Ideas
Arguments and essays on where marketing and search are headed.
AI Search Will Not Kill SEO, It Will Absorb It
Every few years someone declares SEO dead. This time the channel is just changing shape.
StartupsPricing Your Product at Launch With No Data to Go On
No usage data and no benchmarks, so pricing is a judgment call. Anchor to value and start high.
StartupsYour First Marketing Hire, and What the Role Should Actually Be
Most founders hire the wrong first marketer. Here is the role you actually need, and when.
StartupsTurning Early Customers Into Case Studies That Close Deals
Your earliest customers are your most persuasive proof, and most companies waste them.
StartupsThe Minimum Viable Brand for a Seed-Stage Company
You do not need a brand bible at seed stage, but you need more than a logo.
OperationsBuild vs Buy for Marketing Tooling
Every marketing team eventually hits a tool it cannot buy in the shape it wants, and someone proposes building it
OperationsTool Sprawl, and How Marketing Stacks Get Bloated
The martech landscape passed 15,000 tracked tools in 2025, up 9% in a single year, and most marketing teams feel that growth as a slow.
ContentShould You Build a Community?
Every few months a founder decides the answer to slow growth is a community.
GrowthFreemium vs Free Trial
Most teams pick a free model the way they pick a font. They look at what the companies they admire are doing, copy the shape of it, and hope the results follow.
AnalyticsThe Truth About A/B Testing
A surprising number of marketing teams treat A/B testing as proof that they are scientific.
BrandSentiment Is Becoming a Search Problem
For most of the last two decades, brand sentiment lived in a quarterly slide.
BrandPerception Is Catching Up to Performance
For most of the last two decades, marketing organized itself around what it could count.
GrowthBrand Might Be the Only Moat Left in Marketing
Most marketing advantages do not last. A clever channel gets crowded, a winning tactic gets copied, and the cost of every paid platform creeps up until the edge is gone.
ContentDistribution Is the Product
The feed does not owe you a reading. It never did.
SEOIs SEO Dying, or Just Changing?
Every couple of years someone declares SEO dead, and every time the people who actually do the work shrug and keep going.
ContentThe Refresh Beats the New Post
Most content teams would get more out of rewriting their best existing page than out of publishing a brand new one.
GrowthThe Pipeline Math Most Teams Avoid
Every marketing team has a number it would rather not look at too closely, the real cost of the pipeline it generates.
GrowthWhy Your CAC Is Lying to You
Your blended customer acquisition cost is the most trusted number in your growth report, and it is probably the least honest.
GrowthAttribution Is a Story, Not a Fact
Every attribution model is a narrative choice dressed up as a measurement.
SEOProgrammatic SEO, Goldmine or Landfill
Programmatic SEO, the practice of generating hundreds or thousands of pages from a template and a database, has minted some real winners and buried a lot of sites under their.
GrowthThe Metrics That Look Best Right Before a Cut
There is a cruel pattern in marketing dashboards. The quarter a team gets its budget cut is very often the quarter its numbers looked the best they ever had.
GrowthCreative Is the Last Real Lever in Paid
The edges that used to win in paid media are gone, bought back by the platforms that sold them to you.
GrowthPositioning Is the Work Before the Work
Most marketing teams are very good at making things. They can ship a landing page by Thursday, spin up a webinar, and stand up a paid campaign before the budget meeting ends.
GrowthThe Rising Floor of Paid Media
The price of entry into paid media has been climbing for years, and the climb is starting to look less like a cycle and more like a one-way ratchet.
GrowthWhy Your Best Growth Channel Always Decays
Every company has a channel that worked beautifully once. The early hire who swears by it remembers when it printed money, when a small budget pulled in customers faster than.
ContentReddit Is Becoming the Homepage of the Internet
Something changed in how people look for answers, and it happened quietly.
GrowthThe Retention Math Most Teams Ignore
Walk into most growth meetings and you will hear about acquisition.
GrowthUsage-Based Pricing and Its Hangover
Somewhere in the last decade, software stopped charging for the door and started charging for the room.
ContentThe Quiet Return of the Email Newsletter
For something that was declared old-fashioned a decade ago, the email newsletter is having a strange second life.
ContentOnboarding Is the Only Growth Lever That Compounds
Most growth tactics buy you one thing once. Onboarding buys you the same thing again on every customer who comes after, which is why it is the rare lever that gets stronger.
ContentWhat a Good Pricing Page Actually Does
Most companies treat the pricing page as a form. Somebody in finance decides the numbers, somebody in design drops them into three columns, and the whole thing ships as an.
ContentWhy Most Content Marketing Quietly Fails
Most content marketing does not fail loudly. There is no disaster, just a steady stream of posts that nobody reads, a chart that never bends, and a budget that quietly gets.
StartupsThe First Ten Customers Don't Come From Marketing
The night before we launched, I was in a Slack group of about forty operations people, the kind of group where everyone half-knows everyone and nobody posts much.
StartupsFounder-Led Marketing Has an Expiration Date
There is a stretch in a company's life when the founder is the best marketer it will ever have, and everyone around the table knows it.
StartupsPicking Your First Channel Is the Whole Game
Most early teams I talk to are running five channels at once.
ContentThe Case for Posting Less
Most content advice points in one direction, more. More posts, more channels, more frequency.
StartupsWhy Startups Launch Too Loud and Too Early
The night before launch, a founder I know was still rewriting the headline on his landing page at 2am.
StartupsPositioning a Product No One Is Searching For Yet
The first time I tried to sell something genuinely new, I made the mistake of believing the problem was that not enough people knew we existed.
GrowthThe Rebrand Trap, When a New Logo Solves Nothing
When a company feels stuck, a rebrand is a tempting move. It feels decisive, it gives everyone something to rally around, and it produces a visible result.