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Most founders don’t fail. They strategize themselves out of business.
Some planning is really just avoidance—another deck, another persona exercise, another quarter without a paying customer; in other words, fear of failure. Forty-four years in, here is the…
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Marketing is a utility bill, not a discretionary spend
When revenue dips, marketing is the first line anyone reaches for. It is the wrong line, and the research on what happens next is unusually clear about why.
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The machines are reading differently now.
Search stopped matching strings and started estimating intent some years ago. The part that has changed recently is that it now answers instead of listing.
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Every brand is telling a story. Most are telling it badly.
A narrative map and a brand bible sound like agency artifacts. They are the two documents that stop a company contradicting itself in public.
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The list is the only audience you own
Every other channel is a tenancy. The email list is the one asset that survives an algorithm change, a platform collapse or a policy you had no say…
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Rented attention and owned attention
The argument between paid advertising and search optimization is usually framed as a question of cost. It is really a question of what you still have when you…
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You can’t see a remote team struggling.
The hardest part of managing distributed teams is not coordination. It is that the signals you used to read without thinking about it are simply gone.
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The web designer who runs operations
We set out to hire people who would eventually not need us. Two of them now run the company and own part of it. Getting there cost more…
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The referral economy is not a marketing channel
Every project we have taken has arrived by referral. That is not a growth hack. It is a constraint, and it decides what you are permitted to sell.
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We’re only as good as our last job
A client of many years dropped us in November 2017, while I was bedridden after a motorcycle accident. He was entitled to. What that taught me about the…