AdKit lets you actually run your ads from Claude or ChatGPT (not just read the numbers) across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn and more. Tell it what you’re launching, or ask which keywords and creatives are wasting budget, and it comes back with a draft ready for you to approve.

$3M+ in Meta spend already runs through it.

I looked into it and highly recommend trying AdKit.

Marketing Ideas readers get 14 days free (a deal made just for you):

Claim your 14 days free →

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She paid people to cancel her competitor 🪓

Lauren works at Cursor, the AI coding tool SpaceX just bought.

A few weeks ago, she posted this:

Free Cursor Ultra (their $200-a-month top plan) to anyone who cancels a competitor and sends her a screenshot.

This is a GENIUS way to offer a “free trial” 🧠

Every tool gives a boring free trial.

Lauren just added a condition → you only get it if you dump a competitor first.

The only way to claim it is a DM (direct message). So she now has a private chat open with every person who switched, and a built-in excuse to message them again when the free month ends.

People did it and posted the proof:

Every post like that is free marketing for Cursor. I love this so much.

A few days later, another Cursor employee, Tibor, ran the same play, this time with time scarcity (only 24 hours). It worked even better.

How to do it yourself 🧪

Have an employee post the offer from their own account, not the founder’s, not the company’s, as a person doing people a favor (and maybe getting in trouble for it). If it comes from the founder or the company → it’s just an ad.

Then:

• 🧾 Get a proof. Ask for a cancel screenshot, or better: their last invoice (so you know what they were paying).

• 🎁 Give free months of your most expensive plan. Don’t give cash.

• ⏳ Put a 24-hour deadline on it (round two had one at Cursor and it worked).

• 🧩 Get user feedback. Send the free month over DM and ask “what made you cancel them?” You’ll get golden insights.

Before the free month ends, you can offer to keep them at whatever they were paying the competitor

That’s it!

You can publish the cancel screenshots later (ask first). Tons of people canceling your competitor is 10x better than a “us vs them” page or a cringe comparison chart.

See you next week ✌️

Tom

P.S. I wrote about $0 with a Twist last year (free stuff + one weird condition to get it). This is the same trick, but the condition is “dump my competitor”. Lol.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is hiring someone to build the AI agents that run its own marketing and sales. It pays up to $405,000 a year, and it’s literally called “GTM Claude-ification”. 🤯

We’re living in that world now:

AI can run real growth work, and some marketers are having their best year ever because of it. I can tell you exactly how they’re doing it.

(And no, none of their tactics are “generate tons of AI slop” or “blast automated messages on LinkedIn”.)

They use AI to hack marketing itself: genius growth moves that weren’t possible a year ago, the kind that used to take a full team and a budget - now take one person with a few hours.

There’s a playbook for that. 🧠

It includes 9 specific growth tricks you can do today with AI. None of these need technical skills or expensive tools - all you need is a $20 subscription to Claude.

I’ve been running most of them myself, between my day job at Google and this newsletter. A few of these ideas became real lead sources for us, and there are plays in here I’ve never shared before.

I went looking for an unconventional guide like this, but it didn’t exist, so here it is… 💎

How to actually grow your brand using AI ↓

Read more

Thank you for being here. I’m blown away.

The first issue went out in August 2023, to a waitlist of about 700 people. Three years later, this is easily the best career decision I’ve ever made.

See that red circle? I’ll get back to it.

I’ve already told you how I grow this newsletter (at 18K and again at 40K). But the question I get asked even more is different: how do you write one?

So here’s my playbook for running a Substack with 100k subscribers 👇

⚙️ There is no “research” phase

People are always surprised when I tell them this:

When I sit down to write an article, the research is already done. It happened over the previous 2-3 years, one line at a time.

Every marketing idea I know is a note in Obsidian (my note-taking app). When I spot a great example → I add a line. When I think of one in the shower → I add a line. After years of that, the note is most of an article before I’ve “written” anything.

There are thousands of notes (marketing ideas in progress). So each article technically takes YEARS to write, if you count all the time I spend adding thoughts.

🧽 I stole my production model from SpongeBob

I vividly remember the day I learned that a single SpongeBob episode takes almost a year to make.

My first reaction, as a curious kid, was panic math. I had just watched a 20-episode season. Did that take them 20 years??

Of course, as an adult I get it now: they produce many episodes at the same time.

That’s exactly how this newsletter works.

It’s not like I pick one article and write it start to finish. At any given moment, I’m actively writing 10+ articles in parallel.

Most of the writing happens in the back of my mind: the structure, my main point, which examples to include, in what order, etc. Then I come back from a walk or from the shower and a write it all in one burst.

And some weeks I can’t write a damn word. That’s fine: with 10+ articles in progress, something is always close to ready.

🌀 I pay an intern $150/month to doomscroll for me

So where do all these ideas even come from?

I used to doomscroll every platform myself, hunting for cool campaigns. I’m SO thankful I don’t have to anymore. Because now:

1. I’m luckily positioned as “The Marketing Ideas Guy”, so people just send ideas my way.

2. Marketers send me campaigns their own team executed, hoping a mention will drive traffic their way (it does). When the idea is actually cool, I write about it.

3. I pay a $150/month intern whose job is literally doomscrolling. She uses social media like a normal person and sends me the cool campaigns she runs into.

AI helps me track what’s going viral too, but I still prefer the human taste.

The other source is my own diet: I subscribe to hundreds of newsletters, 30+ of them paid, and consume an unhealthy amount of marketing campaigns.

🛑 I was going to stop after 6 months

Six months in, barely anyone was reading this newsletter, and I felt stupid with every email I sent.

I was this close 👌 to stopping.

Around that time, I won a charity raffle Noah Kagan (AppSumo’s founder) was running. He recorded a full review of the newsletter, and at the end, he said: “Do this for 10 years - you’ll have some great success out of this”.

Woah 🤯

That was mindblowing to me: on a 10-year plan, month 6 is super early. I never seriously thought about quitting again.

(Your heroes run charity raffles like it occasionally. I met my Substack role model through one. Use them!)

🌍 Most of my job is generalizing

I once stood in line for 2 hours for a branded hat that says “thinking” on it. The article that came out of it became a playbook any brand can run: What to do if your marketing sucks.

That’s my actual job: when a company does something cool, the article is never just “look what they did”. The work is figuring out how YOU could steal it too, in a different industry, at a different scale.

If only the original company can run the play → I skip it.

More importantly, if I can’t deliver the promise myself, the article becomes an interview: When I knew nothing about AI SEO, I interviewed the people who cracked it - and that became the famous AI chatbots article. Same for the micro-influencer army playbook.

And if I had to sum up my writing philosophy in one word: pragmatism. Before writing, I define the promise: what will you be able to do after reading this?

I recommend giving everything you write online the same job. Pragmatism is also why I avoid ideas that boil down to “pour a million bucks on this”.

💩 “Well, this is shit”

That’s my first thought, 100% of the time, when I re-read one of my own articles a few days before it goes out. I’m not kidding.

Then comes the rewrite, my least favorite part of writing this newsletter. I delete sections, find better examples, ask marketer friends what’s missing. I’ve gotten that slap from my past self every single week, for 3 years.

If your own first drafts read bad to you, mine still do too, 100,000 subscribers in. You’re not doing anything wrong.

Once the rewrite is done, the polishing begins: I send myself the preview email over and over. Literally dozens of times, per article.

I simulate the article catching me in different moments: busy at work, waking up, actually having time to read. I open it on every device and email client I can.

The changes are usually tiny. Split a paragraph, cut 5 words, move an image up, swap an emoji, ALL CAPS a phrase. I’m obsessed with getting every word to sit exactly where it should. In the year-1 article I wrote that 90% of my writing time goes to deleting words, and that is still very true.

Done is better than perfect? Sometimes. But if it’s your baby, make it perfect.

🤖 AI never writes a word here

I’m allergic to AI-generated text, and so are you.

I do use AI daily, just never for creation. It’s my research assistant and my harshest editor. My real prompts look like: “Here’s my upcoming article. What did I miss? Is there a better example?” and “What can I remove? What’s repetitive or breaks the reading flow?”

🖼️ Art is 100% human

A single image in this newsletter takes 2-3 weeks to make.

I work with 4-5 pixel-art designers: for the simple stuff (blog covers), and for the complex illustrations and animations.

Sure, AI could generate all of it.

But I just love the art.

🧪 I spend way too long on the first words you see

The subject line is probably the most important sentence I write every week. All 100,000 of you see it in your inbox. But…only some of you open the email behind it.

So I treat those 5-10 words accordingly: some weeks the subject line gets more rewrites and work than the article under it.

People assume the writing is the hard part. Nope, it’s nailing the subject line.

One email, by effort, actually looks like this:

You can probably tell: I’m obsessed with every detail of this thing. 😅

Let me know in the comments if you want my full guide to writing email subject lines that hook people.

🌲 My articles cannot expire

The payoff of writing an article over years: it also stays good for years. I can see exactly which articles make free readers upgrade to paid, and it’s surprisingly consistent. Here’s the all-time top 10:

1. 🌱 If I had to start from ZERO today, here’s exactly what I’d do

2. 🥷 How to “steal” an audience

3. 🧪 The “Anti-AI” writing cheat sheet

4. 💰 How to send LinkedIn messages that get billion-dollar CEOs to reply

5. 🎯 How to write a viral LinkedIn post

6. ⛔️ The dark art of Reddit marketing (without getting banned)

7. 💻 How to make AI chatbots talk about your brand (for $0)

8. ⚡️ Write this 1 line to make people SHARE immediately

9. 🪖 How to recruit an army of micro-influencers (for almost $0)

10. 🪶 How to make journalists write about you (for free)

New here? Start with any of these.

📦 It’s never about the newsletter

My last habit is the one I care about most: I’m always looking for ways to add value beyond the articles themselves. The goal is to make this the best marketing resource on Earth, and to make getting a paid subscription a complete no-brainer.

2,000+ paid subscribers apparently agree 🫶

This is my actual to-do list of benefits:

The censored lines are the perks that aren’t out yet (and there are a lot of them).

The next perk, probably the BIGGEST in this newsletter’s history, goes live next month 🎊

Subscribe now

🎁 One more thing…

Writing this newsletter is the best career decision I’ve ever made. I’m my own boss here, with no briefs and no approval rounds, and my coworkers are 100,000 marketers who send me their best ideas. Two years ago I wrote that running a newsletter feels like playing an addictive video game, and it still does.

If you’ve been thinking about starting your own newsletter: start your “ideas” folder today. The written articles can come years later, like mine did.

And let me do for you what Noah did for me. I can’t review what you’re building the way he reviewed my newsletter, but the important part of his feedback fits anyone, so take it from me: Keep it up, do this for 10 years. I think you’ll have some great success out of it.

Send me the link when you’re live.

See you next week ✌️

Tom

P.S. Noah, if you’re reading this: 7 years to go ❤️

Last week was a strange week.

A lot happened that marketers should know about. Here are the 5 biggest ↓

#1

ChatGPT stopped citing Reddit 📉

Reddit used to be in 3.8% of everything ChatGPT cited.

Last week it dropped to… 0.5% 🪦

An 86% collapse in one week.

What happened: ChatGPT changed how it searches. It now looks at official websites first. So when someone asks “how much does Notion cost” → it quotes Notion’s pricing page instead of a Reddit thread about Notion.

→ Your own website just became the #1 thing that gets quoted.

So make sure you have these 3 pages:

1. 💰 A pricing page with real numbers. ChatGPT can’t quote “Contact us”.

2. 🥊 A “[you] vs [competitor]” page. Buyers ask AI to compare constantly. It quotes whoever wrote one :)

3. 🌀 An FAQ that answers each question in the first sentence. Use your customers’ words.

Reddit is still cited when a real employee, with a real name, answers questions in big threads. That gets into AI chatbots now. Anonymous/fake accounts don’t.

Full AEO playbook here (with the 7 steps that took HiBob from 17% to 51% of AI mentions).

#2

You can now choose what your LinkedIn post’s URL says 🌐

LinkedIn builds every post’s URL from your first line of text. If your hook is “so I was thinking this morning” and that’s your post’s address forever.

There’s a way to override it and set the URL yourself.

Most LinkedIn users have no idea it exists.

Why change the URL at all? 🤨

LinkedIn ranks well in Google, AI answers read Google, and the URL is one of the things machines look at when deciding what a page is about. Small signal, but you control it now.

It’s free to change and takes 3 seconds per post. Here’s exactly how ↓

Read more

Let’s go 💡

“Feel like you’re being watched?”

That’s a real Facebook ad I made for my client, ExpressVPN:

Today I’ll show you exactly how I created it, step-by-step, with AI.

Zero creativity needed ↓

Step 1: Pick a Problem ⭐️

We need to find a relatable problem that ExpressVPN solves.

To do this, I use my 3-second research prompt.

You can copy the prompt template to try it for yourself:

Go to [YourBrandURL.com] and create a two-column table.
Column 1: Practical problems the product solves.
Column 2: Personal problems the product solves.
Each row should pair a practical problem with a personal problem.

It shows what happens without our product.

The left side is technical. The right side is human.

So let’s use this problem:

Now we’ve picked a problem. Next is the most interesting part: finding the right visual.

Step 2: Find Analogies 🎣

The secret ingredient of the world’s best ads is a visual analogy.

So for ExpressVPN, I asked Claude to find analogies for “feeling watched”.

These were the results:

Number eight REALLY grabbed my attention.

A wall outlet that looks like a face staring at you… I can imagine it immediately!

This feeling even has a name: PAREIDOLIA.

So I go ahead and Google “pareidolia” and find some great images for my ads.

And now, it’s time to add some copy.

Step 3: Write Copy 🧠

Copywriting is the most important skill (by far). My own formula is below, exactly how I run it for clients:

• ✍️ My 10 favorite copywriting techniques, stolen from real ads by Framer, Wise, Vanta, and Lemonade

• 🎯 How to pick the winning copy (the clever one almost never wins)

• 🔁 The exact formula to repeat this for YOUR product (however “boring” it looks)

• 💻 A free Claude tool: type a problem → get 20 ad visual ideas back

Here’s everything I know about writing killer copy:

Read more

Coframe is an AI platform that A/B tests your website nonstop. It writes new versions of your pages, and launches them as live experiments, without waiting on engineering.

Replit used it to double (!) enterprise demo requests in less than 2 months. Dropbox and Intuit have added millions in revenue the same way.

It’s also the only marketing tech company OpenAI has partnered with. Try it out:

Try Coframe

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A Ramp rep sent this generic cold email:

Then a few moments later, they sent the “mistake” follow-up:

Honest mistake? I don’t think so.

“Forgetting” is a genius marketing trick 🥷

The “oops” is the perfect reason to send a second email, after the first one was ignored. Here’s why it’s super effective:

1. 🧠 Psychology: People can’t ignore a correction. “Whoops, I forgot something” feels human, so you open the email without thinking. Now the rep got two emails in front of you instead of one, and the second one has the real pitch.

2. 🪝 Spam filters: Cold emails with links are 10x more likely to get dumped in spam, especially the very first one you send a stranger. The filters don’t trust a link from someone you’ve never replied to.

Genius!

The most successful brands have been doing this for years ⚡️

My favorite email ever came from my favorite cruise line, Virgin Voyages:

Wait, what? 😳 Black Friday was still a month away, and Lorem Ipsum is a placeholder in design templates. Did Virgin make a big mistake? (hint: not at all)

A few moments later, another email arrived from Virgin:

Oh, thanks for the apology, Virgin. 🚢

There’s a strong chance Virgin’s team orchestrated the whole thing on purpose, and nothing was a mistake.

Why “fake mistakes” work so well 🧪

If you’ve never tried it, it’s worth a shot:

1. 🧠 Detective’s brain: People LOVE catching mistakes, it makes them feel sharp. Just like you clicked on this because of the title.

2. 🎉 Create excitement: The “mistake” doubles as a teaser. Virgin’s Lorem Ipsum email told everyone a Black Friday sale was coming, a month before it started.

3. 💖 Humanize the brand: Apologizing for a “mistake” shows there are real people behind the logo.

4. 💰 Prompt sales: An apology is the most natural excuse to throw in a little extra discount or extend a sale deadline.

You’ll find these all over your inbox 🤡

You’d be amazed at how frequently this strategy is used. Try searching “oops” or “Lorem Ipsum” in your email inbox. You’ll find plenty of examples.

Here are 3 recent ones from my own inbox:

P.S. Don’t overuse. While researching this marketing idea, I noticed my inbox was flooded with Epidemic Sound’s mishap emails. They do it every couple of weeks. Pfff.

For everyone’s sake, only do it once.

Have a great week!

Tom

*this is a refresh of a piece I first published in 2023

But if the promotion plan is to post from the company’s LinkedIn page… only 15 people will show up. (A third of them will be your coworkers 🫣)

Filling the room is really hard work.

I promote every webinar the same way: as a 🌊waterfall🌊. The powerful free channels go first, each step down costs a little more, and paid ads comes last, just to fill whatever seats are still empty. It’s how I get to 300+ attendees without an ad budget, and it works the same for a webinar, a workshop, a livestream, or a launch event.

Clay does this better than anyone right now ↓

Their GTM webinars have pulled 19,000 registrations, each one a lead that cost them under $12. Most from channels that cost next to nothing. One exec’s LinkedIn post brought in 4,000 registrations on its own!

I talked with the team at Clay expecting some secret system. But they run the same waterfall.

I’ve been running this “waterfall” method on my webinars for YEARS, so I finally wrote everything down: all 6 channels that get more attendees (with 2 channels I stole from Clay), the best $0 distribution tactics, and the counterintuitive reminder email that gets registrants to actually show up.

Here’s exactly what to do before your next webinar ↓

Read more

Max, the CEO, paid a street trumpet player outside their office to keep playing with a Gumloop sign. Then he did the same with more musicians, across the city, during a conference.

The post got 2,300+ likes and hundreds of praising comments:

But look at what Max actually posted: “What if we spent our marketing budget on musicians instead?”

That sentence is the marketing idea, and you can steal it this week:

Declare that you spent your ENTIRE marketing budget on something ridiculous 💡

Sticker Mule does it as a policy:

5% of its ad budget goes to giving strangers $100 bills on camera. Their CEO said “It’s not philanthropy, it’s marketing”.

I did it too: I raffled my 9 favorite marketing books and shipped 45 books (~$2,000) to 5 readers’ doors. Then posted: “That was my ENTIRE marketing budget”.

It didn’t move the needle - but it surely gave me a story to tell 😅

People call this “Anti-Marketing”: taking ad money and spending it on anything except ads. The internet roots for companies that do it, everyone is tired of being advertised to.

Anti-marketing playbook 🧪

So, what should you (allegedly) blow your entire marketing budget on?

🔒 Below the line for paid subscribers:

13 ways to finish the sentence “We spent our entire marketing budget on…” that people will actually share. Most of them with a real company that pulled it off.

Steal your favorite ↓

Read more

The head of product replied:

Everyone’s been avoiding a penalty that no longer exists… including the guy who runs Meta.

On LinkedIn it’s even worse ❌

When you put your link in a LinkedIn comment, the default “Most relevant” view filters that comment out. Your link is 100% hidden.

People read “link in comments 👇”, open the comments, and can’t find it.

Put your damn link in the post ✅

My most viral LinkedIn posts all had a URL straight in the post.

This one did 333,343 impressions with my newsletter link at the bottom:

So put your link in the post. The algorithm really only cares about what you say in the post. Here’s what to say to go viral in 2026.

Have a great day ✌️

-Tom

Your “book a demo” page is the highest-intent page on your website. The only people who get there already want to talk to you.

So it’s the worst place to lose a visitor, and most companies lose them all the time with bad copy and bad structure.

Which is why fixing it is the cheapest growth work you’ll ever do. ✅ With the same traffic and same budget → you’ll get way more booked calls.

Here’s what I’d do to get 3x more booked calls (7 steps):

1. 🗑️ Cut the form down to one field

As a rule of thumb, every field with an asterisk (must fill in) costs you completions. So before you add one, ask a blunt question: do you actually need this, or can you find it yourself?

The best demo pages ask for one thing only: work email.

Think about it - why would you need anything else? Once you get the work email, you can find them on LinkedIn, enrich the contact with Clearbit or Apollo, and you’re done.

I’m also against open text fields (like “tell us about your requirements”). I get why sales loves it, but you’re asking a stranger to write you an essay before you’ve shown them anything. They won’t. They’ll close the tab. If you really need context, make it a dropdown and save the real questions for the call. Amie still runs the open box, and I promise you it’s costing them:

2. 🗣️ “Submit” is a terrible button

People don’t “submit” or “request” things in real life, so don’t make your button say it. Roughly how I rank them:

✅ See [Company] (e.g. “See Rippling”)
✅ See it in action
✅ Get a demo
✅ Choose a time
❌ Request a demo
❌ Submit
❌ Submit form

If it sounds like a form → fix it.

Make the button sound like the outcome a human may want.

3. ⭐ Show how many people already trust you

Drop your star rating from G2 or Trustpilot right next to the form, and lead with the number of reviews. That’s the part doing the real work. “4.8 from 5,809 reviews” (like Deel) is far more convincing than “4.8” on its own, because the volume proves thousands of real people already trust you. The bigger that number, the better. One rule: don’t make the badge a link, or you’ll send the person you fought so hard to get straight off to G2.

4. 🔮 Tell them exactly what happens next

Half the time people churn for a dumb reason: they have no idea what they’re agreeing to. A walkthrough or a hard pitch? Wait 2 days or 2 hours? So tell them. Vee lays it out next to the demo form, I love it!

5.

Read more

If you’ve ever sat through a voice & tone workshop, you know the drill:

• ❌ 12 astrology cards asking if your brand is a “Lover” or an “Explorer”

• ❌ People arguing over whether you’re a “Hero, but with Creator energy”

• ❌ a mood board with a slider where you rate yourself 1-10 on “Playful”

It looks great in the room.

But then no one opens it again.

And it never once helps a new hire write a LinkedIn post, send an email, or answer the only question that matters: “so what does your company do?”

What top brands actually send new hires 📋

So I emailed CMOs at a dozen of the best brands in the world and asked for the messaging guide they give employees on day one. Most of them said yes (a perk of writing a big newsletter).

They had one thing in common: they were ✨simple✨

Just plain answers: how we sound, the words we use, tone for every channel, and the things we never say. The kind of perfect doc anyone can read in ten minutes and start applying in their work. No archetypes, moods or other BS.

So I built a template ✅

I took the best parts, cut the fluff, and turned it into a fill-in-the-blank messaging guide you can use today. Every section has a real example from a billion-dollar brand (Wiz, Canva, Stripe, others), so you’ll have some inspiration.

Your boss will love it (every boss I’ve had has asked for one 😅). But more importantly, this doc is how you teach AI to always sound like you.

And today, it’s yours.

This is THE one single Google Docs file that will make your scrappy team sound like a $1,000,000,000 brand.

Here’s what you get:

1. 📋 The full 10-page brand voice template (keep it forever)

2. 🎯 Fill-in-the-blank sections that make everything super actionable

3. 💻 Feed it to AI for instant on-brand copy

4. 🧨 A real billion-dollar example in every section (Amazon, Wiz, Shopify, more)

5. 📊 Tone for every channel: email, social, website, sales, and in-product

6. 📂 PDFs of real companies’ actual messaging guides

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

Read more

You know that moment when someone asks “wHy Is TrAfFiC dOwN? 🫪“ and finding the answer will cost you a full day in spreadsheets? I hate that.

Letaido, Ahrefs’ new AI tool, will change your life. You ask the chatbot anything, and it runs an analysis using Ahrefs’ live data: the “why” behind the traffic drop, plus the exact steps out of it. Then it builds reports, dashboards, trackers, even full apps.

Ahrefs’ CMO tested it on a brutal case: ClickUp’s blog lost 97.6% of its traffic. The chatbot came back with the same conclusions as a human SEO expert.

Try Letaido

I tried it and it’s 10x smarter with marketing data than any general AI.

» Sponsor my newsletter

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 job of humor is feeling seen: 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

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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