Speaker 1 (04:52):

Uh, the process in general can take a few months. And then if they like that, then you typically go through a procurement process. The chairman tries to beat you up on the pricing, you negotiate. And then you go through legal and get it all written off. But it can take two to three months just to close a deal easily, sometimes six months because you have multiple divisions, right? Like if someone has SEO issues or paid issues and conversion issues, you gotta figure out how to fix all of them. One was, if someone has a crazy Q4 goal, because they're publicly traded and you got to figure out how to hit a right, like all these things impacted.

Speaker 2 (05:27):

Yeah. So, uh, that's amazing. Who are you typically selling against, you know, for the seven figure contracts that you have to go through procurement and legal on,

Speaker 1 (05:38):

Uh, other bigger agencies. So divisions of like WPP or Dentsu? Aegis. Yeah. It's usually like, like the I prospects of the world, uh, which is owned by density, EGIS. Um, but yeah, it's all other agencies typically owned by the holding companies. If we don't run up against the small and medium agencies, what I mean by that, like, you know, there's a lot of people who own agencies, like, honestly speaking, we don't run, run up against most of them on the enterprise end. Got it. Got it. Okay.

Speaker 2 (06:12):

So here's, the grass is always greener. On the other side, I can't tell you how many ad agencies we've talked to that are like, have a dream one day of getting into software, but you you've like flipped the script. You've like crushed it in software, on multiple locations. And here you are like doing the agency. So like, what

Speaker 1 (06:27):

Was the, like, what was the inspiration

Speaker 2 (06:30):

Where you're just like, Oh, you know what, like, I'm not going to go create another seven, eight figures.

Speaker 1 (06:35):

I'm going to do services. Cause that's the valuations in that are just incredible. Uh, just kidding. But

Speaker 2 (06:42):

What was the, uh, what was the reason? Why did you,

Speaker 1 (06:46):

Well, I don't run the agency. My co-founder Mike runs it. Oh yeah. Okay. Well, there you go. And stuff I'm involved in the agency, but I don't have to run the day-to-day operations. Got it. So what you're saying is money. Yes. But we also used to pay a lot of agencies to do our own marketing and I was so picky and I hated so many of them that we just did it internally. Fair enough too. Yeah, I got it. All right. Cool.

Speaker 2 (07:17):

Well, cool man. Let's get into this rich Chad, what's working for you now. What, uh, what's something that, um, is either an ad or a funnel or an offer

Speaker 1 (07:27):

That, uh, is surprisingly doing quite well.

Speaker 2 (07:35):

[inaudible]

Speaker 1 (07:35):

Sure. So this is like the silliest thing ever, but most people, when they get traffic to their site, they remark at them. Right. And when you do remarketing traffic, where do you send them to get back to the same page? Well, it's been working really well for us right now. And this is really silly is we remark all the people who go to the checkout page, right? Add to cart, checkout, whatever you want to call for SAS e-commerce doesn't matter. And then we create videos that show them what the experience is like if they would have completed the checkout of the product or service, like a high quality video. And the conversion of that are through the roof. Because a lot of the people, right? In many cases, majority of the people that hit checkout don't buy,

Speaker 2 (08:22):

This is like, you're talking about for like maybe one of your agency clients, that's an e-commerce that are, that's

Speaker 1 (08:28):

Like, you know, purchasing at

Speaker 2 (08:31):

Checkout or like give me an example of a product.

Speaker 1 (08:34):

Just any, any thing that has a checkout page, do this. Let's keep it really simple. Let's say you are selling insoles for high heel shoes. Okay. And that's all you're selling and you're probably going to get a hundred people visiting your checkout. But you're lucky if like 50% of them buy, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we'll send a video to the other 50% Facebook, YouTube talking about how it's like, how it insults and how it's so much better and just showing them. But the pitch needs to be the opposite. So if your whole website pitches like all logical, we'll do the video. Emotional. If your pitch on the website is all emotional, the pitch on the is logical because you couldn't convince him the first place, right? So you got to try to rotate up and do a different pitch. Ooh, I like that. There you go.

Speaker 1 (09:21):

Retargeting like some low-hanging fruit, that's amazing. The low hanging fruit that most people aren't using. The, the biggest thing that we're doing right now, which doesn't go into ads, but we're noticing this trend that people aren't going to like, and the trend is ad costs are just going up. So what we're finding is, is giving more away for free actually boost your conversion rates in your funnel, then actually fine tune your ad, copy your ad, offer your landing page or any of that. Seriously. It's just a cheaper hat. Just give away more for free and spend less on ads because your conversion from your ad will go through the roof. I'm not saying turn off your ad, spend less, your conversion rate goes through the roof. Now, is it more of a, kind of a free plus shipping or is it kind of a value bundle deal?

Speaker 1 (10:02):

Get this for free when you kind of buy this, uh, it could be bundled deal. It could be free plus shipping. It could be any one of those things. The other thing that ends up doing quite well too is, uh, you know, like, let's say if you're in software, you would end up doing it more of the features for free, um, or upsells down sells funneling a lot of things for free within there. You know, normally you would get this for $10, but we're going to give you X, Y, and Z fall dollars or something like that.

Speaker 3 (10:33):

This episode is brought to you by funnel Nash's add card, the only charge card exclusively for your digital ad spend. And if you're an ad agency that manages seven or even eight figures a year in media and ad spend for your clients, and you're looking to double your profits over the next six to 12 months, then check out ad card. See the typical agency model is this. You charge 10% of your spend. You make 10 to 20% margin at the end of the day. So that's really one to 2% of your clients spend that is profit in your business. The easiest way to double that is a really find a way to earn in that one to 2% cash back of the card that is on file of your clients has ad account. And before add card we had to do was invoice all your clients for their ad spend upfront. She's really difficult on a cash flow basis and very difficult ask. And then you had to put the card on your own Amex or whatever card of choice to get that level of value back into your business with add card it's entirely different in streamline. You simply get your clients on add card and make yourself the agency of record, and you'll get the cash back. As long as you're managing the ad spend, it's a great way to double your profit without doing any additional work.

Speaker 1 (11:50):

Check it out@funneldash.com. All right, Neil, I want

Speaker 2 (11:54):

To know a poor Adam and I want to know something that you're embarrassed to talk about that failed, uh, and maybe just hurt like a little bit.

Speaker 1 (12:06):

Okay. So I was really off at that one. You know, we had a ad guy on my account and I was telling him like, Hey, just wrap me up. I want to be at a hundred grand. This is for a new campaign. And I'm like, I want to be at a hundred grand a month and spend with them like a week, like they need to. And he's like, yeah. And this was for Uber SAS, our SEO app. And this really hurt me because he's like, okay, I got ways to really do it and get cheap clicks because I want to cheap clicks because it's like, I'm like, yeah, I don't care for conversion to pay. Just give me really cheap clicks that are super qualified because I was trying to do a branding play and what he ended up throwing at me, look at your audience and analytics. And he says like, there's a lot of gamers who are reading are the Neil patel.com website and he's assessed. So then he's spent a load of that a hundred grand in the first week on video games, you gotta be.

Speaker 2 (13:13):

So off

Speaker 1 (13:16):

The world, video games. I don't give a crap about marketing. I'm like, come on. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (13:21):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't even know.

Speaker 1 (13:25):

I thought about that and thought that was logical. I was so off.

Speaker 2 (13:30):

Oh man. 25. Geez. I mean, it's just a lot though, to just like the, the, the angle, the creative, you know, has a big impact in like on LTV, right?

Speaker 1 (13:44):

Video gaming. It's hot in this, you know, your, your audience loves video games. Like it's, cause my audience loves video games who liked video games. They're going to like

Speaker 2 (13:53):

Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:56):

I was really embarrassed about that one. I was just like, just really off and embarrassed.

Speaker 2 (14:02):

You know, the good news says on that, Neil is that you shut it off after a week. Right? Totally. It's only 25 grand. All right. So let's talk about some financial principles here. So this show is all about blending the world of, uh, finance and bringing that world to, to advertising. And we're our kind of enemy is what we call market or math where we're rounding up to the nearest million. Um, but one of the things that I'd be curious on is cashflow management and how you manage the cash and the investments in your business, uh, from an advertising and marketing perspective.

Speaker 1 (14:47):

So you're saying, how do I manage the cash from an advertising manager perspective?

Speaker 2 (14:53):

If you're ultimately as a business owner, you are making investment decisions, right? Like I'm going to invest a hundred K a month into Uber suggest I'm going to invest X, Y, Z into this initiative. And you know, some, some businesses, uh, are more aggressive on those investments. Some aren't, uh, some are willing to lose money on those investments,

Speaker 1 (15:17):

The wrong way. But like, if it's for my own business, I do a lot of stuff for branding. And I don't care about the ROI for most people. I tell them to spend a dollar, you men are make more than a dollar back and it better be profitable as well. Um, but I look at the LTV and I look at branding, cause I think brands are priceless. Like when you, do you want to buy shoes? Like I just want Nike or buy a car, you pick a brand like a Tesla or whatever. You know, not a lot of things are related to ROI. I think a lot of it's brand related, but just other people don't like that. And I'm huge on branding.

Speaker 2 (15:53):

At what point should somebody start thinking about branding and like making those investments, do you think

Speaker 1 (15:58):

When they're already profitable and take their business to the next level, I'm trying to build like a nine figure 10 figure company.

Speaker 2 (16:06):

Yeah. Okay. So if you're already doing like eight figures, branding should be something that you, if you want to get it,

Speaker 1 (16:12):

If you are doing like a million bucks, 2 million a year and they're like, yeah. And put all this money in Brandon, don't do that. We make it like 10 million, 20 million in revenue and you want to figure it out, like tell me branding, spray. Got it.

Speaker 2 (16:26):

And how do you think about investing in new initiatives and new projects? You've got your agency, you've got your, your software businesses, you know, do you have like a loss pool on new test projects? Do you, uh, yeah. Like how do you,

Speaker 1 (16:45):

How do you think about that? No, you're just testing have fun and whatever works. We're methodical.

Speaker 2 (16:54):

You sound so strategic when it comes to your SEO and your internet marketing and it, and just like,

Speaker 1 (17:02):

Right. Like you just got to be, it's different for all businesses. I'm very strategic and I'm very mindful when a businesses starting up. But if you're spinning up free cash flow and you're growing really fast, I'm all about experimenting and just doubling down. Yeah. I love that

Speaker 2 (17:19):

Down on what's working or doubling down on what's your experimenting or both?

Speaker 1 (17:24):

Both. Yeah. I believe winner takes all right. And this is like, Hmm, you got to go, try to take over market share and try to create that monopoly. I know that sounds bad, but that's the reality. If you look at most of the big companies are monopolies, whether they want to admit or not, Google never says, Oh, you know, we control search. Google always says, Oh, we're not. We're like fourth in cloud competing. And we losing against Amazon and you know, icons kills us in the cell phone market. They never talked about search because it had a leader. Apple doesn't talk about I-phones because they're the leader. So they'll talk about like, no one uses Safari browser converted Crow, you know, you know, and then you don't hear Microsoft talking about how they control the operating system, but we're losing with Azure again, AWS, you know, they're not here talking about everyone's using Microsoft office, they're talking about, but all big companies tend to be, uh, monopolies to some extent. And the other thing is they've all built brands. The brand is an unknown X factor. Can you figure out how to build a brand? And that is not something that you can put a formula on. And that's where I think most people get wrong.

Speaker 2 (18:42):

I want to switch gears here for a second. I want to talk about this tool section on your website. This is something I feel like I've noticed in the last year or two with what you're up to. Like what's the high level strategy here with what you're doing with Uber suggest and like this, this suite of suite of tools, particularly with like your own branded domain, right? Like when I look at personally branded websites, I think of blogs. I think of podcasts. I think of like a course, something like that, but I mean, you're taking it to a whole nother level here and I'm just curious to kind of get inside your brain of like what the big idea is.

Speaker 1 (19:16):

I will just wait till next year, I'm going to release a MailChimp competitor and just make emails a hundred percent free. Unlimited sends up. I'm going to contact. You want to send you a hundred million emails a year. I'm in a month. I'm going to pay for a hundred million emails and no it'll be free for you.

Speaker 2 (19:34):

Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about that for a second. What, like, and you're going to put that under the Neil Patel brand. Yes. Okay. So like what, what, like, why, why, why, why the Neil Patel brand? Why not like XYZ?

Speaker 1 (19:50):

It's good. On the keyword email software. How much do you think it'll cost you CPC? I don't know. Marketing. Right? Let's take the word, email marketing. What do you think quick would be just take a guess $18,

Speaker 2 (20:06):

40 bucks. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (20:08):

Okay. So $42 and 57 cents right now. And people like MailChimp campaign monitor, et cetera for, so their cost for pay customers is actually quite expensive. Would you agree with that statement? Because not because every, if you pay for 10 clicks, probably not going to get one customer, you agree with that, right? You're not converting at 10%. That'd be very rare for LTV. It is cheaper to just give away the kit and caboodle for free and just say, okay, I'll figure out a different way to monetize.

Speaker 2 (20:41):

Oh my gosh. So this is like, you know, this is, this was the exact thinking that me down into creating ed card and ed capital was like 10 years of B2B SAS. FunnelDash originally starts out as this analytics and advertising tool. And I'm like, what does it look like? What does it look like for SAS? Like to be free? And that was the original thesis that was like, Oh, there's opportunities to monetize through financial products of a card and a capital side of things. And the, and there's no like set, you know, SAS subscription. So I'm curious, like what other monetization models do you see out there for somebody that wants to make their SAS free? Cause I had the same conversation with, with ClickFunnels. They're like, well, what does click funnels look like to be free? I'm like, well, you guys have like, that's a little bit too late to the game here to be able to pull that off. But like,

Speaker 1 (21:38):

Yeah, because you can't MailChimp technically they cannot just say, Hey, we're going to take our 700 million in revenue and just make it all free. So that is my disruption.

Speaker 2 (21:49):

No, of course. Well, what do you think are some of the new monetization models for others? You know, SAS companies, like I think the next decade financial products are going to be a new way to monetize for sure. But like what do you think?

Speaker 1 (22:06):

Um, I think financial models marketplaces like eventual release marketplaces with a lot of our software. There's a lot of different options, but um, everyone just optimizing for revenue on the front end, I think the real model is the backend. Whether it's you have an agency and upselling your product or creating marketplaces, if you have software or upselling other people's products on your checkout and them upselling yours. I just think that is

Speaker 2 (22:32):

Future marketplaces. Yeah. I love it, man. I, I, I wanna like spend like two hours on that topic alone of like how to make your SAS free and um, and monetize the backend. I think like a lot of SAS subscription companies, I know make high seven figures on like their certification programs and their agency partner programs. Uh, that's almost equivalent to their $50 a month, a hundred dollars a month subscription business. Um, or like a, yeah. So I think that's an interesting, uh, way to monetize when you, when your SAS is free. Um, that's what, gosh, um, we interviewed Mike [inaudible] of, um, grew funnels and that's what you know, he's done so well with, right. He's getting, he just passed over 200,000 hundred 50,000 users and he kinda basically like stuck at the ClickFunnels was like, yeah, it's free. And uh, gosh, there were signing a couple thousand couple thousand people a day and the free was a limited, right?

Speaker 2 (23:46):

It was like, it was a little bit of a bait and switch in the sense that you can only build like five funnels by you and then you had to upgrade to their, their lifetime deal. Um, which is something that actually, I think you've done really well with Uber suggest by the way, like this like freemium and then how you like baked in like a lifetime deal at the bottom tier is like, that is like a more SAS companies need to be doing like an L like a lifetime, like a strategic lifetime deal. Not like an app Sumo lifetime deal where they're just giving away everything. Right. But like, it's this, it's this, uh, you know, middle where you're just gonna, um, you know, push people over the fence. Has that worked well for you or not so much? It has funny enough we use the lifetime deal. Cause it mainly takes more people to go to monthly.

Speaker 2 (24:40):

Yeah. Right? Like it, it takes people from like a free to the, Oh really? Oh. So you wanted to actually push people to a monthly with their life for a lifetime. We also do it because it gives back to the community, but eventually we'll, we'll remove it. We're trying to figure out how to give less our costs are down, but not that much less for people notice it. And then go back to that $10 a month price point. Got it, got it. The software isn't to make money it's to break even a Y w for what? Just because you want to sell them X, Y, Z something else.

Speaker 2 (25:15):

I'm not worried. I'm not trying to think revenue and profitability in front of things. Just break even and gobble up market share. Okay. So help me understand like gobble up market share for Neil Patel. Like so many people, those say personal brands, right? You can't sell them. You can't do it like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There are there's no equity. Long-term equity value. What, what do you say like to that? Right. I feel like you're a smart guy. You probably gotta have an answer. I'm like why you're doing it for Neil Patel. I mean, you're kind of closing off some optionality of people that are going to want to buy the Neil Patel tools. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Uh, I just know the numbers work.

Speaker 2 (26:04):

It's a hard thing. Like I've just been in business so long where I just know certain things will work. And I just know it's one of those things that'll work. And I don't know how to explain it. Other than I know I can make the numbers back out. In what way? Like, it's, it's hard for me to explain to a lot of people. I'm not saying to you guys, but some people don't understand the value of brand and the traffic and what it can do for a long haul. But because I've been doing this for 16 years, I've seen it. It's a lot of ideas to gobble up market share and brand because I've seen what it does to income five, 10 years later, I want to play that game because it's too long of a game. You can go to Sequoia capital and say. Like I'm going to go give away email and I'm going to pay for all this ends and

Speaker 1 (26:44):

Do all of their contacts and all this. And like, how are you gonna monetize it? I don't know. But I'll figure it out later. Like that just doesn't fly. You get what I mean? Right? Like it's, it just doesn't work.

Speaker 2 (26:55):

My question is specifically on like, I don't know anybody else in all of SAS or info that has a SAS tool that is branded under their personal name and domain. That's my,

Speaker 1 (27:08):

Yeah. So when you combine them, but so my blog gets 10 million visitors a month when you combine that all. Wow. So I do it because it drives so much traffic to the tool. The tool also helps drive more traffic to the blog. It doesn't necessarily work if you're trying to sell it. But at the end of the day, if I can show them people tracking and revenue numbers, people tend to forget things like, Oh, it's under the Neil Patel name. If someone looks at your business, your business isn't this cookie cutter business five years ago, people would have told us, told you that your businesses and silly idea. Right. Would you agree with that statement five years?

Speaker 2 (27:42):

Yes. They were just like, what analytics to, why do you want to do analytics? Why do you want to do audits? Yeah. A hundred percent.

Speaker 1 (27:48):

But when I look at how I'm doing with the naming and the convention, people is look at it today and say, it's silly, but the numbers prove out to work. So if they prove out to work, they may not like it. But the numbers prove out to work. These guys are all investors and financial people at the end of the day and spreadsheet junkies from Harvard numbers talk. Yeah. There's so many businesses out there that people don't understand and they don't like, and they're like, why would you do this? But when the numbers were like, Oh, okay, sounds good.

Speaker 2 (28:21):

Look, the numbers are there on your blog. Right? The numbers are definitely there in terms of recurring revenue and like SAS. But like, I literally say there's no one else building SAS tools and investing in that technology and rolling it up into a personal brand like that I think is so like visionary. And I'm still having a hard time, like struggling of like, okay, cool. Like you're just, I think you've just accepted that all these subscription and SAS is just like, like a phenomenal business model. And you're kind of okay with the, except that it's quote unquote, like not sellable because it doesn't have X, Y, Z own like

Speaker 1 (28:59):

Yeah. Optimize businesses for the exit, because I also, I'm not investor back optimized for what I think makes sense for the long haul. I'm not saying I'm right. I do it based on what I think is right. For me, based on what the numbers and the data is showing people may disagree. And I don't worry about the long haul of we'll invest your light this or not, because I believe I'm making the right long-term decision. I think that they'll start coming around. Just like when I tell them I want to do free email, they think I'm silly. Right. But three, four years from now, we'll see if I'm silly or not. And I probably could be the one that's wrong and I'm okay with taking that risk. And, but yeah, it's a big bet. That's

Speaker 2 (29:42):

A really big bet. Expensive. Yes. Yes. Very big inexpensive bet. Well, Neo man, I, uh, what you're doing is visionary in terms of the SAS tools on your personal brand. Uh, what you're doing with, with Uber suggests lifetime deal pricing, your retargeting strategies. Um, and we really appreciate you coming on and still willing to accept failure that you still lose 25 grand on a, a, on a, on a first week of an ad campaign. So thank you. This has been super interesting. Tell everybody what you're up to next and how we can support you. Check out louvers, suggest.com. Check it out.

Speaker 3 (30:28):

Awesome. All right, Neil. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich ed or ed podcasts. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich dad, poor dad.com/podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review. I'll give you a free copy of the rich add or add book. Learn more about the book. Go to rich ed, pour a.com to leave a review that a rich ed or at.com/review. Thanks again.