← Marketing Against The Grain
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- [00:01]
A
Okay, Perplexity Computer is just out and it is incredible. I just give it one prompt and it built me a live interactive website using polymarket data. Not just that, but we used it to grade HubSpot's entire product marketing strategy. It built us an incredible product marketing skill that you can use because we're going to give it away at the end of this show. All of that and more on this episode of Marketing against the Grain.
- [00:29]
B
Here's a quick word from HubSpot. HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. They needed to move fast to produce trending content. But their marketing team was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign. Now they use HubSpot's customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds. The impact, three times more engagement, double the content creation. Want to move faster like Tumblr? Visit HubSpot.com. Here we are on a super agent bender on the show today. We've done a bunch of stuff with Manus, we've done some Claude Code stuff with our friend James at Boring Marketer. Now we're all in on Perplexity Computer and all the cool stuff you can build with these really advanced agents. And we're going to walk you through today some really awesome marketing growth use cases. But Kieran, before we do that off air, we were kind of talking about, it seems like all these AI companies are converging on one core use case that we'll all be doing. It's just a question of where we'll be doing it. And maybe you break down what you mean by that and like what you think that use case really is.
- [01:46]
A
I guess if you've taken the last week or week and a half of all of our episodes and you kind of watch them back from Manus, from Claude Code and even the super scale where they had an autonomous paid agent. And so what is happening? So we have a super agent and that agent has connectors and skills, right? So it's able to connect to whatever amount of tools you give it access to and then it has a bunch of skills to do things in those tools. And what is kind of breaking my brain is every single thing is converging on, hey, we're going to be a super agent and you give us tools. And tools are things like, hey, you can access my email, you can access YouTube. This is what OpenClaw has got a ton of press about. You can go back and watch the episode we did in that. So like open Cloud is the same thing. An autonomous super agent connects to your tools, has a bunch of skills. The skill is like I can do content, I can do paid, I can do aeo, I can do some kind of pre sales work. And I started to kind of go like what is going to differentiate all of these different apps from each other? Like they kind of all are conversion on, hey, where's a super agent? It can do things autonomously, we can enable tools and it has a bunch of skills it can access. And I think you're going to show Perplexity Computer is in the ballpark of one of those super agent. And it's pretty sweet.
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B
It's pretty sweet.
- [03:00]
A
And I'm in this all the time. I spent the entire weekend in cloud code. I built myself a financial advisor on Saturday night whilst I was watching a movie called Giant by Prince Nazim. I'm a huge Prince Nazim fan. I'm just there like what is my life like? I'm building like a financial advisor here with cloud code. I'm watching a movie which is a bad thing to do. I don't think you should like just take some time away from your laptop and just like commit to watching a two hour movie. But I couldn't. And then I get FOMO because you're like, hey, I'm using Perplexity Computer. It's sweet. It's 200amonth, I don't care about it, I'll pay for it. And you show me this stuff. I'm like oh, this is like awesome. We're going to show you that some of that stuff. But I'm like there's too much super agents with tools and skills. I don't know which one to use.
- [03:37]
B
So I do think what we're saying here, we're about to get into Perplexity Computer, which is another one of these super agents. I think the advice you're giving folks is like, oh, this use case is getting pretty clear and it's going to be kind of a primary where you interface with all your other software and data and tools. You're probably better off to focus on one of them.
- [03:56]
A
I think you're a better and really
- [03:58]
B
build and iterate and get right. And that list is essentially Claude Code slash cowork, Perplexity Computer, Manus, Open Claw. Anything else you would put on that list just for people? No.
- [04:10]
A
You know what's fascinating? Only because of an acquisition, OpenAI wouldn't have been in your list. Right. They're only in there because they bought Open Claw, which I think is.
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B
And Google isn't in that list.
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A
Google isn't in that list. Yeah. So that's very fascinating.
- [04:21]
B
And by the way, OpenAI is in the list with, I'd say the most difficult one, like Open Claw is the most technical, it's the least accessible. Most people watching this show probably will not go and use OpenCloud. Claude cowork code or Perplexity Computer is probably the best option for the average person watching this show. Though I did see Kieran that Mac minis are sold out in New York City because of Open Claw.
- [04:41]
A
Open Claw has caught the zeitgeist. I think they are the one that has the community being built around it. This is a great marketing lesson. Like the guy I, I watched him on Lend and he just wanted to do something different from everyone else and basically give it a personality, a quirky personality, which is why it had the lobster and make it feel fun, not
- [05:00]
B
make it feel like a text here.
- [05:02]
A
And I think he is a example of a brand marketer. He branded himself against the curve and people now think of that as like the fun community doing like innovative stuff. And so it does show you the. I think marketing is going to be the de facto skill to have because you're going to have all of these super agents, they do very similar things. And OpenCloud, because of one reason or another, is the one that has caught the imagination of people.
- [05:27]
B
Yeah. Hey guys, one of the most valuable things we shared in the show today was this amazing product marketing skill. To audit the product marketing on your website, we're giving that away for you for free. So if you want that skill, click the link in the description below and we're going to give that to you. It has never been a better time to be a creative person with taste, right? Never. And we've said that a lot on the show. But let's show you exactly what that means. Let's share a few computer examples. So, Kieran, you and I are writing a book. We've talked about it a little bit on the show before. Right. And so this is Perplexity Computer. When you sign into Perplexity, you have Search and now you have computer. And when you start a task in Computer, you describe a task and that task just runs in the background until it's done. Like you were running it on Claude code or in a terminal on your local computer. Right. Hence Perplexity Computer. So I want to show you the tasks that I kicked off last night. I want you to build me a SkillMD file that can design the world's best Business book cover. We're currently writing a book about marketing AI. I want to be able to give a full brief on the book and I have the skill execute five remarkable design concepts. To do that, I need you to go and scrape and reverse engineer the covers of the top 100 business books sold over the last 24 months. So I need you to find the images, I need you to analyze the images, I need you to name the core components, design styles, how they interpret, how they, how they're going to connect to the core content message of the book, blah, blah, blah. So like there was some really complex stuff I asked it to do. Right. It had to compile a ranking, it had to go and scrape all those images, it had to then go analyze each image and compile insights from each image. Right. And then had to take all of those insights and build them into a skill that you couldn't use in perplexing computer cloud code anywhere. Remember, skills are one of the most important things we talk about on the show. And it just went and did it. Karen. I think that's what's really cool. Yeah, and if you were doing this in cloud code, like you probably wouldn't need to install, fireclaw, you would have had to, you know, do some more technical work. It might have been better quality in Claude code because you would've had much more granular control. But I do think that's one of the trade offs here is ease versus like depth of control. Right. And Perplexity Computer I do think has a little bit more depth of control. So you can see that it builds a plan of what it needs to do. And you and I have been talking a lot about like planning becoming a really big important part of how you work with AI. Probably do a show on that soon. So then it researches through all of the best selling lists what the books are, compiles the lists. And then what's interesting is once it has a text file of all the books, it collects the COVID images and then it spawned Kieran four different batches to generate and review the covers of everything.
- [08:12]
A
Right. It's like creating agentic teams.
- [08:16]
B
Yeah. Now let me launch four parallel sub agents, each analyzing 25 book covers in depth, which is pretty wild.
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A
Right.
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B
And so look, the other thing about Perplexity Computer is that it's model agnostic, which means it can use Google models, OpenAI models, Claude models, whatever. Right. You can see right here, it's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 to do this. And it's telling you each of these 25 titles took 10 minutes. So basically if they hadn't been batched, it would have probably taken like an hour. Right. To do all of these. And so then it gives you all of the batches and the learnings. It writes the skill file that you can now use and everything gives you basically we now have a book slash cover design file that I can send to you and we can both iterate on book covers together. Right? It gives me all the learnings and then I then gave it a brief of the book that we're writing and then it created a bunch of concepts which are cool, but I needed it to be able to share it with you in a more easy way. So then it built a website. I had it built a website so that I could just send you the link. Basically builds this beautiful website of rationale of why that cover is the way it is. And by the way, these are good mocks, man.
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A
Yeah, these are really good mocks. I was really impressed.
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B
These are really good mocks.
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A
And the reason they're so good is because to your point is calling the best tools for each task. Yes, it's not Perplexity's image tool again. Coming back to the opener of the show, the super agent that can use the best tools and skills to complete the task is going to be the primary way you use AI and that means the results are going to be like best in class. I remember when we first talked about AI all the way a number of years ago, we talked about code becoming disposable and now there's so many use cases of it. Like here's a website that I've just built for this five minute thing so you can show me these and then never think about it again.
- [10:03]
B
There's two things that I think we got really right. Disposable web for sure. Agents. Yes. And then I, I did get a third. I would just like to go on record for the POD community even if this gets edited out that I was right about the X valuation. By the way, you had a whole podcast on if Elon would be able to turn Twitter around and I just saw that the valuation is 6x above where he bought it.
- [10:24]
A
Always invest in the person.
- [10:26]
B
Exactly. We'll be right back but I want to tell you about another podcast I love the DTC pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas, is brought to you by HubSpot Media. DTC Pod is a podcast about all things direct to consumer. Ramon and Blaine cover everything from starting, growing and optimizing e commerce stores and Direct to consumer brands. They talk with founders, marketers, platforms, creators and marketing and growth agencies to cover topics like brand building, social media, influencer marketing, website conversion, paid media, Facebook ads and much, much more. If you're interested in the stories behind your favorite consumer brands, this podcast is for you. They did an amazing show called Meta ad how top DTC brands spend 300k monthly profitably. You can listen to the DTC pod wherever you get your podcast. You had a cool thing that you wanted to show.
- [11:20]
A
A cool thing to go do to test this out is they have this cool thing where they have live examples, which is great onboarding tool. So they have a ton of live examples here that you can go click on, you can see at work and bring up the final asset. And I hadn't thought about this, so they did this. State of US politics and the core source is polymarkets. And so polymarket is a tool that, where you can bet on outcomes, anything at all. And that is such a killer thing. So, like they have the entirety of old bets being made around US Politics in a single.
- [11:50]
B
So cool.
- [11:51]
A
And so you can see here that they have suffering, Trump's presidency, Federal Reserve, and it's just pulling in all of the info from polymarket. And so you can do that about anything. Like you can take any kind of topic and you can basically create a website all around the bets being made in polymarket on that topic. So, like, for sports, I could pull one together for everything that's happening around the Premiership and send that to my friends to show, like, these are the outcomes that people are betting on. I think this one is really killer because polymarket also tends to be right a lot of the time. So it's not a bad way to like understand what's happening in the world. Yeah, because like you can literally do everything.
- [12:29]
B
And by the way, I would do a separate rev of this where you put a confidence score on each of these based on Polymarket's success in each of these categories. And you put like a confidence score on them, which would be pretty cool.
- [12:41]
A
Yeah, so I think that's a really good use case. You can go basically ask it to just build something, use polymarket as a source and it will actually go do that. There was another funny one, actually. So this one's kind of cool, right? It has all of the AI leading companies, has the whole watch list built for them. But first of all, I thought this was like someone had just, you know, you can publish things publicly in Claude. And so I, perplexity, have the same Thing where you can publish your work publicly. And I thought someone had accidentally done this, but then I realized it was an example. But pretty good. This is someone like getting a offer at Stripe as a senior product manager and using perplexity to come back and give a counter and negotiate. You're like wow, it's really hard to deal with humans anymore. Like negotiation because every human is so well informed, right? It's AI just builds the counter offer. And so that's a pretty interesting one if you're going through a rule at the moment and you need some help. Like this one was really well done. Like research the different base salaries, research what you should get in RSUs and then came back with a counteroffer. I thought that was a really cool one.
- [13:43]
B
That's actually a really sick use case. You know I've been really impressed with the Kieran, let me show a couple other things and then we'll talk about some best practices. Also for how to use Perplexity Computer, I gave it my version of the marketing Turing test. Kieran, this is the thing that I ask every new AI advancement to do. Okay. Which I basically gave it a long instruction of. I want you to go find the fastest growing non obvious companies out there and reverse engineer the unique marketing strategies that they've done.
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A
Okay.
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B
Simple. Basically I'm trying to create a mechanism to discover new hacks to grow, right?
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A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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B
And so it's like I wanted them to go out find a list of these high growing websites that aren't like the anthropic open AIs of the world. Like the next set down what's driving their growth, what tactics are they doing to drive that growth, what could be learned from that?
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A
Okay.
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B
And so it's pretty complicated because they have to go and figure out, find enough data to be confident in a ranking of these companies and then basically reverse engineer what those companies have done. And they've looked at data from similar web and lots of other purpose. They also like look at our organic traffic decline and they're doing this like relative to HubSpot. But what's interesting is at the end of it, Kieran, I essentially have a full website report of what these companies are doing and there are seven patterns driving and these are B2B only. And I think you and I will largely agree with these but I'm interested to hear what you think. PLG dominance. So it did 15 companies. Next time I'll do a bigger sample. PLG programmatic SEO user generated content adjacent category SEO product loops community Driven Distribution and low ad spin.
- [15:29]
A
Yeah. Where's it pulling the ad spend from?
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B
I have to go back and do all that. I don't think the ad spend one is right. But what's interesting is like it's driving deep. So if you go into near zero ad spend, it's trying to find percent of traffic coming from ads I think is what it is. It's not doing actual ad spend. So because this room, this is traffic, not customers, is customers. It probably looked very different, but I wanted to do a breakdown here. So like linear, it has really high direct traffic. So you're seeing a bunch of interesting like interactive ways to look at cool data. Right. And if I am looking to grow, there are some tactics that I could consider. Right?
- [16:13]
A
Yeah. Reverse engineering companies is a super cool one. Research in general is just such a solid problem. You can basically. Yeah, anything that's external you can get.
- [16:21]
B
I think this is a really good example. What I had Perplexic Computer do is I had it basically build a skill of what great product marketing looks like. Then I had it crawl the HubSpot website for all of our products and then I had it use that skill to audit how we were doing. And basically it's like, hey, our big time product pages are doing really well. It's our feature kind of second tier product pages where we could have a lot of improvement. And like Kieran for example, I think this is probably true for almost every company. Yeah, right. But it's something about seeing it in this way where you're not having like the person who's doing the work doing some audit and you're going to have it biased. It's like I think you and I and the entire product marketing team could just sit around and look at this and be like, oh yeah, this kind of makes sense. And there's some obvious areas where it's like, oh, maybe some of these have been lower priority features and maybe some but like sales forecasting and analytics, like we should make those a lot better. Right, let's go make those better.
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A
They should be a lot better because we should just automate the creation of them.
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B
Exactly. And so what I think is really cool is that it I asked it to build an al, a ranking algorithm and score everything and so it was able to give us that ranking, tell us what we're doing well and I think look at what our weaknesses are. Don't you agree with all of these?
- [17:42]
A
Yeah, I think this is really good because then you can just give this to another agent who actually goes off and Fixes and based upon this.
- [17:48]
B
Correct. And it outlines the methodology. But this is to say, if you're running a team, especially now, you can have incredible insight into the work you're doing and your team's doing without having to spend like literally your entire weekend going through stuff manually. Which I think was the alternative up until now.
- [18:06]
A
Yeah, yeah. I think what's coming out in 2026 is like such a huge step up, jump up, step up in terms of the tools we've had in the past.
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B
And so there's. There's a few other things too, Kieran. One is that all of these tools, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Manus, Perplexity, everything, they're about connecting data from lots of places. And so Perplexity, just like all the others, have all of these awesome connectors. Like you can just connect all of your HubSpot data. Right. And start going to town with how you want to visualize your email data. All of that. Like that's. That's pretty cool. Like, that's pretty awesome.
- [18:38]
A
We have the tooling, right? Like, there's just no more tooling, I suspect the average person use.
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B
We have way more product than the world could use at this point.
- [18:46]
A
Yeah. I think the thing that is hard is how do you start to fit it into your workflows or how do you change the way that you work? Changing your habits is the harder problem to solve today than actually the tooling is amazing. Like Perplexity is amazing. I'm looking at it thinking, wow, there's so much I could do here. I spend a lot of my time in cloud code. We love Manus, but it's hard to like go back and continue to use it, even though I have it on my telegram, on my phone.
- [19:12]
B
OpenClaw.
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A
You have to come back and do an OpenClaw episode with some of the marketing use cases. Just crazy.
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B
What's interesting, Kieran, is that we're starting to the point where the technology is no longer barrier. The like operation, the implementation, the using of the technology is becoming the problem.
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A
That is the problem.
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B
And I guess before we close out here, I think it'd be helpful to our audience if we tried to posit some ways to do this. Like I will tell you something I was doing last night. You tell me if I'm a crazy person or not. We have glean here at HubSpot, you know, which allows you to like access all of your internal data with AI in a really semantic like AI search kind of way. Right, Kieran? I was trying to Back into all of the roles on the marketing team and the core skills in those roles so that we could then create skill MD files for all of the skills for each of those roles. Like, I think one of the places you would start is like, if you're a team of two people, record the work that you do on a daily basis of video, put that in Gemini or get the transcript and put it in Claude or something, have it tell you what type of skills you need and then work to iterate and build those skills so that you can do the work you're doing much faster, much more efficient. That, to me seems like one of the most obvious things that nobody's doing that we will all be doing like six months from now.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Do you agree with that?
- [20:32]
A
I think actually lumen yourself doing work and using that as a transcript to build AI workflows from is actually great. We do that somewhat internally where we take looms, like literally just do work and narrate yourself doing work and you can turn that into skills and workflows. The other thing I would suggest that's kind of a follow on from yours is do one at a time, because you could also have 50 skills available to you, but then you have to get into the habit of integrating those into your workflow. And that's the hard part I think people struggle with is changing your behavior, is default into using those skills when you have to do that task. And so for me, what I tell people is, you know, do one workflow at a time. You know, build skills, build the things you need, and then when you go to do that workflow, try to start to default to the AI way of doing it and just go, workflow, workflow, workflow, workflow. Rather than. I think what a lot of folks are doing is just building things like build, build, build, build, build, build. But they're not like using them in any meaningful way. And I think that's going to be one of the outcomes we see for a period of time where it's so easy to build stuff. There's going to be more things being passed around within companies that anyone can actually use. And so you have to start to like, do one workflow at a time and make sure that you're using those things and they are helpful.
- [21:46]
B
For me, you have to use those things too, Kieran, because you have to iterate on them and make them better. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where it's like, cool, let me build this thing right, which is what you're saying. But now it's like, no, I need this thing to be really, really great. Let's say I'm a product marketer and I want a skill to do my first draft of product copy. Right. Like, I probably need to work on that skill for like 20 to 40 hours.
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A
Right.
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B
I need to give it all the work, I need to question it, I need to give it my point of view, I need to do all of those things, then I need to test it. And basically that skill's not good enough until you can run it on a new product and basically have no changes.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And until you're like, oh my gosh, this is like 99% of the way there. Yeah. And it's not good enough.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And you shouldn't actually roll anything out beyond like one individual human until it gets to that point. Like you should have like a big repository of skills until it gets to that point. I don't think.
- [22:37]
A
Yeah. One of the things you can look at is number of edits to see how good your skill is.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And if you have a curve, you have to get the curve right down to like minimal amount of edits. And I still think a lot of it comes back to there's going to be this messy middle where it's really easy to do a first thing and then you're like, oh, this is like great. Claude just built it all for me. Or perplexity built it all for me and I'll just start to pass it around whereas all of the value will become. I'll use this repeatedly and iterate and make it better with the AI. And I think that's gonna be the real value is like integrate into workflow, use it every single day. How do I make this much, much better and make that a systematic way of working?
- [23:12]
B
Yeah. Maybe drop us a comment if you would like us to do, you know, a show on recording your workflow, turning that into a skill and what this process is like, it might be valuable, but I don't know for sure. So if you think that'd be a valuable show, drop some comments. And if it is, we' will do that and kind of show you kind of soup to nuts what, what that would look like to do it. But I think your advice is right, Kieran, that it's about focusing and not spreading yourself too thin using too many tools and not building too many low quality, like access skills, things, stuff junk in the world. Right. Which is AI slop was one thing. AI clutter is the new thing.
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A
Right.
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B
It's like just so much clutter of AI in your life and you're, like, all over.
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A
All over the place. Yeah, yeah. It all looks pretty great. Like, it's a dopamine head. Right. Like, you get these dopamine heads. I made that. No one's actually using it, and I'm not using it.
- [24:01]
B
But that book cover skill was, like, my fifth iteration of a book cover skill.
- [24:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [24:06]
B
And, like, and it still probably needs, like, three more iterations to, like, really, really be good, refine it. And the last couple things I would say before we close out the show, Kieran, is that Perplexity computer is only available Perplexity max, which is 200 bucks a month. So it is expensive. And it is only available on desktop. Cannot use it on mobile yet, which has been a real hindrance for me. I really want the mobile use case. And there are some tips that I asked around how to use it well, and it's basically like, hey, go and give it complex tasks and use the connectors, all the stuff we talked about. But I would ask Perplexity or Claude how to use it specifically to the point core problems you have in your role to get a little inspiration if you're using it or cowork Manus. Anything else, I would be really focused on how you were using one of these super agents.
- [24:56]
A
Yeah. Like ask it to build you an onboarding plan.
- [24:58]
B
Exactly. So good. All right, this is fun. Shout out to Perplexity. I think they built a really good product. I'm excited for this super agent battle to keep going, and we'll see everybody real soon. On the next episode of Marketing at the screen, Sam.