Jeremy Weisz 8:45
You know, when again, as you grow the company, and the there’s leaders and you’re promoting people, what are some of the ways that you find best to groom leaders within the company?
Erik Huberman 9:00
Time spend time in the weeds with them, I mean, that I the mistakes I’ve made in the past or like, I’ll get on my one on ones with our leaders and brushed over things and not get into the weeds and look at the numbers and talk about the teams and ask them what’s going on and really try to try to help them. That’s when it works really well. When you don’t do that. You’re like, what are those, okay, go fix it. That’s when it doesn’t like it’s really like collaborating with your leaders always ongoing. Being in it with them. That’s where we get a lot of benefit. I would love to
Jeremy Weisz 9:29
hear you know, to highlight a little bit more about what a Hawke Media does a few examples. And there was one example with with video man, I’d love for you to talk about what happened with that.
Erik Huberman 9:39
Yeah, I mean, that’s great SaaS business that was like password management and security management for companies that were able to do all their marketing for a while and they went from startup to selling to Google. And again, for the way we work is like it’s alphacard month to month marketing services. But we pretty much run the gamut other than we don’t do Um, PR and experiential. So we don’t do traditional like editorial PR, and we don’t do events. Other than that we have talked teams in about every category, we’re just got one of the top awards from Google, we’re one of the top spenders on Facebook, we managed about half a billion dollars in advertising. On top of being an owner and partner and clay, VO and PostScript and all these other SAS businesses that we mentioned, the fund we invest in, and then become big partners in. And so we have the chops in all these categories, but make it really flexible that like ebb and flow as we need. So we work with video on I think for three years before Google bought them. And like we have these clients that like that doesn’t mean we did the same thing all the time for three years, we change an ebb and flow and pivot depending on what the needs are at the company.
Jeremy Weisz 10:39
You know, for for video them, when they first come to you. Where do you start? What do you do first?
Erik Huberman 10:46
Yeah, so it’s been a few years with them. So specifically, I actually don’t remember where you started. But in general, we always run a marketing audit, we always go in like for free. We’re gonna go look at everything you’re doing. We actually mentioned the AI tool we launched six weeks ago. Finally, we it took us seven years to build this. But basically, we can run all of all marketing channels through this plot or platform, and in real time benchmark you against your industry in terms of all different KPIs like what’s your click through rate on your ads on Facebook? What’s your conversion rate on tick tock? What’s your budget allocations? How much of your revenue is being driven by email versus what’s the benchmark for your industry, all these things, so we can actually quickly and we used to do this manually. Now we have an automated system that we can do a lot of it and then manually go in and double check things reconcile, figure out what the insights are from that. So that we can actually recommend here’s the low hanging fruit, these are the places you’re missing the most, that you shouldn’t be missing the most.
Jeremy Weisz 11:38
They’re just someone after work with you to use that platform, or can they use it separately? As a service.ai?
Erik Huberman 11:46
And when’s this gonna go live? What date? Probably
Jeremy Weisz 11:51
four weeks or so?
Erik Huberman 11:52
Okay, so yeah, that’s it started 250 bucks a month. It’s supposed to be some completely except so it
Jeremy Weisz 11:57
could be different price. Whenever if you’re listening to this three years from now, and the dollars don’t get
Erik Huberman 12:03
no I was gonna say is, but we have an introductory price that’s going up in a couple of weeks.
Jeremy Weisz 12:07
Yeah, I was gonna say, oh, so someone can use it separately. But but the one of the ways that you will work with a company in the beginning just to audit, what’s going on to make your recommendations is you’ll use the tool that you recommend?
Erik Huberman 12:23
Yes, yes, we’ll use a tool we recommend. And we’ll also do manual work, or whoever experts go in and take a look to run an audit manually as well, because there’s a lot of nuance that like AI is not there yet, the goal of ad hoc AI is to build a platform that as AI progresses as a technology, we have the data and the infrastructure to actually leverage it. And that we have that now, but the technology isn’t there yet. So over time, this will become something that can be automated marketing strategy.
Jeremy Weisz 12:49
So we’ll get to that I want to talk specifically about the AI tool for a second, but for the b2b company, you’ll go and you’ll do an audit. There’s manual work, you’re using, obviously, the software that you put blood, sweat, and tears and money into what’s next, after you do the audit,
Erik Huberman 13:06
we come back with based on their budget constraints, what they need, will go hey, here are the things we think you should be doing. This is how much it costs. This is for us to do it. We could, if this makes sense. Let’s go. And we always ask for budget constraints, even if it’s a range, give us an idea ballpark of what your resources are. So we know what we’re working with. And we’ll put together what we think is best for you to do with that. So and that’s, and then we again, it’s all our current month to month, so no barrier to entry, we have all the credibility in the world, we actually win awards every week. It’s pretty fun. And so at this point, it’s like we know what we’re doing. We don’t like I can say that, objectively, we’ve got enough companies to success that it’s just not a factor anymore. And so it’s just if we will tell you what the best use of your dollars are and where you can go run with it with you. And we can adjust on the fly, we can adjust before starting, like depending on again, this is a collaborative effort. So once we present the reason what we’re going to do and why we can have a discussion, if it looks good, what generally it does, generally, it’s like we know what we’re doing, this is what you need to do. Let’s go we go. Sometimes it’s like, yeah, we hear it see all this, but like we want to hold off on this thing, or hey, we see all this, but we actually also need help on this. Can we add that. And again, it’s all easy to put together. And then we kick off. It takes us a few days to kick off in a couple of weeks get ads live, and we’re off to the races.
Jeremy Weisz 14:20
Erik with your e-commerce companies that you grew and then ended up selling. Were you using a lot of these same exact methods now that you do for other companies?
Erik Huberman 14:28
Yeah, and that’s where it came from is more than last one that my first e-commerce company that I sold was bootstrapped and aside to be super scrappy. And so when I moved to the second one, I was brought in by science incubator that already raised 2 million bucks and they just said go and so I had all the budget in the world to kick off and go do whatever the hell I wanted to do. And then it all worked. So I’d spent a year and a half being super scrappy grinding in the weeds because I had to make every dollar count. And then I knew all the things that weren’t there and so I just double down on the second company and it was good timing everything and it just blew out of the water. We did on $400,000 In total marketing spend in four months, I got it to a $6 million run rate. Nice work. That’s awesome.
Jeremy Weisz 15:11
You know, software is a totally different animal. I feel like I’ve been in the room with people, the grass is always greener. Right? agency services are like, I just want a software, the software we like, it’s the margin, you know, the agency in this service. So much better, right? So, so talk about creating this
Erik Huberman 15:32
example is like, I’ll just be blind, like, you know, we burn half of 500 Sorry, not 500, we burn 50 to $60,000 a month in its negative profit right now. I’m paying out of pocket from Hawke Media, which profits to pay for this, because it takes a lot of two built, we have a whole engineering team building this to run this. And the revenue hasn’t caught up yet. We have an amazing adoption immediately. But it took the we bought it. So we bought a piece of software. Actually, I’ll rewind and tell the full story of this because it’s actually kind of fun. Seven years ago, I sat down with two brilliant guys, a guy named Marcus shingles and a guy named Peter Diamandis, who runs XPrize. So I was sitting with them. And they were like, talking about rapid disruption. And they looked at me and said, What’s going to be the Uber to your taxi company, like, as a marketing agency, what’s going to disrupt what you’re doing? And they’re like, we think it’s going to be freelancers. And that’s going to completely disrupt what you’re doing. And you know, everyone’s just gonna go with freelancers like, no, they’re not because they’re completely unreliable. And if you’re running a business, that’s not a good thing to do. But I do think AI will, and like, this is what I think is gonna happen, I think, over time, AI is going to first you’re going to get insights, that is going to watch all your marketing channels and be able to tell you, here’s what’s working, what’s not. And it’s going to, if you can get enough data on the global markets, you can say, this is how you’re benchmarking this, what’s working what’s not. And then over time, you can create insights like this is why it’s not working like your site speed is why your conversion rate is bad. And then over time, it can be like your site speed isn’t working, because these three images aren’t loading well. And then at some point, it’s going to just be like, hey, I can fix this, do you want to turn off these three images? And then it’ll just be automated, like, it’ll just start fixing everything in real time. And I’m like, that’s coming. It’ll be a decade, but I think it’s coming. And they said, Well, why are you building that? So you’ve got a AI engineer, but I appreciate the kick in the butt. And so I actually, you know, in my, the, our company was young, but profitable, and I was like, Screw it. Let’s go build it. So I went through, what I knew immediately is step one of this is I need the data, I need 1000s of companies marketing data, in real time to educate an individual platform on or individual company on how they’re performing according the market. Because if I don’t have that, knowing that my ads are down week over week, was that a market function or a personal problem? Like? I don’t know. So you need the global data for it? Well, nobody’s nobody’s, what do you call it? Nobody’s surprised that Google doesn’t get benchmarking, like there’s really hard to find benchmark, other than anecdotal, what are you guys seeing? So I was like, Alright, so we need to get data. And then I want to build a visualization platform that allows us to then again, do this automated audit that we now can do so we can benchmark them and to see show how companies are performing what they could do better than at insights and what’s build this. So I hired a tech team, I think that was, you know, six years ago, and started building it, built the pipes to start digesting data, I knew that I wanted to do it. So started get finding data partnerships to get the data in. And long story short, I went through three failed tech teams that couldn’t build it, they would spend a couple 100 grand they’d get nowhere we’d move on to next one couple under grand get nowhere. Next one. And that happened three times. And then yeah, well, I’d say it was like the frog slow boil thing, where it happens. So slowly, it wasn’t to your pay us 200 grand it was like 10 or 20 grand a month, three different times for a year. And then like God dammit, and then you move on to the next one. So it was exciting until it wasn’t. And so it was never felt painful until you look at it in hindsight. But it all worked out. Because what happened was a year ago, I went to a program called birthing of giants at UT Austin. And it was basically how do you hockey stick your business and it was actually built for companies about an order of magnitude smaller than mine. So we’re talking things about how to scale a sales team and things that we’d already done. But instead of being like, Oh, shit, I’m in the wrong room and rolling my eyes, I went, I’m still gonna go follow in and figure out like, I’m gonna spend the whole week taking their cues, but trying to apply it to my size business. And what it came out with was, I still need to build this software company, because it’ll make so much efficiency on my team. It’ll do so many things for my business, I need to build it came out. I immediately two days later, put up two job ads for a senior developer and a junior one. I was like, we’re gonna build this in house, we’re going to interview the shit out of people. I’m gonna have some friends that are in software, help me interview him, we’re gonna get there. And then two days later, I got emailed by guy that said, we have this dashboard company we’d love to talk to you about we have a bunch of mutual friends. And I looked at it and again, this was amazing. What is amazing about all this is it was so top of mind. I went, huh, this guy has the monitoring part of what I need for this platform. So I get on the phone and I’m like, Cool platform. Let’s take a step back, though, how long you been doing this? He’s like four years now. It’s been five, four years. I’m like, Okay, how much money have you raised? Where are you at how he’s like, we just got to market. We’re just starting to get customers like, Okay, what if I told you, I now have 10,000 companies marketing data in real time. And we could add that into this creep benchmarking. You can use my 35 person sales team, and my whole infrastructure to build this and we just partner up and do it together. What do you think? And he’s like, Yeah, strong sales. But yeah, it worked. So by the way, incredible people, so we got a deal done in February. I like no, like, it was the coolest like, it’s been the best experience. I’ve we’ve bought nine companies. This has been the I hate to demean anyone else. But the best experience because the negotiations were the most rational above the table like, this is what we need. This is like we have an investor, we got to find a way to at least pay off his interest. Like all these things that we went back and forth on got the deal done. They then told me they could have all the benchmarking integrated within two months, which was basically may, because we really got done around March, and like got roots started integrating etc. And May 15 was the deadline. I got back from a trip on like May 21. And went, Hey, guys, what out then? Did we get all that? Like, where are we on all those things? We promised deadlines like we got done on May 15. Like what you said, which for anyone in software, it’s a miracle. And I’m like, What do you mean, it’s done right here. And they pulled up the demo and showed me all benchmarking integrated already, all the data running through it. And so then I knew like, Okay, this is going to be amazing. We rebranded it from morphia to Hawke AI. In August, we soft launched that. And then September, we did a hard launch. And in six weeks, we got it to over 2000 paying customers. Amazing. And it is the benchmarking is done. We now our insights are launching, I think next week. So by the time this comes out, they should be out where it’ll start saying here are things you should know, based on this data. And then we’re actually starting to do manage within the platform. So like these ads aren’t performing, just turn them off through the platform. So over time, the idea is, is going to be more and more automated marketing strategy. And for a super affordable price.
Jeremy Weisz 22:02
Who’s an ideal customer for Hawke AI?
Erik Huberman 22:05
Well, so that’s what’s been the most amazing part of this. So I am an optimist, I believe that, you know, I’m going to be a multimillionaire, it’s going to happen and like, I believe, it’s to a level of irrational sometimes, and with this, I was like, This is gonna be huge. Everybody needs this. And I say that, but I also know how hard I’m a realist in the sense of I know how hard it is to build a business, I don’t have a few like, so I’m like, we’re gonna get out we’re gonna have to like work through problems cetera, and like, it’s gonna grind. Every single company I’ve talked to, from tiny startup to Fortune 100 is onboarding. It’s like, almost nobody goes. I don’t know about it. Everybody wants this, because it’s such a problem in marketing, that, like we’ve already solved, the product is there, the benchmarking is there, and it starts at 250 bucks a month, like, it is such a no brainer to expend, turn $50, to know where you stand in the market. On a weekly real time basis. It’s actually real time, but at least going in weekly, and seeing where all your metrics stand as we continue to spin up more and more features and more and more things in it for the same price. It’s like, again, we’ve talked to some of the biggest companies in the world that are onboarding, some of the smallest companies in the world that are also onboarding. And what we’ve been surprised by is venture funds, private equity funds, and agencies are all now using it at scale for portfolio management, whether it’s an agency using it to watch all weather companies or a private equity fund the same thing. And we’re talking some of the biggest PE funds are already onboarding. And then we’ve also now had hedge funds, doing diligence on the data, which is anonymized. But we turns out, we have a 99% correlation with Facebook, Google, and Shopify is public data. So we’re able to actually know what’s predict the markets, we’re using our data as well. So a lot of really fun things coming in here that we did not even anticipate out the gate. So I can’t, you know, I can’t focus on this enough in terms of like, I also have the agency to run because every I literally I, my first two calls today at 730 and eight o’clock, for two companies where I Gower and send us an intro. Like we went on board. So it’s just like, it’s a quick like, oh, yeah, this made it so it just makes sense. Everybody should use this.
Jeremy Weisz 24:06
And if anyone’s watching the video part or you know, listening to the audio, that we’re I have a Hawke AI pulled up, you can check it out at Hawke H, A W K E.ai. But you can see kind of the look in the field, the dashboard with the media spend Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, and some of the other components here as you can check out that page. One of the questions I had Erik was, you know, with software, and as you’re iterating and improving it, what are some of the key feedback you got that you implemented that maybe was surprising? Maybe it wasn’t, but I’m sure you’ve implemented feedback that you’ve gotten from companies.
Erik Huberman 24:43
Yeah. And what’s really fun is my entire so the best feedback we got. So we signed up for data Rama with Salesforce, it’s their data platform, and then we brought this in, and we never forced it on our team. We’re just like, hey, we’re gonna onboard our clients. If you want to use it, they’re gonna have it. And so we did that and our team asked if we could just sunset data Rama and use Hawke AI which to know that they want to sunset Salesforce as data platform to use ours, they have no incentive, no reason. And frankly, generally they do the opposite, where it’s like, hey, we have this tool, they’re like, I don’t want to deal with another tool. So that was incredible feedback. And what our team is now doing, Dave, who is the president of Hawke AI is such a great guy. And so product focused and so solid, and Nima, the CTO, both of them are so great, they just go spend time with each of our teams that are using and go, What do you need, and like, there is no better product insight like customer like, it’s the my favorite line with that is like Ford talking about GS customers where they wanted, they still they want a faster horse and buggy like, you gotta be really careful with customer feedback, because you gotta have some vision here. But with our own team, they can see like how we, as sophisticated marketers want to manage our clients. And that is very informative. So like we added LTV analysis, lifetime value analysis, and CAC analysis, and all these things that we wish existed on some of these other platforms. And so it’s been built in a way that we can manage clients, which means clients can also manage themselves. And I’d say, the use case for this the biggest one, the most core one is a CEO, or a CMO, not necessarily like a performance marketer that’s in the weeds all day that can help know where they stand. But they’re constantly optimizing and doing the best they can. This is more to know, like, as a company, how are we doing? And so and know in real time and know, where’s the weak points? Like? Do I need to look at my creative person, because we’re underperforming the rest of the market in terms of click through rates, as an example, that creative person knowing they’re underperforming the market? I guess it can make them try to do better creative, but it doesn’t really inform much action, other than from the senior level.
Jeremy Weisz 26:36
What do you look for in an acquisition? This was a this was an acquisition. And it sounds I mean, I mean, but you brought to the table a lot of customers and data. What do you look for an acquisition? Maybe not software? But are you acquiring more just separate from the Hawke Media? Or is it some of it integrated into Hawke Media?
Erik Huberman 27:00
Oh, it’s all integrated. I mean, we have our venture fund its investments. But for acquisitions, it’s eight agencies in a software company. It’s its agencies that complement what we do, whether its geographic service oriented, or just a great bolt, and that can complement a core part of the business.
Jeremy Weisz 27:18
So what do you look for in an agency? Are there certain a number that you would like to do a year? Or is like, we’re good for a while? What do you look for
Erik Huberman 27:26
a number of acquisitions? Yeah. I mean, the problem is setting goals like that, as it can force wrong decisions, we just try to keep the funnel open. And if it’s a good agency, we’ll partner up. And so you know, that can be a couple that can this year, we pulled back on too, because this year with the instability in the market, there were two big bites we were taking that went, you know, let’s be prudent, let’s not go balls to the wall this year, it’s okay. And it was ended up being a great decision. So, you know, next year, I think it depends, like, in a good year, when things are humming, we’ll do as many as we can. If we find good agencies,
Jeremy Weisz 28:02
is there a fit of revenue level for you, you want to be at a certain revenue, because I’m sure,
Erik Huberman 28:09
it’s hard to do under a million, because it’s really just not a business yet. It’s an individual is what we find, like, there’s exceptions to that rule. But generally, if they’re not doing a million revenue, they don’t really have much of a team doing anything. And I mean that in whatever I put that, relatively, obviously, a person with a $600,000 a year, you know, and a few employees is great. But generally, like, unless it’s a brand new, cool, innovative service that we want to like, plug into our old engine, it’s not going to be that interesting for them or us because it’s hard to make that exciting. At a million we know we can scale it fast. So like that one to four range has kind of been our sweet spot.
Jeremy Weisz 28:48
So let’s assume there’s an agency listening right now. And they’re over a million dollars. Is there a certain need right now at this point, you’re like, we’re looking for this type of service or company or region to play.
Erik Huberman 28:59
Honestly, we’re always open because I love working with agency founders, they’re self starters that can no matter what we found is we have people that come in we’ve 8x 9x agencies, like in a couple years like we can, because of our infrastructure, we working in partnership with an agency, we can grow them really fast a lot of the time and give them all the playbook that we have that we’re constantly vetting. And so we can do a lot there. So it’s just finding the right culture fit where the person wants to run through a wall. The other side of it is like we do get people that just want out and we can be a soft landing for their team. Like we don’t we’re not chop shop here. We don’t want to like go like we’re not gonna we’ve passed on agencies where it’s like, oh, you have to fire half your people to stay in business. Like, yeah, we’re you. We’re not taking that on. We would rather buy an agency keep everyone intact, right? If we have to make a few fixes, that’s fine. But I don’t mean firing. I mean, like, we have to find ways to you know, there’s usually enough synergy to find ways to make it work. We, you know, who then partner up with a founder that wants to grow or not if they want to bow out which this year has had more of that, you know, in a year where the economy is going the other direction, people are just don’t want or burnt out. Like we see that a lot agency founders are burnt out, they want out. So we’re having a lot of conversations on like, can you just take my book of business so I can go get a job, I can’t do this anymore. But generally it’s I want to grow this guy up. But I need a platform, like we have everything you need. We have the full accounting legal, you know, we have a full Sales Team marketing team. So it’s really finding where that agency founder fits in. And then basically taking everything else off their plate, that’s the best deals for us is, you are an expert, either in this type of service, or in BD, because a lot of times agencies owners are just really good sales and marketing people. So it’s like, let’s free you up to just focus on that will do all the delivery will manage the team will hire will deliver all the goods, you go focused on getting business and building relationships.
Jeremy Weisz 30:44
I do hear from a lot of founders, I mean, not just agencies, but about burnout. How do you avoid burnout?
Erik Huberman 30:55
transparently, I don’t I’ve this year, I burned out myself. First time, but just being blunt. And I’ve always been an open book about this, but I never understood it till this year. But it’s it is it’s hard. I mean, honestly, I don’t think that you and I just it’s cool. I just last week, I got to see Stephen Colbert speak. And he actually was asked the same question, how do you avoid anxiety and burnout, because you don’t like you just learn to deal with it and try to like it, if it makes any sense. Like I That being said, I think making so making sure you put yourself in as good of a position as possible to do the things that you’re good at that you also enjoy doing is super important. But at the end of the day, like building a business is fucking hard, and it will never end. And I think that is an important thing to come to terms with, like Mark Zuckerberg company, the one of the richest, the richest person in California for a long time, went down at 78%, or whatever it is, this year, he has to fire 13% of his company, which I don’t know how many 1000s of people that is, but it’s I know, it’s crazy. Like, he built one of the biggest companies of our generation, and he’s having to deal with some really stressful shit right now that I’m sure is burning him out. Same thing with Tim Cook and Apple biggest company in the world. He’s dealing with Geopolitical Problems and a recession and all these things like, it’s not always going to be butterflies and roses. And like when it’s not. And that’s the part that’s important. Like we I think myself included, the past decade has been up into the right for almost everybody. Like it has been a really, really bold decade for the market for economy for businesses. And like even though we all dealt with individual problems along the way, and there’s always challenges in business, the overall picture was good, now it’s switching. So unless you went through 2008 and know what that looks like, it’s scary. And I think that combined with like grinding through the pandemic, and grinding through what’s happened recently, like just the world between war and all this stuff. I think like I see it with my employees, they see it with everyone like the overall mental health of the country is not in good place right now, like the the American Psychology Association just came out with a stat that the for people under 35 47% of them say that stress limits their ability to function on a on a common daily basis. Meaning like, regular or regularly on a not daily, but it’s like, they can’t function on their day to day habits on a regular basis due to stress half of people under 35 in the United States, according to this study. So I think there’s just an overall global thing right now that if you’re feeling stressed out, burnt out, etc. Everyone is and it’s okay. Take a breath, meditate, exercise, do all the things you need to do take yourself, carry yourself and know that we literally go through this shit every decade. And it’s just going to be another one and and act responsibly.
Jeremy Weisz 33:42
What do you do to cope with it when you’re feeling
Erik Huberman 33:46
those meditate exercise, spend time with the family? Do your best to take a breath like perspective. Does it really matter? Are we you know, saving the world here? Are we marketing some cool brands? And that being said, world’s smallest fire when we’re doing fine, honestly like that, that’s the world. Yeah, that’s good. We are doing fine. But like I’m used to 80% compounded annual growth for eight years. So like, that’s every year averaging 80% growth, like we’ve grown up very fast, and so not having that. And all of a sudden, like in a screeching to a halt. It takes the wind out of your sails. And you have to figure out along with headwinds that happen in a situation like this. It’s like it gets stressful. But again, usually what I did is informed myself that I think similar to like, if you get nerves when you do public speaking, best way to get over it is to prep. Same thing with like a surgery or this if you’re nervous. Go look at all the studies. Go look at everything that you know everything that’s coming out about what’s happening, try to understand it, you can’t predict the future but understand it the best you can so you can watch the variables. So that you know like my favorite stat right now is looking at the 2008 collapse the market because it was like it was it’s almost identical. Call to this year with one more drop coming. Do we think the market might drop? You’d have one more sharp drop? Yeah, I think everybody could probably agree to that. But then you’re in 2008 territory, which is the second worst recession since it’s the worst. And since the Great Depression, do I think rationally that we’re going into a Great Depression right now? No more cash in the market than ever? Or sorry, cash on the sidelines? We’ve got, like, nothing tells me we’re going into a depression. Do I think we might have like we’re already in a recession. I don’t know why they keep changing the definition. But we’re in there. But again, these most last a year and a half. And we’re already a year into it. Almost. So like, by mid next year, I think it’ll start to be fine. And can you make it can you tough it out for another six months before things start to recover? I can. That’s how I that’s a big thing of like, how I think about it. This isn’t forever. And another last line on that is a great like interview with Tom Hanks. They asked him something along the lines of like, what is his favorite advice or something and he goes, This too shall pass what he means but and he says that he’s like, things are going great making tons of money. This too shall pass. Oh, things are really horrible. You’re struggling, you can’t make ends meet. This too shall pass. But he talks about it goes both ways. Things won’t always be amazing. And things won’t always be horrible. It goes through ebbs and flows. And just remember that I think is super important. When you’re burning out.
Jeremy Weisz 36:15
Yeah, thanks for sharing that for sure. Educating yourself, and it makes it less scary. Also,
Erik Huberman 36:23
That’s how I dealt with COVID. I just went and did tons of research and but tons of ideas down of what I thought was gonna happen. I was wrong with a lot of it, but it helps with coping.
Jeremy Weisz 36:33
What is one of your favorite stories from the book? Yeah, I’d say
Erik Huberman 36:39
probably the, my favorite one, because it’s actually come full circle was there’s I talked about a company a client we had, that was, all of a sudden their Facebook ads dropped to like their performance went down 85%, or like 88% was horrible, like dropped by a third to an eighth of what it was doing. And I didn’t hear about it for a couple of weeks, our team was scrambling trying to redo Facebook ads to make it perform. And finally it came to my desk. And I’m like, All right, when they look at the metrics, and I’m like, wait, they have the same cost per quick, same click through rate, same CPM, we’re targeting the same types of people. So nothing changed on Facebook, the cost didn’t change, the targeting didn’t change, like nothing’s changed. What’s why is this a Facebook provider we’re trying to fix Facebook sounds like their conversions the problem. So they go look at their site, the conversion rate has dropped an eighth 20. Like it’s their conversion rate is an eighth of what it was. Why? What happened? It happened. Like, we got to look at the dates. Oh, it happened on a day. Like it’s like you can see like the boom, like, oh, that day. So I emailed them and said, Hey, on whatever I think it was in April, like April 21. Did you do something to your website? There we go. Yeah, we just had some minor updates, minor updates. Okay. Let’s, let’s look at the site speed. Their site speed had become it instead of one second load speed on mobile, it had gone to eight seconds. So how many people are going to click on an ad and sit staring at a blank screen for eight seconds until the page loads? Then click the product? And then wait Eight more seconds? No one. So that was what happened? I explained this to them. And they’re like, no, no, it’s Facebook ads. Like, we’re they’re looking at the Facebook, Facebook is top performing. Like it’s your site. We don’t blame our site. It’s your Facebook ads. I’m like, here’s all the metrics, like I’m on trying to pull one over on you. Sure enough, they fire us and go get another agency that lasted a few months. And they fix their site. And everything goes back to normal like, hey, just so you know, we were able to get it back on track. And I’m like, you fix your website, didn’t you? They’re like, Yes, Well done. Good job. Fast forward, they’re gonna become a client of Hawke AI, which is literally what that product is built to do. So when I wrote the book, there was no Hawke AI. Now, like, that’s a perfect case of like, looking at the wrong metrics and thinking like, well, it’s Facebook, because our row has it down. It’s like, all of your metrics are good. It’s not Facebook. It’s this is your problem. And that’s one of the systems that we built into that platform.
Jeremy Weisz 39:01
Love it. Yeah, I encourage people to check out the book. You know, you can get on Audible or on Amazon. And so I have one last question there. First of all, thanks for sharing your stories, your knowledge, your expertise. I want to encourage people before I ask it to go to hawkemedia.com. You can also go to hawke.ai to learn more about AI if you are one of those type of companies if you do anything with advertising, or if you have a portfolio that you manage, check it out. Last question, Erik, is how have things changed since having a child?
Erik Huberman 39:40
Yeah, it’s everything I thought it was, which is a weird thing to say because I was bombarded with people saying you have no idea what you’re getting into. Turns out I did, which three months in so I’m like, I know that there’s plenty of surprises, but it’s what I thought it was meaning like, I know that there’s going to be individual surprises but having a child is what I thought it would be in every great way that you would hope it would Be. And so the way like I work from home, which is amazing because like today, I had a 30 minute cancellation right when it was her play time. So I went well, I’m gonna put my computer down and go play with her for 30 minutes. Like there’s things like that that are just a gift in terms of where we’re at in society. Traveling way less interesting, um, I flew this year so far I’ve been I’ve found 200,000 miles. She was an A, since she’s born. I’ve done three, one overnight, one tonight and one week trip. And it’s not as fun. Like I want to go home, which I never had, I love my wife, sincerely. We have worked great together. But being apart for a few days wasn’t a big deal. Now I’m like, I don’t wanna, I want to go home and see my daughter. So that’s been a change. It’s also frankly, made me more of a workaholic and productive because I was a hobby junkie, free having a baby where like, I got my pilot’s license, I snowboard all the time, a mountain biker do all these things. And now, like, when the weekend comes around, I’m not trying to find the next activity go do I’m spending time with my daughter who’s sleeping half the time. So then I’m like, oh, grab my laptop. I’m just sitting at home. So I’ve definitely found it’s actually I thought it was gonna be a hindrance on productivity. It’s increased my productivity. It’s taken away a lot of my hobby focus, but that’s okay. Because frankly, I’ve got so much fun with that anyways, and at some point, I find equilibrium as it comes.
Jeremy Weisz 41:17
Sometimes as a force function to getting more done. My business partner, John Corcoran has four kids under 11. And like you’re almost forced to get things done during you know, so
Erik Huberman 41:30
you got to be really good at once they that’s the thing is she’s, again sleeping half the time now before they go to school. But once they’re older, like that is going to change it’s going to be by definitely a lot more hands on.
Jeremy Weisz 41:43
Erik, thank you so much everyone, check out the site, check out the book, check out the podcast, check out everything and I appreciate you, Erik. Thanks, everyone.
Erik Huberman 41:53
Thank you for having me.
