Marketing School | Digital Marketing | Online Marketing

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil explains why he despises coaches who sell how to get rich, and Eric separates them from the Bill Campbells and Matt Mocharys who coached Apple, Google, Coinbase and OpenAI without charging founders. Neil reads a cold pitch promising him an extra million a year and Eric dissects why it fails before the first reply. Then the two ideas Eric wants every operator to react to: supermemory killed its viral company brain to protect its core, because unshipping matters more than shipping when anyone can build anything, and Paul Jun of Ramp's brand as software, where a design file carries the brand into every asset so designers do the new work. Neil's take on ChatGPT agent ads, and BugBasher, the Devin agent Ramp gave a card and a phone that made $75 selling pest-control leads in four weeks.

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eight Sleep's co-founder says the company does close to $100 million in email marketing with a team of zero after his co-founder built the bots in three days. Neil calls spades spades: email is harvesting demand that other channels paid for, and one person plus AI would beat both. Eric's version is the agent manager, the job he now interviews for. They scroll Harry Stebbings' Instagram, built on tech's most controversial stories, and debate whether that brings a VC the right deal flow. Eric demos Instinct, the $10 billion iMessage agent that planned his travel and got him onto a waitlist that morning, and the pair take apart Roy Lee's Cluely content and the cold TikTok bio a fan made of Neil. The close: Elon, Buffett and Rockefeller became brands by doing the work. A candid episode on he

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric opens with Bryan Johnson's team telling creators to forget the content calendar and iterate, and how he now rewrites and reposts flopped posts by voice on the walk to the gym. Neil's newest test asks viewers to comment for a free audit, and the pairing metric he wants on every social hire is leads, not views. Then enterprise specifics: a three-year contract that grew out of work in one region, why only two to three percent of NP Digital's enterprise revenue traces back to Neil's personal brand, and how ten-person search agencies quietly decide the biggest marketing contracts. Eric opens his Leveling Up channel to show the wide-TAM experiment, 8.9 million views on one short and interviews that got praise from entrepreneurs' spouses but no leads, before Neil explains the acquisition l

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric and Neil open on Meta Muse, Meta's new autonomous agent, and Neil explains why he trusts Meta with it more than OpenAI or Anthropic: Meta has held everyone's data for years and people already live inside its products. Eric shows what his own Muse did in minutes, pulling Ryan Deiss's best Instagram formats and rewriting them for his channel, and argues that formats are now the job. Then the real debate: Neil says almost all of their content is still too broad, that specific content for a specific buyer drives revenue even at a fifth of the views, and that a room of enterprise marketers in Ecuador proved it when two or three percent knew he ran an agency. They land on a secondary hook, one line that says who you are and what your company does, placed wherever it sounds natural. A prac

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire It took 64 clicks to buy a Tesla online, 30 of them signing loan documents. Eric explains the five-step algorithm from the book of the same name (question, delete, simplify, speed up, automate) and how it 20x'd Tesla's website sales. Then the data: AI-generated ads are beating human creative on completion rate (92% vs 90% on connected TV), Shopify's Q2 shows $116 billion in GMV and a platform built for AI agents, and Neil's case that SEO and GEO are merging into one thing, brand. Eric on the new agents he is testing, Instinct and Meta Muse, and the week's grand finale: Rohan Nayak's post on how Pocket FM went from zero to $500 million in ARR with an AI ad machine that makes 17,500 ads a month. Key takeaways◾Question, delete, simplify, speed up, then automate; most people automate first

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribeNeed marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hireEric and Neil open up their own marketing week. Eric's $250 test assignment that turned into a $2,000 quote, the GrokBots he built in his free time (a call bot that phoned a spa and confirmed a booking, a haggle bot renegotiating every software bill, and a speed-to-lead bot that calls every form fill within 60 seconds), and the 2x2 he uses to decide which agency work becomes a reusable workflow and which gets killed. Neil on speed to learning, why wins on one channel take too long to reach the rest of the company, and how he finds agencies that stopped growing and buys the ones losing deals only because they are too small. Then the social tests: Neil's new screen-share format and LinkedIn engagement scraping, Eric's comment-to-DM flow with Lead Shark and Goji Berry, and the YouTube video tha

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribeNeed marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hireNike's market cap peaked at $280 billion in 2021 and has lost $223 billion since. Eric walks through Trung Phan's breakdown of how it happened: McKinsey advised Nike to eliminate its running, basketball and soccer categories, the marketing budget moved from brand advertising to programmatic retargeting, and hundreds of wholesale partners were cut for a direct-to-consumer bet that collapsed when shoppers went back to stores. Neil on why consultants who never ran a business should not be running yours, and why a kid asking for Nikes is what good brand advertising looks like. Then LeBron James' Polymarket partnership and why both hosts call it brand eroding, and the shirtless YouTuber Eric calls the Sam Sulek of e-commerce. Key takeaways◾Nike cut what worked (categories, brand ads, retail part

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribeNeed marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hireWil Reynolds of Seer Interactive says agency owners are dishonest about how business is really going, and that most have been flat for three or four years. Eric reads the post and Neil agrees the downturn started around 2022 and is the longest he has seen, then explains why NP Digital kept growing anyway. Eric's take: the agencies dying are the ones still doing what they did five years ago, and tough markets are exactly when adaptable founders win the deals against the holding companies. The episode closes on the part of being a founder nobody talks about: watching the people you trained go on to build their own companies, why mindset separates the people who survive the downs, and why a business win feels the way it does. Key takeaways◾Be honest about how business is going; it keeps leads

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribeNeed marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hireEric asks Neil to finally explain digital PR and how it helps with AEO and SEO. Neil gets there via a Huawei phone with a screen on the back, how ByteDance ran AI inside Lark two years before the rest of us, where America really ranks in K-12 education (34th, per Google AI Mode), what China mandates instead, and the FOMO playbook behind Alpha School's marketing. Then the answer: digital PR is the new link building, you're optimizing for the mention, not the link, and you want your product included everywhere the models read. They close on the only marketing advantage that compounds: consistency. Key takeaways◾Digital PR is optimizing for the mention, not the link. That's what the models read◾America ranks 34th in K-12; China mandates 9 years and tracks 40% into vocational paths◾Consistency

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribeNeed marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hireNew Ramp data says 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise revenue comes from 1% of their customers, a concentration risk unseen in any other software category. Eric and Neil dig into what that means for the AI trade and for every company betting on it. Then Tomasz Tunguz's five-year writing data: AI didn't reduce his editing, it raised the quality floor, and the weakest posts gained twice as much as the strongest. Plus ICONIQ's headcount report (the 100%+ growers added 133% more headcount while the 50-100% band cut hiring almost in half), YC's product-market-fit data on user conversations, and a detour into foldable phones. Key takeaways◾1% of customers drive 80% of OpenAI and Anthropic's enterprise revenue. That's the risk◾AI raises the floor of your work, it doesn't shrink the effort◾10

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribeNeed marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hireEric introduces the new AEO: Autonomous Engine Optimization, the AI harness Nick Eubanks used to grow a 12-week-old website, and why every sales call and customer conversation inside your company is a page waiting to be published. Then the self-improving product has arrived: Amplitude's Wave agent found its own problems and shipped fixes worth +160% engagement and a 6% to 9% onboarding lift. Eric and Neil also pick apart OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra launch, the five things that took Andrew Warner's new YouTube channel to 937,000 views in a month, how B2B buyers now find agencies through Claude, and why the best salespeople sell like doctors. Key takeaways◾AEO now means autonomous: content creates, drafts and ships itself with a human in the loop◾Self-improving products are live: Wave found and fixe

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribeNeed marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hireEric came back from a founder retreat with a hard truth: the AI hackathons and training programs everyone planned in January didn't work, and the companies pulling ahead just raised the talent bar. He walks through the GitHub leaderboard that shows who's actually shipping, why one 200-engineer company is keeping only its top 40, and Neil's long-held view that you can't train mindset. Then the sycophancy trap: why ChatGPT agrees with whatever you feed it, what Neil found when he ran a real recommendation test across an accounting firm, and why most executives still don't understand how these models work. Key takeaways◾You can't train mindset. Raise the bar and hire people who already have it◾A public shipping leaderboard exposes who's really working in about a week◾AI is a sycophant. Optimiz

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire What do you actually do when things get really tough in business? Neil and Eric share their worst moments — 2020 included — and the playbook for surviving them: eating the elephant a day at a time, buying time with cash, and choosing stability over growth when it counts. Then the reveal that hot AI startups like Cursor quietly run thousands of ads at a time, and a five-star massage-studio case study on referrals, grandfathered pricing, and service details that carry over into any business. Key takeaways◾Tough seasons are survived a day at a time — systems over panic◾The hottest AI startups test thousands of ads, not two◾Great service businesses engineer referrals on purpose Chapters00:00 When things get really tough09:14 Stability vs growth15:56 The 6,400-ads reveal17:10 The massage-st

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric brings the DHH question — outspend or outteach? — and the hosts take sides on the cheapest marketing that almost nobody has the patience to do. Then it gets personal: why Bezos Expeditions invested in Basecamp, whether pressure makes winners, the hairy reality of agency M&A (data rooms, earn-outs, and numbers that never survive diligence), a tale of two agency contractors, and why revenue beats views every single time. A candid operator's episode on teaching, buying, and building agencies. Key takeaways◾Outteaching compounds — it's the free marketing nobody commits to◾In agency M&A, the seller's numbers never survive the data room◾Optimize for revenue, not reach Chapters00:00 Outspend vs outteach: the DHH question01:12 Bezos and Basecamp02:21 Pressure makes winners05:48 The agency

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric react to the report that Chinese institutions turned 171 million public X posts into a million-account digital twin of the American electorate — and are testing political messages on it. They unpack the marketing angle behind cognitive-domain warfare, why the data asymmetry between open and closed internets matters, the Paul Graham chart showing LinkedIn users adding AI and deleting DEI from their profiles, and why following trends is usually the losing move. A sobering look at what happens when audience modeling gets weaponized. Key takeaways◾Audience modeling at nation-state scale is here — and it's a marketing system◾Open platforms hand their behavioral data to anyone, including adversaries◾Profile trends follow incentives: AI in, DEI out Chapters00:00 China's AI model

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric dig into the two lessons Silicon Valley keeps relearning every decade, straight from Ben Thompson's conversation with Patrick O'Shaughnessy: consumers don't want to pay for software, and they don't care about being productive. They trace the pattern from Dropbox's forced pivot to B2B through to OpenAI replaying the same story at 100x scale, why advertising was always the endgame for ChatGPT, whether the SaaSpocalypse is real, and what the future of marketing looks like when AI knows your smartest moments. A sharp episode on where the money in software actually comes from. Key takeaways◾Consumers won't pay for software — advertising is the consumer endgame◾SaaS isn't dying, it's consolidating into B2B◾The next marketing frontier is reaching people in their smart moments Ch

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire It starts with a message Eric got about a team member's wife being hit by a car, and turns into the clearest thing either of them has said about keeping good people. Neil lays out how he thinks about founder retention after an acquisition, they debate what Single Brain should actually be, and Eric closes with the GrokBot marketing playbook. Key takeaways◾How you behave in someone's worst week is the retention strategy. Everything else is a policy document.◾Brand recognition you already have is worth more than the product name you are attached to.◾Multifaceted marketing wins now: shipping fast, engaging in public, DMing influencers and bundling. Chapters00:00 Looking After Your People02:20 Founder Retention Matters05:31 Building Single Brain08:56 GrokBot Marketing Playbook

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil asks Eric to name the two things he is actually doing for the rest of 2026, and the answer is less about tools than you would expect. Along the way they share their own survey of 100 companies on AI agent adoption, and the numbers are far below the hype. Neil also gives away the specific tactic he is using to get cited by ChatGPT and Gemini. Key takeaways◾Of 100 companies surveyed, only 17 use AI agents in marketing at all, and just 3.5% of their marketing staff.◾The fastest route into AI answers is getting into the same articles that already cite your competitors.◾Shipping constantly beats one big launch. Staying top of mind is the strategy. Chapters00:00 Marketing and Hiring Priorities02:55 What Counts as an Agent06:20 2026 Focus Areas10:43 Europe and Service Expansion

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Reddit's citations in ChatGPT have collapsed to almost nothing, and so have the review sites. Eric pulls up the PromptWatch data live and Neil reads what it means for anyone who built a strategy on those placements. Then they turn to the money side: how to underwrite a deal, what a creative agency is really worth, and what Sequoia's 'services are the new software' thesis does to agency valuations. Key takeaways◾Reddit and the big review sites have been almost entirely cut out of ChatGPT's citations.◾The marketer's job is shifting from ranking pages to being the source an AI quotes.◾Founder retention is not one structure. Name which model each founder is actually in before you buy. Chapters00:00 Reddit’s Decline01:57 The Marketer’s Shift04:14 Deal Underwriting Logic07:36 Valuing Creat

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Eric and Neil open on Travis Kalanick's take on founders, and end up somewhere much less comfortable: the research says the people pushed hardest early on are rarely the ones who end up best. They get into what founder drive actually is, why the two of them handle being crossed differently, how first-principles thinking changes a deal, and the Four Seasons founder's brutal one-line definition of excellence. Key takeaways ◾Being a founder is about pushing, not driving. The title on the org chart is not what makes it work. ◾Across 34,000 top performers, early standouts and eventual world-class performers are almost never the same people. ◾Excellence, per the Four Seasons founder, is the capacity to take pain. Suffering is built into the job. Chapters 00:00 Founder Drive