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Growth Models

I've spent ~10 years helping digital brands grow. I share what I know and what I'm experimenting with in this newsletter.

This is what AI is not good at

I ran a little experiment a few months back that showed me exactly where AI falls flat on its face. And I say this as someone who uses AI every single day, who's built half his marketing ops on it, and who'd rebuild it all again tomorrow if I was starting again (if you wanna see the kind of things I'm building, check this one out...) At the time, I was trying to grow the email list for a publishing brand I was running called Vagrant Press. Everyone kept telling me AI is basically a strategist...

The most expensive instinct in marketing...

Yesterday I said there's one instinct doing more damage to growth right now than anything else. Here it is. When growth stalls, the common belief is to simply… do more. ... Add more channels.... Create new funnels.... Add more content formats cause some guy on YouTube swears by them. Adding feels like progress. When the calendar's full, the output's up, and more ads are running, you feel like things will inevitably work themselves out, right? And AI has poured petrol on that feeling. Doing...

Are you being busy... or productive?

Quick one from my in-laws' guest bedroom (we're over visiting family, so HQ this week is a laptop balanced on a chest of drawers). And I’ll be honest it’s not exactly comfortable. Yet even with my awful sitting posture, the pain in my neck, and having to bend my wrists back at an ungodly angle to type… I could easily knock out a month of content before lunch. We’re talking ad variations, a landing page, thirty social posts, or whatever. AI doesn't care whether I’m sat at my usual desk with a...

Using social algos for better ads...

Just shared something in the GM+ community this morning and I thought I would also share it here as it could be pretty useful for you as well. As mentioned in this, I'm looking at how to automate this at scale for myself in GM+ - if you wanna help with the buid or be in with the initial testers, you can join us here. Now, onto the post... --- Big thanks to MT for turning me onto the guy I’ll be breaking down in this post. Got me really thinking about how to improve my social marketing strats,...

Give it gold, part two. This is the machine

So. I said "tomorrow" two days ago. Getting the last pieces of this working took longer than I thought it would. But anyway, it's live now. On Tuesday I told you the brands winning with AI, and honestly with marketing in general, are the ones with detailed info on their customers. Seriously, knowing who you're selling to makes everything 1000X easier. And, the best form of that info is zero-party data. The stuff customers tell you directly about what they're struggling with and what they...

Give it crap, it makes crap. Give it gold...

I've been spending a lot of time inside AI builds lately. Of course, my own ones, but also helping a bunch of other business owners figure out why theirs aren't producing. From what I can see, nearly every bad result traces back to the same misunderstanding. People think AI is the solution to every answer. But really, all it is is an amplifier. Give it crap, it produces a lot of crap. Faster and more confidently than any human could manage. But if you can give it gold, it prints money and...

A 90%+ discount?

Yesterday I told you about the sly folk who've kept running ads to the same offer for 8-9 months while everyone else packs up shop. Today, I wanna dig into the process. Essentially, what they're selling is a complete done-for-you job. The kind of stuff that was the bread and butter of consultants and smaller agencies for years. In marketing terms, that could be... We'll write you a high-converting sales page We'll create an email sequence for you We'll craft a full Meta ad campaign These were...