Hi Reader,

It’s fresh down here on the edge of the Yarra Valley, as are the takes around growth and AI at the moment.

This week looks at:

• How to sell AI versus how not to sell AI
• Myself versus my reflection back to myself
• Getting ripped on by Claude

So let’s make a bunch of tasks and batch through it.

Startups selling AI versus behemoths

If you’ve been active in a public group, community, or post for nearly any length of time - you’re going to understand what I describe below:

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1. Someone puts up a post asking for someone who is a (insert web developer/lawyer/SEO expert/CRM manager/service doo-diddy)
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2. The post is SWARMED by people from all over the world with recommendations, referrals, and providers getting tagged in and commenting

Sometimes I’m amazed by how stupid some of these response are.

For example - the post might say DM me your details and I’ll be in touch.

Then the provider says stuff like “this is what we do - message me”.

Ahh, no - the buyer said DM them.

If you can’t follow a basic request like this, I struggle to fathom how you’ll be able to meet the needs of my important brief.

​Nick Bell is on Shark Tank and I am connected to him because I’m a LinkedIn whore.

One of these kinds of posts dropped and as you would expect - a deluge of crappy pitches ensued.

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I tagged Will @ Phonely (mentioned on this newsletter before) and got engagement from both Nick and Will. I have no idea if anything will happen from it, but if there’s a fit the startup will have moved fast within 24 hours.

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Compare that to this response from a big tech.

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“Probably make something” for you as a proof of concept, available in October?!

The tension between challenger and incumbents is huge - and in a marketplace where its hyper competitive - the old “work with us because we’re the biggest” isn’t going to work.

In fact - most smart people in this space do not want to commit to one big provider, because they’ll be locked into something that provides much less control and won’t be able to adapt to the rate of change fast enough.

See: voice agents in October

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Getting ripped by my own reflection

The amount of information LLMs can ingest now is formidable.

I’m really enjoying Claude Projects and have created a project called “Self-Reflection”.

With it, I have uploaded my personal and business braindumps/journals from the last TEN years and then put intructions into it to help guide and steer me towards my goals.

It also features voice trancripts, notes from my coach, and any other snippets I think will be useful.

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Before getting sick - I had a good cadence of upload day’s focus, download at night how I went, and what happened in the week.

I then upload updates to the project instructions based on the feedback I’m getting so the system keeps improving.

One of my initial goals is to create $20k p.m. in recurring revenue.

This context is necessary for the next own goal I’m about to share with you.

Driving home one night I noticed the voice functionality.

It doesn’t work as well as Chat-GPT’s - but that didn’t have all my project context so I downloaded with voice what happened and where things are at.

You can hear the full replay here, but it replied with FIRE.

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👏 You have a recurring revenue goal of $20k per month but you keep training potential clients to solve problems with you

👏 Your positioning yourself as a helpful friend instead of a paid expert

👏 You created a competitor

There were two really interesting things about this that I wanted to share:

1. I felt uncomfortable hearing this voice telling me needed to be improved - I listened to my body response and how it almost recoiled at this “pompous” tone telling this to me. Despite my picking the voice, asking it to do exactly what it did, AND knowing it was generative AI. That’s a mind-melt.
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2. It made me question myself. Do I need to change this kind of behaviour to grow and have a successful business?
   Is this a blind spot and slowing me down?
   And while I don’t have straight answers to this - I think it’s exceedingly powerful having these kinds of seeds sown in the space of a month or so.
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   How incisive is it going to get?

The tantalising appeal of low-hanging fruits

When I’m talking to people about AI, I try and make it clear to them just how crazy-good things are for techy growth marketers.

Over 2 years ago, I put out a post like this:

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The hunch I wanted to test was - can this tech lead to fast production and prototyping?

The short answer back then was yeah, but not amazing just yet.

Today, it’s not a stretch for me to do:

• landing page design
• copywriting
• graphics and video
• measurement and tagging
• Automated workflows
• Email nurture sequences
• and anything else you want to file under marketing

… and repeat.

That’s all well and good, but doesn’t interest me as much as the idea I jotted yesterday.

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Build a productised agency blueprint

1. Find a niche with low-cost, bottom of the funnel keywords across a range of ideal customer profiles (any business that buys mid-to-high ticket services) or cheap clicks on socials. This can be found with Perplexity and Keywords Everywhere.
2. Run a search for common problems this customer faces, and solutions these customers buy.
3. Now look for automations that can create for this - n8n workfows, YouTube workflows, ambitious workflows.
4. Now look for data sources that can help make the solution better for all of the above (ad libraries, creator posts, scraped information)
5. Build a list of people I can pitch an MVP offer of the solution to for a case study - at least 5 of them.
6. Deliver and over-perform.
7. Run paid ads to a landing page (all pixeled up for retargeting), and a customer quiz (if easy to execute - for extra pixel events to retarget with).
8. Run outbound to these customers.
9. Run remarketing to pixel events and lookalikes of these customers, and social ads to matched/custom audiences of these customers.
10. Repeat and repeat for each valuable niche.

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Putting it here because it might be something I can reflect back on.

Might delete later ;)

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There’s a number of opportunities I’m working through at the moment, and am trying to give them my full attention before striving to create more.

That’s it this week - battling RSV in the house on top of diverticulitis, so not having a fun time.

Stay healthy and talk soon!

-Marshy

p.s. I've started throwing these onto LinkedIn's newsletter function the following week to increase my distribution, if there's someone you think would enjoy these thoughts please forward this email onto them (thanks to those who have already been doing that!)