This post on social doubt has a great nugget to use in your messaging:

define who your product isn’t for to weed out buyers who will likely cause you a headache (and loss of profits).

Wait, what’s social doubt?

Your buyers are constantly looking for reasons not to buy from you.

Sometimes it’s easier to find your path by closing doors. Rather than trying to figure out what’s similar about the open doors or which you like the most.

Misconception: Brands should be casting a wide net when marketing

Reality: Niche microcommunities are on the rise, and brands are underutilizing them because they underestimate their value.

Scale as a strategy is dead.

Find your people.

Inspired by Seth Godin’s post: “Does it work?”

After Gemini said it couldn’t write marketing content, I asked ChatGPT. Here’s what it gave me:

🔥 In a world where AI can generate content in seconds, what sets your brand apart?

Soul. Perspective. Personality.

AI can write. AI can design. But AI can’t connect like you can.

The future belongs to brands with a voice that feels real—brands that tell stories only they can tell.

👉 Do what the bots can’t. Inject your brand with humanity.

What’s one thing you do to keep your brand feeling alive? Let’s hear it 👇

You can look at products and you can tell whether they have soul or not.

When you’re building a product, you should absolutely, absolutely react to what people are saying.

If you don’t have an opinion or a perspective, then it’s kind of empty. It’s like whatever they say then you’ll run after that thing.

Whereas with some products, you can tell if they have soul.

And you can tell when they lose it.

-Chris Pedregal, CEO of Granola (“an AI notepad for meetings”)

Soul, perspective, personality—call it what you want—is required in a post-AI world.

Do what the bots can’t.

If a customer relationship is viewed as a relationship (novel, I know)…

Focusing on the transaction and leaving it at that is an act of lust.

Fleeting. Shallow. Easily regretted.

Viewing the transaction as one step in the journey—more a beginning than an ending—is an act of love.

Potential.

Here’s Seth Godin on the podcast tour to support his book launch:

The conversation is the product, the book is just the catalyst.

Webinars are usually hated because they’re the digital version of a timeshare pitch. Short on value, long on spiels.

What if every interaction were approached as if it was the product?

A classic from Tim Harford: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

What’s a non-obvious solution to the problem you try to solve for your customers?

Better yet, what’s the opposite of the current primary solution?

2 quotes that seem contradictory but are complimentary.

One from Tyler:

So please develop a better sense of when to keep your mouths shut and work behind the scenes.

One from Seth:

The secret way you do the thing isn’t what keeps your clients coming back. It’s the part you do in public that matters.

There is a tendency to hype the things people don’t really care about and ignore talking about the stuff we find boring that others are interested in.

Is it performative or informative?

Semiconductorctor and data center infrastructure expert Dylan Patel shared this handy heuristic on which AI models when:

• Anthropic (Claude) for one off, non-reasoning uses
• Gemini for multimodal and uses that require a long context window
• OpenAI (ChatGPT) for all other reasoning question flows

From David Perell:

This is the power of symbolism: with one strong, vivid image, you can communicate an entire message or, in this case, build a world

This is why logos and brands are sometimes conflated. The logos of strong brands become visual shorthand.

Humanity needs stories.

People lead their individual life as a story. One of the reasons you need lots of stories is that in every life, your story comes to an impasse.

A valuable nugget from Dana Gioia worth revisiting on one of the seminal story days of modern society.