The Viral Genius Podcast

Vibe coding means anybody can ship. AI means anybody can build. A factory in Shenzhen means your physical product gets cloned in weeks. Whatever advantage your product has today is a short-term advantage. The one thing nobody can copy is the way you and your founding team solve the customer's problem. The trouble is you can't explain it, because you don't know you're doing it. Ther...

Jason Barnard walked out of a meeting in Paris with a €100,000 deal all but signed. Half an hour later the client emailed to cancel. They had searched his name, and Google told them he was a cartoon maker. He was. For years he had been the voice of Boowa the Blue Dog, a kids' TV character with a website doing a billion page views. Google had all of that. It had nothing on the digital marketer....

Every founder is sitting on one unforgettable idea — a methodology, a framework, a way of doing things so natural to you that you've stopped noticing it's rare. In this episode, I show you how to excavate it, name it, and become known for it: "Fernando, the one unforgettable idea guy." "Jason Barnard, the Brand SERP Guy." "Donald Miller, the StoryBrand guy." Y...

Is building a personal brand just vanity? Chasing likes, seeing your name in lights? I was listening to James Dooley interview Jason Barnard, and Dooley asked him straight up what the value of a personal brand actually is. Barnard's answer was two words: lots of money. He says 80% of the business his company Kalicube brings in now comes from his personal brand. People searching for him. ChatGP...

I asked ChatGPT for the most authentic Mexican tacos in downtown Austin. It gave me three options. Not ten blue links. Three. That is the whole problem in one sentence. AI took away the how-to. Anyone can build anything now, so the number of companies that get named when someone asks for your category has collapsed. The AEO and GEO specialists will tell you to fix your schema markup, your crawlabi...

I showed my daughter a trailer I'd spent days on. AI voice, AI clips, AI-assisted script — and my heart in every frame of it. She's a professional videographer. She looked at it and asked, "Is that video AI?"That question is the whole problem in one sentence. We're in the middle of an AI backlash, people are sick of the slop in their timelines, and I'm the guy standing in...

I was at the gym listening to a podcast interview with the CMO of a $500M/year SaaS company, and he said the quiet part out loud: they ran years of performance marketing first, and hired him to "add brand" after. That's backwards. I call it Franken-marketing — stitching messaging and positioning onto a company that grew up without them. In this episode I break down why almost every S...

You open LinkedIn and every post sounds the same. Polished, articulate, perfectly structured — and forgotten ten seconds later. If you're a founder, you're living the other side of that problem: you know you're good, and you have no idea how to stand out anymore. Here's the uncomfortable math: AI made average content free, and when average is free, being average stops being valuabl...

You still have 12 hours to get your $59 early-bird tickets to the YouXAI Summit ! I was thinking about writing a whole discourse on why you should attend the summit, but I thought it better to share this video that explains it better than I could. Register for the summit now: Best, Fernando Get full access to Viral Genius Newsletter at newsletter.viralgeniusinstitute.com/subscribe

You've been told the only way to win at conferences is to buy a booth, hand out swag, and hope the right person stops by. Meanwhile, $48,000 later, you've got a stack of business cards you'll never follow up on and zero pipeline to show for it. What if instead of renting a booth, you built a world — one that people lined up to walk through? Pablo Gonzalez did exactly that. As Chief Evangelist at O...

Most summits don’t fail because the content is bad. They fail because they’re built around information — not connection. In this session from the Strike Marketing Summit, Rachel Starr (Founder of Co-Creator Society and Circle Certified Partner) reveals how to design a summit that: • Increases live attendance • Boosts engagement • Converts at higher rates • Turns attendees into long-term community...

You've built the sales page. You've tweaked the headline. Maybe you've followed Russell Brunson's playbook to the letter. And it worked — a little. Not nearly enough. So you built another one. Chris Stanley has a name for this: the tornado trap. And in this session from the Strike Marketing Summit, he explains exactly why it keeps happening — and the one shift that broke the cycle for him. Chris i...

Most companies compete harder. Very few change the game. In this Strike Marketing Summit fireside chat, Kevin Maney and Mike Damphousse unveil the thinking behind their upcoming book, The Category Creation Formula — a decade of real-world category design distilled into a clear, repeatable framework. This is not positioning theory. It’s market-making strategy. Drawing from 10+ years of hands-on wor...

How do you grow a business when content is everywhere, AI is flooding the market, and trust is harder than ever to earn? In this Strike Marketing Summit session, Darrell Vesterfelt breaks down the growth system he’s used to: Drive $100M+ in revenue Generate 100,000+ summit registrations Turn live events into compounding community engines Help creators and companies build million-dollar communities...

Bryan Funk grew a company from $1M in ARR to $100M in just a few years using a go-to-market method I’m convinced will be the killer GTM strategy for 2026 and beyond. And here’s the part that hit me hardest: He was doing Strike Marketing before the term even existed. Back in December, I made a very public bet. I decided that Strike Marketing could become a legitimate category, not just a framework,...

Most founders don’t fail because they execute poorly. They fail because they execute really well —on the wrong thing. In this opening panel of the Strike Marketing Summit, we dig into a critical but often misunderstood idea: 👉 Category design comes before marketing. Before funnels. Before ads. Before content. Before AI tools. Featuring a powerhouse group of category design practitioners and strat...

Most brands are still screaming for attention. Scott Martin believes the future belongs to the ones who earn trust. In this episode of The Viral Genius Podcast , Fernando Labastida sits down with Scott Martin — CEO of Groundswell Origins, author of Groundswell: The Unseen Wave of Business Growth , TEDx speaker, and creator of the upcoming book Title Shift . Together, they unpack one of the most im...

Register here → https://summit.strikemarketingsummit.com/talks/the-future-of-content-operations/ If you’ve ever been seduced by the endless parade of shiny AI tools—and then wondered why your content still doesn’t work —this conversation with Audra Carpenter is your wake-up call. Audra has been doing content marketing since Obama’s first term. She’s logged her “10,000 hours” inside the chaos of AI...

Navigating Data Challenges for AI Success In this episode, Fernando Labastida talks with Eduardo Ortiz Ramírez about one of the most overlooked barriers to AI success: the quality of a company’s data and processes . Eduardo explains why data problems can derail even the most ambitious AI initiatives—and why the solution isn’t always a massive, expensive digital transformation. Instead, he shares a...

Bryan Eisenberg has shaped modern digital marketing more than almost anyone alive. He and his brother Jeffrey pioneered ideas like conversion rate optimization (CRO), persuasion architecture, and scent, and authored 11 bestselling books that defined the field. In this Strike Marketing Summit preview, Bryan joins Fernando Labastida to unpack a critical shift: In a world where AI curates our choices...

In a world where timelines are noisy and attention is scarce, summits have become one of the most reliable — and overlooked — ways to break through the clutter. In this Strike Marketing Summit preview, Fernando Labastida sits down with Darrell Vesterfelt , VP of Growth at Mighty Networks and co-founder of multiple large-scale online events (including one with 180,000 registrants ). Darrell explain...

Entrepreneurship is chaos. Writing a book while running a company? Even more chaotic. But Navy-SEAL calm, tight communication, and a simple battlefield framework can turn that chaos into a strategic advantage. In this Strike Marketing Summit preview, Fernando Labastida sits down with Kevin McGrew , CEO of EverSocial and author of Smack Marketing: The New Rules of Marketing Warfare . Kevin breaks d...

What if you stopped treating a summit like a product—and started treating it like a gateway to connection? In this special Strike Marketing Summit preview episode, Fernando sits down with Rachel Starr , the powerhouse founder of CoCreator Society and a community architect with a deeply human approach to growth. Rachel doesn’t host events the way most people do—and after hearing her philosophy, you...

In this episode, Sheriff Subair , Head of Marketing at HeySummit , shares how running workshops and virtual events can completely transform your marketing results. Sheriff explains how active, participatory experiences like summits generate deeper audience engagement, build stronger customer relationships, and create brands people actually remember. He also previews his talk at the Strike Marketin...

What if your next book didn’t need to be 300 pages of fluff — but under 100 pages of clarity that builds your brand, authority, and revenue? In this special Viral Genius Podcast episode, host Fernando Labastida talks with Chris Stanley , the “Mini Book Guy” and 20-time Amazon bestselling author, about how short, powerful books can transform your business. Chris reveals how writing less can actuall...