Jon Zacharias and Kevin Miller built GR0 by betting on something the rest of the industry was ignoring: organic search, while everyone else poured money into paid media. They scaled to $20 million in revenue in their first year with 50 employees, and explain how Apple's iOS 14 privacy changes ended up validating their entire model.
Behind the Expert
Jon Zacharias and Kevin Miller are co-founders of GR0, a digital marketing agency that started as a pure-play SEO shop and has since expanded into paid search, email and lifecycle marketing, paid social, creative, and Amazon marketplace management through a mix of in-house builds and targeted acquisitions. The two met in a support-group setting while both newly sober, discovered a shared background in performance marketing — Miller from paid ads at Google and as Director of Growth at real estate platform Open Listings, Zacharias as an SEO specialist who'd worked with high-profile clients — and built GR0 around an insight the industry was largely ignoring: treating organic search as a measurable performance channel for DTC brands, at a time when most ad dollars were pouring into paid social. Zacharias serves as President and Miller as CEO.
The Quick Hits
- GR0's founding insight was to treat non-branded organic search as a performance marketing channel with direct revenue attribution, not an SEO afterthought — ranking a hot sauce brand for "hot sauce," or a percussive massage gun brand for "percussive massage gun," rather than optimizing branded terms customers were already searching for.
- That approach scaled explosively — from zero to $20 million in revenue and 50 employees within the agency's first year — but the real inflection point, in their telling, came when Apple's iOS 14 privacy changes made paid acquisition more expensive and forced brands with weak product-market fit to fold, while validating the value of a channel that didn't depend on ad-platform targeting.
- When brands began cutting costs, SEO was often the first line item cut — which pushed GR0 to expand deliberately into channels a client couldn't easily live without: Google Ads, email and lifecycle marketing (both acquired), paid social and creative (built in-house via an acqui-hire), and most recently Amazon marketplace management, aiming to become a brand's single trusted agency partner rather than one of many vendors.
- Every department head at GR0 has logged what Zacharias estimates as at least 10,000 hours mastering their specific discipline before being trusted to run it — a deliberate bar the founders apply to acquisitions and internal hires alike.
- On AI: both founders describe it as a margin and productivity enhancer for the agency, not an existential threat. GR0's content division, once producing millions of words a month for hundreds of major blogs, didn't shrink when ChatGPT arrived — it restructured around category-specific human fact-checkers and disclosed AI use to Google, and now produces more content with roughly a third of the headcount.
- Their hiring philosophy prioritizes character and hunger over raw talent or credentials. Zacharias says he'd rather hire someone who's a "7" on smarts and a "10" on hunger with a good attitude than a "15" on smarts with a bad one, because character can't be trained the way skill can.
- Both founders point to founder story — the "why," not the "what" — as the biggest lever for brand differentiation in crowded categories, citing examples like Bite Toothpaste's founder documenting her own product-development journey, and arguing most brands under-invest in refreshing and retelling that story over time.
Meeting in recovery, building a business on a shared obsession
Zacharias and Miller met in a support-group setting while both newly sober, and discovered a shared history in performance marketing underneath the more personal common ground.
Turning SEO into a performance marketing channel
GR0's core insight was to measure non-branded search revenue for specific product categories — not the branded terms a customer was already typing in because they already knew the brand.
From $0 to $20 million in year one — then the correction
GR0's early growth was explosive — zero to $20 million in revenue and 50 employees within a single year. Then, around 2022, the market shifted, and Miller remembers the exact moment it became real.
Zacharias noticed a pattern in how struggling brands responded: SEO was usually the first budget line cut.
Becoming the phone bill, not a line item
That question — how to become indispensable rather than optional — became GR0's expansion roadmap. The team set a hiring bar first: only people with deep, proven mastery of a discipline would run a department.
AI didn't shrink their content business — it restructured it
GR0 once ran one of the largest content-writing operations in the country — producing millions of words a month for hundreds of major blogs, entirely by hand. When ChatGPT arrived, capable of writing content "better than a human being," Zacharias expected the obvious question.
That transparency, rather than hiding AI use from Google, became the differentiator — aligned with what Google calls E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust), its main defense against low-quality AI content.
Iconic ads, not just performance ads
Rather than treating brand investment and performance marketing as separate budgets to balance, GR0's stated bar for creative is that it has to work as both at once.
Founder story is the real differentiator
Asked what actually separates brands competing in a crowded category, Miller pointed to something most companies treat as a one-time founding anecdote rather than an ongoing asset.
Hiring for heart, not just brains
Both founders describe a hiring philosophy built around character and hunger over polish or credentials — and a hard-earned lesson about what it actually takes to scale past the founders themselves.
Sound Bites
- “Theragun spends $5 million a month on Meta, and that causes half a million people to Google "is Theragun legit percussive." If you're Truff hot sauce, we want to see how many sales we can get from the word "hot sauce." Our clients were making big multiples on the fee they were paying us — paying us five grand, making fifty grand.”
- “Things got hard, and the first thing these brands started cutting off was SEO. I talked to Kevin — how do we become the lifeblood of these companies, like the phone service? Everyone, even a guy who's low on cash, will figure out how to pay his phone bill no matter what.”
- “Our rule was that we only wanted people who had spent at least 10,000 hours mastering a subject to be in charge of a department at GR0. I'd probably spent 50,000 hours on SEO; Kevin spent more than 10,000 hours on Google AdWords.”
- “We did the exact opposite — we're going to use AI, tell Google we're using AI, and tell Google we're using it responsibly. Our content business kept flying, even better, but with a third of the people.”
- “I look at Liquid Death — they built an icon. They threaded the needle the right way between performance and brand dollars, because their ads were so iconic that they were doing performance ads that were building a brand.”
- “The number one thing I advocate for, the biggest differentiator for any brand, is the founder story. We're friends with Bite Toothpaste — the founder, Lindsay, documented her whole journey of why she started the company and how she did it in her kitchen, took video and photos, put it on the website, educated everyone. People bought into her, and that's why they ended up buying the product.”
- “We pick people for their hearts and not their brains, because you can train the brain and you can't train the heart. Some guy running a level-three ad campaign for us was a barista at Starbucks three months ago. I'll take a guy with a good attitude who's a 7 on smarts and a 10 on hunger over a guy who's a 15 on smarts with a terrible attitude.”
The Chord take
GR0's SEO-as-performance-channel bet, its "become the phone bill" acquisition strategy, and its response to ChatGPT are the same instinct applied three times: find the discipline everyone else treats as a commodity or an afterthought, and prove its value with the same rigor performance marketers apply to paid media. Non-branded organic search was sitting in plain sight, unmeasured, while brands poured money into paid social — GR0 built a business on simply attributing revenue to it properly. When generative AI threatened to commoditize content writing the same way, the founders didn't defend the old headcount-based model; they made becoming expert, transparent users of the new tool the actual product, the same move that built the agency in the first place. Their hiring and management philosophy follows the identical pattern at the people level. A 10,000-hour expertise bar for department leads, and a preference for hunger and character over raw credentials, both bet that deep, provable mastery of a narrow thing beats broad but shallow competence — the same logic that made GR0's original SEO product work. The lesson underneath all of it: durable advantage tends to come from taking an overlooked or underpriced capability seriously enough to measure it properly, not from chasing whatever channel or tool is already crowded with competitors.
Put it to work
- 1Before building or hiring for a new channel, ask whether it's genuinely underserved — like SEO was for DTC brands when GR0 started — rather than already crowded. The biggest wins tend to come from disciplines competitors are quietly neglecting.
- 2Apply a real expertise bar (GR0's is roughly 10,000 hours) before putting someone in charge of a specialized function, whether that's an internal hire or an agency partner you're evaluating.
- 3If a new AI tool threatens to commoditize part of your business, treat becoming an expert, transparent user of that tool as the new product — not a stopgap to quietly manage around.
- 4Audit whether your brand's founder story is fresh, specific, and actually being retold to customers, not treated as a one-time founding anecdote. Categories with many similar competitors are won on "why," not on product spec.
- 5When hiring, weigh character and hunger as heavily as raw skill. Skill can be trained; character and drive are much harder to instill after the fact.
- 6If you're the founder still doing the highest-value work yourself, treat building a trusted second and third layer of leadership as the actual next milestone — not headcount growth for its own sake.
Full transcriptShow ↓
Bryan Mahoney
Welcome to the Brilliant Commerce Podcast — this time in real life, which is my favorite way to do it. Brilliant Commerce is my opportunity to sit down with some of the brightest minds in commerce and unpack the secrets behind some of the industry's most iconic, and I like to say, soon-to-be-iconic brands. Today I'm joined by two of those bright minds, Jon Zacharias and Kevin Miller, co-founders of the agency GR0. Guys, thanks for being on the pod.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah — let me just start off by saying—
Bryan Mahoney
Oh, we practiced this. Only my good friends call me Mahoney.
Kevin Miller
He always brings the energy.
Bryan Mahoney
Always brings the energy.
Kevin Miller
There's never a doubt you're going to get the energy from him.
Jon Zacharias
And I'm just wondering why you brought us onto the podcast if you're trying to bring on—
Bryan Mahoney
I know, I'm wondering.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, yeah, we're happy to be here, for real.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah.
Bryan Mahoney
Happy to have you guys here.
Jon Zacharias
And this is going to be a cool conversation.
Bryan Mahoney
I think so too. I've known GR0 for a couple of years, but most people tuning in probably don't know GR0 yet — they probably should. I'd love for you guys to take a couple minutes — Kevin, you want to start? Tell me the origin story, how you guys met, what prompted you to start GR0, and we'll take it from there.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, so I moved to Los Angeles in 2017, and Jon and I actually met in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, through sobriety. We were in a basement together, sharing our deepest thoughts and feelings about both being newly sober — I think we both had either under a year, or right around a year, of sobriety at that point. I was talking about being the Director of Growth at Open Listings, a real estate platform, and how I was struggling with learning SEO, because that was my primary responsibility — my previous experience was in paid ads, at Google and places like that. He raised his hand and came up to me after the meeting and said, listen, I'm your guy, I'm one of the most experienced and best SEO people in the world.
Kevin Miller
I used to do it for Jack Dorsey, for all these other high-profile companies. Through that we found we had that common ground of sobriety, but also digital marketing love — at the end of the day we're both digital marketing nerds, and we use the term nerd as a term of endearment. So we met through that, became best friends on the personal side for probably the first three or four years, and then came together because we saw a real opportunity to start an SEO agency in Los Angeles — there weren't really any reputable SEO agencies in the United States that just focused on that one thing and tried to be the best in the world at that one discipline.
Kevin Miller
So that was our opportunity, and that's kind of what got us—
Bryan Mahoney
That was the genesis.
Kevin Miller
That was the genesis. But I'll pass it to Jon to add any color on how it started.
Bryan Mahoney
Would you tell the same story, or tell them the truth?
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, no — I tried to get him to partner with me from day one, but he told me I was way too crazy.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay.
Jon Zacharias
And I think Kevin helped me a lot in terms of my emotional sobriety — he trained me to a place where I was able to start a company. I don't think he was worried about the skill set, but more about how our relationship was going to be, how we were going to get along — and we take that really seriously. Even to this day we go to couples therapy together, we have weekly meetings, and we've really been through a lot together. I think those connections you find with other people are more valuable than any amount of money I've made so far in the process. With all the success we've had, it's the thing that makes me wake up in the morning feeling full in the heart.
Jon Zacharias
But yeah, I think we saw a huge hole in the market. These brands were spending so much money on paid media — Theragun, Ritual, these darling D2C e-commerce brands. Theragun spends $5 million a month on Meta, and that causes half a million people to Google, is Theragun legit, percussive — and they weren't even looking at what was happening after that, they were just paying Google for ads. They didn't even realize that people actually read these reviews. Kevin and I looked at it and said, wait, we're the best in the world at SEO, we have a product no one's ever seen before in the SEO field, and no one's doing it in e-commerce. iOS 14, we saw it coming around the corner — everyone's going to run into it. So we really built something incredible — I think what made us famous was turning SEO into a performance marketing channel for these brands.
Kevin Miller
Cool.
Jon Zacharias
That's what was so cool. We built it in a way where it was, no, you're looking at branded search, we're looking at non-branded search. If you're Truff hot sauce, we want to see how many sales we can get from the word 'hot sauce.' If you're Vera Fleur, how many sales from 'roses that last a year.' If you're Theragun, how much revenue we can turn 'percussive massage gun' into. If you're FunBoy, how much money we can turn 'pool floats' into for you a month. We really looked at it like performance marketing, and we had a fee, and our clients were making big multiples on the fee they were paying us.
Jon Zacharias
So they're paying us five grand, they're making fifty grand. If they're paying us ten grand, they're making a hundred grand. I think that was the genesis of—
Bryan Mahoney
An easy investment for them to justify.
Kevin Miller
And none of these really high-profile DTC brands were doing SEO.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
Because typically it's something you outsource.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Kevin Miller
So even really smart teams were missing that one resource. It was very easy for us to get our foot in the door. We built a relationship, and we started getting questions from our clients — hey, we really love working with you on the SEO side, can you also run our Google Ads, can you also do our TikTok Shop?
Bryan Mahoney
Can you also do that — this was going to be my question. You guys meet, here's this smart guy I'm relating to looking for SEO, and I've sort of cracked the code on SEO, and now I'm hearing you talk about GR0 growing, pun intended, into being more of a full-stack agency. When did you see the opportunity? When did you think you two and your team had earned the right to say, hey, we can do more of your business?
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, good question — I'll get into that in a second. But I want to finish off with the level of success this first product had. The first two years were insane.
Kevin Miller
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
We went from zero to $20 million in revenue a year.
Kevin Miller
And 50 employees within one year.
Jon Zacharias
Within one year. Neither of us had ever run a business of that size, so the journey's been especially fun — it's not like scaling a software company, much different. Our product, we actually look at our people as our product.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
That's how serious the product is.
Kevin Miller
Communication, literally the strategy you're providing, the work you're doing, versus the software—
Jon Zacharias
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
That's what sets you apart.
Jon Zacharias
So, around what happened was — I forget exactly — there was some sort of financial correction in '22.
Bryan Mahoney
I mean, some people would not describe it as mild, but yes, there was a correction.
Kevin Miller
There was a correction.
Bryan Mahoney
But things started to get harder — it was more expensive to acquire customers.
Kevin Miller
Closed over.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, the explosive growth you guys saw, partly fueled by your unique approach to the market and your tech, was right place, right time. But then suddenly everything got harder, became more competitive.
Kevin Miller
What happened was — I remember this like it was yesterday — it was the first time we got an email from someone saying, we're going to discontinue your services because we're going out of business.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
I think what happened was a lot of D2C companies raised money that probably shouldn't have, or didn't have the fundamentals that would warrant actually making an investment.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
And when iOS 14 happened, things got harder in that privacy landscape — it sort of weeded out the companies that didn't have real product-market fit.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah. Anyways, things got hard, and the first thing these brands started cutting off was SEO.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
So I talked to Kevin — how do we become the lifeblood of these companies, like the phone service? Everyone, even a guy who's low on cash, will figure out how to pay his phone bill, no matter what.
Kevin Miller
That's the last thing that goes.
Jon Zacharias
Last thing that goes — the phone bill and the electricity bill. We really looked at the ecosystem and thought, okay, there's paid social, creative, Google Ads — we built out our entire roadmap based on what was the most integral part of this to the business. Now we had money and resources, we were a bit bigger, and our rule was that we only wanted people who'd spent at least 10,000 hours mastering a subject to be in charge of a department at GR0. I'd probably spent 50,000 hours on SEO, he spent more than 10,000 hours on Google AdWords.
Jon Zacharias
So we had that. We started making acquisitions — the first was a Google Ads agency, it made the most sense, directly complemented our SEO agency. Then we bought an email agency — we thought retention was a great channel no matter what happens, someone pays us seven grand a month and we can figure out how to get them a big uptick in their business. ROI is really easy to prove on email, especially if you're good at it and have custom designers and good copywriters — you can really make a difference on brands with email.
Jon Zacharias
So then we bought an email agency, and then we built paid social and creative in-house — kind of an acqui-hire, we had two guys with their own little thing and convinced them to come run our department.
Bryan Mahoney
Join forces.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, join forces with us, and they did a great job — shout out to Alan and Tim and Grandma. Then we recently bought an Amazon agency, and that's the most exciting acquisition we've made, because it provides a whole different level of service. You're a business owner starting a company, and people don't really think about it like this, but you're doing a million things — HR, finance, legal — you don't want to have to go vet hundreds of different agencies, figure out how to use them all, figure out who's going to make it. We wanted to be the one-stop shop.
Jon Zacharias
You know we trust these guys, we know they're good, they care, and they're passionate about what they do.
Bryan Mahoney
Well, the passion is clear, I don't think anyone's going to argue that. I watched the transition too, and one thing that always stuck out to me about GR0, when you went beyond SEO and started leaning into creative, is your creative really hits — I think you identified that as something that really mattered. Now you're talking about these other acquisitions. One thing I'll give you guys credit for is being one step ahead — you've talked about iOS 14, some of these things. I'm happy you brought up email.
Bryan Mahoney
I just got back from ShopTalk in March, and one thing a lot of brands were talking about is that organic has always been a really important channel — whether it's people landing on my site through search, or customers I'm able to bring back through email. Those are channels that are often the lifeblood of a brand, that you'll supplement with paid. I think about what's happening now with AI — not content generation, I mean AI that Apple is deploying. We talk a lot about iOS 14, but now there's AI that's going to do a lot of filtering for us, deciding what's relevant. You guys have worked so hard on SEO to create content that's relevant, copy and creative that cuts through.
Bryan Mahoney
If you're advising brands now, trying to stay one step ahead, how are you advising them, or what are you experimenting with, to make sure investments in email actually make it into your customer's inbox? Because I can tell you, brands are terrified this organic channel is going to disappear — in some cases that's 50% of their business at risk right now.
Jon Zacharias
How are you defining organic?
Bryan Mahoney
I'm defining organic as, you've already acquired the customer, you send them an email, and they come back.
Jon Zacharias
We call that retention.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, lifecycle marketing, retention.
Bryan Mahoney
Great to get the nomenclature right.
Kevin Miller
Well, it's anything that's not paid.
Bryan Mahoney
Anything that's not paid.
Jon Zacharias
Okay.
Kevin Miller
It's not the sexiest channel.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
So people often forget about it, but who wants to pay to acquire the customer a second and third time when you could have it for free?
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Kevin Miller
So it comes down to really smart segmentation.
Bryan Mahoney
Okay.
Kevin Miller
On the email side — understanding what email, what message, someone should get at what time.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
Making sure your messaging reflects that. But also, how do you use SMS? That's a largely still-underutilized channel by a lot of our brands — the ones really leaning into it are absolutely killing it, because everyone checks their texts.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Kevin Miller
And as long as the message is actually helpful to the user — a discount, a new feature, a new product they're launching — it gets a good response.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, I think this is where you'll really see AI be a big driver going forward — I agree with what Kevin's saying, it's the personalization of the message people are receiving. That's how you really keep those inboxes, because they're looking at deliverability and open rates on those emails a lot, and the more customized and personalized it is, the better it's going to be. If I'm on Chrome Hearts looking at a certain ring right now, want to buy it, and they send me an email about it, I'm going to be way more interested than if they just send, here's our sale for the fall.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, exactly.
Jon Zacharias
So I think it's getting really smart and clever with it. I was saying this the other day — shout out to a close friend and client — it's also about how you really build community through email.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
The guys who are masters at it — I've got a buddy, Jack at Everyday Dose, I signed up for his product, one of the most amazing products I've ever had, mushroom coffee adaptogens, it fixed my stomach, unbelievable. The brand's done so well as a result of this amazing product he's created, but he's also done such an amazing job making you feel like you're part of a journey, part of a community. I'm excited to read his emails — updates on his journey, his health and wellness, how the mushroom coffee is affecting him and other people in that community. It's really cool the way they've done it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I love that. I used the term iconic to kick us off — for me, brands get put into that echelon because they've developed community, or an amazing story, a great connection with their customer, and a great product. If I think about the heyday of performance marketing, the product didn't matter very much — it was really about, let's just acquire the customer, there's this arbitrage opportunity happening, and the product kind of sucks.
Jon Zacharias
Well, I think that's the big difference iOS 14 made.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
We had one client selling magnetic eyelashes, able to acquire new customers at a certain cost and scale the business to 50, 60 million a year. We had another client selling lashes people said worked a lot better — then iOS 14 hits, and it's like, your product better work.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
Because if it doesn't, the cost of acquiring new customers just skyrocketed.
Bryan Mahoney
Too expensive.
Jon Zacharias
Too expensive. So you have to have products that work. That's the big thing iOS 14 did — there were a lot of people I knew getting rich off selling stuff that didn't work.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, yeah, those aren't going to be iconic brands.
Kevin Miller
It was a healthy correction, because the products that didn't need to exist ceased to exist.
Bryan Mahoney
I want to come back to this idea of community and content, because you two run an agency largely measured on results, how much you can help these brands grow. I really believe in striking the right balance between performance marketing and brand marketing — you can't become an iconic brand, generate that excitement to read an email, unless you're investing in brand marketing. I'd be curious — you've obviously earned the trust of some amazing brands — how hard are those conversations, advocating for spend against brand, which is harder to attribute ROI to, versus pure performance?
Jon Zacharias
Good question, I'll go first and Kevin can add. It's interesting, because you come from that world—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
We come from two different — we don't advocate for it at all. Our whole concept is, let's make iconic ads. Our bar for a good ad is that it's so powerful and outrageous, it's the last thing someone thinks about before they go to bed at night — that's the bar. And by the way, attention is the currency people care about now on social, and the bar for getting people's attention with TikTok went from three seconds to less than one.
Kevin Miller
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
To get someone's attention. That's the bar on what it takes. But we think you build — I look at Liquid Death.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, right.
Jon Zacharias
They built an icon — I know they spend money on brand awareness now, but they threaded the needle the right way between performance and brand dollars, because their ads were so iconic they were doing performance ads that were building a brand.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think if you can nail that, you're really nailing it. But I'd also argue there's traditional brand building in that — you're not just cranking out creative to see what works, you're setting this bar of, yeah, we want it to work, but we want it to be really good, and for people to think it's memorable. I really love that framing — the last thing you're thinking about.
Jon Zacharias
Well, that brings me to one more thing — measurement. It all falls into the funnel. That's where I think brands have the biggest problem — there's YouTube, connected TV, and it's, you're talking about brands investing — we have a brand right now investing a lot in that, a baby formula brand, realizing that to grow they need it, they've hit a wall. But what's interesting is this is where Chord becomes interesting, because it's hard for them to measure and understand it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
That's the biggest thing.
Bryan Mahoney
Measure, understand, predict — I think these are all things we need to get better at. It's harder and harder to say, in a pixel-perfect way, I know exactly where that dollar went and it landed this customer, as opposed to, we're blending these things together and we feel like the money we're spending is getting us the return we want. You told me a story once about someone with a negative ROAS on TikTok, but their in-store sales were through the roof — they said, cool, we're going to keep losing money here because we know it's driving sales in stores.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, Amazon — they saw what TikTok was doing for Amazon and retail.
Bryan Mahoney
That's what it was.
Jon Zacharias
They were calculating it more advanced than other companies at the time, and it let them grow like crazy, because they realized, we can lose money on TikTok because in retail we're winning.
Kevin Miller
Back to your previous question about the brand stuff — the number one thing I advocate for, the biggest differentiator for any brand, D2C, B2B, whatever, is the founder story.
Bryan Mahoney
Mm.
Kevin Miller
A lot of people sell the same thing.
Bryan Mahoney
Yep.
Kevin Miller
There are a thousand companies that sell greens in powder or liquid form. What sets you apart is why you started the company, what's deeply personal about that. There was one on Shark Tank we're friends with, called Bite Toothpaste.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
I was a customer for a while — the founder is a woman named Lindsay, fascinating, amazing story. She documented her whole journey of why she started the company, how she did it in her kitchen, took video and photos, put it on the website, educated everyone about it. People bought into her, and that's why they ended up buying the product. There's the baby formula company he mentioned — three married women with kids, a deeply personal experience with not being able to—
Bryan Mahoney
Why?
Jon Zacharias
The why, not the what. It's the why that we see move the needle.
Kevin Miller
It goes a long way, and I think people still under-invest in it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
But it makes sense to continue refreshing it, adding to your story, explaining to customers why you're still at it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, and 'why' can't just be an academic exercise — I see you two, I see your eyes light up when you talk about brands and customers, you have to be brand people. At the end of the day, to tell those stories and create those iconic ads is what really matters, what's going to help you see around the corner. I hate pivoting to AI, but I'm going to do it anyway — it's never been cheaper or easier to create mediocre, borderline low-quality content with AI. How do you think that changes the landscape you're operating in — existential threat, or opportunity for people who have brand and creative in their DNA?
Bryan Mahoney
Do you see it as an opportunity to stand out?
Kevin Miller
Yeah, I was just telling Jon this. From our perspective as an agency, I don't think AI is an agency killer — I think it's a margin enhancer, a creativity enhancer, a productivity enhancer. I've been blown away by it, because the sheer volume of creative output and tests you can do makes you a hundred times more productive and faster at validating a hypothesis you're trying to get across to your customer, and the tools get better by the week.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Kevin Miller
Just last week, the latest ChatGPT update, the newest model, now builds actually beautiful, usable static images—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
—rather than having to do it a more manual way. It's mind-blowing what it can do and how deeply impactful it is for us as an agency.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, and I have two answers to that — he's exactly right. One, I never look at anything as an existential threat, no matter what — I look at it as an opportunity, always.
Bryan Mahoney
Very unsurprised by that answer.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah. And it's especially important with AI — we had one of the largest content-writing businesses in the country. We were producing five million words of content manually, for 500 of the biggest blogs in the world, per month. Then ChatGPT came out.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Jon Zacharias
And ChatGPT can write content, and can do it better than a human being. You'd sit there and think, how did that not wipe you guys out of business? The answer is, you're always going to need to position yourself as an expert in using the tools — today more than ever before.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Jon Zacharias
We saw it in a huge case study. It didn't take away from our business — we had to pivot the business, become the best in the world at using ChatGPT, learn all the tricks, all the plugins, all the prompts to create incredible content that still gets ranked by Google and doesn't get caught up for plagiarism. And then you can sell it for even more—
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Jon Zacharias
—than if a person was writing it. That was so cool. We even built examples where we're telling Google, in the actual terms and conditions of these websites, we do use AI, and here's how we use it.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
We use it responsibly, we fact-check everything, make sure any legal claims or health claims are fact-checked—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
By a human editor.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
—and ourselves are ranking higher than we ever had before.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Jon Zacharias
You know what I mean? We figured that all out. A lot of companies were saying, we'll use AI but we're not going to tell Google — we did the exact opposite. We're going to use AI, tell Google we're using AI, and tell Google we're using it responsibly.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Jon Zacharias
And here's how. We're able to produce way more content, and we built a team of fact-checkers in every category — finance fact-checkers, legal fact-checkers. That's Google's E-E-A-T compliance — expertise, authority, and trust. They want to know real experts are actually fact-checking these articles.
Bryan Mahoney
Sure.
Jon Zacharias
That's really their line of defense against AI — E-E-A-T. And then, all of a sudden, our content business just kept flying, even better, but with a third of the people.
Bryan Mahoney
It's almost like — well, first, that's great for you, and for people listening, a look behind the curtain of how you're leveraging it not to cut out humans, but to make those humans more efficient. It's really interesting that you found relevancy by disclosing how you're using AI. Going back to the SEO business, you had to figure out how to make content that was relevant — now, thinking about content creation today, you have another audience, these agents, not just the search-engine indexes crawling the site.
Bryan Mahoney
There's all this talk about agentic workflows doing all the shopping for us — I have plenty of thoughts on that, I don't think shopping as we know it is going away, far from it, I love to shop, and I think you two are consumers as well. But we are going to have more agents shopping, more agents pulling content into responses they'll surface for their customers. Have you thought about that for your content generation strategy? I imagine your teams are experimenting, given you're always ahead of the curve.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, that's actually what I look for in employees now — how creative will they get to solve a problem, specifically using AI. A couple nights ago I built a model that gives me the probability of an NBA game going over or under the Vegas line, and I've been able to keep tweaking and modifying it for the output I want — now it sends me a daily email with picks based on historical score probabilities.
Bryan Mahoney
You've got to open-source that.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, totally.
Bryan Mahoney
Give it away, put it in the show notes.
Kevin Miller
You know, every week it gets like 5% better.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
5% more useful. We're constantly — I think people are willing to pay for what he said, being really good at using the tool—
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
—and figuring out how it can help them in every aspect of their business.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, you've got to remember, we work with startups — they don't want to do more, they want to do less, they need reliable people they can trust to do more. So I'm not worried about that at all. With AI agents, I need to stay a few steps ahead, and I think we always have and always will — that's just how my brain works. But at the same time, I don't make drastic changes, the company's too big, without really understanding where the thing is going yet.
Bryan Mahoney
Sure.
Jon Zacharias
And the truth is, I don't think people underestimate — the technology might be there, but consumer behavior is very hard to change.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
People wake up in the morning, start their day looking at Instagram, go online, look at a pair of shoes, go to lunch. Until I actually see and understand my friends saying, oh, this morning my AI agent went and bought me a bunch of stuff and picked the right shoes for me — I'm not going to worry about that. But also, what Kevin's saying is, these AI tools haven't even started to figure out how they're going to monetize it.
Jon Zacharias
ChatGPT charges a monthly subscription, so that keeps them afloat for now, but they haven't done that major ad unlock yet. You saw Zuckerberg and Meta hold everybody off for so many years, and everyone's like, this thing has to start making money or we're out — and then he finally had the perfect ad product, knew it worked, released it, and it created e-commerce basically as you know it today. All the cool brands we work with are basically created from Meta ads. But I can't wait to see the products — there's a great quote from Altman, where they ask him how he's going to monetize it, and he says, I don't know, when the thing gets smart enough, I'm just going to ask it to tell me.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, totally. I saw something fascinating yesterday — my sister's a recruiter, and there's this AI agent called Manus AI that will look at a hundred resumes and compare what they say against the job description you're searching for. It distills it down to the top ten applicants without you doing anything, and gives you detailed notes on the pros and cons of every applicant. So that whole first step, 50% of the process, is already done, and you can compare the AI notes with your own human notes — it puts you in a better position to make the right decision.
Bryan Mahoney
Gosh, guys, there's a ton of nuggets in what you both just said. Jon, I want to come back to the point about the company being too big to be affected by whiplash changes — we've got to go all-in on this certain thing. Consumer behavior takes a long time to change, and we are going to see some of it. Agentic shopping is most likely to happen on toilet paper, not on shoes — shoes are personal, anything you put on or in your body, I don't think agents are going to buy for you, there's something magic about that shopping experience. I also think you're right about the monetization of some of these things.
Bryan Mahoney
I've heard, well, if we can't buy on Google anymore, what are we actually doing — they're going to figure out a way to monetize these things, and I think agencies like GR0 are going to figure out a way to make your customers really stand out. It sounds like you two have done a lot of this growth hacking, but you've also grown a really nice team and business. Shifting gears in the last couple minutes — team building, company building. I've been inspired watching you two build a company. How do you recruit that talent? Probably not with AI.
Bryan Mahoney
And how do you encourage the people working at GR0 now to be the ones looking around that next corner, so it can't be you two all the time? How do you recruit, nurture, and bring along that next generation of talent?
Kevin Miller
Honestly, we try to lead by example, and take that really seriously. That probability model I put together for NBA scores — I come in and tell people how I'm using that at work, ask them what's something in their personal life they could use GPT for. But honestly, we look for good people who were raised right, have good character, a great attitude — that's the stuff you can't teach or train. If they have that down, we can train them on the marketing capabilities, which are always changing.
Kevin Miller
It comes down to finding someone who's a good person, who's inspired, entrepreneurial, wants to do something bigger, is there for the long term, there to make an impact. They don't need to be micromanaged, because that's just who they are.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Kevin Miller
We really believe in the analogy of being a high-powered sports team, and we try to give our employees the resources — just like the Lakers have the best facilities, we try to do the same with our employees.
Bryan Mahoney
Cool.
Jon Zacharias
We pick people for their hearts and not their brains, because you can train the brain and you can't train the heart. Some guy running a level-three ad campaign for us was a barista at Starbucks three months ago.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
We want people who are hungry and smart — that's what we're looking for, and good attitudes. I'll take a guy with a good attitude who's a 7 on smarts and a 10 on hunger over a guy who's a 15 on smarts with a terrible attitude.
Bryan Mahoney
Right, right.
Jon Zacharias
There's a great Steve Jobs quote Kevin and I always play for each other — once you start building a team of A-players, it starts to police itself, because A-players don't want to play with B-players. I think the hardest thing for us was building the right team — we grew really fast and weren't ready for it. We built a product that was really powerful, a lot of brands wanted to work with us, and we didn't understand the importance of having that second and third layer of management within the company, and we paid for it a lot.
Jon Zacharias
I think that's where we learned most of our lessons — how important those second, third, fourth players are. Very similar to how Michael Jordan learned he could score 70 points a game, but he wasn't going to win a championship until not only did he have the right pieces, but he threw them the ball at the end of the game to score the winning basket — that's the lesson he had to learn. So I think that's where we're at today, really understanding that delegation is everything, we need the right people in place. I want to give a shout-out — there are some amazing stories within my company.
Jon Zacharias
What makes me feel like a billionaire today is seeing these guys and girls come in, learn, become part of this amazing thing we've built, care about it, get equity in the company, and then I get to see them start a family, buy a home, buy the car of their dreams — that's what makes us a billionaire today, that's the way we look at it. That's the atmosphere and culture we've really carefully cultivated, and I think that's what separates us from other agencies.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I love that. I've been through agency for 20 years, and I remember this addictive feeling of being the one your customer can count on, the one solving those problems — I struggled with giving that away. When I finally did, and went through some of the same struggles and learned those lessons the hard way, it's really powerful to see people also get addicted to that and grow in their own right. That's when you really feel like you've got something, and it's amazing to watch them go on and start a family and be really successful. That's a really good tip.
Bryan Mahoney
I'd say, if you're shopping for an agency — if I'm a brand right now — content obviously matters, but the people behind the storytelling—
Kevin Miller
Yeah, way more.
Bryan Mahoney
—they've got to buy into it, want to be part of my team, and that excitement has to come through. Clearly they get it from you, but if I'm on a call with anyone else on your team, I feel that too.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, yeah.
Jon Zacharias
We have a great therapist — I mentioned earlier, he and I see a couples therapist together, and he said something that really stuck with me: you need to literally envision yourself passing the ball to these people.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
So it's, I'm about to score, boom, take the ball — you start to think about things differently. Trying to gamify it that way, where it's, wait, I can just easily put this in, but I'm going to throw the ball to this guy, and actually envision it like it's the Lakers Showtime in the '80s.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
That's what makes it so magical, and that's the way we run our company.
Bryan Mahoney
I think you guys are lucky to have found each other. Looking back on my career, I've been very fortunate to have incredible business partners — business is hard enough, doing it by yourself is a real challenge. It's really cool to see what you guys are doing and what you'll continue to do — I feel super fortunate you're part of the Chord journey too. I have to wrap us up in a couple minutes, and I'm curious — I'm sure you saw what we're now referring to internally as the Tobi memo, at Shopify, mandating his team, no more hires, and you need to use AI.
Bryan Mahoney
Maybe just one parting thought on how you're building teams and giving them the tools they need to succeed — we've talked about how AI has already impacted your business, but behind the scenes internally, how do you react to that? Is that something you'll do in a similar fashion at GR0, or how are you encouraging the team to lean into this new productivity frontier?
Kevin Miller
I think it actually is — first of all, I love the speech he gave, I love the message. I think there are two ways to view it. If you're an employee who doesn't really want to work that hard and isn't that self-motivated, you see it as, this guy just wants to make more money for himself, it's going to make my life harder. What I think he means is, I want to challenge all the Shopify employees to use the latest cutting-edge technology to make their lives more efficient, and that's what's going to build the next generation of multibillion-dollar companies that actually has staying power.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Kevin Miller
He wants them to exhaust that, and when they do, and they still need another body, then—
Bryan Mahoney
Build a business case for why they can hire that body.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, but he just doesn't see a world where he believes they can scale by adding more people.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, not going to do it the same way.
Kevin Miller
Not going to.
Jon Zacharias
That's how I interpret it — again, that's a bigger company, a tech company. For us, we have to lead by example with this.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
Kevin's been doing a great job actually using the tools, showing people what he can do with them, and how much easier it's making his life.
Kevin Miller
Yeah, I've been acting as a creative producer, and I go to my actual creative producers, who know I don't have a creative background, and say, I made this for one of our clients, is this high quality enough that you'd deliver it? Then they know, they go home at night thinking, okay, the CEO's doing what I should be doing, I want to come back with ideas for him.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Kevin Miller
And it works — I think that's how you inspire people.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, you're being inspirational, not demanding.
Kevin Miller
I'm not telling anyone — we never ask anyone at GR0 to do anything we wouldn't do. I will take out the trash, I will clean up the kitchen, and I expect my employees to do the same.
Bryan Mahoney
Right.
Kevin Miller
No one does their best work if they feel nervous.
Bryan Mahoney
I think it's striking that right balance, making sure they feel inspired.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, and when you're running an agency, you're always building the plane as you're flying it — at the same time, these guys have to deliver high-quality content for the best brands in the world right now.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah.
Jon Zacharias
So they can't just go, oh, I'm going to test this tool, and maybe one of these amazing brands we work with will figure out it's AI, or they won't, we'll find out the hard way. You've got to be really careful with this stuff as it goes.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, I think that's probably a great place to wrap us up. I rail against this idea that it's somehow a flaw to be building the plane while you're flying it — as fast as the industry is moving, if you're running a business and you don't feel that way, I don't think you're pushing hard enough. Whether you're an agency or a software company, if you think you've got it all figured out, you probably don't. I've watched the evolution of what you two are building within the walls of GR0, and I think it's really inspirational. Thanks for coming on the pod, thanks for bringing it, Jon.
Bryan Mahoney
Kevin, I think you're a real strong second to the energy over here.
Jon Zacharias
No, but congratulations to you, man — I'm really inspired by you, and I think you've got a really cool twelve months in front of you right now. We're grateful to be a part of the journey, and thank you for including us.
Bryan Mahoney
Yeah, man, we're fired up. Cool. Thank you.
Jon Zacharias
Yeah, you got it.
Bryan Mahoney
All right, that's a wrap — we did it, one take.