Anthropic's Growth Team Is Just One Person

Using only 20% of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying and second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20% of their data. Unless you have HubSpot where all the emails, call logs and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more@HubSpot.com so Neil, I think a good starting point on this one. So did you know that Anthropic's growth team is just one person? Yeah, so I didn't know that. I just read about it this week. Let me just give the context for everyone here and then we can go into it. Obviously I think they have a bigger marketing team to just one person. But you can go through it first because turns out I changed my password so I have to log back in.

0:00

So you can. Sure. So there was a report on someone putting it on X on how Anthropic's growth team is just one person. And look at everything they've done from just one person. Uh, they have done a miraculous job. But you have to look at it a few ways. One, a lot of products actually grow through the product just being really good. If you look at some of the best companies, yes. A lot of them eventually end up doing marketing. But good products are much easier to grow naturally than having a crap product. And amazing marketers. The second thing that most people don't report out in this is their growth team is one person. But how many other companies are they contracting with externally to help get things done? Like their super bowl ads or the creative solutions. Right. For the superl ads I think they had. Was it four commercials? Yeah, it was four different commercials.

0:50

Yeah.

1:42

So they, they have quite a few people that end up working on marketing externally and internally. Even though their growth team is one person, I actually believe it is more people working on marketing internally. They're just not marketers. Yep. So we work with Silicon Valley startup. They're not publicly traded. They're valued over a hundred billion dollars. There's not that many of them. So you can take a guess. All right. And we help them. AI company, not a AI company. Okay, so 100 plus billion dollars privately owned. Eventually they will go public. I'm assuming that based on A their valuation B, they raised a crap ton of money.

1:43

500 billion.

2:26

They're not worth over 500 billion. And there's only one yeah, that's true. There's actually not that many. Probably shouldn't said them out, but it doesn't matter, right. Anthropic could be in theory less than 500, but yeah, it's not. I said no AI, so. So yeah, that actually eliminates them. ChatGPT.

2:27

We'll let people guess.

2:46

Yeah, they can end up guessing. So we help them with a lot of different things in marketing from SEO to geo, and the list goes on and on. And we help them in many countries. Take a guess who we work with on the marketing team.

2:47

One of the C level execs?

3:00

No one. We work with engineers. Okay. And we have been working with engineers for three years. I think this is our third year on our contract with them. We just worked with engineers. So the point I'm getting at is in some of these companies that are startups based out of San Francisco, they do marketing. And a lot of times you're not dealing with marketers, you're dealing with engineering people and product people who are helping or who you're working with. Marketing. And the same goes with Airbnb. That one I can mention. So years and years ago, When I had KissMetrics, my old startup, we started doing consulting to reduce our burn because we didn't want to raise more money, I think at that time. Yeah. So we added some consulting and consulting that wasn't related to our product. So that way we didn't have to keep raising money because we had more inquiries. One of the companies we closed was Airbnb. I got connected with, I believe his name is Juni Nathan, the CTO and co founder. Right. I believe it was one of the co founders. I believe his name was Nathan and he was a cto. So I worked with him, I worked with someone else on engineering and we were fixing all of their SEO issues, content issues, duplicate page issues. We were trying to figure out how to optimize their conversion rates. So we're working on so many different things and. And not once out of working with them for, I think with them maybe 12 months or 24 months or something like that. I know it's less than two years, but I believe it was more than one year. Not once had I ever talked to anyone in marketing.

3:03

Yeah. So here's what I'll say. I mean, so this guy tweeted this out. So basically Anthropic's entire growth team was just one person for 10 months, confirmed. This is what we just talked about, right? So single non technical person running paid search, paid social app stores, email marketing, SEO for the $380 billion company behind Cloud. Here's how one human's doing it. The job of a full marketing team. It starts with the cs. So here's what I'll say to all of this. Okay. If you look at the revenue chart for Claude from the last two years or so, it's like going, going, going and it goes parabolic, right? And that's when cloud code, like the Opus models four or five comes out. Four, six comes out. Really? I would say the last year, year and a half or so, cloud really started to take off and they're launching all these products like crazy. To your point, it's the marketing. That's when your marketing is so good and your product is so good and it's consumer and business and you're touching enterprise. Yes, of course you're going to grow really quickly. Right? And to your point, a lot of this, like he is kind of reinforcing, like okay, paid social, paid search or whatever. He, there, there is a marketing team. And by the way, you, when you have all the technology you have, you should be able to, you're not looking to automate away humans, but you, you are looking away to, to automate away processes. And that's why this person can do more. But there's a lot more than this. Like if the product sucked, it doesn't matter if you had the best growth person in the world, it's still, you're polishing a turd. It's still a turd. It's still a golden turd, but it's a turd.

4:36

Yeah. What we've seen with Silicon Valley based companies, a lot of them may not have a big marketing team, but there's other roles that are involved in marketing. So at our agency, NP Digital, we do a ton of app store marketing. So like let's say if you're Netflix, you have an app, you would want it to rank really highly in the app Store, right? Or we've done app work for like Tinder. Right, the dating app. So what we found with a lot of Silicon Valley based companies, when we're doing different marketing initiatives, we tend to deal more with technical people and actually no marketers. It is very reverse from working with like Fortune 500 companies.

5:51

You know, it's funny. So when I used to work at startups, it was the engineers that helped me. So I led marketing. But I worked, I found that I got a lot more leverage working with the engineers because they, they think about things in systems, right? They don't think about the tasks themselves, which is actually interesting. This, this, this brings me to a point. I was listening to the, the CEO of Sierra, the.

6:34

Right.

6:54

So he was chairman of Salesforce I think for a while or like up the board at Facebook and also OpenAI for a little bit. Right. So Brett Taylor is his name and he, he, this quote I really like. He said, look, you know, like talking about replacing humans is like, it kind of sucks. Right? It does suck. Right. But when you talk about AI replacing workflows and processes, that's what we should be thinking about. And I think a lot of people, that's the resistance right now because they tied their identity into doing the actual tasks themselves when it was never about that.

6:54

Right.

7:22

And I think that's a much easier way to put it than like, you know, like all the, all the stuff that gets views, right. That gets clicks. Like I have all these dot charts that go out like this replaces this, this replaces this. And it gets people arguing with each other. But at the end of the day, what we really mean, at least what I really mean. I think you mean this too is you should be looking at replacing processes. It's not so much about all these bloated, you know, you don't want to hire humans like I said last time, to do robot work. Yeah.

7:23

And two things. One, you have to be careful in what you read like when people are saying like, oh, look at everything we did with just one grilled pa. Is it really one growth person or are there a lot of other people dipping their toes in marketing?

7:48

He for sure works with a bunch of engineers and he's probably hired a bunch of consultants. But you can see here this is like a case study from. You can see that's this is their branding. Right. So like oh, as a. The growth marketing team focused on building out performance marketing channels across paid search, social, mobile, app stores, email marketing, SEO. As a non technical team of one, they use cloud code to automate repetitive marketing tasks. Sure, they do that, but there's no way it's just one person.

7:59

I agree with you. And the second thing is you were talking, you just mentioned Brett Taylor. Brett Taylor, who don't know, sold the company to Google back in the day. It was really amazing what he did. He was supposed to be the CEO of Salesforce, decided to back out.

8:20

Was on the Twitter board push during that transition.

8:36

Yeah, he pushed Elon to end up the board, forced Elon to ended up buying X when he tried backing out for a minute. And then I believe he's also on the board of OpenAI.

8:39

I think he was to help with that transition. And I don't know if he's there anymore.

8:50

I'm pretty sure he's on the board.

8:54

He has a conflict of interest now because he has the chatbot company.

8:55

Sam Allman praises it.

8:59

Yeah, I'm sure he does. But that kind of seems like a conflict of interest.

9:01

I think he's still on the board. I'm 99% sure. Maybe.

9:05

Maybe he's still chairman. I don't know. He's not that much older than us. Yeah. Wikipedia says he's still chairman.

9:08

Huh? Yeah. Did you see. So talking about replacing people, did you see the X comparison of Sam Altman? You know, and I hope no one passes away, but Sam Altman passing away versus Elon passing away. What would happen to the companies?

9:13

No.

9:30

So they were just like, well, if Sam Altman passes away. And again, Eric and I don't want any wish ill will to anyone and we don't want anyone to die. But if Sam Altman passed away, they're just like, it wouldn't be a big deal for OpenAI. Brett Taylor would just take it over. He's already on the board. He's an amazing operator. And some are arguing that it may even operate better with Brett running and being at the helm.

9:31

Potentially. Potentially. But you can't lose Elon.

9:52

You can't lose Elon. They're like, well, who's going to replace Elon? They're like, oh, we're going to have a lot of problems.

9:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

10:00

But that just goes to show, and this is a problem, I think, in organizations, and I've seen people talk about this all day long. I'm not valuable like Elon Musk. But I remember when we were pitching NP Digital to investors a long time ago.

10:01

Oh, you tried to raise funding. Oh, I remember this. Yeah.

10:18

Yeah. This is a long time ago. We were. It wasn't really raising funding. We were going to sell a chunk of the company. And when we were doing this, I don't know when this was, but maybe

10:20

like three years ago.

10:28

Three, four years ago, I guess maybe four years ago. So when we were talking to potential people, you know, they would all ask the question of what happens when Neil is gone. Right. And there's Key Man Risk. And then now again, as I, as I told everyone earlier, I'm no Elon. We don't. We don't really talk to investors at all anymore, but we don't really get the question anymore on Key Man Risk.

10:29

Yeah. Which is good. So do you think today, okay, if you were to go away, like, the company could continue on as is, it would continue growing, all the things, same growth rate, next three years, average.

10:53

I think growth will slow down a little bit.

11:08

Okay. Yeah. I think you don't have the key man risk. I have key man risk

11:10

in multiple areas.

11:16

But anyway, I think it's. It's good to call that out. But I do think, going back to it again, the whole idea that, you know, AI here is here to replace processes, I think it's also hard. Like, we're doing our hackathon next week at my company, right? And I was. I'm just seeing the people, the things people want to build. They want to build dashboards or they want to build keyword research tools. I'm like, bro, like, you're building things for humans to still use. Like, stop. Stop thinking like that. Like, think outside. Like, you got to think about things that only robots can do. Right? Because I look at, I look at the stuff people are talking about on X. Like, I'm not doing. I'm not running ads myself. You're not. You're not either, I'm assuming, but X. Or they're just talking about it on X. Like, they're running ads. Yeah, they're like, I use cloud code to basically manage all my ads, and I'm spinning up like a thousand different variations or whatever. And, like, they're showing their process. I'm like, you know, whether it's like, working correctly or not, or even if we do like a tenth of that, that's cool, right? Because I don't think you should be like, spinning up ads or whatever. And I think if you're an SEO, you gotta be learning the different dynamics around AEO. Probably learn some Reddit, learn some YouTube as well. You gotta be very dynamic. So, like, even us going through this hackathon process number two, it's very important for me right now, where I'm like, hey, I got to take a quick look at what they're working on. I'm not involved in the hackathon until the very end, like the show and tell. But I'm like, you got to, like, constantly keep things, like, on track. Otherwise it can just go, like, really haywire.

11:17

Yeah, dude. Speaking of running ads, I got the question the other day, and we ended up creating a chart on this. I don't think it's been published, but it ends up breaking down where companies spend their advertising dollars. It shouldn't be live yet. Right. So I doubt it's on X. But it will be on X. My guess is next week. Okay, so I always get the question from people on hey, where should we be spending money on marketing? And if you guess, where do most people spend their money on? I already know. Yeah, you're going to end up saying ads. Yeah. So we started looking at it from startups to then mid sized companies and then enterprise companies, midsize being nine plus figures. Right. And what we found was startups spend most of their money on paid search. You nailed it, Google. Okay, then the next category, if you had a guess, what do you think it is? Metal. Close enough. It's organic social media. And then the third category and we looped them, we bucketed them in together, was content SEO. Now here's where it gets interesting. With mid size it's almost the same. Paid search is still number one. They shifted content and SEO from number three to number two. And if you had to guess what number three is, it's social media, but it's not organic, it's paid. Paid. Yeah, you nailed it. Right. But enterprise is where it really gets interesting because it changes. Paid search is actually not number one, it's number two. Paid social is still number three. But number one, if you had a guess, where do you think most enterprises spend their money? Big brands. Coca Cola, Pepsi. Yeah. Bingo.

12:32

Yeah.

14:06

Brand advertising. Yeah. And speaking of Claude and using these AI tools. Yes, it should be helping you with a lot of this stuff, especially processes. But when you're doing a lot of brand advertising campaigns, I think that's when it's really important to have the humans in the loop. And the reason being is, did you, you see the Coca Cola fiasco with the AI generated ads? No.

14:07

What happened?

14:31

So they ended up creating AI generated polar bear commercials.

14:32

Oh yeah.

14:36

And then people were just pissed. They're like you took the soul out of that. Oh my God. And they didn't like it. And I'm not saying people are right or wrong, but if your goal is branding, because once a company gets so big, I don't care who you are, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or you know, even in the agency space you look at like publicist, you're not getting your customers from paid social or paid search, you're getting it from your brand name. And we all know this, they've all these companies that are old and that are large tend to get majority of their customers from their just brand. And when you're doing branded campaigns, it has to be thought out really carefully because if you screw up a little bit. It can just really tarnish your reputation and your brand.

14:37

Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I don't think again, I actually wrote this out. I've been writing these X articles. I had one that did well this, this last week. It was like 500,000 views or something. But we can talk about that in a second because I think that's the future of marketing. But I like, I've been talking more about this Ford Deployed Marketer model similar to Palantir. Right. Or similar to Anthropic. Like they put forward deployed engineers in.

15:21

Wait, can you, can you explain it? Because I have no idea what you're talking about.

15:42

A Ford deploy engineer, Palantir. I've always wondered, I'm like what the heck do they do? Right. They make so much money and so what they do is they put an engineer, they embed the engineer into your company. So that's a Ford deployed engineer.

15:44

Okay. Fde.

15:57

And then what happens is they already have the, their stack foundry and that's the base software stack that they have. But they customize it for different government agents that they agencies that they work with or whatever client they're working with.

15:58

Right.

16:09

So Anthropic did this too recently, which is why the government didn't want to turn off of them necessarily. They were negotiating so much because they were so entangled with, with their four deployed engineers and all their software was in all the government systems. Right. It was hard to rip it out. So I think we're at least where we're calling it single brain, where we're taking things. We're going to have four deployed marketers, like really smart marketers that are not just like maybe you're only good at one channel. You're like a more well rounded marketer. Like I would consider us a little more well rounded in our careers now. And so, and then you have, you're. They're working with the custom agent stack that you built and they're customizing for the clients. Right. So I think to your point, going back to the brand thing real quick, I think you're always going to need smart people. Smart people aren't going to, you know, they're not going away. And I think the people that never were good at these jobs anyway, that's okay. They're going to be able to work on something else that they really like and they'll be okay.

16:10

So let's go back to the Ford deploy engineer.

16:58

Yeah, I want to make the M here at Ford Deployed Marketer.

17:02

Okay. Yeah. Because I have something on marketing, that could be somewhat related, but maybe I'm misunderstanding the engineering side. So it is a company has their own software solution or technology and then corporations work with them. So they're putting their own engineers into other companies offices, they're working as an employee of that organization and help implementing their own solutions. But they're in that physical location like being in Goldman Sachs's office or whatnot.

17:05

Similar to how holding companies will put their employees into like.

17:32

Got it. We do the same thing in which some, some of our clients require us to put our marketers within their offices.

17:34

How many hours do they have to be there per month in office? Is it full time?

17:41

Yeah, full time. We don't have any that are part time. It's all full time.

17:45

Got it. So they're full time and once the engagement ends they come back to you. So. And do you find that they actually retain longer because you insert people into the company? Do you have a number? Do you have numbers around that?

17:48

I don't, but I should look that up on that. Yeah. We've been doing this for years.

17:59

I had, I would imagine you like I've never asked, like it's obvious that you've been doing it, but I've just never bothered to think about it, like nor have you.

18:03

Yeah, I never thought about it. I know for a fact we've been doing it for more than five years.

18:09

The retention's gotta be higher. Like I'm so curious though.

18:13

I don't know. And I know we do it in many regions so I can actually break it down by client size and by region. But interesting model here. Dude.

18:16

That post would do well if you have the data around it, you post it to X or whatever that would do it because nobody talks about how well that does. And it's like a new concept but agencies have been doing it for a very long time.

18:25

They've been doing it for a very long time. Yeah, but speaking of that, you know, when I travel throughout all the world, people talk about what they do with AI and one thing that we're seeing consistently is organizations are all paying for these tools. So you can Pick Claude or ChatGPT or Copilot Law actually pay for Copilot, at least on the enterprise end, you know, or Google because it's just thrown in. And when they're paying for these solutions, one, they usually don't pay for one, they pay for multiple. But two, they're all running into the same problem. The problem being, hey, and I'm going to use content as an Example, because this is a simple one that a lot of people or marketers use. Hey, a lot of different people in our organization are using Copilot or Gemini or Chat GPT to help with content. And sometimes the quality is really good and sometimes the quality is really bad. So then they go with a different model. The model being we want to hire companies like yours, NP Digital, to come and train our people on how to create better content. And I always tell them that model's broken.

18:34

Yeah.

19:44

And they said, why? I'm like, you can train people one if they're not receptive to the training because not everyone will be. You're not going to get amazing quality results because they have a minimum bar that they would like and they want everyone to meet it. And I'm like, that is really hard to do. And let's just be realistic. Most large organizations that are publicly traded, I get block laid off 40%, I believe of their staff. Atlassian just laid off 10%. Yeah, majority are not going to lay off 20, 30, 40%. I'm assuming you agree with the statement, especially the older traditional companies that are larger. And I don't.

19:45

Yeah, I don't think it's majority. I think there's a good chunk, but not majority.

20:21

Correct. Yeah. At least in the next, at least in the rest of 2026, I don't see the majority of large old school corporations just laying off a ton of their stuff.

20:24

I agree with that.

20:32

Right. Yeah. Maybe times will change in the future. So they're trying to figure out how they can get their team to produce a minimum quality for any of their marketing materials when they're using AI. So I'm talking to them and I'm like, you guys are all thinking about this wrong. You're trying to train your team to all use AI in a specific way. And I just sent you a meme and you were the one who told me it's like 6 years old, but I just got it today. Do you want to read the meme? Yeah.

20:33

So here, I'll read it and I'll bleep out the word over here.

21:04

Okay.

21:07

So the meme that Neil sent me, it's from MIT Technology Review. I think it was a joke.

21:08

That was from MIT Technology Review.

21:12

But the meme is this. If you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Turns out you're effing stupid. Yeah.

21:14

And the problem that I was telling them is you're expecting everyone to put out a minimum quality of marketing when you're using AI, but people have different abilities. Some people are really talented and smart. Some people are newer and need to learn more. Some people are, whether they're new or great with technology, some people may be in your organization for a while and they're slower to learn technology. So I was like, the solution isn't to train everyone on AI and get a minimum. The solution is to train the AI to deal with different personality and levels so that way it can figure out who they're dealing with. So that way they know what to ask that they're not going to ask, so they can still produce a minimum quality output. So I was like, what organizations need right now is instead of worrying about training a thousand people in marketing or a hundred people in marketing on how to use AI, it's to train the AI on all the edge cases and the people that they're dealing with. So that way it knows the minimum quality of output that it needs to produce for each and every single output. So that way, no matter who's using the AI, it adapts to that person and gets better and better. And I was telling the organizations, I actually think that's more feasible than training, you know, 500 people or 200 people and get them to all create a minimum quality output.

21:21

Anyway, that's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you later.

22:45

Sam.

22:49