Writing
What worked, what broke, and what I would do differently.
Marketing
It Was the Offer, Not the Ads: Why More Spend Won't Fix ItMore ad spend doesn't fix a broken offer, it just loses money faster. Here's how to tell if your bottleneck is the offer instead of the ads, and why brand is the real CAC killer.
Diagnosis-First Marketing: Find the Real Bottleneck Before You Spend a DollarMost marketing problems aren't marketing problems. They're diagnosis problems. Here's the financial teardown that finds whether your bottleneck is the offer, the creative, the channel, or the agency.
The 5 Stages of Customer Awareness, and Why Your Ads Keep MissingMost ads propose marriage on the first date. Here's Eugene Schwartz's 5 stages of customer awareness, mapped to the story your ad should actually be telling at each one.
I replaced three vendors on one projectA market research firm, an ad agency, and a web dev shop. One person and some AI did all three, faster and cheaper.
Surveys are mostly BS. Here's what I use instead.People tell you what you want to hear. Real answers come from people voting with their wallets. Synthetic audiences get close.
I asked 1,000 fake customers before I built anythingHow close synthetic audiences actually are to real people, and exactly where they lie.
Building software without being an engineer
You don't need to code. You need the right order.The problem was never that I can't code. It's that I didn't know the right order, or what an AI could do for me before the building part.
The exact process I use to build software without knowing how to codeA marketer's step-by-step system for validating, building, and field-testing real software with AI, without writing code. The stages, the rules, and the two moves that do most of the work.
How I built a machine that builds software, and I can't codeI'm a marketer, not an engineer. I built a free, open-source pipeline that tries to talk you out of your idea before it builds it. Here's the whole story, and the one weird move that changes everything.
"You're an editor. Figure it out." So I built Split-Test-O-Matic.A boss told me to figure out an impossible edit. Instead I built the tool that does it, Split-Test-O-Matic. It turns one day shoot into hundreds of ad variations. This is the origin story, and I'm putting my name on it.
A photo of an Army manual became a working app by lunchThe one-shot only works as well as what you feed it. With a whole field manual to work from, it went fast.