He’s a marketer, and his job is to find surprising numbers in his company’s data and post them on LinkedIn as simple charts.

He literally posts charts on LinkedIn for a living 😅

And it works! 🎊

Reporters at TechCrunch, Fortune and Business Insider all quoted him last year. Then he moved to a new company, OpenRouter, and CNBC started quoting him again just 2 weeks later!

Most startups still try to get press by pitching their own news… ❌

“Pitching your startup or your business to reporters is super hard. They don’t care,” Peter said on a podcast.

Peter found a shortcut. He gives reporters the numbers for stories they’re already writing, and they quote him. 🤯

So I reached out to Peter.

“I actually believe deeply that more companies should have this role in their marketing function,” he told me in an interview.

You can do this too (it’s easier than you think) ✅

You can even call yourself “Head of Insights” no matter your role, and you might get quoted if you follow the same steps.

I asked Peter how he’d get a tiny startup quoted like this.

He gave me his full playbook:

• 🔥 What Peter would do in his first month at your company

• 🍩 What to chart when you don’t have data

• 🎤 How to get quoted by reporters who’ve never heard of you

• 💰 How to get your CEO to say yes to this role (for you or a new hire)

Read more

FlyCode gets you paid when a customer’s card gets declined.

If you run a subscription business or sell credits/tokens, some payments fail every month just because the card was out of money that day. FlyCode picks the best moment to charge it again, so the payment goes through and the customer stays. GitBook grew its revenue by 8% with it.

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

See how much you're losing →

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“haha no ma’am” 📞

In February, a snowstorm canceled a woman’s flight to New York.

She called United.

The voice on the line rebooked her pretty quickly, but it sounded a little off, so she asked if it was AI.

“haha no ma’am but I get that a lot”.

Then she asked it to multiply 228 by 6,647… It did the math immediately (good luck doing that in your head). Her post got 4.7 million views 🤯

Welcome to AX 👋

Say goodbye to UI and UX.

The future is all about AX (agent experience) → how it feels to talk to a company’s AI.

I’m convinced that in 2027, your best shot at going viral is a great (…or quirky) chat someone has with your AI. They screenshot it, post it, and millions of people see your brand (people love reading other people’s chats).

The marketing idea 💡

Give your AI answers people want to screenshot.

People screenshot a bot when it says something they didn’t expect a bot to say. So decide what you WANT it to say, before someone pokes it.

All the marketers I know spend months on homepage copy and zero minutes on what the bot says when someone asks “are you human?”. That’s the line that ends up on X and LinkedIn.

People try to break bots on purpose 🧪

They run “pressure tests”, tricks built to make a bot say something dumb:

• A guy told a car dealership’s chatbot to agree with everything, then asked for a new Chevy Tahoe for $1, and it agreed (20 million views).

• Someone pushed a delivery company’s chatbot to roast its own company. It called itself “a useless chatbot that can’t help you” (2.3 million views).

Both companies got laughed at. But when a bot passes with a funny or kind answer, people post that too, and the company looks great.

Here’s how to make people screenshot your bot because it’s GOOD ↓

1. Have a funny answer for every pressure test 🃏

Someone tried to rename Snapchat’s AI “Ultron”, the evil robot from Marvel. Instead of an error message, it got the joke:

That screenshot got 354,000 views.

Your bot will get the same tests (the $1 deal, “admit you’re useless”, “are you human?”), so write its comebacks in advance.

2. Give it a personality 🦉

Duolingo made its AI tutor, Lily, a little moody on purpose. So moody that BLACKPINK’s Jisoo told fans Lily keeps hanging up on her (“Hmm… I have to go. Bye!”).

Duolingo replied with a video, from Lily herself!

I love this. A pop star talks about Duolingo’s AI like it’s a real (slightly annoying) person.

Let some personality show, even in boring answers.

3. Hide Easter eggs 🥚

Microsoft hid a secret in Copilot: tap its little blob avatar enough times and it turns into Clippy, the paperclip everyone loved to hate.

That post alone got almost 800,000 views. Finding a secret makes people feel smart, so they show it off 🤓

4. Say yes when they expect a fight 💸

A guy ordered Chipotle from a store in another state. His own mistake. He asked the chatbot for a refund, ready to argue.

It just said yes. Money back in 1-3 days.

His reaction on TikTok: “Let me marry you” (107,000 likes).

We all expect to fight a bot over refunds. When it says yes right away, it feels amazing.

5. Transfer to a human the moment they ask 🤝

When someone types “human”, a person takes over. No “can you tell me more first?”

Octopus Energy’s AI, Arlo, even tells customers a magic phrase for it: “Real Human Please”. (For the serious stuff, people still want a real person. That was last month’s idea.)

Your AX cheat sheet (screenshot this) 📋

1. Have a funny answer for every pressure test.

2. Give it a personality.

3. Hide Easter eggs.

4. Say yes when they expect a fight.

5. Transfer to a human the moment they ask.

Have a great week ✌️

Tom

Shoutout to Navot Volk for the inspiration for this idea!

GUEST POST

Today’s idea is written by Shlomo Genchin - a Creative Director who makes ads for tech unicorns and shares everything he learns along the way. He’s also the creator of the course Boring Products, Fun Ads, loved by 500+ creatives from companies like Apple, HubSpot, and Semrush.

A year ago, a client sent me this brief:

Try making that exciting 😅

This is the ad I ended up making, without filming a single second:

That’s Emma, an overworked payroll admin, and she doesn’t exist (neither does the ocean). Every frame came out of AI tools:

The ad became one of the 🥇top performers🥇 at HiBob (a $2.7 billion company).

Again, there was no film crew and no actors. The entire ad came out of my laptop. You already know what most AI ads look like (a weird avatar reading a script into the camera). This playbook is how you make the better “no-cringe” ads - the kind that actually converts.

Inside the playbook:

1. 🧪 A free research tool that digs up what your customers complain about

2. 🎣 The 8 types of visual hooks (you just saw one)

3. 👱🏻‍♀️ How I made Emma and kept her the same person in every frame

4. 📝 Copy-paste script formula that works for any product

5. 🗣️ How I direct AI “voice actors” (+ the cheat sheet of tags that make them sound human)

Here’s everything I did - from brief to final video ↓

Read more

Gumloop takes the marketing work you do every week, gives it to an AI agent, and you never do it again.

It’s like cloning your best marketer. One person builds a Gumloop agent, and then the entire team can use it. The agent works inside the tools you already use (like Clay, Ahrefs, HubSpot, Slack, and 400+ other apps).

Teams at Shopify, Ramp, and Instacart all use Gumloop to run their marketing.

Try Gumloop free

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The best-converting homepage button 🕹️

A while ago, I wanted a better form for sponsors who want to advertise here.

I googled “form builder” and clicked on forms.app, a form builder with 4 million users. The top of their homepage was a big empty text box: describe the form you need → and their AI builds it for you.

I liked the idea, but the box needed a written description of my form (see image), and I didn’t have time to write something up. So…. I closed the tab.

My sponsor application is still a Google Form.

What the A/B test showed 🧪

A few months later I came across an A/B test that forms.app ran on that exact same box. They showed 25,000 new visitors 3 versions of the homepage:

1. The AI text box that I saw.

2. Sign-up buttons: Google, Apple, email.

3. A single “Create a form for free” button: build first, sign up after.

Which converted better - A, B, or C?

Guess which one won before you scroll down ↓

🥁

🥁

🥁

🥁

🥁

The boring buttons got 2.6x the signups of the AI box. The box came last on EVERY metric they tracked, and 84% of the people who saw it clicked nothing at all. (Same as me!)

Why the AI text box lost ❌

Because it asked me to think. I had never used forms.app, so I couldn't describe what I wanted from it. Signing up with Google, on the other hand, takes zero thinking.

What about the playground (“Create a form” button)? Fewer sign-ups, but the most active users (3.63% vs 3.23%) and the most buyers (0.176% vs 0.102%). I’ve recommended playgrounds since 2023, and I’d still pick that one over the buttons.

The AI box is the one that lost everything, so the lesson is to be careful what you ask for. People will click a button, give you their email, or paste a URL. They won’t write you a paragraph before they know who you are.

That’s why marketingideas.ai, my upcoming product, asks for one thing: your website’s URL (zero thinking required).

Only ask for what they already have ✅

Now look at the first thing your own homepage asks a visitor to do. If it’s one of these, you’re fine:

✅ “Sign up with Google”
✅ “Enter your email”
✅ “Drop your website URL”
✅ “Try it free” (if the product opens instantly)

If it’s one of these, you have the forms.app problem:

❌ “What do you want to build?”
❌ “Tell us about your project”
❌ “Ask me anything”

Here’s what I’d do about it:

1. Move the question to after signup. Keep buttons on the homepage and put the AI box inside the product. That’s what forms.app did.

2. If you really want to keep the box, add buttons under it. 4-5 example answers people can click instead of type. forms.app does this on their AI page now: the same box, plus “Or, choose your goal: Lead gen / Feedback / Registrations / File uploads / Payments”.

Bolt does the same thing under “What will you build today?” with Website / Slides / App / Prototype buttons.

3. If you need context to personalize, ask for something people can paste. A URL, like I do. Or a link to a form or a page they already have. Bolt lets you start from a Figma file.

And if you’re not sure whether your box is a problem → install Microsoft Clarity (it’s free), watch 20 recordings of your homepage, and count how many people click into the field and then type nothing. At forms.app it was 84%.

See you next week ✌️

Tom

So I made a list of every channel I know that costs $0. By channel I mean any spot on the internet where new customers can find out you exist.

There are 50, and I ranked them by where I’d put my own time first.

Here we go ↓

The list starts with the channels you’ve heard of (and how to exploit them in 2026), and goes all the way to things most marketers have NEVER treated as a channel at all:

Bookmark this one. Every marketer should have this list. The next time you need more customers and there’s no budget for them → it’ll be sitting here with a channel you haven’t tried yet.

It took me ten years to collect these. You get them all below. 💎

Here’s my full list (ranked), starting with the 5 channels I’d always try first.

Read more

Their launch post got 5 million views 🤯

And they’re not the only ones:

• Offloop: 2.6M views

• Runable: 2.4M views

• Rene: 1.1M views

• Catch AI: 864K views

• Coworker: 791K views

Every one of them posted from a VERY small account.

Surprisingly - all these views are 100% real, from real people (0% bots).

So what’s the magic trick? 🪄

Let’s say you’re launching a new partnership, a new feature, or your company out of stealth, and you want to announce it on your X account.

But your account is small, so the post gets a handful of likes and looks embarrassing.

How do you launch with barely any followers? 👀

Most marketers fix it with paid ads: they pay X to “boost” the post.

But it’s a bad deal:

1. 🚫 Ads are (very) expensive.

2. 🚫 Virality stops when your budget does.

3. 🚫 Your post gets an “Ad” label, and people skip ads.

4. 🚫 A lot of people never see it at all because of ad blockers.

All the startups above did something else, and I bet you haven’t seen it before.

The better idea is this 👇

Read more

Gumloop takes the marketing work you do every week, gives it to an AI agent, and you never do it again. The agent works inside the tools you already use.

It’s like ChatGPT, except you’re not locked into one model provider. And it can actually log into Clay, Ahrefs, HubSpot, Slack and 400+ apps, finish the task, and run again on its own.

Teams at Shopify, Ramp, and Instacart all use Gumloop to run their marketing.

Try Gumloop free

→ Sponsor my newsletter

Are you still that person? 🪞

My friend Dean got a weird email from a company called Couchsurfing.

I think it’s absolutely brilliant:

He hasn’t used Couchsurfing in years - they’re trying to get him back.

See how NOTHING in the email is about the product? Everything there is about Dean’s identity. It’s the perfect way to get churned users back.

My favorite part is the button “I’m Still That Person”. Clicking it means agreeing with a compliment. Genius. 🧠

They also put an offer (one month free) at the very bottom of the email:

That’s smart. A discount up top makes the visit all about the “deal”, so people exit the email as soon as they open it. But down here - the free month feels like a bonus just for him.

The marketing idea 💡

An email that compliments someone’s identity (with a hit of nostalgia) is very hard to ignore.

Send it to your own dead leads and churned customers:

1. Open with 2-3 short lines about who they are at their best (”You’re the kind of person who ships fast”)

2. Make the button an identity claim (”I’m Still That Person” / “That’s still me”)

3. Put the offer at the bottom, if at all.

That’s it! ✅

This is “Identity Marketing” (I wrote about it in 2024), and the science behind it is pretty crazy:

• → Asking people to “be a voter” instead of “to vote” raised turnout by 15%

• → Asking kids to “be a helper” instead of “to help” made 50% more of them clean up

More quick wins to try 🧪

Little copy tweaks = big identity nudges:

• 🔁 Swap actions for identities in your CTAs: “Help us improve” → “Be a beta tester”. “Refer a friend” → “Be an ambassador”.

• 👴🏻 Show “member since” in your product. Amex prints it on the physical card. ChatGPT made it brag-able.

• 🫆 Give your users a name: Salesforce customers (proudly) call themselves “Trailblazers”.

• 🎉 Start an emoji movement: Ship30for30 students put 🚢 in their X names, Beehiiv employees use 🐝.

• 🌈 Show users their identity according to usage: Spotify Wrapped tells you who you are (”your listening personality”) based on how you use their product.

One more thing if you try the Couchsurfing idea: don’t send people to a login page. Atlas Privacy pre-created accounts for 160,000 dead leads → one click and you’re already inside the product. 8-12.5% converted.

Have a great week ✌️

Tom

This summer I asked my favorite software companies to give my paid subscribers a free year of their product. All said yes. 🎊

Starting today, annual subscribers of Marketing Ideas get:

1. 1 year of Rewardful, affiliate management software ($990 value)

2. 1 year of AiSDR, an AI sales rep that runs your outbound ($3,000 value)

3. 1 year of eWebinar, on-demand webinar software ($1,200 value)

4. 1 year of OpusClip, the AI video editing tool ($348 value)

5. 1 year of Fathom, an AI meeting partner for your calls ($228 value)

6. 1 year of Base44, my favorite AI app builder ($240 value)

I picked them myself. They’re products I actually love and use, and none of these companies has offered a full free year like this before.

That’s on top of the existing benefits of being a paid subscriber:

• 💎 A premium marketing idea every week (too spicy for the free newsletter)

• 🔓 Unlimited archive access: 400+ proven ideas, templates, and playbooks

• 🎁 a PDF copy of my book “Marketing Moonshots” (370 pages of quick wins)

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to join → this is it:

Subscribe now

Important deal details:

• You must be a new customer of each product to use its code.

• The bundle is for annual subscribers only. Monthly subscribers can switch to annual (Substack credits the days you’ve already paid for).

• Codes are limited (each company agreed to a fixed batch), first come, first served.

• If you refund or chargeback your subscription, your codes will be deactivated.

Claim your codes:

Click here to get the 100% off coupons (before they run out):

Get the Marketing Bundle →

Many readers expense it to their company’s L&D budget.

See you inside,

Tom ✌️

800M+ people ask ChatGPT what to buy every week. ChatGPT sells ad slots in those answers now, and almost no marketer is buying them. I don’t say this often, but if you’re going to try one new channel this year - it should be this one.

enso is a growth hacking lab and an approved ChatGPT Ads partner. Their agents run the whole thing: creative, targeting, measurement.

The best part: Join enso as a customer before September 30th and get $10,000 in ChatGPT Ads credits (for free)!

Get $10,000 in ChatGPT Ads credits →

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10 unconventional ways to brag about your customers

You’ve seen the boring “Trusted by” logo row 10,000 times.

Which is a waste, because your customers are the best proof you have.

I’ve been collecting companies that show off their customers in ways people actually STOP and look at. Here are the best 10 ideas I found:

1. Put an *unexpected* customer in your logo row 🪩

Look at the homepage of Deel, a payroll tool for global teams.

“Trusted by 40,000+ companies... and EVEN SNOOP DOGG”. When you hover over the logos - you reveal a secret button:

Snoop Dogg is a “real” customer (his ice cream company hires through Deel), and the button opens a funny case study about it.

How to steal this: do an influencer deal where the deliverable is a funny story about the star being a “customer” of yours. A weird customer in the row makes people stop and look at all the other logos and case studies.

2. Publish a customer’s setup as a template 📋

Notion gives away the Figmanual, Figma’s internal handbook, as a template:

It’s a brag and a lead magnet at the same time. Figma runs its company on Notion, and to get Figma’s handbook, you need a Notion account.

How to steal this: ask your best-known customer for permission to publish the thing they built on your product (a checklist, a dashboard, a workflow) as a free template with their logo on it.

3. Tell a customer’s story like a novel 📖

Hinge is a dating app.

They asked 16 authors to interview real couples who met on the app and write their love stories - now it’s printed books, a Substack, and an audiobook:

How to steal this: interview a customer and write it up as a novel-style story with their photo, then send them the PDF to post. (With a budget, I’d print it as an illustrated kids’ book and mail it to their team.)

4. Make your customers famous 🏙️

Stripe’s billboards brag about Stripe’s customers. I took this photo in Times Square last year:

The focus is on their customer Instacart. Stripe is tiny on the bottom.

How to steal this: write the next post entirely about one customer’s win, and barely talk about yourself. With a few hundred dollars, Blip (a website that sells digital billboard slots) can put that post on a screen next to the customer’s office for 1-2 minutes, and the customer will probably post the photo if you tell them when to look.

5. Celebrate your customers’ first win (in public) 🎉

Shopify did the same thing for its smallest customers.

For Black Friday 2024 it put a live map of orders on the Las Vegas Sphere - and every firework is a merchant’s first sale ever:

I love it.

We do it at Wiz with our Zero Critical Club (the first win in our product is reaching zero critical issues in their environment):

How to steal this: you don’t need budget for this one. The next time a customer gets their first win with your product → post it on LinkedIn with them tagged.

6. Brag about your one-star reviews 🫣

Snowbird is a ski resort in Utah.

They took a real one-star review - “Too advanced“ - and made it the ad:

A bad review from the wrong customer is a compliment from the right one.

How to steal this: find the one-star review that says you’re “too” something your best customers love (too strict, too simple), and put it on your homepage.

7. Put a number under every logo 🔢

Every customer logo on Clay’s homepage comes with a result, e.g. Intercom’s says “+140% outbound pipeline“:

How to steal this: email each customer whose logo you show and ask for one number you can quote. A number under the logo tells visitors it worked.

8. Show the actual proof 🔎

The only thing better than showing numbers → is to also give the proof they’re real.

Greptile is an AI tool that reviews code. Its customers page lists real bugs it caught in well-known open-source projects, each one linked to the actual fix on GitHub:

People believe what they can check themselves.

How to steal this: next to every customer logo, link to the actual thing your product did for them: the website you built, the ad you wrote, the email they sent with your tool, or the bug you caught.

9. Show how long your customers have stayed 🥾

Red Wing makes work boots.

Their flagship store has a wall of boots that real customers wore through a working lifetime, with their stories:

How to steal this: put “Customer since [year]” under every logo. A customer who stayed 6 years says so much more about you than a new big-name logo.

10. Group your logos so visitors find someone like them 🪞

Pylon is a customer-support tool.

Earlier this year, they grouped their customer logos by the competitor each one left - “Migrated off Zendesk”:

Rent the Runway does it with people. Every dress review shows the reviewer’s size, height, weight, and body type:

PostHog (an analytics tool) made the grouping a funny game. You can reshuffle its logos into categories, like companies you can explain to your parents vs. companies you can’t:

How to steal this: split the logos you already have into 2 or 3 groups and let the labels brag (”Switched from [Competitor]”, “Under 50 employees”). Visitors look for a customer like them, and the label helps them find one.

The *worst* way to brag about your customers ❌

One last thing - and it’s the most painful mistake I’ve seen this year:

See you next week ✌️

Tom

In case you missed it, Instinct is a personal AI assistant. You can text it and ask anything: it books the doctor, cancels your subscriptions, orders the groceries, and negotiates with vendors on WhatsApp.

It went from a company no one has ever heard of, to this:

And this is the website (yes, really):

Everything about it is unusual:

• ❌ No signup button and no app to download, just a waitlist link

• ❌ No employees talking about it on social

• ❌ No ads that anyone has seen

• ❌ No press releases or PR

• ❌ No launch, anywhere

When the founder finally posted, after tons of rumors, he got 2 million views.

I’m going to show you *exactly* what the company did, because you can copy it too. Even if you barely have users or an audience.

And no, this isn’t “make your product invite-only”. If limiting signups worked so well, every waitlist on the internet would be viral. What worked is a set of decisions the company made about its first users, and every one of them can work on your existing product/service. ✅

Here’s everything you need to know:

🔐 Step zero: how the first users got in

Read more

Growth hacking is back, baby! And this time AI agents do the work.

enso is a growth research lab. Their agents scan the platforms your buyers already use (Reddit, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, Google) for attention loopholes: spots where a little effort gets a CRAZY amount of reach because no one else is looking there yet. Then they build custom agents that go get that attention for your company.

In one experiment, 62 Wikipedia edits got 3 brands cited by ChatGPT within six weeks:

I've gotten to know the team, and they publish every experiment with the full protocol, so you can steal it even without hiring them. I’d hire them myself.

Hire enso’s agents →

Want to sponsor this newsletter? Apply here.

How can your brand help people avoid AI?

Weird question coming from me, I know (I love Claude).

But every website you open now has this widget:

Port’s website has the same Slack widget…

But it says it’s a human:

Smart! 🧠

That’s the biggest trend in tech right now: everybody wants a human.

Even if your bot is smarter and faster than a person, people don’t want to be the guinea pigs who test it. A human is more reliable right now, and a human has all the privileges, like issuing a refund or opening the admin panel.

Your competitors replaced people with bots wherever they could, so a human who answers is rare now. That’s AI fatigue working for you.

So here are 3 ways to put humans back into your marketing ↓

1. Put a real person where people expect a bot 👋

Port’s widget is a Slack connector: your message goes into their Slack.

Legit Security does the same with a “Chat over Slack” button, right next to “Book Demo”:

Gartner asked thousands of customers about AI in customer service, and 53% said they’d consider switching to a competitor if they found out a company was going to use it.

Do this:

• 💻 Change your chat’s opening message to “Real person here! I’m [Name], write to me and I’ll answer”, and replace the robot icon with your photo. Then answer it yourself.

• 🌌 Add an offline message so the promise holds while you sleep: “It’s [Name], I’m offline. Leave your email and a person replies within one business day”. If you don’t have a widget at all → put your name and face next to the support email instead.

2. Say what you DON’T use AI for ⛔️

Aerie pledged to never use AI-generated people in its ads:

It became the brand’s most-liked Instagram post with 40,000+ likes, and that quarter’s sales grew 23%. (Correlation, I know. I’d still take it.)

Among people under 30, 66% react negatively to businesses using AI in ads. Yup, the AI-friendly generation is allergic to AI ads!

Do this:

• ✏️ Write a post like Aerie’s - along the lines of “we will never use AI for [the thing your customers care most about]”.

• 👱🏻‍♀️ Sign the product: “Made by [Name] and [Name]”, with photos, in the footer or on the About page.

• 🌈 Put a sentence on your pricing page (or your support page): “Every support reply here is written by a person, at 2 AM too”.

3. Host something with no screens 🪑

At a recent conference, we built a branded “No-AI Zone” near the entrance, with free coffee, board games, a postcard-writing station, and a working mailbox. Most booths inside were selling AI.

I've been collecting examples since I wrote about proof it’s human last November, and my favorite is Ramp: they put Kevin from The Office in a glass office in Manhattan, doing expense reports by hand for 7 hours, and the clips passed 85M views.

Ramp’s own explanation to this stunt: “We wanted to show something real in an AI world”. *chef’s kiss*

A few more from the past year:

• Cursor rents a café for a day and puts its engineers in name tags so users can come meet them. The NYC slots had a waitlist.

• Thursday, the dating app, shut down its own app and became an in-person events company, now in about 150 cities.

• Pinterest ran a phone-free space at Coachella: phones locked in pouches at the door, and a printed guide instead of QR codes.

• Hinge has given $2.3M to running clubs and book clubs (yes, a dating app paying people to get off the app).

Anthropic’s version was the “thinking” hat, and I waited 2 hours in line for mine.

Do this:

• ⚙️ The cheapest version is office hours in a café, in a city where your customers already are (or the day before a conference you’re attending anyway). Post from your own account: “I’m at [café] on [day], 9 to 11. Come by and I’ll fix your homepage in person, coffee’s on me”. About $40 in coffee, and Cursor had a waitlist for theirs.

• 🍔 Host a dinner for 8-10 customers, phones in a basket at the door.

• 🎪 If you have a booth this year → set up a folding table where someone does the task your product automates, by hand, in front of everyone, under a sign that says “This is what [product] replaces”.

Have an amazing week ✌️

Tom

P.S. For your own writing, the Anti-AI cheat sheet covers the 15 patterns readers catch.

P.P.S. There’s even a marketplace where AI agents “rent” humans: rentahuman.ai lists 795K+ people available for hire for real-world tasks. Even the AIs are buying human! 😅

You may know me from this newsletter, or maybe from my job leading Growth at Wiz/Google. But what most people don’t know is that I also have a passion project that I think about all the time.

Since 2021, I’ve been buying up domains. And not just a couple. I’m sitting on more than 400 right now - and renewing all of them, every year.

My domain names have literally changed my life. 🌱

And not for the reason you’d think: Yeah, at this point, I’ve sold dozens of them. kavet.com went for $4,500. adpow.com for $4,200. Pretty solid returns for a string of letters I bought for pocket change.

But what has made all the difference for me has been establishing credibility. The best example is the one you’re looking at right now: marketingideas.com

Owning this URL allowed me to rank #1 on Google for “marketing ideas”:

That’s the power of a good domain name.

And I’ll tell you: It wasn’t cheap. But negotiating that one might be the single best business decision I’ve made in my career. It’s part of why I get to be The Marketing Ideas Guy instead of just “that guy with the marketing ideas newsletter.”

If you’re figuring out the domain name for your company or a new product right now → you cannot afford to ignore this lesson.

Learn from the best 🎓

In 1997, Marc Randolph had a problem: “Netflicks” was taken, “NetPix” too, and replay.com was for sale at $50,000. Way too expensive for a startup, so he passed and settled on “Netflix” - the next available cheap name.

Marc Benioff registered salesforce.com before the company even existed. He’s actually a domain collector (he owns bill.com and you.com), and once gave appstore.com to Steve Jobs as a gift. Jobs told him the App Store “wasn’t going to be very big.”

Siri was almost called “Mia” (My Intelligent Assistant), until the team learned the owner of mia.com wanted $200K. Co-founder Dag Kittlaus already owned siri.com, and that’s part of why your phone says “Hey Siri” today.

And the record for waiting: Elon Musk ran Tesla on teslamotors.com for a decade because an engineer who registered tesla.com in 1992 wouldn’t sell. Tesla finally got it in 2016, for $11 million.

Other companies take the opposite approach and pay the price, later: Instagram spent its early life on instagr.am (yes, Armenia’s domain), and Dropbox launched as GetDropbox.com, both because the .com was taken. Which is why both of them later paid six figures to get the real one back ($100k and $300k).

Your domain name matters more than ever 📈

“But Tom… That was a long time ago,” you may be saying. “Is this still relevant? Sure, Netflix and Salesforce focused a lot on their domain name, but do we still need to care in 2026?”

I get it. There are many reasons to doubt:

1. 🌀 The way search works is different. “Zero-click” search means that people get the info they want before even clicking on your site (nearly 70% of Google searches now end without a click).

2. 🐥 People are using social, first. Social media posts and App Store profiles have become an increasingly viable way for people to find out about your product. (For users under 35, social media has already overtaken search as the go-to channel for discovering brands.)

3. 🧩 People are using AI to find stuff. Between asking ChatGPT or Claude to find a tool for them, or just sending out AI agents to gather the info, persuading humans isn’t the only priority anymore.

So does that mean that domain names don’t matter anymore?

Absolutely not. 🧠

Right now, AI slop brands are popping up all over the place.

A domain is the cheapest proof that you’re a real business. Everything else that used to prove it (a logo, a website, glowing testimonials) can be produced in an afternoon by anyone with Claude. The address can’t.

Machines check your domain too (and they’re less forgiving). People ask ChatGPT what to buy, and AI agents read your website before recommending you to anyone. In a market flooded with disposable “[name]-ai.com” brands - a real domain is how you get counted as a real business.

Still not convinced? HubSpot cofounder Dharmesh Shah bought chat.com for $15.5 million a couple years ago, and then sold it to OpenAI, presumably for even more.

So I’m not saying you should spend $15 million, but you also can’t get away with a $10 afterthought. There’s a huge middle, and that’s where you want to shop.

This is my masterclass on Names and Domains 🧵

I’ve spent YEARS (as both a marketing leader and passionate domain hunter and seller) working this out, and I’ve compiled everything I know into this guide. It’s super long, but I hope it will be a resource that you can save and keep coming back to. I’ll also keep it up to date, as I continue to monitor this space.

Below the line for paid subscribers, I’m giving you the full playbook:

• 🏷️ How to pick the right name - detailed step-by-step guide and why most companies pick from the wrong type.

• 🧠 The 3-rule test I run before I commit to any name. One of them comes from the founder of the naming agency behind Apple, Intel, and Vercel.

• 🔤 The letter-by-letter trick that makes a brand feel fast, or expensive, or safe, before anyone reads a word.

• 💾 Everything I know about domains (premium vs. regular, what to do if the .com is taken, how to buy premium WITHOUT paying six figures, fatal mistakes to avoid)

• 🔥 The domain ending trending even harder than .ai right now. Most of the good one-word names are still sitting there unclaimed. I’ll tell you exactly which one.

• ⛔ The popular-looking domain ending you must never touch. Big-company IT teams block this domain, and you’d lose half your buyers without ever knowing why.

• 💸 Where I actually buy domains. Usually ½ the price of GoDaddy.

• 🤝 My full negotiation playbook. I’ve run it on about 50 premium domains and paid 40-50% of the asking price almost every time.

Let’s start with the name, BEFORE you buy anything ↓

Read more

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