Latest / King Dems Podcast | Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights / How Groas AI Autonomous Agents Replace Marketing Agencies and Scale Business Growth

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How Groas AI Autonomous Agents Replace Marketing Agencies and Scale Business Growth · King Dems Podcast | Growth Mindset, Leadership, AI and Business Insights

0:00
I think 95% of marketing agencies are effectively
0:03
complete scammers, right? Complete Cowboys running,
0:06
running a very bad operation that leaves their customers in a
0:09
very bad spot. There's a lot of reasons for
0:11
that, right? But if you look at how a
0:12
marketing agency would work, what they would do, they would
0:14
go spend a lot of money on outreach, paid ads trying to
0:16
acquire that customer. And the second they've acquired
0:18
that customer, almost in all cases, what they're going to do
0:20
is they're going to hire some freelancer, probably from a
0:24
third world country or you know, where they can arbitrage the, at
0:28
the cost of labour and basically get them to do all the work.
0:30
And they just then collect the difference between what they pay
0:33
the that freelancer who then manages essentially a lot of
0:35
their accounts and does very, very subpar work because they're
0:38
poorly incentivized. And then the agency owner,
0:40
whatever sort of sits back before.
0:41
We dive back into today's conversation.
0:42
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2:00
Welcome to the King Dems podcast, where we share the
2:03
stories of extraordinary people and dissect hot, relevant topics
2:07
that shape our world. From visionary leaders to
2:10
trailblazing creatives, we uncover the mindset, strategy,
2:13
and grit behind greatness. Whether it's business, culture,
2:16
or personal growth, we ask the real questions.
2:19
This isn't just conversation, it's transformation.
2:22
The Kingdom's podcast, Your Next Breakthrough, starts here.
2:26
Music licencing reimagined the live Ladies and gentlemen, once
2:33
again welcome to the Kingdom's podcast.
2:36
And today I've got with me a very special entrepreneur
2:41
fighting out of Paris Friends by Wilson Francisco, United States
2:45
of America. Mick, welcome.
2:47
David Poquery. How are you, David?
2:52
I'm very well. Thank you that thank you for the
2:54
for the intro. That was very kind.
2:56
OK, you, you are a man that is Chieftain, the way the business
3:02
landscape is actually going to be for the, I don't want to say
3:07
for the foreseeable future. You're changing it already,
3:10
right? Your changes the landscape and
3:12
you know, leaking out your body of work for me.
3:14
I am actually very, very impressed and I'm going to give
3:17
you your flowers while you're still alive.
3:20
So David, you actually represent a right.
3:24
It's a section of private equity rigour operation, you know,
3:28
operators CAS and frontier of AI execution.
3:32
We write for managing capital at scale in a global private equity
3:37
to build a full autonomous AI system that runs Google Arts
3:43
without human marketers, agencies or PC funding over $35
3:47
billion per month in art spend while remaining fully
3:52
bootstrapped and founder owned. This is not very.
3:55
This is execution today we are unpacking what breaks inside
4:00
most marketing systems, why agencies are failing businesses
4:05
at scale and what founders must understand about AI events
4:09
before the bets they're good from them.
4:13
Ladies and gentlemen, once again welcome David Fakery to the
4:17
Kingdom spot cap and Dyer of the CFO.
4:20
So, David, you have actually lived many lives, you know, from
4:27
being a capital allocator to being a system builder.
4:31
And of course, you've actually spent years inside private
4:33
equity evaluating businesses. The scale this is a business
4:37
podcast. So what patterns have you
4:41
identified repeatedly that you've seen that has convinced
4:45
you that most companies actually get operations wrong, right?
4:51
What is it that is broken before they become eventually
4:57
financially broken? A bit of, a bit of a tough
4:59
question. I think it always comes down to
5:01
to people. I think I love that often, often
5:06
cases either there's, you know, and actually when I say people
5:09
often leadership, right? Because the leadership will
5:12
dictate the team and and the team will dictate the business.
5:14
So I think that's probably the first thing that as an investor
5:17
you would look at is who's running of those particular
5:20
functions And even, you know, we ourselves, that's something I
5:23
obsess about when hiring is the quality of the team.
5:26
Is it a good culture fit? How motivated are they?
5:28
What, what's motivating them aside from earning money?
5:31
Like there's a lot of things that go into that, but I think
5:33
ultimately, like it's always, it always comes back to the quality
5:36
of of the leadership team. I love that the quality of the
5:41
leadership team, you know, the tone at the top is actually very
5:45
important. And of course, you know, when it
5:46
comes to hiring, I myself, I'm an early stage founder myself,
5:50
you know, just in the first year of my company and I've had to
5:54
learn the lesson of hiring and buying in a very, very hard way.
5:58
And it has come down to three things, mind skirts, mindset,
6:03
skill set and tool set. That is a lot of times we tend
6:07
to evaluate the skill set of these individuals that we watch
6:10
collaborate with, but we don't tend to evaluate their mindset,
6:14
right? The mindset is for me the most
6:17
important thing. Then the skill set and of course
6:20
I'm them with the appropriate tool sets.
6:23
And Speaking of tool sets, you have actually created an amazing
6:27
tool set for founders to actually use.
6:30
And you know, we are in that age where the agency model is being
6:38
what I say being erased, right. And of course because the agency
6:42
model has actually helped mid businesses to bleed a lot of
6:45
money, they are expensive and not as effective or efficient as
6:51
the tool set that you have created.
6:53
And of course yourself you have been vocal about how marketing
6:57
agencies destroy value. So what is the fundamental flaw
7:00
in the agency model that most founders still do not understand
7:04
until it's too late? Yeah, Yeah, it's a, it's a good
7:07
question. Look, this might sound a little
7:09
harsh, but I think I can say this now because.
7:11
Bring it on. Full authenticity, brother.
7:16
OK, I'll keep it real. I think 95% of marketing
7:19
agencies are effectively complete scammers, right?
7:22
Complete Cowboys running, running a very bad operation
7:25
that leaves their customers in a very bad spot.
7:28
There's a lot of reasons for that, right?
7:29
But if you look at how, how market agency would work, the
7:32
what they would do, they would go spend a lot of money on
7:34
outreach, paid ads trying to acquire that customer.
7:37
Then the second they've acquired that customer, almost in all
7:39
cases, what they're going to do is they're going to hire some
7:42
freelancer, probably from a third world country or you know,
7:46
where they can arbitrage the, the cost of labour and basically
7:49
get them to do all the work. And they just then collect the
7:52
difference between what they pay the that freelancer who then
7:54
manages essentially a lot of their accounts and does very,
7:56
very subpar work because they're poorly incentivized.
7:59
And then the agency owner, whatever, just sort of sits
8:01
back. Now obviously there's different
8:02
levels to that, right? You have some agencies who are a
8:04
lot more involved. But typically, I think that's
8:06
the big problem as well. The economics often leave the
8:09
businesses they work with in a bad spot because they lock those
8:12
businesses into long term contracts, right?
8:15
A minimum of three months, minimum of six months.
8:16
And if you break and you want to stop working with us, then
8:19
you're going to have to pay an extra fee.
8:22
So that already leaves things a mess.
8:24
On top of that, to even start, let's say a marketing agency,
8:29
you could start 1:00 tomorrow with 0 credibility, 0
8:31
credentials, 0 whatever you could start want to start taking
8:34
on customers tomorrow, You can make up some testimonials and
8:37
just get going. There's no governing body.
8:39
There's no this or that The. Regulatory, yeah.
8:41
I would say and look, there's a lot of exactly, exactly.
8:45
So yeah, there's a lot of marketing agencies in the world,
8:47
a lot more than you or I would would think to exist.
8:50
And I think over a long enough period of time, Grow Ass will
8:53
put a lot of them out of business because instead of
8:55
paying your marketing agency, you know, 3-4 KA month to set up
8:59
your ad campaign once and do nothing, right?
9:01
Literally do nothing. You can pay Grow as 10% of that
9:06
and it will do everything and it'll work for you 24/7.
9:08
That's because we're using autonomous AI to do it.
9:11
So yeah, I think that a lot of them are going to be in a lot of
9:14
trouble. What we're seeing though is a
9:16
lot of them are just plugging in their customer campaigns into
9:20
Grow as not telling their customers anything and then just
9:23
charging them the difference. That's what we're now seeing.
9:27
Wow, You know, one of the major issues or major controversies
9:32
about AI is AI versus humans, AI replacing humans.
9:37
And of course, you've actually viewed an AI that replaces
9:40
humans. So most founders actually viewed
9:43
tools that assist humans, right? How do you feel about you
9:47
building AI agents that replaces humans entirely?
9:52
And of course, what problem was so sleepy that that augmentation
9:56
was not enough? The question so look, grow as so
9:59
V1, which was not full autonomy was like a recommendations tool,
10:03
right? So it was something that people
10:04
actually had to come in and use and it was great.
10:06
And it was there to increase people's performance.
10:08
And then whilst we had that, we're like, OK, fine, we can
10:11
actually do more. And that's when we started
10:12
building for full autonomy, which is where we're at today,
10:14
which is something that genuinely replaces humans.
10:17
It's not something you have to use or log into or whatever,
10:20
whatever. It just runs and scales your
10:22
campaigns for you better than even a, a team of marketers can,
10:26
right? That's where we're at right now.
10:28
There's a lot of work to get to this point, but we're now there.
10:31
Now the reason some people say, oh, is this is this a bad thing?
10:35
It's actually a good thing because for the reasons I was
10:36
saying earlier, 95% of the industry is, you know, is filled
10:42
with scammers. Like we know this by the way,
10:45
because our biggest customer segment is people who fire their
10:48
agencies and then move everything to grass.
10:51
OK? During that process, we get to
10:54
see what the hell these agencies did to these poor customers.
10:57
And it's a complete shit show nightmare.
11:00
And I'm like, this is insane. Like my grandmother who's 90
11:02
years old, God bless her, she could do a better job at running
11:06
these campaigns. And some of these agencies have
11:08
done right. Like it's insanity some of the
11:09
stuff we've seen. And these agencies will charge
11:12
them 510K15 KA month for this. So I think overall it's probably
11:17
a benefit to business and to humanity, I would say.
11:20
Whoa, so fully autonomous AI versus AI powered marketing.
11:25
So there's actually like a lot of noise out there around AI
11:29
marketing tools. There's a lot of garbage and you
11:33
know, we believe a world of imperfect information.
11:37
You know, I studied economics with my first degree and you
11:40
know, when we're being taught about the defence House of
11:42
markets, you have the perfect markets, you have imperfect
11:46
markets. In the perfect markets, there's
11:48
type of information, you know, everybody's well aware of the
11:52
various factors, you know, that impact the market, but that is
11:57
not attainable in the real world, right?
12:00
And of course, like in simple terms, like what is the
12:03
difference between automation, augmentation, true autonomy and
12:10
like does that distinction actually matter financially?
12:15
Yeah, because look, we had, that's what we started off with,
12:17
right? It's just like, OK, grow ass was
12:19
pulling in lots of data and giving insight and saying, OK,
12:21
maybe you should do this. You should add this keyword,
12:23
remove this keyword. We also did a whole bunch of
12:25
stuff around dynamic landing pages, which massively increased
12:27
conversions. We're doing all this cool stuff.
12:30
But what we noticed was that people like, this is great, but
12:33
can you not just do it for me? And that's when we're OK,
12:36
there's something here and that's when we take it to the
12:37
next level. Now, as far as I'm aware
12:40
currently, right, we are recording this in February 2026.
12:43
As far as I'm aware, there is nobody even remotely close to
12:47
grow as when it comes to full autonomy and Google ads
12:49
campaigns, no one. There's a plenty of, you know,
12:52
AI recommendation tools, all of these other bullshit softwares.
12:55
We don't care. We don't compete in that realm.
12:58
Our competition is humans, teams of humans.
13:01
That's who we benchmark ourselves against.
13:03
We don't look at, you know, it's not this word stream optimizer.
13:06
All of these are great tools. God bless them all the best.
13:09
We don't compete that we are like our number one metric is
13:13
how much better are we than humans at managing and scaling
13:15
Google ads campaigns. And I tell this to my
13:18
engineering team every single day.
13:19
If people are logging into grow as and actually using it, then
13:23
we are failing at our job. That's not how it should work.
13:26
They should connect the campaign once, sit back and then just
13:29
wait for the the cash register to ring.
13:31
That's that's really our business model.
13:34
Well, interesting. You know, you speak very
13:36
passionately about scaling. So, but then you've actually
13:40
scaled to $35 billion monthly ad spend without investors.
13:46
So scaling that big right with 0 VC, 0 private equity, you know,
13:56
and this is full ownership. What systems thinking mistake
14:01
forces founders to believe that Excel capital is required even
14:06
when it's often not required? Good question.
14:09
I'm very lucky that I used to work in the investment industry,
14:13
right? So I work in private equity, but
14:14
even before that I actually worked in a couple of venture
14:16
capital firms, right, First time as an intern, next time was like
14:19
a junior analyst. So I know and understand that
14:22
world very well. I have very close friends of
14:24
mine, personal friends who are VCs full time.
14:26
So I know that world super well. And I think it's a very
14:30
dangerous thing to do to go and raise money.
14:32
I think most. Should.
14:34
Absolutely yes I agree. I think unless you're doing Elon
14:39
level cool shit right where you're trying to put rockets
14:41
into space and you need $100 million upfront just to get the
14:44
the info for that. OK, you need money, go raise
14:47
funding. But I would say if you're doing
14:48
some software company, whatever, whatever, you should try and do
14:51
your best to bootstrap that. And if you need to raise money,
14:54
like look into alternative sources, but the VC game is
14:57
mostly rigged. It's a very tough thing to do.
15:00
I think it puts you more at risk than less at risk, in my
15:02
opinion. Because what most founders don't
15:04
get is the second you do that deal with the devil, you are now
15:08
committed to growing 20% month to month, 10% month to month,
15:12
whatever it is. If you don't hit those targets,
15:14
you will not be able to raise more money.
15:16
OK. And then what happens is you now
15:18
have a structurally unprofitable business that is burning cash
15:21
every month because you're investing in growth.
15:23
You're not going fast enough. So no one wants to invest in
15:26
you. And therefore you close down for
15:28
business, even though you may have had a perfectly good
15:30
product, a perfectly good team, all of that, all of that, you're
15:34
basically a little screwed. So yeah, my thoughts on VC is I
15:38
was very stubborn from the very start of grass that and we get
15:40
approached by the way, by VCs 24/7.
15:43
I get probably one a day. E-mail me or or connected me on
15:48
LinkedIn and I tell them to to basically go look elsewhere.
15:51
So I've been very stubborn about trying to keep 100% ownership.
15:55
Well, interesting stuff, you know, I like the way you frame
15:58
it because myself I have a background with the peak for
16:02
accounting fans. I'm an ex auditor, you know,
16:05
PWCKPMG and I have had that, you know, would I say privilege the
16:10
opportunity to be able to audit different organisations, you
16:14
know, across but from startups to PLCS to meet tier companies.
16:23
And I see the same thing that leverage forces founders to to
16:31
to make mistakes, you know, on 1st errors basically, right.
16:35
And like you rightly said, it's like dining with the devil.
16:38
You get it and then you'll be forced.
16:41
I've had AVC on, on this forecast report.
16:43
And, you know, he said something about like what makes a company
16:47
interesting to them is double digits profits.
16:50
If you're not making double digit profit, right, you're not
16:53
interesting to to AVC. And yeah, we understand they're
16:59
in the business of, you know, growth, but it's not the natural
17:05
flow for every type of pieces. Take Uber, for example.
17:08
Uber was not profitable in the past couple of years, right?
17:11
They had to get that structure properly.
17:14
Some companies have to iterate over time, right?
17:16
And of course, when you're not in an industry that has ethical
17:20
concerns versus profit concerns or what do you do, you stock in
17:25
a dilemma, right? So I really want for you to
17:30
would I say expand on the the dangers of having that PC money
17:36
too early, especially too early. At some point, you know, if you
17:40
if you want to scale up, you have maybe very big expansion
17:43
plans, it might make sense. But for me, my philosophy is
17:47
having that PC money too early is a very, very big danger.
17:51
I don't know what you would like to expand on in that regard.
17:56
I mean, of course it is, right? Because then you're going to be
17:59
less cautious with spending because it's not your money,
18:01
right? But I think ultimately the, the
18:03
big issue I see is people celebrate raising money as some
18:05
kind of achievement. Like you've just sold the
18:08
percentage of your company at a discount for like for no reason.
18:11
And let's be clear, you've done nothing.
18:13
And then they, and then they parade on social media, we raise
18:16
that, you know, 20-30 mil valuation.
18:19
That's a nonsense valuation, right?
18:20
I could sell 0.01% of grass for like, let's say AK and now I'm
18:26
worth a billion. Like, what are we doing here?
18:28
So I think a lot of people don't seem to understand that.
18:31
They seem to think that valuation actually means
18:33
something in the real world. The only thing that matters in
18:35
my opinion is what are your, what are your customers saying
18:37
about your product? That's like the best predictor
18:39
of success long term is, are people really enjoying what what
18:42
you're building? How's your retention?
18:44
Like that's something I obsess about is are we retaining
18:46
customers well enough? And if someone ever churns like
18:48
I will, I will lose sleep over it.
18:50
It really pisses me off. Yeah.
18:51
And then the other thing as well the other people miss is there's
18:55
different like classes of shares when you raise right.
18:59
Yeah, exactly. And VCs have to get paid out
19:01
first. So there's so many cases where
19:03
you'll see an exit of like $100 million.
19:06
Exactly. Yeah.
19:07
And the founder leaves with maybe a couple mil at best.
19:10
And so you've just done all of that and you just got screwed
19:12
over. So yeah, look, my, that's my
19:14
take. I'm obviously quite anti here,
19:15
but it obviously has its benefits as well.
19:17
I think it's that case by case. Yeah.
19:20
And you know, I think I'd like to quickly bring in or weave in
19:25
the fact that we now have a lot of cases of founders being
19:28
fraudulent. At this morning, I woke up to
19:32
the headline of Forbes 30 under 30 founder from Turkey.
19:37
I'm not going to mention her name.
19:38
No, she's female. You could go check it out.
19:40
And then actually, but she actually defrauded investors
19:44
awful lot of money. And it's it's crazy.
19:46
We like think valuations and all that stuff.
19:48
So it gets really dirty sometimes, right?
19:51
You know, coming back to the investor lens, right?
19:56
We are the humans you know most consistently introduce
20:00
inefficiency. Buyers waste inside a paid
20:04
acquisition system. That's tough one.
20:07
It's tough because there's so many variables that go into
20:10
this, right? So if you want a good, good
20:12
Google Ads campaign, that's not one thing.
20:14
There's like 1000 different things you need to be optimising
20:16
and tweaking 24/7. Is your landing page good?
20:18
OK, what's in that? What should be in that landing
20:20
page? There should be some social
20:21
proof and testimonials while you're offering like there's a
20:23
million things that go into just the landing page, right?
20:26
Then the checkout flow then. So that's just like the landing
20:29
page side. Then inside Google Ads, there's
20:31
like a million different things as well that you need to be
20:32
tweaking and optimising. Most people, I would say in
20:35
Google Ads, what do they get wrong?
20:37
Like the number one thing I think that I see is keywords
20:40
getting the keywords wrong. They go in and they had like
20:44
1000 keywords and like a $20 budget campaign per day.
20:47
That's just complete lunacy, right?
20:50
It's just like lighting money on fire for no good reason.
20:52
So like if I had to sum it up, because we've seen a million
20:54
different things go wrong and there's a lot you have to
20:56
optimise, but typically it's people are choosing the wrong
20:58
keywords. And obviously grass does a
21:01
really good job with it and helps in whatever, whatever.
21:03
But that's like the number one biggest issue I think across the
21:06
board. Oh, Speaking of landing page,
21:09
you always need to keep tweaking things.
21:11
I said tweaked something on my landing page before I I jumped
21:14
on this interview. So that speaks that hit a home
21:18
run. Let's talk about the 30 to 40%
21:22
of revenue deep, right. You've actually stated that
21:25
e-commerce brands routinely lose 30 to 40% of revenue through
21:31
avoidable mistakes. So what are the top mistakes
21:34
that quietly destroyed the margin without founders even
21:37
though just in? Yeah, I mean, so the first one
21:40
is what I touched on is, is keywords being completely wrong
21:43
and therefore you're wasting a whole bunch of of spend for no
21:45
reason. Actually, the other thing as
21:47
well is negative keywords is another thing in Google Ads
21:49
where most people have none and therefore you're showing your
21:52
ads to people who are not going to convert anyway or getting
21:54
clicks for them that people are not going to convert anyway.
21:56
That's costing you money. The other thing as well, which
21:58
is quite problematic is the ad quality itself.
22:01
Most humans suck at writing good, good copy.
22:04
It's really hard. Now, that's obviously something
22:07
that we've trained grass to do very, very well.
22:10
It's a very important part of of selling things online is how
22:12
well you can convince somebody to like how well you can
22:15
convince somebody to actually buy your product right from cold
22:19
traffic. Not easy to do.
22:21
But I think copy and writing good copy both at the ad level
22:23
and the landing page level is also something that's super
22:25
important. And then finally, you know what
22:28
unconventional answer, but it's going to be patience, patience.
22:31
A lot of people get this wrong, right?
22:32
Because if you've never on Google ads before, the big
22:35
mistake we see is people think, OK, I'm just going to throw 10
22:39
KA day at this and it it it's going to make me a bit, I'm
22:42
going to be profitable. No, like it takes time, right?
22:45
Tweaking an offer, tweaking your campaigns until it reaches that
22:48
sweet spot. Yeah, exactly.
22:51
So tweaking and getting everything right and optimising
22:53
everything until it reaches that sweet spot where you're just
22:55
printing money on autopilot could take months.
22:57
It can take weeks. It depends case by case, but I
23:00
would say patience is a very underrated factor in the game.
23:04
Patience is key. Patience is a virtue.
23:07
Let's talk about trust. We are in the attention economy
23:12
and people actually buy based on trust, but a lot of founders
23:19
actually share that loss of control with autonomous systems.
23:23
So how should leaders think about trust, ethical guardrails,
23:27
and accountability when AI is making decisions faster than
23:31
humans can ever do? Yeah, well, I think it's just
23:35
inevitable, OK, Because it just comes down to a, to a profit
23:38
question effectively, right. Like, yeah, things aren't going
23:41
to be perfect for a little bit, but in some industries they
23:43
already are, right. Software engineering, we already
23:45
have AI that can write code far better than humans far quicker.
23:48
That's that's already happened some places taking longer to
23:51
catch up. But it's just completely
23:52
inevitable that this is going to happen over time.
23:55
And it becomes for business owners, it becomes like a a
23:58
profit question, right? Do you want to employ 10 humans
24:00
to look at something or employ an AI for 1% of the cost?
24:05
It might make some errors initially, but over time it's
24:07
only going to get better and better.
24:09
Yeah, it's effectively that that's where the board is
24:11
heading for. For better or for worse, the
24:14
trainer started and there's there's just no stopping in at
24:16
this point. I'll tell you something, child
24:20
Chippity is my legal consultant. You know, the best legal, the
24:25
best legal consultant in the world for just $20.00 a month.
24:29
I don't think any lawyer charges that.
24:33
You know, I'm going to pick your, I'm going to pick your
24:37
investor braid right now. If you were still seating on,
24:41
you know, the investment committee today, what would you
24:44
look for in an AI company that most investors still miss out
24:47
on? At what stages is it like a very
24:50
under staged AI company or is it like a mid stage or like what
24:52
what stages are? Interesting.
24:54
So so let's break it down. Early stage.
24:56
Mid stage. Yeah, I mean, early stage, the
24:59
only thing to even look at in my opinion is the founders.
25:02
You invest in good founders that that's what it is, right?
25:04
You have to assess the potential of those individuals.
25:07
Is it a team? How well do they work together?
25:08
If it's just one person? Well, they better be very driven
25:11
because solo founding, as I know myself, it's going to come with
25:14
a lot of punches in the face. So that can you can you handle
25:16
it well? But effectively at an early
25:19
stage, the only thing to be thinking about is how good is
25:22
that team? Because markets change, your
25:24
products going to change like so many things are going to evolve
25:27
over time that you couldn't have possibly foreseen.
25:29
But how well those individuals adapt to the situations is like
25:33
the only, in my opinion, determinant of success.
25:36
And like, how do you assess? How do you assess humans?
25:38
That's really tough, actually. VCs typically will default to,
25:41
oh, they went to a good school, therefore we should fund them,
25:44
which I think is mostly BS. It has a bit of truth to it, and
25:48
I get it right to an extent, but it's also mostly BS.
25:51
Not everyone who goes to Stanford is going to start a
25:53
Unicorn. That's just ludicrously.
25:55
Absolutely. So yeah, there's a lot of
25:58
factors. Yeah, there's a lot of factors
26:00
that get into it. But effectively at the earlier
26:02
stages, you're just looking at the the founding team, maybe the
26:04
motivations, like why they did what they want to do.
26:06
If they're doing it just for money, by the way, I don't think
26:09
that's actually a bad answer. That's fine, right?
26:13
If you're, if you're money hungry, maybe you're going to
26:14
work harder than somebody who isn't, right?
26:15
And somebody's just, and somebody's just like, you know,
26:18
I want to make the world a better place, which is also
26:20
mostly BSA. Lot of people say the world a
26:21
better place. It's just some nonsense in my
26:23
opinion. So yeah, look into the
26:25
motivations. How well do they know the
26:27
problem they're tackling in my opinion is like, one thing I
26:29
look at is like, you're doing this, but why?
26:30
Like what attracted you to try to do this particular thing?
26:33
How well do you know the space? In my case, I knew Google Ads
26:36
very well from running E com stores over the years.
26:39
And I knew that there was a lot that was broken and I wanted to
26:41
do better myself. So that's where it came from,
26:43
right? So Google Ads was like a, a
26:45
pretty natural thing for me to, to try to tackle.
26:47
But if somebody has worked in chemical engineering their
26:50
entire life and then tomorrow wants to start an AI for for law
26:52
firms, I'm going to ask them like why they they need some
26:56
good reasons. I actually very, very much agree
26:59
with you. You know, they say experience is
27:02
the best teacher. It's always good to be armed
27:04
with that experience. And by the way, people call me
27:08
AI because my government name is AI Ademola EC member.
27:12
That is my name. So I don't know what my parents
27:15
saw and said a three years ago. They must have seen something
27:17
other people did not see, right? But I look at it, I have always
27:23
thought like somebody who's prompting, even right from my
27:26
days of the beaker accounting firms, now the LLMS are popular
27:31
and he feels like, oh, AI is the next big thing.
27:35
But we've actually been using AI for a long time, but we've
27:39
actually been thinking in this way.
27:40
So basically AI is just a multiplier.
27:44
It accelerates the way in which you think.
27:46
And for me, I, I feel like the people who are brilliant,
27:51
efficient, who only become more efficient and the people who
27:54
are, you know, the other side would also, you know, because
27:59
basically AI is just a multiply. It either multiplies, it
28:03
multiplies your intelligence or multiplies your foolishness.
28:06
So it depends on your value you're standing on, right.
28:09
And when it comes to a founder's identity, every founder has a
28:15
unique journey, right? But a lot of founders actually
28:19
struggled emotionally when the systems that they have created
28:25
outperformed them. So what is that mindset shift
28:29
that is required to move from being the smartest person in the
28:32
room to just being the architect of intelligence?
28:37
No, I much, much rather prefer to be in the second right, even
28:41
architecting that it's not being in the treasury 24/7 doing
28:45
things you. Know why is the minor shift
28:47
brother? Doesn't make you smart.
28:51
It does. But yes, yes, also I think you
28:53
need money as well to do that. And it's also, it's also hard to
28:57
do because hiring, well, hiring is really hard.
29:02
But yeah, I mean, I still myself, for example, will do a
29:04
lot of sales calls with, you know, important customers that
29:07
would possibly on board. I don't necessarily enjoy doing
29:10
that, right? I think in maybe a couple of
29:11
months, hopefully I can find someone who's much, much better
29:14
than me to do these calls. It was much more convincing, who
29:17
knows, for them to know grow ass better than I do.
29:19
Will take a lot of time, obviously.
29:21
But yeah, like that's the stage I think we're at.
29:23
By the way, as a company, we're still quite early.
29:25
We've been going for like, what, 7-8 months now?
29:27
But yeah, we're slowly going to move there.
29:29
If I had more capital, if I'd raised whatever 510 mil and had
29:32
more capital, I probably would have done this earlier.
29:35
But yeah, that's it's, it's essential to do.
29:37
It's absolutely essential. Otherwise you don't have a
29:39
business. You just have a, a job with lots
29:41
of different customers, lots of different bosses you have to
29:44
answer to and you don't have a business.
29:45
So you need to, in my opinion, do that, get to that ASAP.
29:49
That's that's what a business really is.
29:51
I love that. So before I let you go, I'm
29:53
going to put you through the rapid fire questions.
29:57
But before there are a quiet fire questions, I remembered
29:59
something you told me, you know, the first time we indeed get to
30:02
meet, you told me about how grow us is just grade on the search
30:06
engine. So I'd like for you to expand on
30:09
the like, like Grow us is just great.
30:11
Like white fire right now on the search engine.
30:14
I think probably on YouTube or like Google, the Google search
30:19
engine. Oh.
30:21
Right, yes, So I mean all our. For context, one thing I haven't
30:26
mentioned is we still grow as we haven't done any marketing so
30:30
far. We haven't run any paid ads.
30:32
We haven't really done any cold outreach.
30:33
We have done nothing so far. All of our signups, all of them
30:36
come from 85% of our signups come from LLMS referring grow as
30:43
the best solution. So someone will type into
30:45
ChatGPT, hey, how do I optimise my Google ads?
30:47
And then ChatGPT will say you should use grass and then people
30:50
will sign up. So that's like that's 85% of our
30:52
signups, which is great. That's fully organic.
30:54
We do nothing for that. The other 15% is existing
30:59
customers telling other customers, telling other their
31:01
friends that whatever, hey, look, we're using grass.
31:03
It's great. Just sign up.
31:05
The reason this is quite, it's tough, right?
31:07
We're in a difficult position because I want that number to be
31:10
higher. I should be higher than 15% of
31:11
people saying, hey, the reason they don't, and I know this,
31:15
I've been told this is I've asked some of our customers,
31:19
hey, could you give us some testimonials And they refuse.
31:22
And you know why they refuse? Because they don't want their
31:24
competitors to know they're using grass or the agencies.
31:27
I saw that on your websites to know these grass like.
31:32
I saw that on your website. Happens very often where they
31:35
just want to keep it secret. Yes.
31:38
That permits me to expose you. So guys, I've got to read what I
31:41
saw on gross website. You know this client actually
31:46
says to David, he says, hey David, thanks a lot for the
31:48
opportunity. I really appreciate you thinking
31:51
of me. This might sound a bit selfish,
31:53
but grass looks so powerful to me that I'm honestly a little
31:57
afraid my competitors might figure out I'm using it as that,
32:01
using it against me as well. So for now, I think I'll have to
32:05
pass purely out of fear rather than lack of appreciation.
32:09
Sorry about that. And of course, sorry, David, I
32:11
have to expose you on the other podcast.
32:15
So yeah, there you go. There you go.
32:17
That happens very often. Wow it.
32:20
Is one of the. Congratulations on on the
32:21
success, brother. It's, it's quite interesting
32:24
what, what this LLMS do. I had a message from somebody
32:27
earlier today telling you that I, I searched you on Google and
32:32
do you know what Google AI is telling me?
32:34
OK, two people actually detailed me today.
32:36
One of them told me the AI refers to you as AI.
32:40
And I'm like, OK, interested, interested.
32:42
I have to start making money from this name AI.
32:44
And the second person told me, guess what, Google AI is
32:49
referring to you as a Joe Rogan of Africa.
32:51
I'm like, wow, I never knew. And then it sent me a
32:55
screenshot, and then it put a smile on my face.
32:58
So put some respect on my name. You know, the Joe Rogan of
33:00
Africa. Very cool.
33:03
We're shooting for that top 1% yet currently, the two podcasts,
33:07
you know, are global top 2% and global top 3%.
33:11
And yeah, hopefully this year we're shooting into the top 1%
33:14
in the world. Big fire round here we'll go. 5
33:17
questions, very big answers. Let us go.
33:21
Are you ready to rumble? Hey, number one, what is 1
33:27
metric founders? What is 1 metric founders
33:31
obsessed over? That does not matter.
33:35
So off we kind of touched on it, but maybe, maybe money raised
33:40
maybe. Maybe I.
33:41
Don't know, is that the amount of money they're raised?
33:45
OK, I'll give you, I'll give you online that I always use
33:48
revenues, vanity profits, insanity.
33:51
Cash is reality. How about that?
33:54
True, true, but there are exceptions.
33:57
I think if your if your revenues genuinely just skyrocketing,
34:00
like genuinely like just doing boom, then maybe some losses can
34:03
offset it. It's you know, that's that's
34:05
actually a really difficult question.
34:06
I'm trying to think what I look at.
34:09
OK, how about this? How about this?
34:10
Social media followers is my answer.
34:14
Oh yeah. God bless you.
34:15
I love that I love that I love that bro let me tell you
34:19
something I, I, I, I know I know somebody who has like over
34:24
10,000 followers and LinkedIn and this girl has never made a
34:28
dime. The next question of the rapid
34:32
fire will be what is what metric founders ignored that decides
34:35
survival? Easy, John.
34:38
John #1. Oh, OK, OK, yeah, back to the
34:42
story I was telling you right. I don't have many followers in
34:44
LinkedIn, but I get a lot of inbounds saying, oh, I want to I
34:47
want to be on your podcast and you know, guys pay me to talk to
34:51
me from LinkedIn, from socials. Yeah, right.
34:54
Yeah, I don't have many followers.
34:56
Instagram I probably have like 5000 followers, right?
35:00
The people who have 100K plus followers but they don't make
35:05
are dying off these people. So I I very much agree with you
35:09
that that metric is is a vanity metric.
35:12
What is the biggest lie sold about AI in marketing?
35:16
Oh, that's tough. Biggest lie about AI?
35:20
Well, I mean, we are. I think when I'm what I mean, I
35:22
hope we're not selling any lies. I don't think we do.
35:24
So I'm trying to think of other players.
35:26
Guys go to gross that AI to check either.
35:29
Any lies? It's tough.
35:32
I don't know. Truthfully, I don't really look
35:34
at what are the, you know, companies like.
35:37
I just focus on us. That's really all my focus is
35:40
on. I don't know.
35:40
It's hard to say. Biggest lie about AI in
35:44
marketing? OK, The biggest lie is that it
35:49
won't replace humans. It will.
35:52
That's my answer. Interested in it #4 What is the
35:55
hardest thing to let go of when automating growth?
35:59
No, the hardest thing to let go of when you are automating
36:04
growth. OK.
36:08
Interview, interview, interview, interview, interview.
36:21
Yeah, yeah. Sorry.
36:24
Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.