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Funny Marketing 101

Is there anything more cringe than a company trying to be funny and failing?

That’s the kind of #FAIL that people don’t laugh at.

I understand why marketers try so hard to make it work. When you make someone laugh, they remember you, and they forward you to people you could never reach with an ad. It changes buying too: 72% of people say they’d pick a funny brand over a serious competitor.

But in case you haven’t noticed: It’s really freakin’ hard to be funny. Especially in a work context. Especially if you want something to be repeatable.

I hate to break it to you, but AI isn’t funny 🙇‍♀️

Humor is one of the few areas where AI isn’t helping out. Maybe we’ll get genius-level funny LLM in the future, but right now? Not really.

It’s not because LLMs have trouble figuring out the nuances of what makes us laugh. It actually has to do with why humor is so effective in the first place:

The real power of humor is connection. It’s to make people feel like, “they get me.”

When a brand makes me laugh at something only my people would understand, it stops being “them” and “me” and becomes “us.” We’re on the same team. We’re both in on it. That feeling is what builds trust, loyalty, and word of mouth. It’s one of the reasons why memes spread: when something feels like an inside joke, the natural instinct is to share it with other people who will get it: “I HAVE to send this to my coworkers…”

And because LLMs don’t actually have their own experiences, they can’t create that level of connection. Sure, they can latch onto trends and themes that have reached a level of popularity that filters into reddit. But the point of a really good niche joke is that most people wouldn’t get it.

The good news: Funny marketing is a skill you can learn 🧠

You don’t have to be a naturally hilarious person. I certainly wasn’t!! And not for lack of trying, either. Here’s me bombing at a (mostly empty) open mic night when I tried to do standup comedy in 2017:

But fortunately for me (and you), success with humor in marketing is a lot like other parts of marketing: If you stick with it, try a lot of things, and pay attention to what’s working, you can figure it out. That’s what happened for me. Now, making people laugh is a big part of my work. Funny marketing specifically has allowed me to:

• ✅ Create a side-project app that went ultra-viral (1 Million+ users in a single day)

• ✅ Build solid audiences both here on Substack (95k+) and LinkedIn (40k+), in just a few years.

• ✅ Consistently ship funny things for my job at Google that make my bosses love me.

It’s taken me years and years (and so many failures) to figure this stuff out. And I don’t want you to have to fall on your face as much as I did, so this is it: my complete deep-dive on how you can finally get humor right for your marketing.

This is a combo of my own experience, top campaigns I’ve seen others nail, and some tips from the funniest stand-up comics in the world and how it actually applies to your job.

First up? How to be funny… according to science. ↓

Part 1: How to be funny

The science of humor 🧬

Peter McGraw’s Benign Violation Theory explains why things are funny. Humor lands when, and only when, three things all come together:

1. There’s a violation: something seems wrong, off, or threatening.

2. It’s benign: at the same time, it’s safe and okay.

3. Both register simultaneously.

Too safe with no violation isn’t funny (you can’t tickle yourself). A pure violation that isn’t safe isn’t funny either. It’s just offensive. The trick is getting the balance right. And getting them to land at the same time.

Two famous comedians show how you can get to this ideal middle zone from two directions:

• Jerry Seinfeld: Take normal, everyday situations and make them funny by highlighting what’s wrong with them. You start with something safe and create the small violation.

• Sarah Silverman: Take edgy material and make it benign by delivering it in a cute, light, and non-threatening way. You start with the violation and soften it.

But you’re not trying to tell jokes on stage. You’re trying to connect with your target audience. So, here’s is an example of a great campaign, focusing on IT professionals. Their work is generally hard but thankless. Companies can’t run without them, but they’re not usually recognized as the stars of the show, either. So this campaign focused on showing them some love: “Have you hugged your IT person lately?”

This showed that they get the tough situation of the IT department, without humiliating or downplaying them. This kind of recognition makes IT workers feel seen and understood.

But you can imagine how framing this the wrong way - either “IT is hard” (boring) or “Ugh, IT. I HATE it.” (too much) - could have totally ruined the effect.

Once you understand the need for this balance, you can see why it’s so hard for companies to get it right. The stakes are high for individuals… but corporate entities have to be even more careful when it comes to boundaries and expectations.

But don’t worry. That’s why I’m here to help.

The ‘Golden Rules’ to making humor work in marketing 🏆

There’s a lot of advice out there for how to be funny and MOST of it does not translate to funny marketing. So I’m going to give you two specific rules to focus on:

Golden Rule 1 - Be specific.

When it comes to humor, inside jokes are a secret weapon. Sticking to industry-specific comic insights is the best way to engage customers and industry thought leaders.

Why?

Speaking to your audience in “their language” makes them feel loved, because no one usually spends the time or effort to create humor made specifically for them and their interests.

There’s a reason nearly every industry and major organization from Google software engineers to the US Coast Guard usually ends up with a company-run meme page: humor that applies to a specific subset of people makes them feel understood.

Sometimes, that level of understanding is all you need. For example, one tested framework I like to use is to take some well-known sentiment… and make it public. I mean that thing that literally everyone says at the industry conferences, but no one talks about out loud.

I used this framework a few years ago, which resulted in a funny side-project going viral and getting acquired: my Viral Post Generator for LinkedIn.

It was based on something we all know: LinkedIn posts are super cringe. Nearly everyone agrees, but (at the time) hardly anyone said it in public.

It all started when I scraped thousands of viral LinkedIn posts in an attempt to find a common thread.

By doing that, I learned the most frequently used word in posts was “me” - people LOVE talking about themselves on the platform, sometimes inflating the most simple experiences to make up an inspirational message in hopes of turning heads.

Because I knew my audience, I just leaned in: the simple app generated cringeworthy posts based on users’ input. I added a cringe meter for good measure (ha!), made the resulting post shareable, and struck gold. It caught fire and went viral.

The cringe meter (that, by the way, didn’t actually function) was the key - this was the specific sentiment and the exact term that digital workers in tech use when talking about LinkedIn posts. This was the thing that people kept mentioning in their tweets and posts sharing it: “Yes, someone is finally saying it!” This was the unspoken truth that I was shouting out loud with this silly app.

The generator was used by more than 2 million people and was acquired 2 weeks after launching.

If you focus in on exactly what your industry cares about, this one can be a layup. Just ask yourself: What’s the one thing in your industry that everyone feels strongly about (love, excitement, fear, hate, anger, etc) - but no one really speaks about out loud?

If you don’t spend any time on LinkedIn, these posts wouldn’t be funny at all. But for my audience, it was a twist on something they saw (way too many times) every day.

Golden Rule 2 - be surprising.

Great humor is all about messing with expectations. If you know exactly who your audience is, you know exactly what they’re expecting… and that’s how you can change it up to make them laugh. That’s how you can nail both the “benign” and “violation” parts of humor.

Catching your audience off-guard and capturing their attention when and where they least expect it will create the most shock value and the most memorable experience with your startup.

This is how one of my most favorite comedic formulas works: Format + Idea + Twist.

Borrow a structure that people already know (a post format, a meme, an opening line), pour your own idea in, and then change it up in a way that they won’t see coming. Keep a swipe file of formats you love, and when you’re stuck, scroll through it and ask “What’s MY version of this?” Copying something exactly like what someone else has done is boring (and maybe unethical). Instead: Re-skin it! Memes are maybe the ultimate version of this: take one everyone knows, ask “What if the joke was reversed?”, and apply to your specific audience.

You’ll know this is working when you can deliver the humor completely deadpan. If you can avoid telegraphing the joke or winking at the reader, that lets them catch it themselves. That little “wait… 🤔🤔😂” is the real payoff.

Storytime: Funny Business?

When you think of industries that are (literally) serious business… cybersecurity probably comes to mind. After all, there’s nothing funny about data breaches. At Wiz, we decided to take a non-traditional approach that no one expected - the launch of CISOtopia, the first-ever toy store designed for cybersecurity professionals.

We went all-in on this April Fools’ Day campaign. We even hired a 3D artist to create fake products for our online storefront, like blindfolds for your startup’s legal team (for when there’s a cybersecurity incident).

The fake store quickly went viral as it got shared all over social media (including Reddit and X).

Within a week, the CISOtopia prank website had more than 110,000 unique visitors.

We could also attribute a 15%-20% uplift in traffic to Wiz.io, our real website, for the entire month of April (the CISOtopia launch month).

And for the final twist - we actually manufactured most of these toys and ended up handing them out at conferences.

Why did this work?

Well, for one, it shows that humor can work in any industry. But more importantly, it demonstrates the Golden Rules: It was specific to a very niche group of people, and bringing some playfulness and humor to a very serious industry brought us attention that lasted long after April Fools’ had ended.

How to get started: My Marketing Humor 101 ‘Cheat Sheet’ 📋

So now you’ve got the key principles, but how do you actually apply this? From my experience, there are a few quick, practical steps that anyone can use:

Step 1 - Know your audience

You can’t fake this part. You have to know who they are and what they care about. You can’t connect with them if you don’t know who they are.

Step 2 - Find common ground

Where do you and your audience already share interests?

Like my Viral Post Generator, I was able to quickly connect with my audience because I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn, too, and there was a clear common denominator - the max cringe levels of most LinkedIn posts.

Step 3 - Give the joke a job

We already talked about the many benefits of using humor in marketing, but what do you want to achieve with it, for your given initiative? Confirm your goal and then ask yourself and your team:

• Build connection: What truth or shared perspective can we introduce to build a sense of trust and familiarity?

• Remove blockers: Where is there friction that humor could help smooth over?

• Get attention: Where is there a chance to differentiate ourselves, where competitors are playing it safe?

You may pick a different goal for each new campaign or project, but be sure you know what you’re trying to do.

Step 4 - Start small

No matter where you’re trying this out, start with something small. Maybe you (or your CEO) have visions of a massive brand pivot or award-winning, humor-focused campaign… but that’s not the place to start.

Humor is tricky and nuanced and requires a lot of context. You can nail it by being authentic to what your specific audience cares about and swapping their expectations. But it’s very difficult to scale.

Step 5 - Keep it real, keep it simple.

Iconic comedian Steven Martin explains this in his memoir, Born Standing Up: the connection of comedy is impossible without authenticity. In the business world, this means that if you fake what your company is or what it cares about, the opportunity to connect through humor is going to be wasted.

This can be deceptively hard to do, but the key is to just talk like real people actually talk. Drop the corporate-ese accent and the meaningless business jargon. Unless that’s what you’re going to make a joke about!

You don’t have to write a ten-minute comedy set to make an impression.

Step 6 - Keep trying

Comedians have to develop thick skin and if you’re going to try some different things, you will, too.

If the phishing awareness meme you included in a company-wide email didn’t get as much buzz as you’d hoped, don’t hang up your hat. After a few shots in the same direction, try a different style or a different format. Don’t get discouraged, but don’t just keep doing the same thing over and over, either.

As Steve Martin put it: “Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.”

Nail it before you scale it 📈

First you get things going, then you scale it up. After you’ve figured out what gets a positive response from your community, turn it into a repeatable machine by standardizing these 4 things:

1. Topics: These are the recurring themes that you come back to. Pick the handful of things your audience has strong feelings about.

2. Formats: These are repeatable shapes your content takes (a first-person story, a screenshot, one specific meme layout). Condition your audience to recognize them on sight.

3. Voice: This is how it sounds. Pick 2 or 3 adjectives (dry, absurdist, deadpan, warm) and make sure to hit that bar every time.

4. Content rules: These are the always/nevers that become your fingerprint. Maybe you always use real numbers, always end on a one-liner, always include images. It doesn’t matter so much what these constraints are, except that you use them consistently. This is what makes make it recognizably you.

But remember: That’s not where you start. First, you test things out. Don’t over-engineer these elements before you’ve gotten a real, vivid response from your community. Especially with humor, you need to keep some flexibility to take advantage of spontaneous circumstances and opportunities. Once you’ve got some real bangers, you can add this structure to increase your hit rate, but don’t lock it down too fast.

Part 2: Where (and where NOT) to be funny.

Timing is everything. Companies fail on both sides of using humor too little and using it too much.

The top marketing surfaces where humor pays off 🧪

Don’t just pick your opportunities at random. Consider your audience and your objective and choose the place that makes the most sense to connect the dots. For most teams, these are the 8 marketing surfaces where I see huge opportunity.

1. Social media: This is the highest-leverage surface, by far. Humor works on every platform, whether it’s LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. Ideal because you can try so many different things so quickly. Pro tip: If your main account is too buttoned up to be really funny, create a separate, dedicated meme page.

2. Ads (paid and billboards): A big portion of the whole advertising industry is about figuring out humor, so this isn’t a surprise. One of my favorites recently: Exa AI created a billboard that just said “10¹⁸ > 10¹⁰⁰.” The math looks wrong, which made people curious. Turns out, it decodes to Exa > Google (exa vs. googol). Only the in-crowd gets it… and one of those people posted a picture of it, which got 22M views. (More about this example)

3. Email campaigns: Your inbox is a personal space, so it’s a unique opportunity to build connection with humor. Check out Derek Sivers’ “most successful email I ever wrote” to see a single message that earned thousands of new customers. Note: The subject line is the highest-stakes opportunity, since a laugh can earn (or cost you) the recipient opening the message.

4. 404 pages: Turn a dead end into a smile, or a lead. Drift sends you a classic video of DJ Khaled lost at sea. Blizzard provides a “Rescue Murloc” - a World of Warcraft creature who will guide you back to safety. TestResults offers you a gift engraved with your name instead of an apology. And how can you not laugh at this “PICK WHO TO FIRE” option shared by Product Hunt!? (I have a deep dive on this one, in my 404 piece.)

5. Careers page and job posts: These are often the second most-visited page on a site, so they’re a good way to communicate your company culture - but they’re also a great opportunity to build some awareness. Perfect for a fake, rebranded, or weird job post. See: Beehiiv’s “Remote Office Manager.” Tesla’s “Master of Coin.” Apparently, Fiverr’s funny titles drove +91% page views. (More in my careers-page piece.)

6. Swag and merch: Bigger risk, bigger reward. Physical things are harder to produce, but are visible outside of our screens. But by including something with some humor that really resonates with people, you’ll create swag people actually want to keep. (Note: Sometimes, you can get the best of both. With a digital image of swag, people can screenshot and share even without the physical object being created.)

7. Stunts and campaigns (including April Fools): This is the big swing. I wouldn’t necessarily start here if you’re just figuring out what your audience wants and how they react. But a well-timed prank buys attention you can’t pay for. (April Fools is the ultimate opportunity for this - I’ve got a whole playbook for you.)

8. Blog and owned content: The most boring locations are your biggest opportunities. Does anyone actually read company blogs anymore? If it’s funny enough, they’ll not only read it, they’ll share it, too. I wrote a long, mostly-fictional blog post about the “history” of the socks in our swag bags (socks we don’t even sell) and how they featured in every major historical moment. People loved it. (“A brief history of Wiz socks.”)

Notice how different surfaces naturally match with different objectives: Humor on a billboard differentiates. Humor on a 404 reduces friction. Figure out what works with your goals and your audience.

Why stop there? 🥷

If you’ve figured out how to connect with your audience and what makes them laugh, think about opportunities beyond just marketing-owned surfaces:

9. Product: Add some joy in unexpected places. Funny features that exist purely to delight. Think of Tinder’s “Swipe Night,” Mailchimp’s high-five animation when you send, Waze’s celebrity voices, or Android’s hidden gingerbread-man Easter egg and Slack’s random App Store notes that made users anticipate updates.

10. Sales: Humor in cold DMs, decks, and swag. More than 70% of people say they’d buy from a humorous brand over a serious competitor. Memes in sales emails work as a personal touch, and I’ve done exactly that.

11. Internally: We’ve been talking about connecting with external audiences, but internal audiences matter, too. Use some humor to get your teammates and stakeholders onboard with what you’re doing! This kind of connection creates a positive, fun culture that keeps people around and makes recruiting easier. BestBuy, Southwest, and LinkedIn all list “fun” as a core value.

Where should you NOT try to be funny? ❌

This isn’t what you’re expecting. Most people think the answer is “When you have an important, serious business.” But like I said at the top: If we can figure out how to work humor into the cybersecurity industry, you can do it anywhere. But there are places where I wouldn’t recommend it.

1. Don’t touch sensitive subjects. Professional comedians can get away with this, but if your company makes a joke about religion or politics, you’ll get burned. Lots of social media blunders fall into this category.

2. Don’t punch down. If you’re a plucky upstart company, it’s fine (and even expected) to take swings at the wealthy, successful giants in your space. But if you are the larger company, it’s not a good look to make jokes at the expense of your smaller competitors.

3. Don’t try to be funny everywhere. If you try to force something to be funny, it’s probably not going to work. Trying to make literally every marketing surface funny in some way is trying too hard. Find the highest-potential surfaces and lock those in.

4. Don’t start with big swings. If you’re at a company that isn’t known for being funny, don’t start out with a massive humor-led campaign. Try it out on smaller, iterative surfaces where you can get immediate feedback. Do customers and prospects like it when you joke with them? If so, scale it up! But if not, then it’s better to learn that on a series of Instagram posts than in a Super Bowl spot.

5. Don’t be random. I’ll keep saying this - the whole point of humor is to connect you to people. So think about how your funny elements connect to your overall brand and how people perceive your product. I’m not saying you need to do a complete brand refresh to try out some humorous posts, but if you try some things out and it works, think about where you will and where you won’t try to bring the laughs.

Part 3: “What if I’m not naturally funny?”

Humor is a skill that you can learn, but if you’re just getting started, you may be intimidated or feel stuck.

Here’s the advice I always give marketers who want to use humor in their work, even if they don’t naturally bring the laughs: Borrow someone else’s funny.

Borrow from the professionals → Do what working comedians and top copywriters do 🫆

Tom Segura is one of the modern masters of observational humor, which is what I was describing in my first Golden Rule: say out loud what everyone else is seeing. So I’ve dug into some of the specific tips he’s shared on places like on David Perell’s How I Write podcast.

Yep, he points out that the key to his style of humor is articulating the thing that everyone else is feeling. And sure enough, he confirmed Golden Rule #2, too: “I think the simplest way to describe the best feeling of a joke is always the element of surprise.”

If you’re not sure how to get a laugh, try some of his other tips:

• Have an opinion. Indifference is never funny. “This coffee is fine” will get you no reaction. “This tastes like someone boiled it in a cup” or “This is God’s gift, I want to bathe in it,” are both funny. It actually doesn’t matter which direction, but pick a side and commit.

• Being a little annoyed is funny. Complaining, being bothered by something everyone else tolerates, is comedy. This is the whole Seinfeld and Larry David engine.

• Build goodwill first, then you get away with more. Be likable! You can land a bold joke or comment later, if they trust you.

• Say it all. Don’t let the editor arrive too early. This is probably the biggest thing holding companies back: Because having the boss in the room means most people won’t take a risk. But in order to actually be laugh-out-loud funny, you’ve got to try some things. Test more and pre-judge less.

And even more broadly, I keep this list of go-to comedy structures handy. Now that you have it, you’ll notice how often comics and ad campaigns use them.

• Exaggeration: Blow one trait up so far it tips into absurd.

• Wordplay: Twist a common phrase to land two meanings at once.

• Dark humor: Break a small taboo to stand out (keep it benign!)

• Irony: Say the opposite of what you mean to draw attention to your real claim.

• Inside joke: A line only your audience will get, so they share it to feel smart.

• Self-deprecation: Owning your flaws makes you sound human instead of corporate.

• Paradox: Jam two opposite ideas into one line.

• Deadpan: The flatter the delivery, the funnier the line.

• Double entendre: Saying something with both an innocent meaning and a cheeky one at the same time.

(For the complete taxonomy, see Wikipedia’s comedic device overview.)

Borrow from your funny coworkers → Play off others ✨

You know who I’m talking about. They share the best memes on Slack and had the whole room rolling at the last team offsite. They don’t need to be part of the marketing team - if they’ve got a natural sense of humor, ask for their input and feedback on any humor-related projects.

And when you bring people together to collaborate, make sure you approach it the right way - stay flexible! By being adaptable and open to spontaneous changes, you open up the opportunity to some of the funniest moments of all.

In improv, this is called the “Yes, And” concept, where you agree and add to a person’s suggestions to create the scene. (Check out this book, all about it!) Instead of saying “No, But,” you keep things moving forward. Using improvisation is shown to increase confidence and reduce social anxiety, making it easier to connect.

Bonus points if you can use this sort of dynamic approach in interactions with your public audience, too. Which brings me to…

Borrow from your community → Crowdsource your material 🙏

This is one of my favorites. In 2023, we announced our annual Meme Battle at Wiz. We invited employees to create cybersecurity memes and asked the public to vote for the best one.

We didn’t anticipate what would happen next: A huge cybersecurity LinkedIn page (The Cyber Security Hub) with more than a million followers shared one of the memes and tagged us. We plugged an ad in the first comment and saw a major influx in followers on the same day.

Borrow from industry creators ⭐️

Who are the top content creators in your industry? Anyone who has the attention of your ideal audience is in the business of understanding what they care about. If someone nails a viral post that has everyone rolling, try to deconstruct it: What made it resonate? Why did people think it was so funny? Figure out how to make your own version.

Looking for some inspiration? Some of my favorites are:

• Corporate Natalie - She says what we’re all thinking.

• Elena Verna - The meme queen of growth marketing.

• Renée Shaw - Are tech employees allowed to be this funny?

• James Hawkins - Just go read his posts.

• Jason Roeder - Probably wrote your favorite The Onion article.

• Chris Bakke - The gold standard for tech satire.

Follow those people and you’ll have a constant stream of inspiration for funny marketing concepts. Plus, you can tell your boss you’re “researching” while scrolling through hilarious content. You deserve to laugh, too!

Borrow from culture 📺

Pay attention to what’s going on around you: Movies, articles, shows, tweets, and all those short-form vertical videos you watch. Notice anything that makes you laugh and try to figure out why it worked. If you’ve got a deep understanding of your target audience and what they’re expecting, you may be able to translate the premise of that viral TikTok video into something that really lands with the customers you want to be connected with.

The point is: If you don’t think you’re funny… you’re not alone. You don’t have to figure it out by yourself and you can lean on these other sources to help you figure it out.

At the end of the day: Don’t force it. There’s a huge opportunity to insert comedy into your marketing to make your audience feel seen and feel connected to your brand. If you understand them and something makes you laugh, figure out a way to bring it to them. But if you’re twisting things backwards to make it comedic, it’s destined to fail. Like “Mandatory Fun” in corporate offices, this isn’t something you can fake. So keep it real and you’ll get the laughs.

That’s it! Now make ‘em laugh.

There ya go, you did it! Humor is an elite tool for marketers and it’s only going to get more valuable in the age of AI. People are looking for human connection and making them laugh is one of the best ways to create it. Now you have the skills you need to make it happen 🎉

• The core of humor? Benign violation. Shake it up, but keep them safe.

• How to win in corporate humor? Be specific + Be surprising.

• Just getting started? Follow these steps: Know your audience + Find common ground + Choose a goal + Start small + Keep it real, keep it simple + Keep trying. And be sure to nail it before you scale it.

• Where (and where not!) to be funny? Just save the lists I shared.

• Not naturally hilarious? Borrow someone else’s funny. Comedians & Copywriters, Coworkers, Community, Creators, Culture. (Wait! Those all start with C!? I didn’t actually mean to do that. But if you’re a marketer, you probably love named frameworks, so feel free to call that “Tom’s 6 Cs”!!)

You’re all set. I know it can be intimidating, but with these tools, you can do it.

And remember: Even if it’s scary, take encouragement from the fact that the bar is very low for marketing humor. Even if you’re bad… at least you’re not as bad as ChatGPT jokes 😂

See you next time,

Tom

PS - What are your favorite examples of hilarious marketing? Leave a comment or reply to this email - I’m always looking for new inspiration!

PPS - let me know if you liked this longer format of a playbook :)

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The fastest way to become an AI company in 2026

Just rename your “Loading...” to “Thinking...”

I ran a little research and found the actual commit messages on GitHub:

My favorite: “Change Loading to Thinking so I can join the AI bubble” 😅

And this is not a niche joke: Before 2023, a “thinking indicator” shows up in 59 commits across all of public GitHub. Since then: roughly 20,000.

What people do to “look more AI”

• ✨ ~35,000 commits touch a “sparkle icon” since 2023, 30x everything that came before. One dev swapped his chat icon for sparkles because it “feels more AI.”

• 🛡️ ~16,000 pin an “AI badge” somewhere on the screen.

• 🔨 Fake progress is an old trick (5,000+ commits and counting), but 149 now cite the “labor illusion” by name while building it.

• 🤌🏻 Some fake the wait itself: “Add simulated delay to AI analysis for a more realistic user experience.”

• 🌀 And ~5,400 add a “thinking animation”, with an open-source library offering 36 ready-made ones.

Even the real thing is theatrical: Claude Code’s leaked source revealed 187 hardcoded “thinking verbs” (words shown when it’s loading):

It works because the psychology is real: a study from January found that chatbots showing no visible “thinking” read as less warm, less engaged, and putting in minimal effort.

So if your product answers instantly or calls it “Loading...” → users read it as the cheap one, even when it does more.

Do this instead 🧠

Yes, people value things more when they see the effort behind them.

But the problem with “Thinking...” is that it’s the laziest possible way to show effort, and there are 20,000 commits on GitHub proving everyone had the same idea. So what’s the real solution?

Show the real thing. If your product scans 2,000 reviews, write “Scanning 2,000 reviews...” on the wait screen. No one can fake YOUR specifics.

Much better!

Staging the delivery is fair game too. My Viral Post Generator‘s loading screen took exactly 10 seconds (actual loading time: 0.5 seconds). The results were real, people just got them slower, and my A/B tests showed they shared more the longer they waited.

I wrote a full playbook on this exact psychology, fake progress bars included.

Just make sure something’s actually working under the hood.

Have a great week ✌️

Tom

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Today’s post is written by a guest:

Oh, Nano Banana. The greatest AI image tool.

Here are 15 ways I use it to make ads:

1. Change hairstyle

Prompt: Mess up her hair so it looks like a full-on bad hair day: Uneven volume, frizzy strands, pieces sticking out in random directions and covering her face.

(By the way, you can access Nano Banana for free here)

2. Expand frame

Prompt: Zoom out to reveal her legs and more of the room she was painted in, while keeping the same original painting style.

3. Change outfits

Prompt:

Replace her dress with pink cozy pajamas covered in cute cat illustrations.

Replace her shoes with warm, furry slippers featuring a quilted texture.

4. Create mockups

Prompt:

Show the ad printed on a giant wall mural in Berlin. The mural covers the entire side of a building, with natural city lighting and realistic wall texture. Add a few Berlin street elements like bikes, graffiti, and a tram.

5. Add something shocking or unexpected

Read more

If you run a subscription business or sell credits/tokens, some of your customers’ payments are failing every month.

Most businesses just lose that revenue - but it’s recoverable!

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I looked into this and the results are surprisingly significant. Check it out:

Try FlyCode →

(Sponsor the newsletter to reach 95,000 marketing leaders)

A weird chunk of running this newsletter is hunting for other people’s logos.

You’d be amazed how hard companies make this. I search “[company] logo” and get a bunch of third-party sites with a watermark stamped across the file. So I give up and screenshot something blurry.

It sucks.

Now imagine a reporter at a real publication, on deadline, doing the same hunt. But they don't settle for the blurry screenshot. They just write about someone else (whose assets are easy to find).

A while back I explained how to get journalists to come to you in the first place (that storytelling framework got me into Business Insider and The Guardian). Today’s guide is the other half: once a reporter shows up, make it stupidly easy for them to stay.

Your job is to remove the friction ↓

🪄 Logo magic trick

The company doing this best right now is Ramp:

The first thing anyone does when they want your logo is right-click it in the top corner of your homepage. Ramp turned that reflex into a secret menu:

Click their logo and you get “Copy SVG”, a “Media Kit” download, and a link to a full “Press” page packed with stats you can quote.

No hunting required - I love it.

🧱 The most expensive Google Drive mistake

A “press kit” is a folder with everything a reporter might need: your logo, screenshots, brand colors, a headshot or two. The only rule is to keep it very very public - with nothing standing between the reporter and the download.

Rippling almost gets this right. They have all their media resources neatly sorted in one place, which I was happy to see:

But when you click to download something, you actually need to request Google Drive access 💀💀💀

A journalist writing about the space doesn’t really care whether the example is Rippling or Deel. They’re not going to “request access” and wait for someone to approve it. They’ll just cover Deel.

Maybe it’s intentional, and Rippling wants to see who’s pulling their files so they can follow up later. Or they want to prevent competitors from seeing their product screenshots (then why give it to press..? 🤔). Maybe someone just assumed the folder was public.

Either way it’s costing them coverage, so make sure yours is 100% public.

💸 What reporters actually copy-paste

Reporters love a number to build a story around.

Stripe makes it effortless: their Newsroom page has a “Fast Facts” section with big skimmable stats. For example:

Write yours the same way: the stat, then the ready-made sentence it slots into.

My favorite version of this, and the boldest, is putting your real metrics on a public live page that updates on its own. Buffer started it with their /open dashboard, showing live monthly active users and revenue out in the open:

One last thing: make sure they can actually find the page. Reporters tend to randomly type [yourcompany].com/press, or /media, or /brand, and expect to land in the right place. That’s why all three of these Okta URLs point to the same spot:

• okta.com/press

• okta.com/newsroom

• okta.com/news

I think that’s smart.

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Have a great week ✌️

Tom

In 2022 I built the Viral Post Generator. It hit over a MILLION users in 24 hours 🤯, got covered by BuzzFeed and The Guardian, and sold within a week. Building it took weeks of no-code headache, plus my brother writing code and setting up AWS.

Today I can build tools like that with one prompt.

I personally use Base44 for vibe-coding. It’s easy: you just describe what you want → it builds it, designs it, hosts it, and publishes it.

In today’s article: 9 tools worth building, the exact prompt for each, a live example, and how to get people to use them. Let’s go:

Free tools to give your audience 🎁

Free tools are a clever way to get someone’s email address. Tie the tool to what you sell, and every user is a lead. You can follow up with them later, and sell your main product.

1. Grader 💯

Let people grade something they are insecure about.

Say you sell email marketing software: score people’s cold emails. Landing-page software: score their current landing page. Cloud security software: score their posture. Anything your audience is responsible for → grade it.

Users get a number out of 100 and a list of things to fix (you can also pitch your product to fix everything for them).

Get people using it: roast real cold emails you’re receiving day-to-day (maybe censor the sender name), and post the public teardown on LinkedIn or X. Include a link to let people grade their own cold email.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-grader.base44.app

2. Cost calculator 💰

Show people the yearly price of their problem.

Say you sell automation software: estimate the yearly cost of the time their team spends on manual work. If you sell a hiring tool: calculate the cost of a role sitting open. Anything that costs your audience → calculate how much.

Get people using it: put it in cold emails, cold DMs and sales decks with their number already filled in (based on your estimations). Say that you personally analyzed everything for them.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-calculator.base44.app

3. Generator 🎰

If your product makes something (copy, designs, names) → give away a tiny free version of it.

Say you sell a copywriting tool: a generator that turns someone’s product into 10 taglines. If you sell a design tool, generate a color palette from their brand.

People share the result because it’s about THEM. That’s how my Viral Post Generator spread to 2 million people.

Get people using it: run it for 5-10 famous brands, post the funniest results on social, and link the tool so people make their own.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-generator.base44.app

4. Game 🕹️

Build a simple mini-game around your topic.

Say you sell ad software: a “Real or AI?” game where people guess which ads a human wrote. If you sell a copywriting tool, do the same with headlines.

Get people using it: run a contest on social media (with real prizes) - tell people to comment their score (or even better: tell them to publish an entire post with the score screenshot).

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-game.base44.app

5. Quiz 🔮

Sort people into “types” they'll want to share.

Say you sell marketing software: a “What’s your marketing superpower?” quiz. If you sell a sales tool, make it “What kind of Closer are you?”

Make every result flattering, so people post it.

Get people using it: pay a few micro-influencers to use the quiz and post their own result on social. The snowball will roll from there.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-quiz.base44.app

Tools you keep for yourself ⚙️

The next tools are internal, for you and your team. They can save your time, resources, and budget.

6. UTM link builder 🔗

If your team builds campaign links all day, build an internal UTM builder.

This is useful since generic generators (you can find online) require you to fill in the parameters by hand, every time.

Put it to work: keep it in your team wiki (or pin it to a Slack channel) so everyone uses the same format.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-utm.base44.app

7. Content repurposer ♻️

If you publish long content, build a tool that turns a post into a bunch of short content.

Paste a long post in, get tweets, a LinkedIn post, an email, and a few hooks back.

Put it to work: run every long piece through it before you publish.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-content-loop.base44.app

8. Subject-line previewer 📬

If you send a lot of email, build a tool that shows how your subject line looks before you send it.

It shows the line in Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook, including where it gets cut off and which words trip spam filters.

Put it to work: check every email here before it goes out.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-subject-line-preview.base44.app

9. Brief generator 📄

Build a tool that turns 5 answers into a clean one-page brief.

It makes it much easier to hand off tasks to your team and keep everyone on the same page.

Put it to work: require a brief from this tool before any campaign starts.

Live demo: https://tom-orbach-brief-build.base44.app

Hit reply and show me what you are vibe-coding! I’d love to feature it in a future newsletter.

See you next week ✌️

Tom

(In case you’re wondering, Base44 didn’t pay me a dollar for this. I just like building things with it, so I asked them for a free year for my readers. They said yes. Good people.)

Subscribe to get your code to Base44

Brew makes email easy. Describe what you want in plain English, and Brew builds the whole campaign, copy, design, automations, all on-brand. It learns your brand from your site, so every email looks like your team wrote it.

LiveFlow A/B tested a Brew email against their existing one across ~5,000 customers. The Brew version drove 136% more click-throughs to their book demo page.

I’ve been playing with it and it’s honestly wild how fast you can go from idea to sent email. Give it a try!

Try Brew

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3 viral formats are exploding right now. My feed is 90% this stuff.

Copy one of the stunts and add your brand ↓

1. Kill your physical product 💿

Sony announced this week that new PlayStation games are going digital-only - no more discs. The internet did NOT take it well. Their announcement collected 70K angry replies.

Within 2 hours, Domino’s posted an official-looking statement announcing that pizzas are going digital too: customers will download “pizza codes” and enjoy them “in an entirely virtual sense”.

488,000 likes from that one image. 🤯

Other brands followed:

• KFC Spain announced their chicken now comes “in fake PNG format” (157K likes), then followed up with “YOU WOULDN’T STEAL FRIED CHICKEN.”

• G FUEL turned its flavors into “downloadable flavor files.”

• RESPAWN switched to virtual gaming chairs (52K likes).

• Esports Awards killed physical trophies. Winners now download a JPEG (15K likes).

• GameFly swore to rent discs “until they pry the discs from our soft, moisturized hands” (58K likes).

2. Digital product? Go physical 📼

Software companies flipped the same joke.

Proton announced their VPN will now fly you to one of 90+ locations, and their password manager becomes “someone who follows you around and remembers your passwords for you.” 27K likes. I’d honestly pay for the password guy.

Malwarebytes will send an employee to your doctor’s appointments, to protect you from viruses (12K likes).

And GitHub, my favorite of the wave, made it real: they’re burning your code onto actual CD-ROMs and shipping them free to the first 1,000 people who sign up. 29K likes, the front page of Hacker News, and free press everywhere.

3. “The US government shut us down” 🏛️

This meme comes from a different shutdown. The US government took Claude Fable 5 offline for 18 days, citing national security, and the announcement hit 88K likes.

The ban lifted on July 1 and Fable went insanely viral when it returned.

So founders started copying that statement word for word, for their own tiny products:

Marc Lou announced the government suspended his $21K/month analytics tool “after determining my analytics dashboard was simply too powerful”… I love it.

Move today ⏱️

GitHub shipped a real product in a day. Domino’s first reply went up within hours of Sony’s announcement.

In real-time marketing, speed > quality. (free RTM playbook here)

See you next week ✌️

Tom

There’s a new “smartest model” every few weeks, the hype is insane, and then everyone goes back to working exactly the way they did before. So I skip them.

But I’m not skipping Claude Fable 5.

So what’s the big deal?

It overdelivers on everything you give it.

If you ask it for a competitor analysis → it goes wild and builds its own research team: 150 agents reading 700+ papers and web pages, fact-checking each other, grinding until the job is actually done.

The results of Fable are far better than anything I’ve seen from an AI model before. For marketers specifically, that gap is huge. It’s also the most human-like and creative model in the world.

That’s why I wrote this guide for marketers, not developers. 📋

The “Fable 5” growth cheat sheet 🧪

Don’t worry, this isn’t a prompt pack or a “skills” bundle.

I’m handing you 10 things I started doing this week that I couldn’t do with AI two months ago. I stole most of them from the best marketers in the world. Examples and links inside.

Honestly, it feels like cheating growth.

Here are my 10 favorite ways to use it as a marketer.

Read more

Picture this: A buyer opens ChatGPT and asks for a recommendation in your category. Your competitor’s name comes up. Yours doesn’t. And that buyer never makes it to your website. That’s happening right now in markets everywhere. And most teams don’t know it’s happening because it never shows up in their analytics.

HubSpot AEO shows you *exactly* where your brand stands in AI search, where competitors are getting recommended instead of you, and tells you specifically what to fix.

No expertise needed. Try it free for 28 days. Just $50 a month after.

I highly recommend trying it

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People are letting AI do their shopping.

Buyers ask it something like “Find me the cheapest tool for X”. The AI checks a few pricing pages and picks a winner. Sometimes it just recommends one. Sometimes it buys the thing itself.

But your pricing page is probably built for human eyes. When a robot reads it, it usually gets a pile of code with the price buried inside, or nothing at all.

So it may skip you. ❌

The fix is a simple duplication of your pricing page that robots can read. ✅

Here’s the marketing idea, plus the exact line (and the .md file) the world’s best companies already use:

1. Buffer

“See machine-readable pricing (for AI agents)” sits right under their normal plans.

When you click it, you get a plain text version of their pricing - .md format.

The .md file is much more elaborate than the website. It lays out their volume pricing as clean tables, so a robot can read the exact monthly cost at 1, 10, even 50 channels.

2. Flowdown

Flowdown has a complex GEO-based pricing system, so they did something smart: gave robots more than one file.

There’s the pricing.md, docs, plus a note telling the agent that the regional App Store price is the final word. For an app with prices that change by country → that saves the robot from quoting the wrong number.

3. Resend

I loved the “Are you an AI agent?” framing here. Very cute for the humans reading it.

(h/t Kyle Poyar for this one.)

4. Stacktree

Stacktree has a whole section for AI agents in their pricing page. It points to the plain file (or a /pricing.txt version), promises no design and no login wall, and signs off with “the file is the data”. It’s the most robot-native version I could find.

5. Promptfax

This is the most advanced one. Promptfax gives robots a live link they can ask questions. The agent can add the customer’s usage to the URL to get an exact price: /pricing.json?page_count=13 gives the cost for 13 pages. Very cool.

How to copy it

Make a markdown file. That’s just a text file with simple formatting (headings and a table). Keep it plain, but give it a clear structure so a robot can grab any number in one pass:

• A table of your plans: name, price, and what’s included.

• Limits and overage: what each plan caps at, and the cost when you go over.

• Billing: monthly vs yearly, and the real difference.

• A short FAQ: the few questions every buyer asks before paying.

The skeleton all the best companies use:

Save it at yoursite.com/pricing.md (add a /pricing.txt copy too, some robots ask for plain text). Put one visible link on your real page, like Resend’s “Are you an AI agent? See pricing.” Update it when prices change.

That’s it ✅

You don’t even need to announce it

Plenty more companies do it with no link at all.

Supabase and WorkOS both have an md pricing file if you go looking, but they don’t redirect to it from the pricing page or publish it anywhere.

I guess more and more agents will automatically look for a /pricing.md file under your domain - so that’s a good place to start.

The robots are coming

IDC expects 70% of business buyers to use AI to find and choose tools by 2028, before a human ever lands on your page. So the robots are buying now. Give them something they can read.

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See you next week ✌️

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Top marketing teams to follow (2026) ⭐️

I send marketing ideas to 91,500 subscribers every week.

The #1 question I get:

To be honest, the answer is the most boring superpower in marketing: I obsessively follow other companies and study what they do. So I thought I’d hand you my actual list. These 9 teams are a marketing school. Almost everything they ship is worth stealing, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Here are the top marketing teams to follow (2026 edition) ↓

1. Anthropic

2. Lovable

3. Ramp

4. Torq

5. tl;dv

6. Clay

7. Cluely

8. Ahrefs

9. Decart

Keep reading for what they do, the moves I love most, the one play I’d actually copy from each, and where to follow them.

Bookmark this one ⭐️

1. Anthropic 🧠

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. An “import from ChatGPT” button. A one-click feature that moves your chat history and memory over from ChatGPT. It brilliantly kills their competitor’s strongest lock-in. Greatest growth move of the decade IMO.

2. When a competitor ships a hated feature → make fun of it. Soon after ChatGPT announced ads, Anthropic dropped very funny videos of AI assistants ruining chats with sponsored answers.

3. Turn a product test into a 24/7 live event. Anthropic livestreamed Claude failing to beat Pokémon Red non-stop on Twitch. Thousands tuned in to watch it.

4. Swag that flatters the people wearing it. They opened a Claude coffee shop in NYC for one weekend and gave away hats embroidered with “thinking”. I personally waited 2 hours for mine.

5. Google ads on developer error messages. When code breaks, developers paste the error into Google. Anthropic buys ads on those exact searches, so Claude shows up right when someone’s stuck. (Spicier version: bid on the errors your competitor’s product throws…)

Steal this: put the customer at the center of your marketing and keep the product in the background. Almost every Anthropic campaign is really about the people using Claude.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Anthropic

2. Lovable 💻

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. A competitive hackathon live-streamed like a sports event. “Build Launch Win” is a multi-city competition with up to $440K in prizes. People watch AI-built apps go head to head, live on camera. We did something similar at Wiz.

2. Invent a 24-hour event for one specific community. “SheBuilds” gave each woman builder $100 in Anthropic credits and $250 in Stripe credits.

3. Dropbox’s old growth hack, brought back. Students could nominate their university to win $100K of free Lovable access, and naturally spam classmates to vote. It’s like the new and better version of the 2012 Dropbox Space Race!

4. A two-word Google ad. Search “Bolt AI” and you’d see “Lovable > Bolt”. No salesy texts, just easy positioning.

5. Censor your own announcements: Lovable posted a new integration announcement with the partner’s name blurred out. People started guessing in comments. Engagement exploded. A few hours later they revealed it was Shopify. Wayyyyy bigger impact than if they’d just announced it normally.

Steal this: pick one specific group (women builders, students, vibe coders), throw a 24-hour event just for them, and pay people to show up. Lovable does this on repeat, and every launch turns into a thing people actually talk about.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Elena Verna (Lovable’s Chief Growth)

3. Ramp 💳

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Show people what life WITHOUT your product actually looks like. Ramp put Brian Baumgartner (”Kevin” from The Office) in a glass box in NYC and livestreamed him filing 600,000 expense reports by hand. Ramp can do it automatically. 110+ million views.

2. Write a job post so wild it goes viral on its own. Ramp’s “Viral Creative Producer” role with a public “taste test” is genius. They also built and internal AI Skills marketplace for employees and hired Agentic Operator. I honestly think they’re in the top 1% of the marketing world in terms of team building.

3. Engineer a street stunt built to be filmed by civillians and reposted. Ramp launched their Treasury product by smashing a branded car with a wrecking ball in Manhattan. 3x the views of their previous best video.

4. Show how tiny a customer’s team can be. Ramp’s ad bragged about a customer doing $10B in revenue with a 3-person finance team (thanks to Ramp). Every CFO wants that kind of efficiency.

5. Reddit ads disguised as a confession. Ramp ran it in Reddit’s viral TIFU (”Today I F*cked Up”) format, because people skip ads… but they stop for a spicy confession and a screenshot!

Steal this: make the pain your product removes physically visible (let people watch the misery in real time).

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Ramp

4. Torq 💀

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Declare your competitor’s whole category dead. Torq published a downloadable “SOAR is Dead” manifesto (the legacy category their tool replaces), plus branded merch.

2. Take design seriously (in a category that doesn’t). Torq keeps winning “best booth” awards at security conferences, because nobody else bothers. We’re guilty of doing it at Wiz too.

3. Make a conspiracy-theory video about your own brand. Torq leaned so hard into their branding universe that they shipped multiple full conspiracy-theory parodies. Fans play along.

4. $10 per visitor to charity at Black Hat. For every booth visitor, Torq donated $10 to a Vegas nonprofit teaching kids tech, and handed out free socks. No demo.

5. Put a “hype monkey” on the payroll whose entire job is to be funny online. Trevor is Torq’s “Junior Media Intern,” a fictional character played by an actor who posts memes and stars in his own show, TorqTV. At conferences, real people line up to take photos with him, and all that goodwill rubs off on Torq.

Steal this: in a category where every competitor looks the same, just looking different is a real advantage. Torq went full flaming-skeleton, and it probably did more for them than their first $20M in pipeline.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Don Jeter (Torq’s CMO)

5. tl;dv 🎙️

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Run your company page like a comedy account. tl;dv’s official LinkedIn posts running bits like “PM vs Product Owner” and “Best music for meetings that drag on”. Employees like Renée Shaw do it perfectly, too.

2. Give your whole team fake job titles on LinkedIn on the same day: tl;dv “promoted” all 50+ employees to CEO at once. Everyone updated LinkedIn. That’s 50+ “new job” notifications hitting thousands of feeds. LinkedIn rewards job changes with free reach.

3. Attack a competitor’s selling point and turn it into content. When rivals sold invisible “bot-free” notetakers, tl;dv explained why invisible is worse for your privacy.

4. Jokes built for one role at a time. Separate humor for PMs, engineers, sales, and CS. The narrower they went = the better it did.

5. Let creators apply to promote you, and only pay for the views. tl;dv flipped influencer marketing with an open ambassador program anyone can join: post about them, get paid per impression, no follower minimums or approvals. It pulls 10M+ organic impressions a month.

Steal this: let your brand actually be funny. tl;dv runs their LinkedIn like a stand-up account, and the comedy alone took them past 2M users.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: tl;dv (the company page *is* the comedy show)

6. Clay 🗂️

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Make your certification harder to get into than a top college. Clay University accepts as few as 19%, and “Clay Certified” shows up on people’s LinkedIn because it’s so rare.

2. Invent your own category festival (instead of sponsoring one). Sculpt takes over SF’s Pier 48 every year, branded robes and a magician on stage included.

3. Replace your support team with a public community. Clay killed Intercom and pushed everything into a 15K-20K member public Slack. Users now answer each other. Don’t do this if you’re not confident in your product.

4. Build fan clubs of your future buyers before they’re hired. Clay runs 60+ student clubs, training GTM Engineers before they start their careers. Of course, they will all use Clay on Day 1 of their first job.

5. Use your own product in public and show the receipts. Clay used Clay Ads to cut their LinkedIn cost per lead from $250 to $25, then published the whole playbook.

6. Let customers compete for weird “world records”. Clay tracks who used their product in the strangest places (underwater, on mountains, on jet skis). Winners get featured on their website. Give people a public way to compete, and they’ll create content trying to win.

Steal this: build an actual community around your product. Give your best users something to belong to (Clay gives them a “Clay Certified” badge and a 20K-person Slack), and they start doing your selling for you.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Varun Anand (Clay co-founder)

7. Cluely 🥷

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Pick a deliberately provocative positioning. Cluely’s entire pitch is “cheat on everything“ - interviews, sales calls, dates, exams. (They toned it down a bit after launch). This positioning is so loaded people fight about it for free.

2. Make a launch video designed to make people angry (rage bait). Roy Lee used Cluely on a blind date to fake his age and job until she walked out. Tons of views and national backlash in 72 hours, on purpose.

3. A 3M-impression post about getting kicked out of Columbia. Roy posted about his suspension and went insanely viral.

4. A “$50/hr interns in SF” tweet they actually acted on. The tweet hit 4.9M views, so they hired 60+ creators to each post 4+ TikToks a day. 20M views in two weeks.

5. A screenshot of a huge Cluely payout, with no explanation of what Cluely is. Thousands started Googling the name to find out. It broke no Reddit rules, since it was just “someone” flexing their income.

6. Ugly billboards in Times Square. Basic black text on white reading “hi i’m roy / pls buy my thing”, going insanely viral for their simplicity.

Steal this: publish your own playbook in public, including the parts that failed. Cluely openly admitted some videos got 50M views and almost no signups. Almost nobody is that honest, so it builds real trust.

👉 Follow on X: Roy Lee (Cluely’s CEO)

8. Ahrefs 🌐

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Give away a premium product for free, forever. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools hands over backlinks and site audits for any verified site for $0. At most companies that’s the paid product.

2. Share industry insights based on your internal data. CMO Tim Soulo gives away amazing data for free, like what makes AI chatbots recommend a brand.

3. Build a YouTube channel that teaches, never advertises. Tim has one rule since 2015: “creating videos about new features is boring.” 600K+ subscribers, never broken.

4. Ask your audience to publicly roast your product. Tim keeps inviting people on Reddit to trash Ahrefs, 8 years running.

5. Put your ad on something the audience already carries. At BrightonSEO, Ahrefs printed SEO stats on the conference coffee cups, so every attendee held a tiny Ahrefs ad.

Steal this: give away tools and insights you could charge money for. For a bootstrapped company it’s the cheapest way to grow without ads.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Tim Soulo (Ahrefs CMO)

9. Decart 🌀

Their greatest marketing hits:

1. Hire someone full-time to use your product in public (dogfoodmaxxing). Decart makes an AI video model, so they hired a full-time filmmaker who does nothing but create videos with their own tools and post them.

2. Build an in-house studio so you can SHOW your product. On top of the above, their small internal team ships campaigns across gaming, robotics, and fashion. When the product is hard to explain → just show it.

3. Launch with a free demo people can play with right now. Oasis, a playable AI Minecraft clone where every frame is generated live, hit 1M+ users in 79 hours, mostly from people posting clips of it glitching out. It got covered by TechCrunch.

4. Replace your press release with a public URL. Lucy 2.0 let anyone swap their face and clothes live in the browser, then went on stage at AWS re:Invent. Let people play with your product!

5. Send every prospect a personalized version of your demo. Decart’s CMO told me they generated a 1-of-1 AI avatar clone for every journalist on their list, with that person’s own face in it. Millions of views, $0 paid.

Steal this: “Try it yourself" > "Book a demo”. If people can play with your product in a browser, skip the demo form and just ship the link. Show your product and its results whenever possible. That’s Decart’s entire strategy.

👉 Follow on LinkedIn: Decart

What they all have in common

Read these a few times and the you’ll notice the same five patterns:

• ✅ Make the product itself the marketing. Decart’s Oasis. Anthropic’s Golden Gate Claude. Cluely’s launch video. Ahrefs’ free tools.

• ✅ Build characters and series, not one-off ads. Ramp’s Brian. Torq’s conspiracies. tl;dv’s green-screen sketches.

• ✅ Turn your community into your distribution. Clay’s Claygencies. Lovable’s clippers. Cluely’s intern army.

• ✅ Make creative so weird people share it for you. Cluely’s blank billboards. Ramp’s wrecking ball. Anthropic’s coffee shop.

• ✅ Pick a fight on purpose. Cluely’s whole brand. Torq’s “SOAR is Dead.” tl;dv vs “bot-free”.

See you next week ✌️

Tom

“Tom, your ideas are great, but I only have 400 followers. Is this even worth it?”

I get this question all the time.

And to be 100% honest, most of the “viral marketing” playbook (including a lot of mine) is built for people who already have an audience.

If you don’t, you’re locked out. ❌

I know that feeling.

You did the right things: The website looks great, the case studies are out, the LinkedIn posts go up every week, the webinars happen on schedule.

But nothing leaves your bubble. 🫧

Your posts get 7 likes (4 from your team), and the strangers you actually want to reach never show up.

So I built the no-audience playbook 🌀

A list of 28 practical things you can do this week to break out of your bubble - get strangers to notice you.

This is the “Attention Hacking” cheat sheet I wish someone had handed me when I was starting out with no audience of my own. 📄

By the end you’ll know how to:

• ✅ Get people with 100x your reach to promote you, for free

• ✅ Reach total strangers who don’t know you yet (without ads)

• ✅ Make people stop and care about a brand they’ve never heard of

• ✅ Do all of it with no budget, no team, and no followers to start with

And the cheat sheet does double duty: drop the whole thing into Claude Code (or turn it into a Claude skill) and it’s trained on all 28 tactics in seconds, ready to aim at your exact product. Works shockingly well.

Most of these took me years of expensive trial and error to figure out. You only need one of the 28 to hit for the whole thing to pay off.

🔒 Here’s the full cheat sheet, all 28 tactics + the download link:

Read more

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LiveFlow A/B tested a Brew email against their existing one across ~5,000 customers. The Brew version drove 136% more click-throughs to their book demo page.

I’ve been playing with it and it’s honestly wild how fast you can go from idea to sent email. Give it a try!

Try Brew

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You’re not getting replaced by AI.

You’re getting replaced by a 19-year-old.

It’s already happening to me. I’ve spent more than ten years getting good at marketing, and most of that experience doesn’t matter anymore.

That should make me angry. But it mostly makes me feel old.

And it’s not because the 19-year-old is “better with AI” than me. If anything, I’m faster with the tools than she is. That’s exactly the problem: AI got so good that being good at it stopped being an edge. What took me ten years to learn, she gets for $20 a month. We’re “even” on the part I was best at.

But there’s one gap I’ll never close:

Her generation.

I’m convinced Gen Z and Gen Alpha grew up wired differently than the rest of us. That wiring gives the 19-year-old two edges I can’t out-experience:

1. Her nerve. She has no muscle memory (or “context”) for the old way.

2. Her audience-building skills. She’s been building one on social media since she was a kid, long before she ever needed it.

She has both. I lost the first to experience, and I was born too early for the second.

Everyone keeps saying AI will take the entry-level jobs first. From where I sit, hiring marketers since 2022, it’s the opposite. The 19-year-old is fine. It’s the experienced ones who should be nervous, me included.

She doesn’t know what she’s not allowed to do.

So she just does it. She sends the email I’d have talked myself out of. She posts the thing I’d have run past a few people first to make sure it was good. Half of it goes nowhere. Enough of it works that I’ve stopped feeling smug about the decade I’ve got on her.

That’s who I used to be.

A tool I built over a weekend hit two million users in 48 hours. I borrowed audiences that weren’t mine to grow this newsletter. I don’t know if I could do either today. I know too much now, and most of what I know is just a list of reasons not to try.

In Hebrew we have a word for what I lost: חוצפה (chutzpah). The nerve to do something you have no right to do, then look surprised when anyone objects. I was born with it, but 10+ years of “experience” trained it out of me.

She still has all of hers.

She’s been building an audience since she was 12.

When I was a teenager, the only audience I could build was people I already knew. Facebook showed up in my late teens, and “my audience” meant friends from high school. 200 people at most.

She’s spent her whole adolescence doing the actual job of marketing: getting strangers on the internet to care. A finsta at 13, livestreams, a TikTok, a Substack at 16. By the time she interviews with me, she’s run more audience experiments than I had in my first five years.

You can’t really catch up to that - it’s a huuuuuge head start.

And this isn’t only a problem if you sell to young people. Marketing is the same job no matter who’s buying: getting attention from someone who never agreed to give it. She’s been doing that since before she could drive.

So I’m stealing her playbook.

If I can’t win this on experience anymore, I can try to unlearn ten years of caution. Eight things that are starting to work:

1. ☕️ Take a “shut-up coffee”. I buy coffee for marketers almost half my age and make myself stay quiet. With 90,000 subscribers the ask is easy; the discipline is shutting up once I’m there. When we disagree on something internet-related, she’s right until I can prove otherwise.

2. 🌈 Live on the platforms, don’t read about them. I used to read threads about TikTok instead of opening it and call it research. It was fear. My test now: if I can’t name 5 accounts I’d follow even if this wasn’t my job, I don’t get the place. I still fail it on a couple.

3. 🌳 Touch grass. I go to events that have nothing to do with marketing. A few weeks ago I was the oldest person at a meetup at Pie, the Bonobos founder’s new startup, by a decade. Best thing I did all month.

4. ⏱️ Ship before it’s ready. The risk never fully goes, so I give things a deadline and send them a little ugly. At some point, by “polishing” I’m not improving the work. I’m just making my fear feel productive.

5. 🧪 Make it before I judge it. Before I call a format cringe, I spend an hour making one myself, badly, with the same $20 tools she uses.

6. ☀️ Protect the bad ideas. Most great ideas sound stupid for the first five minutes. I used to kill them fastest in the room and call it good judgment. Now I ask “how would this actually work?” before I say no.

7. 🚪 Ask what I’d do on day one. When I’m stuck, it’s usually because I’m defending a call I made five years ago. So I ask what I’d do if I started from zero here today. It’s almost always the thing I’ve been avoiding.

8. 💼 Hire for less baggage. My best hires had the least experience, not the most. They tried the things I wouldn’t. Or the things I’d have killed in a meeting to sound like the adult.

My final thought is this:

You can’t out-experience someone who grew up doing the job, so stop trying. The solution is to just hire her. Finding her is easy. There’s a line of juniors out the door, hungrier than we ever were.

The hard part comes after: letting someone who can’t legally rent a car be right, over and over, until you learn to like it. Kick your ego out of the loop.

That’s my playbook for today.

See you next week,

You can write to almost anyone alive (billion-dollar CEOs, famous authors, etc) and the message actually lands in their inbox.

So it bugs me how badly most people use it.

A few months ago, a founder I was advising sent me his cold DMs and asked why he hadn’t received any replies. He runs a billion-dollar company with a great product, and he was messaging exactly the right people. Still… got nothing back.

It wasn’t his fault:

He paid an agency five figures, and they’d given him the same templated script they give everyone. The kind you (and me) ignore.

I fucking hate agencies. 🤬

The people who run them have never ONCE been on the other side of one of these messages. They’ve never opened LinkedIn as a CEO with 40 identical pitches waiting. So they hand every client the same “proven” script, a thousand other agencies hand out that exact script too, and every inbox fills up with the same cringeworthy slop.

Here’s the message the agency told him to send (I stripped the names):

Where do I even start…

• ❌ That first line, “figured I’d reach out directly”, is the bit that shows up in the notification preview before you even open the message. Most valuable real estate he’s got, and he spent it saying nothing.

• ❌ Then it’s him, him, him. His title, his company, the startups he built before. I don’t know this guy. Why would I read his CV before he’s given me one reason to care?

• ❌ After that comes four sentences of product I never asked about.

• ❌ And then he asks me, a total stranger, to sacrifice 30 minutes for a call. For WHAT, exactly?

[I’m not above this. My own first cold DMs looked exactly like that, and I cringe thinking about them now. But after tons of trial and error, I think I cracked the code. My DMs now actually get replies from strangers.]

So I told the founder to delete it, then wrote him a new one myself.

This is the re-written DM he sent that night:

The next day he texted me, saying he’d gotten 4 replies overnight!

And it wasn’t a one-off. ✅

I’ve been doing this for years for the CEOs and CMOs I advise, and it plays out the same way every time. I’m also on the receiving end of these messages all day, so I know exactly which ones get a reply and which get ignored 100% of the time.

My LinkedIn DM cheat sheet 📋

None of that was luck. I use the same set of tactics on every cold DM, starting with making the person feel chosen (which is why I wrote “We’re being picky about who sees it before launch”).

Below is the full set of tactics, and exactly what to write (copy & paste). I've never published any of it.

What you’re getting today:

1. 💎 10+ LinkedIn DM tactics, each with copy-paste lines to drop straight in.

2. 🧪 7 Ready-to-send templates for the awkward spots: warm leads, the wrong contact, a soft no, etc.

3. 💰 Follow-up sequences that revive people who’ve gone silent (there’s one line that always works).

4. ⚙️ Specific LinkedIn timing and mechanics, from the connection request to InMail, so you never make the big mistakes.

Read more

If you need to reach tech people, you should know this: they don’t see your ads. Ad blockers, LinkedIn fatigue, banner blindness - they’ve tuned it all out.

But they read TLDR. 7 million tech professionals subscribe to these daily newsletters because they actually want them. You can sponsor any of their 13 newsletters (including Tech, AI, Dev, DevOps, InfoSec, Product, Marketing) and reach people who are actually reading (including me).

Open rates average 42% and they write the ad copy for you.

Get TLDR’s media kit →

Want to sponsor the Marketing Ideas newsletter? Apply here

🥇 How to become the “no-brainer” choice

I keep noticing the same pattern on every great homepage: there’s one word doing 90% of the positioning work.

Once you see it → you can’t unsee it.

I’ve been obsessed with this pattern recently. It’s the cheapest, fastest fix I know. And it’s the core lesson of the most-quoted marketing book of the last 30 years.

🧠 The law of mainstream

The book Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore, came out in 1991.

The big idea of the book - how new products win a market:

The left side (your first 100 customers) loves cool features. The right side (the mainstream market) buys “whole” products. They want the complete, obvious answer to all their pains and problems in a given category.

The chasm is the gap between.

Most startups fall in because they can’t cross that chasm: they keep talking to enthusiasts when they should be talking to pragmatists on the right.

Your homepage hero is the first signal of which side you’re talking to. ↓

Subscribe now

✏️ The one word doing the work: “all”

Fin is solving this beautifully right now.

Their hero:

The word they highlighted with glow is “all”.

It tells every pragmatist on Earth: you don’t need to bolt Zendesk together with Claude Code and Slack. We’re the whole thing. That’s how you OWN a category.

I love it.

✂️ You can do it in reverse

I’m the Director of Growth at Wiz.

Our hero used to read:

We recently cut “in the Cloud”:

“In the Cloud” was the limiting phrase, especially in the AI era.

Thanks to this cut, the buyer’s question changed from “what cloud security tool should I get?” to “what will protect everything I build?” - that’s a pragmatist question.

🍣 Pick one problem → solve all of it

Every founder reading this has heard “niche down” a thousand times.

So when I tell you to own “ALL your customer service”, your gut reaction is probably wait, isn’t that the opposite of niching?

You’re conflating two different axes:

• ✅ Niching down on category is what makes you trustworthy. You pick one specific space and commit to it.

• ❌ Niching down on features (inside a category that’s already narrow) is what kills you. You pick one slice of one category and try to call it a company.

The whole-product move is the first kind of niching.

A pizza place that says “every style of pizza” picked the pizza category and went deep on every variation. They’re the king of pizza in town. A pizza-and-sushi place picked two categories at once. That’s the move people don’t trust.

⚙️ Your playbook

Pick one direction:

→ Add a word that owns the whole category. Fin’s “all” is the perfect example. “Everything” or “anywhere” do similar work depending on the business.

→ Delete a word that traps you in a niche. E.g. “In the Cloud”.

I know it sounds insane to add a word like “all” when your product technically can’t do everything yet. Or to delete the most accurate word in your hero. Trust me, category ownership is what closes deals.

Go own your category ✌️

Tom

P.S. This idea pairs with another positioning move worth stealing - how to look “big” before you actually are. I wrote the full playbook here: Look big → become big

Paid subscribers get a free year of Base44 (the AI app builder), a new premium tactic every week, the full back-catalog of 300+ ideas, live weekly Q&As, a community invite, and a PDF copy of my book.

Subscribe now

Being a guest on a podcast or newsletter is the #1 fastest way to borrow an audience that someone else spent years building.

The hard part is knowing which shows to pitch, and how to pitch them without sounding cringe (or self-promoting) ❌

I’ve spent years solving that for myself. I pay for every podcast database out there (like MillionPodcasts, Rephonic, ListenNotes, etc). To be 100% honest, I think their data sucks.

So I built my own database, and worked hard to keep it up to date.

Today, for the first time, I’m giving it away ✅

340+ podcasts and newsletters that take guests, sorted so you can find your fit in seconds and pitch yourself or your CEO.

What’s inside:

• Every podcast/newsletter sorted by category: marketing, engineering, security, data & AI, HR, ops, design, fintech, and more

• A validated contact for each one (email address or form)

• Tons of data like audience size, host’s socials, frequency, typical guest seniority, and more

• No-cringe email template that hosts say yes to + the exact pitch that worked for me (multiple times)

I put this together because I know how hard it can be to get in front of the right hosts and authors. Having direct access can make all the difference.

First things first, download the database using this secret link:

Read more

Along the way, I also stumble onto the worst ones.

I’ve been slowly collecting them for 10+ years.

Today I’m releasing the full list of “UMMM PLEASE DON’T DO THIS” ideas.

Note: The goal isn’t to defame anyone or dunk on the companies that I (sadly) spotlight below. The goal is to learn from their mistakes. Because you don’t want to be featured in the next PR-nightmare LinkedIn post:

If you do marketing for a living, this article is a must-read.

Buckle up for a ride… 🎢

Read more

I talk to a lot of marketers who obsess over subject lines and copy, but their emails are landing in spam (and they have no idea). It’s such a waste.

Warmy fixes email deliverability - it warms up your domain, monitors inbox placement, and keeps you out of spam folders. Most companies don’t realize their emails are getting filtered until their open rates tank.

Worth checking if you’re doing email marketing:

Try Warmy

(Click here to sponsor the Marketing Ideas newsletter)

What to do if your marketing budget is $0 🪫

If your marketing budget is $0, you already have everything you need.

I’ve run marketing for companies with $32 billion exits and side projects with literally zero dollars in spend. I also went through 50 of the fastest-growing companies to map exactly how they reach new customers. The pattern was identical every time: Every great $0 win came from inside the company before any external spend.

In today’s newsletter: the 7 internal resources every company already has, and how to turn each one into a $0 marketing channel. 🔋

Here we go ↓

1. Your product → free mini-tools 🧪

Take an existing feature from your product, strip it down, and ship it as a standalone free tool with its own URL (don’t ask for email or any other friction).

Examples:

• Grammarly built a $13B company on the back of its free Chrome extension and plagiarism checker.

• At Wiz I worked on shipping our free Cloud Threat Landscape. It’s the same internal threat intel database our researchers build daily, just opened up to the world.

• Shopify’s Name Generator ranks for a billion long-tail searches.

All examples I found were once part of a larger product. But they’re now their own SEO target and their own backlink magnet (and their own Product Hunt launch). You’re giving people a free solution to a small problem, so your main product becomes the obvious upgrade.

How to do it: walk through your product with your PM, and find a feature that solves a narrow problem on its own. Strip it out and launch it on its own URL.

2. Your product → brute-force demos 🥷

Use your product on a dream prospect’s behalf, then send them the result (with no pitch or strings attached).

I learned this works because somebody did it to me. When my Substack account got impersonated, the CEO of Charm Security ran his impersonator-hunting product on the fake account, caught it, and DM’d me the proof. I wrote a whole article about them because of that move (it was not sponsored).

Examples:

• Christina Cacioppo, co-founder of Vanta, heard the Segment team was struggling with SOC-2 compliance. She proactively sent them a personalized compliance spreadsheet, for free, and it worked.

• Goldcast built a hyper-personalized demo video for every dream account. They closed deals before sales calls even happened. (Full play here)

• Tomer Dean, founder of Lychee (AI podcast editor), manually clipped real episodes for real hosts, emailed them the result, and closed deals:

The exact copy you should send:

“I spent [X] hours analyzing [their thing] and created [this] for you. No strings attached… thought you might find it useful: [link/image]”

If they ignore you → make it public. Post on LinkedIn, tag them, praise their work, mention how your product “helped.” Worst case they ignore you again. Best case they share it. (Default.com’s CEO did this with Deel and went viral.)

How to do it: pick 5 dream customers, spend 30 minutes on each doing manually what your product does automatically, then send the result with the line above.

3. Your data → exclusive insights 📡

Mine your internal data for a surprising pattern → publish it → then journalists, customers, and even competitors share it for you.

Examples:

• Carta’s startup equity data reveals founder ownership rates at IPO and equity for early hires. Founders share it like wildfire. Every funding article on TechCrunch quotes it.

• Okta’s “Businesses at Work” ranks the fastest-growing SaaS apps using their own usage data. Every company featured shares it because it praises them. Startups are motivated to integrate with Okta just for a chance to be featured.

• Spotify Wrapped is the most copied marketing campaign of the last 5 years. It’s an SQL query.

• (Bonus: Spotify noticed 3,749 people streamed “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” on the day of the Brexit vote and made an ad about it. Genius real-time data play!)

• Asana’s “Anatomy of Work” Index revealed workers spend 58% of their time on “work about work”. Cited everywhere from HBR to Ali Abdaal.

• Stripe’s Online Economic Indicators publishes real-time payment data that gets cited as if Stripe were a research firm.

• Gong analyzed millions of sales calls and found that the opening line “How have you been?” outperforms “How are you?” because it implies an existing relationship. Super valuable for sales teams.

No interesting data? Run a survey. That’s how Asana built the Anatomy of Work from scratch.

How to do it: ask yourself: “what’s the most surprising number in our database?”

4. Your users → status symbols 🎟️

Give your users something worth showing off publicly. Certificates, badges, “Verified” tags, exclusive club memberships, etc. They promote for you because the badge makes THEM look good.

The trick (we learned this at Wiz): make the user’s NAME big, not your logo. When you flip those proportions, social shares jump → at Wiz they went up 300% almost overnight.

Examples:

• HubSpot Academy certifications get added to thousands of LinkedIn profiles every single month.

• AWS certifications are job requirements at half the cloud-engineering postings on LinkedIn. The badge is the resume.

• GitHub’s contribution graph and Stars program are like a professional currency for developers.

• Salesforce Trailblazer ranks end up in email signatures across every sales org on earth.

• Duolingo’s streak counter has people sharing their 1,000-day milestones on Instagram. The streak is the marketing.

• Goodreads’ annual reading challenge counter has millions of people posting their book counts in December.

How to do it: figure out the one status the top 10% of your users would brag about owning. Build the cheapest version of it possible (a PDF certificate or an SVG badge) and email your power users.

5. Your team → employee-led marketing 🎤

Personal profiles reach 2-3x more people than company pages. Get your founder, your team, your engineers posting from their own LinkedIn accounts.

At Wiz, the company page on LinkedIn has 400K followers. But our 2,000 employees, with an average 2,000 connections each, have a combined reach of 4 million people. The math isn’t close.

The Wiz playbook (now public):

• Spoon-feed everyone. Pre-write the posts, make personalized images, and send each one via Slack 1:1 with “copy/paste/post” instructions.

• Run internal contests with real money. Alex Lieberman at storyarb ran a 10-week “Own The Internet” competition with a $5,000 prize that pushed impressions up 87% and pipeline up $183K (22%).

• Build a private “Wizfluencers” club. A Slack channel for the social superstars in the company, with perks, early product access, shareable certificates, and a private leaderboard.

• 15-min LinkedIn workshops on demand. Any team that wants help books me, I show up to their weekly sync, walk through the playbook, then take posts for 1:1 feedback after.

The pattern repeats outside of Wiz. My favorite example is Cluely’s Roy Lee - he built the entire company through his own personal posting. Roy *is* the marketing channel.

And if your founder won’t write, hire a ghostwriter. A part-time ghostwriter costs wayyyyy less than a single month of paid ads, and the output compounds for years.

How to do it: start with the founder. Book a recurring 30-minute slot where a marketer or ghostwriter pulls 3 insights out of them, then publish 3 posts a week from the founder’s personal account.

6. Your design → “Word of Sight” 🖼️

Design your product so the act of using it spreads the brand. Either by making the logo extremely big in the UI, or by baking a public-by-default action into the core workflow.

I call it “Word of Sight” - an upgrade to word-of-mouth.

Examples:

• Apple is the best example. Every logo on every MacBook in every coffee shop is a $0 ad. Steve Jobs flipped the logo to face the audience (instead of the user) in 1999 for exactly this reason. Before 1999, it looked like this:

  

• Shazam puts a giant logo on the recording screen. People hold their phones up at concerts, and everyone around them sees Shazam.

• Slack’s interface (the sidebar, the super ugly purple, the channel list) shows up in every Zoom screenshare on earth and every viral screenshot of a team chat gone wrong. Super easy to recognize.

• Loom keeps videos on loom.com instead of letting people export an MP4 (on the free plan) → every shared link is brand exposure.

• Otter.ai auto-joins meetings as a participant. Everyone on the call sees “Otter.ai” in the participant list.

• Readwise makes users publicly tag @readwise in the comments to save a tweet. Every save becomes a public ad.

This one’s brilliant because it compounds. Every screenshot a user takes of your product is free marketing forever.

How to do it: find where your product gets seen by people who don’t use it (app icon, loading screen, email signature, exported file, public share link). Make the brand large and unmissable in that exact moment. Then find one private action you can make public-by-default (a save → tag, a share → branded URL, an export → watermarked logo, etc).

7. Your name → praise others 🏆

My favorite play in the entire $0 playbook.

Even if you don’t have an audience, your personal name and your brand name are still valuable resources (as long as they look “real”). Use them to celebrate the best people in your space. They’ll repay you in shares, intros, and reciprocal praise.

Remember: Your greatest existing resource is your ability to make other people feel good about themselves. And you can do it by leveraging your name.

• At Mine, I built a “Top 10 DPOs to Follow” page → emailed all 10 → all 10 said yes to interviews → all 10 shared it on their LinkedIn. Site traffic up 4,000% that month. $0 spent.

• Forbes 30 Under 30 is the most successful praise-led marketing engine in media.

• Ahrefs publishes “best SEO blogs to follow” and “top SEO experts” lists. Every person on those lists reposts them.

• Zapier celebrates top AI builders in a special ceremony.

• Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work” is the same play at enterprise scale. Every CEO on the list brags about it from what I’ve seen.

The exact DM that worked for me at Mine:

“Hi [Name], we’re recognizing the top [role] in [industry] and you made the list. We’ll be writing an article about you and your role in [specific achievement]. Would you be open to a quick 15-min interview to make sure we get it right? Here’s the project: [link]”

The real hack is the phrase “we will be writing”. The decisive verb makes the recipient slightly nervous about how they’ll be portrayed, so they say yes immediately (to control the narrative).

If I had $0 and one week, I’d run this on day one.

How to do it: pick a tight, specific role inside your ICP. The narrower the better (”B2B SaaS marketers at Series B startups” is great; “marketers” alone is too broad). List the 10 best people in it. Build a tiny site with their photos and one quote each. Email them with the DM above. Wait.

Bonus: 7 more $0 plays I couldn’t fit above ↓

1. Optimize for “+ reddit” SEO 🟧

People add “reddit” to Google searches to skip marketing fluff. Reddit is now the #3 most visible domain on Google. Build a presence on relevant subreddits, answer real questions, build karma, and mention your product only when it’s actually the right answer. Full playbook here.

2. Get recommended by AI chatbots 💻

ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity recommend brands by name. If yours isn’t in their training data, you don’t exist. SEO lead at HiBob took their AI mention rate from 17% to 51% with one specific playbook. I broke the whole thing down here.

3. The “inspired by” trick 🪞

Build a project, tag the influencer who inspired it, credit them publicly. Strokes their ego → triggers reciprocity → gives them social proof to share. Dan Ariely shared my Viral Post Generator after one “inspired by you” email. Full story.

4. Launch on Product Hunt 🏆

A successful Product Hunt launch can drive thousands of visitors and years of passive traffic. I launched Marketing Ideas in Feb 2024 and still get dozens of subscribers every month from it 15+ months later. My #1-of-the-month playbook here.

5. Career page stunts 💼

Your careers page gets high-intent traffic with zero marketing leverage, unless you make the job posts shareable. Beehiiv’s “Remote Office Manager” went viral on LinkedIn. Fiverr created a job for a “GIF Picker” and traffic went up 91%. Templates and full breakdown.

6. Collect “love stories” instead of testimonials 💌

Generic “Best [industry] product!” reviews are useless. They sound fake and anyone can get those. The reviews that actually convert are what I call love letters: emotional, metaphor-heavy stories about your product. Full guide here.

7. Ambush “[competitor] discount” searches 😈

Build pages that rank for “[competitor] coupon” and “[competitor] discount.” Those searchers have credit cards in hand. This is the “evil genius” way to steal customers from competitors.

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See you next week ✌️

Tom

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That was enough to win:

1. Money to be seen. Attention, TV spots, billboards, magazines, conference booths, ads. The more you spent = the more “real” your brand felt.

2. Money to be first. R&D, product development, speed to market. Outspend competitors → own the category.

3. Money to look good. High-end design, photography, video, packaging. If your brand looked expensive, people assumed you were worth it.

4. Money to be good. The big one. Actual quality. Useful features. Building something worth buying.

Every “classic” moat (network effects, patents, scale) was a child of money. The whole VC model ran on it. You’re a young startup with nothing? Here’s $40 million. Go buy the talent, the visibility, the speed, the quality. Done.

Money was your moat.

But then winter came.

AI showed up. And turns out the “money moat” wasn’t that hard to cross. AI gave everyone a bridge long enough to walk right over it.

Suddenly everyone can look good, be seen, be first, and be good.

Which is a disaster if you’re a founder building something new. Because now you’re fighting a flood of AI-generated competitors who look exactly as legit as you.

You know what I mean:

Fake content by fake influencers with fake engagement from fake followers, launching fake products with fake testimonials. Temu for brands.

And when prospects can’t tell real from fake, they default to NO. They can’t help it. Every signal we used to rely on can be faked now, so skepticism is the only safe bet.

Now the silent question every prospect asks about your brand is:

“Can I actually trust these guys?”

Trust is the new moat.

It’s so damn big that AI can’t cross it.

How to build trust for your brand 🌱

I’ve built trust twice in my career:

Once for Wiz as the early Director of Growth (where trust IS the business → no CISO hands you cloud access because your website looks nice). Once for this newsletter (zero → 90K subscribers in under 3 years). I’ve learned what works.

And here’s the good news: you don’t need $40M to build trust. You don’t need 5-7 years. You just need to know what actually moves the needle.

For paid subscribers, I’ve put together everything you need 🔒

Below are the 13 specific plays you can steal to make people trust your brand, ranked by impact. Start with #1.

Once these 13 are running, your homepage starts converting strangers. Prospects DM you instead of you DMing them. The whole funnel flips.

Here’s exactly what to do:

Read more

People are calling Brew the “Claude Design for email marketing” - and I think that’s 100% true.

You describe what you want in plain English, and Brew builds the entire campaign: copy, design, automations, all on-brand. It learns your colors, fonts, voice, and imagery from your website, so every email looks like your team wrote it.

I’ve been playing with Brew and it’s honestly *wild* how fast you can go from idea to sent email. Works with any ESP you already use - Klaviyo, HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc. Give it a shot!

Try Brew

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Last week, Nikita Bier (Head of Product at X) tweeted this:

He’s right. People watch videos on mute. That’s why we need captions.

But there’s a HUGE gap between “I added captions” and “my captions are working.” If you do it right → you can 5x your chance of going viral.

🎬 Here’s exactly how to do it right

1. Lock the first subtitle on screen at second 0. People will keep on scrolling if they’re not sure the video is “optimized” for watching on mute. That’s why the first subtitle has to be there BEFORE the speaker’s mouth opens. Burn it into the video file in your editor (CapCut, Descript, Premiere). Auto-caption tools always lag 200-500ms behind the speaker. That tiny lag makes people scroll.

HubSpot does this perfectly:

2. First line under 6 words. Your reader has 1 second to decide if this video is worth their attention. They cannot read 15 words in 1 second. They CAN read 6. Treat the first subtitle like a headline. If the speaker says “Today I want to tell you about something I’ve been obsessed with for months,” then your subtitle should either rewrite it (“I’ve been obsessed with this.”) or split it across frames. Never dump the full sentence on screen at once.

3. Turn OFF the platform’s auto-captions on upload. This one drives me crazy. Literally 99% of marketers are doing it wrong. LinkedIn and X both stack their own auto-captions on top of yours, so you end up with two layers of text on screen. Turn off auto-captions in the upload modal before you publish.

4. Size up the part you want to emphasize. Pick the most important part of each section (a number or a punchline phrase) and bump its size 1.5-2x. This is a great way to keep people hooked.

5. Add a background for contrast. Another one most marketers skip. If your subtitle is white text and the speaker is standing in front of a white wall, the subtitle disappears. Fix: add a subtle drop shadow, a semi-transparent dark bar behind the text, or a thick outline.

6. Position subtitles in the SAFE ZONE. TikTok and Instagram overlay their own UI on top of your video. Usernames at the top, share buttons on the right, link previews, and text at the bottom. LinkedIn and X put video controls on the bottom 15%. Keep subtitles in the middle 60% of the frame vertically.

I spent way too long getting these wrong on my own ads. Saving you the trouble.

Have a great week ✌️

Tom

P.S. If you’re wondering what to actually put in the first few seconds of your video → the 3-second rule.

He’d ask one question → go quiet → let the prospect fill the silence.

On repeat.

He talked less than anyone, and closed 10x more than everyone. ✅

There are two ways to handle a prospect who goes quiet on you:

1. Path A: ask another question about what they need, then shut up.

2. Path B: ask something desperate like:

And if that doesn’t work:

Yikes.

Path A wins, every time.

(These are real texts Sam Altman sent his board while being fired, published in the Musk v. Altman lawsuit last week. Same energy as bad SDRs 😅)

Sales tactics every marketer should know 💰

I know, I know.

This is a marketing newsletter.

But I’m the Director of Growth at Wiz. We grew from zero to over $1B ARR faster than almost any company in history. For years, my desk was ten feet from the revenue team that made it happen.

I heard more calls, more post-mortems, more wins and losses than I can count. I’m convinced I’m a 10x marketer because of it. 💎

Here’s everything I know about sales ↓

Read more

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Make customers feel like they won the lottery 💸

Last week, Photo AI told me I was “randomly selected” for free credits.

I’d bet money they sent that to every user. I still felt a tiny dopamine hit → logged in → and burned them.

Now look at this email I got from Canva:

Same situation: free credits for something I’m not using. But instead of “you just won 🎉”, Canva said “looks like you haven’t tried this 🥺”.

The marketing idea 💡

My greatest retention trick:

1. Take a bonus you were already going to give (free credits, a discount, a bonus month, free shipping)

2. Reframe the email so the customer feels like they randomly won a prize. Make them feel like only they won it, not other customers.

That’s it!

I discovered it by accident in 2014 ↓

People don’t want discounts. They want to win. 🎟️

In 2014, I ran my first ever marketing campaign at a translation startup called One Hour Translation. My boss gave me a 5% Halloween discount and wanted maximum redemption.

5% off… it’s not exactly life-changing. 😅

The obvious play was to send everyone “5% off for Halloween”. Instead, I made it look like a mystery prize with three possible outcomes: 3%, 4%, or 5% off.

To find out what you won, you had to paste the coupon code at checkout.

The secret: everyone got the same code, worth 5% (the best possible outcome).

Best campaign we’d ever run up to that point. That’s when I learned we should make our customers feel like winners.

Copy to steal:

• “Congrats! You’ve been randomly selected for [X].”

• “Your account was randomly picked for [X].”

• “You’re our daily winner.”

• “Mystery gift voucher”

• “Surprise! You just unlocked [X] for free.”

• “You just won…”

One more thing: Add a soft deadline. “Claim by Friday” works great even if nothing actually expires Friday.

See you next week ✌️

Tom