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 more used to at least cost you time, which put a natural cap on how much you could pile on. That cap's gone.

… Another 100 social posts? An afternoon.
… Another funnel? A prompt and a template.

The trap’s the same one it’s always been, it’s just like 10X larger now.

I ran my business this way for years… before AI made doing more effortless.

At one point I was juggling a LinkedIn presence, an X following, Facebook ads, SEO, and partnership deals, all at once, all to push a few more people towards one sales page.

I'd spend the whole week feeding that machine, jumping from one task to the next, desperately trying to keep all of those plates spinning.

Then Friday would come round, I'd hit refresh on the dashboards, and get greeted by a big fat zero in the new sales column.

All that effort, for nothing in return.

Let enough of those weeks stack up and the darker questions start...

... Maybe the offer's no good.
... Maybe I'm not as good at this as I thought.
... Maybe I should throw in the towel and get a j-o-b.

I'd love to tell you I grew out of it. But it's something I still have to battle, and it might be worse now thanks to AI.

Any time things slow down, my brain will wake me up in the middle of the night with a new shiny tactic idea that’s nothing more than a distraction.

If you look at your own marketing from the last few months, I'd bet there's a version of this in your actions too.

Here's the thing it took me years to see, though. The adding was never really the problem. It's the symptom.

I wasn't running five channels cause I had a plan. I was running five channels because I didn't know which one would actually work. I thought throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick was the right play.

But every new thing I added was a guess at what might turn the tide in my favour.

And the guesses were expensive.

They were shots in the dark. I realised that every new thing I bolted on in a panic for growth started from zero.

It wasn’t linked to anything else, it didn't feed any other area of my business. It was always one small action that I thought would be the solution to my growth woes.

And the more you add, the harder it is to run the machine. Your hours don't stretch to match the tactic list, so ten half-built things get you ten sets of zero results.

Worse, you can't even tell which of the ten is worth keeping, cause none of them get enough focus to prove themselves either way.

Doing more doesn't reveal what works, it buries the signals that tell you where to focus.

The scarce thing now, like I said yesterday, is knowing WHAT to produce and WHY. And a pile of half-built tactics is exactly what not knowing looks like in the wild.

The businesses actually growing right now run it the other way round. They find the one thing that moves revenue, focus on it til it's genuinely working, and only then add the next thing.

Focus first. Then do more.

It's what I call the rule of one, and a while back I wrote a full piece on applying it if you want the deeper argument.​

Essentially, building one system and focusing all your attention on implementing it well will always beat the person doing 10+ things averagely.

Sounds simple, but it’s hard in the age of AI to say no to the tactics that are quick to spin up. It's especially hard as half the industry earns its living convincing you to add another thing.

Which leaves the obvious question. If piling more on isn't the answer, how do you work out what the ONE right thing to focus on is?

More and more people are handing that question straight to AI, and that’s where they’re finding that the machine really isn't all it’s cracked up to be.

Tomorrow I'll show you what happened when I did, and why the "fresh strategy" it handed me was one I'd last seen working in 2013.

Pete "still fighting the instinct" Boyle