How to make people trust your brand 🫆

13 marketing plays to look more trustworthy (on a $0 budget)

For decades, marketing had one cheat code: MONEY.

That was enough to win:

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

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

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

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

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

Money was your moat.

But then winter came.

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

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

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

You know what I mean:

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

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

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

“Can I actually trust these guys?”

Trust is the new moat.

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

How to build trust for your brand 🌱

I’ve built trust twice in my career:

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s exactly what to do: