I knew it was a bot.
You knew it was a bot.
The person who deployed it probably knew everyone would know.

They did it anyway because some playbook told them to “engage with 50 posts a day” and a tool made it cheap enough to not think twice.

That moment, where everyone involved knows the interaction is fake and goes through with it anyway, is worth sitting with.

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The comment section used to matter

Go back a couple of years. A thoughtful reply from someone with real experience could extend your post’s reach, start a conversation, pull in people who weren’t in your network. The LinkedIn comment section was where real distribution happened in B2B. Actual human interaction driving actual reach.

That’s kinda gone.

LinkedIn is fighting back. 94% accuracy on detecting AI slop, cracking down on engagement pods, shadowbanning accounts. And it’s working on the supply side.

But the real damage is behavioral. People still read comments. They just read every single one through a filter now: “is this a real person?” before they even process what’s being said. That filter doesn’t go away because LinkedIn improved its detection. And no single platform can fix it, because this is bigger than LinkedIn.

On April 27, 2026, bot traffic officially passed human traffic on the internet for the first time. 57% bots, 43% humans. Cloudflare’s CEO said he didn’t expect it to happen until 2027. AI agent traffic grew nearly 8,000% year-over-year. When a person shops for a product, they might visit five websites. An AI agent doing the same task hits thousands. Multiply that across millions of users delegating tasks to AI and you get an internet where humans are now the minority.

Think about what that means for a platform like LinkedIn. The comment section problem? That’s the early version of something much bigger. When the majority of traffic on the internet isn’t human, every metric we use to measure marketing starts to crack. Impressions, engagement, reach, click-through rates. How much of that is real? How much of your “audience” is actually people?

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We, marketers, ruin everything we touch

LinkedIn isn’t the first channel marketers ruined.

Email was personal once. Then automated blasting made it free to send a thousand a day, and now 95% of outbound B2B messages get zero engagement. SEO surfaced the best answers until content farms buried them. Now AI search is replacing the whole model. Remember when webinars were educational? Try saying the word “webinar” to a B2B buyer without watching them reach for the close button.

The pattern is always the same. Something works. It stands out because it’s different, because it’s authentic, because it hasn’t been done to death yet. Then everyone sees it working and jumps in. And the moment everyone is doing the same thing, it stops being different. It becomes flat. Whatever made it stand out disappears under the weight of a thousand copycats running the same playbook.

This is the part that’s worth understanding: the playbooks aren’t useless. They’re the foundation. You need to know the standard plays before you can figure out where to break from them. The teams that stand out are the ones who learn the playbook deeply enough to twist it into something of their own. That’s what the Drift marketing team did years ago. They knew the B2B playbook inside and out, and then deliberately did things differently. They had a book called “This Won’t Scale.” The title was the philosophy. Make it work first. Figure out whether it can scale later.

They weren’t rejecting the craft. They were extending it. And for a while, it worked brilliantly. Then everyone copied the surface of what Drift was doing without understanding why it worked, and within a couple of years the tactics stopped being special.

That cycle repeats over and over. Great marketing teams understand the playbook well enough to know which rules to break and which ones to keep.

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Own your audience

If your entire distribution depends on LinkedIn’s algorithm, or Google’s index, or any platform you don’t control, you’re one policy change away from losing it.

The companies and individuals building direct relationships through newsletters and communities are the ones who survive each time a platform degrades. Everyone who moved their audience to something they own before a platform shift looked like a genius after. Everyone who didn’t scrambled.

If you’re building on rented land and you haven’t started moving your audience to something you own, you’re running out of runway to learn that lesson the easy way.

The scale trap

B2B marketing has a deep, almost pathological relationship with scale. If something works for 10 people, the answer is always to do it to 10,000. And 10,000 is always where it breaks.

That instinct is baked into how the industry operates. Every board deck asks for bigger numbers. Every planning cycle pushes for more leads, more impressions, more pipeline. The pressure to scale is constant, and it’s not irrational. Growth requires reach. But the things that actually build trust, recall, and reputation tend to be the things that resist scale. The private dinner with 12 buyers. The handwritten follow-up after a conference. The LinkedIn post that took you an hour to write because you actually had something to say. The partnership you built over months of real conversations.

None of that fits in a dashboard. None of it compounds the way a paid campaign does on paper. But it’s the stuff people remember. It’s the stuff that gets you on a shortlist before the buyer even knows they have a problem to solve.

Yesterday I went to an event put on by a Finnish company called Haamu. They do executive thought leadership on LinkedIn. Their event? The Haamu Games. A CrossFit-style workout competition for their customers and prospects. No booths, no badge scanners, no sponsored keynotes. Just people sweating together, laughing, and building the kind of trust that no online interaction will ever replicate. Try putting that in a dashboard.

Maybe the best marketing has always been the stuff that doesn’t look like marketing. And maybe that’s exactly why it survives when everything else gets copied, automated, and flattened.

✌️

Your booth is a big waste. Yet 99% of startups do it anyway.

Facts.

At some point, often very early in any startup story, the team makes the decision to sponsor industry events in hopes of finding their next big customer.

“We need customers.”
“Let’s go to events.”

“Here’s a list of industry ones.”
“This one seems like a good fit.”

And then we proceed to sign the cheapest possible sponsorship option only to find out at the event floor that indeed, there will be no money made from the event. You’re $15K to $30K down and the ROI is nonexistent.

Funny enough, companies then continue to do the same thing in hopes the problem was the event, the booth, the messaging, the speed to follow up.

I love events. They can be a great channel for many GTM strategies. But doing them right is far from a no-brainer, and most startups are too early in their journey to have the budget and resources where a long-term sponsorship strategy actually makes sense. The kind where you’re investing in awareness and brand over time. Let’s be real. Most of the time the expectation is immediate pipeline impact.

PS: If it’s not clear enough from the above, yes. I made this exact mistake myself. Multiple times, at multiple companies. It took me too long to learn my lesson but I eventually did. Now I’m sharing it with you.

PPS: The value in events is not the event. It’s face-to-face time where connections and conversations happen. That’s where the best pipeline starts. We’ll dig into that.

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1. The small booth problem

When you pick the cheapest sponsorship option, you end up with the smallest presence in a room full of companies that outspend you. Your booth is in the back corner. Your banner looks fine, but it’s standing next to a competitor with a 20-foot wall, a demo station, and three reps in matching polos.

You’re technically there, but you look small. And looking small at an event is arguably worse than not being there at all. Prospects walk by and their brain registers your brand as a smaller player, which is the opposite of what you were hoping for. Great marketing makes the company seem bigger than it actually is.

To have a presence that actually makes you look like you belong, you need to spend at a level that most startups and scale-ups can’t justify. And if you can’t spend at that level, the booth is working against you.

Yes, you can get creative and pull off some guerrilla marketing around your event sponsorship to maximize your presence. I shared some real examples I’ve run with companies before on a previous post. On this post though, we’re narrowing in on a different approach altogether.

But before we do that, let’s talk effort.

2. The underestimated effort

The sponsorship fee is the obvious cost. The hidden one is how much of your team’s time gets eaten.

Weeks of back and forth with event organizers. Booth design that has to meet specific floor plan specs. Flyer design. Swag sourcing. Shipping coordination to make sure everything arrives on time and in one piece. Travel and hotel logistics. Briefing the team on talking points. Setting up the booth the day before. Tearing it down after. (Even from a sales rep POV, it eats up their week… it really has to be a productive event).

All of that time, energy, and headcount could be going into tactics that actually generate pipeline. Instead, your marketing team is playing event planner for a month leading up to a booth that might get 20 conversations over three days, most of them with people who just wanted the free pen.

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3. People don’t go to events to visit your booth

People go to events to network, learn, and watch sessions. The expo floor is what they do with the leftover time between sessions or around meals. They walk through, glance at booths, maybe stop if something catches their eye or they already know the brand.

Can you stand out? Sure. But then we’re back to point one. Standing out requires a presence that costs more than most startups can afford.

4. The big idea

Here’s the big idea. After enough of these underwhelming booth experiences, we figured out something that worked a lot better. Skip the sponsorship entirely. Just attend.

Attending events instead of sponsoring them can result in just as many face-to-face conversations, meetings, and pipeline. And it’s significantly lighter for marketing to execute, which means you can be at that many more events with the same amount of budget and resources.

The key is the pre-event work. Weeks before anyone gets on a plane, you map out who’s going to be at the event. Speakers, attendees, sponsors, the companies that always show up. You won’t have a perfect list, but you can get close enough through the event website, LinkedIn, and asking around.

Then you run a campaign. Social, email, phone (yes, you can still use a phone to call, not just text). The goal is simple: book meetings before you land. Not “stop by our booth.” Actual sit-down conversations. Coffee in the hotel lobby. 30 minutes between sessions.

If you have the right kind of sales reps, hunters who are comfortable walking up to people and starting conversations, you pair that pre-event outreach with hustle during the show and you’re in the money. You get there with a packed meeting agenda, instead of leaving your success to chance.

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5. The partner advantage

This one is a cheat code that not enough people take advantage of.

If you have technology partners or resellers who are sponsoring the event, you already have a booth. Just not your own. And theirs is probably bigger and busier than yours would have been.

I’ve been to plenty of events where we had our own small booth in one aisle and our partner had a major presence in the main hall. Their booth had traffic all day. Ours didn’t. The math on that is obvious.

Talk to your partners before the event. Ask if you can join their booth, do a joint demo, or use their space for meetings. Most partners are happy to do this because it makes their booth more interesting and shows their ecosystem in action. You get the visibility without the spend.

6. ‘Satellite’ events

This is the part that changed everything for me.

An industry conference is valuable for one reason that has nothing to do with the conference itself. Everyone is in town. Your customers, your prospects, your partners, people you’ve been trying to get 30 minutes with for six months. They’re all in the same city, at the same time, already in “meeting mode.”

When you shift your mindset from “how do we show up at the event” to “how do we create face-to-face opportunities while everyone is here,” a whole different playbook opens up.

Host a private dinner the night before the event. Ten to fifteen people. Keep it small, keep it curated. Pick a good restaurant, set a conversation topic, and make it worth attending for reasons that go beyond your product. Executives show up because the guest list is interesting, not because they want a demo.

Or join a partner who’s already running a happy hour or a breakfast roundtable. Co-host it. Split the cost, combine the invite lists. Now you have a room where your partner’s customers, who could be your prospects, are sitting across from you in a relaxed setting with a warm introduction already built in.

If you’ve mapped accounts together with your partners, this gets even stronger. Your partner invites their customer. That customer trusts the partner. The partner says “you should meet these guys.” That introduction is worth more than every flyer you’ve ever printed.

These small, private experiences around the event create the kind of conversations that turn into follow-up meetings, that turn into opportunities. All without the booth fee and the month of marketing coordination.

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The real question

Is this less work than running a booth? No. It’s different work. You’re still putting in the hours. Pre-event outreach, partner coordination, planning dinners, hustling during the show. Nobody is coasting here.

But every hour goes toward something that directly produces meetings and pipeline. Compare that to the weeks your team spends on booth specs, shipping logistics, flyer design, and swag orders, all to stand behind a table hoping someone walks up.

Same energy. Completely different return.

And because you’re not burning $15K to $30K per sponsorship, you can be at more events. Instead of two or three a year, you can show up at six, eight, ten. Each one producing real conversations with real accounts.

Events are one of the best channels in B2B. The mistake is thinking you need a booth to take advantage of them.

✌️

Right now, somewhere in your target market, a buyer just asked ChatGPT to recommend the best solution for a problem your product solves.

Three to five names came back. With reasoning attached.

That buyer built a shortlist without visiting a single website, reading a single blog post, or talking to a single rep. If your name was in that answer, you are in the conversation. If it was not, you will probably never hear about it.

This is already happening at scale. 71% of B2B software buyers now use AI chatbots to research vendors. More than half start their entire buying process with an AI query. And according to Bain, 95% of purchases go to a vendor that was already on the buyer’s initial shortlist.

The shortlist used to be built over weeks. Peer conversations, analyst reports, conference sightings, that piece of content they bookmarked six months ago. Now it gets built in seconds.

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The invisible majority

A 2026 benchmark of B2B SaaS brands found that 96% have little to no visibility in AI-generated responses. In any given category, five brands capture 80% of the top answers. Everyone else is functionally invisible.

You could have a great product, a solid team, and years of customer proof, and still not exist in the place where your buyer starts their research.

Google gave you ten blue links on the first page. AI gives your buyer four to seven names. The bar got higher and the window got smaller.

Where AI gets its answers

AI models pull from a wide mix of sources to build their responses. The tricky part is that you only control some of them.

The first layer is your own properties. Your website, your documentation, your pricing page. You change it, the information updates.

The second layer is domains you do not own but where you can manage your information. Think G2, Capterra, analyst directories. Your profile, your pricing, your positioning are all there. You can keep those current, but you have to do the work. Most companies set them up once and forget they exist.

The third layer is where it gets uncomfortable. These are sources you do not own and cannot control. YouTube videos where someone compared your product to three others. Reddit threads where a user described their experience with your platform. Wikipedia and Reddit alone account for over 25% of all ChatGPT citations. Community discussions, forum posts, podcast mentions. Content created by people who have no obligation to keep it accurate, no reason to check with you, and no incentive to be generous.

Maybe your pricing changed six months ago but five YouTube videos still show the old number. Maybe a frustrated customer posted something on Reddit that now shapes how the AI describes you to every buyer who asks. You can try reaching out, but you are at their mercy.

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The end of narrative control

For years, the job was to control the story. Craft the positioning. Own the message. Make sure the market sees you the way you want to be seen.

AI search changes that. What it tells your buyer is the weighted average of everything being said about you across the internet. Your website is one input. Your customers, your users, your critics, community conversations, all of those are inputs too. And the AI does not rank them by which one you prefer.

For marketers, that is a loss of control. For buyers, it is a better deal. They are getting something closer to the truth.

We have said for years that companies should be customer-centric. That what your buyers and users experience matters more than the messaging on your website. AI search forces that to actually be true. You cannot say you are the most reliable platform in the category and expect that to hold. If your users are saying something different, the AI will reflect that.

The companies where the external reputation matches the internal positioning are the ones that will show up well. The ones where there is a gap between the story and the reality… are going to feel it.

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What this changes

This connects directly to what I wrote about RECALL. The 95% of buyers who are not in-market right now are still forming impressions. AI compressed how those impressions turn into decisions. When that buyer finally opens ChatGPT, what the AI surfaces reflects everything that has accumulated around your brand over time.

But the mix shifts. Content locked behind forms is invisible to AI. Corporate blog posts that only live on your domain carry less weight than a mention in a third-party publication. A case study on your website matters less than a customer talking about you on a forum, in a review, or in an industry podcast. The balance of effort has to tilt toward earned and borrowed visibility. Your name needs to show up in the places where AI goes looking: independent reviews, community threads, comparison articles, earned press, industry conversations.

The uncomfortable part is the timeline. You cannot fix this in a quarter. The research suggests six to eight months before you see measurable movement, with real compounding over 12 to 18 months. But if your product is delivering real value and your customers are genuinely happy, the AI will eventually reflect that. The signal is already out there in every review, every forum thread, every conversation where someone mentioned your name. It compounds whether you are paying attention to it or not.

The companies that should worry are the ones where the story on the website does not match the experience in the product. For everyone else, this is an advantage.

The truth is finally doing the marketing for you.

✌️

Sales says the leads are crap. Marketing says sales is not following up. Meanwhile, the business is missing its revenue number and the board is asking questions neither team wants to answer.

If you have spent any time in B2B, you have seen this movie. It plays on repeat at companies of every size, every stage, every industry. The script barely changes.

Here is my honest take after 15 years on the marketing side of this. Most of the time, sales is right.

I know. Coming from a marketer, that stings a little. But think about it…

Sales reps want to make their number. They have quota, they have commission, they have a leaderboard staring at them every morning. They have zero incentive to ignore a good lead. When they say the leads are not converting, the instinct from marketing is to get defensive. The reality is that, in most cases, sales is telling you something you probably already know but do not want to say out loud.

Marketing knows when the leads are not great. But when that is all there is, what are you supposed to do? You still have to show pipeline. You still have to fill the funnel. So you keep passing volume and hoping the numbers work out.

That is where the problem lives. And it starts with what marketing is measuring.

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Marketing should own pipeline, not MQLs

If your marketing team is still reporting MQLs to the board, you are already behind. The metric that matters at the highest level is qualified pipeline. Actual dollar value of opportunities that sales has validated and is working.

I am genuinely surprised that there are still marketing leaders in 2026 who are not tracking toward that number. Pipeline is what connects marketing’s work to revenue. Everything else, meetings booked, MQLs, content engagement, social metrics, those are supporting indicators. They matter for the team internally. They help you diagnose what is working across channels. But they are not what you bring to the board or to your sales leader.

When marketing starts owning pipeline, the conversation with sales immediately changes. You are speaking the same language. You are looking at the same scoreboard.

But here is where it gets tricky.

Pipeline generated can be green while revenue is red

Most marketing teams that reach this level of maturity track pipeline generated in a given quarter. You have a target, usually a multiple of the revenue number based on your historical win rate. If you close one in four opportunities on average, your pipeline target is 4x revenue. You know the math.

And marketing can hit that number. Quarter after quarter. Green across the board.

Meanwhile, sales is still missing revenue.

How is that possible? A few reasons.

Pipeline created and pipeline that is actually going to close are two very different things. You can generate $3M in Q1, but if none of those deals close until Q4, that does not help the rep who needs to make the number in Q2. On top of that, the business underneath you keeps changing. New sales leadership with a different qualification approach. Reps ramping in a new region. A shift in strategy that changes which segments you are going after. Quarter over quarter, you are often not comparing apples to apples, and a pipeline number that looks consistent on paper can mean very different things depending on what changed around it.

This is where I like to bring in a complementary metric: in-quarter closing pipeline coverage. Pipeline with a close date in the current quarter, and what multiple of the revenue target it represents.

Say you need to close $1M in Q3. If you have $3M in pipeline with close dates in Q3, that is 3x coverage. That tells you how healthy your position actually is in the quarter where the money needs to come in.

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Deal concentration is what makes or breaks your coverage

$3M in coverage sounds solid until you realize it is made up of 3 deals at $1M each. You close one, you make the number. You lose one, and now you have a 50/50 chance of fully missing the quarter. Get the point? That is not a pipeline. That is a coin flip.

But 15 small deals at $200K each is not ideal either. Your reps are now spread across a lot more opportunities, each one still needs to be worked, and you need to close most of them to make the number.

What you actually want is a mix. A few big whale deals that can move the needle significantly, combined with a layer of smaller, faster-closing opportunities underneath. The whales give you upside. The smaller deals give you a floor and carry you quarter after quarter. That balance is what makes deal concentration healthy and gives you real confidence in the forecast.

And this connects back to the pipeline generation point. A rep adds a single deal for $1.5M. Suddenly your pipeline created number for the quarter looks fantastic. Marketing is celebrating. But your deal concentration to confidence ratio in a future quarter is now extremely volatile.

When you start looking at pipeline this way, it forces you to ask the hard questions about what you are generating upstream. Are you building pipeline that gives sales a real shot at making the number? Or are you creating big headline numbers that look good in a slide but crumble under pressure?

Honest numbers end the blame game

When you strip away the vanity layer and get real about where your pipeline actually stands, something interesting happens. The marketing and sales war quiets down. Not because everyone suddenly agrees, but because you are finally working together.

Marketing stops hiding behind volume. Sales stops blaming lead quality for everything. And when the numbers are honest, the actual problems become visible. Maybe you do not have enough opportunities in mid-stage. Maybe your average deal size is too concentrated in a few large bets. Maybe the pipeline you are generating is solid but the sales cycle is longer than anyone wants to admit.

Those are solvable problems. The blame game is not.

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Before you pick a side

I said at the top that most of the time, sales is right. I stand by that. But I am not saying it to throw marketing under the bus. I am saying it because most people in other departments massively underestimate the complexity of marketing’s job.

If you think marketing just needs to find the right buyers, tell them the story, and get them through the funnel, you are assuming the company has it all figured out. Most companies do not.

They are still learning what they want to be. Product-market fit is a work in progress. You can sell to a lot of people, but really understanding who cannot live without your product, the true core ICP; that takes time. The business model might still have challenges. The go-to-market strategy shifts every few quarters.

Marketing sits in the middle of all of that. And the job is really two jobs at once.

The first is making sense of the business. Working with leadership and product to figure out who truly gets value from what you do, what you need to say to them, and what problem you are actually solving. And doing that while navigating departments, personalities, founders and execs with strong opinions, and product teams with their own vision, all to find what actually makes the company special. That is product marketing at its most strategic, and it is some of the hardest work in the company.

The second is getting the right potential buyers through the door. Building pipeline, running campaigns, enabling sales, driving the conversations that turn into revenue.

That is a tough job.

The marketers who figure out both are doing something much bigger than what the role looks like on paper. I have been reading more and more about how CMOs who are good at this end up becoming CEOs. That makes sense to me. Take a messy, evolving business, turn it into a clear story, and build the engine that drives revenue around it.

That is not a marketing job.
It’s a company-building one.

There are about 200 commercial airlines in the world. Roughly 60 major stock exchanges. Around 440 nuclear reactors, operated by maybe 50 utility companies. A couple hundred advanced semiconductor fabs. Nine container shipping carriers control 80% of global capacity.

If you sell technology into any of these industries, that is your entire addressable market. The whole thing. But the revenue potential per account is massive, which is what makes these businesses valuable despite the small numbers.

Now run that through the B2B playbook everyone swears by. Top-of-funnel content. Paid ads. Lead scoring. Nurture sequences. Webinars to capture MQLs.

It breaks immediately. When your whole market fits in a spreadsheet, that playbook either does not apply or changes significantly, playing much more of a supporting role.

A lot of B2B operates in markets exactly like these. The people inside them know the standard advice was not written for them. Most of them are still trying to make it work anyway.

In this article, I am going to pick one of these as a figurative example. Stock exchanges. About 60 of them worldwide. I‘ll walk you through what a go-to-market could look like and what the key marketing principles are when you know every potential buyer by name.

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1. Your TAM is a contact list

In a typical B2B company, marketing exists to find buyers you do not know yet. Cast the net, pull them in, qualify them, hand them off. In a finite market, you already know every single one of them. You probably have their names.

So the entire job becomes making sure that when the buying window opens at any of those accounts, your name is already in the room. (I wrote about the idea of R.E.C.A.L.L. in a previous post. How you build it might look a little different in a market like this, but its importance only goes up.)

2. Tier your market. Start in the middle

The instinct when your market is this small is to go after the biggest accounts first. The NYSE. The London Stock Exchange. The logos that would look incredible on your website and signal to the rest of the industry that you have arrived.

Resist that.

Those accounts have the most complex procurement, the longest sales cycles, and the highest expectations. If you land one before you are ready and something goes wrong, that failure does not stay quiet. In a market of 60, everyone talks. One bad experience becomes a story that follows you for years.

Instead, tier your market into three segments and work them differently.

Tier one: your top 10 to 15 accounts. The largest exchanges with the biggest revenue potential and the longest sales cycles. All you are doing here early on is showing up. Executive dinners. Conference presence. Building credibility so that when the time comes, the door is already cracked open.

Tier two: your next 30 or so mid-size exchanges. This is the sweet spot. Large enough to generate meaningful revenue, nimble enough to move faster on new technology. Less red tape, shorter decisions. These are the accounts that carry startups through the early years, quarter after quarter.

Ideally, your whole GTM for tier two should be built around a zero-risk proposition. Pilot programs with clear timelines. Flexible terms. Maybe even performance-based pricing where you only get paid when they see results. Implementation in weeks, not quarters. No shelfware risk. When the ask is that clean, budget approval stops being a battle.

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One caveat here: know your value. Making it easy to say yes does not mean underselling yourself. If you are getting into contracts where the cost of serving that customer is greater than the benefit, that is an early indicator of a sinking strategy. Tread carefully around those decisions.

Tier three: your remaining accounts. Lower priority, but valuable for market coverage and for rounding out your proof points across geographies. Oftentimes a partner or channel-driven strategy tends to be the most efficient way to attack this tier.

Here is the part most people get wrong. The sequence matters more than the tiers themselves. Win tier two first. Learn from them. Let your product mature with them. Build a wall of customer proof with them. Then go upstream to tier one with the operational maturity and the receipts to back it up.

Going after a top-tier logo before you are ready is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make in a finite market. If you land it and bomb it, that story will reach the rest of your TAM before your next board meeting.

3. Hire your buyer

One of the most underrated moves in finite-market marketing: hire someone who used to be your buyer.

In a market of 60, there are maybe a few hundred executives on earth who have ever made the kind of purchasing decision you are selling into. Hire one. Everything changes.

They know how decisions really get made inside those organizations, what keeps people up at night, and what actually moves a deal forward.

That hire brings maturity to the entire business. Go-to-market gets sharper. Product roadmap gets more focused. Customer success knows what to expect. And in a market where everybody knows everybody, they bring a network that no marketing budget can replicate.

4. Build an advisory board

Whether or not you can make the hire above, build a formal advisory board. Current customers willing to champion you, former executives from the world you are selling into, respected veterans who have been around long enough that people take their calls.

It gives you credibility with prospects who do not know you yet. It opens doors your sales team could spend months trying to open. And in a market of 60, the right introduction from the right person can move a deal forward faster than any campaign.

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5. Build clusters and FOMO

In a finite market, competition is one of the most powerful forces you can use. The moment one exchange adopts something and starts seeing results, the others feel the pressure. Nobody wants to be the one falling behind in a market where everyone knows what everyone else is doing.

This is why you should think in clusters. Group your target accounts by whatever makes them likely to run into each other. Geographic proximity, similar size, same competitive set. Then focus your early wins inside those clusters. When three mid-size European exchanges are working with you and a fourth is not, that fourth exchange is hearing about it. At conferences, in working groups, in the hallway conversations that happen between sessions. The peer pressure does work that no outbound sequence ever could.

I have seen this play out in previous roles. At a previous company, we closed a major San Francisco tech company that everyone would recognize. It took nine months. We had to build roadmap items specifically for them. But once they were live and gave us a testimonial saying they ran a thorough evaluation and we turned out to be the most suitable partner, we put that everywhere. Every piece of material, every sales conversation, every conference slide.

The next three or four San Francisco tech companies closed in two to three months each. One of them told us directly: “If it’s good enough for those guys, it’s good enough for us.” Nine months became two. That is what clusters do to sales velocity.

Your content should support this. Create material that highlights the problem you are solving and what companies who are addressing it are gaining. You are not talking about your product here. You are talking about the gap between the companies that are moving on this and the ones that are not. Original research. Commissioned analyst reports. Data that your champion inside the account can take to their CFO to build the internal case for budget.

6. Customer proof is everything

In a market of 60, every single customer story is a signal to every other potential buyer. This is where you invest heavily.

Named case studies with real numbers. Video testimonials from customers willing to put their name on it. Joint presentations at industry conferences where you are on stage next to someone who chose you. Your prospects are not evaluating you against a blog post. They are asking each other. Make your customers look like geniuses for choosing you.

7. Offline beats digital

In a finite market, real business gets developed face to face. Offline is the primary channel. Digital plays a supporting role.

Map every relevant conference, summit, and association meeting for the year. Those are the moments when your potential customers are in the same building. Everything else you do between those events is air cover.

You do not need to sponsor from day one. Just attend. But do the work. Drive meetings ahead of each event through direct outreach by email, social, and if possible, phone. Then build “satellite events” around the main conference. A private dinner the night before for 12 to 15 executives. A smaller roundtable the morning after. These happen where your buyers are already gathering. The key is to make them worth attending for reasons that have nothing to do with your product. If you are selling to CROs, co-host with a VC firm. Those CROs will show up because they want to build relationships with investors, and you get the room. Pick a theme that matters to your audience, bring in a speaker or a perspective they cannot get elsewhere, and keep the sales pitch to a minimum. The conference badge gets you proximity. The “satellite events” get you relationships.

Where digital fits is in the supporting pieces. An ROI calculator on your website where prospects can plug in their own numbers. Analyst reports and original research, easy to find and share. Content designed to arm your champion with what they need to sell internally. These tools make the offline conversations more effective.

8. Reputation is the whole game

In a big market, you can afford to be messy. Burn a few leads, learn, iterate. A market of 60 does not give you that luxury. Every interaction either builds your reputation or damages it. There is no spray and pray. Just precise, thoughtful engagement with people who will remember exactly how you showed up. When you do it right, the market comes to you.

I used stock exchanges as the example, but the same logic applies if you are selling into any space where the total number of potential customers is limited and fairly small.

The playbook that dominates the internet was built for a different game. If you know every buyer by name, stop playing it.

✌️

This is not a Granola AI ad. But I am going to talk about Granola a lot in this post.

What I’m talking about is a process: take a meeting transcript, turn it into structured notes, then prompt AI on top of those notes to extract something valuable. Granola just happens to do the first two steps really well, so I’m using it as the tool of choice for now.

It records your meetings in the background and turns the raw transcript into clean, structured notes. No filler, no “can you hear me?” moments. Just the substance of what was discussed. That matters because if you try to prompt on top of a raw transcript, the AI gets confused. Too much air. Granola cuts through that and gives you something the AI can better work with.

The notes alone are incredibly useful. But here’s where it gets interesting. You take those notes and prompt on top of them with a specific question. What comes back depends on two things: the kind of meeting you had, and the prompt you run.

The possibilities are endless, but let me show you what I mean with some concrete examples.

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1. A weekly 1:1 turned into LinkedIn content

I had a 1:1 with someone on my team. Standard agenda, then it shifted into development areas, priorities, how to approach certain decisions. It turned into a real coaching conversation. The kind where you both walk away feeling like something clicked.

Afterwards, the conversation felt so good that I went into Granola and prompted it to dissect the core things we discussed into LinkedIn post ideas. No names, nothing personal, keep it generic (yes, my team mate gave the green light to do this).

It gave me three ideas. I ran with two of them.

One became this post:

That idea came from an organic conversation that just happened to be recorded. Granola caught it. The prompt pulled the idea out. I just had to write it.

This is the use case I’m most excited about. Think about how many conversations you have in a week that contain something worth sharing. 1:1s with your team. Strategy debates. Calls where someone says something that makes the whole room pause. Every one of those is a potential content idea, for your personal brand or for the business.

Try the prompt:

“Give me LinkedIn post ideas for [marketing leaders / your audience] based on this conversation. Focus on leadership, career development, or decision-making themes. No names, no personal details. For each: a one-line hook and the angle in one sentence.”

2. A manager 1:1 turned into a development tracker

Now flip it. Instead of prompting for content ideas after a 1:1 with your report, prompt for development patterns after a 1:1 with your manager.

What feedback keeps coming up? What are you being pushed on? What does your manager keep circling back to? Most people walk out of these conversations and forget half of it by the next day. Do this consistently over a few months and Granola becomes a mirror for how you’re growing as a professional. Based on what was actually said, not what you remember.

Try the prompt:

“Summarize the development areas and feedback from this conversation. Flag any recurring themes from previous 1:1s. Focus on growth areas, communication patterns, and where I was challenged. No names, no internal context.”

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3. Hiring interviews turned into candidate scorecards

If you’re running a hiring process, you’re doing multiple interviews for the same role across days or weeks. Every interviewer walks out with a gut feeling and some scattered notes. By the time the debrief happens, half the detail is gone.

Prompt Granola after each interview to score the candidate across the areas that matter: depth of experience, strategic thinking, communication quality, culture fit, red flags. Structured notes work better here than raw transcripts because interviews are full of small talk, context-setting, and filler. The notes strip that away and let the prompt focus on substance.

Do this for every candidate and you end up with consistent scorecards you can compare side by side, grounded in what was actually said in the room.

Try the prompt:

“Score this candidate based on the interview conversation. Evaluate: depth of experience, strategic thinking, communication quality, and culture fit. Flag any red flags or concerns. Keep it factual based on what was discussed. No personal opinions, no assumptions beyond what was said.”

4. A brainstorm turned into a ranked backlog

Every team has brainstorms where great things get said and nobody can remember what by the next morning. You leave the room energized. A week later all you have is a whiteboard photo nobody looks at.

Prompt Granola to pull every distinct idea from the session, deduplicate them, and rank them by whatever matters to you: feasibility, originality, alignment with a specific goal. The brainstorm actually produces a usable backlog instead of a vague feeling that “we had some good ideas.”

Try the prompt:

“Extract every distinct idea or suggestion from this conversation. Remove duplicates. For each idea, write a one-line summary and rank them by [feasibility / originality / alignment with our Q3 goals]. Group related ideas together.”

Try it after your next meeting

Pick one meeting this week. Let Granola record it. After it’s done, open the notes and ask it something specific. You’ll be surprised what’s already sitting inside the conversations you’re having every day.

If you’re already doing something like this, I’d love to hear what meeting types are giving you the best results.

✌️

But buried in that same post is a graph that tells one of the most interesting growth stories in tech right now. Pull requests, commits, and new repositories are all spiking to record highs. A sharp, vertical line starting around December 2025 and going straight up.

GitHub is now absorbing 275 million commits per week. On pace for 14 billion commits in 2026. That is a 14X increase over 2025. Fourteen times more.

The platform is breaking under the weight of growth so explosive that even one of the best-funded engineering teams in the world cannot scale infrastructure fast enough to keep up.

That is a very good problem to have.

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When a decade of scaling needs to happen in months

In October 2025, GitHub started executing a plan to increase platform capacity by 10X. That is already an aggressive number. Most companies would call that a decade-long infrastructure project.

By February 2026, four months later, they realized 10X was not going to be enough. They needed 30X.

A company backed by Microsoft, with some of the best infrastructure engineers in the world, planned aggressively for a growth wave and still underestimated it by three times in four months.

What happened?

AI tools like Claude Code, Copilot agents, and Cursor went from interesting experiments to daily workflows.

Now anyone can describe what they want in plain English, and the AI writes the code, commits it to GitHub, and opens a pull request. Marketers, product managers, founders, analysts who had never opened a terminal started showing up on the platform. Some are vibe coding entire applications. Others are using GitHub as a central brain for their teams, building knowledge systems in Markdown files. All version-controlled, all reviewable.

GitHub accidentally became the platform for everyone who works with AI. The outages are just a side effect.

What all of this means for GitHub as a business

Microsoft bought GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion. A lot of people thought they overpaid. GitHub was generating somewhere between $200 and $300 million in revenue at the time.

Today, GitHub’s annual revenue run rate is $2 billion. The estimated valuation sits around $35 billion. Nearly five times what Microsoft paid. Over 40% of that revenue growth comes from Copilot, their AI coding assistant. 4.7 million paid subscribers. 140,000 organizations. Enterprise subscribers nearly tripled year over year.

None of this was in the original thesis. When Microsoft wrote that check, Copilot did not exist. AI agents flooding the platform with 275 million commits a week was not in anyone’s model. They bought the platform, kept investing in it, kept it open. And then the world shifted in a direction nobody predicted, and that shift landed directly on top of what they had already built.

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GitHub is not the only one

n8n has a similar story. They launched in 2019 as a workflow automation tool. Solid product, steady inbound growth, fair-code model. A good business doing fine.

Then AI agents needed a way to chain tasks together. And n8n was already built for exactly that. When the opportunity showed up, they went all in. In 2025, their revenue grew 10X. Users grew 6X. 80% of workflows on the platform now involve AI agents. Their valuation jumped from $350 million to $2.5 billion in four months. They scaled from around 67 employees to over 900 in about a year to meet the demand.

You cannot predict this kind of thing. You cannot put “global AI wave redirects all workflow traffic to our platform” in a board deck and expect anyone to take you seriously. These are moments that happen to you.

But the wave arriving is only half the story. What happens next is where the real work starts. Scaling infrastructure, making the right calls under pressure, hiring fast enough, keeping the product stable while everything around it is accelerating. GitHub is doing that in public right now, writing apology blog posts while simultaneously redesigning for 30X capacity. n8n scaled their entire team by 12X in a year. None of that happens without strong leadership and sharp execution. The timing was lucky. Everything after that was earned.

Why this matters if you are in marketing

My LinkedIn feed is full of conversations about GitHub and Claude right now. Marketers are building internal tools, writing automation scripts, shipping projects that used to require an engineering ticket. A year ago, none of that was happening.

The business lesson is what sticks with me. GitHub never ran a growth campaign targeting non-developers. n8n saw the AI wave early and leaned into it hard. Both had spent years building something solid, and when the world shifted, that shift found their platforms.

Every company builds for the market it can see. Sometimes the biggest growth comes from a market you did not know existed, showing up because something shifted underneath everyone’s feet. The “breaking” is just what that kind of growth looks like before the infrastructure catches up.

✌️

PS: If you are interested in learning how to build an AI-native marketing team using GitHub and Claude, I wrote a three-part series on how we are doing exactly that at Rocket.Chat.

This week’s post has nothing to do with B2B marketing or moving abroad. But it has everything to do with The Long Game.

I was watching some old VHS tapes recently. My 5th birthday. Baptism. Stuff from back then.

My parents got divorced when I was four. It wasn’t friendly. It still isn’t. And growing up through that came with a few negative experiences. For most of my 20s, I let all of that define me.

But here’s what hit me watching those tapes.

The moments that, for a long time, shaped my entire self-image? They were short. Really short. A thing someone said. A thing someone did. Minutes. Hours. Maybe a rough stretch of a few years. When you’re watching it back on a shaky VHS recording, you realize just how brief those moments actually were in the context of a whole life.

And yet, we let them become the whole story.

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The limiting version of you

We all do this. We take a handful of bad experiences and build an entire identity around them.

“I’m not disciplined.” “I can’t do that.” “That’s just not who I am.”

People say these things with so much certainty. Like they’re stating a fact. Like it’s permanent. Concrete. Irreversible.

But where did that come from? Usually from something that happened a long time ago. Something that was painful, yes. But something that was also temporary.

“That’s easy for you”

I was talking to someone recently about goals I’m working on. Things that require consistency and effort. And their response was, “Well, that’s easy for you. You have discipline. I’m not like that.”

This is exactly what I’m talking about.

What do you mean you’re not like that? You’re making a choice. Right now. Today. You’re choosing to not do the thing you believe you should be doing, and then blaming it on some version of yourself that you decided is permanent.

It’s unfair to yourself. You’re locking yourself into a story that you wrote, based on a few experiences, and refusing to edit it.

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A short period of time

Here’s the thing. There’s real science behind this. Psychologists have studied formative years for decades. Erikson’s stages of development, attachment theory, all of it. About 85% of brain growth happens before age 7. The experiences you have early on genuinely shape how you see yourself and the world. That’s not made up. It’s well researched.

But here’s what the science also says: the brain doesn’t stop changing. Neuroplasticity research has shown that the adult brain continues to rewire itself throughout life. For most of the 20th century, scientists believed the brain was fixed after childhood. That turned out to be wrong.

So yes, those years matter. But they don’t have the final word. You do.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to.

If I sit down and think about the worst moments from my parents’ divorce, I’ll get upset. They were crappy. They weren’t good experiences, and I’m not going to pretend they were.

But they passed. They were a short period in a much longer life. There have been a lot of other times where the experiences were positive, meaningful, and good.

So why would I keep marinating on the bad ones? Why would I hand over the power to define who I am to a handful of painful moments from 30 years ago?

We all get to decide who we are. Not anyone else. Not anything that happened. Those things were upsetting. They were difficult. But they don’t get to write the rest of the story.

The superpower

Once you can break out of this, something shifts.

You stop being a prisoner of a version of yourself that someone else created, or that a bad experience created, or that you created when you were too young to know better. You start making choices based on who you want to be.

And when you do that consistently, it compounds. Not just for you. For everyone around you.

I’m not talking about chasing money, status or power. I’m talking about balance. Happiness. Lightness. Forgiveness. The ability to move through life without dragging a bag of old stories behind you.

That’s a superpower. And the wildest part? Everyone is born with it.

It’s not about pretending the bad things didn’t happen. It’s about not letting them be the only thing that matters.

✌️

When you sit across from investors who are having these same conversations with 5, 10 other portfolio companies, they are pattern matching at a level you simply cannot do from inside your own four walls. They are seeing the same problems, the same growth ceilings, the same blind spots show up across industries, stages, and teams.

If you are paying attention to the things they pay attention to, and specifically the questions they ask, you can compress years of learning into a single meeting.

Three of the most effective questions I have ever heard all came from the same investor. And each one changed how I thought about the company I was helping build.

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Question 1: “Where is the easy button?”

We were growing. But it was the kind of growth that felt like pushing a boulder up a hill. Every bit of ARR we added to the business was hard-earned. We were doing the work, grinding, making it happen. But there was nothing easy about it.

Then this investor asked a question that stopped the room.

“Where is the easy button? What do you need to do to unlock growth in a way that is easier?”

It sounds simple. It is not.

When you are deep inside the day-to-day, you normalize the grind. You start to believe growth is supposed to feel like that. An outside question forces you to step back and challenge everything.

That one became a forcing function. It pushed us to confront business model and go-to-market assumptions we had chosen to leave untouched. And those were not small assumptions. They were the kind that required difficult conversations internally, with the management team and the founder. The kind that would hit short-term revenue before they paid off. The kind that changed something customers had come to expect. But they were also the adjustments the business needed in order to grow. Eventually, it led to changes that accelerated our growth in ways the old playbook never could.

Looking back, I understand why an experienced investor reaches for that question. When they see a team grinding, they know what most operators do not want to admit. Optimizing monetization almost always moves the business faster than acquiring more leads. Research has put that number in the 11 to 25% bottom-line range, and the fastest way to add serious enterprise value to a software company is rarely a new feature. It is almost always a better monetization strategy. But those are the decisions that get deferred because they are politically hard, commercially risky in the short term, and easier to keep talking about than to actually execute.

The lesson? When growth feels like a grind, the answer is not always to push harder. Sometimes you need to ask whether you are pushing in the right direction at all.

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Question 2: “How much business is being done across all three?”

We had three direct competitors in our space. We knew them well.

Then this investor asked something different. He wanted to know how much total ARR was being generated across all three competitors combined in a given quarter.

Not our number. The whole market’s number.

It was a brilliant reframe. It forced us to zoom out and think about the size of the actual opportunity. Is the total addressable market growing? Is the pie getting bigger, or are we all fighting over the same slice? Are there geoeconomic factors, market shifts, regulatory changes affecting how much business is happening across the segments where we operate?

It also helped us understand where we stood from a market leadership perspective. Not just relative to one competitor, but relative to the total opportunity. That is a completely different conversation.

And that is just the surface. A question like that is doing multiple jobs at once. It is testing whether your pipeline targets are grounded in what the market can actually support, or whether you are setting numbers in a vacuum. It is probing whether a slowdown you are seeing is a you problem or a category problem, because those get solved very differently. It is checking whether the category is expanding fast enough to justify the next round of investment, the aggressive hire, the bet on a new segment. And it is getting you to benchmark your growth rate against the category growth rate. If the category is growing 40% and you are growing 20%, you are losing share even while your ARR chart looks up and to the right.

That single question has implications for everything: pricing strategy, product investment, how aggressive to be on hiring, what to prioritize when you are thinking two to five years ahead.

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Question 3: “What is missing before we can truthfully claim to be the best at this?”

Every company has a claim they want to own in the market. The most secure. The fastest. The easiest to implement. The one buyers think of first for a specific kind of problem.

This investor did not ask whether we believed we were the best at ours. He asked what was missing in the product before we could truthfully state it.

That word, truthfully, did all the heavy lifting.

It drove a conversation that went deep into the gaps between where we were and where we needed to be. Not aspirational gaps. Real ones. The kind of things that, if a customer or analyst pressed us on, we would have to hedge or redirect.

That conversation heavily influenced what our product roadmap looked like for the years that followed. It gave us more confidence in the direction, more clarity on the intent behind what we were building, and a sharper understanding of who we were trying to serve.

It also did something more subtle. It forced a distinction that most roadmap conversations avoid: what actually gives us an edge versus what just keeps us at parity with the rest of the category. A good investor knows that category leadership is not built by shipping features. It is built by picking the claim you want to own, being honest about the gap between where you are and where that claim requires you to be, and sequencing the roadmap around closing that gap with intent. Everything else is noise.

One year later, our roadmap was so mature and so aligned with our ICP that the entire business had complete confidence in that claim. Not as a marketing line. As a fact.

The common thread

I still reach for these questions when I am working through a problem, even without the investor in the room. They became part of how I think.

That is the real compounding value of sitting in those rooms. Not the meetings. Not the decks. The questions you walk away with that keep working on you long after the room has emptied.

✌️

It had been years since I visited home.

I get off the plane, make it to the house, and mom is there, ready for THE BIG WELCOME HUG.

As I walk towards her, I catch a glance of her hands. They look older. Much older.

It was as much of a shock as it was a reminder: when you live abroad, you’re giving up time with some of the people you love most.

I’ve been away from Brazil for about 21 years now. Canada, the Netherlands, Finland. At the time of that visit, maybe 15 years. My mom is very young for her age. But the skin on her hands had a texture I didn’t recognize. Not old. But older. Different from what I had in my head.

When you see someone every day, you don’t notice the changes. They happen gradually and your brain adjusts. But when you’re away for that long, you see it all at once. Like skipping forward in a movie. Your brain is holding a version of that person from the last time you saw them, and suddenly the gap is right there in front of you.

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Never complete

When I first moved to Toronto at 19, my friend’s wife told me something I never forgot. She said, “Once you make the decision to move abroad, you’re never complete. You build roots here, and if you go there, you’re missing here. If you’re here, you’re missing there.”

I nodded like I got it, but I didn’t. I was 19…

But she was right. The longer you stay, the more roots you build. I have my wife here, my two kids, my wife’s family. My oldest is starting to have his own world. His school, his friends, his sports. Going back to Brazil wouldn’t solve anything. It would just move the problem.

The flip side (The aging son)

While I’m noticing my mother getting older, she’s dealing with the same thing in reverse. The aging son.

In the beginning, I couldn’t afford to fly back every year. There were stretches of three years without a visit. So when I did show up, I wasn’t the same.

I remember being home for Christmas one year, sitting by my uncle’s pool, and my mom hands me a beer and a Cuban cigar. Now we’re smoking a cigar together.

(This is the same woman who told me growing up that if she ever saw me with a cigarette in my mouth, she’d have my head.)

It was my first and last cigar by the way. But I digress…

Before that, she came to visit me in Toronto. I was dating my now wife and we had moved in together. Mom hadn’t seen me in years, and suddenly she’s not visiting her kid in his apartment. She’s coming to our house. Mine and my girlfriend’s. I could see her trying to keep it together, but she was struggling.

(In Brazil, people live with their parents until they’re way older than in North America or in Nordic countries, so culturally this was an even bigger jump for her.)

She didn’t get to watch any of that happen gradually. It all hit her at once. The same skip forward. Just from the other side.

The point?

These are the moments that remind you what living abroad actually costs.

Not the cold winters or the language barriers. The distance from the people who raised you, and the fact that life keeps moving on both ends whether you’re there for it or not.

I’d make the same choice again. Every time. But I’ve learned you have to be intentional about how you carry it.

My wife and I never talk about where we live in permanent terms. We’re in Finland now, but we always keep that door open. Whether it’s realistic that we’d make a big move at this point, that’s not the point. What matters is that the door isn’t closed.

We drive the kids across town every Thursday at 5:30pm, which is not easy with work and everything else, so they can learn to read and write in Portuguese (maybe they need to go to school in Brazil at some point).

I’m really close to my family, so these things are a big deal to me. For someone else these things might not be as important. But if you’ve moved abroad and you recognize any of this, the one thing I’d say is: don’t let it just sit in your head. Talk about it. Make small moves that keep your options open.

It won’t make you complete.

But it helps.

✌️

"Before You Move Abroad" is a series about the hard-earned lessons from building a life away from home. The things I wish someone had told me before day one.

Check out parts 1 and 2 below:

The comments were full of marketers sharing their version of the same experience. The override that killed a campaign. The feedback loop that never ends. The meeting where keeping the peace won over doing the right thing. Different companies, different contexts, same pattern.

This is clearly a topic people feel strongly about, and after sitting with it for a while, I think there is more to unpack here than what I covered in the post. Because the easy take is that the opinions are the problem.

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Opinions are not the enemy

Some of the most valuable lessons I carry came from opinions that were tough to hear.

At a previous company, our marketing team spent weeks on a flyer for an event in the UK. We were inspired by old-school advertising copywriting. The headline was clever. The design was creative. The photo was on point. It was truly great work. Then our CRO at the time looked at it and said something along the lines of “nobody in the UK knows who we are. Just say what we do.”

That hurt. He was right.

Same CRO, different project. We produced a company video with an agency. Shot at a mall with actors, shot at our office. A long, expensive project.

When it was finally ready, I remember sitting in my house at 8 or 9 in the evening on the phone with him while he picked apart specific things we were missing. Integration capabilities that customers and prospects kept asking about. Details that mattered to the market and that we had overlooked.

It was painful to go back and add all of that. He was right again.

Those were not random opinions from someone who just did not like the font. Those were educated perspectives from someone who was hearing things from the market every day. They made the work better. They made me better and I still carry those lessons.

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So what is the actual problem?

The problem is not that people have opinions about marketing. The problem is what happens when “open season” leads to keeping the peace.

When every voice carries equal weight regardless of expertise or context, the path of least resistance is to play it safe. Play it generic. Round off the edges until nobody objects, and also nobody notices.

There is a classic version of this. Take a VC-backed startup. The founder is always working with investors, and there is always an incentive to tell the biggest possible story, because that is what makes the company more valuable. Huge TAM. Massive revenue potential. Position it as a platform, make the story as big as it can possibly be.

That’s all great. But when it becomes a series-A startup website headline, you sacrifice clarity and focus. It turns into the kind of generic, synergy-filled, enterprise-platform language that nobody outside the building actually understands.

That is what “open season” produces at its worst. Not bad opinions. Consensus that kills differentiation.

The balance

This is the part that is genuinely hard. And I think it is what separates the marketers who are really good at what they do from the ones who are still developing.

Knowing when to listen, learn, adapt, and redo because there is real, educated, valuable feedback on the table. Versus knowing when to stand up with confidence for your work because you understand something about the market, the audience, or the craft that the person giving feedback does not.

I saw this recently with a designer on our team. We were producing a video and there were a lot of opinions floating around about how to visually differentiate and strengthen the brand. Many ideas, from many people. This designer took control. He acknowledged the ideas, said they could be considered in the future, then laid out exactly how he was going to move forward and why.

When I watched the final video a few days later, it was growing on me. And I realized he was right. He had the expertise to filter through the noise, make the call, and deliver something better than what a committee would have produced.

That is the other side of the coin. Sometimes you cannot let the voices get too loud. You have to trust your judgment and your ownership of the craft.

Earning the trust

When you get this balance right, something starts to shift. The executives who had strong opinions start to see your expertise in action. They start to trust your judgment. Not because you fought them. Because over time, the results proved you knew what you were doing.

Marketing is open season. It always has been.

The job is not to shut that down.

✌️

Part 1 was the architecture. Part 2 was building your first AI employee. This is the payoff.

You have a repository, a CLAUDE.md, context files, and at least one working skill. Now we run an actual project through the system. A full campaign with multiple assets, produced in sequence, reviewed through pull requests, and tracked from brief to results.

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The scenario

You are launching a new product. The campaign needs:

• A project brief

• A competitive one-pager for sales

• A landing page draft

• An email announcement

• LinkedIn posts for launch week

Five assets. Five skills. One project folder.

Step 1: Create the project folder and write the brief

Create projects/2026-04-product-launch/ in your repo. Every project gets its own folder.

The first file is always brief.md. It answers the questions every asset needs answered before work begins:

• What are we launching and why now?

• Who is the primary audience?

• What is the one thing we want them to do?

• What assets do we need?

• What is the timeline?

• What does success look like?

You could build a skill to generate this brief, so the structure and questions are consistent every time, for anyone on the team.

Every skill you run for this project should reference this brief. It is what keeps a five-asset campaign coherent. Without it, each skill runs in isolation and you end up with a landing page that says one thing and an email that says something else.

Step 2: Build your skills

In Part 2, you built one skill. Now you need a few more. Building skills is fast once your context files exist. Same structure: Role, Approach, Context Files to Reference, Template to Follow, Input, Output, What Good Output Looks Like, What Bad Output Looks Like.

For this launch:

• skills/write-competitive-one-pager.md

• skills/write-landing-page.md

• skills/write-email-announcement.md

• skills/write-linkedin-posts.md

Build these skills to be reusable across any campaign, not just this one. Instead of hardcoding a specific project brief into the skill, have the skill ask which project it is for, which audience segment to target, and any other details that change from campaign to campaign. That way, next time you launch something, the skills already exist. You just run them and answer the questions.

You do not need to build them from scratch. Tell Claude: “I need a skill file for writing a competitive one-pager. Follow the same structure as my write-customer-story skill. Reference brand voice, the relevant audience segment, competitive context, and the product overview. Have it ask me which project brief to use.” Claude drafts the skill. You edit the Approach and Good/Bad Output sections to match your standards.

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Step 3: Run the skills in sequence

Start with the competitive one-pager. It forces you to sharpen your positioning against a specific competitor, and that thinking flows into everything else.

“Run the write competitive one-pager skill for this project.”

Claude asks which competitor, which segment, reads the brief, and produces the one-pager. Review it, edit it, save it to the project folder.

Then the landing page. Then the email. Then LinkedIn. Each skill reads the same brief, the same context files, and follows its own template. The messaging stays aligned because every skill pulls from the same source of truth.

The order matters. The one-pager sharpens differentiation. The landing page builds the core narrative. The email distills it into 150 words. The LinkedIn posts pull the sharpest hooks from the landing page. Each asset builds on the one before it.

This can later be saved as a product-launch-play.md in your /plays folder; so your team can use it again during your next launch.

Step 4: Review through pull requests

Batch the assets into a pull request. A team member reviews the diff, leaves comments, approves or requests changes.

The reviewer can see the skill that produced the output, the brief it referenced, and the context files it pulled from. If something sounds off, they can check whether the issue is the skill, the context file, or the brief. The review becomes specific instead of “it just doesn’t feel right.”

Step 5: Write the results

The campaign launches. Data comes back. Create projects/2026-04-product-launch/results.md:

• What was the business goal and did we hit it?

• Did the campaign accomplish what it was meant to accomplish?

• What moved the needle and what did not?

• What did we learn that changes how we approach the next launch?

• What should change in the context files, skills, or templates?

That last point matters a lot. The email worked but the landing page fell flat? Update your audience context file. Sales loved the one-pager but said it missed a new objection? Update the competitive context file. The results file turns campaign outcomes into system improvements. The next project starts from a better baseline.

The compounding effect, in full

Every customer call transcript adds buyer language to your knowledge base. Every campaign result that updates a context file makes every skill sharper. Every new skill inherits the full depth of context your team has accumulated.

Six months from now, your AI employees are not the same ones you started with. The AI did not get smarter. Your context got deeper. Your skills got tighter. The system learned from the work.

Where to go from here

You have the architecture from Part 1. You built your first AI employee in Part 2. You ran your first project in Part 3. This series is dense. If you got all the way here, you have already done the hardest part.

Now the work shifts. You have to sell this internally. Get your team to actually use what you built. There will be resistance. That is normal. But here is what I believe: AI is not going to replace people. People who use AI are going to replace people who do not.

You have the foundation. The real challenge now is changing how your team works. Once they adopt the method, the system compounds on its own. Every project, every result, every context file update makes the next one better.

The system is live. Now use it.

✌️

In Part 1, I laid out the full architecture. Every component, what it does, how it all connects. If you have not read it, go back and start there. This one assumes you have the blueprint.

Now we build.

By the end of this post, you will have a working repository, a CLAUDE.md that defines how your AI employees behave, context files loaded with real knowledge about your business, and one fully functional skill that produces a strong first draft you can actually use.

This will feel like a lot of work. You are building your first AI employee from zero, and that means creating foundational context like voice guidelines, product knowledge, and buyer intelligence. You only build that foundation once. Every skill you create after this one inherits it. Your second AI employee will take a tenth of the effort. Your fifth will take minutes.

The skill we are building is a customer story brief writer. It takes a raw customer interview transcript and turns it into a structured brief: the customer problem, why they chose your product, the outcome, and key quotes your team can reuse across marketing and sales materials.

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Step 1: Create the GitHub repository

Go to github.com. Sign in (or create a free account). Click the green “New” button in the top left. Name it something clear. marketing-ai works.

A few settings to configure right away, all on the same “Create a new repository” page. Scroll down and you will see the options:

• Set visibility to Private (this is your internal marketing infrastructure, not a public project)

• Check Add a README file so the repo is not empty

• Leave Add .gitignore as None

• Click Create repository

Once the repo is created, configure two things under Settings:

• Settings > General > Pull Requests: check “Automatically delete head branches” so merged branches clean themselves up

• Settings > Branches > Add rule: select the “main” branch, enable “Require a pull request before merging,” and set required approvals to 1

That second one is important. Nobody pushes changes to the live version without a review.

If you have never used GitHub before: a repository is just a folder with superpowers. It tracks every change, lets people propose changes without overwriting the live version, and gives you a full history of what changed, when, and why.

Now let us build the folder structure from Part 1. You could create every file manually through the web interface, but there is a faster way: let Claude do it. To set that up:

• Open Claude Desktop and switch to Cowork mode (or use Claude Code if you prefer the terminal)

• Go to Settings > Connected Apps and connect your GitHub account

• Select a folder on your computer where you want the local copy of your repo to live

Then give Claude this prompt:

“Clone my GitHub repository at github.com/[your-username]/marketing-ai and create the full Tier 1 folder structure: context/brand/, context/products/, context/audience/, context/competitive/, skills/, templates/, enablement/, knowledge-base/, knowledge-base-input/. Add a placeholder .md file in each folder. Commit and push.”

Claude will clone the repo, create every folder and file, and push it in one go. Everything after this is filling it with real content.

Step 2: Write your CLAUDE.md

Part 1 covered what goes in this file: team roles, voice rules, default behaviors, messaging pillars, output defaults, regional differences. Now you actually write yours.

Tell Claude: “Help me write a CLAUDE.md for my marketing AI system. Here is how our team operates.” Walk it through your rules and standards. Let it draft the structure. Then edit it until it sounds like you. Keep it under 300 lines. How the AI should work, not what it should know.

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Step 3: Build your context files

Context files are the knowledge layer. You do not need to build all of them right now. You only need the ones this skill references: brand voice, audience, and product. The rest you will add as you build more skills.

You probably do not know what a well-structured Markdown file should look like for each of these. That is fine. Claude does. And you probably already have the raw material in Google Docs, PDFs, slide decks, Notion pages, or internal wikis.

For each file below, give Claude the existing documents you have (drag them in or point it at the files) and tell it what kind of context file you need. Something like: “I need to build a brand voice Markdown file for my marketing AI system. Here are our current brand guidelines and our five best-performing blog posts. Create a well-structured .md file that captures our voice with specific, enforceable rules and real examples.” Claude will generate the structure and populate it with your content. Then you edit. You have the expertise. Claude just organized it for you.

context/brand/voice.md

This is the most referenced file in the entire system. Every skill that produces customer-facing content reads it. What to include:

• Tone by channel (website, email, social, blog)

• Phrases that are on-brand and off-brand

• Real examples of good copy from your company (actual sentences, not adjectives like “professional and innovative”)

If you do not have a brand voice document, pull up the last ten pieces your team published, find the three or four that sound right, and write down what they have in common. That is your voice.

context/products/platform-overview.md

Write this for someone who is smart but new. If you have multiple products, one file per product. What to include:

• What the product does, who it is for, how it is deployed

• Tiers, editions, pricing logic

• Technical details: compliance certifications, security architecture, integrations

• Proof points: customer numbers, deployment stats, analyst quotes

context/audience/enterprise-it.md (or your primary segment)

Pick your most important buyer segment. One file per segment.

Do not write a persona with a name and a stock photo. Write a buyer intelligence document:

• Job titles, company size, industry

• The trigger event that puts them in market

• Their daily frustrations in their own words

• The objections they raise during the sales process

• How they describe the problem they are trying to solve

If you have access to Gong or call recordings, listen to three or four discovery calls and write down the exact phrases buyers use. That language goes in this file.

Three files. That is all you need to run your first skill. The competitive battlecards, enablement docs, and everything else from Part 1 will come as you build more employees.

Step 4: Create the template

Create a new file: templates/customer-story.md. This defines the output shape for the skill we are about to build. You can ask Claude to generate the ideal template structure for any asset type (”What should a customer story brief template include?”) and then customize from there. Here is one you can start with:

# Customer Story Brief

## Source
- Transcript file: [filename]
- Date: [date of conversation]
- Customer: [company name]
- Segment: [audience segment]

## About the Customer
2-3 sentences. Who they are, what they do, and enough context to make the story relevant to similar buyers.

## The Challenge
What problem were they facing before they found your product? What was the business impact? Use their own words wherever possible.

## The Solution
How did they use your product to solve the problem? What capabilities mattered most? Include any details on setup, integrations, or time to value if mentioned.

### Key Quote
The strongest verbatim quote from the transcript that captures why they chose your product. Include the speaker's name, title, and company.

## The Outcomes
What changed after implementation? List key benefits, each as a short bold label followed by one sentence of detail. Quantify where possible. If metrics were not discussed, note the qualitative outcomes described.

## Additional Quotes
2-3 more verbatim quotes. For each, note where it could be reused (case study, sales deck, email, ad copy).

Change it to fit your needs. The important thing is that it exists and every run produces consistent output.

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Step 5: Build the skill

Create a new file in your skills folder: skills/write-customer-story.md. This is your first AI employee. Here is how to build it, section by section.

Role. Define who the AI is for this task. Not “you are a helpful assistant.” A specific role with specific expertise.

## Role
You are a senior content strategist with deep expertise in customer marketing for B2B SaaS. You specialize in extracting compelling narratives from raw customer conversations and structuring them into marketing-ready story briefs.

Approach. How should the AI think about this task? What principles guide the work?

## Approach
Listen more than interpret. The best customer stories use the customer's own language, not marketing polish. Pull exact phrases and terminology from the transcript. Frame the story around the customer's journey: what was the problem, what did they do about it, what happened. Do not lead with your product. Lead with their situation.

When the transcript is messy or incomplete, work with what is there. Flag gaps rather than filling them with assumptions. A brief that honestly notes "metrics were not discussed in this conversation" is more useful than one that invents an outcome.

Context files to reference. You could tell the AI which files to read in a regular chat prompt. But you would have to remember the file paths, check which ones are relevant, and hope every team member builds the same prompt. The skill standardizes all of that in one place.

## Context Files to Reference
Before producing any output, read the following files:

1. `context/brand/voice.md`: Follow tone and language guidelines for all written sections
2. `context/audience/{segment}.md`: Load the persona file for the customer's segment. Use it to frame the story in terms that resonate with similar buyers
3. `context/products/platform-overview.md`: Verify any product claims or feature references against actual capabilities

The skill is wired into your context files. Every time it runs, it reads your brand voice, your audience persona, and your product details. It does not start from zero.

Template to follow. Point to the template file.

## Template to Follow
Structure the output using `templates/customer-story.md`. Follow the section order and length guidance exactly.

Input. The person just calls the skill. Claude asks the right questions.

## Input
Before starting, ask the human:
- Which transcript from `knowledge-base-input/` should I use?
- Which audience segment does this customer belong to? (maps to a file in `context/audience/`)
- Any specific angle or asset type to prioritize?

Do not start producing output until you have the transcript and the segment.

Output. What does the skill produce?

## Output
A single Markdown document, 300-500 words, following the template structure. Saved to the relevant project folder or provided as a draft for review.

What good output looks like. Tells the AI the standard.

## What Good Output Looks Like
- Quotes are verbatim from the transcript, not paraphrased
- The customer's own language and terminology appear throughout, not marketing jargon
- The problem section would make the reader nod and think "that is exactly what we deal with"
- Every section adds something new (no repetition across sections)
- The recommended use section is specific and actionable, not generic
- A content marketer could turn this into a case study draft without going back to the transcript

What bad output looks like. Tells the AI what to avoid.

## What Bad Output Looks Like
- Rewriting customer quotes in polished marketing language (losing authenticity)
- Making up outcomes or metrics not mentioned in the transcript
- Generic problem statements that could apply to any company in any industry
- Ignoring relevant competitive mentions from the conversation
- Recommending "case study" for every brief regardless of the actual content

Commit the file. You now have your first AI employee.

Step 6: Run it

Get a customer interview transcript. Drop it into knowledge-base-input/ and commit it.

Open Claude (Cowork mode or Claude Code, pointed at your repo). Claude automatically reads your CLAUDE.md first. Type:

“Run the write customer story skill.”

Claude will ask you which transcript to use and which audience segment the customer belongs to. Answer those questions, and watch what happens. It loads your brand voice, the audience persona, and the product overview. It reads the transcript. It produces a brief following the exact template structure, with verbatim customer quotes, framed for the segment you specified.

That is not “using AI.” That is running an AI employee through a system.

Step 7: Edit, improve, repeat

The first output will not be perfect. That is the point. Read the brief. Mark what is strong and what missed.

If the problem framing is generic, your audience context file needs more detail. If the voice is off, your voice file needs sharpening. If the recommended use is weak, tighten the “What Good Output Looks Like” section in the skill. Update the file. Run the skill again. Better?

This is the feedback loop. Every time you improve a context file, every skill that references it gets better too. You are not editing one output. You are upgrading the entire system.

What you have now

One repository. One CLAUDE.md. Three context files. One template. One skill. And the muscle memory of how the whole thing works.

That is your first AI employee. Every improvement to a context file makes this skill better and makes the next skill you build start from a higher baseline. The compounding effect from Part 1, in action.

What is coming in Part 3

You have the architecture. You have your first employee. Part 3 is the payoff: running a full project end to end. A brief, multiple skills in sequence, assets landing in the project folder, review through pull requests, and a results file that makes the next project better.

That is where this stops being infrastructure and starts being how you work.

✌️

PS: This is a comprehensive guide. Bookmark this page for future reference.

Every marketing team is “using AI” now.

Someone on the team has a Claude or ChatGPT subscription. They paste in a brief, get a draft, edit it, ship it. They call it “AI-powered marketing” in the next all-hands.

But is it?

There is no memory between sessions. No shared context about the business. No review process. No version control. No way to know what prompt produced which output, or whether the copy that went live last Tuesday followed the same standards as the email that shipped last month. Every interaction starts from zero.

Now imagine a different version.

You have twelve AI employees. Each one has a defined role. One writes product update emails. One drafts landing page copy. One builds competitive one-pagers. Each one knows your voice, your positioning, your buyer personas, your proof points.

Every piece of output goes through a review process before it goes live. Changes are tracked. Quality improves over time because the system learns from every campaign. Six months in, your AI employees are dramatically better than they were on day one.

That is what an AI-native marketing team looks like. And that is what we are building at Rocket.Chat right now.

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The difference between using AI and running AI

You would never hire a copywriter, hand them zero context about your company, your market, your buyers, and expect them to produce work that sounds like your brand. But that is exactly what happens when someone opens Claude, types “write me a product email,” and expects the output to be ready.

The shift is treating AI the way software teams treat their code. Every AI employee has structured context files that define what it needs to know. Every output goes through a review process. Everything is version controlled so nothing gets lost and nothing goes live without approval.

This is not complicated. But it requires thinking about AI as infrastructure, not as a tool you pick up when you need a draft.

What this system actually is (and what it is not)

This entire system is about one thing: teaching AI what you already know, and then using that infrastructure to leverage it at scale across your team (even beyond marketing as it matures).

It does not replace having the fundamentals figured out. You still need to know who you are, who you are selling to, what makes you different, why someone should buy now and not six months from now, what your key verticals and use cases are. You still need positioning, messaging, and a deep understanding of your ICP. Without that foundation, building this system just means automating bad marketing faster.

Every component I am about to walk you through requires real expertise to build. The AI produces strong first drafts. That is how I treat every output. But the human brings the judgment, the editing, and the market knowledge. Over time, the system gets better because you keep teaching it more. Get the fundamentals right first. Then build the system. Then keep iterating.

The full architecture

This post walks through every component. What it does, what goes in it, how it connects to everything else. By the end, you will have the blueprint to build this yourself.

Here is the complete repository. This lives in GitHub, which is essentially a shared folder with version control and a built-in review process. More on why GitHub later.

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Not all of these carry the same weight. I think about them in three tiers.

Tier 1 is mandatory. These are the components you absolutely need to do this successfully: CLAUDE.md, context/ (with all four subfolders; audiences, brand, competitors, products), skills/, templates/, knowledge-base/, and knowledge-base-input/. If you build nothing else, build these. They are the foundation of the entire system.

Tier 2 is recommended. .claude/ is the technical configuration layer you will want as you scale usage across your team. plays/ and projects/ are where repeatable campaign execution and organized work output live. You can start without them, but as soon as you are running real campaigns through the system, you will want them.

Tier 3 is expansion. tools/ is where scripts, integrations, and automation utilities go. You do not need this on day one.

The idea behind these tiers is important. Start with the core. Get comfortable. Then expand. As you get deeper into this, you will start to see opportunities to build new things that are specific to your company and your team.

Here is an example: tracker.md. It is not something I would recommend for every team. But it can be a lightweight project management layer built right into the repository. A Markdown file at the root of the repo that lists what is in progress, what is up next, and what is done. It is not core. But it shows what becomes possible once the system is in place. The system is designed to grow with you.

Now let me walk through each component.

The files you will be working with

Mainly .MDs and .CSVs

Almost everything in this system is a Markdown file (.md). Plain text with light formatting. Human-readable, works perfectly with version control, and is exactly what AI tools like Claude are built to read and write. Your CLAUDE.md, context files, skills, templates, plays, knowledge-base files. All Markdown.

The exception is structured data. Pricing matrices, competitive feature comparisons, customer account lists with deal sizes. Those are better as CSVs, sitting in whatever folder makes sense for the data (a pricing CSV in context/products/, a customer list in knowledge-base/). You will also occasionally have PDFs or slide exports. But the default is always Markdown. When in doubt, write it as an .md file.

CLAUDE.md: the onboarding document

Tier 1: Core

This is the first file AI reads when it starts any session. Think of it as the onboarding document for every AI employee on day one. It sets the rules that apply across everything.

Think about what yours should define: who is on the team and what their roles are, what words to always avoid, what messaging pillars to follow, how long outputs should be, how many CTAs per piece (hint: one), sentence style conventions, regional differences if your buyers span geographies (North America and EMEA do not write the same way), and default behaviors like always leading with the customer problem or always asking a clarifying question before starting work (AskUserQuestion).

This file should not be longer than 300 lines. It is not where detailed product information goes. It is not where campaign strategy lives. It is the behavioral layer. How the AI should work, not what it should know.

What it should know lives in context.

context/brand/

Tier 1: Core

Voice, tone, and visual identity. How the company sounds. Not just adjectives like “professional” or “innovative.” Specific, practical guidance.

Start with three to five copy variations that actually sound like your brand. Add the phrases that are excellent and the ones that are off-limits. If your tone shifts depending on the audience (it probably does), define how. If the brand voice file is vague, the output will be generic. Get specific. Include real examples of good writing from your company. Show what the voice sounds like, do not just describe it.

This is also where your messaging and positioning live. Your core value proposition. Your key differentiators. Your messaging pillars and how they map to different audiences. The USPs that matter for each buyer segment. If you have a positioning document or a messaging framework, distill the most critical elements into this folder. The AI should be able to pull your positioning into any piece of content it produces without you having to remind it every time.

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context/products/

Tier 1: Core

Features, pricing, deployment types, roadmap highlights, and integration details.

If your product has multiple tiers, deployment options, or editions, this is where the AI learns the difference between them. What each one means. What the pricing logic is. What proof points exist for each. This is also where technical details live: compliance certifications, security architecture, integration capabilities. The things your buyers actually care about that marketing usually gets wrong because nobody took the time to write them down properly.

Use cases belong here too. What are the three to five primary use cases your product serves? For each one, what is the problem, what is the solution, and what is the measurable outcome? When a skill needs to write about a specific use case, it should be able to pull that directly from this folder.

context/audience/

Tier 1: Core

ICPs and personas. Their job titles, their industry, what they care about, their daily frustrations, their buying language.

Not “IT leaders in enterprise.” That is useless. Instead: the specific job titles, the specific company size, the specific trigger event that puts them in market, and the specific language they use to describe the problem they are trying to solve. Include the objections they raise. Include how they describe their own pain in their own words. Include what matters to different segments, because a buyer in one geography or vertical is not the same buyer in another.

If you have different audience segments, each one gets its own file. The AI loads the relevant one depending on the task.

PS: If you’re running an ABM program, you can even include a .CSV with your target account list per territory.

context/competitive/

Tier 1: Core

Battlecards. What each competitor claims, where they actually win, where you win, what objections come up, and how to respond.

Structured per competitor. Each file follows the same layout: At a Glance, Where We Win, How They Differentiate, Common Objections, Proof Points. This way, when a skill needs competitive positioning (and they often do), it pulls from a consistent format every time.

Competitive context is some of the highest-leverage content in the entire repository. The difference between “we are better” and a specific, informed comparison is the difference between marketing that converts and marketing that gets ignored.

skills/

Tier 1: Core

This is where your AI employees live.

A skill is a structured prompt that defines a specific task end to end. It tells the AI what role to assume, what approach to take, what files to reference (context files, templates, knowledge-base entries), what the input will be, what the output should look like, and what separates good output from bad output.

Here is what makes skills different from just “having a good prompt.” A real skill is complex. It might instruct the AI to read your brand voice file, pull the relevant audience persona, reference the competitive battlecard for a specific competitor, follow a particular template structure, and produce output within specific length and tone constraints. If you tried to type all of that into a chat window every time, you would miss things. Different team members would do it differently. You would waste time reconstructing the same instructions over and over.

The skill standardizes all of that into one file. Any team member can call that skill through the chat instead of rebuilding the prompt from scratch. The email writer skill. The landing page skill. The competitive one-pager skill. The blog post skill. The social copy skill. The webinar invitation skill. The onboarding drip skill.

Each one is essentially an AI employee with a defined role and a consistent way of working. You will start with two or three. Within a few months, you will have a dozen.

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templates/

Tier 1: Core

A skill tells the AI how to think. A template tells it what the finished product looks like.

A competitive one-pager template might define five sections: At a Glance, Where We Win, How They Differentiate, Objection Handling, Proof Points. A case study template: Challenge, Solution, Quote, Key Metrics. Skills and templates work together. The skill is the coaching conversation. The template is the example doc you hand someone and say “make it look like this.”

knowledge-base-input/ and knowledge-base/

Tier 1: Core

When you think about adding context to this system, there are layers. Day one, you have your CLAUDE.md. Then you have your context folder with deep, structured knowledge about your brand, products, audience, and competitors. Knowledge-base-input and knowledge-base are where it gets really interesting.

Your team has conversations with customers every day. They interview prospects. They sit in calls with buyers from different regions. Your product marketing team is discussing a new capability or a launch with the product team. There is golden information and terminology being described in all of these conversations, and usually that knowledge is scattered across team threads, call recordings, and meeting notes. Or worse, it lives in one person’s head because they happened to be in the room.

Knowledge-base-input is where you dump all of that. Raw transcripts from customer calls. Feedback from support tickets. Notes from analyst briefings. Product documentation. Competitive intelligence from the field. Unprocessed, unstructured. It does not matter. Get it in.

Knowledge-base is the processed version. A human (or an AI with a processing skill) takes the raw material, cleans it, structures it, and moves it into knowledge-base as organized, tagged reference material.

The separation matters. You do not want the AI pulling from messy transcripts. You want it pulling from curated references. Two folders. One pipeline. And over time, this is where the system builds its deepest advantage, because no competitor can replicate the institutional knowledge your team accumulates here.

.claude/

Tier 2: Recommended

Claude Code configuration. Model preferences, default behaviors, and tool settings. This is the technical layer that controls how Claude operates at a system level. Settings like which model to use, what commands are available, and what guardrails are in place.

You do not need this on day one. But as you scale usage across your team and want more fine-grained control over how the AI behaves, this is where those settings live. You will configure it once and rarely touch it again.

plays/

Tier 2: Recommended

A play is a campaign playbook that chains multiple skills into a step-by-step workflow. A product launch play might define: Step 1, run the email-writing skill. Step 2, the landing page skill. Step 3, competitive one-pagers for the three closest competitors. Step 4, social copy for LinkedIn. Step 5, the internal sales enablement brief.

The play is not automation. It is a recipe. A human follows the steps, runs each skill when the play calls for it, reviews every output. Instead of every campaign being a blank canvas where someone reinvents the process, the play defines the process. You do not need plays on day one. But once your core skills and templates are working, plays are what turn individual AI employees into a coordinated team.

projects/

Tier 2: Recommended

This is where the actual work happens. Every campaign, every initiative gets a project folder. The output from each skill run lives here, organized by campaign.

Every project starts with a brief.md and ends with a results.md.

The brief defines the campaign: what it is, who it is for, what the goals are, what assets need to be produced, what the timeline looks like. You can build a skill specifically for brief creation so that every team member produces briefs that follow the same structure and format, saved automatically in the project folder. The entire team can reference it throughout the project.

The results file gets written a couple of weeks after the campaign ends. What data came back. What worked. What didn’t. Over time, when you look across all your project folders and all those results files, patterns emerge.

Projects are temporary. They are the working space. Context files, skills, templates, and plays are permanent infrastructure. Projects use that infrastructure to produce work.

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tools/

Tier 3: Expansion

Scripts and utilities. Automation helpers. Things like a script that pulls the latest competitor pricing from a public page, or a formatting tool that converts a raw transcript into a structured knowledge-base file.

This folder is future state for most teams. Start empty. Fill it as your needs evolve and your team starts building small utilities to make the system faster. Integrations with your CRM, your analytics platform, your ad accounts. This is where the system starts to connect to the rest of your stack.

Why GitHub and not Google Drive

GitHub sounds like a developer tool. It is. And that is exactly why it works.

Google Drive does not have real version control or a review process. When you edit a Google Doc, that edit is live immediately. No approval step. No way to experiment safely.

GitHub gives you three things. A repository is the shared folder, one source of truth for the entire team. Branches let you make changes without touching the main version (update the brand voice file on a branch, test the output, merge it in if it works, delete it if it does not). Pull requests are proposals: you update a skill, someone reviews it, they approve or give feedback before it goes live. Nothing ships without a second pair of eyes.

The compounding effect

This is the part that gets me the most excited. And it is the part that makes this fundamentally different from “using AI tools.”

Every campaign makes the system smarter. Context files get updated with new proof points from closed deals. Skills get refined based on what produced strong output and what fell flat. Plays get updated with retrospective learnings. The knowledge base accumulates new source material from every customer conversation and market shift.

That is not a productivity hack. That is a structural advantage. The kind of advantage that compounds quietly while everyone else is still arguing whether or not AI is good enough for them.

What is coming in Part 2

This was the blueprint. The full architecture with every component and how they connect.

In Part 2, I am going to walk through how to actually build your first AI employee, start to finish.

If you are thinking about how to actually operationalize AI in your team, bookmark this series. Part 2 drops next Sunday.

✌️

AI writing all sounds the same." "You can always tell." For 99% of AI-generated content, that's true. But that's a prompting problem. Most people give AI nothing to work with and then blame the output.

Writing better content with AI starts with something most people skip: your own expertise. What you know about your craft, your audience, what works and what doesn’t. AI can’t figure that out on its own. You have to bring it.

I’ve spent over 15 years writing B2B marketing emails and picked up five principles through trial and error. When I codified them into a structured prompt with hard rules, the output started consistently beating what most people (including me) would write on an average day. Fifteen years of experience, loaded into every draft, for anyone on my team.

You probably have something similar. Maybe it’s product one pagers, investor updates, blog posts. You already know what good looks like for the content you write. The difference is whether you put that into the process or just hope AI figures it out.

Marketing emails are what I'm using here as a simple example so you can try this for yourself. This post gives you everything you need: my five writing principles, a prompt that codifies them, an anti-AI writing checklist, and step-by-step instructions to get an email written. In five minutes, you can test what happens when you give AI actual context and structure instead of a blank prompt.

PS: Next week I'm sharing part 1 of a more comprehensive series on how to build an entire AI-native marketing team with Claude and GitHub; including step-by-step on the complete systems architecture (yes, we're doing this at Rocket.Chat right now).

Share this post with anyone who might be interested.

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Ok, let's first go over the five hard-earned writing principles.

1. One CTA. That’s it.

Give people one clear action. The moment you add a second one, the message becomes unclear. The reader now has to choose between two things, and when people have to choose, they tend to choose neither. One email, one ask, one link.

2. Every line is your last chance.

The subject line has one job: get them to open. The first sentence has one job: get them to read the second. The second paragraph does not matter if the first one didn’t earn the right to exist. Every single line in your email is auditioning for the reader’s attention. Treat it that way.

3. Get. To. The. Point.

Your email is the least of their priorities. They have 47 unread messages, a meeting in five minutes, and a kid screaming in the background. Respect that. One cohesive storyline from beginning to end. No circling. No buildup for the sake of buildup. Say what matters and stop.

4. Make your copy actionable.

There’s a difference between telling and inviting. “We have a session to share ideas and tips” is a statement. “Interested in a session to share ideas and tips?” is an invitation.

A statement delivers the full picture and asks nothing of the reader. Easy to skim, easy to forget. A question forces the reader’s brain to actually process it and form a response. When someone reads “Interested in...?” and internally thinks “yeah, maybe,” they’ve made a micro-commitment. That tiny mental “yes” creates momentum toward the click.

5. No one cares about you or your company.

This is the hardest one. The moment you write “I,” “we,” or “our,” you’ve made the email about yourself. And nobody signed up for that. Compare: “We’re hosting a webinar tomorrow” vs. “500 of your peers are joining a webinar tomorrow.” Same event. Completely different energy. The second one makes the reader feel like they’re missing something. The first one is just an announcement nobody asked for.

The hard part about principles.

Knowing them is easy. Executing them consistently is where it falls apart.

On a good day, all five show up. The hook lands, the copy is tight, the CTA is clean. On a busy Tuesday between six meetings? Maybe two of them make it in. Now multiply that across a team of five, ten, fifteen people with different writing instincts, different habits, different blind spots. Consistency at scale is almost impossible through training alone.

That’s where the prompt comes in.

The prompt

All five principles, turned into a structured prompt with non-negotiable rules. Subject line length. Word count limits. Forbidden words (I, we, our, us, my). Required framing techniques. Social proof over announcements. Hook first, always.

The output is a first draft that systematically hits all five principles every single time. It never has an off day. It never forgets rule number five. It never gets lazy on the hook.

The full prompt is at the end of this post as a downloadable .md file. Copy it, drop it into Claude, and use it as many times as you want.

The anti-AI checklist

Good output is only half the job. The other half is making sure it doesn’t read like AI wrote it. Em dashes everywhere, perfect parallel structure, “furthermore” and “moreover,” that slow buildup where the point doesn’t show up until paragraph three. These are patterns that trained eyes spot instantly.

The anti-AI writing checklist is the second downloadable .md file at the end of this post. It covers the eleven most common AI tells and how to fix each one, plus an editing process to run after every draft.

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How to do this in 5 minutes with Claude

1. Download Claude Desktop. Go to claude.ai/download. Install it. Switch to “Cowork” mode.

Why the desktop app and not the website or mobile? Cowork mode can read files directly from your computer. That means it can load the full prompt file, follow every rule in it, and write the draft in one go. The web and mobile versions can’t do that. The prompt is too structured and detailed to paste into a chat window and get consistent results.

2. Download the two files from this post. Save them somewhere easy to find. Desktop works.

3. Select that folder in Cowork. Click “Select folder” and point to where you saved the files.

4. Type this into Claude:

“Read the email copywriting prompt file and use it to write me a marketing email.

Topic: [what the email is about]
Audience: [who’s receiving it]
CTA: [the one action they should take]
Value: [why they should care]
Date/time: [any relevant dates, deadlines, or event times]”

Example:

“Read the email copywriting prompt file and use it to write me a marketing email.

Topic: Upcoming webinar on pipeline generation for B2B teams
Audience: VP Marketing and Demand Gen Directors at mid-market SaaS
CTA: Register for the webinar
Value: 3 frameworks that helped 200+ companies double their pipeline in 6 months
Date/time: Thursday, March 20 at 11am ET”

Try this: Add ‘AskUserQuestion’ to the prompt above. Instead of the prompt provided, write this ‘Read the email copywriting prompt file, then AskUserQuestion and use it to write me a marketing email’. Claude will start to ask you clarifying questions about the email so you can shape the output together.

5. Run the anti-AI checklist. Tell Claude: “Now read the anti-AI writing checklist and review this email against it.”

Why run the anti-AI checklist at the end and not at the beginning with the prompt? Because the checklist is an editing tool, not a writing tool. If Claude tries to write and self-edit at the same time, the draft comes out overthinking itself, second-guessing every sentence. Let it write freely against the prompt rules first, then filter through the checklist after. Write first, check second.

6. Edit the draft. Read it. Edit it. Then get up. Go have a glass of water. Come back with fresh eyes. Read it again. Edit it again. The thing you heard on a customer call last week, the objection that keeps coming up in sales conversations, the specific pain point your audience is dealing with right now. YOUR OWN JUDGMENT. That’s how a strong first draft becomes a great email.

What you’re getting

Two files, ready to use:

1. The Email Copywriting Prompt - All five principles baked into a structured prompt.

2. The Anti-AI Writing Checklist - What to watch for and fix so the output reads like a human wrote it. Use this as the editing companion after every AI draft.

Both are markdown files available for free in my GitHub Gist. Visit the link, click ‘download ZIP’ on the top right of the page. Drop them into Claude, follow the steps above, and go.

The pre-work is what most people skip. That’s exactly what makes the difference.

Now go write some content.
(let me know how it works for you).

✌️

PS: If you want to go deeper, next Sunday I'm sharing part 1 of a more comprehensive series on how to build an entire AI-native marketing team with Claude and GitHub; including step-by-step on the complete systems architecture. Stay tuned.

Content calendar? Full. Ads running? Check. Blog posts shipping? Weekly. Leads coming in? Sure, some.

But here is the question nobody wants to ask out loud.

When a buyer in your category finally has budget, finally gets the green light, finally sits down to make a shortlist... is your name in the room?

For most companies, it is not.

Not because the product is bad. Not because the team is lazy. But because all that marketing activity produced noise, not memory. The pipeline looks busy. The brand is invisible.

That is not a lead gen problem. That is a recall problem.

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The gap between activity and memory

Most marketers know this but rarely act on it: according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, roughly 95% of your buyers are not in-market right now. They are not clicking your ads, downloading your eBooks, or requesting demos. They are going about their day.

But they are forming impressions. Every touchpoint, every post, every interaction with someone at your company is either building a mental shortlist or it is not.

When the buying window opens, the companies on that shortlist get the call. Everyone else gets Googled, maybe, if there is time.

So what makes a brand stick in a buyer’s head long before they are ready to buy?

Six things. I call them R.E.C.A.L.L.

R: Repetition

Not saying the same thing over and over. That is annoying. Repetition is showing up consistently with something valuable, so often that your name becomes automatic.

The brand that shows up 50 times before the buying trigger wins over the one that shows up once with a gated eBook. Every time.

If your marketing strategy depends on catching buyers at the exact right moment with the exact right ad, you are playing a lottery. Repetition turns the lottery into a sure thing. Show up often enough with something worth paying attention to, and when the moment comes, you do not need to chase it. You are already there.

Look at your last six months of content. Would your target buyer recognize your name from it? Or would they scroll right past?

E: Edge

Safe brands disappear.

The ones with a sharp point of view, a take that makes people stop scrolling, a stance that rubs some people the wrong way. Those are the ones that stick.

Gong did not become Gong by saying “sales is important.” They came in with data that challenged how people thought about their own sales calls. They made people uncomfortable. They had an edge that was impossible to ignore, and it made every competitor in revenue intelligence feel generic by comparison. They were the purple cow.

If your messaging sounds like every other company in your category, you do not have recall. You have wallpaper.

Now think about your own brand. If you removed the logo from your content, would anyone know it was you? If the answer is no, you are blending in. And blending in is just a slow way of becoming invisible.

C: Clarity

If a buyer cannot explain what your company does in one sentence, your marketing has failed at its most basic job.

(side note: bad messaging starts upstream. Unclear positioning, unclear strategy. Marketing alone cannot fix what the company has not figured out yet.)

And that failure poisons the entire company. Sales tells a different story than the website. The product team gets pulled in ten directions by customers who never should have been customers. Support drowns in tickets from people who bought the wrong thing. It goes way beyond marketing.

Drift understood this. They did not say “we sell chatbots” or “we do real-time website engagement.” They created a category: conversational marketing. A buyer could explain what Drift did before ever talking to sales. That clarity was not just good marketing. It was the foundation everything else was built on.

The clearer the message, the faster it sticks. If your positioning needs a paragraph to explain, it is not positioning. It is confusion with a logo.

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A: Availability

Stop gating your best content behind forms. Stop making buyers jump through hoops to learn from you.

Look, I get it. You spent weeks on that report. You want something back. An email address. A lead. Something to show for it.

But here is what actually happens: the buyer hits the form, weighs whether your content is worth giving up their inbox, and most of the time decides it is not. Your best thinking dies behind a gate that 90% of your audience will never open.

The brands that give more than they capture are the ones buyers remember when the buying window opens. Make your best thinking easy to find, easy to consume, and easy to share. That is not charity. That is strategy.

When someone learns from you for free, repeatedly, over months, you are not losing leads. You are building the kind of trust that no form fill will ever create.

L: Leaders

Not your logo. Not your corporate LinkedIn page. The trusted voices your buyers actually follow.

People trust people, not brands. This is not new. But very few companies actually build around it.

Drift did not just have a great product and a clear message. They had Dave Gerhardt. A VP of Marketing who built a personal brand so strong that he arguably did more for Drift’s awareness than their paid budget ever could. When Dave talked, people listened, and Drift was always part of the conversation.

The companies that figure this out have a massive advantage. One credible person saying your name is worth more than a hundred ads saying it for you.

Think about the brands you trust most in your space. Chances are, you can name a person behind them before you can name a product feature. That is not a coincidence. That is the strategy.

L: Listening

None of the above matters if you do not deeply understand your buyer’s world. Their frustrations. Their identity. What they actually care about when no vendor is in the room.

This is the letter most companies skip. They jump straight to repetition, to content, to campaigns, without ever sitting down to understand who they are actually talking to.

And you can feel it. You can feel when a brand gets you and when it does not. When the messaging lands on something you have actually felt versus when it sounds like someone ran a keyword report and called it research.

Listening is not a survey. It is not a focus group. It is immersing yourself in the conversations your buyers are having without you. The communities they are in. The frustrations they share with peers. The way they describe their own problems in their own words.

That is the foundation that makes every other letter work.

Start here. Always.

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The audit

Here is the uncomfortable part.

Run your own marketing through these six filters. Be honest about where you land.

Are you showing up often enough to be automatic, or just often enough to check a box? Do you have a point of view that actually stands out, or are you blending in and calling it “professional”? Can a buyer explain what you do in one sentence? Is your best thinking easy to access, or locked behind a form? Are there real humans at your company building trust with your audience, or is everything coming from a logo? And do you actually understand your buyer’s world, or are you guessing?

Most companies will not score well on all six. That is normal. The point is not to be perfect. The point is to know where the gaps are so you can start closing them.

Because in the end, the company that gets remembered is the company that gets the call.

And the one that does not? They are still wondering why their pipeline is full of leads that go nowhere.

✌️

Pretty cliche. Yet truthful. Common.

Coming from Brazil to Canada, and eventually Finland, that really meant two things:

Safety. The peace of mind of knowing your family will be safe when they leave the house in the morning.

Opportunity. The privilege of knowing that if you work hard, it’s possible to move up in life.

I don’t mean to paint a bad picture of Brazil. It’s a beautiful place full of amazing people. You can visit and you’ll be fine. But if you live there your whole life? There’s a 100% chance you’ll have a couple bad experiences.

When I was 10, I watched my mother being held at gunpoint by what looked like a barely 8-year-old boy at the traffic lights.

So when people ask me, “Why would you leave Brazil to come somewhere so cold and dark?”

That’s why.

Because I love knowing that I’m likely the sketchiest person in my neighborhood. 😂 And I’m not sketchy at all.

My oldest is only 8. He’s been walking to school alone for the past year. All the kids in the neighborhood do.

That’s priceless.

The opportunity thing

Growing up in Brazil, I knew I had only a few viable career choices if I wanted to do okay financially. Doctor. Dentist. Engineer. You get the idea.

But my thing was music. The creative world.

The thing I was almost jealous of when I landed in Finland was seeing that people could, if they really wanted it, pursue a career doing what they love.

I met three firefighters who started a business on the side and became entrepreneurs. Amazing.

So why am I writing about this?

Because like with many things in life, there are challenges.

As much as I know the life I’m able to give my children today is the one I worked so hard for, part of me can’t help but wish they were growing up having the same experiences as me.

Is that human nature?

I want them to ride their bicycle at ‘Fonte do Sapo' in Santos. I want them to love and play football. I want them to speak Portuguese without an accent.

I want them to appreciate and value how privileged they are by experiencing struggle. By seeing how hard life can be for others just based on where they were born.

So they have perspective.

But most importantly, so they have the fire to dedicate themselves to a craft. To find purpose in life. And therefore be truly happy.

Perspective

My oldest’s first time in Brazil, he saw a homeless guy sleeping on the street. He was afraid. “Why is that uncle sleeping there?”

I remember being there with my wife when she saw someone going after an old air conditioner in the middle of the garbage by a street post. The person knew there’s leftover water in old air conditioners. He was thirsty.

My friends all take a step back when someone comes near on a motorcycle. That can be a cue that they’re about to get robbed.

These aren’t good things to be aware of. But I think it’s important to have that awareness. To understand that the world is made up of many different places and that each one of them has positives and negatives.

I truly believe that distance from home builds perspective; the further you go. And that is a life skill that will allow them to go further in life, to be able to relate to others, to read the room and, most importantly, to have an objective view of home by looking at it with ‘fresh eyes’.

Their worlds are only going to get bigger as they grow up; without experiences that build perspective, they’ll be blind to their own reality.

Lucas Pinheiro, the Brazilian-Norwegian gold olympic medalist

Lucas Pinheiro Braathen recently became huge in Brazil. He’s a 25-year-old alpine skier who grew up in Norway with a Brazilian mother and Norwegian father. He skied for Norway his whole career until he abruptly retired in 2023. Then he came back a year later to represent Brazil instead.

He just won Brazil’s first Winter Olympics gold medal. The whole country is behind him.

In interviews, he talked about growing up feeling like an outsider everywhere. Not Norwegian enough in Norway. A gringo in Brazil. Third culture kids, the ones who live across two worlds, know that feeling too well.

Lucas talks about how he eventually understood that what makes you different is what makes you strong. And that’s a great message.

My kids are not just Finnish. They’re not just Brazilian. They’re both. And that’s a superpower.

The richness of two cultures

Having two cultures is an incredible richness.

We sing happy birthday in two languages. First the Finnish version, which is calm and contained. Then the Brazilian version, which is loud and chaotic.

They speak three languages at home. Portuguese with me. English between my wife and I. Finnish everywhere else.

It’s colorful. It makes our lives so much more interesting. It raises eyebrows at restaurant tables all over the world as conversations shift across three languages. The experience of teaching these kids everything across these two cultures has been really fun and exciting.

And for them? It’s just normal.

✌️

What about you? Raising kids abroad? How are you navigating the balance? Let me know in the comments.

Why is B2B marketing so freaking boring?

Not just boring. Actively bad. Forgettable. Indistinguishable from everyone else doing the exact same thing.

We’ve all been to the same webinars. Read the same eBooks. Clicked through the same white-papers. Attended the same events.

They all look the same. Sound the same. Feel the same.

FLAT.

And somehow, nobody questions it.

We tick the box and move on to the next thing. Launch a webinar. Check. Send the nurture sequence. Check. Publish the thought leadership piece. Check.

Being a B2B marketer has become more about tinkering, integrating, automating, orchestrating than the actual craft of marketing.

Now with AI? 10x all of that.

We’ve learned to use the channels. We just forgot to put any substance behind them.

The question nobody asks

I saw a post on LinkedIn recently that made me stop scrolling.

Someone was talking about how they do small exec events for CROs. The challenge? CROs get dozens of event invites every week. Getting them to show up when you’re a tiny, 20 person startup, is nearly impossible.

Most companies would just send the invite and hope for the best. Maybe follow-up a few times then call it a day.

But this team asked a different question: “Who has social capital with CROs?”

The answer: VCs.

So they partnered with firms like Sequoia to co-brand their exec dinners. Suddenly, the invite wasn’t coming from some unknown startup. It was coming from a brand CROs already trusted.

That right there is what most teams skip.

They just do the event without asking the hard questions.

And that’s the problem.

Big, bold and wild

Over a decade ago, I was working in marketing at Toronto-based startup Influitive. We needed to launch a new version of our core product, AdvocateHub.

We could have done what everyone else does: a webinar with slides, a demo, maybe some Q&A at the end. Standard B2B product launch playbook.

Instead, my colleague (and creative genius) Truman Tang, created BAM!TV The first late-night talk show for B2B software. Ever.

Complete with a host (Tony Wright), special guests, commercials, live feeds from ‘remote locations’, the whole thing.

It was challenging. It was fun. It was incredibly memorable.

We even went as far as to send pizza to our customers offices which they could enjoy while watching the show together. (Yes, back then everyone was always at the office).

Results:

• 1,500 views in the first 24 hours (4,000+ total)

• 461 event leads

• 574 tweets

• Reached 183,000 accounts

But here’s what mattered more than the numbers: people actually remembered it.

They talked about it. They shared it. They showed up to our booth at conferences and referenced the show.

That’s the kind of marketing that makes work exciting and rewarding for you and your team.

Here's BAM!TV on YouTube if you're curious.

Making sovereignty emotional

At Rocket.Chat, we had a different problem.

We needed to create awareness around data sovereignty for European governments.

Right now, this topic is bigger than ever. European governments, and even commercial sectors, are actively looking to move away from US big tech to ensure they have complete control and ownership over their critical data.

That was not always the case.

We needed to speak up about the problem, help people connect with its deep significance and, in the process, build recall for Rocket.Chat as the solution.

So we made it emotional.

We created a campaign called Monuments. The idea was simple: pair iconic European landmarks with the message “This monument is definitely here, what about your data?”

Big Ben in the UK. The Eiffel Tower in France. Instantly recognizable. Big national monuments that are definitely within their nation’s border and control.

We wanted to make people think “I get it. But what’s happening with my data?”

We worked with many of our partners and with our employees so that on launch day, everyone would post their own version of the campaign on their social media profiles. For ex.: I live in Finland so I posted about the tuomiokirkko; which is something I was proud to share.

Results:

• 1.6M+ impressions across our key accounts

• 208 social shares

We later expanded this into an integrated digital campaign that went on for a few months targeting our key accounts.

This campaign was all about building recall; because people make up a mental shortlist of the vendors they want to evaluate when solving specific challenges long before they’re ever actually looking to buy. You need to be on that list.

Recall drives preference, and preference drives revenue.

(Roughly speaking, only about 5% of your targets are ready to buy at any given time. Do not ignore the other 95%).

You need to become your audience

At Smarp, we were pivoting from selling advocacy software to employee communications. Completely new audience. We needed to build pipeline from scratch.

We could have run the standard demand gen playbook: gated content, lead magnets, email nurture sequences.

Instead, we picked up the phone and called Sue Dewhurst. She literally wrote the book on employee advocacy.

Myself and my CEO at the time spoke to her on the phone for about 20 mins; with a child like curiosity to learn about her craft. We ended up flying her over to our office the following week so she could speak to our employees and, most importantly, take questions from marketing, sales, product; the entire team.

“Where is the money in internal comms?”, “What capabilities are most crucial for our product to address?”, “What keeps them up at night?”.

For the next few months, we immersed ourselves in the world of internal communications.

It wasn’t long before we knew the who is who in the profession, where they hangout, their frustrations and aspirations. We then stumbled upon what came to be at the core of everything we went on to do:

Internal communications professionals are seen as the party planners and newsletter senders. That pisses them off. They are strategic communicators who deserve a seat at the table.

That feeling hit deep, so we went on to champion it across everything we did as a company; without ever mentioning our product (it was implicit).

We did everything with them and for them. We created events that people looked forward to; such as our quarterly live session ‘The Great Comms Debate’ (hosted by our favorite product marketer Aleksander Cardwell).

A very simple concept where internal comms pros from well known brands would agree or disagree on 5 different controversial and timely questions.

This thing took on a life of its own, with people sharing their thoughts on the topics all over social media, asking to participate and engaging heavily during the live session. It was an absolute blast.

You can still watch it if you wanna see the concept.

We also wrote blogs with our community. (Guess what, if you ask 16 people to collaborate with a piece of insight for a blog you’re writing, they will all proudly share it on their socials. Many of their connections are also in internal comms so they see it and they want in).

One of our very creative and talented team members Oles Datsko (who’s since become a life long friend of mine and just so happens to also be a marketer living abroad), took it upon himself to design and draw a map of the internal comms profession. He researched all branches of the function and put together what looked like a subway map.

We offered to ship it to people on LinkedIn if they commented ‘map’ on the post. It went crazy viral and we spent the next month shipping these posters to offices all over the world. It was awesome.

By the end of year 1, we had 2 of the biggest voices in the world of internal comms running our podcast, inviting guests (they could get ANYONE to join), brainstorming topics. All for free because there was value for them in being at the top of that community.

It was a magical time.

Results:

• Personally acquired 14,000+ LinkedIn followers

• Our community drove 68% of all business pipeline during my time at Smarp

Again, the numbers aren’t the point. The point is: We took the time to understand the people and the profession so we could truly connect.

We gave them something worth their time.

Standing out by not playing it safe

Another one from Rocket.Chat.

We’re a secure communications platform that sells heavily into government organizations. The challenge? You can’t do direct outreach into the navy. You can’t cold call. You can’t send prospecting emails. Getting in front of the buyer is extremely difficult.

Federal System Integrators (FSIs) are a key part of the puzzle. These organizations win large contracts for different federal programs and then put together best-in-class solutions to fulfil these contracts. Which means it’s critical that we have a strong presence with them.

Leidos is one of these key FSIs for us.

In advance of their annual conference (where hundreds of technology partners showcase their solutions) we were challenged with a simple question: how do we stand out?

Most technology partners just set up a booth, hand out branded pens and flyers, and call it a day.

Here’s the thing: we’re talking about a critical industry. Subject matter often related to national security. It’s key that our brand instills confidence, professionalism, and represents the zero tolerance for failure these organizations demand.

In other words, it’s easy to play it safe.

But the ideas that make you most uncomfortable are usually the ones worth doing.

So… we showed up with a billboard in front of the venue entrance. A branded truck. A flyering team around the venue and recommended hotels. All with one single line:

“Dear Leidos, we know nothing about your customer’s operations.
(And neither will their enemies.)”

It was a statement about how secure our platform really is. It spoke to the fact that no one; not even Rocket.Chat; has access to our customers’ data. They own and control all of their communications data and infrastructure. Which is exactly what these organizations require.

Results:

• 6-figures in won revenue

• Our team had resellers, Leidos personnel, and event attendees stop by our booth to tell us about the red billboard and truck outside

The AI trap (and how it’s making this worse)

Now add AI to the mix.

AI can write your emails. Generate your blog posts. Draft your social captions. Create your webinar outlines.

And most marketers are using it to do exactly that: create more of the same flat, forgettable content everyone else is creating. AI bloat.

AI should be the tool that lets you focus on the craft. On the strategy. On the creative thinking that actually differentiates you.

But instead, we’re using it to scale mediocrity.

The answer is not complicated. It’s just hard.

TL;DR:

If you take anything away from this article, let it be these 4 points:

1. Ask the hard questions before you execute.

2. Find the opportunity for creativity in the mundane.

3. Remember that tools are not strategy.

4. Treat your work money like you would your own. (This one does wonders).

The craft of marketing is still the craft of understanding people, telling stories, and creating experiences worth remembering.

Everything else is just logistics.

Good is a rare currency in B2B.

Be rare.

✌️

What do you think? Are we losing the craft, or am I being too harsh? Which one of your own campaigns are you most proud of? Let me know in the comments.

It is exactly what I did 20 or so years ago. Somewhat impulsively.

My cousin invited me to a study abroad fair in São Paulo, Brazil in October 2006, and I landed in Toronto, Canada on December 6th, 2006.

Over the years, I’ve been constantly contacted by friends, acquaintances, and acquaintances of friends asking about the experience of moving abroad. They have dreams, questions, and very little idea of what it actually means to build a life somewhere new.

Global mobility is far more common now than it was back then. Remote work has normalized the idea of living anywhere. Digital nomad visas exist. Entire communities have formed around the expat experience.

But that doesn't make the move any easier. It's still a huge step.

This series is a hard-earned manual on what that journey looks like. From the moment you first land in your new country to the realizations that only come once you’re too deep to turn back.

I moved abroad, built a career, started a family, and never looked back. Well, mostly... It was the second best decision of my life (aside from marrying my wife).

I hope you’ll find this series helpful, fun, relatable and who knows, maybe it can even help you decide whether a life abroad is right for you.

Part 1: Baby Again

One flight was all it took. And there I was… 5am, standing at Toronto Pearson Airport.

My friend’s brother picked me up wearing a, very familiar, São Paulo football jersey. He drove me back to his place and went back upstairs where his wife and kid were still asleep.

I sat down in his basement and turned on the TV. Hockey highlights came on. The commentator’s voice was indecipherable, and with it came, finally, the overwhelming feeling of “wtf have I done?”

A wave of anxiety hit me so hard my head spun. I’d only ever seen houses with basements in movies. Nobody plays ice hockey in Brazil (we have zero Winter Olympics medals for a reason; though I’m hopeful Brazilian-Norwegian alpine skier Lucas Pinheiro will soon fix that 😀).

My impulsive decision to quit university and move away from everyone and everything I had ever known had finally hit me.

Oh boy.

What no one tells you about moving abroad is that for the first few months, it’s kinda like being a baby again.

You can’t communicate properly. People around you don’t really understand you. The simplest tasks become complex challenges. You don’t yet know the world around you.

Yes, I spoke English. Thank you, Wizard English language school at Avenida Paes de Barros. At least I thought I did… until the first Canadian spoke to me and I realized my ears weren’t trained to pick up the rhythm, the accent, the speed of real conversation.

Just understanding the voice in the subway announcing the next stop was a challenge. “Was that Spadina? Bloor? Did I miss my stop? Yeah, I did. Again.” I’d stare at the map on the wall, tracing the colored lines with my finger like a child learning to read.

This was 2006. There were no smartphones. No Google Maps to tell me I was heading the wrong direction. No translation apps to help me decode a menu. I carried a folded paper map of Toronto in my coat pocket and a positive attitude.

In Brazil, I was Bruno Bin.

Son of Marcio and Rosa. Grandson of Aldo and Dirce. From Moóca. Went to this high school. Played football at that local club. These are the things that define you; the web of context and connection that makes you someone.

In Canada, just 24 hours later, that was all gone.

No one knew any of these people or places. The stories that made me me didn’t translate. I was a newcomer. An immigrant. I sounded funny. My sense of humor landed flat. I had no idea how to dress for the weather. (Vans and a hoodie are not a good idea in -25°C).

I can’t imagine doing this at a later stage in life; though I’m well aware many people do. I was only 19, full of energy and fight. Failure wasn’t an option. Going back home and proving everyone who doubted me right wasn’t either.

For now, building a sustainable routine and managing it with the resources I had was more than enough.

Improve my English. Get a job… any job. Try to have some fun along the way. That was the mountain in front of me.

TL;DR

If you’re thinking about moving abroad, here’s what that first chapter will look like:

1. You will feel incompetent; and that’s normal.

Even if you speak the language. Even if you’ve visited before. Living somewhere is different. You don’t know how the bus system works. You don’t know the products at the grocery store. You don’t know the unspoken social rules. Accept that you’ll feel lost for a while. It gets better.

2. Your identity will be stripped away.

Everything that made you you back home doesn’t exist here. You’re building from scratch. That can be terrifying, but it’s also liberating. You get to decide who you want to become.

3. Loneliness will hit harder than you expect.

Especially in those early months. You don’t any have friends yet. You don’t have routines. The weekends are long and quiet. Find connections as fast as you can.

4. The practical stuff is harder than you think.

Opening a bank account. Getting a phone plan. Finding an apartment. Navigating bureaucracy in a language that isn’t quite yours yet. Budget extra time and patience for everything. It will take twice as long as you think.

5. You need a reason to stay.

Moving abroad is romantic. Staying abroad requires purpose. A job. A partner. A goal. Something that gives you a reason to push through the hard days.

6. It gets easier, but it never gets easy.

Even 20 years later, there are moments when I still feel like an outsider. When cultural references fly over my head. But those moments become rarer. And the life you build becomes richer. Before long, home is both here and there; an advantage, with its own complications.

Moving abroad is less a leap and more a long adjustment. If you expect the discomfort and give yourself time, you’re more likely to make it through the first chapter; and stay.

✌️

Every now and then, a company comes along and rewrites the rules—not just by building a great product, but by completely rethinking how they show up in the market. When it happens, you know it. And for the years that follow, you watch everyone else scramble to copy it.

Right now, that company is Lovable.

A quick recap, if you haven’t been paying attention

Lovable is a Swedish AI startup that lets anyone build fully functional software—apps, websites, products—just by describing what they want. No code required. Just chat with AI, and it builds.

The numbers are staggering. Launched in late 2024, Lovable hit $100M ARR in eight months—faster than OpenAI, Cursor, and Wiz. By late 2025, they were at $200M ARR. They recently raised $330M at a $6.6B valuation. All with a small team, built out of Stockholm.

It’s a 0 to 1 product. The kind that comes along once in a generation. And I think we’re only scratching the surface of what it’s going to become.

But here’s the thing: the product is incredible. That’s not what this post is about.

This is about how they’re growing. And specifically, how they’re doing it almost entirely through LinkedIn.

The playbook nobody saw coming

Most companies at Lovable’s stage would be throwing money at paid acquisition, performance marketing, and traditional demand gen. Lovable is doing something different.

They’re building a growth engine out of personal brands. And they’re doing it in a way that’s genuinely new.

There are three people at Lovable who are driving this strategy. Combined, they have over 400,000 followers on LinkedIn. Each one plays a different role. Each one uses a slightly different tactic. Together, they’re creating something that feels less like a marketing strategy and more like a masterclass in organic growth.

Let me break it down.

Anton Osika - The Visionary

Anton is the CEO and co-founder, with around 154,000 followers on LinkedIn. He’s the face of Lovable—but not in the way you’d expect.

Yes, he shows up in traditional media. Big outlets, podcasts, industry events. He talks about his vision for democratizing software creation, and he does it well. He’s young, compelling, articulate, and clearly believes in what he’s building.

But the tactic that stands out? The hire selfies.

Anton has been consistently posting selfies with new key hires—former founders, impressive young talent, people who are clearly leaving big things behind to join Lovable. Simple posts. A photo of the two of them. A few sentences about who they are, why he’s excited to have them on board, and what they bring to the team.

It’s not flashy. It’s not polished corporate content. And that’s exactly why it works.

On the surface, it’s a talent acquisition play. Anton is signaling to the market: “Look at the caliber of people choosing to come here. Look at what this company is becoming.” It builds credibility, attracts more talent, and creates a feedback loop—every new hire becomes proof that Lovable is the place to be.

But it’s also brand building. It humanizes the company. It makes Lovable feel less like a startup and more like a movement. And it does it without spending a dime on ads.

I haven’t seen this done quite like this before. I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot of companies start copying this one.

He doesn’t stop there. Next come the creative showcases. Anton consistently shares the most impressive, creative uses of Lovable—the ones that make you stop scrolling and think, “Why didn’t I think of that?” These aren’t just product demos. They’re proof of what’s possible. They inspire people. They make the product feel limitless.

And it’s working. Companies like Microsoft are already starting to hire for “vibe coding”—a term that’s basically become synonymous with what Lovable enables. When your product creates a new job category? That’s not just growth. That’s a cultural shift.

In fact, according to Anton, Americans are now moving to Stockholm to join Lovable. What more can be said?

Elena Verna - The Growth Engine

Elena is the Head of Growth at Lovable, with around 189,000 followers on LinkedIn (can Anton catch up? 🙂). And if you’re in B2B marketing or growth, you probably already know her name. She’s been at Dropbox, Amplitude, Miro, SurveyMonkey—she’s one of the most respected growth operators in the industry.

Her LinkedIn strategy is sharp. Really sharp.

Here’s what makes it work: she layers product and company updates with memes (yes, memes!).

That’s it. That’s the tactic. But the execution is what makes it brilliant.

Elena doesn’t just post product updates and call it a day. She mixes in memes—funny, relevant, on-topic content that’s related to Lovable, growth, vibe coding, and the community she’s building around it. The memes drive engagement. They’re shareable, they’re relatable, and they pull in people who might never click on a product update alone.

Then, in between the memes, she drops the real stuff: product launches, feature updates, community wins. By that point, her audience is already engaged. They’re already paying attention. The product content doesn’t feel like marketing—it feels like a natural part of the conversation.

It’s a masterful content rhythm. And it works because Elena understands something most marketers don’t: engagement is the bridge to trust, and trust is the bridge to conversion.

Felix Haas - The Designer

Felix Haas is in design at Lovable, with around 89,000 followers on LinkedIn. And his content strategy is a quiet masterclass in how to build excitement around a product without it ever feeling like marketing.

Like Elena, Felix layers his content. But his hook is different: he builds things and shares them.

Cool demos. Creative experiments. Things he’s putting together using Lovable. Each post showcases what the product can actually do—not through polished marketing copy, but through real, hands-on examples that make you think, “I want to try that.”

And then, just like Elena does with her memes, Felix layers in product updates and announcements between the building posts. By the time the product news lands, his audience is already engaged, already excited, already paying attention. The updates feel like a natural part of the conversation—not an interruption.

It works on two levels. It gets people genuinely excited about what Lovable can do. And it attracts other builders and designers—people who see what Felix is creating and want in on it.

Felix’s content is quieter than Anton’s or Elena’s. But it’s doing something really important: it’s making the product feel alive. It’s showing people that Lovable isn’t just a tool—it’s a creative playground. And the way he mixes the excitement of building with the substance of product updates? That’s the same playbook Elena runs, just with a different flavor.

The bigger picture: what’s actually happening here

Here’s what ties all three together, and what makes Lovable’s approach genuinely different from what most companies are doing.

It’s not one person doing personal branding. It’s not a corporate social media strategy with a list of approved talking points. It’s a whole team—growing every day—each person surfacing as their own voice, flying the same playbook, building things and sharing them with the community.

And then? The corporate Lovable account reshares it all.

It’s a beautiful puzzle. Individual voices create trust and engagement. The corporate account amplifies it. New people join the company and immediately plug into the same rhythm. The hype compounds. The community grows.

This isn’t accidental. This is a growth strategy. It just doesn’t look like one.

And it works because of something we’ve known for a long time but rarely act on: people trust other people, not brands.

Lovable is proving that at scale. Right in front of us.

And they’re not done

Here’s what makes this even more interesting: they’re still experimenting. Still adding to the playbook. Trying new branches, seeing what sticks, and building on what works.

Lately? They’ve started offering badges for your LinkedIn profile—digital credentials that prove your competence in Lovable. It’s smart. It turns users into advocates. It creates a visible signal of expertise. And it feeds back into the LinkedIn ecosystem they’re dominating.

Will it work? Too early to say. But that’s not the point.

The point is they’re not sitting back and running the same playbook on repeat. They’re testing, iterating, and finding new ways to keep the momentum going. That’s what separates companies that capture a moment from companies that sustain it.

Why this matter for all of us

Here’s the bigger point, and the one I want to leave you with.

We are watching the future of how companies grow. And in that future, personal brands aren’t a nice-to-have. They’re the strategy.

Think about what this means for hiring. The best companies are already starting to look beyond your skills and experience. They’re asking: Can this person build an audience? Do they show up? Do they have followers who trust them?

It’s not about vanity. It’s not about being an influencer. It’s about building a portfolio that people can see, follow, and trust over time. It’s about having your work validate itself.

Now more than ever, building your personal brand isn’t something you do on the side. It’s something you invest in as seriously as you invest in your craft.

It’s not easy. It takes consistency. You have to show up week after week. It’s not an overnight hockey stick—it’s a compounding effort over time. There’s no shortcut.

But the shift is already happening. The best companies are going to start hiring for influence alongside capability. And the people who figured that out early? They’re the ones who’ll have access to the most valuable, and lovable, opportunities (see what I did there?).

Lovable is just showing us what that looks like at its best.

Pay attention.

✌️