Push day Sauna Made kids lunches and took them to school Hike with the dog Wrote another 1k words Recorded podcast with cool Exit Five member Home 🏡 I’m built different than these other ThinkBois

What the life maxxers miss: Sometimes there is no balance. Today I wrote for 6 hours and did not eat. Did not move. Did not stretch my hip flexors. But I had an incredible day. When you have a wave of creativity or inspiration you need to chase it. Not schedule for tomorrow’s 5 - 7 AM work block you need to go now. That is reality.

Weird growth tactic that is working well for us right now: Focusing on quality. We're not doing crazy things with AI. We don't have some secret growth hack or viral loop. Our business is: - A newsletter - A podcast - Webinars - Events - A private community And I'd say the single biggest lever we've pulled in the last 12 months is a focus on quality. This means: - More prep calls with guests and speakers (yes, it works - putting in more effort up front) - More editing cycles on newsletters and articles - More prep work on webinar setup, run of show, event logistics - Better research; deeper understanding of our audience and what people want In a world where it's become incredibly easy to just blast out and AI generate email to 50,000 people on our list, we're going the opposite direction. Leaning in to everything before publishing. Better research. Better prep. Better guests. Pushing for less fluff and more specifics, real examples, metrics, stories from marketing professionals who actually did the work and had something on the line. Don't let your lust for Claude get in the way of quality.

Classic marketing lesson: We announced a sell out of our event. No tickets left. Not a fake sell out. Not a marketing sell out. An actual "we are at max capacity and can't sell any more tickets" sell out. After announcing this sell out, we got a FLOOD of people asking for tickets with every excuse in the world. "I meant to get it the other night" "My internet was not working on Thursday" "I broke my toe and my dog was vomiting" The biggest learning was how many people did not believe that it was actually sold out; like this must be fake. Some marketing play. And if you email us, you can secretly get a ticket but that was not the case. It was an actual sell out!

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD: If the Founder or CEO gets invited to do a podcast ... DONT MAKE IT A 45 MINUTE AD. I don’t get why people do this. The whole medium is about opening up, being real, having some banter, sharing stories. And they keep bringing it back to their software, their product, their new book. This is the opposite of good marketing. Be great. Be useful. Be funny. Be interesting. That’s the best marketing. And you won’t need to pitch the product the whole time. But some Founders and CEOs just only know how to be in robot PR team mode. Please use your brain. If *you* listened to this podcast, would you find value in it? No you'd skip through it, rolling your eyes at another on-script CEO just parroting a bunch of talking points. And the worst part, most of these people are not Fortune 500 CEOs. So there's not some huge risk of saying the wrong thing, upsetting Wall Street etc. I've had this happen before as a podcast host. Plenty of times over the last 10 years. Sponsor company wants to have their CEO on. Random PR pitch wants to have the Founder or key executive of this AI company on to talk about AI trends. And it's always the same thing: boring, no substance, and a thinly veiled pitch for their company. They never have any energy, never ask any questions back, just ends up being another piece of corporate marketing slop. Like when the CEO of Farmers Insurance gets to speak for 5 minutes on a PGA Tour broadcast (but you're not the CEO of Farmers Insurance). Marketing 101, do not do that! Be likable. Go off script. Use this as an opportunity to build trust, get people to know you, and think "hey, that founder was actually awesome, I gotta go look up their company." But instead we are always so short term focused. Thinking a podcast appearance will somehow lead to 6 new MQLs this quarter. This is another reason I am GLAD AI is eating the funnel in marketing and creating a sea of sameness. The only way to win moving forward is going to be to LET GO of control of your brand.

I can't articulate exactly why in some pithy way, but I think everyone getting access to AI and everyone using AI to slopify their business is actually the greatest thing that could happen to people who care, have taste, can innovate, and think on their own. Oh you can use AI to write all of your sales emails? And make the landing pages? And website images? And sales deck? And scale "1:1 outreach" to every customer? That's great. Please have at it. The opportunity is going to be to find ways to bring some HUMANITY to your business. That is what people are craving right now. The same way we thought Marketing Automation and Sales Sequences were the magic growth playbook of the 2010s. Despite what you read on LinkedIn and on the internet, my IRL experience (and I'm that annoying guy that asks everyone I know how they really feel about AI) have been that producing everything with AI is *not* something to celebrate. Huge opportunity to be weird. To be different. To have only one item on the menu. To only be open 4 days a week. To actually write letters by hand instead of using that fake letter writing service. To revisit the 2010s MailChimp playbook and knit hats for your customers cats. Or write product marketing copy like @jasonfried with Basecamp. I believe in the power of AI and agentic workflows and all that, but I think it's the stuff I mentioned above here that's actually going to be the difference maker. But hey, what do I know. I'm just a guy on the regular version of Claude.

What is the ROI of our podcast? It's not a big podcast by any means; usually 18-20k downloads a month. Peanuts compared to to business podcasts. But we're focused on a niche: B2B marketing professionals. So we talk to VPs, CMOs, and subject matter experts on different topics. 300 episodes in We generate $ 1M+ in advertising revenue from it But it's also the number one source of word of mouth. - People join our newsletter and tell us they've been listening to the podcast. - People join our community and tell us they've been listening to the podcast. There's also huge value in the podcast being a "trojan horse" for content creation. The podcast becomes the fuel for our social media content, newsletters, articles, and informs event and webinar topics. I don't sweat the growth of the show. I care more about getting DMs from the right people after listening, reading the newsletter replies from people that joined after listening, or members we meet that listen every week. Niche down!

Top themes and questions from the Exit Five Executive Community over the last two weeks, as curated by me, in no particular order: 1. Should we keep our PR agency on retainer; what role does PR need to play today vs. the old way? 2. Profound vs. AirOps - which one are you using? Which one do you need? 3. What's your policy on sending team members to conferences? I'm generally pretty liberal about it, but it's getting out of hand. 4. I am heading out on maternity leave any minute now and would love any tips/tricks from the parenting pros in this group. What should I know? 5. Talk to me about your team offsites - the whole marketing org is getting together this fall and I'm starting to frame out what we'll spend our time doing. How do I run an offsite that doesn't suck? 6. For those of you that operate globally, what are y'all doing for website translations these days? 7. Turns out a bunch of these top execs have lives and families and things they are passionate about outside of work too (!!! imagine that) 8. Anyone have a connection to an employment lawyer? I'm working through a negotiation and need some legal help. 9. If someone has a good SEO/GEO/AIO contractor that they are working with or have worked with, I would love a referral ASAP. 10. There is no such thing as a summer slow down, only poor resource planning. True?