The New Rules of Marketing, Building an Audience, and Digital Entrepreneurship in 2026

the bossbabe podcast

Digital entrepreneur Ryan Le Levesque joins Natalie to discuss the fundamental shift in digital marketing as we approach 2026. He argues

Key takeaways

• Ryan Levesque recommends the '1-1-1' rule: one platform, one avatar, and one content format to achieve sustainable growth.
• The mid-tier market ($2,000–$3,000 offers) is disappearing due to a 'great bifurcation' in wealth and market expectations.
• Marketing strategy should shift from triggering dopamine (addictive loops) to fostering oxytocin (trust and connection).
• AI should be utilized for back-office automation rather than customer-facing touchpoints like email or social media content.
• Ryan Levesque successfully sold a business funding company to PayPal for over $100 million using quiz funnels.

Main topics

• The death of mid-tier digital offers
• AI and the erosion of consumer trust
• Neuroscience in marketing: Dopamine vs. Oxiente

Notable quotes

The paradigm to optimize for is sustainable, not scalable.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a strategic guide for entrepreneurs to build res

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Most of the businesses that fail to scale that I work with that are unable to get to like a million dollars or even a few million dollars in business is they have too many skews. They've got too many things that they're trying to sell that this one makes a little bit of money, this one makes a little bit of money, and it ends up just pulling them in all these different directions. You know, they're trying to make Instagram work, they're trying to make LinkedIn work, and then they're running ads on Facebook, and they've got this. Pick one channel, one way to attract, one way to convert, and one way to serve. Speaker 1 (0:27) It is. very easy to grow your audience right now. It is very easy to grow your distribution if you get a flywheel in place and you're putting stuff out there. What kind of marketing funnels are you seeing work the best right now? If you are, how would you 1-1-1 it right now? You Speaker 3 (0:43) pick one platform, one avatar, one form of content, and you should be driving people to subscribe to your email newsletter where they can go deeper in what it is that you have. If your Instagram account gets shut down or your YouTube account or LinkedIn account or Facebook account or whatever, you can take your email list. You can put it on a SD card. You can move to any country in the world. You can plug it back into your computer and you can start over. If Speaker 1 (1:06) you were in 2026 deciding, okay, this is the year I want to get a new business off the ground. What would you do different than you perhaps would have done starting this 10 years ago? Speaker 3 (1:18) Most people do not stick with the thing that they're doing long enough in order to see results. The paradigm to optimize for is sustainable, not scalable. Speaker 1 (1:33) Ryan, I actually found you because of your newsletter that you write, which I am a huge fan of. And you said something in there which really stopped me in my tracks and made me rethink my entire business model. And it was around the mid-tier products not working anymore. And I have a signature 3K product. And I was like, is this the end? Of my 3K product? What does this mean? And so I went down a rabbit hole of your work and I just was blown away in consuming so much of your content. I'm so grateful that you're here. Can you start there? Is my product dead? Speaker 3 (2:07) Well, look, I would say that there are exceptions to every rule, right? But what's happening in the world right now is what I describe as a great bifurcation. So we have AI that's accelerated the trend toward the infinitely scalable, which has pushed the vast majority of what it is that we do to being free. The expectation in the market is this should be free. And at the same time, we have value migrating to the extremes where we have a very small segment of what we do that can be positioned as being ultra premium. And this mirrors what's happening, generally speaking, in the world in terms of wealth inequality right now. So since you and I have been alive, we are at the greatest point of wealth inequality in over 100 years, meaning you've got a smaller number of people that have a greater concentration of wealth in their hands and greater purchasing power than ever. And you have a larger segment of the world that's struggling. So at the top of the market, in your market, in my market, and anyone who's listening to this right now, you've got a segment of your market that's very much price insensitive, meaning they'll pay $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, $25,000. To them, it's effectively the same amount of money. It's not impacting their purchasing decision. But then you have the vast majority of the market that you serve right now that may be struggling. Credit is really tight right now. People don't have the same purchasing power that they once did. There's a lot of fear and uncertainty about where the world is going, whether that fear or uncertainty is warranted or not. So what that means is the middle is hollowing out. And it's what I describe as the void to avoid in the middle. Where you do not want to be is in the middle, trying to sell something that doesn't have the margin at the ultra premium side of the market, but at the same time is really designed for the masses or the mass affluent in your market. And you and I both grew up really in the same paradigm of having a mid-tier $2,000 to $3,000 sort of bread and butter offer. That's the core of what it is that you do in your business. And I see hundreds of businesses. And I can tell you right now that the middle is hollowing out. Speaker 1 (4:17) So interesting. We have definitely seen similar too. We're seeing low ticket just absolutely crushed right now. And then we're seeing our high ticket mastermind do really, really well. And I'm still fighting for that middle because I know I have so many women that need more support than the low ticket, but they are not ready for that mastermind. So I'm in that middle place of trying to figure that piece out too. So I'll report back. But that brings me to what I want to talk to you about today is the new digital marketing playbook. Because for anyone that says their marketing is working the same way that it has been for the last five years, they are not probably telling the truth. Things have changed. So before we dive into that, I want to get into a little bit of your journey because you're very well qualified to speak on this. Even if someone is new to your work, they are not new to your work. They have been through or created a quiz funnel. That is what you've created. You've generated over $100 million doing this. Can you tell me a bit about your journey? Speaker 3 (5:14) Yeah, sure. So 20 years ago, I was working in corporate. And I had this dream that I wanted to make $10,000 a month in passive income on the internet. That was kind of like my someday maybe dream. And I thought, okay, I could quit my job. And that's all I ever want to do. So I started exploring going into these different niche markets. My first business was in a totally random market. I was teaching people how to make Scrabble tile jewelry, which is a business my wife found on Etsy when we saw that there was an opportunity. This is like in 2006. And so we built that business to a few thousand dollars a month. It took off and it collapsed, but it kind of gave me a bit of experience to understand how to figure out what your market wants and give it to them. So then I followed that same process in the Orchid Care market and the memory market. And at that time, my dream, my vision was I said, okay, if I can build 20 half a million dollar a year businesses, I'll have a $10 million empire. So I did it in three different markets. And I quickly realized like that was a really bad idea. But I'd learned a process along the way that was the only way I was able to enter these markets. And it was to use what was a very primitive form of what has come to be known as a quiz funnel. And along that time, I had businesses that started to see and hear what I was doing. I started doing a bit of speaking and I had big companies that wanted to partner with me to bring this into their business. So I partnered with about a dozen companies. I went into the golf market and partnered with a company. We ended up selling that company to NBC and the Golf Channel for nine figures. I went into the business funding market with a now known as a quiz funnel to build a business funding. assessment effectively. We sold that company to PayPal for over $100 million. And so I got very small pieces of these exits. I wasn't the majority shareholder, but it showed me that there was a real power in this process. So then I started teaching this and I wrote a book, my first book called Ask, which surprisingly went on to be the number one bestselling book in the country when it launched about 10 years ago, a little over 10 years ago now. And it served as a cornerstone to build a seven-time Inc. 5000 fastest growing company, built a training and education company, then later built a software and technology company, and then later sold that business and kind of served as the first really 15 years of my life in the digital world. And I'll talk a little bit about why I sold the business when I did, why I exited that space when I exited, and what I'm seeing. sort of evolve in what's different today than what was true maybe even five years ago. So Speaker 1 (7:45) let's get into that then. What are you seeing right now in 2026 that is very different to the last couple of decades of doing this? Well, Speaker 3 (7:54) I'll tell you right now, Adam Masseri, who's the head of Instagram, did a keynote. And he had some words that I thought was really, really, really interesting. And it's that we spent the last decade trying to figure out what makes something perfect. we're going to spend the next decade trying to figure out what makes something real. Speaker 2 (8:12) And Speaker 3 (8:12) I think that really underscores certainly the thesis of my most recent book. And really what I've spent the last two plus years of my life really diving deep into is that what the market is craving right now more than anything else, and you can look at this in all sorts of different ways, is not more, but the market is craving is what's real. They're looking for real people. The market wants real food, real ingredients. They want someone that they can really trust. They want to exist in the real world, not just in this digital, synthetic abstraction of what life has become. The world is craving what's real. So if we go back in time 20 years ago, when having a website was new and novel, having an online funnel was new and novel, those were competitive advantages at that time. If you could reach your customers in this automated way, that was a competitive advantage that made a lot of sense in a very different time and place. Today, what's happened, like most things, like fashion and many things in life, is that the pendulum has swung back in the opposite direction, where we no longer trust those automated sales processes online, the fake personalization at scale that I've used myself. I'll be the first to admit, I've used a lot of that myself. The market's very jaded around all of that. And now with the advent of AI, there's this level of distrust that exists where people... no longer trust their eyes and ears when they're experiencing something online to know if it's real, is it a deep fake, is it AI, or did this come from a real human being with a real beating heart? So what's changed and the competitive advantage today is to build a business that demonstrates that what it is that you're creating is real. It's not just about the what you're doing, it's about the how and the who. It's about your process behind what it is that you make. And it's about the person you are behind your products and services and why you're doing what you're doing. So that's sort of a, I know, shot across the bow, not necessarily totally invalidating the first 20 years of my career and everything that I've done in the digital marketing space. But I think what we need to recognize, to your point that you brought up earlier, is that we are living in a very different time and place today than we were even just a few years ago. And the faster you can accept that and recognize that, the faster you can move forward and make the pivots necessary in your business to survive and thrive what's coming next. Speaker 1 (10:33) I really agree with you. And I'm curious your take on this because I feel like right now, it is very easy to grow your audience right now. It is very easy to grow your distribution if you get a flywheel in place and you're putting stuff out there. And right now, you pretty much can assess whether someone is real or fake on Instagram, Substack, email. You can get a sense of it. We can kind of spot some of the AI tales and the avatars. We can definitely spot the AI writing. I don't think that's going to be true for too much longer. And I think the people that are building the brands now and are building their own distribution are doing something really powerful because five years from now, some of them won't question is Ryan real? Is Natalie real? They know we are. But if you're building your brand five years from now, I do worry that the window is closing because it's going to be so hard unless you're running events, unless you're in person with people, which I think is going to really take off. I worry that it's going to be hard to know if you're a real person. I'm curious how you feel around that and the building of distribution and personal brands right now. Speaker 3 (11:37) A million billion percent. I mean, look, you and I are having this conversation virtually, but a little kind of behind the scenes. I was slated to fly from my farm in Vermont to California to be in person to record this interview. And I got three hours into my journey when my flight was canceled. And there was no way that I could make it in time for our interview. So I had to turn around and take a four-hour journey back from Boston to my farm in Vermont. And the reason why I was committed to doing that is because I believe wholeheartedly in this thesis that we can talk about this in different ways, but I'll introduce a neuroscientific perspective, which I think is helpful. And then we'll talk about how to practically implement this in your business. Speaker 3 (12:22) My background before going into business, what I studied in school was neuroscience. I taught and studied neuroscience at the Ivy League level. I thought at one point in my life, I was going to go into medicine and pursue study of the brain. So it's always been a passion and interest of mine. And if we look at digital marketing through the lens of neuroscience, the neurotransmitter that's gotten all the headlines the last decade plus is the neurotransmitter dopamine. We all know about dopamine loops, right? Create these addictive product loops that people keep coming back for more. The problem is there was a time and place for that. But what's emerging in the world right now is that there's a new neurotransmitter that's more important than dopamine. And that neurotransmitter is a neurotransmitter of oxytocin. Now, as a mom, you probably know about oxytocin as the love hormone. When a mother gives birth to a baby, there's just this flood of oxytocin that creates a lifelong bond and love and it's uncontrollable. And it's what bonds our human species. Now, the thing about oxytocin is it's also the neurotransmitter of trust. And unlike dopamine, which can be triggered with like a shade of red on an alert on your iPhone, oxytocin requires physical presence, touch. It can be elicited with something like a hug. From afar, it can be elicited through story. So I believe in this post-AI world, to answer your question on a more tactical level, what is the opportunity? Where's the competitive advantage? I believe, arguably speaking, that the most valuable post-AI skill to really get good at is telling stories. Stories that create emotional response in your readers, in your listeners, in your viewers, because it can create this bond and it can fill this void that most people don't realize. not only that they have, but that the neuroscientific mechanism behind it, that the isolation, the disconnection, the loneliness that people feel is actually a deficit in oxytocin in their body. Like we need, psychologically speaking, somewhere between four and eight hugs per day. Like actual hugs is not a metaphor. Like we really need that many hugs. If you've got young kids, because you've got two young girls. Yeah, two girls, yeah. Yeah, so you got two young girls. I've got two. I've got a preteen and a teenager, both boys. You're getting fewer Speaker 1 (14:41) hugs probably right now. Speaker 3 (14:42) Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, I'm kind of getting out of the hug window with my kids. Like, you know, they're like, yeah, dad, I'll give you a hug. But, you know, not like when they were really, really young. And so we need this. We need this around this. Now, okay, so you might be saying, okay, I'm a digital marketer. I sell courses. Like, I'm like, how does this even relate to me? Well, what it means is we've got to rethink what it is that we deliver. to our audience. Dopamine has gotten all the headlines. And so we've largely built businesses that are designed to create these dopamine loops. That was the last decade. What's in front of us right now is what I describe as this global oxytocin deficit. You touched on one element. People are craving in-person connection. So maybe in the past where we shied away from building an in-person component in our business, we thought about building a digital course and... serving people over Zoom and doing all the things that we could do. So we kind of shied away from having an actual physical event. I believe in-person events should be at the center of any transformational, educational, expert-based business. And if you're not doing that, you're missing out on a huge, huge opportunity. I Speaker 1 (15:51) could not agree more with everything you said. I've been... keynoting a lot recently. And there's one thing I