Insights

“To teach, to delight, and to move.”

— Cicero, De Oratore

1. Marketing is One to Many Sales

I was talking to a veteran sales guy at a conference last week in Vegas.

He told me he’s never had a marketing team get him leads, it’s all be him banging phones.

And he asked what does marketing even do in b2b?

I used to hear this daily when I worked at an agency.

Marketing is one to many sales.

When you talk to someone in sales who really knows what they’re doing, who really knows the product, knows the customer pain points, knows how to express all of this concisely…

It doesn’t feel like sales it feels like education.

And marketing when it’s done right is education that defines a pain point, shows a future life someone can have, and presents the product as the bridge to get them there.

I host a podcast weekly that 10,000 people listen to.

To the listener it feels like free education.

In reality I’m selling 10,000 people simultaneously.

2. Demand Capture vs Demand Generation

I was talking to a startup founder who just raised their A round and he was telling me their CAC was increasing.

Classic.

In a past life I consulted a QA software service business and my main point of contact was purely a paid ads guy, no content.

Costs were going up he said. It wasn’t as cheap as 5 years ago.

They had a massive mailing list, so I proposed a weekly webinar series. Hit the whole list, have on industry experts to talk, cross promote webinar to their list.

Immediately shot down. Too much work.

As the market ages, more people join the competition.

This increases costs to capture demand.

So the only way to combat increasing costs is to start doing demand generation activities.

Demand generation typically comes in the form of content and is a catalyst for word of mouth to occur, for brand to build, and for more organic inbound to be felt.

You don’t stop demand capture, you slowly shift your resource portfolio over time.

Day 1: 80% of demand capture and 20% on demand generation.

Year 2: 20% on demand capture and 80% on demand generation.

3. Sweaty Startups Without the Sweat

I learned about the business of this OG SEO named James Dooley this week.

He invests in home service businesses, but the structure is fascinating.

There’s a lot of vapid gum flapping about how sweaty startups are where you should invest and compete because its’ blue ocean. How blue collar is actually how people make their wealth.

These contrarian thinkers are so full of shit .

The first thing they do when they get cashflow is buy high margin digital businesses. They are unprincipled grifters fleecing the uninitiated.

But Dooley has a different model which I really like.

He invests in these service businesses, but just helps them grow by building their lead flow.

That’s it.

He owns marketing agencies, that have the business biology to facilitate 60-80% margins servicing clients.

And then his hold co buys 20% of local service businesses that he then has his agencies market.

I like this business.

Tools

1. Stormy AI - AI agent for influencer marketing that does research, outreach, and negotiation

2. Smithery AI - MCP library, connect your things with the world

3. https://www.mailreach.co/email-spam-tester - Test cold email to all different mailbox types for free

4. https://rapidapi.com/organization/social-master - Scrape emails from YouTube, IG, or Tiktok with an API call

5. https://www.scrapin.io/ - Real-Time B2B Data for AI Products. Get structured public data on professionals and organizations, refreshed continuously and built for scale.

6. Swell AI - Turn videos into written content. Make LinkedIn posts, email newsletters, and Tweets about your long form content.

7. Drafthorse AI - Write and publish hundreds of SEO optimized articles in minutes.

8. https://www.folk.app/ - CRM for your personal life. import whatsapp messages, emails telegram, everything.

9. https://21st.dev/home

10. https://influencers.club/search-youtube-channel/

11. https://viral.app/

12. https://scrapecreators.com/

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Business Ideas

1. n8n template subscription

There’s a whole ecosystem developing of people making n8n workflows on YT and selling the templates.

There’s an opportunity to make a directory of all of these, and charge a subscription for unlimited downloads of the json packages.

Validate the JSON. Include the tutorials. Make it searchable by nodes.

Marketing

SEO and paid ads to the library.

Post on LinkedIn and Twitter about the most popular flows.

Youtube videos talking about the flows.

2. Canva video captions

Canva is the fastest growing video editor in the world currently.

And their video captions absolutely suck.

Terrible accuracy, even worse styles.

This what opportunitiy is made of.

Build the native app.

Marketing

1. on platform optimization

2. YouTube videos showing how to do canva editing

3. Sponsor YouTube creators who do Canva marketing

Growth tactics

1. YouTube shorts with phone number on them

Local service guy is doing shorts showing his work for lead gen.

Says his phone is ringing off the hook. Thought this was so simple and effective.

2. youtube creator cold email playbook

Find 1000 creators.

Scrape their emails from their profile.

Cold email them using Instantly AI asking for cost of 3 video package and 30% commission.

What you'll find is that a bunch of them are underpricing themselves.

And this is because YouTube is an inefficient market. People don't know what their real value is.

So there is arbitrage.

Of those 1000 in that you reach out to, 100 of them will hypothetically respond, and then 10 of those will be undervaluing themselves.

Those are the 10 that you want to work with.

Give them a 30% affiliate commission.

3. hiring sorority girls for LinkedIn message sending

So I just heard about this guy that is cold DMing sororities on Instagram asking if the sorority sisters want to join his company as an employee.

And then they're using these employees as a way to bulk cold DM on LinkedIn.

So each LinkedIn account allows a certain amount of messages that it can be sent daily.

But these accounts need to be ID verified.

So he'll pay them $20 a month for access to their account.

He connects it to a shared cold DM sending platform.

100 people.

10,000 DMs a month.

4. Taboola Competitor Email Retargeting

So I just learned that Taboola allows for email retargeting of people who have been emailed, by your competitors.

From their site:

Taboola email retargeting lets advertisers reach people based on their interactions with emails, including those who have received emails from competitors, by building custom audience segments using mail domain data. This allows brands to show ads to users who may have already been targeted by a competitor’s email campaign, essentially enabling "competitor conquesting"."

Who I learned this from said that the best ad to run is to a VSL.

This is one of the few channels that still allows you to target the exact people that you're wanting to get in front of.

Best Content

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