Founder - building managed company brains @ singlebrain, ad agency @singlegrain, Investor. Member: @YPO Beverly Hills Podcaster: Marketing School, Leveling Up
Joined April 2010
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Press releases with clear subheadings got 61% more AI citations.
New data from Notified (GlobeNewswire): ~26,670 releases, 850,000+ citation events from ChatGPT and Claude.
vs. the average release:
- Topical subheadings: +61%
- Link to your own site: +57%
- "First of its kind": +60%
The twist: 56.4% of AI citations land more than a week after release. Up from 48.4% in April.
Vendor data, correlations only. But AI reads like a skimmer.
Write subheadings that state the point. Link back to your site. Measure for a month, not a day.
This is my sales call prep @bot, and the template is free 👇
- reads the calendar invite before every important call
- pulls the account from our CRM and our email with them
- checks what the team said about them in Slack and in our last call notes
- hands the rep a short card on where the deal stands and what needs a decision
- writes the follow-up after the call and leaves it in drafts
- won't send rouge emails out
Here's the sales call prep bot, Pre-Call Intelligence, free on Skills Dojo. Import it into your Grok Bot and connect your calendar and CRM first 👇
skillsdojo.com/templates/yQR…
Someone on a recent webinar of mine: "I'm spending $500 a day on tokens."
Me: dude, just buy yourself a ChatGPT Max account.
He didn't know.
Someone else on the same webinar was spending $10,000 a month on his own. After watching some of my stuff, he cut it to $3,000.
How many people are spending like this?
Pay-per-token makes sense for products and automated workloads at scale. For one person doing their own work, a flat plan is often way cheaper.
Neil's point: token costs keep dropping, because most people don't need the newest model for most work. And $20 a month goes a long way now, as long as you can show the output.
This is deflationary. Costs come down, and people learn to spend better.
Quick audit: list every tool and API key, split personal use from automation, put routine tasks on cheaper models.
Get disciplined early. Put the savings into work that moves revenue.
ericosiu retweeted
The most important book right now for understanding company building in the age of AI is about an agent... a hollywood one... Ari Emanuel's book ('roll the calls') -- there are TWO key lessons from it (one simple, one a bit more nuanced but even more important...)
The two:
First - the easy but important point... it is all sales right now as software commodifies, and the real lesson of first half of the book is simple -- as software commodifies and everything is just sales, if you get a 'no' call the next day... over and over and over... be relentless and keep asking til you get the answer you want. This mentality has historically not been in software / tech CEO DNA, but as the leverage of being 'unique genius' gets destroyed by arms-dealing AI / commodification of expertise (and certainly software) -- the winners are storytellers and salespeople.
Second - the more intellectual but even more important point - WHAT AGENTING REALLY IS? Why does anyone pay an agent... for trust / the relationship. What do agents do? Whatever the clients need / everything - not one thing. Why this matters? it totally changes business building. In a world where tech is 'hard' being a leader is figuring something out about the universe, building an advantage around that competency, and doubling down over and over on your 'advantage' in providing something specific. No more... whether for consumers or for companies...
if you are a 'business' in an agentic world, your asset it TRUST of your client, and you do as much for them as you can / anything (also send them random gifts). Your job is to get in the door, become trusted, and then pick up more and more business doing whatever the customer needs. This means the mission is SERVICE not PRODUCT or MISSION. The asset is the 'relationship' ... and the winners do everything they can for their clients.
If you are building a modern business right now - this reality changes everything from how tech companies were built over the last 20 years or so... mission is less important, top-down vision is less important, instead what matters is sales, clients, and being flexible with 'free to develop' software and services to SOLVE problems for your actual specific customers.
It this GOOD for most (startup) business... probably not.
Agents get fired all the time, there is less enterprise value in what they build, etc... also per Ari's book, in the agenting world, scale is everything -- but from a technological deterministic perspecitve... this is where we are going, and founders that understand that (relenteless sales, how do i get in the door with something and build trust, and then what I 'do' is everything ... will be the RELATIVE winners)...
Pro @bot tip: Get yourself a Bot Improver grok bot.
Grok bots are powerful enough to help run your entire business.
But the more you have doing work, the harder it gets to know what’s actually working.
Your chief of staff coordinates the bots. Your Bot Improver checks whether they’re getting results, including the chief of staff.
Think of it as a weekly health check: Is each bot doing useful work, focused on what matters, and moving its number?
My Bot Improver @bot tells me every week which of me bots are working.
Add it to your Grok Bots, connect your tools through SingleBrain Gateway, then say...
"Every Monday, check each of my bots and automations against the number it's supposed to move. Give each one a verdict: working, fixed or needs you. Only use counts from my tools. If one is missing its number two weeks in a row, fix it or tell me to shut it down. Bring me only the fixes that need my call."
Steal mine below👇
ericosiu retweeted
I let AI run my YouTube without my taste on it.
Result: ~1,000 views a video.
A month earlier, writing them myself: 13,000 to 20,000 views. Same channel, same audience.
It's everywhere:
- Ad creative for clients: can't let the AI run alone.
- AEO/SEO content: still needs an editor.
- My X: Max used the X skill on autopilot, reach dropped. He started writing in his own voice again, reach came right back.
- Cross-posted videos: 1K on autopilot vs 15-20K when I write.
You still need the human in the loop.
If anyone tells you AI has already figured it all out, run in the other direction.
Neil's take: the key is adapting. Figure out where AI is weak and where it's strong, and don't drink the Kool-Aid.
AI plus taste beats either one alone.
AI-only content usually isn't bad. It's average. Average gets buried. Your taste is the part AI can't fake yet.
A-players only want to work with A-players.
And A-players today are AI-native.
Therefore, AI-native players only want to work with A-native players.
multiple big tech companies have essentially one (very well paid) person who really knows how to use AI, and this “AI fixer” is their great hope — taking on projects and educating others.
problem is, some don’t have anyone, and a lot of those frontier people would rather work in a broadly AI-native company and find out what a team of people going this fast can do
Send this to your Grok @bot and every evening it will tell you which of your posts to make again.
We run a version of this on my account every weekday evening. It checks each post against my usual numbers and flags the ones worth repeating.
Copy this:
"Every weekday at 6 PM, check how my X posts are doing. My handle is @[yourhandle].
1. Pull my posts from the last 30 days with views, likes and bookmarks, and work out my median views.
2. For every post that's 24-72 hours old, compare its views to that median.
3. Any post at 3x my median or more is a winner. Tell me what it did (format, first line, image) and give me 2 follow-up ideas that reuse the format with something new to show.
4. If a format has missed my median 3 times in a row, tell me to pause it for 2 weeks.
5. Keep it to 5 bullets. If nothing changed, send nothing.
Read only. Never post, reply or edit anything."
You get one short note each evening: your winners, two follow-up ideas for each, and the formats to rest for a while.
Thorsten Ball's best AI advice: be unreasonable.
You're not working with humans anymore. Things that would be unreasonable, over the top or downright rude to ask a person, you can ask AI for now.
His examples:
- "Test this end to end. Again."
- "Give me irrefutable proof this works."
- "Give me 10 variations of this UI." Ten.
- "Show me how they'd fix this at Apple, at Google, at Teenage Engineering."
- "Find the race condition. 8 times at least. Try to break it."
You'd never ask a colleague for that. With AI it's the job.
For marketers: ask for 10 hooks, then 10 more in a different direction. Ask for the counterargument to your own strategy. Ask it to find the weakest part of what it wrote and fix it, twice.
It won't get mad at you.
Leaders: if your team uses AI politely, that's a training problem. Show them unreasonable, live.
‘We will train our staff on AI’ is a fallacy.
If you tried to ‘train’ college students on AI, your curriculum would be outdated on a monthly basis.
Similarly, I’m in multiple groups with 9-10 figure revenue companies where they believe their ‘AI enablement’ programs have been ineffective.
So what’s the solution?
You hire for mindset. More specifically, you hire for curiosity and adaptability.
Why? Because mindset cannot be trained.
You can’t ‘train’ someone to want to work hard. You can’t ‘train’ someone to be curious or adaptable.
Anybody who works hard underwent some type of transformation to get there. It’s personal.
So how do you find these people?
1. We source using Jev and other recruiting tools to look for people with 2 promotions at 2 companies with an average tenure of 3 years. Or 3+ promotions at 1 company.
2. If they’re interested, we send them 7 pre-screening questions and then Jev measures against our evals.
3. Only then do they make it to a live human screen.
Here’s our talent @bot you can use below:
ericosiu retweeted
Intercom now charges $9.99 every time its AI agent qualifies a sales lead, and $0.99 every time it resolves a support chat.
3 of the biggest support platforms already bill for it (breakdown):
> Intercom: $0.99 per resolved conversation, $9.99 per qualified lead
> Zendesk: $1.50 per resolution on a commitment, $2.00 pay as you go
> Salesforce: $2 per conversation, or $0.10 per agent action
1. They charge for a finished job
> Intercom bills when the customer says the answer helped or leaves without asking for more
> If that customer comes back to the same conversation, the charge comes off
2. The way in gets cheaper
> Salesforce gives Enterprise customers a pile of free agent credits to start
> Intercom sells its agent on top of Zendesk or Salesforce with no seat fees
3. Seats haven't gone away
> Intercom's help desk is still priced per seat, and so are Zendesk's plans
> For now you pay for the seat and then a fee for every job the agent finishes
I said in July that more agency services would move from hourly billing to pricing on what ships. Software is getting there first.
What I'd do with it:
> Price one service by what it delivers, since clients care what shipped and what changed
> Track token cost per finished job the way you track ad spend
> Start client meetings with what your agents shipped that week
Neil and I disagree on hiring salespeople.
Neil: hire for sales skills (relationships, phones, pitching, organization) and teach the AI stuff later.
Me: you need both.
Our last salesperson was an East Coast agency bulldog. Great follow-up, great on the phones. Couldn't pick up the AI side, so he never understood where we're going. Didn't work out.
Our current guy gets both, sales and AI. Deal sizes are a lot bigger.
Where we agree: you can't hire someone good with AI and tell them to "learn sales." That doesn't work.
I'd rather sit through the pain a little longer to find both. Not forever. But a few weeks of waiting beats a year with the wrong hire.
Applies to most roles, not just sales.
If you go Neil's route, test hard for attitude. Some people just don't want to change or learn, and AI is only teachable to someone who wants it.
Bigger deals come from doing both in one call.
Bought a few DGX Sparks earlier this year at $4k a pop and they’ve already gone up to $8k each.
Meanwhile, a fully loaded new MacBook Pro is $14k. Even more for a fully loaded Mac Studio.
This stuff won’t get cheaper for awhile because 99.8% of the world still isn’t aware of the superpowers right in front of them.
We already hear this a lot, but the amount of compute we’ll need when the average person is fully utilizing superintelligence will be unfathomable.
I WANT TO HIRE YOU
We're growing the @singlegrain team.
Looking for A-players who can:
-Turn a messy problem into a clear plan.
Take a project from idea to execution.
-Use AI to improve how the work gets done.
-Explain their thinking without hiding behind jargon.
-Spot what’s underperforming and figure out why.
-Take feedback and make the next version better.
-Connect their work to results that matter to the business.
Open roles:
-Director of SEO & AEO
Senior Manager, SEO/AEO (AI Search)
-Digital PR Manager
-Senior Manager, Paid Media (AI-First)
-Head of Sales (Closer)
-Senior Technical Product Manager
-Head of Forward Deployed Engineering
-Fullstack Product Engineer
-AI Automation Engineer
-AI Automation Engineer Intern
Sound like you? Apply in the first reply!
We run over 21 marketing jobs as Grok @bot
How?
Each bot does 1 job, Jev checks its decisions for pennies, and anything that goes out or spends money waits for a person's yes.
Here are 5 of the jobs, and you can copy them into whatever bot runs your marketing:
1. Research: give it a buyer's question and have it list the brands AI recommends.
2. Content: have it pull 40 topics, pick 20 yourself, and grade every draft out of 100 before a person edits it.
3. Distribution: have it put your best and worst videos side by side, thumbnails included.
4. Pipeline: let it build your paid campaign with your CRM connected, and keep the spend behind a yes.
5. Reporting: have it pull your Google Search numbers every week and end with one thing to fix. Ours flagged a post with 6,653 impressions and only 9 clicks.
Today I'm going live and showing you how each of these bots works, and you'll leave with:
1. The 5 bots on screen, with what each one made.
2. A research job run live: a buyer question in, the brands AI recommends out.
3. The templates, free on Skills Dojo, connected to your tools through SingleBrain Gateway.
4. Which job to hand off first this week.
It's at 10 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. CT, and the registration link is below 👇
Register here. (P.S. If you can't make it, register anyway and you'll get the replay)
riverside.com/webinar/regist…
