00:19:50 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:19:50] S1: Yeah. I agree. I'm doing like the same, and I and I think, like, I like to also tweak the content. I think it saves you like a lot of time not to start from a blank page. You can play a lot with AI, like to to change things, but in the end, like playing with words yourself, like decided what you want to write about, etcetera, etcetera, like more precisely is always I think the best way. Because I think the risk, especially for a junior marketer, is because they don't know what good looks like, sometimes, you know, like AI is very good at giving you something that from the outside will have like the perfect structure, you know, like a hook, context, etcetera, etcetera. So for someone from the outside, they believe like it's actually high quality. In the same way that if you ask AI to design you like floor plan for your flat, if you're not an architect, you're gonna say, I mean, that looks pretty accurate. You know? And you realize that everything's like out of shape, that, you know, like the volume are not the right one, etcetera, etcetera. So,
00:20:53 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:20:53] S0: yeah. This comes back to you need to have judgment. But I think one of the things you said there is really important, and that AI gives you a ton of polish. Because it's looking at all of the best writing that's ever been done and then gives you a perfectly crafted post. And I see that, you know, we can see that now. We call that AI slop. And it's not slop. It's just that these are writing patterns that are great writing patterns and have... Are now being done to such a scale, they just, like, look generic because you see them everywhere. And I think people are just misunderstanding that if you have a great idea, polish doesn't matter that much in writing. And so a lot of the times now, I just free flow. I don't think about my structure. I just don't... I have a thought, a good idea. I free flow it out, and I just post it now because it's so authentic compared to what you see. There's no polish. It's just like me free flowing, not thinking about structure, not really thinking about grammar or sentences. And I find that content is starting to do really well because everyone sees the polish. The, you know, the incredible hook. Everything's perfectly structured. It looks like a TED Talk. And unfortunately, this is the challenge with AI in that... Let's say that that version that I just said works... Starts to work really well, and a lot of people start to do it. What will happen is it will start to become a training set, and then AI will start to use that. And so you're always, like, three months from being saturated. This is, like, the Internet. This was not relevant pre Internet, but you're governed by the algorithms. Like, most of the things you do from marketing have some sort of algorithm that is dictated in how successful your things will be. All the way even from email, like your deliverability rates, your ability to stay out of the spam filters, but more and more so, we are governed by algorithms. And then the other one you're governed by is the law of saturation. And that all marketing will be saturated at some point because everything is external, can be viewed, and replicated. And so pre AI, you were still on that hamster wheel where algorithms would change. You would have to adapt to algorithms, and the things you're doing at some point will be replicated.
00:22:57 · Kieran Flanagan, Guillaume Moubeche
The problem with AI is those things are just happening at such an accelerated pace because the algorithms are changing all the time because they are trying to figure out how to adapt with all of this influx of content. I think the amount of content produced over the last year has four x ed. And so if you're in these companies, you are just getting overwhelmed by content. And they're like, how do we integrate that into the algorithms? Like, what are the new things we need to put into the algorithm to continue to keep the quality bar high? And at the same time, the things you're doing are so easily to... They can be replicated so easily. You blog post about something, and people can take that blog post and tell AI [00:23:37] S1: Rewrite it. [00:23:37] S0: Turn that into a skill. Yeah. And every... And now I just wanna do that on mass. Yeah. And so you're just on a you're just on a complete hamster wheel of trying to stay ahead of those two things. [00:23:47] S1: And and from your side, like, at HubSpot, have you, like, been automating the content creation process? Like, because obviously, like, if SEO has been going down heavily, like, on your sides, like, how exactly have you been replacing, like, the the volume part of it?
00:24:04 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:24:04] S0: Yeah. And I'll put it back into the methodology so people understand. So we we kinda... We did the express. I'll skip over Taylor for a moment. Taylor is, like, how you take that taste profile and craft things for people that make it feel specifically for them. And what we're getting into here is there's the Amplify, which is a new set of distribution playbooks for marketers, and and then Evolve, which I... We can talk about at the end maybe, which is how you restand up your marketing team for the AI age. But in terms of Amplify, which is, like, what are the new distribution playbooks? Like, forever... Especially in b to b, it's been a lot of, like, content search, SEO, email marketing automation, B2C, it's been a lot of paid advertising creators. And so in B2B, how did we... What are the new kind of distribution playbooks we stood up? Well, content is actually still a big part of how we acquire demand. We just went into different places. And so YouTube has been a pretty big success for us. And so we went into YouTube because we were like, kinda works similar to like Google search, but it's much more defensible, And that was part of a media network we stood up. And so we bought a company back in 2021 called The Hustle. And people might know that show from My First Million, Shaan and Sam's podcast. And so I led the acquisition of that company. And within six months, we had built a creator network around it because they they were... They had such great podcasts. It was a great way to start to build a podcast network. We built a YouTube network. We have a creator program now with 350 creators that are part of that media network. We have the hustle How does
00:25:29 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:25:29] S1: that work exactly? Like, the the creator network? Is that, like, people you pay to create content, or do you sponsor, like, their videos, or how exactly does it work?
00:25:37 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:25:37] S0: Yeah. We stood... The way I stood that up was kinda like a little bit like a VC program, which is, basically, there's four tiers. And based upon your audience size, you are in a certain tier and you get paid based upon your impressions. And we took half your ad inventory, and you could still resell the other half, and we locked that in for a two year contract. The thing I ask all the time is, well, what is the unfair advantage? How do you win? Right? Like, if you compete with the same things, you get the same results as everyone else. And so what we were trying to figure out is, well, what is our unfair advantage here? Well, the unfair advantage is when you look, there was two things that were... We had two like main insights here, which was creators wanted predictable revenue. And so the way they acquired revenue was like sell an ad space. And they were never sure how much ad space they would sell in a, you know, in a given month, in a given year. And the second thing is most of the growth... A lot of the growth for creators came when other creators mentioned them on their show. So what we did was we built a network, and that network was, you know, had had an array of different creators at different levels, and we could lock in a contract for two years at the CPM rate that they had then, and then we could cross promote all those creators to make those shows much, much bigger. So I'm not... I don't think I'm able to say the names. So one of the bigger... Some of the bigger shows five x their growth in the network. And so we now are getting a huge amount of upside on that CPM rate because we had locked it in here. Now they were getting tons of upside as well because they were getting predictable revenue, and they were getting predictable... They were getting predictable revenue, and they were growing their audience. And then they can renegotiate after two years, which is a whole other thing.