Cole Gordon Podcast
Cole Gordon Podcast
Content vs Paid Ads: Which One Is Better in 2026?
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0:00 Paid Ads vs Organic: Which 8-Figure Business Is Actually Worth More?
1:58 Spencer's Case: Why Ads Are the More Valuable Business
9:21 Jeremy's Case: Why the Creator Economy Makes Organic King
16:53 Is "Personal Brand" a Scam or the Ultimate Moat?
22:52 Rebuttal: Why Views Don't Equal Cash
27:52 Can You Actually Sell an Organic Business?
32:08 The Hidden Cost of "Free" Organic Traffic
38:56 Is Charisma Born or Built? The Skill Gap Debate
43:37 Which One Actually Scales to $25M Faster?
52:36 Lead Quality Showdown: 25% vs 40% Close Rates
1:06:44 Start Cold or Start Warm? The Hormozi Sequencing Fight
1:15:38 Which Model Gives You the Better Lifestyle?
1:22:29 The Conviction Test: Can You Fake Your Way Through Content?
1:31:36 Does Building a Real Brand Even Require Content?
1:47:20 The Micro-Niche Escape: How to Win When You Can't Beat Hormozi
What's better to grow your business?
SPEAKER_00Paid ads or organic? The phrase personal brand is the single biggest scam ever conducted in this industry. We're entering deep into the creator economy. In the next few years, if you don't have a brand, if you don't have content backing your stuff up, you're actually gonna be What the f does that actually mean?
SPEAKER_02I have been hearing we're in the creator economy and ads costs are rising and all this stuff in the last 10 years, and every year people have made more and more and more money from ads.
SPEAKER_01So today I have Spencer Vaughn, he's the CMO of my company, he spent well over $10 million on ads. He also runs a multiple seven-figure SaaS company called SalesKick. So he's gonna be arguing that paid ads is better. Whereas Jeremy Moser runs an organic content agency and has been able to generate tons, if not millions, of dollars purely through organic for himself and his clients, people like Jeremy Miner. He's helped me also with my organic content and tons of other big industry names that you would know. So he's gonna debate the organic side. So we're gonna kick off this debate, starting with Spencer's opening argument.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thank you, Cole. I'm very excited to be here. And I want to start by just saying I want you to throw out everything you've ever heard from online gurus, from courses, from people like Jeremy here who have the best intentions, but candidly are leaving out some very key points that prove that ads is a far more valuable business than organic. And today I have five main points that I'm gonna share with y'all. So to start, number one is the durableness of a business runoff of ads is far greater than a business runoff of organic. And this is just easily provable. I mean, case in point, when was the last time you watched a video from Dan Locke? Probably not anytime recently. When was the last time you watched a video that was not about uh you know his SEC loss? It was a training video from Ty Lopez, probably not anytime recently. Same thing with folks like Grant Cardone, who is obviously world famous now, but in terms of his actual content, he gets you know a tiny amount of the views that he used to get way back in the day. And so the truth is, you know, with organic content, if you do it well, which that begs that question as well, but if you do it well, yes, you can get hot for a little while and you can ride the wave off of that for a little bit. But inevitably, over time, you lose relevancy. And that brings me to a very important stat that I found when researching for this from Patreon. Patreon did a survey and a study across all of their clients and found that more than half of their content creators uh actually are having significantly harder time getting views now than they did five years ago, which further proves a point that there is no durableness to your business if it's reliant on organic, if it's reliant on those views and traffic, okay? And all that brings me to my second point, which is that ads, surprisingly, are far more profitable than organic. And I know that's very radical to say because a lot of people, like Jeremy, will tell you that, oh, you know, organic is way more profitable than paid ads. And all of that is just completely nonsense if you want to stay relevant. You know, case in point, people like Mr. Beast, the number one content creator in the world, have said very specifically that he invests all of his money from all of his businesses, his you know, ad revenue, et cetera, back into his content to further grow his brand. And I understand that that's okay, obviously the number one example, but even somebody like Hermosy has publicly said he t he spends tens of millions of dollars on organic content. And here's the reality: because of the lack of durableness of these uh channels, of these followings, uh, of building a company off of that, you have you're forced to reinvest a significant amount of your money into content to outdo yourself every single year. That's why they call it the content hamster wheel. And so many people get stuck on this, and then what do they do? They get burned out. Or they just accept that they lose relevancy and they kind of fade off into obscurity. I mean, a great example of this, uh, you know, 10 years ago, there is Evan Carmichael, who I love Evan Carmichael's videos. When I was starting out, I used to watch his stuff all the time. He'd break down, you know, key quotes and success habits from you know some of the most famous people who've ever lived. And yet nobody watches him anymore. And it's no offense to Evan if you're watching this, but you know, his viewership is way down. It's just hard to maintain relevancy over any you know period of time greater than like 24 months, okay? And that brings me to my third point. Even if magically, for some inexplicable reason, you're able to maintain relevancy, what's often and basically guaranteed to happen over a long enough time period is that you're gonna have some sort of account ban issue or you're gonna get canceled in the court of public opinion. And the reality is, is yes, I want to address this head on. You can get your ad account banned too. It's happened. Anyone who's run ads, well, you know, obviously that's a reality. But the reality is that when you get your ads account banned, what do you do? You just make a new ad account and you bring over the stuff that's already working. Okay, it's not that difficult. When you get your, you know, one million subscriber channel banned, what do you do at that point? Uh you hope you can get it back, and if you can't get back, you start from ground one. And good luck getting all of your followers back who now, you know, can't even see your channel and have to start from square one. And that brings me to point number four. Point number four is that paid ads create far more flexibility. Uh, this is studied by some of the greatest institutions and just you know generally known in business, that when you build a brand known for one thing, and that one thing is no longer in style today, it's no longer in trend today, you basically can't switch. Like it's extraordinarily difficult. And so, case in point, I was actually recently watching um some content, funny enough, uh, about the burger chain Five Guys. And Five Guys is way down in uh revenue and value recently. And the reason why is because they built their whole brand around being the highest quality burger. Well, guess what? The economy's changed. Now people are looking to save more money, right? We're not in the, you know, basically free money, 0% interest rates, um, you know, governments handing out stimulus checks like in 2020. Like we're not in that you know, economic environment anymore. And so that means people are being a lot more, you know, for lack of better words, uh choosy about where they spend their money. And spending $25 to $30 on a hamburger and fries, even if it is better, is just not in the budget for most people. Well, guess what? Five guys' entire brand is built off of quality. So what do they do? Well, they could no longer be quality, but then they lose all their brand positioning. So they have no choice other than just accept less revenue, right? Which is obviously critical. And so all of that brings me to the point that fundamentally, for all of the reasons I listed above, and I'm sure more will talk about today, and just again to recap, number one is a lack of durability. All right, people fall off all the time. It's not surprising. In fact, that's the norm. Okay, I'm sure Jeremy will bring up some examples where people magically stay forever, but 99% of the time they fall off. Number two is profit. It costs a tremendous amount to stay relevant, even if you magically can figure out how to. Uh, number three is you can get your account banned, you can get shut down, you can get canceled at any time, and you're basically screwed. Uh, number four is uh it's impossible to switch offers or switch brands. Uh, in fact, Harvard Business Study actually put out a uh quote that said that the one of the single most challenging things is changing your branding positioning and is often noted as the last fatal mistake of a dying business. Okay. And the last thing is all of that equals essentially no enterprise value. So when we're here to answer Cole's question today, of hey, what is a more valuable business? Is it 10 million based off of organic or 10 million based off of ads? Well, if we can scientifically and logically prove that there is effectively zero enterprise value in a business that is purely based off of organic traffic. And we know for a fact that that's because it's likely that that business won't exist in the future. And even if it does, no one can buy it from you because they can't buy the trust from your audience. They're not you. They will never be you, okay? Unless your plan is to sell your business and have them impersonate you with AI, which I don't know about you, that doesn't sound very ethical to me. So, my whole argument is factually speaking, there is zero enterprise value in these businesses. And again, that's for the reasons I listed above.
SPEAKER_01All right, that's Spencer's opening case. Jeremy, you take the floor. We'll see.
SPEAKER_00Right. Well, as you just heard Spencer say he gave you a bunch of reasons. Well, I'm here to go and tell you the exact opposite because my whole point to you, telling you why organic should be the only way you build your business, as opposed to running a bunch of paid ads, is this. We're entering deep into the creator economy. And so in the next few years, if you don't have a brand, if you don't have content backing your stuff up, you're actually going to be fucked. Okay. There's a study right now by Deloitte as well as other research platforms that give out that 60% of consumers are making their decisions right now based on what creators or influences they follow promote. Meaning that it's no longer about I saw this ad or I saw this billboard that leads to making a decision. It's the actual fact that, hey, this person that I follow and resonate with actually told me about XYZ product or service, and that's why I actually want to go and buy it. And so instead of you trying to go and play this losing game of trying to stay relevant when customer acquisition costs on paid media are up by 60% over the last five years alone, instead of that, you want to piggyback into the one vehicle that's actually becoming more and more relevant in society as a whole making decisions. There's a reason why, even in presidential elections, presidential candidates are going to creators trying to tap into the actual organic side because they know that's where the attention lies and where decisions are being made. Now, there's three backing up reasons that I'm going to provide you with, which is number one, the profitability. Number two, the operational complexity, and number three, longevity. Now, a lot of it is gonna comp is gonna contradict what Spencer says, and that's because, quite frankly, that there's just two different sides of opinions to it. Now, let me start the first things first with profitability, right? On average, having worked with a bunch of clients ourselves that do both paid and organic, I can tell you this the average client that does a million plus a month off of paid ads has a roughly a profit margin of 45%. Whereas clients that do a million a month off of organic have an average profit margin of 64%. That drastic difference is super simple. Number one, the customer acquisition cost is significantly higher. Okay, as I mentioned, it's drastically rising. But on paid organic, when you when you run scale paid, your customer acquisition cost drastically increases over time. Whereas with organic, it actually like decreases because you're actually building an asset. So your customer acquisition cost goes lower as you scale, which gives you outsized returns. Number two, with organic, you have a significantly lower refund rate, something that people don't really discuss, but a lot of businesses struggle with refunds, chargebacks, all of that good stuff. Our clients, based on stats that we've kind of gathered, have a three times lower refund rate off of organic because people don't just buy to into an offer, they buy into you as a person, which means they, in some way, shape, or form feel less likely or less strong towards actually going and charging back and pressing you on that. And last but not least, the one thing you can do is as a personal brand, you have a certain level of status, which means you're actually able to charge a premium for your offer. Every single personal brand that you might imagine right now, they're able to charge a premium for what they're doing because they actually have that form of leverage and status, which as a result allows you to have a higher profit per unit and just makes organic as a whole significantly more profitable. Now, reason number two, and I think this is the most pressing one as a matter, is operational complexity, right? Now, it's all great to talk about the scalability of ads and how awesome it is and how it's so predictable, but at the end of the day, the operational complexity is one thing that really screws you, especially in the long time, with as I mentioned, client acquisition costs rising. As an example, we have clients that do a million months off of paid versus organic. On average, the paid guys they have 1500 to 2000 sales calls that they book in order to achieve that million dollar month mark. For our organic clients, that's been anywhere between 600 and 800 calls, give or take the offer, which as a result is means we have literally double the amount of calls. Now that means you need double the amount of sales teams, it means you need significantly more management and just resources being put into the entire sales process. And so you have, you know, a bunch of like dead leads and a bunch of clothes that you need to churn, recruit for, and replace. And on the flip side, you have significantly higher show-up rates as well as close rates, because people from organic, they're sold on who you are, they're sold on what you do, and they're sold on sort of them actually being able to get the result, which stems from them consuming significant amounts of content. And as a side note, right now, every single person spends a fortune on actually getting people to consume content, which is kind of pointing, a proven point in case. Now, last but not least, on the whole premise of like operational complexity, the biggest thing that I would say is right now, a lot of people they rely on back-end offers as well as like the offer in of itself to be able to drive sales and revenue. Again, as even Cole outlines in a lot of like his trainings, right? The offer is a pivotal part uh in order to stand out with paid ads. And so instead of coming up with more fancy guarantees, you know, making up some some really cool offer and having to, you know, build a fulfillment system that now costs more and more as you scale, right? You actually, with organic, are able to have similar offers that have significantly longer timelines. One of our clients, for example, he's had the same offer, no additions made since five years, and he's still gradually growing and scaling his company. Not because his offer is not cooked, you know, he's in one of the more most sophisticated markets, but because people buy the transformation that he desires and they buy into him as a person, as opposed to just, oh, this is a fancy offer, I want to go buy into this. Now, a third reason that I'm gonna make here is the longevity of things, okay? A personal brand right now and building an organic platform is really the big moat in a weird way, because the one thing that you have on the paid ad roles that nobody wants to address is the fact that you can get copied overnight. I can steal your entire funnel, I can steal all your ads, I can seal your entire email flows, I can steal your entire business within 24 to 48 hours. And this is the thing with organic that people don't understand. You have a moat. You look at the biggest personal brands, Cody Sanchez, Ivan Gaji, Shelby Shap, all of the big industry titans. The one thing that they have that nobody else can replicate is their personality, their story, their expertise, and their unique experiences. And that is why when you build a brand, that's your moat. You can leverage your experience, your story, all of that stuff that you have that makes you you in a way to relate to your ICP, which nobody else can go and do. Sure, people go and copy your content, but as a result of that, they can't copy your persona, your background, and all of that good stuff. And that gives you actual leverage, right? And on top of that, with you know a personal brand, you can gradually grow your audience, which means your leverage and the impact that you get significantly grows. Even today, you probably as a big personal brand have people that follow you six months, 12 months, even 24 months ago, that will actually go and convert. You don't have to go and spend a ton of money to actually go and sort of like you know argue with them or like essentially go like convince them. They just consume your content, which means as a whole, the efficiency of the dollars you spend is significantly higher. And last but not least, the biggest thing is this, right? With personal brands, people buy you and what you do, which means, which contrary to what we're probably gonna discuss, you actually can have multiple offers. You look at some people like Ryan Pineda, even some of our clients or Imon Ghazi, they have dozens of different offers that they push under the same umbrella. Not because they they build a personal brand around their expertise, they build a personal brand around their persona, which means if they promote something, people stand for it. That's why a lot of the streamers are capable to provide different, you know, gambling platforms or like different clothing companies, and people buy it because there's just an affiliation with that. And so, again, to round this out to you, the reason why I'd always go with the personal brand, which is very simply put, is because one, it fits into the economical and societal trend that we're running into right now with the creator economy taking over. Number two, it's significantly more profitable, right? It's operationally less complex, and last but not least, in the long run, especially with what's going on right now, having a personal brand is really what's going to set you up for long-term success.
SPEAKER_01If you ever wanted to get my one-on-one help in terms of scaling your business, then listen up really fast. So, we're taking on a few clients where I can personally one-on-one audit their business across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance to be able to tell you what your constraint actually is. And ultimately, what are the one to three things you need to do next to be able to scale working entirely one-on-one with me? So if that's interesting, there's a link in the description that'll say call one-on-one that you can go book. But essentially, not only will you get my personal advice, but we'll also be opening up our entire playbooks of my $36 million year company across marketing sales, operation fulfillment, finance. So you can basically model the best practices of what we've done right into your business, and it'll include the opportunity to meet in person up at an event with me. So if that's interesting, click the link in the description and mount back to the video. All right, we'll go to Spencer's rebuttal.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, uh, the phrase personal brand is the single biggest scam uh ever conducted of this industry. I mean, it's completely ridiculous, and I have very clear proof of this. So, who is the number one personal brand in this industry? Well, it's none other than Tony Robbins himself, right? The guy is an absolute GOAT. I think everybody here agrees that he is the number one personal brand that's like an info coaching guy. He's been doing it for 30 years, okay? Well, funny enough, isn't it funny how wait a minute, his content doesn't actually do that well. Like he doesn't get that many views. Like, he doesn't have a personal brand because of content. And see, what's happened is people like Jeremy, who again, I'm very intelligent, I'm sure he has the best intentions, uh, folks like that have uh contorted the meaning of brand to fit a narrative that is completely untrue. So the idea of brand is uh very simple. It's your reputation as a company. Okay? That's what brand is. What content is, to put very simply, is you saying things about yourself. So we all know, just logically as human beings, that what I say about myself has the lowest impact on my reputation. And things that have much greater uh impact on my reputation are what? Are what other people say about me. And candidly, unless your entire full-time focus is into being a content creator, which we talked about, if you don't do that, it's not durable at all. Okay, hence why we've seen so many people come and go as the number one person on YouTube, both in our niche, in business, et cetera, and just in general on YouTube. Many people have come and gone. And in the future, I'm sure someone will overtake Mr. Beast as well. But beyond that, it's because unless you do that, then guess what? People, when they talk about you and your reputation, your brand, they're gonna be talking about their experience with your product and service. So we live in a world now where magically, uh, and this is something that Jeremy said earlier, we live in the creator economy. And I have a very uh good question. What the fuck does that actually mean? Can somebody please define it for me? Because I have been hearing we're in the creator economy and uh ads costs are rising and all this stuff for the last 10 years, and every year uh people have made more and more and more money from ads. Like, I don't know. And same thing with the creator economy. Like, I I that's just a fancy buzzword. It doesn't actually mean anything, it just sounds smart, okay? And so my point being this is number one, there is no, or I don't want to say no, there's very, very little correlation between content and building an actual brand. And so the whole phrase a personal brand is a is basically a facade that's saying, like, oh yeah, like if you post some things and you know, be you know, become popular on YouTube for a couple months, you'll make some money. Yeah, no shit. No shit. That doesn't mean you actually built a real durable brand that's gonna be around for a long time, like Tony. Okay, number one. Number two is um something that Jeremy mentioned is that, oh, with your personal brand that doesn't exist, you get to charge a premium, uh premium price, right? Well, here's the thing there's plenty of examples of you get to charge a premium price with ads too. I mean, case in point, Cole just interviewed John Madsen from Superhuman, and he's a weight loss guy that his front end is $10,000 and his back end is $40,000. And guess how he drives almost all of his traffic is on ads. So clearly there is literally zero connection between having a personal brand and being able to charge premium prices. Uh, or at a bare minimum, you have to admit that you can do it with both. And then Jeremy said some other things that I'd like to call out. He mentioned building an asset. Well, again, I mean, tell that to Dan Locke. Like, Dan Locke doesn't have much of an asset if he doesn't get any views anymore. Nobody wants to buy anything from him. Okay. Um, and you know, I think there's a lot of the organic guys, they they like to say a lot of things that sound really, really, you know, powerful and good, but a lot of them are just buzzwords and they're meant to scare you. Like, I mentioned this earlier, but I have been told every single year, and I've been in this industry for 10 years, that ads costs are rising and you have to you have to get on organic. And yet somehow we make more and more money from ads every year. I don't know how that's possible, but it is. And so my final point is, and I'd like I think this is important. Um, you know, Jeremy's one one of his biggest points was building a moat. And hey, if you have an audience, you have a moat, but if you have a funnel, you don't have a moat. And I think that's just so disingenuous. Because the reality is, and I'm sure Jeremy's gonna bring this up, running ads at scale, as he mentioned, is complex. It is challenging. Now, it's not as complex nearly as Jeremy makes it seem. I mean, case in point, I'll tell you straight up, we, you know, we do multiple eight figures a year with one media buyer uh who is hybrid media buyer, hybrid marketing tech, and like one marketing ops guy and me, you know, as well as some video editors, which you would need for organic anyways, and a creative director, which you would need for organic anyways. So there's no difference. But on the note of emote, I don't think you can call having an audience a moat when in today's world, all of the social platforms are moving away from audience based suggestions. I mean, case in point, a few years ago when TikTok really started to boom and the form. You page became the main delivery vehicle of content on socials. You know, people started noticing a decrease in returning viewership from their subscribers, from their followers. And that's because, you know, at the end of the day, these platforms are incentivized to do what? Collect money from the advertisers, okay? Like me. And by doing that, they just want the best content possible. And so they don't care if you subscribe to somebody for five years or not. If it's not the best content possible, they're not going to show your video. And we've seen this over and over and over again. So that mode is once again a facade. It doesn't even exist.
SPEAKER_01All right. That was four minutes and well, that was about five minutes and 30 seconds. So your rebuttal, you'll have the same time.
SPEAKER_00So Spencer told you like a lot of stuff, right? Durability, how profitable ads are, how it's easier to go and reverse spans, as well as flexibility. So I'm just going to quickly demystify a lot of this for you. Number one, the whole point of like durability and that decrease in views is absolute nonsense, right? Let's take a guy like Imon Ghazi as an example, right? Who by by means of our industry is probably one of the biggest leaders. If you look at his views right now, no disrespect, Iman, but like they've kind of gone down the gutter, right? But the thing is, if you look at his actual performances, he makes more money than ever. Because the thing is, which someone like Spencer, no disrespect, he obviously really understands ad, but what he simply doesn't understand is that views don't equal cash. It's not about how many people you actually go and reach and like how big of an influencer you are. It's about who actually sees your stuff. And this is the thing that most of the paid ads guys don't understand is that just it's not about just creating content. Content can be equally as much of a marketing strategy as much as it is to go and run paid ads, right? So again, I just said that views don't really mean mean cash as a whole, right? And so essentially, like at the end of the day, he mentioned how like Tony Robbins, Grant Cardones, all these fossils who have been around for like 20 plus years are not relevant anymore, right? I would like to go and ask who are any of these big guys who are running paid ads like a while 10, 15 years ago. I don't even know who they were, because quite frankly, they're not relevant anymore, right? Whereas with content, especially the newer gens, they're the ones who actually stayed relevant for the significantly longer. Not because they go and maintain millions of views, because their core audience maintains engaged with them. Point in case, someone like Imon Ghazi, I've been watching for the like a part of six plus years, right? And still watch. Is it still as popular? Does he get millions of views? No. But the core audience who's been engaged with him for years up and years will stay engaged and will continuously buy stuff. The second thing on the paid ad stuff being more profitable, to me is like absolute nonsensical, right? You're talking about you you maintain at scale probably like a three to five X ROAS, right? Which probably, you know, is is probably the standard. And means if you need to reinvest into content, right, that means you need to go and invest like a three to five X ROAS. There's no chance most people invest, you know, anywhere between 200 and like, you know, 300K plus every single month into their content. That's just like nonsense. Someone like Mr. Beast, who doesn't really have like a clear structured monetization model, is probably gonna invest quite a bunch, but that's just because he doesn't have a monetization model. That's not a content problem. When you look at the biggest personal brands, again, you take your Iman Ghazi's, your Alex Hermosis, they probably invest 100k, 200k plus every single month. Yes, but the outsized return set they're getting is 1020x that. And so as a result of that, that's pretty much what I think is not makes sense. The second thing that Spencer mentioned, with all the you know, ads being better and all of that stuff, is is cute. But a lot of the big names, you know, that are spending a lot of money on ads, they literally use their best performing content as ads. So if you deduct the content, their ads pretty much go down the gutter, which makes the profit statement pretty much i irresponsible. Now, one of the points that Spencer made, which actually I thought was a really good point, right, is how to go and run paid ads at a high level, you need to have like a really high skill set, which is kind of, according to his words, a little mini mode. And I think that's true. But at the same time, the complexity that comes with it allows you a very small margin for error, which means you need your ads, your funnel, your media buying, all of that stuff dialed in, right? Whereas with content, you just need to have decent content and you have your sales stuff dialed in. And so, with that being said, I think on the profit side, that complexity quickly goes in these interior margins, which makes that argument in my sense nonsensical. Now, in terms of bans and cancel, simply put, like, yes, can you go and get get banned on Instagram? Yes, same as your ad account. The one thing I would go and say is a lot of ad media buyers say this, oh, the pixel data is so valuable. You literally just target your ICP, which is lovely, until I go and spoof you your pixel with like a bunch of plus nine-one offers, and then all of a sudden you just get shown out in Mumbai and Nigeria, which probably is not where your ideal client audience is at if you want to sell a $10,000 product. And so, as much as that is as much in Instagram as it is on Facebook, you can go and ruin someone's pixel consistently, but it's next to impossible to go and take someone's brand down on every single platform, which again, with with content-based businesses, you're allowed to go and have decent diversification, which in of itself kind of makes the band argument very nonsensical. Last but not least, the flexibility. I think I pretty much diffused that in my opening statement. But a personal brand isn't just like an expertise, it's a person, which means as you kind of evolve, you have multiple things. So take someone like Imon, who've mentioned a few times, right? He's had the crypto thing, he's had like basically like an SMA and info and all these different ways to go and kind of make money, right? Which kind of shows you can go and have a lot of flexibility. Because again, you sell through your story and through who you are as a person, not a vehicle.
SPEAKER_01All right. So what we're gonna do, we're gonna go to the open section now. That was both rebuttals, both opening cases. I'm gonna tee you up, guys, up with some questions because again, what we really want to talk about is if somebody magically was just gonna give you a business and it was $10 million a year, run completely through ads or completely through organic, which would you rather have? What do you think is more valuable? I want to hit on a couple very key points. And we'll start with Jeremy since you went first, but this is gonna be a conversation, so there can be a back and forth here. So uh if I want to sell my business, though, why would organic be better?
SPEAKER_00I don't think organic would be better if you want to sell your business, to be quite frank with you. But I think the point point in case is a very small percentage of companies would go and sell. And you know, t tell me if I'm wrong, but from the statistics that I've recently read, especially businesses doing around like 10 million a year, that's actually the one that private equity is the least interested in. And so as a result, why would you want to go and sell a business if the interest in that is particularly low?
SPEAKER_02Well, I I think that's first of all, that's not even true. But beyond that point, if you're not defining value as the value of the thing, how are you defining value?
SPEAKER_00To me, that could be how I want to live my life. That could be one way to define value. It means how much money I net in profit every single year. Those are just two ways I can go and define value. I don't think if you want to go and build a not every person in this industry wants to go and sell a company. Because if you do, you probably wouldn't start an info coaching business if you want to sell a company, would you?
SPEAKER_01Well, what I want you to I want you to address his point about he says most people in the industry can't sell, there's not private equity interests. It, you know. Do you think that's true? And do you think ads allows you to sell have more actual sellable asset if you wanted to exit your business because you want to retire someday?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yes. And and yeah, I'll answer that question by actually responding to a point you made just a minute ago, which at the very end of your rebuttal section, uh, you mentioned that you're not building a personal brand around your expertise, you're building a personal brand around a person, and and your followers follow this person, and it's like some beautiful cult-like thing going on there, and it's it's it's amazing. Um, but that that's actually exactly the problem, right? Is um, you know, to Cole's point and asking you this question, you you can't sell a company based off of a person. Now that is irrelevant to kind of to your point, whether that's ads or that's organic. It's just that if you've built a brand off of you're the person, and like good luck switching that. That's pretty hard to do. You basically can't do it. Now, the whole notion that like most people don't want to sell a company, I don't think that's actually true. I think most people don't take it in as an actual reality that they can do. When in reality, there has definitely been people selling company. I mean, case in point, the biggest organic person right now, in our space, at least, you know, biggest, I would say we all agree aside from Tony Robbins, uh, is Hermosy. And Hermosy got his platform from selling his info company, right? So clearly there's an opportunity to sell, not just sell for a little bit, sell for tens of millions of dollars. Um, but that info company was not based on organic. That info company was based on ads and diversified with cold outbound. Okay. And that's nothing negative to say about ads. It's just that, hey, you know, when you sell a business that asset, you want to have multiple streams of traffic. And obviously, cold outbound is very attractive to investors. So, yeah, in terms of people wanting to sell it, I mean, I can't speak for people. I think if people realized the opportunity that was available, if they structured their business the right way to sell, I think they'd be much more interested. I think we're in a market that is, um, you know, a lot of people, this is their first successful business or they're early on in their career. And so, you know, you're starting out, you're focused on income, and that's totally fine. I was in the same place. Um, but eventually, you know, you get you get to a point where you're like, man, I want to build some real enterprise value and exit. And you can totally do that in this industry if your entire business isn't based on your personal brand.
SPEAKER_00I I actually agree with what you're saying, to be fair with you. My my rebuttal to this would be yes, I think you can definitely go and sell. And if you want to go and sell, you should probably do it through ads, because obviously you're gonna have key man risk. Now, I would go and say if all your revenue comes through ads and it comes through Facebook ads, you kind of to an extent have the same key man risk because you're basically one ad account or one ad freeze away from getting your shit shut down. But at the end of the day, right, you mentioned obviously hormosy being like very successful, right? Obviously, with basically like no organic whatsoever. To me, the point will be for every one hormoses, there's gonna be like a hundred plus other people that don't go and actually achieve the dream of selling. And so, in my eyes, I'm like, why would I want to go and optimize for like an outcome that such a small percentage of people, you know, kind of realize and leaves a lot of people on the shitter instead of actually having a business that provides me with, you know, the cash flow and all of that stuff that I could actually go and have.
SPEAKER_01So let's move on to profitability. And so we'll start with Spencer. Why is paid ads more profitable? Is it more profitable? Because most people would probably take Jeremy's stance, maybe that, okay, you're not having to spend the money on ads, obviously. So because you're not spending the money on ads and the traffic is free, that running an organic eight-figure business would be more profitable.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, look, if you're a full-time content creator, like that's your entire job, sure, that's gonna be more profitable. But we're not talking about being a content creator that makes $10 million a year. We're talking about owning a business that makes $10 million a year. And uh owning a business, an actual business, requires systems and it requires people. And those people are expensive. And uh to my further, my earlier point about durability and relevance, you know, uh Jeremy mentioned, like, hey, you know, Imon Ghazi's still making money, and you know, I'm sure he is, obviously. Um, but his viewership is down. Uh and yeah, okay, cool. Like, I don't know, I don't, I'm not Iman, I've never talked to him. I don't know, you know, I'll just take that at face value. But based on that, I think that brings up an important point, which is like he's clearly not investing the same time, energy, resources, and capital into producing the best content anymore. And he's losing relevance. And in the short term, sure, he's got a big enough following that he's built up to where he can make some money, just like if you ran ads and you stopped running ads, you have a huge email list that you can kind of milk it and make money from for a while. But eventually that email list dries up and you have to feed the beast. You have to, you know, give give it new blood. And if you're gonna make your entire business off of organic, you can't afford to not reinvest a ton of money into organic. And so when people say organic is less expensive, what they're really saying is, I'm not gonna factor in all of my organic costs and my team and all of my time and energy making these videos, which is extremely high, okay, especially if you're the CEO of a $10 million year company, every hour of your time is worth a tremendous amount of money. I'm not gonna count all of that, and I'm gonna say the traffic is free.
SPEAKER_01So, what do you think about Spencer's point, which to recap is essentially okay, you're not factoring in the opportunity cost time of let's say you as the CEO actually spending all this time on the content hamster reel, uh, and then overall just your thoughts on ads versus organic in terms of profitability.
SPEAKER_00I actually think Spencer brought up one really good point that I personally like really agree with, right? It's the fact that again, everyone thinks that organic is free. I don't believe organic is just free, right? There's a lot of like people that do organic, whether that's like, you know, one you've mentioned the time you invest into creating content, but also some stuff like you know, you do podcast tours, you do, you know, you basically like get other people to collaborate with you. Those are like, you know, in a sense, like paid opportunities that you're gonna take. However, here's the thing the return off of those like you know, opportunities is significantly higher, right? First things first. As an example, you take a podcast like Fresh and Fit, right? Technically, you know, an appearance fee there can be like 20, 30k, you know, and one of our clients has gone there multiple times. But every single time he's come out of a podcast like that, he's driven literally 10, 20x that in sales as a direct result off of that newly gained brand awareness. Now, at the same point, right, you go and talk about you know, you basically being a full-time content creator. The issue with that is most people think that content creators just sit there, they they walk around their house and go like, oh, content, right? The point is over time, with especially with AI, you can have very simple systems and people that you bring on that, you know, aren't as expensive as Dear Spencer tries to make it out to be, right? That actually can have a tremendous impact. So, for example, some of our clients, right, they actually run businesses or have multiple businesses, right? But they their core focus is their personal brand, their content systems. They spend one or two hours every single week on creating content. They don't go and do the whole due diligence and all of that rubbish. They just sit down, they create the content, and they essentially have like, you know, whether that's low-cost editors in the Philippines, whether that's, you know, copywriters, someone who actually manages everything, and actually go and produce the content. Yes, there's costs attached to it, but the returns of that is significantly bigger. And you're still actually building a growing engine where as your audience grows bigger, you have outsized returns.
SPEAKER_01So I think a good way to summarize his point is he did acknowledge that there is an opportunity cost as you as the CEO, even if your hourly rate might be $30,000 an hour, and doing going on somebody's podcast or filming a piece of content, etc. I think his point is maybe you look at somebody like Daniel Priestley, who went on the diary CEO and basically that podcast launched his entire business. So, what would your response be to that, as well as his, you know, you can systematize it and all that stuff with your content?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I love like the organic gurus. It's all about like we systematize the content and you like don't ever spend any time on it. And then like the people who are actually like doing really big content numbers, like Hermozy, are like constantly making fun of people who say that. Like it's just kind of contradictory to me, which is pretty funny. Even the content guys can't agree, okay? Um, but one thing that I I think is kind of quite interesting is uh, you know, earlier, and this plays into this point, you know, you mentioned like, hey, you just throw together some decent content, you start making money. And like, boy, I wish it was that easy, man. Like, I would be the biggest YouTuber ever, man. I posted a lot of decent content, you know. Um, but the reality is, like, especially in 2026, you can't just post decent content. And I don't know, you know, if you're watching this video, you know, I I I challenge you for the next 24 hours, go out and just meet some random people on the street. Even better yet, go out to a business conference, meet some entrepreneurs. And I want you to like legitimately in your head evaluate, man, could this person be a good content creator? Because the answer almost always is no. Okay. It's like I rarely meet someone, I go, man, this guy's got such an amazing personality and way of communicating that he's gonna crush content. And so the reality is, is like for those people, the 99% of us that are just like, you know, want to have a business and are regular people and don't want to be a content creator, okay? Yes, you know, you could make the argument, hey, we could learn content and we could get good enough. Um, but you know, that's like saying I can learn basketball and go to the NBA. Like, okay, you know, that's that's like a 20-year skill gap. So thank you, you know. I I think, you know, in the example of this gentleman uh going on the uh uh podcast, you know, to use Jeremy's own argument against him for every one of those. There's a bunch of people who spent a bunch of money on podcast agencies and never made anything with it. By the way, you're looking at one of them, right? And so, you know, just because you get on a podcast, uh, it's not just about being in front of people. It's about conveying your message in a way that, you know, creates a little bit of emotion in them, gets them interested in you, builds a story. And that is, you know, debatably a skill. I'm not even I'm not even confident to say that that is a skill. But uh, even if it is one, it's an extremely challenging skill that just most people don't have the time and bandwidth to learn. And so, therefore, like all of these stats about it being more profitable and the durability and all that, like, whether or not you agree with me or Jeremy, at the end of the day, none of that matters if you're not a great content creator, because you're not gonna be able to sustain the revenue that you got to.
SPEAKER_01So his point is some people don't have the innate personality, charisma to be successful with content.
SPEAKER_00How would you respond to that? I think that whole thing basically goes to like you're being a natural, which I just so truly disagree with, right? You look at again, what you're saying is hey, uh, not everyone's a good content creator, you know. I kind of agree with that. But with that being said, not everyone's a naturally born thing. I don't think Cole here, right, who obviously runs ads really well, or you know, hormozy woke up, was like, ha, ads and is great at advertising right off the bat. It's a skill. Same thing with content, you know. The great the beautiful thing about content is you actually to an extent can take control of the persona you inhibit. As an example, we take, you know, Andrew Tate as an example. If you if you see him on in online, he's a persona. Whereas behind closed doors, it's completely different. He learned the skill of becoming a persona, just as, for example, you have to go and learn ads. I myself am a content guy, I'm fairly confident in my ability to create content, and we start to run some ads, and you know, my ad skills are horrific. Which again, it kind of like just kind of throws your argument back at you where it's like, well, just because I run ads doesn't mean I'm gonna be awesome at it, right? There's a learning curve involved with it. And so if you don't you you basically just pick your poison, what you want to invest it in. One, you essentially just go and run into the same issues over and over again. But the other one, if you actually learn content, you have the skills, right? You essentially over time build like actually compounding effects. The second thing that you keep mentioning is the fact that like the views and like the virality and like you just create some content, which is the exact nuance that I think a lot of like paid ads guys, you know, just like Spencer, kind of oversee, is that content isn't just like I just talk on camera or I say some controversial thing and I just make like a gender or like a politics statement, and now I go viral and I get a bunch of sales. It's it's strategic, right? The reason why a lot of creators right now have lower views is because they've noticed that at first they go and play the views game, right? They go and do all of this like crazy stuff of going viral, and then they realize that virality is cool, but actually what really works is speaking to specific people. And again, if you look at even what the Instagram CEO says, they're being more and more specific, similar to a pixel, where they show based on what you say, they go and show your content to specific people. And so now it's actually not even as fancy to go and get millions of views, it's more about speaking to a specific person through your content, which again, it's it's learning it as a skill. I agree with that, but so is pay that's I just personally think the one I will want to go play is the more profitable one.
SPEAKER_01But let me give you an opportunity to answer this because his point was you gotta have a personality to or and a charisma or some sort of kind of natural predisposition to make content. And then you you mentioned like Andrew Tate has two different personalities, etc. So I think what I want to ask you is is it possible to be an introvert or not? I mean, Andrew Tate's insanely charismatic. I think we can all agree. Is it possible to not be maybe a charismatic person and be more logical, engineering, mining, etc., and be good at content?
SPEAKER_00100%.
SPEAKER_01Can you give an example? Who's a good example?
SPEAKER_00I have a good example. There's this one gentleman online, his name is Richard Garcia. So he has 1.5 million followers. And when you look at his content, he's extremely charismatic, extremely confident. Now, one of my friends was actually the person who built that, you know, particular gentleman up. And when you look at his first videos, he's extremely shy. He honestly looks like the worst creator ever, and he doesn't have the skill set whatsoever. But because he's put in the reps, right, and he's basically done the consistency with it, you can essentially go and see how the confidence on camera and the awareness of what does and doesn't work is actually going and coming across much better.
SPEAKER_01So, what would you say? Do you have any response to him? Or do you want to be one of the next points?
SPEAKER_02He really answers the question. Like, he asked you, like, oh, do you need to be charismatic? And then you gave an example of a guy that then you just said is very charismatic. So, like, is your argument that like you can learn charisma over a long enough time period? Because like, sure. But like, I a hundred percent guarantee you can start making a significant amount of money with ads in a short period of time. We're kind of getting off the topic here of the $10 million valuable business. Right? We're like, we're like, we're like going into this world of like how long does it take to learn charisma? And like the question is, what's the value, like what's a more valuable business? And I mean, you in your own words said that like uh yeah, you can't sell a company based on ads. So I think, or excuse me, a company based on organic. See, that was a Freudian slip for you. So I I mean that that can that kind of answers the question, you know? It's like if you can't sell it, then what value does it impose? Now, maybe it provides value to you in the short run, but maybe you end up like Dan Locke and you end up not making any money, you know?
SPEAKER_01Well, what would you say though to somebody who says, well, you know, sure you've got to be charisma to do organic, but that's because it's recording videos and the best performing videos or sorry, the best performing ads are videos.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's not, I mean, that's not even necessarily true, right? Some of our best performing ads are right now are images. But even aside from that point, um, you know, I mean, there's so many, there's so many rebuttals to that. It's like number one, don't have to run video ads. Number two is it's much easier. You know, Jeremy mentioned uh AI and using that in content creation, which I thought was a bit contradictory because on one hand you said, like, hey, it's super easy to systematize, and you know, it's it's you can do it in one, two hours. And then on the other hand, his last thing was like, oh, you know, um content is not just about your personality, it's like super strategic. And it's like, well, if it's that strategic, how do you like are you hiring some VAs to like build the strategy of your million subscriber channel? Like, probably not, you know. Um, but furthermore, uh using AI in your ads is far easier. Far easier. Like Good luck making an AI Cole Gordon YouTube video. You know, like you got to replicate him and his speaking tone and everything like that. That's maybe we'll get there at some point, but we're not there today. Um, but with that being said, there's plenty of platforms like RCADs, is one example of them, where you just copy and paste your proven uh ad script and you get a bunch of AI versions of the ad, and a lot of them crush it. I mean, I've seen that firsthand.
SPEAKER_01So moving on, what is more scalable? So if you think about maybe you're already at 10 million and you want to go to 25 million in terms of revenue, right? Is organic more scalable or is paid ads more scalable? We'll start with you.
SPEAKER_00I I will actually go say very controversial. I know everyone's like, ah, that's more scalable. I'll actually go and say content is just equally, if not more scalable. Now, the biggest thing most people don't underestimate is when it comes to you know the scalability of content. They think, well, you just post more, you just need to go more viral. Well, actually, you know, to an extent, yes, but more importantly, the one thing that most people don't understand is like very similar to ads, where if you have a winner, you just spend as much money as possible on it, something very similar is possible with the concept of organic. As an example, right? We'll take Luke Bellmar as an example. He had this one particular video about like, oh, like I studied, bro, like, you know, a few other clips where it's gone extremely viral. Well, he's actually not just posted that once and just eventually like reposted it. What he actually has done is like, you know, he's had a bunch of clipping pages that clipped up his content and obviously create almost like multiple pages, which is just another way of also diversifying some of that risk because he scales his persona. But also, number two, what you can do is you can obviously scale through buying into distribution, whether that's podcast appearances, whether that's like you know, Instagram shout-outs where you basically like buy into theme page networks, right? Whether that's doing different collaborations with peer members, all of that does. And last but not least, what most people don't really understand is like a lot of organic companies, what they eventually go into, again, you look like Patrick Beck David, you look at Grand Cardone, even to an extent in a slider state, look at like Imon, is they're scale through like avatars, right? So essentially, like obviously, with with Patrick Beck David, you have like multiple avatars there, they have their own little segments, it's basically like a media company. You look at Grand Cardone, who has like for every single division, he has like a different avatar. And so I think the scalability on there is extremely high. You look at someone like TJR, who has like 20 plus sub pages that all drive like millions of views every single month, you know, not saying those are all the best millions of views, but that whole ecosystem that you're building over time is actually gonna be significantly more scalable than most people think.
SPEAKER_01So to summarize his point, you know, he's thinking about it more of like a Disney model. So if you look at Dave Ramsey, there's multiple faces, and Armozzi, there's now gonna be multiple faces, they're building that out. And uh even Grant Cardone, there's multiple brand faces. So that makes it more scalable and potentially, maybe to his point, uh more excitable for the main person at least to get out. So how would you respond to that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I I think we're like cherry-picking a few examples that, you know, candidly are not relevant for 99.9% of businesses and or content creators in the creator economy. So um, you know, you mentioned Hermosy, you mentioned Ramsey, you've mentioned some people that have added in faces to um their viewership. That only works if you have conquered an entire category. What I mean by that is if you're making content, for example, on uh, you know, PCOS, which is a very specific women's health issue, can you then start making content on uh maybe one step to the right of that with some other you know popular women's issue? Maybe. But if you're like, man, you know we need to scale the business right now. Testosterone clinics are going crazy. We need to launch testosterone, like, good luck, you're starting from scratch. So there's no advantage to that. One thing that I brought up earlier was how difficult it is to reposition the brand. Um, Harvard Business Study, again, says that it's often one of the most fatal things an existing brand can do is to try to reposition. And so, unless, and I think we need to actually separate this out, if we're talking about a $10 million dollar a year business that's a media company, that's different than 99% of 10 million dollar of your businesses, which are not media companies. And you can't scale a non-media company in the way that you would scale a media company. For example, let's say you're doing $10 million a year in, you know, HVAC or some sort of home service niche, and you know, you've become a really popular person all over the country on, you know, I don't know, HVAC and home services. Well, you can't do what he's saying. You can't be like, well, I'm gonna add another face to this and uh, you know, roll out another product line. Like it doesn't, that that doesn't work. That doesn't make sense. So uh the last point I'll I'll make on this is operational complexity, which one of his main arguments that organic is better is that, oh, it's so simple uh compared to ads. You know, it's ads are so operationally complex. Well, I've already explained uh the only thing we need for ads to run at our scale, which is much more than $10 million a year, is one media buyer who's also a marketing tech, one marketing ops guy, me, and some good systems. But meanwhile, he just mentioned in about a 60-second time period, you need clipping pages. Nobody talks about that. It's not just oh, I post some videos. It's like, no, you actually have to do all you have to have like 55 accounts. Oh, uh, guess what? He also mentioned buying distribution. So are we talking about paid or are we talking about organic? Like, what are we talking about, right? And then obviously I already addressed his, you know, talking about a media company with multiple avatars. That just doesn't work for most businesses.
SPEAKER_01But before I let you respond, how would you respond then to maybe somebody who says, okay, well, we're talking about scalability? Ryan Sirhan, Hermosy, Dave Ramsey, uh, Carda. I mean, they're all the biggest in their industry. Is that not more scalable?
SPEAKER_02First of all, I disagree with that point, which is uh Ryan Sirhan is not the biggest in this industry. Keller Williams is. Uh so I think that's just a false testimonial, false social proof. Shout out to Ryan. I love you, Ryan, but you know, Keller Williams. Um number two is um there are plenty of people who scaled with paid ads and or even if they haven't used paid ads, are the biggest in the industry without organic content at all. So like I think we're drawing a false connection, false correlation. I mean, case in point, you just interviewed Dean Graziosi. He's not Mr. Organic, and he's generated hundreds of millions of dollars online, and you know, his net worth is in the multiple nine figures. And actually, I think I understood it. He's generated billions online, I think is probably a fair way to say. Um, and so there are plenty of examples of companies who have scaled not using organic content. And um, sure, there's famous examples of people who have, but it doesn't mean that they're number one. It just means that they're you know top of mind because they're how they got there was by becoming famous.
SPEAKER_01How would you respond to all his points of what I just asked, but also even what he said before? Could you want to go with something specific because you said a bunch of stuff and nothing? Well, well, okay, so specifically, I mean, recap your points.
SPEAKER_02Yes. So number one is most companies that uh, you know, if we're assuming they're doing $10 million a year, are not media companies. So if your uh process for scaling them is by rolling out multiple avatars and going to that, that just doesn't work for a non-media company, right? Number two is um in order for them to scale, they would need to reposition the brand. Reposition the brand, according to Harvard Business Study or School, excuse me, uh, is one of the most fatal things that a business can do. Most businesses that try to do it die. All right. There's some few that obviously have survived, but most die. Um and and then the last point I just mentioned, which is as you scale, uh, operational complexity of organic not only meets ads, but actually far surpasses it. Because in order to get more content, uh to you know, bring in more viewership, feed the beasts, as we talked about, you have to start doing stuff like buying distribution, clipping a bunch of, you know, doing a bunch of clipping pages, and posting like a hundred pieces of content a day, which requires a lot of infrastructure.
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SPEAKER_00So to go and to go and face on the stuff that you've said, right? Which is obviously like the oh, you're not a media company at like 10 mil a year. I think at this point we're arguing over what's the definition of a media company, when do you become a media company or not? At the end of the day, it's it's very simple. If you get to $10 million a year off of like a personal brand, content, whatever you want to call it, right? You just bringing on and basically replicating that process for different avatars is not gonna go and add a fuck ton of complexity into it because it lets you do more of what's already working, right? And number two, you're not really going creating an entire complex structure around it. Again, you mentioned clipping pages, for example. A lot of clipping pages, the complexity behind this, you start a content rewards campaign. That's the extent to which a clipping page goes. There's next to no complexity in that whole spiel.
SPEAKER_01So, what would you say about lead quality then? Is organic or paid better in terms of lead quality as it pertains to making the sales team easier, uh, or their their source process easier for that matter, client's access rate, refund rate, etc.
SPEAKER_00Now, lead quality, right, as an example. I think that it's the age-old comparison where like a lot of paid guys say, oh, actually, our lead quality is better because we have pixel conditioning and all of that stuff, and like Instagram guys will say, like, oh, it's better because they're organic, right? I think it's it comes down to the same premise that like if you understand marketing as a whole, your lead quality is gonna be good. So, for example, somebody who just goes and tries Mr. Beast, for example, will probably have the worst lead quality ever because like half of his audience might be based in in you know non-buyer demographic countries, right? But with the flip side, you have creators who understand how marketing works, which means the lead quality is gonna be extremely strong. I'll take myself and our clients as an example. We are very good at attracting high net worth individuals, which every paid ads guy will say, Well, you know, when you find poor people on Instagram, we we're extremely good at attracting that because we understand how to create content for set demographic. And so I would go and argue that overarchingly, the lead quality off of organic done correctly is better than paid ads. Because, in my in my perspective, in my understanding, people come in, they already consume a bunch of content, and they make a decision to reach out as opposed to being pulled in by like an offer or like something that sounds extremely sexy. How would you respond to that?
SPEAKER_02Well, I I think it's convenient that like you add on the qualifier of you know, content when done correctly brings in great lead quality. Like, sure, you can make the same argument with ads, you know what I mean? So, like, yeah, I I don't I don't if if your argument that is if you do something well, you get good lead quality, yeah, I agree with you, right? Like, but that's true of any marketing process.
SPEAKER_00But I think that's the point, right? If you go and say, oh, well, if you if if I run ads good, right, then you get really good leads, correct? Sure. Exactly. Same thing with content. So it's like I I run ads and my ad skills are really shit, so right now I get crappy leads. That doesn't mean that like, you know, it doesn't mean that I go and say, oh, you know, ads are bad or like organics bad just because I suck at it. But I would go and say, on average, if you have a skill set of like three or five out of ten, the likelihood of you attracting quality leads is higher with organic than it is with paid ads.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so uh I think that is true to a certain extent, which is if you have a three out of 10 or 5 out of 10 to use your own words, skill set with organic, yeah, like your first big uh batch of sales that you're gonna get or leads that come through your pipeline. Yeah, they're gonna be people who've watched all of your content or super bought in. And yeah, those are gonna be pretty good leads, I agree. However, if you only have a three out of 10 or 5 out of 10 skill set with organic, that means your following probably isn't that big. And you probably don't actually have that many people who've watched a lot of your content, and you're gonna burn out of the good quality leads quickly. And so what you end up with is two things. Either basically no leads, right? Or uh leads who are not actually people who've watched a bunch of your content because it's not good enough to have garnered a ton of views to warm people up. Whereas if you have a three out of 10 or 5 out of 10 skill set with ads, you have two advantages. Number one, as we mentioned earlier, it's much easier for the CEO to step out of that role and work tandem with somebody because he has an understanding of how it works, but it's not dependent on him being the face. Whereas with organic, it is. Um, and so that allows you to quickly level up your skill set to increase the quality of leads. But also, again, you know, I think paid ads sometimes, this is I'm saying this is a paid ads guy, and you've brought this up, and I completely agree at this point that a lot of paid ads people they go like down this crazy ass rabbit hole of some of like these media buying and like crazy technical stuff about lead quality. At the end of the day, like improving your lead call with ads, it's 99% of the time ain't that hard. There's a few things that you do. We don't need to overcomplicate it. It's all about who you call out in your audience and you know how you communicate your offer.
SPEAKER_01How would you, just to give you a hard question though, and then I'll let you respond, how would you then reconcile that again, what what we're asking, what gives better lead quality? And a lot of times if you look at and you segment segment organic versus paid in a sales team, you might see something like 25% close rate on paid, 40% close rate on organic. So, how could you make the argument that lead quality is better with paid when you see statistics like that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, because uh I think when you're looking at one period in time, one can be better than the other anytime. And so again, my my my first point was yeah, like if you know, again, you're three out of 10 or 5 out of 10 with content, you've built up a little bit of a following, and now you start selling some of them, those people are warmed up, they are gonna be better at lead quality. You're exactly right. But if you're only that level of skill set with your content, you're gonna quickly run out of those people, and it's gonna force your sales team to effectively sell people who are way less botted because your content kind of sucks if it's three out of 10, 5 out of 10, especially in 2026. It's like, you know, in this world, and we talked about the creator economy, everybody wants to talk about how you gotta post content, it's gotta be great, and all this stuff. Or, you know, in your words, you gotta post decent content. Well, posting decent content doesn't really help you that much. Like if the whole idea of content creating better lead quality is people watch your content, they get super bought into you. If your content's not very good, that same process doesn't happen. The same thing, like if someone buys a product and the product's not very good, they're not gonna be like, man, that was amazing. I'm super excited to buy something else, right? So it's just your reputation over time. So, anyways, my hopefully that that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you mentioned obviously the skill set, right? If you have like a five out of ten on content or three out of five, right, as I've mentioned, it's easier on ads to go and go and replace yourself, right? And then essentially then it is with content. And then if you have like if you have a five out of ten skill set, your content kind of sucks, you're not really gonna get people in, right? It can't we keep coming back to the same notion that like you need to have like a shit ton of views, right? As an example, you know, obviously we we work with like a lot of different info business. We have a client right now who has like 8,000 followers. His content is okay, not great, right? But he makes like you know significant amounts of revenue every single month. Whereas someone who has like 10 X's following is struggling to go and crack those numbers. He gets more leads, but he doesn't get the right kind of leads. My point behind this is I think right now, especially and this is underlined by what the Instagram CEO said in a public statement, is they're pushing creators and they're very specific in terms of what you say within your content determines who it gets shown to. So, as an example, we had a real estate client and we mentioned randomly the word, you know, Zillow in like a pond and three times, and the comment section was full of bloody realtors. Now, again, I would go and argue on the front, and that content piece wasn't even that great, but because of how nuanced the algorithm is getting these days on organic, it still gets shown to the right people. And I would go and argue that, you know, if you're an expert, you kind of know your your way around what it is you're doing. As long as you can somewhat communicate that, which really isn't like the craziest skill set on earth to go and have, right? If you can just communicate a point, Instagram actually naturally helps you as an example, just as a platform example, to go and reach those people as well. And so I think the whole set of like, oh, you can't really go and like get any any people in because you they're not now just just non-existent, is a bit wrong, right? Vice versa. You mentioned you can obviously outsell, you can outsource like sales, uh, you can outsource like ads to obviously someone, someone that's like really good. You could go and make the same argument with you know organic, where oh, if you go and have a hard time getting really good at, you could go and and hire someone that's gonna be like your head of content or is gonna be that. Those people, one, aren't actually like that expensive as people make it out to be, cheaper than the than the paid ads guys for sure. And two, they can then help you actually level up your skill set quite significantly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, look, I you know, I know I know you mentioned like we go back to the views, doesn't equal money thing. And yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, you're right. But also, like, I think what's happening now, and we have to understand the meta-deception of the current environment that we're in. Hermozi put out a post, what maybe a year ago, and he's followed it up saying the same thing that, like, hey, I'm not gonna focus on views because views don't equal money. That makes sense. But to a certain point, we can't look at it as black and white. Like, if he had zero views, he wouldn't be making any money either. So, like, views do equal money to a certain point. It's just about getting the right people to view it. And as you mentioned, the content you make determines the people who are gonna watch it. So I bring that up to say, well, the same thing with ads. If we go back to lead quality, right? Like, the ads you make determines who's gonna see it. Uh, and one thing that I think is um, you know, uh relevant in this point that uh Jeremy has brought up uh, you know, a couple of times, is that, hey, you know, it's not hard to you know learn how to make a clear point. I don't know what world you're living in, dude, but there's a lot of people who can't make clear points in a concise, entertaining way. Like I would say that's normal, right? Like, because normal human beings, we just have normal conversations. Hey, how's your day going? You know, good, okay, cool. And they move on. And so, like, yeah, again, if somebody wants to, you know, dedicate uh a huge percentage of their time to becoming really, really good at this craft, yeah, absolutely, they can become good at it over time. But in terms of, hey, if you plopped us into a business today that's doing $10 million a year in revenue and we needed to scale it, and it was either organic or it was paid ads, and I would be looking and being like, oh shit, dude, like, am I an expert in what and what you know this company's selling? Because if I'm not, I'm screwed for organic. I can't keep posting about something I don't understand.
SPEAKER_00I think the the notion that you're saying, right, is like, oh, it's so difficult to learn and all of that stuff, actually would kind of go and say, like, yes, does it is there a certain craft in getting millions of views and rather being really appealing and charismatic? Yes. But at the same time, right now, when you're looking through the timeline, it's no longer about being super like straight to the point and like super efficient with your words and like super charismatic. A lot of the bigger creators right now, they're literally just talking to the camera and they're having a conversation, right? Which I know if you do that on ads, that's gonna leave your shit right down the gutter because obviously nobody has an intention span this high. And so basically, like on socials, you have this notion where you actually have the grace right now off the platforms of actually having a bit of a skill deficiency not being the end of you. Whereas on paid ads, I think we can go and very much agree that if you're not concise with your opening and like your whole flow, you're gonna be down the gutter. And I know you can use AI platforms like RCATs or all that stuff, but you could do the exact same thing on organic, right? I can go and take a reel from a competitor, go and download the structure. I can say, okay, cool, where do I slightly go and have it, where do I have a different opinion, switch those words, and then I have like a decent, a decent template to go off. But I think as a whole, the platforms that like on Instagram is less punishing on you not being the most, you know, consistent or like you know charismatic on camera, as opposed to ads where you need to be a lot more concise.
SPEAKER_02Well, I guess I mean, how do you explain? Like, there's billions of hours of content being uploaded to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok every single day, and 99.9% of it never gets more than 50 views. So, like, how do you explain that?
SPEAKER_00I think it's a simple supply and demand. It's the same thing on the paid ad side, right? If you look at how many ads are being live and which ones actually never crack a row ass on it, right? I've had video, for example, that got like 300 views that actually led with two high-ticket sales. So, like, and obviously that's like the reality of it. And so it's like, yeah, you your first piece of content will probably suck, just as your for your first ad will suck. But if you actually do some of the time and you basically just commit to 30, 90 days of just posting once a day, I would go and argue that's gonna go lead you to a higher ROI or a faster skill progression than it does with 90 days of running ads. Because obviously, with ads, you have a testing phase where you can't go and flip around and and you know test stuff. So I think the skill progression there will be significantly higher.
SPEAKER_01So let me ask you this. So, Spencer, basically what we just kind of talked about is okay, if you take somebody, let's say John Matson, who does fitness coaching, but he only works with high net worth individuals. So if you take somebody like that, he has great messaging and therefore he might get better league quality than somebody who's making generic weight loss content who gets a lot of views on YouTube, but obviously those people are broke. But his argument, of course, and I think there's validity to this, is okay, great. Well, yeah, John Madison can do that. You can also do the same thing, you might not as get as many views, but you're still gonna get really high quality clients. So let's just say those things are equal for a second. How would you say, you know, his argument earlier was you get less refund rate, better client success rate, your customers already get value before they're actually coming in and working with you, therefore you have better client experience overall and you got to do less stuff. How would you debate that point?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, I think logically, if we could sit here and say, like, hey, if every single person um that buys your thing watches 75 YouTube videos and 400 reels and like, you know, writes you an email about how much your content has changed their life before they buy, like your reference can be pretty low. Like I agree with that point, right? But I also think like a lot of times organic folks like to live in this world where like they believe that every single person that buys their thing is watching all of this like a ton of content. And you know, I think you bring up a point about the the the high net worth folks, which is I watch content, um, but you know, to be fair, like a lot of times I'm half listening, not really paying attention, or I'm watching an interview with like Elon Musk or something. It's not like I'm watching, you know, a shout out to John. Like if John had a big channel that he was pushing content to, uh you know, I'm not like sitting there watching. Fitness tutorials from a high net worth fitness trainer, right? Like that's just not normal behavior for most people who are super busy. Um, especially like we're talking about better lead quality, high net worth folks. So I think that's a bit of a mute point. And I think fundamentally, again, like if we live in the world where like we just assume every single bar of an organic, you know, customer's or excuse me, organic business's uh product is, you know, they've gone through and watched a bunch of YouTube videos. Like, yeah, okay, the the refund rate might be lower. I'm happy to concede that point to you. But I also think that's a bit of a stretch because at the end of the day, you're gonna get to a certain point, if we go back to scalability, with growth, where hey, we're posting 50 times a day. Well, shoot, you know what we should do? We should do like Hermozzi did. We should start running ads, right? Because now he's doing that with uh, you know, his his his uh his his company, right? So, you know, at some point you run out of your really qualified people and then you have to go cold anyway. So you might as well learn how to do that up front, which will then compound your skill set will compound over time, uh, not just you, but your company skill set as well. And you'll be able to maintain and sustain lead quality for a long time.
SPEAKER_00Now, let me let me go into this because that's what you just brought up is like, oh, if you just do like, you know, if you just do like uh if you if you have to do eventually, you consider in your words, right? You have to do cold, you might as well start out with it, right? Well, if I if I can go and reference, right? Obviously, this gentleman in the podcast mentioned how every single person who has an organic following, if they actually run pay dats, they have a significantly easier time to go and actually get conversions because obviously people already like them. So, so the very point in case is like, yeah, why would you go and do something, you know, say you're 10 mil a month, sorry, if you're a 10 mil a year, right? Why would you go and try to get there the hard way if eventually, if you're running out of options, you go and do the one that's actually gonna be a super easy lever. So, for example, why would I go and try the hard game of like cracking cold, do all that stuff when I can get there through organic? And then if eventually, right, God forgive, one day I have to go and run pay that, that's just gonna be an easy lever that helps me capitalize because I've laid the hard groundwork. Right now, there's this whole reverse effect, right? Where, like, for example, someone like Ryan Dice, who publicly says that he shut down all of his ad spend because he's realized posting content has a much higher ROI and is actually helping him scale significantly harder, actually doing the reverse. So people who actually literally sold courses on Facebook ads, right, and are literally running this whole, oh, I was used to do paid ads, now run cold ads, right? Every single paid ads guru, to some extent on their strategy that's talking about how lucrative has some form of like, oh, I run a content-first ad strategy, right? You know, people like Jeremy Haynes, shout out Jeremy, talks about publicly how important it is that content is to be posted. And so again, to me, it's like, why would I go and do something that's really hard and that even by industry experts is deemed as like, yeah, it's really much more difficult than it used to be a few years ago, as opposed to doing the thing that everyone's doing now. Even again, even Hermozzi, right? Once he's blowing up, now he's he's publicly saying that his best ads are his organic pieces of content. So I think that point's just a bit nullified.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, what which point are you addressing? About the lead quality, or what which point are you addressing?
SPEAKER_00Your your point essentially that you need to go and like why would you not go and do cold from the start as instead of once you're more advanced?
SPEAKER_02What to throw her mosey back in your face? I feel like this is just a debate about her mosey. Most things are. But her mosey literally just recently said that um that's so funny, that uh you know, you start with cold and then you go to hot because starting with cold prepares you, it makes it makes going warm after that way easier, right? And so to your point, I I don't think any of that's true. Um, you know, in terms of uh there's this reverse effect. Like, sure, if you have a massive brand, a massive following, running retargeting as that brand is gonna work, of course, right? But that doesn't mean you should start with that, right? Those things have no connection, you know. Um, I mean, case in point, why didn't Hermozy start with it? He started with paid. Now he's still saying that, hey, you want to start cold and then go warm. So I I think that's a bit of a of a uh red herring in that um, you know, oh, you shouldn't start with something hard and then and then go easy. Um and I also think it's a red herring to say that ads is necessarily harder than organic too. Like it depends on how you define hard. You know, like to me, hard is having to wake up every day and run on the content hamster wheel and post a freaking video and go like, I hope Instagram pushes out my content and I get a sale, you know, versus just being like, no, like this is my offer, it's good, I know people like it, and I spent two grand yesterday, I'm gonna spend two grand today, and I know I'm gonna book somewhere in this range of calls.
SPEAKER_00So I will go and say to this, right? It's it's the exact same thing. It's like if I just wake up and I go, oh, let me just toss up a new ad. Let's hope the ROAS go works this time. It's the exact same premise. But what I will go and say is with paid ads, right? Yes, there's probably some softwares you can roughly go and track what is and isn't working, but you don't really see like, oh, this ad gets like a 5x ROAS or like a 7x ROAS, right? I don't think that's available unless you have some black hat tools here. But on content, I can literally go and see, oh, if I look at like, you know, what people in my industry do and think, oh, this content topic is actually performing. And so now I already have like a starting point where I understand, hey, this is actually something that people resonate with. So if I make something around that, my chances or likelihood of actually succeeding with it is significantly higher. And so I think as a result of that, you know, as a complete newbie, that is this easier process to go and follow and have a higher likelihood of success as opposed to, oh, let me just this this ad's been running long. I don't know if it actually works and how it works, but let me just go and copy that. So I think on there, I think organic is significantly simpler.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I I think, you know, look, there's plenty of people who've copied our ads and who've made more money, right? So, like, I I don't know. If your argument is you can't copy other people's ads effectively, I mean, I think everyone watch this who's ever ran an ad is gonna tell you that that's not true.
SPEAKER_01What would your argument be to the main YouTube strategy being copying other people's outliers? Say again. Well, the main YouTube strategy is copying other people's outliers and blah da-da.
SPEAKER_00I think to an extent, I think that's like as a starting point. I think that's not the dumbest thing to go and do. Because again, at the end of the day, you want to go model after success, especially if you're new, instead of you trying to come up with like a new strategy from the get-go and like reinvent the wheel, you want to go piggyback of what's already working. But I think especially as you kind of get some baseline skill, the point is how can you go and differentiate, right? We spoke earlier about like the importance of like charisma and all of that chajle. I think you know, if to go from zero to one, you go and figure out what's already working, how can I go and tweak it to what I do? And then over time, it's like, how can you go make something your own? And so I think I think off of that, you know, off a strategy of copying, I think to go as a start, it's okay, but it's not gonna work at start.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, time out, time out, dude.
SPEAKER_00Time out, stop.
SPEAKER_02One of your main points was that you build an audience, you build a moat, and people can't just copy you. And then now you just said you should start by copying other people. So which one is it?
SPEAKER_00It is, it comes over time. But for example, if you start out, right, you have zero clue of like what to go and do, right? You see you don't really have like a clear-cut strategy. The easiest lever that you can go and pull is to go and see, hey, what formats, what topics are already working in the marketplace and replicate that. But then again, by using your own in in story, your own expertise, your own experience.
SPEAKER_02Do you have a mode or do you not?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because if it's this easy to copy, then how do you have a mode? No, for example, right, when you look at when you look at the biggest personal brands in the space, the biggest content creators, the biggest moat that they have is the fact that you know their story, their experiences, their sort of like outcomes and all of that stuff is their moat. For example, we use a trading space, right, which is probably like one of my least favorite spaces. You have someone like TJR who I don't I don't know what what his like entire thing is, I don't even know whether he trades or not, but he's probably one of the best earning people because his personality and like his sort of persona on how he's kind of built himself, right, is actually significantly different in standing out and harder to replicate for 99% of people out there.
SPEAKER_02Okay, but this is a whole contrary to your whole argument. So you're saying like it's hard to copy TGR because he's super charismatic and he's special. Okay, cool. I don't know TGR, but agree, it's probably great. Shout out to TGR. Okay, but so if it's harder to replicate because he's super charismatic, then a beginner who's not super charismatic can't do that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but that's the point, right? You in in the beginning, I doubt somebody just there's a few people that come in and they're just like charismatic off of the riff. But the point is, as you kind of work into it, you kind of go and use, you know, the copy strategy in the beginning, you then over time gain sort of the baseline that allows you to go and really dive into who you are, which actually allows you to build charisma. I don't think personal brand experts or like personal brands are born, oh I'm charismatic day one. You grow into it. It's the same thing on paid ads. I reckon the first time, you know, if I would go if if Cole goes back through all of his ads that he's ever recorded, I don't think on the first ad that he's ever recorded, he was like, you know, charismatic or like as like confident as he is on ad, I don't know, like 30,700.
SPEAKER_02Listen, Cole's always been charismatic, man. All right, that's number one. But number two is I again, I just think there's a bit of a contradiction. Because if you're like, well, you when you're not charismatic, you copy other people who are charismatic and who are winning, and that's how you build success. But then the other argument is like, well, by being charismatic, people can't copy you. It's like just that this doesn't really make sense at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_00It's an evolution thing at the end of the day. Again, just as mentioned, the same thing with the pay that's thing. In the beginning, you gotta go and build your baseline. If you come in, you're already charismatic, and you can just go, as an example, you can just go and say, hey, I'm gonna just go and riff off of stuff. You can go and do well right off the riff. If you come in, you're you know, maybe a bit of an introvert, right? Number one, you can go and maybe just use the modeling principle to go and get baseline stuff. Then once you actually understand it works, that's when you kind of build on top of it. So I don't think that's a contradiction in and of itself. It just shows that there's like skill progressions. Just as, for example, with with ads, as you could go and argue, right? I'm gonna make that argument for you. If you suck on camera or like you have like a massive, like, you know, you're like from a different country, so you have like a massive accent, you would potentially start with like, you know, static ads or something like that, so you don't have to get on fucking camera. Same thing for content, you know, if you're if you're not like you wouldn't say you're the most charismatic, you know, for some of our clients, for example, that that's the case. We just go and do b-roll plus text stats, or we do like, you know, carousel-based stats, you know. And so essentially I think it's it's just a place of you start out with it, and then over time you evolve.
SPEAKER_01One of the biggest points that he made earlier was organic might lead to a better lifestyle, and that's why it's more valuable to him. So, you know, he mentioned ads are complex. There's also a content hamster wheel. So if somebody maybe doesn't want an exit, but they want a business that can cash flow them a lot, that's the typical lifestyle business, why would ads be better?
SPEAKER_02Yes, uh, very, very simple reason. Um, because when you're building a personal brand, by definition, you are building a job. Regardless of how valuable that job is, how much revenue or income that job brings you, you're building a job. And uh I did not wake up, going back to my earlier point, I didn't wake up this morning and be like, man, I'm so excited to be a content creator, you know, like let's go make some videos. Um and you know, Cole dragged me here. Okay, so here I am, guys. Um, but my point is is, you know, when we talk about lifestyle business, what do we mean? It means like, hey, you get to make a ton of money and you get to do what you want. And inevitably, we've seen with even with people who do wake up to be great content creators, at some point they have to take a break because it's demanding, it's a job. And you know, as much as Jeremy might say, like you can outsource all of it and it's super easy, the truth is it's way easier to outsource paid ads. I mean, a ton of companies have done that successfully. Um, and or at a minimum, even build an internal system to do it where it doesn't involve you. I mean, candidly, just to use our own example, uh, Cole, I mean, how often do you even film ads for us? Like, not very often. We have Martinez, we use AI, like he's not even in, you know, he films bigger stuff for us, but honestly, he doesn't even film very much for us on the ad side. But for all of his content, he films way more content now. Uh, and he he can't stop doing that if he wants to continue to grow his brand. Like, I'm not gonna, you know, put on my Cole Gordon uh watch and my Cole Gordon polo and become Cole Gordon, right? It's gotta be him.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that that might be true. But guess what? For every single minute you save on the app front, you know, as I've mentioned, you're gonna spend equally as much time just being in the back end, you know, like doing all of the stuff that you need to go and do. Whether that is, oh, you need to go and spin up another back end offer and like do all of that stuff because your your front end cac sucks and now you need an upsell to go and actually be profitable. Whether it is you now need to go and like manage teams or manage your managers so they can manage your like massive bloody sales team. I think there's equally as much time spent on the back end working. Whereas I just personally believe with a content-based business, right? Yes, you have probably your shooting day, right? Which like honestly, like I know Hormozy says he spends he spends one day filming. Some people say, hey, I spend one half, uh half half an afternoon filming, right? You spend one fraction of your day filming, you know, maybe it's content. For you it's a hamster wheel. To others, it's like, I just do my thing, right? But at the at the end of the day, the time that you might call might say if, you know, doing the ads or the content, you equally go and get back by being essentially like employed, right, in your business and running the actual business. And if you say it's not, then that just very much takes away because you need to hire people that do it for you at a high level, which then destroys the profitability argument that you've made earlier on.
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SPEAKER_02Okay, so you're saying, hey, you have a ton of profitability and it's only a little bit of time because you just have to film. Okay, well then who edits the video? Who creates the strategy? Who does all the costs? You still have to pay for those people, you still got to manage them. In fact, oftentimes uh with organic-based businesses, you need more people than with ads because ads is much more scalable, right? As I mentioned, we have one media buyer spending tens of thousands of dollars a day in ads across, you know, at one point, multiple, like a handful of different offers, right? And so with organic, yeah, no, you you sure he can, if he had a really dialed-in system, he could have someone else build the content, someone else film it, someone else edit it, and a lot of that he does. But two things. Number one is for you to make really, really good content, guess what? You have to be involved because you have to know the subject matter, you have to be passionate about it, etc. And number two is even if you found a way to circumvent that somehow, uh, guess what? He still has to employ those people, which also takes away the profitability that you're talking about. So I think either way, as you scale, if you want to have a lifestyle business, you have to build a team under you that can self-manage and self-regulate.
SPEAKER_00Yes and no. So I think to an example, what you're saying, yes, will you have to go and hire people? You keep mentioning the media buyer example. Yes, maybe like a media buying or like marketing department on like a paid ads business isn't gonna be massive. I don't think, I think it's a misconception that like a content department has to be like massive, right? For example, I just know how we run stuff internally and how some of our clients do, which is like extremely lean. But the biggest thing, especially on like you know, uh a paid ads business, is like the the bigness of like you know the sales department with like sales leads, sales SDRs, like sales reps, and all of that stuff. And so I think that is the where the real complexity kind of comes in. Because now on the back end, you need someone that manages all the data for those people, you need to manage the calendars. There's a bunch of stuff that goes into that. That's where I think it takes away. Now, to what you're saying is I don't think that you go and really, you know, remove yourself completely from content ever, right? I think there's always an element where you're gonna be involved, but I don't think it's anywhere near as in-depth as like the you know, sort of like involvement that you're articulating it out. But overall, I would say the whole debate is like whether you know the organic thing is true. We haven't really touched on it, whether some of the paid ad stuff is actually as glorious as as it's been made out to you.
SPEAKER_01But what I really want to know is, okay, but if I'm somebody who's doing 10 million a year and I just want to work as little as possible and have as much cash flow as possible, why would content be better?
SPEAKER_00So, as I mentioned, right, you say you do half an afternoon work worth worth of filming, right? You record you you record your YouTube video, right? You record your reels, right? From there, you record it. You obviously have like, you know, an editor which is like what $500, $1,000 a month. And again, right now, with with stuff not being as high production based as possible, you actually get away with like a lot more simpler edits, and especially if you do 10 mil a year with an info business or a coaching business off organic, the editing doesn't matter anywhere near as much as as people think, right? So that's one thing. Two again, the profits are just gonna be naturally higher, you know, especially if you don't invest much into what I've mentioned, like which is distribution. If you do, maybe that takes a small hit on it. But again, even for us, lifestyle, lifestyle ROAS of us, lifetime-wise, it's been like a 30x, right, off of content and content distribution as a whole. And so off of that, the profitability is gonna be massively higher. So if I just have less people to go and manage overall, right, across sales and marketing as a whole, and I go and have a higher ROAS, I will as a whole have a lot higher, you know, profit margins and pre-tax profits that I take in, which to me allows me to live a better life. The second thing, which is kind of underrated, like a lot of people that make a lot of money, they might want to go and be able to like travel or like do stuff. A lot of times you can actually combine the two, and you can go and actually like make travel and actually use that for content. And so essentially, you actually like as an example, we we come back to you know the same bloody people here. But let's go and say, you know, somebody somebody like Imon goes and travels somewhere for bus for pleasure, he can go and turn that into a vlog, which then again feeds his content engine and makes him more money. So I think as a whole, you kind of get a better, a better lifestyle as a result. How would you respond to that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think the crux of your argument is that you can kind of like phone in content and do well. And I just think that's been proven untrue over and over and over again. Uh, I mean, case in point, you brought up Iman. You also brought up Iamon saying his viewership is way down. So, like, yeah, it's probably because he's traveling and phoning in his content, dude.
SPEAKER_01Like, but to be fair, he also said his revenue's gone up. Okay.
SPEAKER_02I'll take that of Facebook. I don't know Iman's business. But the point I'm making is um at the end of the day, content is a you know, it's very simple. Ads is a uh monetary-based scaling engine. Content is a uh, you know, a time-based engine. In my opinion, what is more scarce if you're making $10 million a year? It definitely ain't money, it's time. So why would I want to sign up for something that, you know, if we get out of the perfect world that Jeremy has has described, where I just like show up for 30 minutes, I throw on my pants, I throw on my shirt, I say some stuff in a microphone, I leave, and I cash my $10 million check. Like if we get out of like that false reality, that fantasy world, we say, like, well, what does it actually take to do well? Like, first of all, everyone who's good at YouTube will tell you like the editing is like actually extraordinarily important. And you can't just get some crappy editor. You need a really, really good edit editor who's knows about retention editing, who understands that at the end of the day, there's two key metrics and content. There's your click-through rate of the people who are gonna watch your video, and then there's your watch time, right? And if one of those two is not optimized, guess what? It's not gonna work. And my final point is this Jeremy, I I've just met you. You're a very intelligent guy, and I have a lot of good things to say about you. But I do have one question, and then I have something to say afterwards. Are you a psychopath? No, I'm gonna assume no, right? Well, we're all not psychopaths here either. And so, in order to make really, really good content and have that really sharp charisma and certainty in your voice, you have to believe what you're saying because you're not a psychopath, we've confirmed, okay? And so my point of saying this is if you phone in the content, you go, oh, he's gonna make the script, he's gonna do this, and then you just show up and just try to read it like monotone, it's not gonna perform because you don't believe what you're saying. So you have to be involved. There's no circumnavigating that of like, oh, you know, I'm not gonna be involved and just show up and do my best and hope it goes well because you're not a psychopath. So if you're watching this, you're a psychopath, organic might be better.
SPEAKER_01Are you a psychopath?
SPEAKER_00No. So so to go and kind of go through a few things that you've just said, right? You said, like, oh, you just need to like, you need to like this one content piece and whatever. I think one of the things that just kind of gone unnoticed is like a lot of times if you have one content piece that we just call like a winning piece of content, say it's gone viral, you can track back a lot of revenue to it, right? You can actually go and scale said content piece. And so it's not like you need to go and have these billions of content pieces. That is definitely, and again, I said in the context of going from 10 to 25 million, right? If you want to get to 25 million a year, yes, stuff like clipping, extra distribution becomes invaluable, right? Just as with paid ads, you'd have to go into multiple funnels, like different sort of like acquisition methods, whether it's webinar plus VSL, webinar plus low-ticket funnel, like you name the beast, right? It's the exact same thing. But if I just take a certain content piece that have been winner for us, we now can go and say, without crazy work, I know you think that's it's incredibly complex, you can go take a winning piece of content, put it on trial as you get multiple juice out of it. We out of a real that, let's say, gets a million views, we can squeeze that out and almost triple the entire view count we get out of it. And essentially, like, even if you factor in some saturation, we can double the revenue we get out of it. Right? And so as a result, I don't think that fallacy of like, oh, you need to constantly go and create stuff, right? And last but and last but not least, one of the important things is you've mentioned you need to have conviction when you speak about stuff. I agree, you need to have conviction, right? Just as I'm convinced in inorganic, you're convinced in paid ads. The point is, you cannot go and show up on a paid ad and not be convinced of the same thing. It's the exact same argument. If called show something is like, I will get you to a million month guaranteed or I go and finance your next IRS audit, like whatever that might be, right? Like, you know, like that. Yeah, crazy offer, but like he wouldn't have conviction in that unless he has like the craziest fulfillment and like you know, guarantee on planet earth. But like it's the same fallacy. So you can't go say, like, oh, on content you need this crazy conviction, you don't need it on paid ads, because you do. Yeah, yeah. Well, well, two things.
SPEAKER_02So, first of all, okay, as it relates to conviction, I that's not an apples to apples argument. It seems like it is a service layer, but if you actually think about it, um if the whole idea of content is like we put out stuff into the universe, and people watch our stuff and they like me and they're educated by me, and now they're more likely to buy, and all the other benefits we talked about. That's different than saying you need to have conviction in an ad talking about your product that you sell. Like the level of conviction there, like Cole has conviction in his company because he's built a great company, he's got a good service, he's got a good product. And if I write an ad for him and just show it to him, it's talking about the same company, the same product. It's written in a slightly different way. Maybe he tweaks it real quick or whatever, but bang, and then he films it. Okay. Whereas if we write an organic piece of content, a long-form YouTube video for Cole, and that's about, you know, for example, he just had a recent one about the echo, like the how economics uh translates to business. Like without him doing a tremendous amount of research, he's not going to have confidence and certainty in that because it's not about something he's already familiar with. And on the on the note of like, oh, well, you just find one piece of content and then you just blast that forever. You just multiply on the one piece of content six million times. I mean, obviously that's not true. I mean, why do you think people like Ramosi talk about, hey, I post 60 times a day? Do you really think they're posting the same video 60 times a day? Probably not.
SPEAKER_00He's definitely not posting 60 times on one singular platform. That means the same content piece that he mentioned within the 60 goes from Instagram over to LinkedIn over to Twitter. So there's there is a multiplication factor. No, but if he posts three times a day on Instagram, right, we're already like at nine. And then obviously he has like multiple channels where he like clips up stuff. So it's not that he's creating 60 unique pieces of content every single day. Again, you want to go and run that argument? That's very much in case. He now has multiple channels that he's scaling, right? Talking, talking about into scaling strategy, which are literally clip-ups from previous sessions, live calls, the YouTube videos he's made. So he's actually not going and creating, you know, the whole 60 pieces of content a day. Now, to go and to go and counter your point on you know the argument and conviction that you need, sure, if I go and script a YouTube video on what you've mentioned, right? Economics, yes, I need to go and have some form of familiarity and like you know confidence in it. But vice versa, if I, as a face of the company, go make a claim or like a promise on what I'm gonna guarantee someone, right? And somebody just comes like, here are the ads, I need to go and have utmost confidence in what I'm actually gonna go and say, which means, as of at the very least, I need to go be honest and heavily backtrack that, which you don't just go and shop me, like, oh yeah, this sounds good. Like, you know, kind of I think we can fulfill on that. That that confidence needs to be deep rooted, which means you actually need to be like deeply in the trenches to be able to have that confidence.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, look, I like I don't think that argument is relevant because two things. Number one is, you know, Mr. Content himself, Gary V, jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? Like, what's his, you know, if you don't know, jab, jab, jab is like your content, right hook is your offer. Okay. Well, whether you make an offer on an ad or you make an offer with content, you have to have a certainty in an offer. I mean, what you're saying is you need certainty in your business. Yes, I agree. But that's irrelevant of the traffic source.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I agree with that. Okay, so then you brought in the relevance. No, no, you brought in the relevance that on content is significantly harder because you need to have confidence. Yeah, because of conviction. Yeah, yeah. So the same thing is true. You need to have conviction when you're creating content, and what you're saying is the same as you as with your ads.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't I don't know if you're quite getting what I'm saying. The the certainty in your offer is having certainty in your existing business, which is irrelevant to how they get to the offer. Ads, organic, cold out, doesn't matter. You have to have certainty and you're making a bold offer, right? Okay, well, when you put out content, you can't like your content can't just be the same offer and over it. Like you're making valuable content people want. You have to have certainty in every single one of those things. And which require, in order to have certainty, unless you're a psychopath, it requires you to do a lot of research, be well read, and and have you know extreme confidence that what you're saying is accurate, unless you're, you know, you're just like, I just want to scan people and I don't care, but I don't find it.
SPEAKER_00I don't think so, because again, what you're saying is you want to make valuable content, right? Which means you make content about stuff that your business does or stuff that you're teaching people, right? Which means you need to, again, in your words, have confidence in your business. If I make content, for example, on con on like organic or organic distribution, I can't go and like just go and like randomly say it, right? But I think naturally because I'm confident in my business and in the offer, if somebody tells me, hey, talk about distribution, I'm confident in the topic, right? Now, the the the comp the the comparison that you're making is you compared an ad to like a YouTube video, which I think is like a bit wrong. Because if you want to compare it, you would compare a VSL to like a YouTube video. I would say an ad is more similar to like an Instagram reel as an example, but on a you on a VSL, right? You obviously would introduce like facts, statistics, and stuff like that. Again, if you're reviewing that, which which goes back to your point, you probably need to have like some form of research and involvement in yourself as well. Because otherwise you wouldn't be confident in making those statements.
SPEAKER_01So I want to move on to a really interesting question. And the question is is does building a brand even require content? Now, from a binary perspective, there's probably a lot of examples of people who they've built a brand through commercials and stuff like that. So that's not what I'm talking about because obviously, okay, that's possible, you know, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, whatever, they build a brand without having to actually produce nobody's doing that on YouTube, okay? But here's a better way to think about it is if you look at, let's say, some of the biggest brands in the industry, you know, Tony Robbins or Grant Cardone, they do spend a lot of money on ads, they don't get a lot of views, and they're very known, okay? So they do have a brand in the sense that they're very known, but being known is different than views, right? So this is really the question I want to ask. It's not necessarily does a brand require content because, you know, Pepsi Coca-Cola, boom, okay, there you go. But if I wanted to build a brand and I wanted to become known, would it be more effective or just as effective to do paid ads than it would be to do content?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, I think it depends on the time horizon, right? And you know, brand is uh often associated as it should be with long-term thinking, right? Like if you're just here to do a quick cash grab, you don't care about having a brand. It's irrelevant to you, right? So if we look at brand in its purest form of like, I want to have a long-term durable thing, then in the long term, no, it's completely uh, you know, irrelevant. Uh and it goes back to the point I made in my opening argument, which is, you know, brand in a nutshell is your reputation in the market, right? It's a it's a it's a sum, it's a the collective sum of what you know the average person thinks about you that is a that has brand awareness, right? And what you say about yourself is much less relevant on that note than what obviously the people who make up your brand, the sum, right, say about you. And um people make their judgments uh far less on things that they don't pay for versus things that they do pay for, right? You know, we all this is basic, simplistic stuff. If I pay you something, the more I pay, the more I care about how good it was, right? If I just watch some YouTube video like half-ass listening on 2x speed while I go for a run, that doesn't really build your brand, okay? So with that being said, the two final points are number one is how do you actually build a brand? How did Tony Robbins do it? He did it from having amazing services, amazing events, uh, working with some flagship people, literally presidents, okay. Um, and case in point, to further to further that point, closures.io, Cole's business, we have a brand, and we're just kind of getting into content for the first time seriously now. I'm making a serious effort at it. And how do we have our brand? Guess what? Same thing. Great results, great uh, you know, customers that really enjoy working with us and flagship testimonials, right? It's the same pattern. So that's point number one. And point number two is to your counterpoint, you're gonna say, well, there's plenty of people who've built a brand with organic. Sure, but the only way that they've done that is by the Alex Ramosy method being extremely compelling on camera. And so if his whole point is like, oh, I could just be decent at uh you know, decent at content and build a brand, that's not true. Right. And furthermore, you can't be decent at anything and build a great brand. Obviously, you have to be really good at whatever you do. But fundamentally, the only way to build, you know, make significant progress with the brand with organic content is to actually make extremely compelling content where people go, wow, I haven't heard that before. I haven't, I haven't thought that way before.
SPEAKER_00I think the the one to the to me is a bit comparing apples to oranges to an extent where essentially you keep mentioning like Tony Robbins, you know, all of those guys, even like Colt as an example, right? And that's like kind of like saying, you know, back in the day, obviously, if you want to launch a business, you do like a research study, you do like all these complex things to go and like set up the company, and then you would start selling, right? Whereas today, because obviously we've just been proven there's there's faster ways, you would just go and like make an offer, right? The point is very much like when you look at like Tony Robbins, you know, back in the day, content in terms of distribution, the accessibility, the consumption rate, right, has not been anywhere near as high as it is today. And so, yeah, that's great to go and say, right, what you're saying in terms of how Tony Robbins became known, you know, like how Cole built a lot of his poorly brand equity. But the point in case is right now, right, most of the business owners actually growing up, they they understand that the consumption happens on social platforms first, right? I don't think there's have any been any like notable brands that we can go recollect in the last three years that were built through at first platforms, which is obviously your point. And so I think especially as we're seeing more and more people, every single person that we kind of watch, they've they've blown up through content. And then once they kind of like, you know, have the content things down, they eventually realize like, oh, maybe if I want to go and add another layer to it, I'll I'll add ads. And so I think the point is you can't go and say, oh, back in the day, all these big people now they they they spent their way into it. I just think that's like kind of being, you know, oblivious to the fact where it's going, which is tied into my original statement where I said that the future is kind of going what you belittle as the creator economy, where people discover and learn stuff through social media platforms. And so why would you not want to go build your platform first on those very on those very places?
SPEAKER_01Now I'll let you to respond to that as well as any other points that he's made previously you want to drill down on, and you guys can just freestyle.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so zooming out, in my opening argument, I made five claims about why uh paid ads is a significantly more valuable business than organic. Uh and the five points I made are number one, enterprise value. You've already agreed with me that I won that point. Uh, number two is durability. Now you've brought up people like Eamon and, you know, we don't need to go through the names again, we've done that a million times, but you've brought up people who are still making money even though their views have gone down. But you haven't addressed the point of like, well, you agree, I mean, I'm sure you don't disagree with this, that at some point every business needs new blood into their ecosystem. And whether you generate that with paid ads or organic is relevant to the point that you need new people. You can't just keep selling the same people over and over and over again, especially in our industry where revenue retention is extremely low, right? So I guess my question for you is like, uh, for somebody like Emon, uh, or not even take Eamon, let's just take kick him out of it for a second. But somebody like that who did build a following but now has, you know, not getting the same views or whatever that they used to. And sure, they're making some money now, but I mean, what should that person do over the long term?
SPEAKER_00I think the one thing you've kind of like, because I actually addressed that in my opening statement, is the fact that a lot part of the durability is like the conversion cycles, right? So for example, with direct response, right, to a degree I understand it, you somebody opts in, right? They go through like the sales cycle, let's say 30, 60 days. If they don't convert, they're pretty much like get churned and burned, right? Maybe occasionally someone gets reactivated. With content on the other side, right, which is why I actually so much like it, we actually we have data on this that someone who might follow us today, they might not buy immediately today, even though they might send an inbound DM or they might book a call, but they might reach back out after three, six, twelve, as much as like 24 months, and they actually go and buy. And so, yes, while eventually that you can go and see a dip in view, like you know what, you're not always gonna buy ride like that hot streak, right? By consistently bringing in even a small fraction of people, you're not only gonna bring in new blood, as you've mentioned it, but also people that have followed you for like, you know, some time ago, they're always gonna lock back in terms of the conversion event. Which is why I actually like made made that point is like not only do you have the durability of it, if you as long as you stay consistent on like the posting stuff, but you also have longevity of it. Because again, people who might have followed you like six, twelve months ago, right, as long as they see some of your content or like they stay in touch with like what it is you're doing, right? You actually go and have some form of touch points, which means right place, right time, they actually will still go and convert, which is why I believe the durability out argument isn't really valid.
SPEAKER_02Well, wouldn't you agree as it relates to that final point that like, oh, if people fell in love with you, you know, two years ago and then they stop watching your content, you know, and then they see something from you later on, they're they're more likely to, you know, whatever, re-repurchase or something like that. Sure, that's true, but also for 99% of people doing content, that's not true because they're not big enough to have established that many connection points.
SPEAKER_00Yes and no. I mean, it's the same, it's a it's the very same concept we can go into comparing. It's this very same concept of like, if your content isn't awesome, you cannot you're not gonna go and reach tons and tons of people over and over again. It's the same point as like if your ads aren't profitable on the front, then you're not gonna go and reach like millions of people or be able to consistently get in front of other people, because you probably don't have the money to go and actually like reach those people. And so, yes, to an extent, right? Yes, if you suck at it, you're not gonna go get in front of tons of people. Same thing on ads, really, at the end of the day. But if you do it over a long enough time horizon, one, your skill set in front of the camera, what what you called conviction, you know, it might improve. On the flip side as well, if you if you make those micro improvements, you consistently go and reach new people. Again, you go that across multiple platforms. Maybe someone who watched you on YouTube is now gonna follow you on Instagram, maybe somebody watched you on Twitter is following you now on LinkedIn. And so you have multiple platforms, multiple touch points or ways to go and reach people. And so I don't think that unless you're really shit, at which point you probably should just quit, you know, if you post for 90 plus days, you're gonna consistently reach new people.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And to and to kind of underline this to you, because I think that's important, we have one of our clients been with us for like five plus years, right? And ever since I kind of mentioned this in like the longevityable part of it, ever since he's crossed, let's say, you know, 200k per month once, he hasn't fallen below that ever since, regardless how well content performed, like even if it was like a slower month, which kind of to the durability point, if your ads are shitting the bed for like a month straight, right, you're probably not gonna have a profitable month. Like we we can probably agree on that. And that's what I would say on the content format, right? You're actually capable of because you have people that you know follow you extensively, and like even if your content isn't performing well, they see it, they'll convert and you'll have some form of consistency within your business.
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, you could make the same argument with that you build up an email list and a pipeline of sales through ads, right? So, like, you know, at the end of the day, like a list of people who are aware of you is a list of people who are aware of you, whether um, you know, whether you get them from purchasing media or from posting content, it's kind of irrelevant to that point. There's just different vehicles to to to talk to those people. But I did want to ask you, because I brought this up earlier, and you know, I said it as like a joke, kind of like funny, but I actually do want a definition. What is please tell me, what is the creator economy?
SPEAKER_00Creator economy, simply put, where people actually make decisions or like actually consume, you know, content, whatever format that is on organic platforms, right? And within the creator economy, essentially people creating stuff, whether that's content, whether that's products, and people buy into that. So, for example, I would say very elusively, like you see some big influences who originally started that, where people, I guess I would say like the female demographic, they wanted to go and wear certain clothes, like you know, look a certain way because of you know, let's say the Kardashians, right? Right now, like people they want to become streamers or like want to do like certain sports because of the people that they watch. And so that would be the definition of the creator economy, which obviously, like, you know, you you look through, that's where obviously a lot of people started using media as a going as a going platform in the organic sense to go and actually drive purchases for their companies.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and and I want to address this point because obviously, you know, you need to come up with a creator economy thing. So this is not really a a rebuttal to you specifically, but to your point, you know, what you just described is how the economy has always worked. Like, yeah, people want to associate with people that are famous. Like in 1985, uh 1984, excuse me, Nike launched the Jordan one and took their company from $3 million a year to like $180. Okay. Were we in the creator economy then? You know what I mean? Like what like the creator economy is just a fancy word to get people to make content, right?
SPEAKER_00Yes, but I think there's one big distinction, right? Because what you're saying is is accurate. But what I believe is is different is you mentioned the word influencers, right? Back in the day, it used to be like, oh, the Michael Jordans, right? The LeBron James, you know, like Serena Williams, and like that's who everyone gravitated to. I think now it's a lot more like the everyday person. You don't have to go and be an influencer, right, in order to go and have people wanting to be like you. A lot of a lot of people that, you know, over time might blow up, but a lot of the people that have a big impact on a smaller scale are the people that feel relatable to the everyday person. You know, so for example, if you go and if you go and look at, yeah, I'm gonna just use like an influencer as a as a term here, you know, like Alex Earl. If you look at like at the impact that she's had when she actually was smaller, right, and less like fully blown out in the media outside, her impact probably was significantly bigger, and she had like a lot of a bigger cult because people are like, oh, this person is literally me, just two steps ahead. And I think that's where a lot of stuff, seeing people that aren't like at the pinnacle of their job, but actually just like a few steps ahead of you, that's when they actually want to go and kind of be like you, which is where I believe the creator economy is coming from. Who uh who I'm sorry, who's who's also like a big big influencer, like like a like college chick. Do you know?
SPEAKER_02Uh I do, but just okay, very basically college chick. Out of the world of being a content creator, back into business. Um, so I don't even know who we're talking about. You're talking about people I don't know. Um my point is fundamentally, is uh you in order for people you like what I did there? I'm glad I'm glad you liked that one. That was good. In order to do well with content over the long term, you have to continually provide value to your audience. Would you agree with that?
SPEAKER_00You have to, yeah, to an extent. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02What's the extent?
SPEAKER_00I think you can you can define the word providing value, right? It's I think it's it's if you're going, it's like giving value, entertaining, yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_02So there's no difference. Like the creator company is not real because like Michael Jordan provided value to his audience by being really entertaining and being amazing basketball. Now people can provide value to their audience by being an expert in their thing. But the only difference is like the TAM of that is much smaller. And like, are we here to say like there weren't micro influencers in the 70s, 80s, 60s, 50s, 40s with radio, uh, even before that? Like microinfluencers have existed since you know mass media has has existed.
SPEAKER_00What would you say the barrier of entry was back then to become like, again, as you said, like in the creator economy, like a massive influencer? Like to go and be Michael Jordan, you literally had like one in like a bloody billion.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah, I think nowadays look to be Mr. Beats, you'd be one in a billion, too, right? So like I don't know.
SPEAKER_00But that's we're talking about like, yeah, but back then you would only make substantial income, or like you'd actually make substantial money out of what you call the creator economy back in the days, right? When you were like a Michael Jordan type. I think nowadays you can drive significant amounts of revenue by being like just an I don't want to say like an average Joe, but like someone who's like, you know, not even incredibly like well known again. I'm gonna go into like, you know, one of the business coaches example who had this like physical practitioner who has like who makes like a million dollars a year and just speaks to like that specific person on content, content gets like a thousand views and makes a million dollars out of it. So I think that's where really where if you want to talk about the creator economy, where like even small people on a small scale can drive significant results.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, look, if you're comparing the barrier to entry of you know becoming a micro influencer pre-social media to today, I mean, yeah, it's it's a different, it's a different uh, you know, opportunity, sure. Um, you know, at the same time, I actually would disagree with you about making money because you know anytime there's a barrier to entry, uh, to use your point of a moat, uh it typically protects your earnings over a long-term uh you know, long, long, long enough time frame and allows you to have different differentiated returns, right? And so previous to social media, when uh before everybody could just make content and become famous, uh, you know, people, yeah, they had to work for that distribution, but that distribution was worth a lot more, even at a micro level. And I think this is really important as one of the final points I'll make in this debate. I said this earlier, but again, why the hell does everybody need to be a content creator today? Like, I how many business coaches do we need? You know, like Hermosy has crushed it with business content. And you can look at a few people names that have crushed it in their categories. How many of those people do we need? You know, like at the end of the day. And if you're an aspiring business coach, for example, how are you gonna compete with Hermosy? Well, you're not, you're gonna become a microinfluencer, a sub-niche guy. And then again, okay, cool, but ads are still better. So you can get there much faster, it's it's much more effective.
SPEAKER_00Why would you go and say that, oh, you can be a microinfluencer? I'm not gonna go if I start running ads today, right? And I say I'm I'm gonna be a business coach, you know, how on earth am I gonna go and say, oh, I'm just gonna go and run the same ads as Cole and I'm gonna be like the next Cole? It's like the very same, same point in case. It's not that it's just better. My point is very much like as you've mentioned, right? Hormozy is is is done crushed it, you know, done really well. The big thing, what you're what you're articulating here with the mode stuff is yes, he's built a mode where like people eventually will buy from him. But with that being said, you know, if we use the example of like Nike, right, people buy like Nike running shoes, eventually they'll go and buy some like Adidas or like you know, some ASICs ones, which translating that to our example, eventually people buy like business coaching, they might want some like niche expertise coaching, right? Which is why they might go with like an niche influencer. So why would you not want to be known for a specific thing within your industry?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so we gotta finish the debate. We've gotten almost two hours now. So a couple things in the comments you get to vote on who won the debate. So, Spencer, give him a three if you think he's one, and Jeremy, give a seven if you think he's one. And let us know in the comments, and we'll see you in the next video. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably gonna like this podcast I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here.