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Transcript17 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hey, everyone, we're here trying to answer a question that's on every marketer's mind. I don't get on a call with a marketer these days where they're not like, oh, man, I'm getting less traffic from Google. Nobody's opening my emails, nobody's downloading my white papers. All of this stuff just isn't working like it used to. What's going on? What should I do? What is this vibe marketing thing I keep hearing about? And we're joined by the one and only Alex Lieberman, friend of the pod. Alex is going to be our third presenter here, where we're just going to talk about what marketing is going to look like in the future. This all started with Alex and I going back and forth on Twitter on, like, the idea of vibe marketing. And vibe marketing is kind of the early term for marketing in that AI era, where you can just kind of have an idea, work with some AI tools and go from idea to an initial marketing campaign, marketing asset, what have you. So I think the biggest problem most people have with where marketers going is they're kind of too in the weeds of the technology and not enough in, like, the changes that that technology is having on humanity and. And like, kind of the playbooks to take advantage of that change. Right. I wrote a big memo that Kieran has seen on this topic and, like, the kind of defining point of view that I have on this is like, the. The next era of marketing, whatever the heck you want to call it, will not be defined by who can publish the most content, but by who can express the most taste, act the fastest, and establish the most, like, resonant identity with their audience, which was a lot of what you were talking about, Alex. Right. Like, I don't think that's that far off from what you were talking about, but that's very different than, like, AI workflows. And I think that's what I'm trying to like, really anchor everybody in this discussion and the show today is that the world of just like publishing a bunch of content is gone.
- [02:01]
B
Yeah.
- [02:01]
A
Like, that's not going to work in the future.
- [02:04]
B
What's interesting to me is, and this is actually why I think there's so much similarity now in software and content is because if you were to ask me, like, what are the moats in software today, I would say there are four moats, and you guys are going to have a strong view on this. But just bear with my lack of definitional rigor. The first is what I would call Brand and wrapped in brand, I would say it's UX taste and customer obsession. Okay, so I'm wrapping up in there.
- [02:31]
A
We're buying that.
- [02:32]
B
The second is speed, speed of putting things out into the world. The third is unfair distribution. And the fourth is data. Having data that actually makes you better at doing basically everything in one through three. My view is that is what's going to make the next kind of like generation of software businesses build sustained advantages. And what I'll say is there are certain software businesses that truly do have a technological moat now. But I would say that is like the vast minority of software businesses. If you were to ask me what does differentiation in content look like, I would argue there is some difference properly that we can argue. But they look very similar in terms of moats and content.
- [03:16]
A
I like your list of four. Kieran, you may or may not agree with what I'm gonna say. I would swap speed for learning. Learning is actually the benefit of speed. Speed is how you learn and how you learn faster than everybody else. But it's like learning loops and basically iterating and making faster progress. I might swap out speed for learning, but I don't know. Did you buy what Alex is saying there?
- [03:39]
C
I also think that's generally right. Like I think distribution is always a moat companies had, but it's really hard to have a kind of moat around distribution because of the way things are collapsing. I think the biggest just moat a company will have is always going to be network effects. But like network effects are very dependent upon the product you build. I think if I was in the product building game, I would want to figure out how to build network effects into my product because I think that is like the hardest thing to disrupt and maybe switching costs, but even switching costs, like one of the crazy things to think about is like switching costs were definitely a moat. Right. It's like really hard to like pull all my stuff out of this software and bring it over to this software. But actually if LLMs become the interface to software.
- [04:16]
A
Right.
- [04:17]
C
We saw Zapier has launched in OpenAI's latest API response API. It's available in Cloud4. So now you can actually access and do work in 8000 apps via just sitting in OpenAI. Sitting in Claude.
- [04:30]
A
So.
- [04:30]
C
So if that's your interface, switching costs actually may not be a mode either because you can probably tell the AI to switch a lot of your stuff over to one of those apps. But I think network effects, which is like the product becomes better each time another customer joins. So every customer that joins actually enriches the experience for the customers who are already a part of that product. That, to me, is a really hard thing for anything to disrupt.
- [04:51]
B
Yeah, I totally agree with that. And the only thing I would add to Network Effects is I totally agree with, like, the historical definition, which is every new user makes the product better for the previous user. And I think that's always going to create sustained advantages in businesses. But I would say the other thing that creates Network effect now is data, because the quality of your data is the quality of the output of an AI tool. And so just again, using a quick, small example with Distro, it's like in a Distro studio, the quality of the interview you're getting with the AI interviewer is going to be dependent on your previous studio sessions because it's using all previous knowledge of every conversation you've had with it to ask your questions in the next session.
- [05:34]
A
Real quick. If you're tired of fighting the algorithm and want to actually build a real connection with your audience, we've got the ultimate guide for you. This guide goes beyond the metrics. It helps you actually connect with your ideal audience. These frameworks have been tried and tested by marketers who've cracked the code beyond the noisy digital world. They will make your marketing unforgettable. If you want it, scan the QR code above or click the link in Description. Now let's get back to the show.
- [06:00]
C
I think there's a playbook for companies to build tools because the cost of code has become so low that even if their core product doesn't have network effects, that they can build tools that acquire data that enrich their product. Right? Like, I would actually build tools with the only objective to get unique data sets into my product.
- [06:19]
B
When I think about what Dharmesh has built with agent AI, like, I just think about basically because the cost and complexity of building software is almost zero now. Like lead magnets, as we've historically known them are just like software tools now.
- [06:33]
A
Or like, like we're going to get into that. That's part of the show today. I want to talk about that. All those things you said, especially data, UX and usage, right. You kind of had UX bundled in, but like, yeah, people have to use the tools, you know, like, if you don't use Distro in your example, Alex, it's not going to have the context, it's not going to be as good of experience, Right? So usage and the user experience to drive usage becomes very, very important. Even more so in Technology companies. I think, Alex, on what you were saying there though, if you look at the last like 10 to 15 years of marketing, right, what was rewarded was management. Can I manage people and can I manage software, right? Like can I be an admin? Can I know the ins and outs of this product? Or can I manage all of these humans and orchestrate them and organize them to do these really complex manual tasks, right? Like that's, I think from my experience what a lot of doing marketing and leading a marketing team was like over the last 10 to 15 years. To your point, that's changed dramatically. The only thing you actually need to manage now is AI agents and they're in some ways a lot more self sufficient than at least traditional software and subscription software, right? And so that is like a big, big shift. The second thing here is you're almost penalized in this new world for being too specialized. Everything's so new, everything is changing so much. The generalists are going to do well over the next five to seven years. Like the broader your skills, the broader your understanding of the world, your market, what people like, what people dislike, and your ability to translate that into stories and content and applications and agents for people is going to be incredibly valuable. And I still think the foundational skills of storytelling, of being able to interpret data and get the right insights out, all those things that have been core to marketing are that. But it's like if you're going out and hiring a marketer right now, are you going to go hire somebody who is like spent the last decade doing email marketing and deep, deep in the weeds of email marketing? We. Or are you going to hire a more generalist profile of person who can take on more and kind of be that account manager across agents and a portfolio of work? You're probably more likely to hire the latter than the former. It's all about curiosity. I think the reason we want to do the show today is because I think the three of us talk a lot and marketing is changing far more and far faster than anybody actually realizes it. Like everybody's feeling it on the edges, but it is like existential and at its core the foundations are there, but everything else outside of those foundations is basically getting rebuilt. Right? I think that's what we're trying to say is that things are changing much faster than it feels like. And we tried to paint some perspective on the future. And if you were thinking about trying to be an early adopter and an early wave of that change, here's some ways you should think about it and some ways you could operate around that we'd love to hear in the comments questions, follow up ideas for future shows where the three of us talk more about this, please comment down below. But Alex, as always, it's awesome to have you on my friend. I hope you are well. We'll see you on the show again here soon.