Software Is Becoming Marketing

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Eric Siu and Neil Patel

Business, Careers, Marketing

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2026

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Growth Newsletter: https://levelingup.beehiiv.com/subscribe Need marketing help? Visit: https://www.singlegrain.com/ and https://npdigital.com/ Want to recruit great marketers? Find them here: https://marketingschool.io/hire Neil and Eric explain why software itself is becoming the best marketing channel: free tools, calculators, agents, and lightweight products now do the demand-gen work blog posts used to do. They break down how every feature launch becomes a marketable moment, why free products drive outsized buzz, and how conferences and events still generate real pipeline when you show up to give rather than sell. Plus how they think about valuing AI-pilled talent and staying focused. Key takeaways ◾Software is the new lead magnet, not the PDF ◾Every feature launch is a marketable moment ◾Win the hallways at events, don't just speak Chapters 00:00 Software is becoming marketing 03:03 Free products drive buzz 06:59 Events and conferences as lead gen 14:41 Valuing AI-pilled talent 19:58 Vision boards and focus 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗡𝗘𝗟 Welcome to Marketing School, one of the top business podcasts with over 61 million downloads. Each episode delivers actionable marketing tips and strategies from two entrepreneurs who truly practice what they preach. The show is hosted by Eric Siu, founder of Leveling Up and Single Grain, and Neil Patel, co-founder of Neil Patel Digital and recognized by Forbes as a Top 10 Marketer. 🎙️ Learn More About the Hosts Eric Siu – Leveling Up: https://www.youtube.com/@LevelingUpOfficial Neil Patel: https://www.youtube.com/@neilpatel

Transcript

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0:00.0	Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this?
0:03.1	You've been prompting for 20 minutes.
0:04.8	The output is polished, confident, and completely useless.
0:08.5	That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business.
0:11.6	HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data.
0:14.5	Every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time.
0:17.9	So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com,
0:23.1	the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. So I want to talk about this new concept,
0:27.6	that software is becoming marketing. So really, the question is, what if your product is your
0:33.8	best ad? So this isn't necessarily anything anything new but i think with the proliferation of
0:40.7	anything that you can vibe code now almost your software becomes the lead magnet so it used to be back
0:46.0	in a day your lead magnet could be your it could be like a email opt that like a PDF right could be a
0:53.1	PDF it could be something like a quiz or something like that. But now you actually get software. So when I look at Neal software, Uber suggests I look at that as a software that's kind of becoming marketing in its own right. Same thing with answer to public. With Clickflow, with carrot, we kind of look at the same on our end. And the cool thing is, within each piece of software, every time you have
1:12.4	an interesting feature that you launch, each feature becomes a marketable moment. So like Clay,
1:16.7	they're doing, they're launching like every week, I think they're doing like a launch of a new,
1:21.1	a new feature with their product. And it's something that people are asking for. But they're putting
1:25.8	a lot of fanfare around it.
1:33.8	And so we actually have a mutual friend. He was always launching one marketable moment per month.
1:39.6	I think now you can probably launch one marketable moment per week. And so I think software now is becoming marketing. And I think the job of someone like a Neil or myself is we can we can prototype
1:45.6	something and get it 60, 70% there, but then you can hand it off. And then and then if you do
1:52.0	have a product out there and there's a, there's a repo, you can just, you know, submit a bunch of
1:55.0	pull requests and then your developers can decide if whatever you're building is garbage or not.
	...

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