Part of the tradition is being invited to a gala dinner with all the other honorees.

The room was crazy: every founder, scientist, artist, and investor you’ve read about. Dozens of people who’d built amazing things before 30.

I figured it was my only shot at that kind of exclusive access, so I spent the night running a tiny experiment. I’d find an opening in every conversation and ask each person the same thing:

I expected a mess of different answers. Hustle, network, timing, luck. The usual stuff.

But what I got was the most unanimous answer I’ve ever heard to anything:

Taste 💋

Their answer was humbling -- and impossible to argue with. After 10 years of doing marketing, I can’t think of a job where it’s more true.

Let me explain why.

Taste is the #1 unfair advantage in marketing 🧠

Since 2022, every marketing craft has been automated or commoditized. Copy, design, research, analytics, targeting. All of it is now available to anyone with a $20 subscription and good context.

The result is a sea of marketing slop that’s technically valid and emotionally sh*t. Taste is what cuts through it.

The clearest proof I have is from hiring:

I’ve interviewed hundreds of marketers at Wiz and given take-home assignments to dozens. Almost all of them use AI now. (Which is great! I do too.) The ones I end up hiring share one thing: better taste. Same prompts, same tools, but they got sharper judgment about which of the 10 AI drafts is actually worth shipping.

That’s the whole marketing job now.

The lie the marketing industry sells you ❌

The industry has been selling us the same lie for decades: “taste comes with experience”. Put in 10 or 20 years, ship enough campaigns, and eventually your gut gets sharp.

Wrong. Taste is trainable. ✅

In this playbook, you’ll get:

→ The 4 daily habits that build the taste muscle + how to start
→ 7 quick rules I’ve stolen from people who are 10x smarter than me
→ The 5-pattern framework I use to reverse-engineer great marketing
→ The Notes system I use to calibrate my taste against reality every week

Do it for 30 days and you’ll know whether a piece of marketing is going to work BEFORE it’s published.

Here’s the full playbook 👇

Read more

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Monday inspiration time!

Here are 5 genius marketing ideas I found last week ↓

#1

The 404 page that gives you an AirPods case

TestResults is a startup for automating software testing. They built the best error page on the internet:

Instead of apologizing for the broken link → they send you a gift with your name engraved on it 🎁

It’s a perfect flex for their audience. They sell a software testing product to people who love finding bugs. So when one of their users stumbles onto a broken link, that user basically IS their ideal customer. Might as well throw them a prize.

And the form’s final step is actually the smartest part:

You’ll get an extra gift if you tell them what brought you there! 🧠

It’s important because of AI hallucinations:

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini all invent URLs. Your 404 is getting hit by AI-confused users wayyyyy more than by actual broken-link users now.

How to steal this: Turn your 404 into a gift. Match the gift to your audience (swag for developers, a free product month for SaaS users, etc). Add one bonus question asking where they came from. You’ll learn a ton about AI referral traffic.

#2

The rogue "z" that made Warmly $100K in pipeline

Speaking of mistakes:

Warmly sent an email to 83,000 marketers last week. But their cofounder Alan accidentally left a lowercase “z” floating in the top-left corner.

Marketers HATE typos.

9 of them wrote back → all of them asking about the z, none about the actual content of the email. So Warmly leaned into it. They replied with: “sorry about the z, book a demo and we’ll have more rogue letters for you 😉”. 4 took demos. 3 are in pipeline. $100K from one stray letter.

People love catching brands being slightly imperfect - it’s the strongest signal that there’s a real human on the other end.

How to still this: next time a tiny mistake sneaks into a live campaign, don’t apologize. Reply with humor, double down on the weirdness, and turn it into your CTA. In my experience, a typo will get you more replies than a perfect email ever will.

#3

Every sale needs a reason. Nostalgia is the best one.

I spotted this Pret A Manger sign on a NYC sidewalk last week:

A generic "20% OFF" is meh. But a discount with a REASON attached to it becomes a story people repeat. And nostalgia is one of the best “reasons” you can attach to anything right now.

Justin Bieber just did the same play on the biggest stage in the world, plugging his laptop into the Coachella screen to play "Baby" straight from YouTube, harmonizing with his 2009 self.

It was perfect.

The people yearn for nostalgia. I wrote about why here a while back. Y2K fashion is back and film cameras are selling out because we all want to feel 12 again.

How to steal this: Pick a year your customers loved and tie your product back to it. “Spring sale” → “The menu from the summer you met your girlfriend”

#4

The GitHub trick every product is copying now

Every developer has bragged about their GitHub contribution grid at some point. Each green square = a day they pushed code:

Now everyone is copying the format.

Habit Kit uses the same grid to help users build new habits.

Blackmagic shows it to creators for tracking their social posts.

Claude Code just added a contributions grid to their desktop app yesterday.

Why does this format keep getting stolen?

1. ✅ It’s a screenshot magnet (it gives users social currency).

2. ✅ It rewards consistency over intensity, which is the exact behavior you want in any sticky product.

3. ✅ It triggers completionism.

4. ✅ It’s instantly understood with zero onboarding, zero copy, zero explanation needed.

How to steal this: pick one behavior you want your users to do daily, and ship a contribution map for it. Works for a B2C app (daily usage), a B2B SaaS tool (active days), a newsletter platform (publishing cadence), a CRM (touchpoints logged), etc. Cheap to build, massive retention lever, and almost nobody outside dev tools is using it yet :)

#5

She turned a LinkedIn post into a $0 growth channel

Amanda Zhu took her best-performing LinkedIn post, printed it on a postcard, and mailed it to the home address of Tenali's CEO.

I love it.

The CEO probably got 200 emails that day, 40 LinkedIn DMs, a dozen retargeting ads… and one postcard. Guess which one he’s telling his team about.

And the only thing better than sending your own post printed → sending THEIRS.

How to steal this: print people their own creations and mail them. Their best LinkedIn post from last year, framed. Their top tweet on a magnet. Their most popular Substack issue printed on heavy cardstock. Services like Postpilot, Lob, and Handwrytten make this trivial to run.

See you Thursday ✌️

Tom

I don’t know your name. I don’t know your job title. I’ve never met you.

But I’m going to tell you exactly who you are in 13 sentences. And I’m willing to bet you’ll think I nailed it.

Ready? 🪄

1. You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.

2. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.

3. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.

4. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.

5. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.

6. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.

7. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.

8. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.

9. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.

10. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.

11. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.

12. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.

13. Security is one of your major goals in life.

How many felt accurate?

If you’re like most people, at least 10.

I just gave you the exact same “personality reading” that a psychology professor gave his students in 1948. Every student got the same 13 sentences.

When he asked them to rate the accuracy from 0 to 5 → the class averaged 4.26.

Almost perfect… For a personality reading that was completely fake 🤯

This is called the “Barnum-Forer effect” 🧠

Psychics use it. Horoscopes use it. BuzzFeed quizzes use it.

The top 1% marketers in the world use it to write copy so “personal” that people actually convert, stick around, and share it with their friends.

I first noticed this at MineOS, when we added a “What is your role?” box to the signup form.

It wasn’t connected to anything in the product.

But people started replying to our onboarding emails and converted more because they felt the entire platform was personalized. I’m not going to pretend that one form field 10x’d our revenue. But it changed how I think about every piece of copy I write.

This is the power of “fake personalization” 🎭

Most people think the takeaway is “write vague stuff that applies to everyone”. That’s NOT how to do it. If that’s all it took, every horoscope would go viral.

There’s a *very specific* way to do fake personalization that makes it actually work, and it has nothing to do with how clever your copy is. Once I figured it out, I started seeing it everywhere, and using it on landing pages, onboarding flows, and ads.

Today, I’m sharing my “fake personalization” playbook:

• 🧪 How to “read someone’s mind” without knowing anything about them

• ✍️ 6 copywriting techniques (with fill-in-the-blank examples) that make readers feel like you wrote it just for them

• 🎁 3 formats that do the personalization for you, without actually personalizing anything

• ⚖️ How to use it without crossing the line into manipulation

Read more

If your budget is small but your ideas are big - this one's for you. Here are 5 marketing ideas worth stealing this week.

Let’s go ↓

#1

A $3,500 stunt filled a startup’s pipeline for 3 months

Lunos is an AI startup that automates accounting.

Their pitch to CFOs:

So they hired an actual cowboy, put him on a horse, and sent him to Wall Street.

How much did it cost?

$3,500.

They got thousands of site visits, hundreds of LinkedIn comments, and word-of-mouth spreading through CFO Slack groups. Alex Mann (head of growth) said every single prospect who entered their pipeline mentioned seeing them on LinkedIn.

It worked because it wasn’t random:

They took their own metaphor and acted it out. Literally.

I call this 📝 Literal Marketing 📝 → take a figure of speech from your industry and make it physical.

Like this dress code:

Ask yourself: If you had to physically act out your value proposition in a public place, what would that look like?

That’s your stunt.

P.S. When you send images of your stunts to the press (or social) → it’s best to use images where someone is taking a photo of your stunt.

Lunos did this perfectly in The Guardian:

#2

You don’t do the stunt for the stunt. You do it for the LinkedIn posts.

Speaking of cowboys.

At HubSpot Inbound last fall, Virio (tiny AI startup) hired cowboys to walk two horses around the conference.

The horses moved too fast. The crowd was thin. There was a 💩 situation.

By every normal event metric, it flopped.

But they still got 300+ qualified website visitors and some discovery calls.

Co-founder Emmett Chen-Ran said it directly: the goal was never the stunt. It was the social content the stunt would generate.

Eric Lay (co-founder) wrote a brutally honest post about the whole thing. Instead of a $40K booth, they spent it on horses. Got more eyeballs than any booth at the conference.

I love that.

The difference between a booth and a stunt is “shelf life”. A booth works for three days. Virio’s horses are still being talked about months later. You’re reading about them right now.

If you’re going to a conference this year, ask yourself: what would make someone stop and take a photo? 🤳

I wrote a whole playbook on this - 28 ways to generate buzz at events WITHOUT a booth or sponsorship.

Worth a read.

#3

Reddit just did something big. Most marketers missed it.

Reddit killed r/all last week. It means the universal feed is gone: Every user now gets a personalized feed.

I know, I know.

“Reddit did something” doesn’t sound like urgent news. But hear me out:

Your customers already use Reddit before they buy. Threads about your product rank high on Google and AI answers.

You just need to be there.

Most marketers have no idea how to show up on Reddit without getting banned. I found a proven way to be there. Readers who tried it said it works. What Reddit just changed makes it significantly easier.

Here’s exactly what changed and what to do about it 👇

Read more

I know that sounds like a hot take from a newsletter writer, but the trend speaks for itself. In 2-3 years this will be as obvious as “your company should have a website”.

Last week, OpenAI put a price tag on what that’s worth:

They acquired media company TBPN for “low hundreds of millions”.

For context, TBPN is a live show that two guys started just 17 (!) months ago 🤯

A week earlier, Plaid ($8B) bought This Week in Fintech, a newsletter with 200K subscribers.

Same story, over and over:

• HubSpot bought The Hustle (2.5M subs) + Starter Story (800k subs)

• Semrush bought Search Engine Land + Backlinko

• Zapier bought MakerPad

• Stripe bought Indie Hackers

• Ahrefs acquired Detailed.com

• a16z acquired Turpentine

10+ acquisitions, billions of dollars. All because a trusting audience is the most valuable asset a company can own.

But there’s a cheaper path:

You don’t have to buy a media empire - you can build one for $0 👇

I think building a media brand around your company is the biggest arbitrage in marketing right now. It makes your company look 10x bigger than it actually is. It makes people trust you before they ever talk to your sales team. And it costs almost nothing compared to what these acquirers paid.

I’ve actually done it twice before:

At Wiz, we built a podcast that became #1 in cloud security using a tactic that takes us maybe 2 hours a month. I built this newsletter to 82,000+ subscribers with no team. Both on the side, almost no budget.

What if your company was THE media brand in your industry?

(It’s easier than you think.)

My practical “media empire” playbook 🎁

Let’s build a media empire from scratch.

I put together the most comprehensive guide I’ve ever written on this:

50+ real examples to copy, trade secrets from Wiz and Hubspot, the exact tactics I personally used, and a step-by-step guide you can start executing today with a single person and ZERO resources.

Here’s what you’re getting:

• 📡 Database of 50+ examples: companies running media empires in 2026 (with exactly what each one built and how)

• 🧲 The Substack growth hack that your company blog will never have

• 🤝 How to get the biggest names in your industry to create content for your media brand, for free

• 📈 How to 10x your content output with one writer and zero AI (a tactic I accidentally discovered while working with HubSpot)

• 📘 A step-by-step playbook for launching and growing a media brand with one person

Read more

(I was home all week)

KitKat posted an “Official Statement” confirming the theft.

That post lit the whole internet on fire.

Within 48 hours, every major brand on social media was posting their own “Official Statement” ↓

Domino’s sent condolences (and announced their new Kit Kat pizza).

Dr. Squatch pitched chocolate-scented soap (”we have 12 TONS of ingredients btw”). Picsart confirmed their app “cannot hijack trucks”.

DoorDash, RØDE, Ryanair, KFC, McDonald’s... the list is still growing.

KitKat’s social team leaned in even harder and launched a “Stolen KitKat Tracker” where you can check if your bar is from the missing batch.

The truck is still missing.

Every “marketing guru” got this wrong ❌

I’ve seen dozens of posts about this in the last week. All saying the same recycled lessons:

• “Don’t be afraid to show vulnerability!”

• “Join the conversation!”

• “Position yourself!”

I hate this advice. Try walking into a Monday morning meeting and saying “our strategy this quarter is showing vulnerability”. Your boss will kick you out the door.

I’ve been doing marketing for 12 years. I think the reason Kitkat went viral is way more specific, and way more useful:

KitKat gave everyone a “job” to do 👏

Think about it:

1. 🍫 KitKat played the “victim”. Their tone was serious, which created space for everyone else to be funny.

2. 🪞 Other brands became “suspects”. The “Official Statement” format was so simple that any social media manager could copy it in 10 minutes and plug their own product.

3. 🔮 Regular people became “detectives”. Sharing screenshots, tagging brands, speculating who did it, etc. When the tracker launched, they also had a game to play.

Everyone on the planet had something to do!

That’s why it spread the way it did.

Same pattern every time something truly blows up. When Duolingo “killed” their owl, users had the “job” of figuring out what happened, other brands posted RIP, and Duolingo kept dripping cryptic updates over days.

When your audience has a “job” → they do your marketing for you.

How to copy this for your next launch 🧪

Ok enough theory. Here’s the actual playbook for your next big announcement:

1. 🍫 The 4 “jobs” your audience needs before anything spreads (with examples for all types of businesses)

2. 📱 A copy-paste social media sequence for staging a mystery launch from scratch, day by day

3. 🐣 The small brand version how to use this playbook with 400 followers and zero budget

4. 🚨 What happens when you DON’T give people a “job” how a $300M startup nearly killed itself last week by doing the exact opposite of KitKat

You’ll finish this article knowing exactly how to run a viral stunt -- what to post, when to post it, who to partner with, and what to avoid.

Read more

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Every Thursday at 12PM ET, I run a live Q&A for paid subscribers.

They can ask me anything: Marketing, growth, careers, launches, strategy, weird stuff.

Some of the recent questions were too good to keep behind the paywall, so here are my favorites (lightly edited for clarity and brevity).

How can I make a boring B2B product interesting on social? 😴

You don’t make the product interesting. You make the person interesting.

I was marketing a privacy-tech startup. Privacy is, objectively, not exciting. So I stopped trying to make it exciting and built campaigns celebrating Data Protection Officers (the humans doing the work) instead of the product. It outperformed everything product-focused we’d tried. I wrote about this here.

Think about why it works: A General Counsel who gets publicly celebrated as the unsung hero keeping the company out of legal trouble? That person 100% shares it. Their whole network sees your brand.

Praise the person. They’ll do your distribution for you.

Should I use LinkedIn automation for lead gen? 🤖

No. It’s all spam and everyone can smell it. Do inbound instead.

Here’s the playbook:

1. Send connection requests to your target audience with no welcome message. About 100/week is the safe max. Post daily about your niche. Don’t mention your product. Just share what you know about the problem it solves.

2. When someone engages with your content, THEN message them. Personally. Thank them for the comment, mention your product briefly if it fits.

Outbound LinkedIn is chasing strangers. Inbound means warm people are coming to you. The conversion rates aren’t in the same universe.

What’s the #1 thing to look for when sponsoring podcasts or newsletters? 🎙️

Does this creator actually USE the products they promote?

Check their past sponsorships. If the ad reads are personal, with their own experiences and real opinions, that’s who you want. If it reads like a script they saw five minutes before recording, pass.

That’s my best filter.

How do I build hype while still in stealth? 🤫

Lean into the mystery. It’s more interesting than a product demo anyway :)

1. Countdown teasers. Post every day. “19 days...” Then 18. Then 17. Humans love countdowns.

2. Buy the launch date as a domain (like 01-19-2026.com). Put a countdown timer, email capture, and maybe a raffle on it. Point all social traffic there.

3. Send the website or launch video to 20 influencers early. Don’t ask them to share it. Ask “may I get your feedback?” They feel invested before you ask for anything. And some of them will share it anyway, because people love leaking things they got early access to.

4. Vibe-code a .rip website for the problem you’re solving (as if it’s about to die) - with a graveyard of previous solutions. Great example here.

5. Censored content. Take a selfie with your cofounder, their face blurred, caption like “Building something huge with this person. Can’t say who yet.”

   

How do I get bold marketing ideas past risk-averse leadership? 😤

Win small first. Then swing big.

80% of your energy should go to safe, visible wins. Hit your numbers. Make your boss look good. Stack a track record of being right about small things.

Then use the other 20% to push through the bold thing. When you’ve been right about the small stuff, people give you room. Lenny Rachitsky wrote a great piece about this that I keep coming back to.

Most marketers pitch the risky idea before they’ve earned any trust. In my experience, that’s exactly why it dies.

Trust is like a currency - earn it first, then spend.

I have to rename my brand. How do I relaunch? 🔄

Treat it like a second launch. You literally get a second first impression.

Add “[formerly X]” temporarily so existing customers don’t get lost.

Then squeeze the rebrand for everything it’s worth. Document the process publicly: why you’re changing, the logo options you considered, the decisions you made. People love behind-the-scenes content. This alone gives you weeks of organic posts and humanizes the brand more than any campaign could.

How do I grow a job board with no budget? 📋

Three tactics:

1. Pinned spots for shares. Offer hiring managers a pinned spot on the board if they share it on LinkedIn. A little tacky, but it works because it’s a fair trade.

2. Logo grid graphics. “These companies are hiring engineering leaders right now” with a grid of recognizable brand logos. Gets 10x the engagement of a standard job-post link. I’ve seen this pattern work over and over. The logos are social proof that does the selling for you.

3. Undercover Reddit stunts. Post a spicy story about someone starting a new engineering leadership role. Someone in comments asks how they found it. OP links to your board. Sounds guerrilla because it is. I wrote about it here.

How do we grow a screen time blocker app with zero budget? 📵

Show up where the conversation is already happening.

I actually looked this up while answering this question live. Found a tweet about doomscrolling from that same day with 37,000+ engagements and thousands of people publicly saying “I have this problem”.

Those are your customers.

Your team needs to be in these conversations from personal profiles. When a post about phone addiction goes viral (and they do, regularly), be in the comments. Don’t pitch. Be useful. Mention what you’re building only when it fits the conversation.

P.S. Here’s how to find those conversations in real-time.

What’s the biggest mistake marketers make when pivoting? 🎯

Staying vague on purpose.

When a company pivots, leadership tries to keep messaging broad so they can pivot again if needed. They hedge. They use words that could mean anything.

The problem: a pivot is already confusing for your market. Vague messaging on top means almost nobody understands what you actually do now.

Pick one promise and commit to it. If you’re wrong, you can pivot again. A clear wrong bet teaches you what doesn’t resonate. Vagueness teaches you nothing because you can’t measure a reaction to something no one understood.

Gated or ungated content for lead gen? 🔐

Simple filter:

If it’s deeply tactical and hard to find elsewhere: gate it. People will trade their email for something they can’t Google.

If sharing it would make someone look smart: ungate it. The reach and brand awareness is worth more than the email addresses. When someone shares your content to look smart, they’re doing your marketing for free.

How should I upgrade my CV for a Head of Brand role? 📄

Three things:

First, make your most recent title match the role as closely as possible. If “Digital Media Lead” can honestly be reframed closer to brand, change it. Hiring managers (including myself) pattern-match titles before they read anything else.

Second, don’t put too much focus on metrics. Attribution in brand work is messy and everyone knows it. List actual projects with hyperlinks instead.

Third, and this is the best move for brand roles specifically: redesign your CV in the company’s brand colors. Someone did this for Spotify and it went viral. It shows taste, effort, and the exact skill they’re hiring for, all in one.

How to come up with content ideas without getting stuck? 🧠

Lurk on Reddit 24/7. Seriously.

Find the subreddits where your audience hangs out, and see what they talk about, complain about, ask about, argue about. That’s an endless stream of content ideas because it’s what real people actually care about right now.

Every post that gets 500+ upvotes in your niche is a content idea someone already validated for you.

How to do marketing in an industry where hype destroys trust? 🏦

Ask questions instead of making statements.

“What would happen to your family’s lifestyle if you couldn’t work for 6 months?” is just a question. But the person reading it will probably think about disability insurance for the next 20 minutes without anyone telling them to.

That’s the whole game in trust-first industries (finance, legal, healthcare, consulting). You don’t manufacture urgency. You surface a concern they already have but haven’t put into words yet. Once someone answers that question in their own head → they’ve basically sold themselves.

Three things I’d build:

1. A calculator. “Are you on track for retirement?” They discover the gap themselves. You didn’t tell them anything. The data did the selling.

2. “A client asked me...” posts on LinkedIn. “A client inherited $500K last month and had no idea what to do first.”

3. Client stories with no moral. Share what happened. Don’t say “this could be you.” Just tell the story and stop. Let the reader draw their own conclusion.

Best advice for launching a first product? 🚢

Waitlist + manufactured exclusivity.

Start a waitlist. Promote it hard. Make the product invite-only at launch.

Once you have 1,000+ signups, DM creators in your space: “Over a thousand people are waiting for this, but I’d love to give you early access in exchange for feedback.”

You don’t really need their feedback. You need visible people using your product. Once they’re in, they feel like insiders. “I got early access to this thing everyone’s waiting for” is content they want to post. You turned your launch into their social currency.

How do I market a Voice AI widget for websites? 🤖

A few ideas for your product:

1. Record a split screen. Your widget vs. a traditional contact form. Same question. Widget answers in 8 seconds. Contact form: still waiting 3 days later. That’s your entire pitch in one video.

2. Find bad checkout experiences and fix them publicly. “We added our AI to [industry]’s worst checkout flow.” Before/after. Tag similar companies. This works because you’re giving them free value and calling out a problem they know they have.

3. Hire voice actors on Fiverr to create funny conversations with your AI. Ridiculous 2am requests. People share funny stuff.

4. If you’re bold: pick a customer’s website, install your agent, and stream a live dashboard on X showing every sale it closes over 24 hours.

And install it on your own site first. If you don’t trust it enough to put it front and center on your homepage, why would anyone else?

Should I create a new category or compete in existing ones? 🗂️

I’d say compete (99.9% of the time).

Category creation takes years, costs a fortune, and confuses your market. Most startups die before it pays off.

“It’s like X but for Y” or “It’s X without the annoying Z” works because people need somewhere in their brain to file you. Give them that familiar drawer to put you in. Once you win, the new category shows up on its own. Customers start describing you differently. Analysts pick it up. But that happens after traction. Always after.

Good example: white chocolate isn’t technically “chocolate”. It’s sweet cocoa butter. But when it launched in the 1950s, the makers didn’t try to create a new category.

They called it “chocolate” (familiar) and added “white” (different). That’s the perfect move: state what you ARE using language people already know. Then add what makes you DIFFERENT.

How do I get more value out of speaking at events? 🎤

The talk itself is maybe 10% of the value.

Get someone following you around with a camera. Have conversations with known people at the event. Being a speaker makes you the event’s superstar automatically so most people would agree to talk. After a minute of chat, ask for a photo.

Every photo can then become a LinkedIn post. Tag them → their audience sees you. One day at a conference can give you weeks of content. The ROI is in the networking documentation, never the keynote itself.

How do I repurpose old webinar recordings and eBooks? ♻️

Rename them.

• “Webinar recording” → “Mini-course” or “Masterclass”

• “eBook” → “Playbook”

Split the webinar into individual lessons. Now it’s a course.

How to get a good testimonial from a customer? 💌

Timing is everything.

Ask them for a testimonial when they’re at ✨ peak happiness ✨ with your product.

The best way to do this: set up an automation that captures a success moment inside your product (first big win, milestone hit, goal reached) and triggers an email celebrating them with a gentle ask for a review.

The email copy should celebrate their achievement first, then ask. “You just hit [milestone], that’s amazing. Would you mind sharing a quick review?” People are far more likely to write something genuine when they’re already feeling good. You can also offer a gift card if budget allows. I wrote more about this here.

What will startup marketing look like in 2026? 🔮

Here’s what I see:

1. AI makes content free to produce. So the market floods with average stuff. The companies that publish less but make it weirder and more personal will own attention.

2. Founders who show their face and tell the truth about building their company will get more attention than brand accounts. Your face is your best ad.

3. Your employees’ LinkedIn accounts are also worth more than your brand account. Give your team posts to share. Make graphics about them. Let them take the credit.

4. Physical marketing is coming back. Everyone’s in the same digital channels with the same AI content. A handwritten note to 50 prospects will probably outperform your paid social budget because it’s surprising.

5. The smartest positioning move right now: go against the AI wave. While everyone screams “do more faster” → say “think deeper, make better stuff.” That’s where the loyal audience is.

6. Mini-tools will replace free trials. Give away something tiny that solves one problem. Just like my favorite mantra: get the user before your competitor gets the email!

7. And the boring stuff still wins. Good emails. Referral programs. Fast landing pages.

These came from one hour of live Q&A. Paid subscribers get a seat every Thursday at 12PM ET. Bring your weird and personal questions to the next one:

Join the next Q&A

See you inside ✌️

Tom

But that’s not why it went extremely viral.

Look at the first line:

“The entire row is alllllll yours.”

Not “all yours.” Alllllll. One stretched word.

It got them 33 million views - and it proved a human wrote it. No AI would ever write “alllllll”. It’s grammatically wrong, it looks weird, and that’s exactly why it works.

This is called a 🌀 pattern interrupt 🌀: Something in the first line that makes your brain go “wait what?” instead of keep scrolling.

I’ve written thousands of social posts so far.

Pattern interrupts are my single best LinkedIn trick. I used them to grow Wiz’s page from zero to 400K followers, and some of those posts crossed 1 million impressions. The pattern interrupt is a big reason why.

My. Favorite. Version. ⭐️

Another pattern interrupt that works really well: Putting a period after every single word.

Instead of “This is massive” you write:

“This. is. massive!”

Instead of “Oh my gosh” you write:

“OH. MY. GOSH.”

The periods force people to read each word separately instead of skimming past.

Your cheat sheet (9 pattern interrupts to steal) 📋

It took me years and thousands of posts to figure these out.

You get them in 3 minutes :)

Below are 9 proven pattern interrupts with real examples you can copy-paste. No creativity needed. Grab one, drop it into your first line, and I can pretty much guarantee the results will surprise you.

Let's go:

Read more

The ones who turned out to be superstars all had something in common: they made stuff on the internet. Side projects. Newsletters. Viral experiments. Weird little tools. They were the kind of people who couldn’t help themselves, they just HAD to make things. They’re the opposite of what I’ve seen other companies end up hiring.

And the #1 reason companies keep hiring the wrong ones? The job description itself.

Every company writes the same thing:

• ❌ “5-7 years of experience in B2B SaaS”

• ❌ “Manage cross-functional stakeholders”

• ❌ “Develop and execute marketing strategies”

These attract traditional marketers. Not the kind of people who make things go viral.

Then in February 2026, Kalshi posted a job description that made my jaw drop:

They knew exactly who they wanted and exactly how to describe them. $8 million for the right marketing person. That’s how much a great marketer is worth.

I’ve been collecting job descriptions like this since 2020. Every time I see a line that makes me think “omg, THAT’S what makes a great marketer,” I copy it into a Google Doc.

It’s 57 pages now. Kalshi, Amie, Levels, Wiz, Morning Brew, Google, and dozens more.

I used everything I learned from this collection (plus 100+ interviews and 6 years of hiring) to build a job description template. One modular doc with “blocks” for creative stunts, analytics, community, content, paid growth, product-led growth, partnerships, and technical stuff. Each requirement is built from real phrases in the best JDs I’ve collected. Pick the blocks that match your role, delete the rest.

And today, I’m sharing it with you, along with the full 57-page collection.

Here’s what you’re getting:

1. 📋 The full job description template (keep it forever)

2. 🗂️ My full 57-page database of the best marketing job descriptions ever written, with highlighted phrases you can steal

3. 🔍 The 8 things I look for in candidates after 100+ interviews (with how to check each one)

4. 🕵️ Where to actually find these people (not on LinkedIn Jobs)

5. 🤝 How to make them say “yes” (most CEOs hire too early)

6. 📅 The first 90 days plan for what your new hire should actually do

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

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

But they read TLDR. 6 million tech professionals subscribe to these daily newsletters because they actually want them. You can sponsor any of their 12 newsletters (AI, DevOps, Marketing) and reach people who are actually reading (including me).

Open rates are 40-48% and they write the ad copy for you.

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#1

The “URL Hunt” is the simplest challenge you’ll ever run

At Wiz, we had a sleep-themed booth at a conference.

So we bought 30+ domains like wizzz.io, wizzzzzzz.io, and wizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.io… Each with a different number of Z’s 💤

Only one URL showed a winner page.

Visitors had to guess the right number of Z’s to win swag.

People went nuts. They kept coming back to our booth to try again. Some of them pulled out their laptops and wrote scripts to brute-force every URL at once 😂

When your audience starts coding to beat your game, you’ve won.

My take: Works for conferences, but also for social posts, newsletters, product launches, whatever. Buy a few domains for $10-30 each, hide something fun behind one of them, and give people a clue. Easiest game ever.

#2

How hard is it to respect women at conferences?

In 2024, Palo Alto Networks used women as human lamp holders at an event:

They got absolutely destroyed online. CISOs did not like it.

The CEO had to publicly apologize.

Last week, it happened again:

At LegalWeek in New York, a company called Zantaz put up a booth featuring an AI-generated woman in a tight red dress and text “Who knows what she really wants...”

The company’s president said this was “the type of attention our entire design team was hoping for”.

Yikes.

Here’s a marketing idea for you all: Put women on stage, not on display. Make sure they get a mic, a panel, a keynote slot, a quote on the website. It’s really not that difficult. Come on.

#3

The best RSA strategy is skipping RSA

A big cybersecurity conference called RSA is coming up.

Your LinkedIn feed is probably drowning in “Meet me at RSA!” posts… RSA fatigue before it even started.

Clover Security saw this mess, and their CEO posted this gem:

They set up a matcha bar at a separate location nearby. No booth noise, just good conversations. I love it.

My take: When everyone screams “MEET ME AT THE CONFERENCE” → be the person who offers a break from it. We took the same approach at Wiz and put a “No-AI Zone” outside of RSA.

Sometimes the best marketing is just letting people take a break.

#4

Tell people what to buy with the money they’ll save

Senja sends this email to help users switch to annual billing:

That’s ridiculously funny.

My take: This is the kind of email people screenshot and post on LinkedIn/X (which is exactly how I found it). If your product saves people money or time, show them something stupid they could do with it. That one email becomes free marketing.

#5

Screenshot marketing still works

I wrote a full article about screenshots a while back.

This week, the social app Poke put what looks like an internal team chat on a highway billboard.

My take: Ads look like ads. Screenshots look like accidents. That’s the whole game.

Have a great week ✌️

Read more

Anthropic is paying customers to throw meetups in their city

The program is called Claude Community Ambassadors.

The deal:

You host local meetups, Anthropic covers all costs. They also send swag, give you monthly API credits, early access to new features, and a private Slack with the team.

That’s a fantastic marketing idea.

I recommended meetups & local events in my guide for reaching customers when the internet is 90% AI slop. Friends of Figma was my go-to example.

Anthropic is even better.

And it’s good for acquiring *new* customers too: Someone’s friend invites them to a local tech meetup → they show up → and suddenly they know about Claude.

How to steal this idea: Find ONE customer from each country worldwide. Send them a personal email from the founder. Give them insider status and a small budget. They’ll represent you locally 10x better than any employee could, because they chose to love your product. Let them run local events for almost $0.

#2

The $0 trick that gets replies from enterprise accounts

If you’re selling to enterprise, there’s one move I always recommend first.

It takes about 10 minutes, costs nothing, and almost guarantees a reply from your target account.

Here’s the smartest ABM play (+examples):

Read more

IT’S OFFICIAL: Google acquired Wiz for $32 billion.

I’ve been the Director of Growth Marketing at Wiz for 3.5 years now. When I joined, CISOs would ask “What’s Wiz..?” on sales calls. Today we’re a household name in cybersecurity and also the biggest acquisition in Google’s history.

Here’s my A-Z playbook for how we marketed Wiz from zero to $32,000,000,000.

A written summary (+ a list of actionable tactics) is available for paid subscribers 👇

Read more

Every week I send you the 5 most interesting marketing moves I spotted in the wild. Quick real examples, the stuff you can steal tomorrow.

Let’s go ↓

#1

Your CEO is not an influencer (please stop trying)

McDonald’s CEO posted a video trying their new Big Arch burger. He called it “this product” (not burger), held it like a science experiment, couldn’t smile, and took the TINIEST bite imaginable 🫣

The internet destroyed him.

Burger King’s president then posted himself devouring a Whopper (sauce on his cheek), and Wendy’s president jumped in inhaling a Baconator. Full CEO burger war.

Credit where it’s due: McDonald’s official page then called it a “product” again (on purpose). A wink at the meme.

That part was actually well played.

But the damage was already done.

And the real question is: who approved that original video?

A room full of marketers probably watched that video and said “Wow, it’s perfect!”

I’ve been in those rooms. The marketing team can tell something’s off. But the CEO just filmed it, he’s proud of it, and now you’re supposed to give “feedback”. Good luck.

My take: The best marketing teams I’ve worked with are the ones where someone can say “this is NOT good” without it being a career move. That’s rare. And that’s why most CEO content is mega-cringe to watch.

What to do instead? 🧠

1. Find a superfan or power user. Invite them to be the first person in the world to try your new product. Film their real reaction. That’s content people actually want to watch.

2. Just hire an actor (like burger brand A&W did).

#2

This company DOUBLED its Google searches in 24 hours (zero ads)

Look at this:

Behind that spike is a marketing idea so simple you’ll be mad you didn’t think of it first.

This company just took a small chunk of their ad budget and did something SO OBVIOUS that most brands would never think of it. 13+ million views in 24 hours, Google searches more than doubled, all organic.

Here’s what they did ↓

Read more

Building marketing emails takes forever: you’re either stuck with basic templates or waiting on a developer for custom designs or mechanics.

Stripo is an email template builder that lets you design better emails 3-10x faster with drag-and-drop and modules, then export them to whatever platform you use - Mailchimp, Gmail, HubSpot, Outlook 90+ others.

65% of Fortune 100 companies use it. I tried it and it’s WAY more flexible than building in other ways.

Try Stripo free →

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Get yourself a “hype monkey” 🐒

This is Trevor.

He’s technically a “Junior Media Intern” at Torq (a cybersecurity company). He posts memes, does ridiculous stunts at conferences, and stars in a whole video series called TorqTV.

He also doesn’t exist.

Trevor is a fictional character played by an actor. And he’s one of the best marketing assets in tech right now.

At conferences, people literally stop him to take photos:

That’s a Hype Monkey. 🐒

A Hype Monkey is a person (real or fictional) whose actual job is to post on social media all day from their personal profile and create positive noise for the company.

They post memes, behind-the-scenes moments, hot takes, and goofy content that has nothing to do with the product. People follow them because they’re entertaining - and eventually that goodwill transfers to the brand.

Every tech company should have one.

Your CEO can’t do this ❌

Your founder has a professional reputation to protect.

The Hype Monkey doesn’t need any filters. They can be sillier, edgier, more irreverent. They can post a meme making fun of your own industry without it reflecting poorly on the CEO.

That freedom is exactly what makes the content so good.

LinkedIn’s algorithm makes this 10x more powerful 🌀

LinkedIn is connection-based. That’s the secret engine here.

The algorithm shows you content from people you’re connected to, especially content that your other connections are engaging with.

It works like this:

1. Your Hype Monkey sends connection requests to 50-100 target prospects every week.

2. Then your other employees (sales, marketing, whoever) connect with those same prospects.

3. Every day, those employees like and comment on the Monkey’s posts.

4. Suddenly, LinkedIn’s algorithm understands that multiple people in the prospect’s network are engaging with the same profile, so it pushes the Monkey’s posts to the top of the prospect’s feed.

Now the algorithm shows the Monkey’s content to that prospect ALL THE TIME:

The prospect never asked for this. They just accepted a few connection requests. But now your Hype Monkey is making them laugh in their feed daily, and your brand is along for the ride.

All of this costs you one salary. No ad spend required.

The viral formula is stupidly simple 🧪

There are tons of great “Hype Monkey” examples:

Carmen Vicente from Slate, Izzy Kim from Clay, Max Pete from Sprout Social, Vince Chan from Gong (until recently), and my absolute favorite - Renee Shaw from tl;dv.

Renée’s LinkedIn title is literally “your mom at tl;dv”. She makes satirical video skits about everyday work pain points and has a huge following.

Her biggest posts are never about jumping on trends, Renée told me when I interviewed her (she also writes about it on her Substack). She takes a universal work problem and ties it to something completely absurd.

One of her most viral posts:

Do you see anything about tl;dv here? I don’t. Her content NEVER mentions product features - but everyone who follows her knows exactly where she works.

She also gave me a smart take on matching humor to audience: engineers love bleeding-edge memes, marketers respond to feeling “seen,” salespeople enjoy broad industry commentary, etc.

Your Hype Monkey needs to study who they’re posting for.

The “Hype Monkey” playbook 📕

Here’s how to actually do it:

1. 📍 Find the right person. You’re looking for someone young (ideally Gen Z) who wants to get into marketing but doesn’t have much experience yet. That’s the sweet spot, because when you hand someone like that their own social media account and say “your job is to be funny and post every day” → they’ll be 10x more excited about it than any senior marketer would.

2. 🦄 This can be a real employee or a contracted actor (like Trevor from Torq). Both work. An employee is more authentic, but an actor gives you more control and the character stays with the company if they leave.

3. 🧩 In between posting, they can help with operational marketing tasks that you shouldn’t be spending your time on anyway. So you’re getting a Hype Monkey plus a useful junior team member.

4. 🧠 Weaponize the LinkedIn algorithm. Get the monkey to connect with 50-100 prospects weekly. Get every employee to engage with the Monkey’s posts. This floods prospects’ feeds organically, as explained above.

5. 🌈 Put them everywhere. Conferences (where people will eventually stop them for photos), webinars, product demo videos, podcast appearances. The more surfaces they show up on → the stronger the effect.

Start with whoever’s loudest at your company 🐒

Pick the most charismatic person at your company and give them 2-3 hours a day to post and engage. Run it for 3 months.

Track whether sales is hearing “oh I already know you guys” on calls.

If it works (I think it will), hire someone full-time.

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- Tom ✌️

If you’re trying to get in front of technical decision makers: TLDR is where they’re already paying attention.

6M+ tech professionals subscribe across 12 newsletters (AI, DevOps, InfoSec, Marketing and more) because they actually want to read them.

Open rates avg. 40-46%. They even handle the ad copy so you don’t have to.

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Happy Monday!

Every week I send you the 5 smartest marketing moves I spotted in the wild. Quick real examples, the stuff you can steal tomorrow.

Let’s go ↓

#1

Anthropic is running ads on your error messages (and it’s genius)

Here’s a sneaky Google Ads move I loved:

When a developer hits a bug, they often copy-paste the error message straight into Google (hoping to find a solution). For most of these niche errors, there are barely any search results. And definitely no ads.

So… Anthropic started bidding on those exact searches:

Think about it: Someone is literally stuck, already googling for a fix, and Anthropic shows up saying “I can solve this for you right now”.

My take: you don’t need to be an AI company to do this. Just think about what your audience googles when something goes wrong and bid on that keyword. Even spicier: bid on the actual error messages your competitor’s product shows.

#2

Coinbase put Subway Surfers on their earnings call

Yes, really 😅

Earnings calls are the most boring content any company produces.

So Coinbase released their Q4 results video with a Subway Surfers game playing on the top half of the screen. Like a TikTok brainrot meme, but for financial reporting.

People loved it:

This is exactly what Slack does with their App Store release notes. No one actually reads them. So the marketing team of Slack stopped pretending anyone would:

My take: Every company has boring touchpoints - release notes, legal pages, earnings calls, etc. These are the BEST PLACES to inject personality, because everyone expects nothing there. When you surprise people in a space they’ve learned to ignore → it works 10x better than being creative where everyone is already trying to be creative.

The marketing idea is this:

1. Look at every touchpoint you control.

2. Find the boring ones.

3. Go be weird there. The bar for standing out is basically zero.

#3

Make your website playable

People don’t read websites. They scroll. Fast.

Unless there’s something to play with 🙃

That’s workers.cloudflare.com - one of my favorite finds this weekend. You can spin the globe, drag it, interact with it. Almost every strip is playable.

Even the footer SVGs are draggable:

We see this at Wiz too. We built a nutcracker strip that lets you click to crack security problems. On our heatmap - it’s the #1 most clicked element on the entire homepage. By far!

Why you should do it: interactive website = longer visits = stronger SEO = more organic traffic.

#4

Spotify is selling a $495 urn

An urn is what you put someone’s ashes in after they die.

Spotify and Liquid Death made one together… With a Bluetooth speaker in the lid.

You can actually buy it right now for $495.

The idea is that your family can play your favorite songs at your grave. Forever. Which is either beautiful or INSANE (depending on how you look at it). 🤣

They also made an Eternal Playlist Generator that builds a post-mortem playlist from your listening history.

It’s a super smart stunt:

1. ❌ Will they sell many urns? Nah… a few dozen maybe.

2. ✅ Will millions of people talk about it? Yes. Already happening!

The marketing trick is to manufacture a tiny batch of something crazy. The product IS the press release.

My take: The formula is simple. (1) Take your biggest fan. (2) Ask: what’s the most ridiculous way I could serve them? (3) Create a small-batch product that does it. Spotify’s answer was “let them listen to their playlist in their grave”. And boom. They got a fantastic headline.

#5

Google just killed the $2,000 product photoshoot

Google Labs dropped a tool called Photoshoot this week.

You upload one basic phone photo of your product → the AI turns it into clean studio shots or lifestyle images in under a minute. 🤯

Watch the full video because it’s actually insane:

My take: Go grab it while it’s free. Try it here.

Have an amazing week ✌️

They can’t always explain why it feels off.

But something in their brain goes “nah” and they continue scrolling.

You’ve done it yourself. You’ve read a LinkedIn post and thought “this is ChatGPT” before you even finished the second sentence.

Now imagine your audience doing that to your content:

Your emails. Your landing pages. Your LinkedIn posts. Every time they scroll past, you lose a tiny bit of credibility. And credibility, once lost, is really hard to earn back. ❌

I’ll be honest with you: this is the #1 thing I worry about as a marketer right now. Not growth. Not ad costs. Whether my audience trusts that I’m the one talking to them.

Most marketers don’t even know what’s giving them away. 🤦🏻‍♂️

They think the fix is to ask AI to “add a personal touch” or “make it more conversational”. I see this advice everywhere and it drives me crazy. That’s not the problem. The problem is that AI writes in very specific patterns that are invisible to the writer but obvious to everyone reading.

I’ve found over 24 patterns that make writing sound AI-generated.

Every single one is fixable.

Once you learn what they are, two things happen: you can never unsee them (you’ll start spotting them everywhere, including in content from marketers you respect), and your own writing gets *dramatically* better.

The weird thing is, I haven’t seen anyone compile these properly. People talk about “making AI sound more human” in vague terms. But I couldn’t find a single resource that listed the exact patterns, words, and structures to avoid.

So I built one myself. ✅

I personally run every single thing I write through these rules before I publish. I refuse to let anything out the door that could make someone think “AI wrote this.”

Today I’m handing you my entire checklist.

This is what I wish I had when I first started worrying about AI cringe.

Here’s what’s inside:

1. 🧪 What makes writing “sound AI” (it’s not what most people think)

2. 🔍 13 weird AI patterns to avoid with before/after fixes for each one

3. 🚫 List of 100+ banned words and phrases that only AI uses

4. ✏️ How to add your own voice back after AI strips it out (this is a super-important step everyone skips)

5. 📋 The copy & paste prompt that fixes all of the above for you automatically

Read more

If you’re trying to get in front of technical decision makers: TLDR is where they’re already paying attention.

6M+ tech professionals subscribe across 12 newsletters (AI, DevOps, InfoSec, Marketing and more) because they actually want to read them.

Open rates avg. 40-46%. They even handle the ad copy so you don’t have to.

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A baby monkey named Punch broke the internet this week.

He’s a 7-month-old macaque at a zoo near Tokyo. His mom abandoned him after birth. The other monkeys rejected him too.

So zookeepers gave him a stuffed orangutan toy to keep him company:

He drags it with him everywhere he goes.

The whole world lost their minds over this little guy.

30+ million views on TikTok. Stephen Colbert talked about him on TV. The zoo had lines so long they had to publicly apologize.

The stuffed toy is actually a $19.99 IKEA product.

You can try to buy it right now if it’s not sold out near you (it probably is).

IKEA confirmed the DJUNGELSKOG orangutan toy has sold out across Japan, the United States and South Korea.

IKEA didn’t plan any of this. But what they did next turned a baby monkey story into one of the BIGGEST marketing wins of 2026.

And they spent $0 on it.

Here’s what they did ↓

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1. IKEA’s social media manager did NOT ask for permission 👑

Most companies, when a viral moment shows up, call a meeting, brief the agency, get legal to sign off, and spend a week producing a polished asset.

By the time they post something → the moment is gone.

Elissa Wardrop runs social for IKEA and did something 10x simpler:

She immediately grabbed the toy from her office, walked outside, put it on the grass, and took a photo with her phone.

That was it.

The result of her little “photoshoot”:

110K likes on Facebook alone!

If she had waited for a professional photographer, the moment would have passed. If she had sent it to legal first, the moment would have passed. If she had briefed an agency, the moment would have passed.

That's exactly why I love this quote of Thanos:

Just do it yourself.

In real-time marketing, speed > quality.

So next time something goes viral that’s connected to your world: grab your phone, make something scrappy, and post it fast.

2. Donate first, sell later 🧸

Within days of Punch going viral, IKEA Japan donated tons of stuffed toys to the zoo.

For Punch and for the other animals too.

The mayor of Ichikawa City posted about it. And just like that, IKEA became heroes.

Most marketers would’ve jumped straight to “BUY THE TOY PUNCH USES!”

It would have felt gross.

IKEA donated first, and only then started promoting.

By giving to the zoo, they earned the right to sell to everyone else. They became part of Punch’s story instead of hijacking it.

This is what I call 🔓 story permission 🔓:

When something goes viral and your brand wants to participate, you can’t just show up and sell. The donation is what gave IKEA permission to enter the story. After that, every ad they ran (”Punch’s comfort orangutan”) felt natural instead of forced.

You don’t need to be IKEA to pull this off:

If something blows up that’s even loosely connected to your industry, find a way to contribute (donate) and you’re part of the conversation.

For example-

1. 💻 If you sell software → give free access to a nonprofit that’s trending

2. 🧠 If you’re a consultant → offer a free audit to whoever’s blowing up.

3. ✏️ If you write a newsletter → cover their story and send them traffic.

The mechanic is always the same: donate publicly, get associated with the story, and earn the right to promote later. That’s your “story permission”.

3. The *real* reason Punch went viral 📈

The zoo’s first post about Punch went up on February 5.

It got massive traction.

Any normal brand would celebrate and move on. But the zoo posted again the next day. And the day after that. And so on.

Each post was like another chapter.

People started checking in on Punch daily like it was a TV show.

Punch went viral NOT because of a single cute video - but because of weeks of daily updates from the zoo.

The zoo gave the internet an ongoing story that people actually cared about: Will the other monkeys accept Punch? Will he be ok? Every day there was a new update, and every day people came back to find out.

That’s the part worth studying: Most marketing content you create is standalone. Each post lives on its own, with no connection to yesterday’s or tomorrow’s. That’s why people never build the habit of coming back.

A daily series is the opposite: It gives people a reason to come back. And the zoo proved my point.

Here’s how you can apply this principle to go viral:

1. 🎉 When you launch a product: Don’t do one big announcement. Make people follow along for many days. For example: Day 1: the idea. Day 2: the first prototype. Day 3: the first customer reaction. And so on.

2. 💌 When you share a case study: Break it into chapters like the problem, what you tried, the results, etc.

3. 🎬 When you run a campaign: Show the process. The brainstorm whiteboard. The rejected concepts. The final version. People love watching things get made.

When something works, post a follow-up the next day. Show the behind-the-scenes. Share the reactions. Keep feeding the story for as long as people care.

The 3 principles you should steal today 🧠

Here’s the marketing masterclass:

1. Speed > polish in real-time marketing. Grab your phone and go.

2. Donate first, sell second. Earn your way into the story before you promote.

3. Turn anything into a series. One post is a spark… daily updates are a bonfire.

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Have an amazing week ✌️

Tom

“If you had to start a new company from scratch today, how would you market it?”

I gave my best shot.

But the question stuck with me.

I kept thinking about it on the flight home.

Then the next day. Then the entire week. I got a little obsessed. 🫣

Because I’ve actually done this before: I helped build Wiz to $32B. Grew this newsletter to 75,000 subscribers. Built a side project that hit 2 million users in 48 hours.

And every time, it was all about doing the right things in the right order.

So I wrote it all down. If I had to grow a new company from scratch tomorrow, this is EXACTLY what I’d do. Step by step. The full marketing playbook.

Now listen:

I’m tired of bad marketing advice that sounds smart but doesn’t help.

• ❌ “Define your ICP!”

• ❌ “Send cold emails!”

• ❌ “Host webinars!”

• ❌ “Build a lead magnet!”

You’ve seen it a million times. I have too. It’s not wrong, it’s just... not useful when you’re starting with zero budget, zero audience, and zero time to waste.

So I created what I actually wish I had myself when I started out. It’s a long practical playbook on what to do when starting from scratch + examples + biggest mistakes to avoid ✅

And now it’s yours.

Here’s the best marketing guide I’ve ever written:

Read more

How the top 1% of marketers think

Let’s play a game:

You’re the CMO of Polymarket. You want to run subway ads in NYC. What do you do?

Think about it for a second.

...

Many marketers would:

1. Google “best subway ad campaigns” for inspiration

2. Ask the agency for specs

3. Make something clever (or reuse an existing ad)

4. Put it up

5. Done

That’s fine.

Polymarket did something smarter… 🧠

They went and looked at how people REACTED to previous subway ads. And they found this:

I wrote about Friend.com’s subway disaster a few months ago. People hated the “AI friend” idea so much they vandalized almost every ad.

Now here’s where most marketers stop. 🛑

They see that and think: “Ok let’s not be controversial. Let’s make ads people WON’T scribble on.”

That’s level 1 thinking.

Polymarket went level 9000.

They looked at the Friend.com vandalism and thought:

“What if we WANT people to write on our ads?”

So they made ads that literally invite defacement:

Look at this beauty: controversial bets in big font, TONS of white space, and grid lines like a school notebook.

Polymarket basically said: “Write here. We dare you.” 💡

Now every time someone scribbles on a Polymarket ad → they’re making free content. Because people take photos and debate online.

The vandalism IS the campaign.

The big takeaway:

• ❌ Lazy marketers study other campaigns to avoid their mistakes.

• ✅ Great marketers ask: “Can I turn that mistake into a feature?”

My take: Next time you’re planning any campaign, go study how audiences REACTED to similar campaigns. If there’s a negative reaction that keeps showing up, ask yourself: is there a way to make that reaction work FOR me? The best marketers I know do this instinctively.

That’s the difference between good marketers and f*cking exceptional ones.

#2

This company tried one of my favorite marketing ideas… and blew it

Typos and “mistakes” in your marketing are incredible attention magnets.

It proves a human was involved.

But this week a major brand crossed a line with it (and got cancelled) ❌

Here’s the full story + the huge mistake they made:

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