Rude Marketing 101 đ
Steal these savage growth ideas.
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#1
The most savage âsocial proofâ Iâve seen
Look at the logos on the homepage of Pylon:
âMigrated offâ. đ¤Ż
They grouped their customers by which competitor they left!
My take: If your customers came from a competitor â thatâs your strongest selling point. Donât bury it in a case study. Put it right on the homepage where every visitor sees it.
Thanks Ben Lang for sending this
#2
I found a 30-second trick to get more X followers.
Just swap your regular X profile link for this one:
https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=YOURHANDLE
Thatâs it.
When someone clicks it, instead of landing on your profile, they get a popup that says âDo you want to follow @you?â with a big Follow button.
Itâs amazing.
We switched this at Wiz and the numbers went up pretty much immediately.
My take: Put it in your website footer, email signature, link-in-bio. Anywhere youâre linking to your X (Twitter) page. Easy quick win!
#3
A masterclass in roasting your competitor
Ok this campaign is incredible:
A few weeks ago I wrote about ChatGPT adding adsâŚ
Anthropic saw blood in the water and went ALL in. đĽ They made a series of ads where AI interrupts you with sponsored garbage:
It blew up.
Sam Altman responded with a long thread defending OpenAI, and I honestly think that was a mistake â
You can only punch up. Punching down makes you look insecure. OpenAI is the giant here, Anthropic is the challenger. When the giant responds seriously to a joke â it loses.
Best move was probably silence. Second best was posting a ChatGPT user growth graph with the caption âlolâ â
My take: I love Anthropicâs ad because they found the one thing everyone already fears about AI and made it funny. They didnât invent a problem. They just said out loud what weâre all thinking. Thatâs the whole trick with attack ads- find the thing people already believe and turn up the volume.
#4
This is becoming the new âMac vs. PCâ
Anthropic isnât the only one running this playbook:
Webflow invented the âAI Guyâ - a confidently wrong chatbot who makes up everything about your brand.
And even Amazon Alexa dropped a super funny ad with an AI that âtries to kill youâ.
See the pattern? They all humanize chatbots + make AI look dumb.
This feels like the start of a trend. And it totally gives me Mac vs. PC vibes.
Appleâs template got copied for a decade. I think âyour product vs. dumb AIâ is going to be the next version of that.
It works because everyone has been burned by bad AI answers.
My take: If your product solves an AI-related problem (or helps people avoid an AI-related annoyance) â youâve got a ready-made ad format. This template is going to get copied a lot over the next few years so better be early.
#5
How to insult a competitor AND get away with it
Figmaâs had a rough few months. Stock is down. Everyoneâs expecting them to ship something big with AI. The pressure is real.
So what did they announce this week?
Image-to-vector conversion đ People were expecting more.
So two hours later, Notion posted this:
âALERT THE PRESS!â for a totally unimportant feature đ¤Ł
My take: This is the *cleanest* way to be rude to a competitor. No tags, no mentions, no screenshots. Just a well-timed post that makes everyone laugh at the right target. If Figma responds, they look defensive. If they ignore it, the joke still lands. Notion wins either way.
Have an amazing week âď¸
P.S. Done something cool at work recently? Send it my way! Iâd love to feature your unconventional/crazy marketing projects as an inspiration drop in the next few weeks. This is your chance to get all the fame (and traffic from 71k+ subs) for it :)











Did Notion really take a shot at Figma? I don't see them as competitors though.
Surprised Notion took a shot - seems off brand for them