Archive of posts from February 2025

Leverage is a hot topic.

In discussing leverage, most transform into business gurus, regressing leverage into a form of glorified consignment.

“If I sell something and someone else works for ‘peanuts’, I can earn more, that’s leverage.”

But there’s a better version of this. One that’s less disrespectful, predatory, and short-sighted.

“If we work together and share the upside, we’ll all achieve more and be better off for it.”

That’s leverage.

All ships rising, greater works happening.

Leverage doesn’t have to mean one person gets more while another gets ‘peanuts’.

Leverage can be good for everyone involved.

Don’t give people ‘peanuts’. They’re not squirrels.

A really useful thing about creating new things,

Is that someone’s probably already done what you’re trying to make.

If you’re combining two ideas to make something unique,

Both of those ideas have probably happens already.

Which means you can spend all your time focusing on what makes you unique,

And build upon that which already works in the market.

No need to re-invent the wheel. No need to re-invent anything.

Use the parts that work, and invent something new for us with your newfound leverage.

If AI can write your emails…

Does it even matter who sends them?

No if:

• You never showed up (it was just AI)
• Your voice vanishes (you sound like anybody)
• Your creativity’s gone (just words and templates)
• Your perspective’s gone (just AI-generated ideas)

Yes if:

• You’re still there (you just had help)
• Your voice grows (it’s more uniquely you)
• Your creativity grows (sharing novel new things)
• Your perspective’s stronger (AI’s just your intern)

Most will lose their voice.
Some will fight to keep it.
Few will be even stronger.

The third sounds like the best to me.
How about you?

The iPhone 16E launch teaches us a valuable lesson.

One we should all learn:

• On paper, it’s inferior to others in-class
• On social, it’s ridiculed for the price
• In reality, it’s going to do great

Because it’s consistent. We know what to expect from the brand today, and tomorrow. And in smartphone-land, that’s a pretty rare thing. Samsung is similar to this, which is in no small part why they’re the two top smartphone brands.

Consistency and experience go a long way.

A longer way than spec sheets ever do.

Great businesses don’t focus on “growth.”

They focus on:

• Products worth sharing
• Pages worth clicking on
• Brand worthy of fandom
• Videos worth a big smile
• Content worth consuming
• Experiences worth repeating
• Ads worth being interrupted by
• Emails worth looking forward to
• Profitability to do it again tomorrow

Growth isn’t the input.
Growth is the by-product.

Not because you ‘made it happen’.
But because you ‘let it happen’.

Isn’t that better?

If you’re always focused on sales, marketing or product…

You’re likely forgetting the most important part:

Post-sale experience:

• Do buyers feel immediate progress after buying?
• Do buyers feel their identity shift by 2–3 weeks?
• Do buyers feel new habits form by 4–6 weeks?
• Do buyers need to tell others by 7-9 weeks?

’Cus if you get those right,
Sales & marketing get easy.

Isn’t that better?

If AI can create faster, test faster, ideate faster, process data faster, spin more plates at once, and is only going to get faster still…

Where does that leave you?

For instance, cold email agencies are blowing up because AI tools are better than they are. And so email is becoming fiercly competitive.

Until you realize you can simply show up as a human — like so many have been unprepared to do — and be a breath of fresh air in inboxes. Going the extra mile, showing real care, and being a human being have never been more valuable.

How about development agencies, or design agencies, or marketing agencies? Same again: AI can write code faster, design templated visuals faster, and create marketing campaigns based on historical data faster. And so it’s all becoming fiercly competitive.

Until you realize there’s more to great code than lines generated, more to good design than seen-it-all-before templates, and so much more to great marketing than doing what has already been done, using the same brain everyone else is using.

Again: Going the extra mile, showing real care, and being a human being have never been more valuable.

What interesting times we live in.

What are you really buying?

When you buy a car, are you buying mobility, freedom, or status?

Let’s say it’s freedom. Does freedom mean speed, or off-roading ability, or top reliability scores?

Let’s say it’s reliability scores. At what cost to the other variables factoring into your purchase?

We’re rarely buying what we think we’re buying.

Usually, we’re buying an expression of what matters to us.

We should be minddful of that as buyers, and as sellers.

My son’s been drawing on the iPad a lot lately.

The great thing about a digital canvas is, he can do a few lines and then utter “New one!” and a parent will magically create a new, fresh, blank canvas.

And away he goes again, making his next masterpiece.

“New one!”

“New one!”

The number of opportunities to create are infinite.

The number of mistakes counted or cared for are zero.

I see it as a metaphor for so much in life. A blank canvas is only a thought away. Starting over is exciting, not scary. Opportunity isn’t found in waiting for the right moment, but by simply starting to draw, then draw, then draw some more.

New one!

Failing is not responding to new information.

Pivoting is responding positively to new information.

Quitting is responding negatively to new information.

Marketers underestimate inertia.

Did you buy your last iPhone because it was the best?

Or did you buy it because it’s what you’re used to buying despite the price, despite it being the same as the last one you bought, despite the limitations, despite everything.

Inertia.

If you want to move someone to do something new, you need to do something different. Something special. Something unique.

So put the trends and templates away. They’re only holding you back.

How to turn customer churn into an asset.

There are two types of churn:

1. You succeeded: Your user had a problem, they solved the problem with you. Mission complete.

2. You failed them: Your user had a problem, You lost them before it was solved. Mission failed.

Here’s how to make them both an asset:

For the first kind, have your post-sale create brand champions, so they’ll share their success and invite others to try you too. Every ‘graduating’ user invites 1+ more.

For the second kind, have your post-sale stack wins and future-pace sales so they stay with you until the problem has been solved. Then they become the first kind.

DON’T focus on trying to lower churn.

DO focus on a post-sale experience so good that customer ‘graduations’ mean business growth.

Isn’t that better?

The most important rule of social ads?

Remember this (even if you don’t run ads yet)

⛽️ Ad spend is petrol.
🪵 Creative is firewood.
🔥 Petrol only helps when there’s a flame.

Don’t run creative as an ad if…

• You tried organic and it flopped
• Target demo sentiment is ambiguous
• You don’t know what the content’s role is
• You don’t know how to grade its performance

Do run creative as an ad when…

• Organic impressions are good
• Target demo sentiment is good
• You know what the content’s role is
• You know how to grade its performance

Take-away:

Pouring petrol on a fire makes it bigger.
Pouring petrol on a spark puts it out.

“Marketers ruin everything”

I 100% agree with this, unless they:

STOP:

• Lying to us with sensational claims
• Interrupting our feeds with boring ads
• Filling our DMs with unremarkable pitches
• Being allergic to new/unique/exciting ideas

START:

• Inviting us to try great new experiences
• Filling our feeds with exciting things to try
• DMing only when it’s worth telling strangers
• Directing budget to new/unique/exciting ideas

We don’t get online to be bored or spammed.

We get online to learn or be entertained.

Do those things and watch what happens.

If you do design or marketing in your company…

Here’s what AI isn’t taking from you.

AI is good at:

• Fancy buttons and shiny layouts
• Experiences you’ve seen before
• Performance marketer tricks

AI is not good at:

• Understanding YOUR audience
• Experiences never seen before
• Building things they’ll adore

Remember: Most products/experiences aren’t our choice.
They’re chosen by employers, social circles, or inertia.
Those experiences are what AI is trained on.
Draw upon something different.

Make things people actually want and enjoy, then give it to them where and when they’ll be drawn to it.

Isn’t that better?

Website design is regressing into a game of “who can add as much superfluous detail as possible”.

Text sliding in from transparent, images swooshing into view… it’s the new PowerPoint.

Why? Because designers are desperate to stand out from the crowd, grading their work on box-shadows and linear-gradients, rather than people helped.

People don’t want more things to swoosh in.

People don’t want more garnish on their buttons.

They spend most of their time on social media platforms that work hard to do away with all of those things for good reason: to amplify the content.

The best designers remember:

Bad design says “Look at me!”

Good design says “Look at this!”

And make “this” the part that’s truly remarkable.

How to turn customer churn into an asset.

There are two types of churn:

1. You succeeded

Your user had a problem,
They solved the problem with you,
Mission complete.

2. You failed them

Your user had a problem,
You lost them before it was solved,
Mission failed.

Here’s how to make them both an asset:

For the first kind, have your post-sale create brand champions, so they’ll share their success and invite others to try you too. Every ‘graduating’ user invites 1+ more.

For the second kind, have your post-sale stack wins and future-pace sales so they stay with you until the problem has been solved. Then they become the first kind.

DON’T focus on trying to lower churn.

DO focus on a post-sale experience so good that customer ‘graduations’ mean business growth.

Isn’t that better?

When you create any marketing material

Ask yourself 2 questions…

1. Value: How valuable is it to my target market?
2. Enjoyment: How much enjoyment does it create?

Then put them on a graph:

• Make Value the X axis
• Make Enjoyment the Y axis
• Put your marketing material on the graph
• Put competitor material on the graph

It’ll reveal more opportunity than you ever imagined.

“Ads are too expensive.” “Ads don’t work.”

This is only true if you:

• Copy your competitors blindly
• Try to please absolutely everybody
• Try to sell them directly on the timeline
• Use boring visuals they’d never usually like
• Write boring things they’d never usually read
• Don’t invite to something more fun than the timeline

Avoid those mistakes and they’ll surprise you.

Most landing pages shouldn’t focus on conversions.

They should focus on:

• Understanding what preceded them in the CX
• Being a continuation of what users were enjoying
• Expanding upon the user narrative, leading to next steps
• Making signup/onboarding/discovery interesting/useful/exciting

When you focus just on conversions?
You’ll try to squeeze users to do what you want.

When you focus on continuing the experience?
You’ll give users what they actually wanted & want more of.

(Here’s a secret: doing that creates WAY more conversions)

Isn’t that better?

So often, marketing is a byproduct of what companies can get approved—whittled down through layers of ‘feedback’—instead of what customers actually want to experience.

The idea people, the managers that approve those ideas, and most roles that follows simply want to lay low, not rock the boat, collect their paycheck and head into their weekend.

Great ideas don’t get shot down because they’re not great ideas.

But because they’re different.

But the market likes different. Their loss, your opportunity.

Fun-fact: Everyone says they listen to customers.

But in reality?

Almost nobody does. It’s a big lie.

This is from hands-on experience looking inside hundreds of businesses over years.

Trust me: almost no one is doing it.

That’s your opportunity.

So many indies are obsessed with achieving super-successes, that they miss the magic of simply staying afloat at all.

Don’t forget: Most businesses fail. Most.

Being able to earn more than you spend, keep the lights on, do it all again tomorrow, IS successful.

Not having a yacht. Not flexing on each other with so much testosterone everyone risks getting everyone else pregnant.

Not a hot new stayup.

A cool old stay-up.

If more people remembered that, we’d see a lot more exciting products, niche delights, and happy creators in the market.

A “good idea” is an unfinished sentence.

A “good idea for” is getting a little closer.

A “good idea for my audience” is getting closer still.

A “good idea for my audience and my business” is nearly there.

A “good idea for my audience and my business right now” is much more like it.

Finish the sentence. It contains clues.

People don’t buy your ‘product’.

People actually buy:

• Your customer experience
• Your user progress-point ascension
• Your ability to future-pace the solution

Example:

• A bad cab service sells ‘the cab’.
• A good cab service sells ‘the ride’.

Isn’t that better?

So many of the ‘rules’ we see in business are a bit like the instruction manuals you’d find in a LEGO box set.

Sure. Follow the rules. Get what’s on the box.

Just like everyone else.

Or throw the rules out, and make your own thing.

Try what’s on the box. Then make something special, something unique, something we’ve never seen before.

That’s why we buy LEGO in the first place, isn’t it?

I renewed Apple Music recently to see what their library was shaping up like.

And do you know what?

It remembered everything I listened to five years ago when I was last subscribed.

All evening I’ve been writing and listening to bangers I’d forgotten all about.

The ones that really jump out at me, are the ones I remember listening to while cycling to the beach every day. Particularly because I was just about to buy an indoor bike for the cold icy days that cycling isn’t very smart.

It made me reflect on everything that has happened in that time. Moving countries. Getting married. Starting a family. Moving to the countryside. Business breakthroughs. All of it.

Sometimes, it takes something random like an Apple Music reminder to remind us of just how far we’ve come.

Look back and admire your progress a little more often. There are some bangers.

How to turn customer churn into an asset.

There are two types of churn:

#1 You succeeded
Your user had a problem,
They solved the problem with you,
Mission complete.

#2 You failed them
Your user had a problem,
You lost them before it was solved,
Mission failed.

Here’s how to make them both an asset:

For the first kind, have your post-sale create brand champions, so they’ll share their success and invite others to try you too. Every ‘graduating’ user invites 1+ more.

For the second kind, have your post-sale stack wins and future-pace sales so they stay with you until the problem has been solved. Then they become the first kind.

DON’T focus on trying to lower churn.

DO focus on a post-sale experience so good that customer ‘graduations’ mean business growth.

Isn’t that better?