营销代理实战：定义、部署与三个商业构想

Let's be real, the hardest part about building a startup today is getting customers to the startup. You can vibe code stuff now super easily, we all know that, but getting customers to drive revenue is hard. So, how can you actually set up marketing agents that help you do this? I feel like a bunch of people have talked about this, but no one's really gone in depth and clearly explained what a marketing agent is and how you can use it to go [music] and get you customers.

In today's episode, it's two parts. We give you a startup idea that I really love, and then we also explain what marketing agents are, how you can set them up, what are the tools you need to understand if you actually want to be a marketing agent manager,

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and Cody Schneider just does an incredible job on this episode of explaining everything end to end.

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Um so, enjoy the episode and I'll see you at the end.

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Thank the good lord that Cody Schneider is back on the podcast. Uh Cody, by the end of the episode, what are people going to get out of this?

Yeah, I'm going to show you and tell like share everything that you need to actually deploy real marketing agents, and I'm not talking about some like Zapier automation workflow that's linear. I'm talking about like code in the cloud that's making decisions off of your live business data. And then I'm also going to give you three businesses um that are concrete so you can basically feel like, okay, what these agents actually look like for a specific company type.

So, you're going to walk away with three business ideas and also the agents that you should potentially deploy for them, how to actually deploy them for them, uh so you can grow the company autonomously.

As you say, may the MRR gods be with us.

Blessed be thy name.

[laughter]

Let's go.

Awesome, man. Cool. So, I think just to start out, like what is a marketing agent, right? Like I see this thrown around so much and it drives me nuts and I've talked to so many people and that I you know, talk huge game on the internet and then you would like actually get down to the brass tacks with them on a conversation. You're like, you're so full of just to be blunt. So, to me like what is it what is a marketing agent?

It has to be three things. It's like you have to solve the data problem to like give the agent unified data clarity of like the whole pipeline. Um and then you have to be able to have the agent like autonomously making decisions um you know, on some type of cadence like with like a thinking loop in it, right? Um so, in practice like the infrastructure that's necessary for that. You got to build a data pipeline, a data warehouse and then have like the ability to host these agents in the cloud.

And when I say an agent, like it doesn't have to be this like AGI Hermes thing, right? It like where it can think on its own. I actually don't want that. Like I want something that is like doing a process for me and then looking at the data and then basically like improving based off of the data that's getting back from it. So, I just want to like define that really quickly um for the audience because I think that there's so much out there that's like this is a totally autonomous agent that's like running your your like entire marketing stack and it's like no, it's not.

[laughter]

Like this end-to-end workflow I guarantee you is not entirely running your marketing stack, but in contrast like I can and we like we'll talk about this today. Like you can make an agent entirely run Facebook ads now. And I'm talking about like it is researching the pain points. It is researching the outcomes of your target customer. It's making creative that's on brand both statics and also like AI avatar UGC. It's publishing that content into your Facebook ads account.

It's turning off the losers. It's promoting the winners. And then it's going in a feedback loop where it's like, okay, what what is it actually working? And how do I go and basically make more content like the best performers? And I'll talk through all of that today and try to show you as much as I can. It's not not really easy to show cuz it's just like code. But anyway, we'll go through that. So, yeah, and then just to jump into that the first business that I want to talk about to use is kind of like a just a a sandbox for like how would you actually build and deploy these agents for this like this company type is AI for WordPress.

I've talked about this before online, but like I have actually pitched like three startup founders this that are like we got into YC, we don't know what to pivot into. And I just they always just like are like no, I don't want to do this. So, I just want to hit on this idea. So, let me let me just screen share real quick and kind of show you the data for this cuz I think it's just fascinating and I think it's such a huge category that like nobody is talking about right now or that like nobody's really executing on.

And before people's like eyes glaze over and they and they tune this out, WordPress is bigger than you think. So,

powers like 50% plus of the internet, right?

Like it's I just checked 43% of the internet

that are like

All websites.

that are indexed by Google are WordPress websites.

No one's building stuff for WordPress.

It's insane, man. It's insane. And it's like it's such an easy space to compete in. It's kind of blue ocean for this. And all I'm going to pitch to you today is like literally it's just lovable or anything.com but for WordPress, right? So, you're just

[laughter]

all you're doing is you're making it so that people can like vibe code their website, but like on top of the WordPress platform. And then the business structure is super simple. It's like hey, you get all this stack. Like you get forms solved. You get like, you know, maybe a CRM. You like all of these plugins that people would go and like hodgepodge together. You just bundle that up into a single package. And then you sell tokens.

So, it's like whatever, you know, base tier is $29 a month. That gets you x amount of tokens. And then that makes you so that you can go and basically like, you know, build out design the site with this like pre-built in like you know, again forms these these pre-built features.

So, you got me thinking that I actually think that the there's a bigger opportunity here than just the Lovable for WordPress. Because and you don't know this about me, but back when I was 19 years old, 2000 and I don't know, I'm bad with math, he was like 11 or something. Um I was a partner in an agency and the agency's job was basically to get people off their existing CMS and move it to WordPress. And we were officially partnered with WordPress on doing that.

So, if you called WordPress and you're like time.com Time magazine, you're on some custom CMS, they would they would be like work with Greg and team to move and do the migration to WordPress. WordPress is happy cuz they want more people, right? Um and and time.com is happy cuz they basically need someone to handhold uh through the process. So, it was a great business. We did like time.com, techcrunch.com, a bunch of big websites.

Um the amount of money I saw that I in the in the WordPress automatic ecosystem and plugins was absolutely absurd. So, what you got me thinking about is you know, the the play is basically how do you find plugins that have validated demand that don't have an AI component and building the AI first version of each. Cuz you already know that, you know, there's proven demand, people are paying for it, and then you just make them 10x better with Agent.

So, I'll give you uh a couple of examples. The Yoast SEO tool. Do you know about that one?

No, yes. I've used it forever ago.

Forever ago, right? I think it was I think it's a guy named Joost. I I I could be wrong, but I think it's a guy named Joost. There is no way that they have you know, that