I Tested Sol 5.6 vs Fable 5 on Real Marketing Work (Clear Winner)

Sol 5.6 versus Fable 5. What's better for marketing? Yep. So I basically ran a test and your mileage may vary. In fact, I think your mileage may definitely vary.

So Neil, have you done like a head-to-head test yet or no? I have not. Okay, so I'm going to speak to this and then we can react to this. So I basically, so I ran a test with Sol 5.6 versus Fable 5 to test which one's better for marketing.

And I actually was really surprised by the results. And so Sol 5.6 is ChatGPT, obviously Fable 5 is owned by Anthropic. These are the frontier models as of this recording.

And so when I tried Sol 5.6 for a, like an analysis on the best. If I were an investor, what bets would I choose if I were running Amazon? So Fable 5 said it would bet on the same-day grocery service for Amazon as an investment.

They would bet all in if they're running Amazon. Sol 5.6 was like, I would bet all in on the Amazon, the supply chain service that they just launched recently, where you can basically use their infrastructure to ship out more, ship out goods, right, using their infrastructure. And then it kind of outlined how big the industry was. So I'm just saying from like a technical analysis point or like an investment analysis point, Solve 5.6 chose the one that had the bigger opportunity, whereas Fable 5 missed the big opportunity.

So that's one that I reward to Solve 5.6 to start. Okay, so number two, what I did, Neil, was I had, and I wish I could share my screen right now, but I had Fable 5 make a website and I had Solve 5.6 make a website. The thing is, Solve 5.6, it made the website, which is like a scrolling website, meaning that Every time you scroll your mouse down, it will zoom in into this world.

The world will get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I did it in one shot. Fable 5 kept asking me more and more questions. And so as I continue to run more and more of these tests, I realized that Solve 5.6 is like the employee that you just tell it to do it and it just does it.

Whereas Fable 5 always has to keep asking you questions back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, right? Which is really annoying. And by the way, Solve 5.6 is cheaper too. The third example I'll give is that when it came to making thumbnails,

I just told Sol 5.6, I was like, Take the transcript. So for example, us recording this marketing school right now, I can just take the transcript and I just say, hey, saw 5.6, look at my YouTube channel and take this transcript and I want you to make the thumbnails. And literally we published those thumbnails and they're getting like a six, 7% click-through rate, which is good for B2B.

Whereas Fable 5, it failed, right? It needed a lot more context and it needed a lot more connectors. And again, it was just like, it was too much back and forth, right? So I can't remember the fourth example off the top of my head right now,

But based on my, I read four different, five different tests. And keep in mind, this is just one person. I found that Sol 5.6 was not only cheaper, but it got the job done faster without all the back and forth.

So you would say Sol is better. I find myself using Sol 5.6 a lot more now because Fable 5 is a lot more token hungry. And by the way, I'm not going to say that Fable 5 is bad lad. You can definitely use it.

It's really good for planning. It's really good for adversarial code reviews and things like that. But since I've been using ChatGPT more in the last few months with Codex, I find it to be more convenient for me. And the skills that I'm making, all these things, like ChatGPT's image gen is really good as well.

Fable 5 and Claude in general are um, I just, I don't use a harness as much. And this might be different for someone that uses the harness a lot more when it comes to clock.

Yeah, dude. Um, In AI, I've always seen with these models never to get hooked on one. One company will have a better model one month and the next one someone else releases a better model and then you just end up going back and forth.

And then what you end up finding is different models are better at different things and your team just adapts. But I think the key here is don't have your marketing reliant on one model or one company. and their stack, things change, you need to adapt with it.

Especially in AI, it's like every week shit changes. So Neil, let me show you something real quick. I don't know if I can, I'm going to share my screen with you real quick. So can you see this?

Yeah, I can see it. Okay. So not, not bad, right? Like basically, by the way, this is just me talking to chat. I'll say, Hey, by the way, shouldn't all the Claude icons be Fable 5 icons instead?

And it's just going back and forth. These are the thumbnails. So, um, and I'm sharing my screen right now. So those of you watching kids can see it. But Neil, do you see like these thumbnails, they are, I wouldn't say they're the best in the world, but they're not bad, right?

Yeah. You just whipped them out. They're not terrible. Yeah, I whipped them out. So 6-7% click-through rate is not bad. And by the way, when I asked it to switch the Claude logo over here, switch it to the Fable 5 one, this looks pretty legit, doesn't it?

Yeah. Okay, so let me show you more. When I go back to my profile, I actually can pull up the examples here on Sol 5 versus Fable 5 over here, okay? So 5.6, what's better for marketing?

So basically this website that I'm sharing right now, this was the world that it made, okay? One took about 30 minutes. The other one took about a couple hours or so. So Sol 5.6 took about 30 minutes to make this website.

And this is what it looks like. So Neil, keep in mind, when you're zooming on the site, it goes deeper and deeper and deeper. for single brain over here that you can see. And for thumbnails, you can see the difference with the thumbnails over here.

So these look pretty good, I would say. And then, oh, by the way, Neil, it did a really good job. Okay, this is the fourth thing. So when it comes to clipping for marketing school, I said, hey, I want you to put a hook at the beginning of each of these and then here's the entire export.

So I could literally take this export that we're doing right now and it'll basically find like 10 different moments and it'll put the hook in the beginning and then, because you need a hook in the user, right? and then it'll put the meat of the content and it'll have a transcription. I used to have to go back and forth with my Hermes all the time to get it right. I didn't have to do that.

So my point is, it gets to the point a lot faster, and that's what I would say, right? So it works a lot faster. It costs less tokens overall. I even have it running a recruiting loop as well, and this Amazon analysis as well.

So all that to say is, I'm not going to say, again, your mileage may vary. I think both of them are very strong frontier models, but I've just found it to be with the tests that I've ran, to be more helpful in general.

Dude, yeah, I'm with you. And on a random note, I just got this message on my WhatsApp. So one of my team members says, check out our user acquisition on Ants of the Public. 62% comes from direct.

Does this make sense? Then he says, the same is with Ubersuggest. Does this make any sense? 62% of direct traffic is super high, you know? And I said, it does, not super high.

When you build a strong brand, most of your revenue ends up being direct. When I look at all big companies, and I'm not saying my companies are big, but when I look at all big companies that we work with, the number one source of revenue is direct. It's because they've built massive brands. It beats out anything else.

And the key is good product, good brand, be in business for a long time. It's doing all the stuff you did for years, SEO, paid advertising, social media, it all helps build a brand and all feeds into each other. But if you're measuring your marketing and if your direct sales and direct traffic isn't increasing year over year, you're doing something wrong.

Yep, totally. And by the way, I mean, how long would you say you've been building your Neil Patel brand for? Intentionally or just in general? Intentionally, intentionally.

intentionally, I would say 20-ish years. Wow. That's two decades, guys. I just want to call that out. And I think for me, I think it's probably been maybe 13 years or so.

So this stuff takes time. And we've said this before on this podcast. If you want to start to build a brand, you might not see anything for the first three years or so. And that's usually the case for whatever reason.

It usually is around three years. Sometimes you might hit lightning in a bottle. But even if you look at Mr. Beast, he struggled for such a long time to get it going.

And I think it took over three years to really get it going for him. And, you know... I think it's just, to even get 10,000 subscribers, I think that took him quite a while, like longer than he thought he would take. And if you look at his videos in the beginning, they're really bad, right?

And so I think you have to embrace the suck, you have to embrace the cringe. I would say, again, if you're starting from scratch right now, go out there, create in public right now. build in public and then other people will start to follow you. You'll find like-minded people.

You might even find partners to work with as well. Neil, I think there's one last topic we can hinge on here, lean on here before we hop out. So let me share my screen again. Neil, do you see my screen?

Yes. So there's a lot of talk about building an AI native services company or AI native whatever company. And so this is a post that our team put out in terms of the structure of how this team might look. And so I'm going to keep it very high level here.

I'm really talking about any AI native company in general. And I think the way, whether it's your business or my business, Neil, I think both of our businesses need to evolve, right? And so what I mean by that is, you know, your team is maybe, they're this human judgment layer over here.

So they have these strategy calls, taste calls, client trust calls, all these calls over here, right? Then you have these operating roles, these processes that I'm showing on the screen over here.

And so I think the way you structure a company now from an org chart standpoint or even how you structure it from a process standpoint is going to be very different because you're going to have a lot of different skills that your team might take on and the agents might take on. You're going to have different knowledge and memory layers that the agents might take on as well. You're going to have an agent fleet, some that might do paid media work or SEO work, and then you might have all these loops.

So there's all these things that you have to consider. And Anil, I won't pretend to say I have all the answers, nor will I say you have all the answers, but I think the key thing now is that we start to talk about this because, you know, we're all kind of just figuring this out as we go. But I don't think people can kind of just sit still.

I think that they're going to get by with the same original structure. So how are you guys thinking about how you guys will evolve this over time? Or are you even thinking about this at all right now?

I'm not thinking about it, but my team thinks about it. So it's just something that I don't spend my time on. We just divide and conquer and we focus on what's the most important for us as a company and individually to get done.

And I don't worry about some of the stuff that my team handles because I trust the people that are working on that stuff. So do they even bring this stuff to you at all?

No. Oh, what a life, Neil. What a life. So they tend not to bring me much stuff. I tend to bring them stuff. All right. So I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital.

And they work with a whole host of global companies or a global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and Answer to Public. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com to learn more. And we'll see you on the other side.

By the way, we should talk about that. I focus majority of my time on just growing revenue. I don't actually spend most of my time on operations. I genuinely focus majority of the time on revenue.

Well, Neil, let's talk about that because I think that's great. So the reason this is important, I think it's worth double clicking on, is because if you... Let's see, Neil has an amazing executive team, right? Which he has said many times that his team is really good. And he's been very complimentary of them, right?

Now, here's the thing. If you have to continue to tell people what to do versus them, like them kind of just figuring it out, that probably means you haven't hired right, right? And so I would say if there's one thing Neil's gotten right with MPDigital the last seven, eight years or so is he's hired correctly. Then when you have to push people and pushing is probably you're always going to have to push them.

But when you have to tell them what to do strategically, that means that you have to dedicate your brainpower to that. And that means, unfortunately, whether they're good people or not, and I tend to think that most people are nice people, it's not a good thing for your business because then your mind becomes split in all these different directions. The good thing is Neil's just focused on, let's say, the M&A piece, right? Or he might just be focused on driving more revenue right now, doing more deals, right?

He focuses on what he's good at, and he hires people for the things that he's not so good at or that he's not interested in doing. But I would say that my observation of Neil over the years is that he continues to keep the energy high. He keeps the temperature high.

He continues to push people. But if Neil, you hired me for sales and you have to keep telling me what to do, what ends up happening to me in a couple of weeks or a month or two? All I was asking is when you're saying, hey, what would you do if I had to keep following up with you? Are you saying this is your organization or you're working for my organization?

I'm working for you. There would be a problem. Yeah. And very quickly, right? Yeah, very quickly. But my team and my culture is very sales driven. So my co-founder, Mike, messages me at 541 AM.

All right. I'm on PST. He's on PST as well. He sends me a screenshot. Good news for Friday. X company signed. And then someone else on the team, amazing.

They're mentioning the team member's name, absolutely brilliant. This is a country where we made changes to recently because we felt it wasn't working out, especially on the sales end, right? When I said I made changes, you can assume it is people changes.

So, and I didn't, my management team did because they also are very sales driven and it wasn't working out. So I said, oh, wow. And I said, yeah, Mark told me a few days ago that it was going to happen.

So, and then he responds to me, what's the elevator pitch you give to agencies when you talk to them for the first time? And this is in context for them acquiring. Okay. At the same time, my CEO is on vacation.

All right. 5.51 a.m. He's talking about a country. I won't name the country. And he says, X country finally closed something. 75K euros. Mark says a few more to come.

So you can assume it's in Europe somewhere. He's a good sign of life. And he's talking about, you know, he's updating me because he knows we made a change. We were investing a lot of money in change.

It takes time to see results. And they're just keeping me up to date. We get these messages constantly. Now, for a region like the United States, they don't update me on like, hey, we just got a new deal.

There's too many deals to end up going through. But they do keep me in touch about the big deals, right? So even though he's on vacation, I got a message yesterday at 12.39 p.m.,

Hey, I'm sure Nick told you, but we finally got red lines on X. And this is a really massively publicly traded company. And he mentions the person's name and he says he has what he needs for the billionaire. And he's talking about the person who owns the company.

This is a private company. I don't know if I said public or private, but if I did, I meant to say it's private, like it's owned by an individual. It's not out there like where you can go buy the stock.

So they'll keep me up to date on the really big deals or even the smaller deals for the regions that we're making changes. And this is just stuff that we continually do as a company because we make sure everyone knows what's happening that's important.

When you're trying to grow, you're making changes. Sometimes you're disrupting. People need to know what's working and what's not working. If they can't figure that out, people assume the worst one.

They don't know what's happening. Yeah, I think the main thing before we hop out of here is that, one, you want to hire people that are smarter than you. Steve Jobs used to say that you hire people that are smarter than you that tell you what to do versus you telling them what to do, right?

And then Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are just like, yeah, we don't hire people that need to be coached. We just hire people that have kind of been there, done that, right? In many cases, you still want to have maybe like 10, 20% are new blood.

But majority of you, you want people that have been there, done that. The other thing is you want to be just observing Neil's organization. How Neil's always been, even before he had this organization, is that you move quickly when it comes to people. You move quickly.

The first sign that you know it's not going to work out, you start having these conversations. And then if it continues to not work out that way, you make a move, right? And so it's not to say that You know, humans should be expendable and just throw them to the side.

It's more to say that you want people to do their best work. And sometimes that best work is not necessarily with you. And there's no use to continue to try to fit that square peg into a round hole. So anything else you want to add, Neil?

Yeah, what I've had for majority of my business life, and I've also taken into my personal life, is I expect people to be on it 24-7, whether others believe that's fair or not, at least the people I work with. And I found that if they can do that, it works out. If they can't, it's not going to work out. So for example, I live in a house.

The house has gone through some renovations and construction. I got a letter from the city asking me to fill out some assessments on some changes we made so they can readjust the tax bill.

And there's this lady that works with us. She's part of a company called Real Construction. And I messaged her 5.45am. Got a letter from the city on property assessment that they want us to fill out.

That's all I said. She knows I'm not going to fill it out. She knows I'm not going to even read it. And she responds by 6am. This is not someone who works for me.

It's a company. She works for a company that I pay. And she's like, I'll pick it up today. I was like, cool, that's it. It's just like, I expect amazing communication and people to be on it seven days a week if I work with them both on a personal level or a business level.

And if it doesn't work for people, then that person is not going to work for me. And I found that if someone's just in it and willing to do everything that they have into something and just willing to work hard and not give excuses –

things just progress. The moment you work with people who only want to work eight to five or aren't always going to be on it or don't want to respond after hours about how things are going, I find it just never works because they're turned off and that means they don't care about your project, your house, or whatever is important to you when it is important to you during that time.

Neil, I'm going to ask you some questions here, okay? I'm going to play devil's advocate. But Neil, it's your business. Why should I care as much as you do?

Because I'm paying you really well. And if you don't care, that means you're not passionate about it and you should go do something else in life and I'll try to help you find whatever you're passionate about in life. If you have the attitude that you only work certain hours or you may not care because it's not your business, usually it has nothing to do with ownership. It has everything to do with passion.

When someone's really, when they love what they do, people don't look at a career or a job as a specific set hours or they clock in and out or they can turn off and they can just ignore it and whatever problems happen, it's not their issues.

But Neil, you have more upside than I do at this company. And you have less downside than I do because when times are really bad, I make sure that you're taken care of because you've put everything that you have into this business. So when times are bad or you have some personal issues like your kid may get sick, I'm here to help even if you don't need my help.

Because we're a family. And I look at it as if I win, you win. And you won't win as much as me when I win because I'm the owner. But when I lose, yes, you may struggle, but nowhere near the amount that I do.

And I'll take the brunt of that, the bad times, and I'll make sure that you and your family are still okay. Last thing, Neil. So when you're talking to people, I think this is good for everyone. When you're pitching people, because I've done a few interviews here when I was in Italy.

So I anti-sell them at the end, right? So it's exactly what I said. So I'll tell you what I say and then you tell them what you say in the anti-sell, okay? Let's do that and then we can end the episode.

So I say, I say, here's why you shouldn't join single grain or single brain. Okay. Either or one, it's not a nine to five situation. We operate like a tech startup, right?

Expect to not necessarily like, you know, I'm going to be on you all the time, but more so like you're not, it's not a clock it clock out environment. That's number one. Two, you better be AI pill because if you're not, you're going to fall behind the people who are right now. And it's not going to be fun for you at all.

In fact, it's going to be hell for you. So don't join if you're not AI-pilled. And we know if you got it. We know if you don't very quickly. So there's that.

The third thing is expect direct feedback. But it's not only just direct feedback, but it's public direct feedback sometimes too. Because it just works for us. It works for me.

I found that whenever I tried to hide that, when I tried to just bring it to behind the scenes, it disrupts the ability for everyone to alert someone's public feedback. It's got to be respectful, but it's going to be public feedback. So I'll say those things, right? I'm just curious.

Neil, when you do your anti-sell pitch, why people shouldn't join MP Digital, what do you tell them? Yeah, and mine's not really anti-pitch. It's more so what I'm expecting. It's similar.

It's just how you want to end up describing it. I usually mainly interview managers or executives and I'll straight up tell them like, hey, we're looking for people who are passionate about the business, love marketing, love it so much. They're willing to work seven days a week, even on holidays, and they're willing to put the job in many cases ahead of their family because They don't look at it that way.

They just love what they're doing so much. They want to just keep working. And no matter what role you're in, we expect people to get their hands dirty. You know, our CEO works a lot.

He doesn't just sit there and manage. If you have to spend all your day managing, then you've hired the wrong people underneath you. You should be a player and a coach. And if you can't do both and you're not willing to get your hands dirty and you don't want calls from me on the weekend, this isn't going to work out.

I love it. Okay. Well, guys, that's it for today. Sorry for the technical issues. That being said, we will catch you all later.