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.
