$30B Founder: SEO is Dead.. Do This Instead

Sam Parr

Alright, so we had **Dharmesh Shah** on the podcast today. Dharmesh is an interesting one. He's probably the most listened-to and viewed guest we've ever had. The reason he is that way is because Dharmesh runs **HubSpot**, which is a $25 or $30 billion company that makes billions in revenue. He's a billionaire. He is also sort of like a *hacker*—he launches little projects all the time. Sometimes they work, sometimes they fail, sometimes they make $5,000 a month. He's probably the only person on earth who has the perspective of both being a big thinker and launching new projects.

Shaan Puri

Yeah. On this episode, we wanted to talk to him about the early days—how did you actually get HubSpot off the ground? You had no money, you didn't have any connections, and he figured out a new model of marketing around *blogging* and **SEO**. We wanted to talk about what that looked like then, because today with **AI** and **ChatGPT** it seems like there's a new opportunity. I have more energy than when I started, because he's got this kind of—*I don't know*—playful, builder, "get-after-it" energy that's pretty contagious.

Sam Parr

Alright, give it a listen. Let us know what you think in the **YouTube comments**. Darmesh, what's going on? How are you? </FormattedResponse>

Dharmesh Shah

Doing well. Back from a busy but fun week at Inbound in San Francisco.

Sam Parr

Did you guys get together in SF?</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we did. **Dharmesh** was like, you know, *this was his Coachella* — he's there, he's the guy. So, Sam, I go to San Francisco and basically the street is shut down. They take over that area — the Moscone Center — and they have this thing called *Inbound*. Dharmesh is like, "Hey, after your talk let's go hang out." So we go hang out, and my first question was, "Dude, so what is this?" I'm looking at it and there are these giant block letters that just say "Inbound." It doesn't even say "HubSpot" — the first thing is "Inbound." Then there are all these people walking around, and I'm just thinking, "Why are they here? What is this all about?" He actually told an interesting story about the origin of this that I think is a pretty interesting business strategy. Dharmesh, tell the story—you told me something: > "I was talking to Brian and he was telling me about these very well-funded companies that had CMOs who were trying to drive traffic to their websites. Meanwhile, here's Dharmesh just blogging for fun at home, and he's getting way more traffic. They looked at that and were like, 'They have a chief marketing officer, an ad budget, and all this stuff — how are you getting ten times more visitors to your website? People come into your store more than they do theirs. There's something here, right?'" Wasn't that the story?

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah — that's exactly the story. I was still in grad school finishing up my thesis. Brian graduated a year ahead of me, but we would still get together once a week and chat about ideas. We had considered the possibility of starting a company together. While we were doing that, he was working as a venture partner at one of the VC firms here in the Boston area. His role was to help these startups go from rinky-dink little startups and get scale. Basically, he helped them with go-to-market, marketing, and sales — how to get customers. As part of my thesis work, I wrote a paper called *Patterns and Practices of Modern Software Entrepreneurs*, because I'm a software guy. My thesis adviser, Darmesh, who's one of the tougher advisers, said three-quarters of the way through, "You’ve got a lot of words here, but there's not a lot of data. This is not Darmesh's opinion — this is supposed to be a thesis. You have to have research and things." My immediate thought was: what he's asking for is going to involve interacting with humans, and that sounded awfully unpleasant. That's not what I signed up for. Blogging was a new thing at the time, so I thought maybe I could write a blog, get comments, and use those as citations for the research — like, "In my blog article I said this, and some people said that." So that's what I did. I started a blog. To come up with a name, I took the first two words of the title of the thesis — which was *On Startups Stuck* — stuck the words together, and put a .com at the end. This was in the early days, so that domain was available. I registered it for about $15. Then the question was: how do I get people other than my mom and two friends to read it? I dug in. There was this thing called Google. It had two types of traffic: you could pay your way in, or you could do search engine optimization (SEO) to get organic traffic. There were social media sites like Digg and Reddit at the time. These were the things you did to get people to your website. I obsessed over all of those things and learned them. Brian was watching me do this. When we met he'd say, "Darmesh, how's that blog going?" I’d say, "It's going pretty well — here's the traffic." He'd ask, "How the heck are you doing that?" I explained SEO and all the things you do. He said, "My portfolio companies can't get a hundredth of that traffic. They should be doing this. Stop spending budget on things that aren't driving engagement." That was the genesis of the idea of **inbound marketing**. Everybody was doing it wrong. They needed to be pulling people to their website, educating them, and putting value out there. Our catchphrase at the time was: > "Try to add value to your prospective customers before you try to extract it." All other marketing felt like forms of extraction — how do I interrupt you at dinner, how do I get you in — and we were the opposite. Back to the conference: we didn't have a product yet. We were using common tools like Google Analytics and blogging software. Two things we decided: one, so many people weren't doing inbound marketing not because it didn't work but because it was too hard to put all the pieces together. Two, there was a lot of nodding heads around the idea, so we decided to start blogging about it, get on stages, and convene like-minded people who believed in this new way. The first conference was at a Marriott across the street from the office — about 200 people in a ballroom. We made the decision early on that this was not intended to be a company conference. The idea was that **inbound marketing** was a better way, and we were simply the hosts bringing the community together to talk about it. In fact, we actually forbade — I don't think I've ever used the word "forbade" before — HubSpot employees from pitching HubSpot or their companies from the stage. All the speakers we had were external; we kept it that way. That’s why the conference was never named "HubSpot." This is the seventeenth year we've run that event annually. It was a convening of the community, not a classic tech conference where CEOs get up to pitch their book. There were a few smart things we did that worked, and a few things I would wreck if I did them again. But if you're trying to start a movement or a category, a key decision we made was *not* to trademark the term **inbound marketing**, even though we had coined it and were starting a company. We wanted everyone to use it. We wanted people to put it in their job titles and job postings. The way to make it a thing was to make it accessible. Even in the early years, direct competitors would send half a dozen people — sometimes their entire team — to the Inbound conference, even though HubSpot was a competitor. It was an industry event, not a company conference.

Sam Parr

I've seen this happen many times. I was part of the early blogging community. At first I was a reader — really passionate about a bunch of blogs — then I had my own small blog. Somehow I became friends with many of the people whose blogs I read. From 2008 to 2014 it was a really *magical* time for blogging. Back then we felt like freaks. There were very few of us and we were kind of weirdos — basically all nerds — and we loved meeting other nerds. When I lived in San Francisco with Sean, there were startups, but then crypto arrived. Crypto was the same thing: a very small, very passionate group of people. They were freaks, they were weirdos. If you told someone what "Bitcoin" was, they would laugh. I was one of those people at first — I thought it was a joke. My takeaway from hearing you tell that story is that I've seen this happen so many times: niche communities — early bloggers, early YouTubers, early crypto — start as very small groups of unique, often odd people. They're tiny, but it's crazy how strong the signal is because of how passionate they are.

Shaan Puri

"Who's that now?"

Sam Parr

I think *AI* is already—it's ours. That's past. Yeah. So, like, that's not it. But I think that Peter Lovells has done that with the indie hacker; that was really cool. But what do you—what is it? Brian Johnson—was that two years ago? Like, "body hacker"? Mm-hmm. It's obviously easy for me to say what is past, but it's a hard question. I don't—I don't actually know. What do you think it is now?

Shaan Puri

I was thinking about the strategy that **HubSpot** used with category creation: make it about a movement and a way of doing things instead of starting with your company and your product. I was thinking who’s done that well, and I thought of two small examples while he was talking. The first was Brian Johnson. When Brian started, he didn’t have a product to sell, so he essentially created a way of living around biohacking and longevity. He named it the “don’t die movement.” It’s like: you believe what I believe, and the way is to use science and be a little particular about your habits — “I’m going to sleep at this time,” “I’m going to put this mask on my face,” “I’ll get this test done every six weeks,” and so on. He did an incredible job creating that longevity movement, along with Huberman and others. Of course, no one person or company owns these things, but he helped popularize that way of living. The second example is Russell Brunson with **ClickFunnels**. He rebranded what we already had — websites, landing pages, growth — by owning the word *funnel*. They popularized “funnel” and then built a community around it: funnel-hacking competitions, conferences, and meetups that celebrate people who excel at funnel building. They make those people feel like stars and give plaques for how many sales they’ve driven through their funnels. Naturally, if you’re going to build funnels, ClickFunnels becomes the tool you’d use. Russell Brunson did a great job popularizing a way of marketing and then selling the tool to do it well. Alright, guys — if you’re liking this interview with **Darmesh**, you might want a little gift from him. Darmesh has put together a bunch of **AI** prompts you can use to help your brand grow with AI. The old way of getting discovered was being at the top of Google. The new way is people using **ChatGPT**, **Perplexity**, and other AI tools to ask questions and search. To get found there, you need to make content that AI likes — content the AI knows how to read. Darmesh has compiled prompts you can put into ChatGPT to get ideas for content and help your brand get discovered by AI. If you want the prompts, go to Darmesh’s site — there’s a QR code and a link in the description — and there are 100 of them. You can literally copy and paste them and start using them for your company. Check it out; it’s pretty cool. Alright — back to the step side.

Dharmesh Shah

So, one kind of category of ideas I've been obsessed with for 30 years — which I think is a really great, broadly defined category — is **making inefficient markets efficient**. At a macro level, an efficient market is one in which every transaction that should occur does occur. In other words, if someone wants to sell X and someone wants to buy X, that transaction happens. A good example is the public stock market: someone is willing to sell shares at a price and someone is willing to buy shares at that price, so the transaction occurs. The question is: what makes markets inefficient? There are a few common reasons: - The buyer and seller don't know each other, so there is no way to connect the dots. - The buyer and seller know each other but can't come to an objective way to determine price. - They can agree on a price but there's not enough trust for the actual transaction to clear. If you look across history, some of the most money ever made came from taking an inefficient market with latent economic value and removing that inefficiency. For example, eBay created an efficient market for niche physical goods — Pez dispensers and similar collectibles — connecting sellers who were obsessed with an item to buyers who wanted it. Google, in a way, created an efficient market for niche information: someone writes a blog post about “how to build fences for llamas” and Google connects that content to someone searching for it across a very long tail. From a business perspective, a **community** is a form of creating an efficient market. These are people who would enjoy knowing each other — maybe they transact, maybe they do business, maybe they hire each other, depending on what the community is. Simply pulling those people together removes some market inefficiency. As a result of removing that inefficiency, you get to participate in some of the economic value you uncovered. That’s how communities make money. When communities do well, they can do very well on a profit-margin basis because they're relatively cheap to get started and can be almost self-sustaining once you reach critical mass. They also have network effects: once a good community is aggregated, it’s hard to disrupt.

Shaan Puri

So one of the other things we talked about when we were hanging out was this story you told me about early on when you were blogging. It was getting a crazy amount of traffic, and then we realized, “Oh, there are going to be other people who want to do this,” so we built a tool. I was like, one era of marketing was when that was early — as it matured, HubSpot became a huge beneficiary. Then I started thinking about it, and I think we talked about a few other eras of marketing. For example, when Facebook launched its ad marketplace — which was around 2010-ish — paid ads across Google and Facebook became a dominant way to market your product, and a bunch of people did that. Then there was one other era I told you about that I thought I was late to, even though it was right in front of my face. I call it *“algojacking.”* Two people I met have done this incredibly well, and they even told me about it — specifically to my face. They told me the secret; I was too dumb to acknowledge it at the time. The first was actually Steve Bartlett. I hired Steve when he was probably 18 or 19 years old. He came more for me, and Steve had this one skill that was really interesting: he was building up all of these social media pages — random themed accounts — and he could grow them very fast. They were run by a single 19–21 year old person, and they got like 10 times more engagement than my corporate accounts.

Sam Parr

"What's an example page?"

Shaan Puri

So he had one—*freshman problems*.

Sam Parr

Okay.

Shaan Puri

And he would just post something, and then all the college kids would laugh at the memes and the freshman problems. But guess what? Once you get the attention and trust of every college kid through your freshman/university problems pages, he would create those pages and then just shove in a product. Spotify and others, like Nike, would come and pay him $100,000 to reach that audience through his accounts. So he had this method. I guess, in the same way, **Darmesh** — you were just a guy blogging in his bedroom and you were basically outpacing these venture-funded startups with CMOs and budgets and marketing professionals who couldn't get one tenth of the traffic. The same thing was happening. He literally was in my office — sleeping in my office at the time — and he was telling me, "Yeah, you gotta think about, you know, *Jenny in her bedroom*; she's just scrolling. What's gonna make Jenny in her bedroom care? She's not gonna care that you launched your app. How do you get attention for that?" He started thinking about working backwards: what does the algorithm want? Give it that, and then find a way to slip your product in while giving it the same things. Now, if you look at one of the most successful podcasts in the world, *Diary of a CEO*, the reason it's so successful is because he figured out how to algo-jack YouTube and Instagram. The engagement they get on social is, I don't know, a thousand times bigger than what we get on our podcast. He worked backwards from the algorithm. What we do, for example, is we have our product and then we try to share it — it may or may not work. What he did was change his product completely to be what the algorithm wanted. It started as *Diary of a CEO* — his personal diary. Not that many people wanted that, so then he started interviewing other CEOs about CEO stuff; some business people wanted that. If you go look at his feed today, it's like

Sam Parr

**Seth Rogen** — health

Shaan Puri

Sex conspiracies... you know, like whatever. It's basically the mass mainstream thing, mostly in the format of "they've lied to you about carbs," "they're lying to you about this," and then they're like *but guess what — that's what the algorithm wants.* When I say "the algorithm," I really mean what people like to click on when they're bored. Jenny in her bedroom is bored, scrolling on her phone. MrBeast did the same thing. If you go talk to MrBeast about a great video, what's a great video? One that gets a lot of views. By that definition, sure. But is McDonald's the best burger? He's like, "Well, yeah — it sells the most burgers, so it's the best burger." Like, what are you talking about? We have different definitions of "best." His thing has always been: *I want to make the videos that get views, so I work backwards from what's going to get a view.* I work backwards from how do I get views. The algorithm is basically: what does YouTube want to show a billion people? I'm going to try to make that video. Even though I saw that trend — that sort of "algo-jacking" trend — I didn't really understand it. Long story short, Darmesh, today you see a new trend. What do you see today as, like, the next thing?

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, so let's talk about this, because I think there's real value in some history. The thing I was doing back when **HubSpot** got started — and we made a brief reference to this — was called **search engine optimization (SEO)**. That practice, and now an entire industry, is about how you increase the odds that your web page or website will rank in **Google** organically. *Organically* means you're not paying ad dollars — it's for free. The question is: how do you rise in the rankings? There was an entire discipline around how to do that. Pulling on your thread, Sean, around algorithm "hacking" — I'm a positive kinda guy — it's really **optimization**, not hacking in the malicious sense. What you're doing is saying, "Okay, knowing what I know about what Google is looking for, here's what I'm going to do in order to have my website go up the rankings." There are layers to the game. The first layer is more about the hacking approach: how can I trick the Google algorithm into ranking my website versus somebody else's? There were lots of practices that were later labeled **black hat**, for example: "Oh, it really likes when it sees the keyword someone's searching for on the web page." So people would say, "Okay, I'll just put the keyword on the web page 500 times."

Shaan Puri

In *white font on white*, under... at the bottom of [unclear].

Dharmesh Shah

The page—that's exactly it. And then that was *level two*. It's like, "Oh, well, Google got too smart about that." It's because that would actually show up poorly in other results, so I'd do it in a tiny font or a white font on a white background. It was just this game that was constantly being played to try to trick the Google algorithm.

Sam Parr

Google would do an update every year — I don't remember exactly when — and then you'd all run the update. Six months later you'd see an article: "This company lays off 500 people." It's like... you see the pattern. I remember I'm friends with the NerdWallet guys. **NerdWallet** is a company that writes articles about the "best credit card." They were not doing well, and then after three years Google made an update and they became number one if you Google "best credit card." Literally overnight they went from making $0 to, in the third year, about $30,000,000 in revenue. It was like Google rewarded them because the algorithm changed and they followed best practices. All these other people got wiped out, and it worked out. So that's what you're describing — all these hacks versus doing it the right way.

Dharmesh Shah

That's exactly right. I really went deep down the rabbit hole on **SEO** back in the day. I wanted to understand what it is and how it works. There were a couple of key insights that I think are still applicable today — insights that made us money and would make other people money because it's a successful strategy. Going back to kind of Sean's point: the first thing you have to figure out is that there are lots of smart people at **Google** whose sole job is to deliver high-quality results to the *end user*. If you accept that, it means every black hat tactic you try may work right now, but you've got an army of really smart people whose job is to make what you're doing not work. It's just a matter of time. So, are there other things you can do that make those people's jobs easier? Yes. They like it when you structure a web page so their crawler has an easier time crawling it. They will reward — sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally — what we would call "good behavior": make your site clean, make it load fast, and make the content actually useful. When I used to speak to small business owners — that was my primary audience — my one piece of advice was simple: whatever term you want to rank for, type it into Google right now. Look at the people that are coming up. Do you have a page on your site that *deserves* to rank higher than the ones showing up? Be honest with yourself. If you were the actual human typing this keyword in, would you want to find your website versus what Google is showing right now? If the answer is no, job one is to create the content that deserves to rank higher. Google is imperfect and those battles are winnable. Maybe the top two or three are pretty good, but if you would want something different as a searcher, then produce the page the actual end user would want. Nine times out of ten — ninety-five out of a hundred — it's just a matter of time because there are a lot of smart people who want to find that page if it's truly better for the end user. There are a bunch of practical things you can do: write good content, write timeless content. I have content I wrote for HubSpot 19 years ago that still drives traffic, still generates leads, and still generates revenue today. This is one of the big things about **SEO**. We'll talk about **AEO**, a kind of successor to that, but one principle is clear: when you're doing Google AdWords or other paid channels, you're effectively renting someone else's stage or microphone. You pay them to put you on the page. There's a nice auction mechanism for price, but the day you turn that off, the traffic turns off. Your link no longer shows up in search results. You don't control the rent or the prices — those are market dynamics. It may cost $5 a click today and $15 a click tomorrow. The nice thing about investing in **SEO** and content-focused strategies is you're building your own property on your own land that compounds value over time. As land prices go up, the value of what you built goes up, and it's under your control. If a competitor produces a better blog article, it's very rare that they instantly take all your traffic overnight. You'll see competitors climb the rankings, and you can do something about it. So there's a lot of positivity to investing in **SEO** versus relying solely on paid channels.

Shaan Puri

I was going to ask you this. One of the painful lessons I've learned is the phrase **"intensity is the strategy."** I'm the type of guy who always likes to read the next blog, the next tweet, the next book because I'm always looking for a better answer. In my head, life was a game of chess: if you just knew the right moves, you would win. But chess is the wrong analogy for life. It's more like taking a chess piece and battering the other guy as many times as you can in different ways—picking up different pieces and just keep hammering on. I've learned that for most things in my life I already knew the strategy or the answer. The difference between success and failure was the level of **intensity** I applied to that strategy. Dieting is the easiest example: we all know what to do. The question is how intensely you do it. A lot of things in life work that way. I bring this up because I can kind of tell—and I want you to confirm or deny this, maybe I'm wrong—but your volume was a lot higher than normal in those days. It wasn't even that you were the best writer or the smartest at **SEO** necessarily. I'm guessing what you guys did as normal was completely abnormal in terms of volume. So, was it basically **volume or intensity of the marketing**—the execution—more important than coming up with the perfect strategy?

Dharmesh Shah

Totally. This has been my personal belief for, I think, my entire life. As far back as I can remember, I'm never the smartest person out there—or even in any given room I'm in. So you could outthink me, and I think that's relatively easy to do. **You will not outgrind me and you will not outwork me**, because that's under my control. I've always believed that the quality of the outcomes is almost always directly proportional to the number of iterations. That's it. If you can squeeze out more iterations compared to the next person over the fullness of time, you win. The universe says, "Ah, you win," right? And you just have to have the conviction. The problem is that the universe has a kind of slower feedback loop, especially in the early years. When you're first blogging, four people will read the blog post, and then you pour your heart and soul into it and it goes to six. Then you post again and it goes to five. It goes down—it's like, "Okay, what the hell is going on here?" But you have to have the conviction to say, "I know it's just a matter of..." I don't work out, but it's just a matter of putting the reps in. It's meaningful, thoughtful, and they don't have to be perfect reps. They just have to be incrementally better each time.

Sam Parr

One of the things I wanted to do was, for some reason, HubSpot — you guys changed your blog. I used to be able to go to Dharmesh Shah or Brian Halligan's author page, sort by **Recent**, and then go in reverse to see your early blog posts. It was pretty cool because Brian was very casual. You'd think, "This guy doesn't sound like a $30,000,000,000 company," and it kind of gives anyone inspiration because it's great. If you go to *OnStartups.com* — which is your personal blog — you can sort by recent (you have to change the URL a little bit) and look at some of your old posts from 2006. A few things stood out: the headlines are evergreen and fantastic. Examples include: - "Raising Capital: Friends, Family, and Fools" - "Revenue: Early. Revenue: Often." - "The Danger of Solving Venture Capitalists' Biggest Problem" Those are really good headlines. There was a day in November where you posted five articles in one day. For the most part, in 2006–2008 — when I imagine HubSpot started (I think 2006) — you were running an early-stage company that probably took up your whole life. I don't know if you had a family at that time, but I'm sure you were very busy. Yet your personal blog was posting something like three to five articles a week — not the company's blog, your personal blog. Pretty crazy.

Dharmesh Shah

**"Reps work, my friend."** That's the one thing. We've talked about this in terms of picking an idea to work on. As an entrepreneur, one of the most important filters or criteria should be: *Is this something I at least enjoy enough that I will be able to put the reps in?* If you can't make yourself do something you hate — for that long, that many times, over an extended number of years — it's just not going to work. So, pick a market you like. Pick a category you like. Pick a kind of business you like. If you like e-commerce or selling whatever it is, then do that. Just because something else has higher margins, or because Susie down the road was able to create a billion-dollar outcome, it won't matter if you give up along the way. As a final note: "Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."

Sam Parr

Right — it's so funny. Listen: in April 2006 he wrote an article saying "less is sometimes less." The article was about how a lot of people say "less is more," and he's like, "No, I disagree with that. I think *more is more* — more in terms of effort." It was pretty funny. You've been saying the same stuff now for twenty years.

Shaan Puri

Did you guys see this video that's going *semi-viral* of the **YouTube** founders early on? Have you seen this?

Sam Parr

"What's this?" "No."

Shaan Puri

So this is twenty years ago, and this is Chad and Steve from YouTube. They're just in their office talking. But basically it's the guys saying they're just sitting around—like, "I was kinda depressed last week. We had 40 videos on the site and, you know, if I came to the site I wouldn't find... I'd be gone. I wouldn't..." And they're just like, "Yeah, this sucks." This is YouTube—the founders of YouTube—and you were talking about, like, *now, early days blogging*. It's like, "Yeah, I got six visitors and I gotta eat next week." Being able to persist through that time, and then the volume, right? You just don't have enough videos. It's not that YouTube doesn't work—it's that YouTube with 40 videos doesn't work. It's not that blogging doesn't work—it's that you're blogging once every two weeks that doesn't work. I think that's one of the big lessons here. We didn't close the loop, though, Domesh. So, you—the new wave: we talked a lot about SEO and, like, that's good because "history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes." What's the new wave?

Dharmesh Shah

So, the new wave — and I think just like **SEO** created an opportunity for SEO consultants, SEO agencies, and businesses driving direct traffic organically — we have a new thing now. A couple of things are happening. Lots of marketers have been hit by the **AI** stick in a way: organic traffic that used to come through SEO very predictably, including for folks like **HubSpot** (we've been very good at the SEO game and have played it for a long time), has declined by about **20% to 40%**, depending on the industry. Historically, the practice of search was that we would go to Google, type something in, and get "10 blue links." That's the whole game. As it turns out, there's this new thing called **AI** and a new app called **ChatGPT**, which has about **800 million weekly active users**. What people are doing now is not going to Google and getting those 10 blue links; they're going to ChatGPT, asking a question, and just getting an answer — and that's it. There’s no click-through because people prefer "just tell me the answer" instead of reading articles from those 10 blue links and piecing together their own answers. You can already see this in the data. What's emerging now is a new discipline: in the same way we had search engine optimization, we now have what we're calling **AEO** — **answer engine optimization**. Previously, people would search Google for my product, service, industry, or category, and my job was to be one of those "10 blue links," preferably high up because of the power-law curve. Now, people are looking for products and services in my category on ChatGPT (let's say that's the number-one app right now). The question becomes: how do I show up as the answer, or as part of the answer, when they do that? There are a few distinctive things about **AEO**. One is that click-through rate — web traffic to your site via AEO — is going to be down, because if users just get the answer, there’s no reason for them to come read your blog post about X where you explained your approach.

Sam Parr

And it also lists way less—much fewer results. So if you ask, "What's a good clothing company, or whatever?" you only get about four options, whereas on **Google** I can click "next, next, next."

Dharmesh Shah

And you get—yes. Which no one ever, by the way, did. That was a running joke in the SEO world: "If you ever had to hide a dead body, hide it on the **second page of Google search results**, because no one ever went there." All they would do is rewrite the query. They would not click "next"; they would just rephrase their queries, like, "I must have asked this suboptimally or wrongly; I'm just going to rephrase my question," instead of going to the second page. But at least I get 10, like a...

Sam Parr

A lot of what I noticed when I asked about the **JWT** stuff is that they give me two or three.

Dharmesh Shah

I agree. Yes — it's even more important. That's what engineers and math people would call a **binary outcome**: either you show up or you don't. If you're not in the actual citations in the answer that was given, you might as well not have played the game, because there is no difference. You're literally at zero in terms of the traction you're going to get. So the question is: how different is it now, and what should people be doing? What should we be doing now in order to start getting that traction? The number one thing is this: when Google crawls your website — back in the old Google days — there was a Google crawler that crawled websites, and you could kinda control that. There were things you could do to make it easier for the Google crawler to crawl: make your site faster, make it more structured. All of those things still actually apply. The difference now is that there's a bot called **OAI Search Bot** — that's the bot doing the search indexing — and there's another one called **GPTBot**, which is used for model training and related tasks. So there are two different bots. Number one: on the off chance that you're blocking unknown crawler bots (which some companies do because they only want Bing or Google or whatever to crawl, or because random crawling costs resources), if you're explicitly blocking bots, go in and turn on the ability for **OAI Search Bot** and **GPTBot** to crawl your website. If you don't get indexed, then you're not even in the game. You have no chance of winning, because you can't appear in the results.

Shaan Puri

Okay, so that's **thing one**, for sure. Yeah.

Dharmesh Shah

**Thing two** is that — and this was nice of them — they now report it. So, Amy, when you look at your Google Analytics or HubSpot web traffic, or whatever analytics tool you use, it now self-reports when something comes from one of those bots or from the AI. You can see it as a **utm_source** parameter [for those of us who do analytics]. HubSpot has this in the product now. It will tell you what percentage of your traffic is coming from AI referrals. Just like we used to show "here's how much you're getting from paid" and "here's how much you're getting from organic," now you'll see "here's how much you're getting from AI referrals" — broadly defined. Take a look at what traffic you're getting today. As you do things, you'll know whether you're better or worse. You have to measure it in order to improve it. Start looking at that traffic, see where the baseline is today, and begin tracking it. **Number three (tactical tip): Reframe your content.** Either rewrite existing content or publish new content that is closer to a **structured question–answer** format. This is less about prose, narrative writing, and hooks, because you're not trying to hook a human like you did when writing blog posts. Back then, humans were clicking links, so you needed a great page title to get the click and really good content to drive lead conversion. You were effectively solving for humans, with Google as a proxy. Now you're solving for the AI crawler. The AI crawler is trying to get a good answer to the question the user is asking. For example, if the question is **"What are the top CRMs for small business and startups?"**, there should be a web page on the HubSpot site that explains the primary factors that influence which CRM you would pick, and then lays out the reasons — for instance, "the seven reasons why HubSpot is the top choice." Make it easy for the AI: reduce the friction so it can find the best possible answer. **Number three (continued): Classic SEO still matters.** Most of the things you used to do in classic SEO still work. You still want page authority because ChatGPT, specifically, when it goes off and does things, takes your question (e.g., "What's the best CRM for small business?"), converts or paraphrases it into search queries, and then runs those queries — often using Bing. [It may rephrase the query, but it still performs a search.] The search engine returns a list of pages. Those pages go back to ChatGPT, which processes them through the LLM and generates the answer shown to the end user. So getting high-authority links, showing up in Bing, and following classic white‑hat SEO best practices still applies.

Sam Parr

**"Sean, have you noticed that you're getting traffic and sales for your stuff from AI?"**

Shaan Puri

I don't pay attention to it at that level of detail, but we've — and it's not that big for us — we've looked at a few of these tools. There are some new startups that have been funded for this. It's similar to SEO tools like **HubSpot** or **Moz**: these tools say, "We can help you track this and get you into the **top answer box**." We're trying those now, but it's still early to see if we're getting any results. By the way, I just typed: "Yep, I said, 'I'm a small business owner and I think I need some kind of place to keep track of customers and prospective deals. What should I be using?'" **HubSpot** was the second answer in the result. The response said, "Here's the top — you need a **CRM**," and explained "Here's what a CRM does," then listed "the top CRMs for small business 2025." But it looks like, in this case, the ranking was pulled straight from **TechRadar**'s article. TechRadar has an article titled, "I've tested 13 of the best CRMs in 2025," and the tool literally pulled that exact list and put a comparison table in there. Like you said, it just gave me whatever TechRadar said as the answer.

Dharmesh Shah

*Little tricky.*

Sam Parr

For Hampton, we've gotten a **lot of business**. It's crazy how much is happening.

Shaan Puri

"What are people looking for, Sam, that they're finding—Hampton?" </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

So, sometimes it's just like: "I want — what's an entrepreneurial group that I can refer [people to] or that I can look into?" That's one major need. But sometimes people ask **ChatGPT** as if it's an executive coach, saying, "I'm struggling with this problem," and it will respond, "Have you considered an executive coaching group or an executive peer network?" Then we get shown. What's crazy is we don't even try. I was shocked by this. I started seeing leads and customers come in, and it would say — we use **HubSpot** — and HubSpot would be like, "Yeah, this lead or this new customer came from ChatGPT." It honestly shocked me. I remember the first time we got that, like eight or ten months ago. And it was you, Sean — you asked Darmesh, "When was the time that the light bulb went off?" I felt a little bit of that light bulb. The problem is that maybe it's not the problem. I think the best way to make it work is you just do the same things that you're doing to rank on Google.

Shaan Puri

No, but he had some good nuances, right? For example, on Google you would structure your page a certain way because it's like—if a guest comes over for a dinner party and he really likes to discuss books and current events, alright, cool; that's what I'm going to give him. This other guy really loves to debate, and it's like ChatGPT loves question-and-answer. So **format your content as question-and-answer**. It's just a simple nuance of the new... yeah.

Sam Parr

Guess so.</FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

**"The new way."**

Sam Parr

"Of doing."

Shaan Puri

Things right.

Sam Parr

But in general, it's a sign—kind of like *just do what you think a customer wants.* The last thing is: even early on, Google had... what was called a "keyword"—a tool. They used to call it one thing and then changed it. In the early blogging days, you could type in a certain word and it would tell you, ballpark, how many people were searching for it. It would also tell you how much competition there was, so I could just replicate that. I don't think that exists for **ChatGPT**, does it, Domesh? </FormattedResponse>

Dharmesh Shah

It does not yet. And the other thing that doesn't exist yet is that we don't really get—so back in the early years of Google, as part of the data that would come through in your traffic analytics, you would see which keywords people were searching for. It would show up in HubSpot, it would show up in Google Analytics. Google has subsequently curtailed that, so they don't pass that kind of granular—what we think of as—intent data: what the user actually searched for. But yeah, I think things will evolve. A couple of more tactical tips that I think are applicable today: - Sean — and this may be happening automatically based on being on the Shopify platform — one of the things that ChatGPT and the AI engines really like is **structured product catalogs**. That's because, as you would expect, there's a standard semantic-web way of describing the product catalog: size, color, all those things. Another key thing is **inventory**: is it in stock or not, can it be shipped, delivery time, those kinds of things. If you put those on the website, that's going to influence results as you would expect. If I'm searching because I want to buy this kind of musical synthesizer, I want to find a site that actually happens to have it. That's why, you know, Amazon gets so much love generally. - Sam — the other thing that the AEOs of the answer engines kind of optimize for is more human-based signals. If you look at the review sites — G2 and things like that — for product-oriented companies, but also Reddit, it highly weights things like Reddit, especially if there's active back-and-forth. If there's a reddit thread where the original post asks a question that matches the question the user is asking—like, "What's the best CRM for small business?"—and there is a comment that definitively answers it ("Yeah, it's HubSpot, and here are the five reasons why") and that comment gets a bunch of upvotes, because the engines have access to that data, that reddit thread has a very high likelihood of being a cited source in chat.

Sam Parr

This is going to be the **biggest company in the world**. Imagine if **Google** had a subscription — it's huge. Google is already the third-largest company in the world, or something like that. Now imagine every customer is also paying **$10 a month**. You know what I mean?

Dharmesh Shah

Three episodes ago we were talking about **OpenAI**. It's like, "Oh, if you could be... if we have to predict which is gonna be the next trillion-dollar company." This was before—I don't think any company had reached a trillion dollars at the time we did that episode, but one was about to. It's crazy how much... like **ChatGPT** — for it to be "800" — [unclear: "800" referring to what?]. They're essentially the new operating system for this current generation.

Sam Parr

I had a buddy, and I maybe mentioned it on the podcast years ago. He was deciding between two very promising companies. One of them was **OpenAI**, and this was before **ChatGPT** was launched. I think they were already worth $30,000,000,000. We were talking and he was like, "Man, I don't know if this equity can grow anymore. I just don't think it can work." He ended up taking the job anyway, and he already made something like $30,000,000 or so from his stock. He sold a portion so he could be very comfortable. Then we were talking and he's like, "What should I do with the rest?" I was like, "Man, there's definitely a world where it could 10x or 20x or more — who knows?" It's just crazy to say that out loud: what's it worth now, $1,000,000,000,000 or $800... I don't even know, $500,000,000,000.

Dharmesh Shah

Is the current publicly disclosed round that's happening currently?

Sam Parr

Can we do some rapid-fire questions? We have this document—this is for listening. We were preparing different ideas, and Sean said he wants to know your process from zero to one: how do you get ideas? Do you do research? What do you do to move the ball forward? You replied something interesting. You said two things. First, "this gives me a good chance to talk about *algebra*," and I said, "I have no idea what you're talking about." The second thing you said was: "iteration—it's all about iteration." Could you elaborate a little bit on that?

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, so a couple of things. One is: I don't do deep research on ideas. I don't look at the market like an MBA would. Most of the things I end up pursuing are either personal itches — I need the thing myself or someone close to me does. Either my business needs it, my wife needs it, or it's something that should exist but doesn't. All the things I pursue tend to end up being software. That's the only thing I actually know how to produce. If I were a carpenter or musician it would be something different. My running thesis — and this is the reference to algebra I was making — is around **mathematical induction**. Mathematical induction is this very simple principle that says: as long as it's true for n = 1, and it's also true that if it's true for n then it's also true for n + 1, then it's going to be true for everything along the way, up to infinity, for all positive numbers. I'll simplify and distill this down: what that means is, if you start (that's condition one) and if you can always take the next step, make the next iteration, it will work — okay, that's "work" for some definition of work. You just have to keep at it. I'm not saying stubbornly pursue the exact same idea you started with — that does not work. Iteration means truly taking market feedback and doing a real loop: "I'm going to do it or at least try to do it better the next iteration, the next iteration, the next iteration." But that's my approach: find an idea that I can like and then just get started. Often it'll be like, "Can I write code tonight?" Right now I've got three projects in flight that are these kind of scratch-my-own-itch AI projects, and I'm almost tempted to tell you what the three are because I will force you to launch them before this episode goes live... they can...

Sam Parr

"Give a **one-liner**, maybe for one or two of them."

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah, so one is around—it's like a **visual designer as an agent**. There are lots of great image-generation tools. ChatGPT has one, and there's *Nano Banana* [now from Google]. But what I've always found lacking is the actual **process** I go through as a non-designer and as a businessperson. If I'm doing a social media post or a blog post, I have a process: okay, I want to come up with visual ideas—what would represent this? Then I want to see ten possible examples, iterate, and then pick five. I want to create my own personal brand and style, and then apply that style to the content. There's this workflow I go through, and it's painful because I'm too impatient. I have access to designers—this is not a matter of saving money—but if I have an idea at 2:00 AM and I want to get the idea out there with a visual that goes along with it, I need to do it immediately. So that's the thing I'm building: it goes through my entire flow as an agentic process.

Shaan Puri

Do you have a name for it? I know you like to do names with the ideas.

Dharmesh Shah

I do. I'll put it out there — it's close to launchable. It's called "imagegen.ai."

Sam Parr

Is this going to be, like, one of your first or second times on *MFM*? Wordle was popular, and you said that you made a Wordle alternative. For those listening who don't know what Wordle is, it's a game—like Scrabble, whatever. Your side project—you just launched it, I think, with your son—was making **$80,000 per month** at the time. I have no idea where it's at now. Do you have any ambitions or guesses about where this will be in six months?

Dharmesh Shah

I don't know, actually. Part of it—we talked about this a little bit on the last couple episodes—is that I've been working, as part of my HubSpot hat, on the Agent.ai platform. It's basically a marketplace for agents: you can build agents, find agents, and hire agents to do these kinds of things. In the back of my mind I'm going to build this thing, but I'm building it as an agent that will live on the Agent.ai platform. The hope is that if the utility is high enough, either it will drive a bunch of users to Agent.ai—which is now up to **2,000,000 users**, which is awesome—or, someday, agents on the platform will be monetized. For me, it has to pass a simple litmus test: if this thing already existed, would I pay $5 a month for it or $10 a month for it? The answer is yes. I actually posted on LinkedIn about the product roadmap yesterday. I didn't disclose the name, but I explained what I'm building and what it's going to do. Right now it's stupidly simple things. For instance, when you generate an image that contains text—which a lot of business images do, like a headline or some other copy—the image models have gotten better at text but are still not perfect. One thing I want to do is: if you generate an image with text, pass that generated image back through AI and ask, "What text is on this image?" If there's a typo, just rerun it. Don't waste my time by giving me images with typos and then telling me, "By the way, you misspelled this." By the time it reaches me, it's already fixed. It's like having an intern do this work in the background. I show up and there are ten options for me to pick from. I can choose one, it will run in my style, and it will be without typos. That sounds minor, but it's useful.

Sam Parr

Sean, do you want to ask him some of these other questions? You had some pretty good ones, like the "request for startup" or his "ChatGPT history."

Shaan Puri

"Yeah, well, I'll do the **ChatGPT history** one. I'm just curious: you run a huge company, you're also kind of a *scratch-your-own-itch* guy, and you're an investor—you wear many hats. I'm just curious how you use **ChatGPT**. If you were to pull up your ChatGPT and looked at the last five to seven searches or questions and answers you did, what are you talking to ChatGPT about?"

Dharmesh Shah

I'm a huge **ChatGPT** fan—don't get me wrong, and even if I were an investor in **OpenAI**, the way I consume ChatGPT is not through the app. I use their API, so I have my own command-line interface that I use. There's a reason I do this. The next big advancement we're going to see in AI apps generally is this notion of *memory*—that they remember. As you've been using ChatGPT, you'll find it remembers more and more things about you, even things you mentioned a week or a month ago. It's the best out there at retaining that memory, which is awesome. The downside is that that memory is locked into ChatGPT. If you ever go to **Claude**, **Gemini**, or something else, those models won't have that memory of you. That's very frustrating, which is great for OpenAI because it makes the product very, very sticky.

Shaan Puri

"Well, wait — so your personal version that you're running in your command line has better memory than **ChatGPT**. Why? Why does that—how'd you do that?" </FormattedResponse>

Dharmesh Shah

Oh, because it has **infinite memory**, and what makes it the better memory is that it's under my control—it's my memory. For instance, I can go off and say, "I want to go back through," and I have this for my email as well, which I think is just another form of memory. I have an email archive, and I have like two and a half million emails in my "quote unquote" memory. I can go back and say, through my ChatGPT history, "here's the thing I'm actually trying to kinda get to," and then I can combine that with other things. I can take that memory—it's like, now I want to pass that to Google Gemini or intersect it with Google Gemini, which does video analysis a lot better than ChatGPT does (ChatGPT doesn't do video analysis yet). It's the openness of it, right? That's the motivation for it. It's not that I can do memory better; it's the fact that I can do more things with it because I can intersect it with other apps. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

"But why isn't this the product? Because I think *everybody* would want this, right?"

Sam Parr

"Yeah, give me that."

Dharmesh Shah

Okay — I have three rules of business. **Rule number one:** never own a piece of a restaurant. Never be a shareholder in a restaurant. **Rule number two:** never be a landlord, because I don't even want to maintain my own properties, let alone properties on behalf of other people. **Rule number three:** never compete with Sam Altman from OpenAI. Those are my three rules. That would violate the third rule, which is I don't want to create a ChatGPT competitor. But where will this manifest? HubSpot is building memory into our Breeze Assistant — you know, our AI product — and so that's going to happen: localized memory in terms of use-case specifics. I don't want to create a consumer app that tries to solve this for a broad, horizontal group of people. But I think, over time, the industry will evolve where there will be some form of federated memory. I think that will say, "Oh, you can plug into this," similar to how we plug into Google Docs, Gmail, and other things. OpenAI may not own absolutely everything, but right now someone needed to build the memory. I think they did the right thing; it was not diabolically planned to be that way. It was just, "Oh, this would be a better product if it had memory," so they added memory.

Shaan Puri

Right, okay... but you didn't answer my full—my full question. You said don't use the **ChatTV** app. I use it through the **API** on my own little thing you've created, which has better memory. Okay, but what do you use it for? What's the last few things you've used it for?

Dharmesh Shah

So I do it a lot for research. I'm researching ideas, and I use it a lot for domain names, as it turns out. I have a tool that can actually look at **Google Trends**, so I can say, "Oh, I've come across this idea for a domain name—here's the price." I can look that up in the marketplace right now. I can look up the transaction history: has this domain been sold before? What was the last purchase price? It's like **Zillow** for domains. One of the agents I'm also working on will launch this week. What I want to do is say, okay, *vibe coding* is a good example. It's like—once Andrew Karpathy... I was actually part of that—but sometimes I'm a little bit late to the game. I see a trend kind of picking up and I want to know: who coined the term? What is it? What domains are available and what's the price? Are any of them listed or not? Is any one just free and clear—no one's taken it? As it turns out with *vibe coding*, I was early, but late enough that someone had already kind of purchased the .com domain.

Shaan Puri

By the way, **"vibe coding"** would fit your inbound framework. If I'm Replit or one of these companies right now, I'm creating the **"vibe coding"** movement — you know, the community, the events, the blog, and all that.

Sam Parr

Like, yeah.

Shaan Puri

I have the tool underneath that you could use, but you could use many others, right? Or maybe Supabase [unclear: "super based"] or one of these other companies—like putting it behind that the way you've done with *inbound marketing* would be smart right now.

Dharmesh Shah

I'll tell you what. I will—I will sacrifice this idea. *Not for free*, but... The idea here—this was the original idea behind it. So I paid six figures for that domain. That's, I think... I'm—what?

Shaan Puri

"Vodecoding.com — or what did you get?"

Dharmesh Shah

**vibecoding.com.** Okay — really. Oh my God, the idea: I've logged hundreds of hours doing what some would call *vibecoding*. There are other terms, like *agentic coding*, which I think is a more accurate term, but it doesn't have the same vibe as *vibecoding*; it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. And just in case, I own that one too, but that's a different story. I think **vibecoding.com** is a great idea. It lowers the bar and allows lots of non-developers to get into the product-building game. The problem is — and I would bet lots of money on this — that almost everyone who is not a developer by trade will use vibecoding if they're trying to build a real product. There's a class of problems that vibecoding is really, really good at. For example: if you're building software for yourself; if it has a short lifespan; if it's disposable software; or if you're building it just for your team (you only have to make it work for three people and if it stops working, no big deal). But as you start violating some of those criteria — if you want to build a production product, build a billion-dollar software company that's going to be long-lived, and you're going to be maintaining this product one year, three years, five years, ten years down the road — vibecoding will inevitably paint non-developers into a corner. They will hit some bug, something won't work, something will break. It's just a matter of time, depending on how ambitious the project is. When that happens, it's entirely possible you actually have an economically viable idea but an unviable codebase, because you have no idea what's happening inside that black box. When that happens — not if, when — what if there were a community or marketplace called **vibecoding.com** where engineers hang out and offer help? They could say, "I'll answer minor questions for you, but also for $500 an hour I will jump into your GitHub repo, figure out your problem, fix it, add unit tests for you, and help you get through this corner you painted yourself into." I think that's going to be a massive market.

Sam Parr

"So you listed, I think, so you probably own between 500 and 1,000."

Dharmesh Shah

It's between 500 and 1,000. Yeah. Okay, so I could collect if...

Sam Parr

If I had unlimited money, I could probably collect 500 over ten years [500 domains]. You just have an idea and you buy it. What's crazy is a lot of these domains you have actually have projects on them. I'm looking at pitchcraft.com, opengraph.com, prompt.com, dadjoke.ai, and speedround.com. Speedround.com — it's an investment firm: a "check or no" in twenty-four hours [a yes/no investment decision in 24 hours]. Dadjoke.ai is a dad-joke generator that works, but not that well. You said you have three other projects you want to launch, but you also said, "I need this podcast to go out, and then I'm going to go and get it out," so I'm setting this up. Sean came up with the idea of being *generative*. This is the most generative I've ever seen someone. Which is: how do you have enough time to actually do all this?

Dharmesh Shah

Well, just to be clear: the list of domains I put in—I don't have sites launched on them right now. What I was trying to share (and I may just put this up publicly) is: here are my top 20 domains for which I have ideas, but I don't have the calories to actually pursue them. **Make me an offer** if you're interested, but you have to have *street creds*—something that gives me evidence you would actually be able to pursue the idea. I'll contribute the domain and maybe some capital to kick the idea off. To answer your question bluntly, Sam: my hours have not changed in the 30+ years I've been doing this as an entrepreneur. I still think of myself as an entrepreneur, despite being part of a $3,025,000,000,000 company for all intents and purposes. I mean this in the most positive way I can possibly put it: **I live in the matrix**. It's like—are we in a simulation or whatever? For me, my window into the world is little talking character people that sometimes just show up on this other screen I have up here in my office. I'm just trying to play the game. In the same way people play video games obsessively, this is my version of a video game. I did play video games a lot when I was younger too, and I really enjoy it. If I were a writer, my favorite writers are the ones who spend a lot of time on world-building and character-building. Especially sci‑fi and fantasy writers: they create an entire world that could exist, with its own physical laws, the species that live there, the powers they have. They fabricate this entire world out of thin air with words. I'm trying, in my own small way, to create a version of the universe that solves the problems I have—or the problems of people I love—that I can poke around at the edges. I want to make a version of the universe that I think is a **v1.1** of the universe that exists.

Sam Parr

Does your house work like that in your physical life? Like, in your day-to-day life, is your home life set up so that you've built everything about your life in your very particular way of going about things? Is it set up that way?

Dharmesh Shah

No — and I'm actually probably drawing the wrong visual picture. My life, if you just looked at how I live, is more like the *absent-minded professor*. My desk is completely messy. So it's not like I have an engineer's or scientist's setup with a white lab coat, a clean desk, and everything pristine. It's the exact opposite. This is just not how I work. I'm not that methodical about it. I'm analytical in some ways, but I actually play things very loose. I'll have a random idea and drop the thing I'm working on. I'll go play with something else for a day or two, and then I'll pick it up again. For example, I might stop working on something like *imagegen.ai* for a few days, and then I'll finish it and get it to some semblance of working. I've said this before, but it bears repeating: a really good piece of personal advice is that when a musician is out playing music and practicing — even if they're not practicing twelve to sixteen hours a day like some people do — or an athlete is practicing eight hours a day between games, we never question that. We're like, "Well, that's what it takes to be at the top of that particular game — music, sports, or whatever." For some reason, there's a stigma attached to work. There's also a stigma attached to making money from the thing you happen to be doing; people ask, "Why would he keep doing this for money?" I'm not doing it for money at all. I don't care about money. But I do enjoy the craft, the practice, and the actual process of building.

Shaan Puri

Have you ever heard of the famous clause that Michael Jordan put in his contract when he signed his big deal with the Bulls? They added a clause—I'm not sure if this was Nike marketing or if it was genuine—but at the time, if you were an NBA player signed to the max contract, there were all these rules: you can't ride motorcycles or do things that would jeopardize you as an asset to the team. One of them was that you couldn't just play random pickup basketball games on concrete with strangers—you might get hurt. Jordan had a famous clause he put in called the **"for the love of the game"** clause. It meant Jordan was allowed to play basketball anytime he wanted for the love of the game. I think that's a clause we all want in our own mental contract for how we do things. You had this great tweet where you said, **"If money doesn't let you do the things you love doing, why else would you want it?"** I thought that was so good. Oftentimes I talk to my mom or my sister and tell them about my buddy Furcon—Furcon was my cofounder of our last company. The company built before that, AppLovin, is now like a $100 billion company. Furcon's got all the money he'll ever need, right? They'll ask, "What's Furcon up to?" and I say, "Oh yeah, he built this lab called Founders Inc in Fort Mason and he's in there until 11 p.m. He's grinding; he's got a new startup." They say, "If I had the money I would never do that." Part of it is: you wouldn't. He's not doing it for the money; he's doing it because he wants to. That's why he got the money. First of all, you have it reversed—the money came because he is this way, not the other way around. Also, whether it's athletes or musicians, we find it noble when they do it, but if you're a businessperson, you're labeled greedy or a workaholic.

Sam Parr

When your mom says that, you're like, "Have a seat, Mom." </FormattedResponse>

Dharmesh Shah

"Pull up."

Sam Parr

A chair. You see **LeBron James**.

Shaan Puri

Are you familiar with Jordan's contract in '96, subsection three C's — the *For the Love of the Game* plug? She's like, "Oh, I just wanted to know if he has kids yet or not," right? Like, she's actually operating at a completely different level than me. Oh.

Sam Parr

Man, Darmesh — we love hanging out with you. I always leave better than I came in. I wish we could do this for many more hours because there are just so many different things about life and business that we can learn from you. We had Howard Marks on recently, and at the end it was the same thing. I was like, "Man, you came to talk about investing, but you're really just talking about how to live a good life." You're that guy. You kinda do the same thing. </FormattedResponse>

Shaan Puri

Where it's kind of funny: the kind of "legend" investors we have — they bring this philosophical energy of patience. Observe the world, stay calm. You know, "stay calm and carry on," or whatever. Darmesh and some of the builders have a slightly different energy. It's still philosophical, but it's more of a *let's make it happen* energy: "Let's build it — why not? We could do this, let's try this." It's okay if it doesn't work. It's a totally different, playful builder energy that I think is dope to be around. </FormattedResponse>

Dharmesh Shah

Yeah. Well, I... I have a tweet I almost sent yesterday, but I wanted to get my image generator working so I could attach it to this tweet. It's two lines I'm going to share with you. It's a *nice, warm* kind of closing, which is: > "Dance like no one's watching. Build like everyone's waiting." Nice.

Sam Parr

**We—quick plug.** One of the ways this episode came about was the marketing team at HubSpot saying, "We need you to promote this thing," and they told us to promote it. We're like, "Yeah, let's just have Dharmesh on the pod and maybe he'll plug it, because that's way better." But what is it—Loop Marketing?

Dharmesh Shah

**Loop marketing.** By the way, loop marketing is a new inbound marketing — that's what...

Shaan Puri

It is.

Dharmesh Shah

Is that your prediction? Learn about how to do marketing well in the modern age of **AI** — look up **Loop Marketing**.

Sam Parr

"*loopmarketing.com* — you own that one too, I guess."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we promised we would say it seven times, so: **"loop marketing, loop marketing, loop marketing."** Boom — quote ahead. Let's go.

Dharmesh Shah

They were like, "Could you..."

Sam Parr

Guys, read this ad or talk about it.

Shaan Puri

"Like the *white font on a white background* at the end of the pod." </FormattedResponse>

Sam Parr

You didn't even plug it, by the way. We asked, "What is the new inbound marketing?"

Shaan Puri

You called it "AEO."

Sam Parr

That's true.

Dharmesh Shah

That's true.

Sam Parr

Thank you. That's it — that's a pod.