I think 95% of marketing agencies are effectively
complete scammers, right? Complete Cowboys running,
running a very bad operation that leaves their customers in a
very bad spot. There's a lot of reasons for
that, right? But if you look at how a
marketing agency would work, what they would do, they would
go spend a lot of money on outreach, paid ads trying to
acquire that customer. And the second they've acquired
that customer, almost in all cases, what they're going to do
is they're going to hire some freelancer, probably from a
third world country or you know, where they can arbitrage the, at
the cost of Labor and basically get them to do all the work.
And they just then collect the difference between what they pay
the that freelancer who then manages essentially a lot of
their accounts and does very, very subpar work because they're
poorly incentivized. And then the agency owner,
whatever sort of sits back before.
We dive back into today's conversation.
I want to share something important.
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Welcome to the King Dems podcast, where we share the
stories of extraordinary people and dissect hot, relevant topics
that shape our world. From visionary leaders to
trailblazing creatives, we uncover the mindset, strategy,
and grit behind greatness. Whether it's business, culture,
or personal growth, we ask the real questions.
This isn't just conversation, it's transformation.
The Kingdom's podcast, Your Next Breakthrough, starts here.
Music licensing reimagined the live Ladies and gentlemen, once
again welcome to the Kingdom's podcast.
And today I've got with me a very special entrepreneur
fighting out of Paris Friends by Wilson Francisco, United States
of America. Mick, welcome David Poquery.
How are you, David? I'm very well.
Thank you that thank you for the for the intro.
That was very kind. OK, you, you are a man that is
Chieftain, the way the business landscape is actually going to
be for the, I don't want to say for the foreseeable future.
You're changing it already, right?
Your changes the landscape and you know, leaking out your body
of work for me. I am actually very, very
impressed and I'm going to give you your flowers while you're
still alive. So David, you actually represent
a right. It's a section of private equity
rigor operation, you know operators CAS and frontier of AI
execution. We write for managing capital at
scale in a global private equity to build a full autonomous AI
system that runs Google Arts without human marketers,
agencies or PC funding over $35 billion per month in art spend
while remaining fully bootstrapped and founder owned.
This is not very. This is execution today we are
unpacking what breaks inside most marketing systems, why
agencies are failing businesses at scale and what founders must
understand about AI events before the bets they're good
from them. Ladies and gentlemen, once again
welcome David Fakery to the Kingdom spot cap and Dyer of the
CFO. So, David, you have actually
lived many lives, you know, from being a capital allocator to
being a system builder. And of course, you've actually
spent years inside private equity evaluating businesses.
The scale this is a business podcast.
So what patterns have you identified repeatedly that
you've seen that has convinced you that most companies actually
get operations wrong, right? What is it that is broken before
they become eventually financially broken?
A bit of, a bit of a tough question.
I think it always comes down to to people.
I think I love that often, often cases either there's, you know,
and actually when I say people often leadership, right?
Because the leadership will dictate the team and and the
team will dictate the business. So I think that's probably the
first thing that as an investor you would look at is who's
running of those particular functions And even, you know, we
ourselves, that's something I obsess about when hiring is the
quality of the team. Is it a good culture fit?
How motivated are they? What, what's motivating them
aside from earning money? Like there's a lot of things
that go into that, but I think ultimately, like it's always, it
always comes back to the quality of of the leadership team.
I love that the quality of the leadership team, you know, the
tone at the top is actually very important.
And of course, you know, when it comes to hiring, I myself, I'm
an early stage founder myself, you know, just in the first year
of my company and I've had to learn the lesson of hiring and
buying in a very, very hard way. And it has come down to three
things, mind skirts, mindset, skill set and tool set.
That is a lot of times we tend to evaluate the skill set of
these individuals that we watch collaborate with, but we don't
tend to evaluate their mindset, right?
The mindset is for me the most important thing.
Then the skill set and of course I'm them with the appropriate
tool sets. And Speaking of tool sets, you
have actually created an amazing tool set for founders to
actually use. And you know, we are in that age
where the agency model is being what I say being erased, right.
And of course because the agency model has actually helped mid
businesses to bleed a lot of money, they are expensive and
not as effective or efficient as the tool set that you have
created. And of course yourself you have
been vocal about how marketing agencies destroy value.
So what is the fundamental flaw in the agency model that most
founders still do not understand until it's too late?
Yeah, Yeah, it's a, it's a good question.
Look, this might sound a little harsh, but I think I can say
this now because. Bring it on.
Full authenticity, brother. OK, I'll keep it real.
I think 95% of marketing agencies are effectively
complete scammers, right? Complete Cowboys running,
running a very bad operation that leaves their customers in a
very bad spot. There's a lot of reasons for
that, right? But if you look at how how
market agency would work, the what they would do, they would
go spend a lot of money on outreach paid ads trying to
acquire that customer. Then the second they've acquired
that customer, almost in all cases, what they're going to do
is they're going to hire some freelancer, probably from a
third world country or you know, where they can arbitrage the,
the cost of Labor and basically get them to do all the work.
And they just then collect the difference between what they pay
the that freelancer who then manages essentially a lot of
their accounts and does very, very subpar work because they're
poorly incentivized. And then the agency owner,
whatever, just sort of sits back.
Now obviously there's different levels to that, right?
You have some agencies who are a lot more involved.
But typically, I think that's the big problem as well.
The economics often leave the businesses they work with in a
bad spot because they lock those businesses into long term
contracts, right? A minimum of three months,
minimum of six months. And if you break and you want to
stop working with us, then you're going to have to pay an
extra fee. So that already leaves things a
mess. On top of that, to even start,
let's say a marketing agency, you could start 1:00 tomorrow
with 0 credibility, 0 credentials, 0 whatever you
could start want to start taking on customers tomorrow, You can
make up some testimonials and just get going.
There's no governing body. There's no this or that The.
Regulatory, yeah. I would say and look, there's a
lot of exactly, exactly. So yeah, there's a lot of
marketing agencies in the world, a lot more than you or I would
would think to exist. And I think over a long enough
period of time, Grow Ass will put a lot of them out of
business because instead of paying your marketing agency,
you know, 3-4 KA month to set up your ad campaign once and do
nothing, right? Literally do nothing.
You can pay Grow as 10% of that and it will do everything and
it'll work for you 24/7. That's because we're using
autonomous AI to do it. So yeah, I think that a lot of
them are going to be in a lot of trouble.
What we're seeing though is a lot of them are just plugging in
their customer campaigns into Grow as not telling their
customers anything and then just charging them the difference.
That's what we're now seeing. Wow, You know, one of the major
issues or major controversies about AI is AI versus humans, AI
replacing humans. And of course, you've actually
viewed an AI that replaces humans.
So most founders actually viewed tools that assist humans, right?
How do you feel about you building AI agents that replaces
humans entirely? And of course, what problem was
so sleepy that that augmentation was not enough?
The question so look, grow as so V1, which was not full autonomy
was like a recommendations tool, right?
So it was something that people actually had to come in and use
and it was great. And it was there to increase
people's performance. And then whilst we had that,
we're like, OK, fine, we can actually do more.
And that's when we started building for full autonomy,
which is where we're at today, which is something that
genuinely replaces humans. It's not something you have to
use or log into or whatever, whatever.
It just runs and scales your campaigns for you better than
even a, a team of marketers can, right?
That's where we're at right now. There's a lot of work to get to
this point, but we're now there. Now the reason some people say,
oh, is this is this a bad thing? It's actually a good thing
because for the reasons I was saying earlier, 95% of the
industry is, you know, is filled with scammers.
Like we know this by the way, because our biggest customer
segment is people who fire their agencies and then move
everything to grass. OK?
During that process, we get to see what the hell these agencies
did to these poor customers. And it's a complete shit show
nightmare. And I'm like, this is insane.
Like my grandmother who's 90 years old, God bless her, she
could do a better job at running these campaigns.
And some of these agencies have done right.
Like it's insanity some of the stuff we've seen.
And these agencies will charge them 510K15 KA month for this.
So I think overall it's probably a benefit to business and to
humanity, I would say. Whoa, so fully autonomous AI
versus AI powered marketing. So there's actually like a lot
of noise out there around AI marketing tools.
There's a lot of garbage and you know, we believe a world of
imperfect information. You know, I studied economics
with my first degree and you know, when we're being taught
about the defense House of markets, you have the perfect
markets, you have imperfect markets.
In the perfect markets, there's type of information, you know,
everybody's well aware of the various factors, you know, that
impact the market, but that is not attainable in the real
world, right? And of course, like in simple
terms, like what is the difference between automation,
augmentation, true autonomy and like does that distinction
actually matter financially? Yeah, because look, we had,
that's what we started off with, right?
It's just like, OK, grow ass was pulling in lots of data and
giving insight and saying, OK, maybe you should do this.
You should add this keyword, remove this keyword.
We also did a whole bunch of stuff around dynamic landing
pages, which massively increased conversions.
We're doing all this cool stuff. But what we noticed was that
people like, this is great, but can you not just do it for me?
And that's when we're OK, there's something here and
that's when we take it to the next level.
Now, as far as I'm aware currently, right, we are
recording this in February 2026. As far as I'm aware, there is
nobody even remotely close to grow as when it comes to full
autonomy and Google ads campaigns, no one.
There's a plenty of, you know, AI recommendation tools, all of
these other bullshit softwares. We don't care.
We don't compete in that realm. Our competition is humans, teams
of humans. That's who we benchmark
ourselves against. We don't look at, you know, it's
not this word stream optimizer. All of these are great tools.
God bless them all the best. We don't compete that we are
like our number one metric is how much better are we than
humans at managing and scaling Google ads campaigns.
And I tell this to my engineering team every single
day. If people are logging into grow
as and actually using it, then we are failing at our job.
That's not how it should work. They should connect the campaign
once, sit back and then just wait for the the cash register
to ring. That's that's really our
business model. Well, interesting.
You know, you speak very passionately about scaling.
So, but then you've actually scaled to $35 billion monthly ad
spend without investors. So scaling that big right with 0
VC, 0 private equity, you know, and this is full ownership.
What systems thinking mistake forces founders to believe that
Excel capital is required even when it's often not required?
Good question. I'm very lucky that I used to
work in the investment industry, right?
So I work in private equity, but even before that I actually
worked in a couple of venture capital firms, right, First time
as an intern, next time was like a junior analyst.
So I know and understand that world very well.
I have very close friends of mine, personal friends who are
VCs full time. So I know that world super well.
And I think it's a very dangerous thing to do to go and
raise money. I think most.
Should. Absolutely yes I agree.
I think unless you're doing Elon level cool shit right where
you're trying to put rockets into space and you need $100
million upfront just to get the the info for that.
OK, you need money, go raise funding.
But I would say if you're doing some software company, whatever,
whatever, you should try and do your best to bootstrap that.
And if you need to raise money, like look into alternative
sources, but the VC game is mostly rigged.
It's a very tough thing to do. I think it puts you more at risk
than less at risk, in my opinion.
Because what most founders don't get is the second you do that
deal with the devil, you are now committed to growing 20% month
to month, 10% month to month, whatever it is.
If you don't hit those targets, you will not be able to raise
more money. OK.
And then what happens is you now have a structurally unprofitable
business that is burning cash every month because you're
investing in growth. You're not going fast enough.
So no one wants to invest in you.
And therefore you close down for business, even though you may
have had a perfectly good product, a perfectly good team,
all of that, all of that, you're basically a little screwed.
So yeah, my thoughts on VC is I was very stubborn from the very
start of grass that and we get approached by the way, by VCs
24/7. I get probably one a day.
E-mail me or or connected me on LinkedIn and I tell them to to
basically go look elsewhere. So I've been very stubborn about
trying to keep 100% ownership. Well, interesting stuff, you
know, I like the way you frame it because myself I have a
background with the peak for accounting fans.
I'm an ex auditor, you know, PWCKPMG and I have had that, you
know, would I say privilege, the opportunity to be able to audit
different organizations, you know, across but from startups
to PLCS to meet tier companies. And I see the same thing that
leverage forces founders to to to make mistakes, you know, on
1st errors basically, right. And like you rightly said, it's
like dining with the devil. You get it and then you'll be
forced. I've had AVC on, on this
forecast report. And, you know, he said something
about like what makes a company interesting to them is double
digits profits. If you're not making double
digit profit, right, you're not interesting to to AVC.
And yeah, we understand they're in the business of, you know,
growth, but it's not the natural flow for every type of pieces.
Take Uber, for example. Uber was not profitable in the
past couple of years, right? They had to get that structure
properly. Some companies have to iterate
over time, right? And of course, when you're not
in an industry that has ethical concerns versus profit concerns
or what do you do, you stock in a dilemma, right?
So I really want for you to would I say expand on the the
dangers of having that PC money too early, especially too early.
At some point, you know, if you if you want to scale up, you
have maybe very big expansion plans, it might make sense.
But for me, my philosophy is having that PC money too early
is a very, very big danger. I don't know what you would like
to expand on in that regard. I mean, of course it is, right?
Because then you're going to be less cautious with spending
because it's not your money, right?
But I think ultimately the, the big issue I see is people
celebrate raising money as some kind of achievement.
Like you've just sold the percentage of your company at a
discount for like for no reason. And let's be clear, you've done
nothing. And then they, and then they
parade on social media, we raise that, you know, 20-30 mil
valuation. That's a nonsense valuation,
right? I could sell 0.01% of grass for
like, let's say AK and now I'm worth a billion.
Like, what are we doing here? So I think a lot of people don't
seem to understand that. They seem to think that
valuation actually means something in the real world.
The only thing that matters in my opinion is what are your,
what are your customers saying about your product?
That's like the best predictor of success long term is, are
people really enjoying what what you're building?
How's your retention? Like that's something I obsess
about is are we retaining customers well enough?
And if someone ever churns like I will, I will lose sleep over
it. It really pisses me off.
Yeah. And then the other thing as well
the other people miss is there's different like classes of shares
when you raise right. Yeah, exactly.
And VCs have to get paid out first.
So there's so many cases where you'll see an exit of like $100
million. Exactly.
Yeah. And the founder leaves with
maybe a couple mil at best. And so you've just done all of
that and you just got screwed over.
So yeah, look, my, that's my take.
I'm obviously quite anti here, but it obviously has its
benefits as well. I think it's that case by case.
Yeah. And you know, I think I'd like
to quickly bring in or weave in the fact that we now have a lot
of cases of founders being fraudulent.
At this morning, I woke up to the headline of Forbes 30 under
30 founder from Turkey. I'm not going to mention her
name. No, she's female.
You could go check it out. And then actually, but she
actually defrauded investors awful lot of money.
And it's it's crazy. We like think valuations and all
that stuff. So it gets really dirty
sometimes, right? You know, coming back to the
investor lens, right? We are the humans you know most
consistently introduce inefficiency.
Buyers waste inside a paid acquisition system.
That's tough one. It's tough because there's so
many variables that go into this, right?
So if you want a good, good Google Ads campaign, that's not
one thing. There's like 1000 different
things you need to be optimizing and tweaking 24/7.
Is your landing page good? OK, what's in that?
What should be in that landing page?
There should be some social proof and testimonials while
you're offering like there's a million things that go into just
the landing page, right? Then the checkout flow then.
So that's just like the landing page side.
Then inside Google Ads, there's like a million different things
as well that you need to be tweaking and optimizing.
Most people, I would say in Google Ads, what do they get
wrong? Like the number one thing I
think that I see is keywords getting the keywords wrong.
They go in and they had like 1000 keywords and like a $20
budget campaign per day. That's just complete lunacy,
right? It's just like lighting money on
fire for no good reason. So like if I had to sum it up,
because we've seen a million different things go wrong and
there's a lot you have to optimize, but typically it's
people are choosing the wrong keywords.
And obviously grass does a really good job with it and
helps in whatever, whatever. But that's like the number one
biggest issue I think across the board.
Oh, Speaking of landing page, you always need to keep tweaking
things. I said tweaked something on my
landing page before I I jumped on this interview.
So that speaks that hit a home run.
Let's talk about the 30 to 40% of revenue deep, right.
You've actually stated that e-commerce brands routinely lose
30 to 40% of revenue through avoidable mistakes.
So what are the top mistakes that quietly destroyed the
margin without founders even though just in?
Yeah, I mean, so the first one is what I touched on is, is
keywords being completely wrong and therefore you're wasting a
whole bunch of of spend for no reason.
Actually, the other thing as well is negative keywords is
another thing in Google Ads where most people have none and
therefore you're showing your ads to people who are not going
to convert anyway or getting clicks for them that people are
not going to convert anyway. That's costing you money.
The other thing as well, which is quite problematic is the ad
quality itself. Most humans suck at writing
good, good copy. It's really hard.
Now, that's obviously something that we've trained grass to do
very, very well. It's a very important part of of
selling things online is how well you can convince somebody
to like how well you can convince somebody to actually
buy your product right from cold traffic.
Not easy to do. But I think copy and writing
good copy both at the ad level and the landing page level is
also something that's super important.
And then finally, you know what unconventional answer, but it's
going to be patience, patience. A lot of people get this wrong,
right? Because if you've never on
Google ads before, the big mistake we see is people think,
OK, I'm just going to throw 10 KA day at this and it it it's
going to make me a bit, I'm going to be profitable.
No, like it takes time, right? Tweaking an offer, tweaking your
campaigns until it reaches that sweet spot.
Yeah, exactly. So tweaking and getting
everything right and optimizing everything until it reaches that
sweet spot where you're just printing money on autopilot
could take months. It can take weeks.
It depends case by case, but I would say patience is a very
underrated factor in the game. Patience is key.
Patience is a virtue. Let's talk about trust.
We are in the attention economy and people actually buy based on
trust, but a lot of founders actually share that loss of
control with autonomous systems. So how should leaders think
about trust, ethical guardrails, and accountability when AI is
making decisions faster than humans can ever do?
Yeah, well, I think it's just inevitable, OK, Because it just
comes down to a, to a profit question effectively, right.
Like, yeah, things aren't going to be perfect for a little bit,
but in some industries they already are, right.
Software engineering, we already have AI that can write code far
better than humans far quicker. That's that's already happened
some places taking longer to catch up.
But it's just completely inevitable that this is going to
happen over time. And it becomes for business
owners, it becomes like a a profit question, right?
Do you want to employ 10 humans to look at something or employ
an AI for 1% of the cost? It might make some errors
initially, but over time it's only going to get better and
better. Yeah, it's effectively that
that's where the board is heading for.
For better or for worse, the trainer started and there's
there's just no stopping in at this point.
I'll tell you something, child Chippity is my legal consultant.
You know, the best legal, the best legal consultant in the
world for just $20.00 a month. I don't think any lawyer charges
that. You know, I'm going to pick
your, I'm going to pick your investor braid right now.
If you were still seating on, you know, the investment
committee today, what would you look for in an AI company that
most investors still miss out on?
At what stages is it like a very under staged AI company or is it
like a mid stage or like what what stages are?
Interesting. So so let's break it down.
Early stage. Mid stage.
Yeah, I mean, early stage, the only thing to even look at in my
opinion is the founders. You invest in good founders that
that's what it is, right? You have to assess the potential
of those individuals. Is it a team?
How well do they work together? If it's just one person?
Well, they better be very driven because solo founding, as I know
myself, it's going to come with a lot of punches in the face.
So that can you can you handle it well?
But effectively at an early stage, the only thing to be
thinking about is how good is that team?
Because markets change, your products going to change like so
many things are going to evolve over time that you couldn't have
possibly foreseen. But how well those individuals
adapt to the situations is like the only, in my opinion,
determinant of success. And like, how do you assess?
How do you assess humans? That's really tough, actually.
VCs typically will default to, oh, they went to a good school,
therefore we should fund them, which I think is mostly BS.
It has a bit of truth to it, and I get it right to an extent, but
it's also mostly BS. Not everyone who goes to
Stanford is going to start a Unicorn.
That's just ludicrously. Absolutely.
So yeah, there's a lot of factors.
Yeah, there's a lot of factors that get into it.
But effectively at the earlier stages, you're just looking at
the the founding team, maybe the motivations, like why they did
what they want to do. If they're doing it just for
money, by the way, I don't think that's actually a bad answer.
That's fine, right? If you're, if you're money
hungry, maybe you're going to work harder than somebody who
isn't, right? And somebody's just, and
somebody's just like, you know, I want to make the world a
better place, which is also mostly BSA.
Lot of people say the world a better place.
It's just some nonsense in my opinion.
So yeah, look into the motivations.
How well do they know the problem they're tackling in my
opinion is like, one thing I look at is like, you're doing
this, but why? Like what attracted you to try
to do this particular thing? How well do you know the space?
In my case, I knew Google Ads very well from running E com
stores over the years. And I knew that there was a lot
that was broken and I wanted to do better myself.
So that's where it came from, right?
So Google Ads was like a, a pretty natural thing for me to,
to try to tackle. But if somebody has worked in
chemical engineering their entire life and then tomorrow
wants to start an AI for for law firms, I'm going to ask them
like why they they need some good reasons.
I actually very, very much agree with you.
You know, they say experience is the best teacher.
It's always good to be armed with that experience.
And by the way, people call me AI because my government name is
AI Ademola EC member. That is my name.
So I don't know what my parents saw and said a three years ago.
They must have seen something other people did not see, right?
But I look at it, I have always thought like somebody who's
prompting, even right from my days of the beaker accounting
firms, now the LLMS are popular and he feels like, oh, AI is the
next big thing. But we've actually been using AI
for a long time, but we've actually been thinking in this
way. So basically AI is just a
multiplier. It accelerates the way in which
you think. And for me, I, I feel like the
people who are brilliant, efficient, who only become more
efficient and the people who are, you know, the other side
would also, you know, because basically AI is just a multiply.
It either multiplies, it multiplies your intelligence or
multiplies your foolishness. So it depends on your value
you're standing on, right. And when it comes to a founder's
identity, every founder has a unique journey, right?
But a lot of founders actually struggled emotionally when the
systems that they have created outperformed them.
So what is that mindset shift that is required to move from
being the smartest person in the room to just being the architect
of intelligence? No, I much, much rather prefer
to be in the second right, even architecting that it's not being
in the treasury 24/7 doing things you.
Know why is the minor shift brother?
Doesn't make you smart. It does.
But yes, yes, also I think you need money as well to do that.
And it's also, it's also hard to do because hiring, well, hiring
is really hard. But yeah, I mean, I still
myself, for example, will do a lot of sales calls with, you
know, important customers that would possibly on board.
I don't necessarily enjoy doing that, right?
I think in maybe a couple of months, hopefully I can find
someone who's much, much better than me to do these calls.
It was much more convincing, who knows, for them to know grow ass
better than I do. Will take a lot of time,
obviously. But yeah, like that's the stage
I think we're at. By the way, as a company, we're
still quite early. We've been going for like, what,
7-8 months now? But yeah, we're slowly going to
move there. If I had more capital, if I'd
raised whatever 510 mil and had more capital, I probably would
have done this earlier. But yeah, that's it's, it's
essential to do. It's absolutely essential.
Otherwise you don't have a business.
You just have a, a job with lots of different customers, lots of
different bosses you have to answer to and you don't have a
business. So you need to, in my opinion,
do that, get to that ASAP. That's that's what a business
really is. I love that.
So before I let you go, I'm going to put you through the
rapid fire questions. But before there are a quiet
fire questions, I remembered something you told me, you know,
the first time we indeed get to meet, you told me about how grow
us is just grade on the search engine.
So I'd like for you to expand on the like, like Grow us is just
great. Like white fire right now on the
search engine. I think probably on YouTube or
like Google, the Google search engine.
Oh. Right, yes, So I mean all our.
For context, one thing I haven't mentioned is we still grow as we
haven't done any marketing so far.
We haven't run any paid ads. We haven't really done any cold
outreach. We have done nothing so far.
All of our signups, all of them come from 85% of our signups
come from LLMS referring grow as the best solution.
So someone will type into ChatGPT, hey, how do I optimize
my Google ads? And then ChatGPT will say you
should use grass and then people will sign up.
So that's like that's 85% of our signups, which is great.
That's fully organic. We do nothing for that.
The other 15% is existing customers telling other
customers, telling other their friends that whatever, hey,
look, we're using grass. It's great.
Just sign up. The reason this is quite, it's
tough, right? We're in a difficult position
because I want that number to be higher.
I should be higher than 15% of people saying, hey, the reason
they don't, and I know this, I've been told this is I've
asked some of our customers, hey, could you give us some
testimonials And they refuse. And you know why they refuse?
Because they don't want their competitors to know they're
using grass or the agencies. I saw that on your websites to
know these grass like. I saw that on your website.
Happens very often where they just want to keep it secret.
Yes. That permits me to expose you.
So guys, I've got to read what I saw on gross website.
You know this client actually says to David, he says, hey
David, thanks a lot for the opportunity.
I really appreciate you thinking of me.
This might sound a bit selfish, but grass looks so powerful to
me that I'm honestly a little afraid my competitors might
figure out I'm using it as that, using it against me as well.
So for now, I think I'll have to pass purely out of fear rather
than lack of appreciation. Sorry about that.
And of course, sorry, David, I have to expose you on the other
podcast. So yeah, there you go.
There you go. That happens very often.
Wow it. Is one of the.
Congratulations on on the success, brother.
It's, it's quite interesting what, what this LLMS do.
I had a message from somebody earlier today telling you that
I, I searched you on Google and do you know what Google AI is
telling me? OK, two people actually detailed
me today. One of them told me the AI
refers to you as AI. And I'm like, OK, interested,
interested. I have to start making money
from this name AI. And the second person told me,
guess what, Google AI is referring to you as a Joe Rogan
of Africa. I'm like, wow, I never knew.
And then it sent me a screenshot, and then it put a
smile on my face. So put some respect on my name.
You know, the Joe Rogan of Africa.
Very cool. We're shooting for that top 1%
yet currently, the two podcasts, you know, are global top 2% and
global top 3%. And yeah, hopefully this year
we're shooting into the top 1% in the world.
Big fire round here we'll go. 5 questions, very big answers.
Let us go. Are you ready to rumble?
Hey, number one, what is 1 metric founders?
What is 1 metric founders obsessed over?
That does not matter. So off we kind of touched on it,
but maybe, maybe money raised maybe.
Maybe I. Don't know, is that the amount
of money they're raised? OK, I'll give you, I'll give you
online that I always use revenues, vanity profits,
insanity. Cash is reality.
How about that? True, true, but there are
exceptions. I think if your if your revenues
genuinely just skyrocketing, like genuinely like just doing
boom, then maybe some losses can offset it.
It's you know, that's that's actually a really difficult
question. I'm trying to think what I look
at. OK, how about this?
How about this? Social media followers is my
answer. Oh yeah.
God bless you. I love that I love that I love
that bro let me tell you something I, I, I, I know I know
somebody who has like over 10,000 followers and LinkedIn
and this girl has never made a dime.
The next question of the rapid fire will be what is what metric
founders ignored that decides survival?
Easy, John. John #1.
Oh, OK, OK, yeah, back to the story I was telling you right.
I don't have many followers in LinkedIn, but I get a lot of
inbounds saying, oh, I want to I want to be on your podcast and
you know, guys pay me to talk to me from LinkedIn, from socials.
Yeah, right. Yeah, I don't have many
followers. Instagram I probably have like
5000 followers, right? The people who have 100K plus
followers but they don't make are dying off these people.
So I I very much agree with you that that metric is is a vanity
metric. What is the biggest lie sold
about AI in marketing? Oh, that's tough.
Biggest lie about AI? Well, I mean, we are.
I think when I'm what I mean, I hope we're not selling any lies.
I don't think we do. So I'm trying to think of other
players. Guys go to gross that AI to
check either. Any lies?
It's tough. I don't know.
Truthfully, I don't really look at what are the, you know,
companies like. I just focus on us.
That's really all my focus is on.
I don't know. It's hard to say.
Biggest lie about AI in marketing?
OK, The biggest lie is that it won't replace humans.
It will. That's my answer.
Interested in it #4 What is the hardest thing to let go of when
automating growth? No, the hardest thing to let go
of when you are automating growth.
OK. Interview, interview, interview,
interview, interview. Yeah, yeah.
Sorry. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah.