How Groas AI Autonomous Agents Replace Marketing Agencies and Scale Business Growth

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 market agency would work, 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 cost of labor and basically get them to do all the work. And they just then collect the difference between what they pay 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.

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The Kingdoms podcast, your next breakthrough starts here. Music licensing reimagined. We're live. Ladies and gentlemen, once again, welcome to the Kingdoms podcast. And today I've got with me a very special entrepreneur fighting out of Paris, France, by way of St. Francisco, United States of America. Make welcome David Pokery. How are you, David?

2:22

I'm very well, thank you. That, thank you for the, for the intro that was. That's very kind.

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Okay. You, you are a man that is shifting 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? You're changing the landscape. And, you know, looking at 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 rare intersection of private equity, rigor, operation, you know, operators, cars, and frontier of AI execution. We went from managing capital at scale in a global private equity to building a fully autonomous AI system that runs Google Ads without human marketers, agencies or VC funded over $35 billion per month in ad spend while remaining fully bootstrapped and founder owned. This is not theory, 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 agents before the bets get good from them. Ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome David Fakri to the Kingdom Spotcast and Diary 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 still. This is a business podcast. So what patterns have you identified that you see that has convinced you that most companies actually get operations wrong, right? What is it that is broken before they become eventually financially broken?

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A bit of a. Bit of a tough question. I think it always comes down to the 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 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 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 all, it always comes back to the quality of, of the leadership team.

4:58

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 firing in a very, very hard way. And it has come down to three things. Mindsets, mindset, skill sets, and tool sets. That is, a lot of times we tend to evaluate the skill set of these individuals that we want to collaborate with, but we don't tend to evaluate the mindset. Right. The mindset is for me the most important thing then the skill set and of course arm 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 made 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 floor in the agency model that most founders still do not understand until it's too late?

5:40

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.

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Bring it on. Full authenticity, brother.

7:11

Okay, 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.

7:16

Right?

7:29

But if you look at how a 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 cost of labor and basically get them to do all the work. And they just then collect the difference between what they pay 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 gonna 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 one tomorrow with zero credibility, zero credentials, zero whatever. You could start one to start taking on customers tomorrow. You can make up some testimonials and just get going that there's no governing body, there's no this or that, no regulatory. So yeah, I would say. And 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, 4K a month to set up your ad campaign once and do nothing, right? Literally do nothing, you can pay gross 10% of that and it will do everything and it will work for you 24, 7. That's because we're using autonomous AI to do it. So yeah, I think they're. 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 growas not telling their customers anything and then just charging them the difference. That's what we're now seeing.

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Wow. You know, one of the major issues or major controversies about AI is AI versus humans. AI replacing humans. And of course, you have actually built an AI that replaces humans. So most founders actually build 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 severe that that augmentation was not enough?

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Good question. So look, grow as a 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 like, okay, 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 team of marketers can.

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Right?

10:26

That's where we're at right now. It was a lot of work to get to this point, but we're now there now. The reason some people say, 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. Okay? 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 running these campaigns than some of these agencies have done, right? Like, it's insanity some of the stuff we've seen. And these agencies will charge them 5, 10k, 15k a month for this. So I think overall it's probably a benefit to business and to humanity, I would say.

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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 gadget and, you know, we leave a world of imperfect information. No, I studied economics for my first degree. And you know, when we're being taught about the different types of markets, you have the perfect markets, you have imperfect markets. In the perfect markets, there's perfect 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?

11:20

Yeah, because look, we had. That's what we started off with, right? It's just like, okay, growass was pulling in lots of data and giving insights and saying, okay, 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 were doing all this cool stuff, but what we noticed was that people are like, this is great, but can you not just do it for me? And that's when we're like, okay, there's something here. And that's when we took 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, there's a lot, there's Wordstream, Optim, all of these are great tools. God bless them. All the best. We don't compete There 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 ass 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 cash register to ring.

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That's.

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That's really our business model.

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Wow, 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 zero vc, zero private equity, you know, and this is full ownership what systems. The thinking mistake forces founders to believe that external capital is required even when it's often not required. Good question.

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I'm very lucky that I used to work in the investment industry, right? So I worked 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 as 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 companies should absolutely know. 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 up front just to get the, the info for that. Okay, 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 on month, 10 month on whatever it is. If you don't hit those targets, you will not be able to raise more money. Okay. 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 growing 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 email me or connect with me on LinkedIn and I tell them to basically go look elsewhere. So I've been very stubborn about trying to keep 100% ownership.

14:09

Wow, interesting stuff. You know, I like the way you frame it because myself I have a background with the big four accounting firms. I'm an ex auditor, you know, PwC, KPMG and I have had that, you know, would I say privileged opportunity to be able to audit different organizations, you know, across bot from startups to PLCs to mid tier companies. And I see the same thing that leverage forces founders to, to, to make mistakes, you know, on first errors basically. Right. And like you rightly said, it's like dining with the devil. You get it and then you've been forced. I've had a VC on, on this podcast before and 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 interested to, to a vc. And yeah we, we understand they are in the business of, you know, growth but it's not the natural flow for every type of business. Take Uber for example. Uber was not profitable in the first 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're stuck in A dilemma. Right. So I really want for you to, would I say expand on the, the dangers of having that VC 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 VC money too early is a very, very big danger. I don't know what you would like to expand on in that regard.

15:55

I mean, of course it is.

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Right.

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Because then you're going to be less cautious with spending because it's not your money.

17:57

Right.

18:01

But I think ultimately 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. 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.

18:01

Right.

18:20

I could sell 0.01% of grass for like, let's say a K. 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 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.

18:20

Right, yeah, exactly.

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And VCs have to get paid out first. So there's so many cases, you'll see an exit of like $100 million. Exactly. 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's a case by case.

19:00

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. This morning I woke up to the headline of Forbes 30 under 30 founder from Turkey. I'm not going to mention her name, she's female, you could go check it out, but actually she actually defrauded investors of a lot of money. And it's, it's crazy with like fake valuations and all that stuff. So it gets really dirty sometimes, right? You know, coming back to the investor lens, right? Where do humans, you know, most consistently introduce inefficiency, bias, waste? Inside a paid acquisition system?

19:20

That's tough one. It's tough because there's so many variables that go into this. Right? So if you want a good Google Ads campaign, it's not one thing. There's like a thousand different things you need to be optimizing and tweaking. 24, 7 is your landing page good? Okay, what's in that? What should be in that landing page? There should be some social proof and testimonials why 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 add like a thousand keywords and like a $20 a budget campaign per day. That's just complete lunacy.

20:06

Right?

20:49

It's just like lighting money on fire for no good reason. So like, if I, 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 yeah, obviously grass does a really good job with it and helps it and whatever. Whatever. But that's like the number one biggest issue I think, across the board.

20:50

Speaking of landing page, you always need to keep tweaking things. I should tweak something on my landing page before I jumped on this interview. So that speaks. That hits a home run. Let's talk about the 30 to 40% revenue, 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 destroy the margin without founders even noticing?

21:08

Yeah, I mean, so the first one is, what I touched on is keywords being completely wrong and therefore you're wasting a whole bunch 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, but 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 selling things online is how well you can convince somebody to. 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 run Google Ads before, the big mistake we see is people think, okay, I'm just going to throw 10k a day at this and 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 can take months, it can take weeks. It depends case by case. But I would say patience is a, is a very underrated factor in the game.

21:38

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 fear 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?

23:04

Yeah, well, I think it's, it's just inevitable, okay. 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 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's where the world is heading. For better or for worse. Uh, the train has started and there's, there's just no stopping it at this point.

23:33

I'll tell you something. Chad Chippity is my legal consultant. You know, the best legal, the best legal consultant in the world for just $20 a month. I don't think any lawyer charges that. You know, I'm gonna pick your, I'm gonna pick your investor brain right now. If you were still sitting on, you know, investment committee today, what would you look for in an AI company that most investors still miss out on?

24:19

At what stages? Is it like a very early stage AI company or is it like a mid stage? Or like what, what stage is it at?

24:48

Interesting. So let's break it down. Early stage. Mid stage.

24:53

Yeah, I mean, early stage. The only thing to even look at in my opinion is the founders. You invest in good founders. 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, yeah. At an early stage, the only thing to be thinking about is how good is that team? Because markets change, your product's 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 ludicrous. So, yeah, there's a lot of factors. Yeah, there's a lot of factors that get into it, but effectively, at the earliest stages, you're just looking at 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 someone who isn't right, and someone who's just. And someone is just like, you know, I want to make the world a better place. Which is also mostly bs. A 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 Comm stores over the years, and I knew that there was a lot that was broken. I wanted to do it better myself. So that's where it came from.

24:57

Right.

26:43

So Google Ads was like a. A pretty natural thing for me to. To try 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.

26:43

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 isi. That is my name. So I don't know what my parents saw 33 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 is prompting even right from my days of the B core accounting firms. Now the LLMs are popular and it feels like, oh, AI is the next big thing. But we've actually been using AI for a long time. Like, 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 feel like the people who are brilliant, efficient will only become more efficient. And the people who are, you know, the other side would also, you know, because basically, AI is just a multiplier. It either multiplies. Multiplies your intelligence or multiplies your foolishness. So it depends on wherever 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 struggle emotionally when the C stands that they have created outperform 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?

26:57

No, I. I much, much rather prefer to be in the second. Right and architecting that. It's not being in the trenches 247 doing things, brother, doesn't make you small. It does. But yes, yes, 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 we're possibly on board. I don't necessarily enjoy doing that.

28:37

Right.

29:10

I think, you know, maybe a couple months, hopefully I can find someone who's much, much better than me to do these calls, who's 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, seven, eight months now. But yeah, we're slowly going to move there. If I had more capital, if I'd raised whatever 5, 10 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.

29:10

I love that. So before I let you go, I'm going to put you through the rapid fire questions. But before the rapid fire questions, I remembered something you told me. You know, the first time we did get to meet, you told me about how grow asses just grade on the search engine. So I'd like for you to expand on it. Like, like gross is just great. Like Whitefire right now on the search engine. I think probably on YouTube or like Google. The Google search engine.

29:50

Oh right, yes. So look, I mean all our. For context, one thing I haven't mentioned is we still grow s. 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 grass as the best solution. So someone will type into chat GPT, 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, their whatever. Hey, look, we're using grass. It's great. You sign up. The reason this is quite tough, right? We're in a difficult position because I want that number to be higher, right? It 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.

30:20

I saw that on your website.

31:27

To know these in grass, like, I

31:28

saw that on your website.

31:33

Happens very often where they just want to keep it secret. Yes.

31:34

Permit me to expose you. So, guys, I'm going to read what I saw on Gross website. You know, this client actually sends 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 and start 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. On the podcast.

31:38

So, yeah, there you go. There you go. That happens very often.

32:15

Wow. Wow.

32:18

It is what it is.

32:19

Congratulations on the success, brother. It's quite interesting what these LLMs do. I had a message from somebody earlier today telling me that I searched you on Google. And do you know what Google AI is telling me? Okay, two people actually detailed me today. One of them told me the AI refers to you as AI. And I'm like, okay, 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. Wow. And then it put a smile on my face. So put some respect on my name. You know, the Joan 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. Quick fire round here we go. Five questions, quick answers. Let us go. Are you ready to rumble? Okay, number one, what is one metric founders. What is one metric founders obsess over? That does not matter.

32:20

Oh, it's a lot. We kind of touched on it. But maybe, maybe money raised. Maybe. Okay, I don't know the amount of money they raised.

33:34

Okay, I'll give you, I'll give you one line that I always use. Revenue is vanity. Profit to sanity. Cash is reality. How about that?

33:45

True, true. But there are exceptions. I think if you're, if your revenue is genuinely just skyrocketing, like genuinely like just doing boom, then maybe some losses can offset it. It's a tough. You know, that's, that's actually a really difficult question. I'm trying to think what I look at. Okay, how about this? How about this? Social media followers is my answer.

33:54

Yeah, God bless you. I love that. I love that. I love that, bro. I'm gonna tell you something. I know somebody who has like over 10,000 followers on LinkedIn and this girl has never made a dime. The next question on the rapid fire would be what is what metric founders ignored that decides survival?

34:14

Easy, John. John, number one.

34:37

Okay, okay, yeah. Back to the story I was telling you, right? I don't have many followers on LinkedIn, but I get a lot of inbounds saying, oh, I wanna, I wanna 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? There are people who have 100k plus followers, but they don't make a dime 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?

34:40

Oh, that's tough. Biggest lie about AI. Well, I mean, we are. I think that I'm. I hope we're not selling any lies. I don't think we do. So I'm trying to think of other players.

35:16

Guys go to grass AI to check either Eddie. Lies.

35:26

It's tough.

35:31

I don't know.

35:32

Truthfully, I don't really look at what other, 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, huh? Okay. The biggest lie is that it won't replace humans. It will. That's my answer.

35:33

Interesting. Number four. 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.

35:53

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

36:05

Sorry.

36:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

36:25