“from scratch, what metrics
would you look “at to determine success?” – Uh, if you’re starting
from scratch, what metrics would you look
at in measuring success? – [India] Yes. – Money in and profit post money in. And I’m actually making a
joke but I’m being serious. It’s so funny, I just
had a business meeting. I think a lot of people have metrics for the sake of metrics. Marketing for the
sake of marketing. If you have a business
the only metric that you should be
paying attention to is your top line revenue
and your profit at the end of the day
that can afford to pay your costs that
are driving your business. Now, if you’re very,
very early on, you want to see traction. But I think the reason I’m
jumping on this question is we now live in a
culture where so many people think the following, which is they’ve been
affected by Twitter, Instagram, Facebook
and Snapchat. If you get tens of
millions of followers it doesn’t matter that
you don’t make money. You eventually
become a billionaire. The problem is that works
for seven companies. That is not the norm. Most people try to, and this is what’s
going to happen over the next decade my friends, you will see, and over
the next three years, you will see an enormous
amount of companies that went and tried to
get 10,000, 100,000, a million users, didn’t get there, weren’t the hot product,
the unicorn, the once in a
generation business. The once in a
generation business. And they ran out of money. And then you go out of business. So what I really want
to ground this first question in, in practicality. The only metric a business person should be understanding
is their cash flow. Money in, money out. How do you build momentum? Is it heading in the right direction? I’m very proud that AJ
and I and the senior leadership that helped
us along the way, we built an actual business here. VaynerMedia wasn’t a valuation. VaynerMedia is
revenue and profit. And I do think that
we have gotten way too into
users and mentions, and the one that
bothers me the most, number of followers, and we’ve got away from
what are you doing? Do you know how many people
have come up to me and they’re like, yeah I’m struggling, and they’re like this is
actually, DRock you were with me, it really hit me during
that one kid coming up to me in Colorado, and I don’t
want to pick on the kid, but like everybody thinks
that amassing a following on social media is a business. Amassing a following on
social media is a platform for you to create
a business on top of. A business, is a functioning
organization that sells something that
you make profit in so you can sustain
that business and grow (snap)

– [Voiceover] Niall asks, “Ideas
alone can only get you far, but “once you gotten off the ground,
what does an investor need to “see to investment in a startup? – Well I think investors
all act very differently. There some black-and-white
binary investors who are looking for math to add up, right? Here are your sales, here’s your
cost of acquisition your monthly burn just pure financial
decisions and then other investors are betting
on the hypergrowth. You’ve gone from 0 to 50,000
users in two minutes, I predict that you’re going
to go to 5 million users. You’re not making any money but
you’re going to grow faster and you’re going to hit a home run
and I’m okay with the burn and the financial issues ’cause
you’re going to raise more money as you get bigger and bigger
so you’re betting on hard-core financial principles or
you’re betting on the anticipation of hypergrowth. I think one thing to keep in
mind is once you’re off the ground people have
something to judge. So I think a lot of people get
away with getting investors just on ideas which I think
is a vulnerability to the whole ecosystem. But it’s funny I’ve always been
fascinated by companies that are making money and have a year’s
worth of data often times aren’t as sexy as the idea because
investors get romanced in the upside without any practical
data versus well I already know you’ve done for a year and so I
think a lot of youngsters have been crafty in getting
investment before they have a product which I think has led to
a much higher return of failures which I think people need to
become more practical and so I think, just for everybody and
for you, once you have some data be prepared to be grilled a
little bit more because people have something to judge. I think that’s great and
healthy and needs to be more the standard. – [Sam] Cool.
Next video submission.

My name is Aaron Martinez and
I hope you like the hat but my question for you is I have a
YouTube channel that has grown from 0 to 88,000 subscribers in
a little bit under 10 months. Now on my channel I upload
Snapchat tips and tricks but I try to do a little bit of other
things in the earlier stages of my channel but they
didn’t really work out. Going into the future may be
passing 100,000 subscribers, what do you think I should do? Primarily stick to Snapchat or
try to do different things and if so what? Thanks guys over VaynerMedia. I hope you guys have a nice day. – Aaron I think and I’ll let
these guys jump in because I’m sure they have a lot to add to
this unlike the first question. Aaron, I think a couple
things that struck me with that question, number one, this
magical number of 100,000 followers or your first thousand
or a million, I’m telling you and I’m telling this because
of a lot of heart for the youngsters sitting with me right
now these are the wrong metrics to reverse engineer against. More importantly if you were
here what I would need to know we were just talking for second
as DRock broke the sound is what do you want to happen. I think one of the biggest
mistakes by so many Snapchat and YouTube influencers right now
they want to become Hollywood famous because they grew up
where that was the pinnacle and to me I keep trying to remind
them my early days with Jerome and Rudy and Brittany Furlan and
that whole space with the Vine influencers that were definitely
the spark that you’ve watched have the Instagram and Snapchat
thing very different than the generation of YouTube
that I grew up with. In 2022, in 2024 the most
famous person is not the person that’s on a TV show on MTV, it’s
a person that’s dominates this which is the new television. Just like being a cable star
wasn’t interesting in the early 80s but then eventually if
you’re the number one star on HBO show which to remind
everybody, you guys are too young for this, HBO’s was shit. HBO was a shit place
to go 1982, 1984, 1986. You were a B,
C-list, D-list, F-list. Nobody wanted to be a
Netflix star 48 months ago. Nobody. Now everybody
wants to in Hollywood. First and foremost, Aaron, I
think that you need to decide what you want to happen. You want to get your
art into the world? Is it about money?
Is it about fame? And I think you need to own
your vanity ’cause way too many people try to
bullshit it, number one. Number two, you gotta go
where the attention is. To me, enormous emphasis on
Snapchat and YouTube and now look one minute Instagram videos
probably opens up a lot of creativity for a lot of people
here and definitely people that are watching so that
because a new thing. Look, MusicAlly, actually
this is a question from me real quick, are any of the three
of you playing on MusicAlly? – Yeah, I downloaded it
after hearing you talk about it a couple of times. – Have you had the time yet to
look at what’s going on there? – Little bit. – This is what so
interesting, right. A lot of my YouTube
celebrity friends when Vine came along were like eh. I’m like you came from
YouTube that’s what was just being said five minutes ago. Then a lot when Snapchat came
I was telling a lot of Viners, like this thing I’m telling
you and they’re like eh. And then of course now
everybody’s there and now even MusicAlly right? Snapchat its at it’s apex but
ironically I think Snapchatters as I’m giving you advice right
that go and really go all in on on MusicAlly are going to win
those junior high people are gonna be here in 36 months
and be like holy shit that was such a good idea
or it could go away. But much like what happened
on Vine, this is such a good learning from Vine, we were
talking about Vine off as DRock broke the sound. The people that won on Vine
have been able to siphon that attention and be
successful on other platforms. Not everybody. – Some.
– Exactly. Not everybody because some of
them would held on Vine either because it didn’t have enough
talent to be anything more than a few minutes but some were. And it’s no different than being
a really good actor on a hit show on CBS for two seasons and
then coming back two years later on ABC and siphoning
some of that audience and building on that momentum. These are channels and
doing the right thing. Aaron, I think what you need to
use this and I would say this the three individuals here
who I have a lot of heart for. 80% tripling down on what works. You guys can fucking draw. You’re funny and intriguing.
All that stuff. – Can’t draw.
– I cannot draw as well. – Can’t draw.
– But you want to learn? – Maybe someday. – Never?
– Never. – Correct. So 80% of that and
20% experimenting. That’s what you should be doing,
Aaron, from my point of view. Gang? – Can I say something?
– Yes. – Nobody cares
about subscribers? Nobody cares about followers? It’s all about influence. If you can actually create a
sustainable amount of influence or something that you can
actually push to other platforms that’s something
people care about. Numbers is not something that
people are going to care about in the future. 100,000 subscribers or a
million subscribers if nobody is consistently watching
your videos nobody cares. – I agree with that. Brands care now
’cause they’re not sophisticated in
their language. – They won’t three
years from now though. – Well it depends. The answer is results should
and always do matter at the end. There’s a lot of things. A metric can be accepted by a
marketplace like Nielsen ratings that doesn’t map to a results
yet the entire $80 billion advertising industry most
of it doesn’t quantify against actual results. They quantify against metrics.
I’m with you. And by the way all my
behavior maps to your rant. – Right.
– That’s what I’m living. No question– – Metrics in general are broken. The whole industry
is broken on metrics. – The metric that should
matter is how many did you sell? Of whatever that is. And when I mean sell, you
know, I want you to donate to my nonprofit. That’s a result or you did a
show and how many people showed up to it to watch you
paint for an hour. India? I think that’s the case. Any thoughts on
Aaron’s questions? It’s funny we all
actually know Aaron– – And you hate him.
– No, he’s great. – He’s like the nicest guy. – He does like Snapchat
tutorials and tips and tricks on his YouTube. Absolutely that’s something we
need to us expand upon because he has identify what he wants
to be not someon with 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. Whatever he wants to
turn his career into and then play to that. I think you’ve clearly got some
chops and I think the question becomes what, what do you that
at this young, and by the way for all three of you, what
do you at this young of an age want to happen and then try to
do project who you think you are in the balance of vanity, money,
happiness, work-life balance, these are a lot of things you
have to project at a young age. Yeah, right. And by the way everybody’s got
different percentages of it. Two minutes and that’s that.
Let’s move. I’ve got this client thing. We broke sound, we were late,
fucking people people running. – [India] Ben.
– Ben.

going south and no longer worth putting
energy into engagement when something’s big MySpace Twitter right now is
interesting to watch Google+ tumblr when when something gets
big you just watch organic-rich on Facebook it’s not so hard like you know
when it happens to snapchat oh I remember the days when I 25,000 people
watching my stories and i can get two thousand people to screenshot now I’ve
got four hundred thousand people watching my stories I couldn’t get and I
couldn’t get a hug people to screenshot like it’s very easy
its data you just stop feeling it when I send an email and cell four hundred
cases of wine in an hour and then set up seven years later it took me four weeks
or four months to sell that same 400 you like wait a minute and then you look at
the data and the open rates are not as good the click-through rates are not as
good the data that they’re like you know like
you just you just respond to the reaction either you’re stale and people
want to tune you out or the platform has an issue until you get to the site is it
you and you begin the same old song and dance or is it that that the platform
sucks you really thought you even though I have a lot of the same things a lot of
you watch before the energy or the routine excitement of it all you know
you’re starting to grasp IPCC’s more importantly there’s just so many view
the comments right now did you just meet me in the last 30 days YouTube Facebook leave a comment that
you just may be the last 30 days there’s always more people like nobody knows who
I am tell me everything I know it’s true you
have even recognized more on the street

and nap track that’s very easy it’s
called how many views are you getting on your stories a week ago I was getting three thousand
views now getting 20,000 views are making progress making progress let’s go

– [Voiceover] Matt asks, “If
you could change one part “of Facebook’s API for
marketers and business pages, “what would it be?” – I don’t give a crap,
Matt, about this question. Like, India. But I think I’m now playing
into my character of this show. If I would, so I’m dissing myself, screw you, Gary. – [India] If you could change
one part of Facebook’s API for marketers and business
pages, what would it be? – I mean look, Matt, I
think it’s a great question, it’s very tactical. I think we as marketers
would always take more data. I want everything. Right, like, if I could
follow people around, I would do that. Like, so the truth of the answer is, any piece of data that
they’re not giving me, like I would love the
data of first name data. I want to target people
by their first name. I don’t think you can do that right now. So I’d like to reach out to every Gary, and be like, yo! It’s me Gary, as well. Let’s be boys, all Garys. So, I would love to target
people by first name. And I don’t think you
have that capability yet, so that would be one. And there’s probably 15
other cohorts that I’m not completely up-to-date on
of what we have access to and what we don’t, but I would
love to have more access, more data points. If I had the time to sit
down right now and have, ’cause it’s moving all the time. So if I went to the analytics
and pay team right now and said ok, let’s just do a quick update. Whatever the first
highest value data point on an individual is, that
I don’t have access to, would be the answer to this question. And that would be the
thing that I would have a creative idea against
that I don’t have access to, like first name targeting. Like that’d be funny, right?

“Gary, how do you analyze all
the social media data “that you get every day? “Personally and corporately.” – What’s the corporately part, like, how does VaynerMedia do it versus me? I do it completely on what got me here in the first place, and Brian, you know, this might be interesting, Brian, it’d be interesting, this is
probably to make me feel good, but you can go anywhere you want with it, you have an interesting perspective, because you were actually
there when my thing happened. There’s not that many people that were. So, you know, I did it back then on feel. I was right about a lot
of things intuitively, and that’s what I do now, I mean, I just read it, I read my feeds, I read my comments, I look
at the enagement levels on what I’m putting out, so
I’m analyst on my own stuff. Vayner as a corporate entity is doing it much more
Excel sheet than gut feel than I am, they’re
analyzing numbers deeper, they’re converting that into a report for their clients, I’m sure
you guys do similar stuff, but me, personally, I’m just reading it. Like, I’m watching how fast
I get likes on Instagram when it’s convenient, not every post. You know, if I’m on a plane
and I do it right before I take off, and as soon
as I get the Wi-Fi, I can look at it, like,
there’s kind of serendipity to the way I analyze, but I’m feeling it. I was very intuitive in
the way I marched in, ’06-7-8-9, a lot of
those things worked out. I continue to do that, I continue, look, I’m doing it even with the show. If you’re noticing, Brian
is now the culmination of a period here where we
brought in a lot of guests by comparison, so I’m
always testing and learning, looking at the comments,
trying to understand, trying to vibe with it. Bri? – The one thing I will say about you as your friend, is that
you’ve always cared, right, so at a time where, we’ve
come up with a lot of people over the years that just
really try to buy into the hype, create the hype, and really try to grow their fan bases,
and all of that activity, without actually adding
value to the community. You’re still hustling probably
harder than ever before, maybe more than you did early on. You take that feedback, I watched this, you take that feedback, you
actually do something with it, you do shows like this
where you can add value to people’s lives, people’s streams, with everything that you do, so I think your metric
system is just sort of a validation of the fact that
you’re listening to people and trying to give back to the community. That’s evident, and you
should be rewarded with that. – Appreciate it. You like that, India? And by the way, by the
way, I have been asked by 900 people to sit in this seat and do this, and we’ve been at 6, and, like, 5, and one of them was my father-in-law,
so it’s not, you know, I think it speaks to your ways. Well, and then there’s all
the behind-the-scenes stuff that you and I know, which is, there’s the business stuff, and you can be very business-oriented, this is a good lesson for
a lot of the youngsters, there’s the black-and-white
business stuff like, ‘yo, homie, support my book?’ Sure, I could do that, but
then there’s just life, right. Like when somebody’s sick, when you post something on your Facebook that you’re having a tough time, or the, all the people
that we share in common that we’ve never sat
in the same room with, that, how they talk about us to each other when we get brought up
in a setting, right? It’s all those other things that are part of the equation as well. – You know, I think, if
there’s one thing I’ve learned along this journey is to constantly give more than you take and. – 51-49. – Treat people in ways that
make them feel more special when they leave an engagement with you, and then, last is, just
live and act and breathe as if you want people to talk about you when you’re not in the room
in a way that’s complimentary. – 100%. Legacy and brand.

– [Voiceover] David asks,
“What would you do “if you were the new CEO of Twitter? “How would you turn that ship around?” – David I would do a couple things. One I would recognize that
the data that we’re collecting on a daily basis is
disproportionately valuable to a lot of real time marketers
and real time data analysts. You saw Bloomberg Twitter
JV come across the headlines for me I haven’t read it
yet but that’s exactly where I’d go putting my
money where my mouth is. I invested in the company
called Data Miner years ago that I felt Twitter would or should buy or become a big company
on the backbone of that. I would also recognize that normal people don’t understand Twitter. Twitter as a product is
not as easy to understand as Facebook and Instagram
and that is a friction point. When you look at the data
that shows how many people have signed up for Twitter
but then have not been active that’s a vulnerability. So I would hire the
single best product guy that I could, or gal,
and so product person would be very, very, very high on my list. I would not guess, I would
poach with all my ability with disproportional
economics and give them as much stock as I had to from
a Facebook or an Instagram or things of that nature. I would probably make
a very aggressive plan. I would change the logo of the bird. I would probably change it to a cat and have the cat eat the
bird as a symbolic notion to it’s a totally different company. So I think you’d need a branding play that would change the optics. So I would change the
logo from a bird to a cat. I would tell Wall Street that they should start
selling my stock now because I’m not gonna be a CEO
that’s gonna confine itself to making numbers on an
every 90 day basis and that I have empathy for that’s
how they have their business and I probably only would
have gotten the job as CEO of Twitter if I communicated
that to the board and the biggest stockholders
who then clearly, weirdly allowed me to go become the
CEO ’cause they wouldn’t care about their stock price
over a 24 month period. ‘Cause it would go way, way
down because my behavior’s more predicated on business building not so much Wall Street appeasing. So there’s a lot of
things that I would do. I would also recognize that Twitter is one of the true social networks. That the value in listening
is very big on Twitter. Whereas Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr they are, Snapchat,
it’s pushing content out. It’s more of a content
management system, a CMS, where Twitter has a lotta
listening capabilities. It is where you have a conversation. It is the place you go for
now when something happens in the world ’cause people wanna talk. Starting to move a
little bit in Instagram, there’s some of that behavior. But those are some of the
top line things I would do. – [Voiceover] Kamil asks,
“How would you raise money

– The dislike button. This might have to be an article as well. I don’t know a lot about it and I think you know, Ben Leventhal, the CEO of Resy, aforementioned in the prior video and I had dinner last night
strategizing around Resy. Download it if you’re in LA,
New York, Miami, Washington DC. R-E-S-Y. You know what Staphon? Put a glove on me there
when I did the right hook. Oh, my man! This wonderful man is going
to be shadowing me today. Hey brother! – You never said I was joining it. – Good to see you. I’m live by the way. – Oh. – You can just sit. I’m finishing up the show. So the dislike button introduces
some interesting stuff. Ben’s point was when negativity
comes into the ecosystem, it can really crash and burn a platform. He was talking about how
Twitter got more negative after the Kumbya moments
of 2007, eight, nine. And there’s a lot of truth to that. To me the dislike button allows Facebook to make its algorithm even stronger. But that was kind of how
I first thought about it as if it was a hide, you wouldn’t know. But it seems to me, and
this is where I think Facebook may have a problem. It seems to me that they want to, in the quotes that I read late last night. It was two o’ clock in the morning when I wanted to read it real fast. So I haven’t invested in
a very smart answer yet on this Steve or Derek, thank
you for asking the question. It seems that they want to allow people to express other emotions. To me where I think
they’re going with this is we see a lot of
people post, for example, we see my friend Drew
is an incredible friend. And his father passed away. And he wrote an incredible piece and it was a beautiful picture of his dad and a wonderful peace about how hardcore of a Philly sports fan he
was, which kind of struck me. I kind of already even
thought about my own demise and how my kids were going
to talk about my Jets fandom of how he was a fan and
then he bought the team. What an amazing man he was. But that’s not what makes him amazing. He was the best dad. I’m giving you guys some material Xander. So I think that what Facebook is trying to figure out a cadence around is you look and a lot of
people are hitting like. And there’s all these life events that maybe you wouldn’t in real life, in real communication say I like that. There’s other things. Now I don’t know if you’re
going to say dislike to that. But I think what Facebook is
starting to show with this move and clearly has a enormous upside in its continuation of evolution. Very similar to my first
answer on the Snapchat question is I can see an environment
where multiple buttons exist. We have a much stronger way
to express our actual thoughts on the content we’re seeing in front of us and that intelligence becomes the backbone of making a much better
product for Facebook itself. Anybody who’s into data science or understands how these things work and even if you just deploy common sense, you recognize that the like is too broad for Facebook to do enough with that data to make the product better. So if they had more options
to create more context, they’d be able to create a
far better curated experience. So I think that’s what they’re up to. It’s intriguing to me that
it’s a dislike button. You know, if my thesis was right, my intuition is that they would go with a different kind of button and that’s why I’m not so sold that I’m right with my
point of view there. But those are the curiosities that are running through my head. So what do I, to answer
it black and white, what I think about, actually turn me into black and white here even though it’s part of the official show because I think that’s funny to
answer it black and white. Thank you Staphon. Actually, no, go back to color because the show’s always
full time in color. But in that one little weird
period make it black and white. I think it’s a very clever
and very important step. One that I do believe has major impact. And one that this market will look back at five years from now and recognize it was a massive moment in Facebook’s, you know, lineage, including
it became a chip aaway at becoming more negative and not going in the right direction or started creating the framework for even smarter better experiences for all of us on their platform. And don’t forget that platform deploys to Instagram so
a lot of you are saying “Yeah, but I’m not there any more.” Oh yes you are. It’s called Instagram. You live there. And so I think it’s important. I’m excited to see what happens with it. That’s it? Good show.

– Hey Gary, this is
Dan from Fan-View here. I hope I make the cut to the golden age of the #AskGaryVee Show in this format, and my question, my question to you is if you believe that sports teams will begin to use the rich data
from the influencer market, all the companies that are coming in with amazing stats around athletes, to use that data to start
to play marketing moneyball with their teams. I’ll love to hear your thoughts on that, thank you for giving back, peace! – Marketing moneyball, right? Yes. Will sports teams use data to make better marketing decisions? Yes. And I know that I’m, like,
keeping it basic, but, like, first of all, cool-ass video. Second of all, very
basic question, meaning all of marketing will use data to make better decisions. Moneyball is the notion
of using data in baseball, data is going to be used in every part of our
world everywhere forever, marketing happens to be one of them, dating is, you know, if
you think about, like – oh.
(laughter) Anyway, dating is one of them. A lot of things (laughter) a lot of things will be that way and so I think that data will
be overlaid across everything, and marketing’s actually already here, and there are teams doing it already, and we’ve done stuff like that for the Jets and the Dolphins already, so yes.